Well-trodden beautiful truths to live by

by Joanna Silber

“Such a long long time to be gone; such a short time to be there!”

This Grateful Dead lyric (a renown U. S. folk band, also endeavoring in genre fusion (blues, country, rock, funk, and experimental, for the younger and/or uninitiated)) from the track “Box of Rain” reverberates a lot in my mind lately, spiraling and out of my thoughts. It’s the song’s final lyric, a joyous burst of death contemplation, the universal human notion of the brevity of human life. The song itself encapsulates the deep paradoxical truths of human life: rich, colorful, piercing and poetic, a range of conflicting emotions and all of it fleeting; a song that runs over five minutes. This song is what first bubbled up when I encountered this parsha, as it begins:

“Moses went and spoke these things to all Israel. He said to them: I am now one hundred and twenty years old. I can no longer be active. Moreover, יהוה has said to me, “You shall not go across yonder Jordan.”

One hundred and twenty years old is a rich, long life and yet when compared to life itself, a short time to be there. I ignored this song’s call at first. It’s a poignant truth and I love the band, but why bring it up here? Each time I ignored the song, it returned to me. I wasn’t listening to what it had to offer. I surrendered, joyously, upon recalling a notion from my Jewish upbringing that the divine can be found in the mundane. I’m not arguing the Grateful Dead and holy texts are identical. I want to offer joyful appreciation for the aliveness it brings to this parsha for me, allowing me to connect to a sort of a divine portal. The song’s pertinence in analyzing this text rang true to me once more with the following:

“And it’s just a box of rain
I don’t know who put it there,
Believe it if you need it or,
Leave it if you dare”

I did and do need it. It’s enough to ritualize simply because I need it, enough to find meaning because there is love, and to surrender to it because maybe you know, intuitively, on some level, that a truth that will catch you, along with many contradictions you’ll trip on along the way. Believe it if you need it is what helps me connect to ritual at large (in Judaism and otherwise) to allow myself to search for meaning, simply because I need it. The song lays a path to follow as I unspool this parsha. The song’s truths are nothing new. I embrace that for what it is: tender classics in human life, sweetly worn by all.

It’s all of these notions that I collected in the lyrics and that leap out at me in this parsha: an oldness that returns (nothing new under the sun is nothing new under the sun), life as a messy, rich, dance between grasp and surrender, accepting ritual as meaning-making in human life, among others. Much like the oldness that returns, this song returned to me, old and new every time, not unlike the prayers and texts we return to time and time again:

“Gather the people—men, women, children, and the strangers in your communities—that they may hear and so learn to revere your God יהוה and to observe faithfully every word of this Teaching.”

Now almost three years into my journey with chronic pain, I also dance the familiar, delicate disabled dance between grasp and surrender. With each exhausting episode ravaged by a world designed around the young and mobile, such meaningful moments of joy return with added depth and texture, unsurprising to me that I would be even more attuned to blips into the divine. Here, there is a dance between grasp and surrender, a tension then alchemized through Moses’ poem. God and Moses endeavor for the people to continue to heed God’s instructions and to not forsake God as Joshua leads them to the land, finding home. 

Ultimately God and Moses are to surrender the reality that people will forsake God, leading to God’s anger and resulting in evils by the people. To be in this dance between grasp and surrender, to fight and then release, knowing what suffering is to come, (I allow myself here to stretch suffering resulting from evils to any form of suffering, but I clarify I do not think that experiencing pain is an “evil”) and to devise a plan to follow are certainly acts of the Divine here, and how many disabled people at times do too. We hold certain truths alone sometimes, not recognized by others and must carry on. There are certain unavoidable, undesirable fates that we surrender to and devise a way to move through it. As I write this, I experienced a day of great overexertion and I knew this would happen, and know the troubles ahead in my recovery. It’s a violent, bumpy and meaningful road.

Here I would like to take us finally towards the alchemizing of the dance between grasp and surrender, which to me in this parsha emerge as art and expression. What can we do after we surrender? Part of surrendering often means accepting the importance of this unmet need. Does the surrender need to be final? Could there be alchemy of those two realities in the form of artistic self-expression? This may indeed soothe the anger and offer a way to restructure meaning when our original plans are dashed. As God instructs Moses to have their say in the form of a poem, I identify similar solutions within myself in moments of turmoil, whether activating a divine portal through art like the Grateful Dead or tending to my own writing, drawing or painting. I warned you the notions I find would find a sweet home in well-trodden territory. Sometimes, universal truths and a well-trodden songs are what offer divine connection. Not only can self-expression and beyond the self but political expressions and expressions of the community meet that need, it also adds further dimension to the self and/or selves expressing. Indeed, God says:

“Therefore, write down this poem and teach it to the people of Israel; put it in their mouths, in order that this poem may be My witness against the people of Israel.”

The song lingered in my ears and on my lips. On Friday nights, there are prayers in my mouth, as they were in my ancestors’. Interacting with poetry, art is to meet these ideas intimately way for it is merely a way to connect with one’s self through art. This act, to write a poem to have one’s say, a song wrestling with life’s unbearable sweetness and brevity, can indeed make these needs more approachable, offer more texture and more saliently convey their truth to others. They can be discussed over, sung and engaged with from generation to generation. Perhaps finally, they can offer their creator (whether with a big “C” or small c), a form of peace for they can rest easy knowing they released an expression and allow for it to find its way into the world: “they didn’t listen to me at first, so I leave a piece of me, to be received in a more salient and touching way, perhaps.” It is grasp, surrender and art. All of them are allowed to dance and find their way in this messy, ugly, evil, beautiful and Divine world. 

With art and self-expression perhaps we can also enjoy opportunity to be in a cyclical form of time, where I leave you with a final Grateful Dead lyric:

“For this is all a dream we dreamed one afternoon, long ago”

Another salient, achingly beautiful and succinct distilling of the notions in this parsha. And perhaps it’s what gave me surrender and peace as I came to write this, for what if it all was already written?

Shabbat shalom and with love,
Joanna

Hi my name is Joanna Silber! My first name I was told means in Hebrew "by the grace of God." I find that apt as I fumble gracefully into deeper notions of the Talmud as someone raised more secularly. I'm a writer, teacher, artist and often thinking on and indulging in absurd joke writings, and likely cackling too loud in a public place.