Mother Teresa and the Rebbe of Lublin
I was sitting in my temple during this High Holy Day service of Rosh Hashanah and thinking about Mother Teresa. Strange? Maybe not. The Jewish New Year and the 10 Days of Awe leading up to Yom Kippur, give us an opportunity to think about our lives, our values and commitments and the lives and value of all our sisters and brothers both near and afar.
As I examined my own heart, certainties and doubts, it is not surprising that the honest and agonizing introspection of Mother Teresa should swim into my meditations. There is a current controversy about Mother Teresa. Did her doubts, her loneliness and despair, and the painful absence of, what she understood as God’s presence, make her life a fraud and her piety a lie?
Let me break the rules of essay writing and give away my conclusion. She was not a fraud. Just the opposite. Her painful doubts honored her faithfulness. Faith without questioning is a lie. Everyone falls into despair. Our doubts are a compliment to faith. Faith is not belief or even certainty. It is involvement, relationship and engagement with the great and often terrible question of meaning and the Source of Meaning.
My Rabbi, and friend of over 35 years, Rabbi Michael Roth, spoke of the Rebbe of Lublin and how his particular Hasidic group celebrated life with singing and dancing. Yes, they studied the Law but were yet more interested in the direct experience of the divine, that feeling of connection which transcends mere belief and manifests in experience and ecstasy—ecstasy understood as being out of the static and moving to the music of the spirit. The Hasidic emphasis was on music, dance and joy.
Although, the Jewish world in Lublin in Poland was seldom overly joyous, the Rebbe believed we should find and celebrate such joys as were available. Don’t miss the wedding because there is a funeral. Don’t give up on a life of meaning, which is not so much about conventional faith, as faithfulness to life. In other words, despite the pogroms, the deprivation and the suffering, we can still shout L'Chaim! To Life!
As his Hasids were singing and dancing, they noticed the Rebbe's absence. This was unheard of, and they immediately got worried and hysterical, as is the tradition of my tribe. They went out and searched for him, and when they came to his house, they saw his second story window open. On the ground, under the window, the Rebbe lay bruised and broken, though alive.
They gathered around him, comforted him and carried him up-stairs to his bedroom. He looked at them weakly and then implored them to go, to return to the celebration of the festival—a festival marked by most Jewish traditions, but supremely by the Hasids, with dancing.
Oy, they had so many questions. They wanted to know how he got to the ground. Was he pushed? Was there a robber, a rival, or an agent of the unfriendly government? The Rebbe would only respond that a great and terrible force took him through the window and brought him down. No further details, just lots of questions—unthinkable questions.
Could a holy man, a teacher of righteousness and joy, fall so low as to feel the ultimate in loneliness and despair—and act on it?
In my temple, there were as many views of this story as there are opinions about Mother Teresa. Does despair cancel joy? Do feelings of being totally alone and without God (for the theological essentialists) or a sense of meaning (for the philosophical existentialists) annul our actions, beliefs and values? Do moments without meaning, or the sense of the sacred, render our lives, our joys, our dancing, our laughter and our tears absurd?
If so, not only are all normal people, of both conventional and unconventional faith, in trouble, but so too are David and Jesus for crying out the same plaintive wail of deep despair, “My God! My God! Why hast Thou forsaken me?”
Why did David, Jesus, The Rebbe of Lublin and Mother Teresa feel abandoned? How could this come to such holy people? The brief answer is: Life. The expression “To Life!” is not easy sentimentality. It a large Yes, not of constant and even faith, but faithfulness—and the courage to be real and the courage to be afraid.
Does it, in fact, make any difference if the Lubliner Rebbe jumped or was pushed? He was on the ground and broken. His friends and followers owed him comfort and care—even if they thought he had somehow been weak and transgressed. Their duty was not conditioned by the state of his soul but his body. Mother Teresa’s faith and doubt do not dim or diminish her life, which was a response to the condition of our beautiful and broken world.
The Rebbe of Lublin and Mother Teresa’s lives and despair may serve as an example for all of us. To holy people and saints, as well as to the majority of us who are normal neurotics, life takes us from rooms of joy and sorrow. We leave a birth to attend a funeral. We dance at a wedding and the next day rend garments in mourning.
How could we not become confused and disoriented? How could we sail the currents of current events on an even keel? Should we even aspire to such detachment? How could we look on the glory of existence, of life and thought and not be drawn to faithful service? How could we look at the misery and pain, the injustice of fate and not be drawn to faithful service?
As the opposite of love is not hate but indifference, the opposite of faith is not doubt; it too is indifference. Doubt honors faith with a faithful struggle to live lives of meaning, perform acts of kindness and honor life through service and joy, tears and doubts and, of course, dancing!
