“One sister has a brain tumor his other sister’s not well — and I don’t feel a thing. Not a thing” she calls to say. “What happened to me? I used to be a walking heart. Even when I fell down and got a cut my mother said it was in the shape of a heart. And now I can’t feel.”
She pauses.
“I was cleaning the kitchen this morning and I asked myself Why can’t you feel? What’s happening? And I thought with all the events the news the family tragedies I’ve learned just to turn off. But I think I learned too well. And — I feel like it’s not Jewish to be cold like this.”
While she’s talking I remember the story of a little girl in the Holocaust hiding with her parents under the house of a kind family. During that time she wasn’t allowed to cry for any reason under any circumstances for fear of risking all their lives. When the war was over and they crossed into Switzerland the girl turned to her mother and asked “Can I cry now?”
“I feel like something or someone or maybe even me cut out my heart like a person sometimes needs to amputate a limb to survive. But then I’ll hear an old song and there it is my heart comes back. Is that all it’s about a heart? It cries it loves it fears?”
I don’t answer because her questions aren’t finished.
“But what are you supposed to do with it? Harness it like a horse to get you somewhere let it eat hay drink water and graze? Or let it pull you all over the world looking for a piece of greener grass?”
Short pause.
“But you can’t starve a heart either. You have to keep it well fed and honest or it pumps poison into the blood. And then the body runs on bad energy.
“So where does that leave us?” she asks.
I don’t know what to say but I think out loud. “Well if we’re talking about the heart then let’s go to sources that speak about the heart.” I pull out Chovos Halevavos Duties of the Heart.
She puts me on hold for a minute and I turn a few pages. And I think about the other day when I had to drop something off in the building of an old friend. As I passed by her door and wondered whether to knock she suddenly opened it.
She was scattered and breathless. She offered me a drink but forgot to give it.
Within minutes she was crying about some part of her life. At some point she pounded her hand on her heart really hard. We didn’t find any real solutions. But just the company the moments of release from self seemed to help. Like a cane for a limp while the leg remains the same.
After I left I kept picturing her face and the way she sat there. It felt like she was in this silent war not a war that attacks a city a house or even a body. More like a pogrom on the heart. We pass through moment after moment of crushed hopes and hurt feelings.
I keep thinking that life doesn’t work like that haiku we learned in ninth grade:
A piece of green pepper
fell
off the wooden salad bowl:
so what?
I don’t even know why it was a haiku it doesn’t even follow haiku rules. And it left me so empty like scenes of war atrocities — tributes to our sufferings instead of stories of faith and kindness. Only showing the atrocities leaves one’s heart where the green pepper falls off the bowl. It’s a feeling of “so what?” A Jew can’t survive with “so what?”
I find the page in Chovos Halevavos. Where it says how our faith will steer our heart and our heart will steer our mind and our mind will give our limbs their orders. And to do all our acts public and private for the sake of G-d and not to win the favor of humans. Somehow that helps.
The words cleanse the blood from the poison of “so what?” so our limbs don’t become too weak to extend to others both our hands and our hearts. —