You Have to “Got Time for the Pain”

Mine is almost 12 years old.  It’s a white, cloth bag that I got on a college reunion weekend in Ann Arbor.  It’s my shul bag.  And if you ask my kids, they could identify it in an instant.  Over the years, it has carried talises, candies, tissues, and books from  On Repentance  to  Hop on Pop.  Truth is, what we carry in our bags, tells a lot about us as we move through the years of our lives.  -

As we pack our metaphorical bags, especially the ones we take with us on the Yamim Noraim, we pack lots of emotions as well.  We enter this time of year with fear, awe, hopes, dreams, regret and joy. But there is one emotion that most of us do not associate easily with this time of the year - - the emotion of pain. 

Andrew Solomon in his book Noonday Demon, quotes a Russian expression that says, “If you wake up feeling no pain, you know you are dead.”   This quote makes me think a lot about the role not of physical pain, but of emotional pain in our lives. Integral to the human condition is the power of pain. It is a power that needs to be part of the Elul and Yamim Noraim experience of motivation towards a better life.

The Rambam famously writes that the shofar tells us, “Awake you sleepers from your sleep.”  And Rabbi Steinsaltz comments that the shofar’s purpose, “is to arouse and to shock.”  During this time of year, we must grapple with the things that are shocking and painful --the things that keep us up at night.

This shofar’s wakeup call should make us remember the places that maybe we have been afraid to revisit--a quarrel with a friend, a misunderstanding with a colleague or a mistreatment by or toward a family member.  To paraphrase Tehilim 6:6, , בְּדִמְעָתִי, עַרְשִׂי אַמְסֶה. “Every night  I drown my bed with tears.”  We should cry and remember the feelings of pain we felt and reflect upon where they took us.  We should also remember that all of us, intentionally or not, have inflicted pain on others.  Pain should make us weep.  Pain should make us uncomfortable it should be used as fuel for our engines of self improvement and transformation. 

While pop singer Carly Simon famously sang, “I haven’t got time for the pain, I haven’t got room for the pain,” the Torah takes the opposite approach.  We are actually obligated to take time and make room for pain.  No fewer than 36 times are we told that we can turn toward good by making time and room to remember the pain of being strangers and the pain of slavery. כִּי-גֵרִים הֱיִיתֶם, בְּאֶרֶץ מִצְרָיִם  (Ex: 23:9).  This pain keeps our moral compasses as a people alive.  

Naomi Shihab Nye in her amazingly powerful poem Kindness echoes this lesson. While I recommend the entire poem , two lines sum it up well.  “Before you know what kindness really is  you must lose things.”  and, “Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.”

This Elul and Yamim Noraim in order to do the hard work of self reflection and growth, make some time and room for pain and take it in your bag wherever you go.  Take time to weep and to feel broken.  Remember the things you lost and may have caused others to lose. Remember how others lifted you and how you can lift others. Take the losses and the pains and channel them to gains by making things right with others and with yourself in the year to come.