A Narrow Bridge

Kol ha-olam kulo gesher tzar m’od v’ha-ikkar lo l’fahed klal. “The whole world is a very narrow bridge, and the essential thing is not to fear at all.”

These words, adapted from the writings of the great Hassidic master Rabbi Nahman of Bratzlav, are as enigmatic as they are famous. Set to music, the words are sung by children in schools and summer camps, at b’nei mitzvah celebrations, weddings, Shabbat tables, in every Jewish setting imaginable – by me, by you, probably many times over. What is interesting is that I have never stopped to consider what message the lyrics are actually communicating. “The whole world is a very narrow bridge, and the essential thing is not to fear at all.” Why is the world like a bridge, a narrow one at that, and if it is, why not fear – especially if you are doing something dangerous, like crossing a narrow bridge?

After a week like this one, a month like this one, I found myself lingering on the haunting melody, humming it to myself, thinking about the words and their meaning. As New Yorkers, we continue to feel a collective sigh of relief after dodging a potential terrorist bomb in Times Square last Saturday night. Just imagine what could have happened, the death and destruction, the unraveling of our safety net. We are deeply alert to the sense of good fortune, luck, or blessing that we avoided an attack by the skin of our teeth. We are grateful for the collective forces that, just in the nick of time, were able to stop this would-be terrorist from completing his mission. We all feel thankful that we have walked this bridge to safety. Nevertheless, even having arrived, we are equally aware, as demonstrated by yesterday’s evacuation, of just how narrow that bridge is, how close we are to the edge, and how easy it would been to fall off.

The simple truth is that for every Times Square “exhale,” every near miss, we have far too many reminders of late that more often than not we actually do slip off. The oil rig explosion that has wreaked havoc on the Gulf of Mexico, a horrific and long-term ecological disaster – such a tragic loss, just weeks after one of the worst coal mining disasters in history. Every few days I hear of another earthquake. If there ever was a time that we felt battered and buffeted, not totally in control of the events of our lives, this is it. What about that volcano? Have we forgotten already? If you want to hear from someone who felt their destiny was not their own, controlled by forces beyond our power – speak to someone who was stuck in Europe that week.

The shocks are not only geological. There are also political and economic shake-ups – the elections in the United Kingdom and the riots in Greece. I was speaking to a friend in the financial world and he reflected that this week, people went to sleep simply not knowing what the next day would bring, not knowing how far the Greek meltdown would spread, and how long it would last – a very narrow Wall Street, perhaps even a tightrope, that many, perhaps many in this room, continue to walk. We want to be in control, we work hard to direct the events of our lives, but a week like this is a not-so-gentle reminder that however hard we try, no matter how tightly we seek to grip our reality, it is simply not for us to predict, and certainly not for us to determine, the script of this uncertain world. As the Yiddish proverb goes: A mensch tracht un Gott lacht, Man plans and God laughs.

The awareness that we live in an unpredictable and uncontrollable world, a world shot through with contingency, is hardly new to us. If anything, the question of how to progress through a world that is ultimately not ours to understand or control is one that our predecessors asked with far greater frequency than we do. Arguably, the ancients approached this question with greater sincerity and deeper humility, if for no other reason than that they were not filled with our modern presumption that one can control his or her surroundings. We in this room delude ourselves thinking that we are in control, unaware of the fact that we are one volcano, one computer crash away from being stopped in our tracks. To use a trivial example: just yesterday, the synagogue’s tech person informed us that our computers would need to be shut down for an hour. It was totally disorienting. I found myself doing something very late 90’s – using a telephone. We produce medical advances and technological innovation; we try to tighten our grip ever so slightly, but it is only a tweak at the edges. The fundamental limitations and frailties of what it is to be human remain constant.

Think about our parasha, a bold statement reminding us that it is not we who hold the cards. There is the shmittah, the sabbatical year that took place every seven years, when slaves went free and the land lay fallow. There is the jubilee year that took place after seven sabbatical cycles, when everyone went free and all non-urban land reverted back to its ancestral family’s possession. Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook explained that the jubilee year is a spiritual regimen to engender a sense of humility before an unknowable God. We let the land lie fallow because doing so cultivates and strengthens this sense of humility. We do not have the final say.

Blessings and curses abound, and we, living from one moment to the next, do not know what is in store. This brings us to the central question at hand. If we are not in control, and if we don’t know what will happen from one moment to the next, how do we proceed? If the world is such a narrow bridge, how do we walk it, if we walk it
at all?

The answer, or at least part of the answer, is in the song: lo l’fahed klal. We do not fear, or at least we do not allow our fear to immobilize us. In other words we “walk on.” As Rabbi Harold Kushner explains: “Courage is not the absence of fear; it is the overcoming of fear.” (Conquering Fear, p. 168) Even in the face of the unknown, we press forward with cautious optimism, alert but not frightened, vigilant but not paranoid.

Illness, Mother Nature, and a deeply flawed humanity – these are narrow bridges of uncertainty in all of our futures. It never has been and never will be for us to control our surroundings. What is in our power is to choose to leverage that uncertainty towards cultivating a profound appreciation for the present blessings of our lives. We need to hug our children in a way that treasures the moment, but never so tightly that they fail to develop their own self-confidence in this uncertain world that will be theirs to inherit. None of us need look far to be reminded of our mortality. But the choice of what we do with that awareness belongs to us, we dare not be paralyzed for fear of falling – we can and must make the willed choice to cross these bridges before us. As Eleanor Roosevelt wrote, “You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you stop to look fear in the face and you are able to say to yourself, ‘I lived through this… I can take the next thing that comes along.’ You must do the thing you think you cannot do.” (quoted in Kushner, Conquering Fear, pp. 170-171)

It was none other than our own late Rabbi Milton Steinberg who recognized that greater than the fear of death is the fear of life. That far too many of us go through this world with a temerity born of a fear of the unknown, the “what ifs” and the inevitable uncertainties of our existence. Faced with this fear, Steinberg taught, we must choose to proceed with a sense of purposeful duty. In Steinberg’s words: “Let the mother tend her young and let the poet sing his song, and the laborer dig his ditch and the merchant do his best. And if life is hard and the child grows into an ungrateful [adult] and the poet’s song falls on deaf ears, if the laborer digs his ditch in vain and the merchant fails in his business endeavors, then at least each will have done his or her duty.” (quoted in Kushner, Conquering Fear, p. 171)

Our lives are indeed akin to standing on a narrow bridge. If we stand still, we shall be frozen. If we veer too far to the left or to the right we shall most certainly fall and be dashed to pieces. What we must do, wrote William James, is to “‘Be strong and of a good courage.’ Act for the best, hope for the best, and take what comes… If death ends all, we cannot meet death better.” (Conclusion of his essay “The Will to Believe”)

Kol ha-olam kulo gesher tzar m’od v’ha-ikkar lo l’fahed klal. “The whole world is a very narrow bridge, and the essential thing is not to fear at all.” I think, finally, I know what it means. May we – this week, next week and the years ahead – live up to Reb Nahman’s charge, believing in ourselves, believing in our God, believing that our lives, precarious as they are, can be lived hopefully, courageously, and filled with purpose.

I would like to thank Rabbi Harold Kushner for his explicit and implicit influence on this sermon. After a lifetime of admiration from afar, I was finally able to make his acquaintance this past year and I dedicate the above sermon to his ongoing influence. Anyone interested in an extended meditation on living in an uncertain world would do well to read Rabbi Kushner’s recently released book, Conquering Fear: Living Boldly in an Uncertain World (Knopf, 2009).