For Congregation Ner
Shalom, and dedicated to the nursing and therapy staff of Santa Rosa
Memorial Hospital ICU and Neurology Ward.
I’ve
begun to take off my shoes at the hospital, in Mom’s room. I’ve taken to wearing
slip-ons for just this purpose. I’ve gotten comfortable here. It has been three
weeks after all, and our departure for the new adventure of a skilled nursing
facility is imminent. Here at Memorial, I know at least 40 nurses, doctors,
therapists and respiratory techs by name. I know many more by face. I know the
other most ardent bedside vigil family. We ask each other in passing about our
loved ones’ progress; we answer with noncommittal mutterings about daily improvement
– amejorándose cada día, gracias a Diós.
I
know the long traverse from bedside to bathroom to lobby to cafeteria. I love
the cafeteria food, even though it’s not really any good. I look at the beige,
crusted over fettuccini with vegetables, and I think, “Oh, it’s a bad night for
the vegetarians.” I think that until my eyes wander over to the tuna casserole
and I realize that it’s a bad night for everybody. But the food here is cheap
and made with sincerity, geared to feed hungry healers and anxious families,
and I can taste that straightforward intention. Less than four bucks later, I’m
back in Mom’s room, with a paper bowl of salty beans and rice and another of
carrots and, fortified, I can feel the kitchen staff at my back in this great recovery
campaign we’re waging.
Mom
has by now ended up in a private room. Not really private, just roommate-less. The
staff has been deflecting incoming patients to other rooms, because they’ve
grown fond of Mom, and her smile, and her laugh, and her family and friends.
They know we take up space, what with our books and our guitars and our food
baskets and photos and Shabbat candles and smuggled Manischewitz.
This
big, half-empty, soon-to-be-abandoned room has been imbued over this short time
with a kind of holiness. You can feel the room awash in it. So many people have
brought so much love into these four walls. And Mom absorbs it even when it
wears her out. We have chanted and read stories and coaxed out of her real
pitches and good stabs at pronouncing Gershwin lyrics with her limited
inventory of 5 vowels and 3-or-so consonants.
There
is a holiness in this room. The simple drama of life and death; the undeniable power
of word as demonstrated by its absence; the play of kindness, of chesed, mitigating the otherwise
unchecked tyranny of biology – all of this carries a force that feels epic and
ancient – and holy. There is a sense of the divine in moments of peril. “No
atheists in a foxhole,” they say. But I think what they mean is that you can’t
stand on that precipice of life and death and not feel the mix of hope and dread
that accompany danger. It may or may not be God, but perching on that threshold
of such elevated awareness brings with it an undeniable swell of grandeur.
Mom’s
condition indeed has an epic, ancient quality – a biblical resonance. My
friends Dawn and Eitan Weiner-Kaplow pointed out to me this week that her left
temporal impairment is even described in Psalm 137, the “waters of Babylon”
psalm. The passage goes, “If I forget you, O Jerusalem, may my right hand
forget its cunning; may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth if I do not
remember you, if I do not exalt Jerusalem above my chief joy.”
My
mother has never forgotten Jerusalem nor, to my knowledge, taken any vow re
same. Still, the context of the psalm – a song about grave loss – is apropos.
She has, like the Israelite captives in Babylon, lost her home. She has lost
use of the Temple that is her body. How can she sing her old songs in this admat nechar, this foreign soil, both the
foreign soil of California and the new, still uncharted normal of her own body?
First she must learn to sing again, period.
There
is much to lament in her situation. But grief and hope and uncertainty are as
holy as joy, and this room is palpably holy, so much so that I have begun to
remove my shoes, like Moshe in this week’s Torah portion, Shemot. Moshe, escaped
from Egypt and Pharaoh’s wrath, is now a shepherd in Midyan. An angel appears
in or as a bush that burns but isn’t consumed. (At Hebrew school I asked the kids
what that means. I asked who had a fireplace at home. Many hands went up. One
small girl piped up proudly that her family has two fireplaces. I asked her, “So
what happens to the wood that you burn in the fireplace?” She responded, “I
don’t know. Neither of them works.”)
In
the Moshe story, it’s unclear if the bush is meant to be a miracle, or just a
mechanism for getting Moshe’s attention. In order to perceive the bush wasn’t
turning to ash, he must have not only noticed it but stared at it for some
period of time, perhaps hypnotically, perhaps meditatively, or maybe just full
of scientific curiosity. In any event he slowed down, drawn into a different
kind of time, that holy kind of time that can move very fast or very slow, like
Alice getting big and getting small in the rabbit hole, but either way her
attention getting drawn to the unusual details around her. Once Moshe slows
down to this unusual shrinking and expanding pace, only then is the space
around him declared to be admat kodesh,
holy ground. And then, at that point, the shoes became superfluous.
I
asked the students why they thought there would be a “no shoes” rule in a holy
place, since it seems to be somewhat of a universal, whether the holy place is
a mosque or my German grandmother’s apartment. Some students were concerned
that shoes would mess up the site, leaving unsightly and disrespectful Nike prints.
Someone else suggested humility – that in the presence of God we are like
paupers before a great monarch; our shoelessness symbolizes that.
But
there’s also something else about how our feet, so seldom permitted nakedness, feel. Our hands touch and manipulate the
world all the time; they are for fiddling as much as for feeling; their
sensitivity is tempered and they are not to be trusted when testing the
bathwater. But our feet, so often sheathed in leather and canvas and rubber
are, when unleashed, open and guileless. Our feet feel for real; they transmit
sensation purely.
Which
makes our feet sensational organs for perceiving holiness. Whether the ground
is soft or hard, dry or moist, carpeted or tiled, when we slow our tempo, like
Moshe did studying the flame, we can feel so much from our feet. We can divine energy
emanating from the earth’s core, pouring up through our bodies, northward like
the Nile, and overflowing like the proverbial cup of Psalm 23. From earth into
body into spirit, with our feet as key synapses. This is the energetic conduit that
runs from sole to soul.
I
was listening to “To the Best of Our Knowledge,” on NPR the other night. It was
an episode called “Religion in a Secular Age.” They played comments from
callers about religion and one caller said, “Every day when my feet hit the
floor I experience the divine.” By which he seemed to mean that he felt the
divine from the moment he got up in the morning. But the metaphor, in which his
feet closed the circuit, really struck me.
I
think how my own favorite moments of the High Holy Days have come during ne’ilah, the closing of Yom Kippur, when
I give up any pretense of keeping shoes on, and stand before the closing gates
in my white Hanes athletic socks, trying to suck the holiness of the moment right
out of the ground.
Being
without shoes also allows me to climb into Mom’s hospital bed once in a while
to comfort her through a bad dream or some troubled breathing. My stocking feet
let me make the move from chair to bed smoothly, without it having to be a conscious
decision about care management or propriety. My feet simply lead, and I follow.
We
have a long road ahead. My sister and I are hunkering down. Mom is improving, and the doctors have retracted their direst speculations about the cause of her hemorrhage.
If she continues this way, God willing, we will at some point step off this
elevated threshold, step back from the precipice. Will our feet feel the
holiness even then?
In
the Torah portion, after Moshe’s shoes are off, after he and the bush have some
important chitchat about slavery and freedom etc., Moshe asks the name of the
holiness that surrounds him. God does not reply, “I am El Shadai, the God of the Mountain.” Nor “I am Haborei, the Creator of the World.” Not even “I am Hamakom, the World Itself.” But instead
something much vaguer, at once both a brilliant circularity and an outrageous
copout: Ehyeh asher ehyeh. “I am what
I am.”
Which
I choose to take as an invitation to notice the divine at any time in any
circumstance. “I am what I am,” “I am where I am,” “I am when I am.” Holy
ground is not a specified place to which one must make pilgrimage. And with all
due respect to Shabbat, holy ground is not limited to one day a week. Yes, you
might feel it extra on Shabbat, or in Jerusalem or Mecca or Rome or at the
lighthouse at Point Reyes. You might feel it extra in times of great danger, in
life-changing times. But it is also there in the ehyeh asher ehyeh experience – in the “whatever” moments.
As
we move off this precipice and on to the next phase of Mom’s recovery, I am
going to look for holy ground in the skilled nursing facility, in the rehab
gym, in the first swallows, in the words of slowly increasing intelligibility
and even in the frustration and tears when they don’t come. I look forward to
Mom’s – and all of our – admat nechar,
foreign soil, becoming admat kodesh,
holy ground.
To
do this I will try to remember to take off my shoes. Not my literal ones. But
to remove whatever barriers stand between me and the holiness of this existence.
Whether the barrier is leather or crepe; whether the barrier is work or worry. I
will do my best to remove the barriers that sheath my soul, so that I can feel the
holy ground beneath my feet. Whether that holy ground is a hospital room or a cafeteria
or a sidewalk or workplace or hiking
trail. Or sitting in the car with an unexpectedly dead battery on an
inconvenient day or some other stupid predicament.
After
all, Moshe found holy ground on the roadside himself, chasing a lamb that got
away from him. Inconvenient. Unexpected. He probably felt stupid. And even so, he
ended up on holy ground. He just slowed to the flow, staring at that bizarrely
intact bush defying the laws of thermodynamics. And I too will try to see
through those inconvenient, unexpected, stupid moments to spy what lies beyond
them. And maybe I’ll keep wearing slip-ons too, just in case.
