While I was home for Thanksgiving, my mother and I watched And Then She Found Me. I hadn’t heard anything about the movie, and my mother had rented it thinking it was a “frothy chick flick”, which could not have been a less accurate description, unless things like love and motherhood and faith and family are insubstantial.
One line from that movie has remained with me, so much so that I had to google it to find out where I was remembering it from. [spoilers in the next sentence] The always-amazing Helen Hunt, playing the Jewish protagonist of the movie, doubts her faith in G-d when her husband leaves her the day her adoptive mother passes away, her newly-discovered birth mother is difficult and perhaps crazy, and she is unable to sustain a pregnancy even after endangering her new relationship by having sex with her now-ex. [end spoilers] Searching for a prayer to say in a pivotal moment, she settles on the Shema.
The Shema is the quintessential prayer of Judaism. The full Shema is several paragraphs, but the first line - the Shema proper - is short enough that probably anyone with any Jewish education has memorized it. Shema Yisrael, Adonai eloheynu, Adonai ehad. Commonly translated - I can see, in my mind’s eye, the small blue card my parents gave me when I was six to keep in my bedroom so that, until I had memorized it, I could recite the prayer every night before sleeping, which I almost always still do - this is Hear O Israel, the Lord is our G-d, the Lord is One. It is a declaration of faith that observant Jews speak at moments both pivotal and mundane, when they lie down and when they rise up, when their children are first born and as they themselves die.
In the literal sense, the Shema is what the Jewish religion originally was: a repudiation of polytheism and idolatry. It is the fulfillment of the first commandment. It is also a connection to the community, addressing itself not to the divine or to nonbelievers but to others of the faith. It is saying, History, ancestry, family: I am still a part of you. It is saying, The G-d of Sarah and Rebecca and Rachel and Leah, the Force who brought us out of Egypt and gave us our identity, is still alive in the world. It is saying, There is only One.
Hunt’s character in the movie offered a more modern interpretation: The G-d of love and the G-d of Fear are the same G-d. This is an argument against indifference and forced safety, and also against the new idolatry, the modern insistence that the spiritual and the physical are somehow separate, that joy does not arise from the same source as pain, that life is not intrinsically tied into death. That acceptance of beauty does not imply and is not implicit in acceptance of heartbreak.
We all have a tendency to place ourselves somewhere on an imaginary continuum between virtue and vice, weigh our lives on a scale of successes and failures, pretend that there is a separation between the things we embrace and those we try to deny. We try to exclude from our lives the pain of loss, of waste, of terror - but the only way to succeed in this is by also excluding joy and love and hope. And G-d does not command us to avoid pain. She tells us to honor our parents and love our children, to share our food with the hungry and give our animals a weekly day of rest, to dress and act in ways that mark us. To fight war after war for our independence and to light candles in honor of our own who have died and to spill wine in sorrow for our slain enemies, and to wander in the desert for forty years if that is what it takes to find a place where we feel at home. None of those things is untinged by difficulty, obstacle, sorrow, sacrifice, but that does not diminish their good. The G-d who brings us the things we desire also brings us those we avoid, because we need them just as much.
