Storytelling

Telling stories has always been at the heart of Judaism. Our tradition says, B’rosh Hashanah yikateivun, on Rosh Hashanah the Book of Life is opened and reviewed. During these Days of Awe, we gather in community, and each of us reflects on our life story, asking: What chapters have I written in the last year? What chapters are yet to be? When we tell our stories aloud, they gain in power. Through them we draw closer by discovering our similarities and differences, and by acknowledging that every single human life has its triumphs and trials.

In an earlier time, our ancestors relished storytelling. They lived in extended families, often for generations in the same town. Each town had a central square where they would catch up with friends, maybe play cards, or savor some coffee and pastries. Perhaps they lived in cities; and there, too, they sat on stoops, or park benches, or fire escapes chatting with others. The discussions flowed easily from gossip and kvetching, to bragging about kids, to commenting on world events. Sometimes their city or town may have seemed too small, yet back then everyone knew their neighbor and everyone knew that they belonged.

Today, those moments are rare when we can connect and share our stories, person to person. This is an era when communal bonds are eroding. Given the pace of our lives, it’s no wonder—we run frantically, seldom having time for a genuine conversation despite being linked by email and cell phones. In our down time we are lucky if we have enough energy just to watch TV or surf the net. This lifestyle leaves little room for civic engagement or public relationships. As scholar Robert Putnam has noted, “Americans in massive numbers join less, trust less, give less, vote less and schmooze less.” People report feeling more alienated than ever before. It seems that stress, apathy, and loneliness may be the collateral damage of broken communal ties. We have lost the skills and the comprehension of what we can gain by relying on others within our community.

Let me tell you a brief story about Jaclyn. In 2016, Jaclyn, who happens to be a rabbi at a large synagogue in Seattle, preached to her congregation about her postpartum depression and the many challenges of adjustment to parenthood. It was only then, after publicly sharing her saga that the true power of her story manifested. Because for weeks afterward, men and women of all ages reached out to her with gratitude and grace. They shared struggles, fears and previously unspoken challenges they endured. They shared how the sermon changed the way they spoke with and related to the new parents in their lives. They told her how it gave them courage to open up to their loved ones, that it inspired more authentic vulnerability and compassion. It was in the sharing, even the broadcasting of her story, that it had the chance to ripple outward and leave the largest mark. Because people of all genders, ages, shapes, and sizes, saw themselves in Jaclyn’s story! Some, of course, connected with the painful and oft-ignored topic of postpartum depression, which I’m sure is a known quantity to all too many people in this room. But even for those with no firsthand experience, Jaclyn’s struggle and breaking point of believing that she was totally, uniquely, terrifyingly alone resonated with many of her congregants.

Jaclyn’s storyline speaks to a universal human condition—of pain, of isolation, of some kind of catalyzing moment—and then, in time, of a pivot toward victory. By sharing her story, Jaclyn

subsequently became an epicenter of sacred storytelling at her synagogue, of facilitating healing and meaning-making through listening. Once she’d shared her own story, people answered back with their own.

Their stories, our stories, YOUR story—are all rich with meaning. Our own interpretations of our past experiences have a strong impact on who we believe ourselves to be. Your stories are the defining moments in time that help that make you you. And this is no mere observation, but a well-documented psychological concept authored by Dr. Dan P McAdams, chair of the psychology department of Northwestern University. He calls it narrative identity: the idea that who we are “[goes] considerably beyond [biological or demographic] facts as people selectively [interpret] aspects of their experience and…construct stories that make sense to them and to their audiences, that vivify and integrate life and make it more or less meaningful.” Our stories animate us, explain the large and small choices we make, and point us firmly in the direction of who we want to be.

Obviously we as Jews are steeped in storytelling, from our never-ending reading and rereading of our Torah to the entire folk genre of Chasidic tales passed down from generation to generation. As I mentioned last week, I had the opportunity to visit Yad VaShem, Israel’s Holocaust museum. One of the many impressive parts is how the museum made the decision to center the exhibits around personal stories with the belief that the stories of individuals deepened the understanding of what happened. Contending with its vastness, it wasn’t about counting to six million, but delving into one.

The director of Yad Vashem explained: Visitors will be encouraged to look each victim in the eye and get to know him or her as closely as possible. Visitors might see Bluma Wallach’s plain pair of glasses, which she had given to her young daughter Tula for safe keeping when she was sent to the showers in Birkenau. Tula held onto those glasses long after her mother was gassed. For forty five years, they represented a face, an entire life. Even in the Museum’s model of Auschwitz the artist gave individual expression to the 3,000 figures in the display.

The museum undertook incredible efforts to identify the names of people in the photos, uncover their stories, and collect personal artifacts. However since most of the Jews were murdered, and their property confiscated or destroyed, sometimes they’d have as little as a bead…or a button…To tell a story.

The museum exhibit at Yad Vashem concludes in the Hall of Names, a giant domed room layered with wide shelves, a quarter of them filled with thick volumes, each page containing the brief life story of an individual victim, the empty shelves speaking as loud as the ones filled.

I think about those shelves at Yad Vashem and wonder about our own community, how much do we really know about each other? Sure, we talk at Oneg on Friday nights. We see each other in line at the bathroom. We’ve heard each other speak, but have we heard each other’s story? Have we been still enough, patient enough to coax out each other’s pressures? Have we provided a space that is welcoming and safe to draw out what each other’s greatest pressures are?

Imagine, now, what telling your own, personal, original story might do. Not the words in a book, however good that book might be, but the words that only you know. The release of coming together not to read a text, but to create an entirely new text in conversation with others who are also looking to add a next chapter by sharing their own stories. The chance to re-mine your story for meaning, both from looking back on it from who you are today and the chance for your story to have an impact on others who need your insight from the lessons you’ve already learned. Just like Jaclyn, you can admit and then illustrate the human condition in vivid color, allowing others to see themselves in you, whether or not you’ve had the same exact experience. You can be that first story, that spark that lights the flame in others who will answer your story with one of their own.

And I’m not just speaking in hypotheticals. Jaclyn got to share her story with the masses because she was a rabbi with a bimah, a stage, but most of us have no such outlet to tell our story beyond our inner circle. That’s why I’m inviting YOU to share your defining stories. I’m so incredibly sure that all of us gathered in here are carrying big if not HUGE stories inside of us, stories looking for acknowledgement, begging to be told, to be liberated from isolation. Your miracles, your heartbreaks, your transformations, your hard-earned accomplishments. Stories that let each one of us become an address for sacred storytelling.

We will start tomorrow and continue throughout the year. We will begin to listen to one another by sharing our stories, and in learning to listen to one another we will connect and grow. We will grow into a better, more thoughtful community. We will learn to have the sort of yirah, the awe I described last week, for each other’s personal history. Instead of saying, with attitude, “What’s his story,” We will learn to say, “Yes, That person must have some story.” When we disagree we will learn to consider each other’s stories.

So, I humbly ask, please plan to stay tomorrow and share your story. If you can’t stay tomorrow, I have set up monthly story telling evenings and once a month story telling lunches. It is so important to me that we get to know each other and we can do that by sitting down, face to face, and letting one story follow another. I want to see TKA strengthen as a community through these storytelling.

Again, lest you think you’re not fancy enough, or important enough, or insert-adjective-here enough, I want to assure you that you are enough. We all have stories. Stories of becoming a parent, whether you succeeded or not, however your child came to you. Stories of coming to America, of self-acceptance, of grief from any kind of loss, of aging at any stage of life, of coming to Judaism or changing your Judaism, of addiction, of serving your country, of navigating multiple cultures, of beating the odds, of abuse, of dreams coming true, of wisdom, of physical change. Or whatever else you is on your heart that you feel called to share. Happy stories, sad stories. Painful stories, inspiring stories. Stories of your humanity in its fullest.

Stories will bring us closer together. Because we get to continually reconstruct and add chapters to our own stories. Because every person deserves a bimah. Because no one needs to feel that they’re the only person on Earth who has ever felt this way. Because our stories are our very humanity.

Let’s be clear, the conversations that begin tomorrow are not the end; they are just the beginning. Long-lasting relationships and change happens through dedicated, on-going effort. It’s ok building relationships will take time because as members of a community, we are in it together for the long haul. We want to garner the stories, gifts, and resources from all our members so that we may shape Kol Ami and our community not just for today, not just for ourselves, but for generations to come.

Kol Ami, in your stories, in your courage to share, may you be found in 5780. Let your voices ring out, let your stories be heard. Let someone else in, and share the defining moments that make you you. And when we raise our voices up, when we take a chance on being brave…we write the next chapter of our own story. And when we come together, one year from now, ready to greet our next new year—let the story of this year be the stories that brought us together.