Feel Everything
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On Joel (Haftarah for Shabbat Shuvah, Between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, Ashkenazi Tradition)
Yael Landman, Assistant Professor of Bible, 91快播
During this time of ongoing, unendurable communal pain, I think of a few verses from the book of Joel, one of the biblical minor prophets. Amid bleak warnings of overwhelming catastrophe, 鈥淢ost terrible鈥攚ho can endure it?鈥� (Joel 2:11), the prophet cites God鈥檚 call for teshuvah: 鈥淵et even now . . . turn back to Me with all your hearts, / and with fasting, weeping, and lamenting鈥� (2:12). Joel then demands, 鈥淩end your hearts / rather than your garments!鈥� (2:13). In incredibly difficult times, it is sometimes easier to focus on going through the motions of ritual, but Joel challenges us to feel everything, full-heartedly, however unbearable that may seem.
Despite a sense of intense despair in this prophecy, Joel invokes God’s attributes of mercy, reminding his audience that God is 鈥済racious and compassionate, / slow to anger, abounding in kindness, / and renouncing punishment鈥� (2:13). These attributes, variations of which we repeatedly recite throughout the High Holidays, may start to feel formulaic to the point of numbness. But after this list of attributes Joel adds, 鈥淲ho knows but [God] may turn and relent鈥� (2:14). In Joel鈥檚 鈥淲ho knows?鈥� I hear echoes of pain and desperation, but also an expression of divine possibility. Today, let us rend our hearts as a community, in pain and in prayer, clinging to the hope that we shall also find ways to mend.
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