Hannah

It was our last service before Shavuot. We spoke about Sinai moments. Then I asked my husband, Ralf, to pick up one end of the tallit; I took the other.

We raised the tallit above our heads. Outstretched above us was a soft silk sky of teal blue shot through with lines of sapphire. A gold border shimmered on each side. The colors of sunset and morning sky and the dark of night rippled overhead.

Folks gathered beneath our chuppah. It was very quiet. Each person was praying.

Thus, each soul was singing.

Later, a congregant wrote to me: “I couldn’t help but bring to mind our Sinai moment underneath the beautiful tallit… I will carry that memory with me for the rest of the year, and beyond!”

There is nothing so real as the certainty of spiritual wholeness. It is a thing that cannot be described without tripping over the inadequacy of words.

I live for these moments however impossible it is to describe them. Time does not seem to pass; I am inhabiting a space that is singular. It will never come in that form again.

That was Friday night.

On Sunday morning, I sat at my desk and wrote about Hannah.

Rabbis, ministers, and scholars praise Hannah for her faithful prayers. They laud YHVH for granting her a miracle in the form of her son Samuel.

But those accolades are misplaced. It is YHVH who inflicts barrenness on Hannah, and for no reason. She has done nothing wrong; there is no punishment befitting some imagined failing. How many readers notice how long Hannah endures divinely induced infertility? Hannah must endure the taunts of Elkanah’s other wife, Penina, who reminds Hannah that YHVH has closed her womb. Year after dreadful year (1 Samuel 1:6-7).

YHVH does nothing. There is no communication. There is no explanation. Each year, Hannah weeps. Each year she fasts. There is no answer, no divine response. YHVH reacts only when she vows that if she is given a (male) child, she will return him to serve YHVH.

Perhaps this was YHVH’s plan all along? Perhaps this was a way to find a surrogate mother for a child YYHVH could take for his own, train for his own, and control on his own. For that is what happens to Samuel, who is forced to leave his family as a child. The repeated use of hiphil forms make clear that Hannah “causes” the child to be brought to Shiloh (1 Samuel 1:24).

To erase difficult texts only inflicts a second erasure. I can’t do it. Those readers who know what it is to be taunted and tormented, abused in body and soul — those readers would know me for a fraud.

There is no way to contend with the cruelty and violence of our own time with honesty and clarity while simultaneously privileging sacred texts and shielding them from accountability. The ethics we claim we bring to the present cannot be discarded when we address the past.

Sometimes, I inhabit that silence within which I sing. I know that space is inspired by Jewish practice, by Jewish experience, and by Jewish inheritance. Sometimes, I live inside the texts – biblical or rabbinic. They demand that I am honest and true – even to what is painful therein.

Both locations teach humility because neither space can be ignored.

I cannot pretend that all is well because I know it can’t be. That is arrogance, an arrogance that harms those who suffer. Nor can I authorize an uncritical belief in the sanctity of texts that valorize cruelty, or rewrite them to erase what hurts. That, too, would be arrogant; that, too, only harms.

I stand below the sky, which is the greatest chuppah. It makes us all small things, but, I hope, honest ones.

Singing has had a strangely magical effect on me since I was a small child. Something visceral occurs.

For decades I didn’t speak to anyone about this. I believed that I was imagining the whole thing. Or, at least what happened when I sang.

But I repeatedly found myself helplessly giving in to That Thing That Happens every time I started singing. My surrender was especially marked when I was leading services. I could be cranky, exhausted, or even unwilling; as soon as the service began, I would succumb in the first tender notes of the first prayer.

During High Holy Days, the magical nature of that strange Thing That Happens turns into a kind of sorcery. It would have frightened me all these years if it wasn’t – every time – so beautiful.

Many years ago, I just reached the haftarah for Rosh Hashanah, the story of Hannah, who longs so desperately for a child. Before I began, I asked my congregants to name an ancestress. Predictably, I heard names like Miriam, Sarah, and Leah. My husband, Ralf, who is an expert in throwing intellectual and spiritual curveballs, suggested Lot’s wife.

I sang in Hebrew and then sang spontaneous English translations. At some point I no longer remember, I began singing the stories of all the foremothers my congregants had mentioned. All the trope melodies landed in the right places. Miriam’s joy and power, Leah’s sadness – I composed as I sang, but the text seemed given to me, rather than invented by me.

When I came to Lot’s wife, I sang of her looking back at children she had lost and the neighbors she would never see again. I sang of how she became an inhuman thing – for looking, for longing. She lost everything — including herself.

This will read just as weirdly as it sounds: from the small windows at the very top of the sanctuary, I became aware of soft voices – all seemingly female. “Tell my story,” one said. “Tell my story,” said another. The voices were gentle enough, but they were insistent, clamoring. Countless Jewish women of some ages past were suddenly asking me to tell their stories. And they wouldn’t stop asking – even as I continued singing, inventing, telling the stories I knew from Tanakh.

At some point, I said (thought?) helplessly: “I can’t tell all your stories – I would never have the time to do that.” I paused. “But I will try. I will do my best in the years I have.”

And the voices were still.

Recently, I have realized that my whole life – all my academic research, all of my teaching, any activism I’ve engaged in – has been devoted to telling the stories of those whose voices have been lost or suppressed. The outcome saddens me. I have achieved so little. I have longed for so much.

Am I, in the end, a descendant of the unnamed Lot’s wife? Will I, too, turn into some form that even while it crumbles, can only leave behind near fruitless efforts to combat the toxic uses of power that continue to rain down upon the vulnerable?

But of course, that sort of sadness is a useless exercise. There is a deeper learning here. Whatever that Thing That Happens is, it is for the good and to the good and about the good. I plan to be grateful for that.

And to all those pleading voices, I say: Yes. I am still here, and I will tell your stories.

Tag: Hannah

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