The following is a transcript of Episode 173 of the Identity/Crisis Podcast. Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.

Yehuda: Hi everyone. Welcome to Identity/Crisis, a show about news and ideas from the Shalom Hartman Institute. I’m Yehuda Kurtzer and we’re recording on Monday, January 29th, 2024.

One of my all-time favorite quotes comes from Jonathan Safran Foer’s book Everything is Illuminated. By now, the quote’s pretty well-known. I may have even quoted it on this show before. He writes, “Jews have six senses: touch, taste, sight, smell, hearing, memory. While gentiles experience and process the world through the traditional senses, and use memory only as a second-order means of interpreting events, for Jews, memory is no less primary than the prick of a pin, or a silver glimmer, or the taste of the blood it pulls from the finger. The Jew is pricked by a pin and remembers other pins. It’s only by tracing the pinprick back to other pinpricks, when his mother, tried to fix his sleeve while his arm was still in it, when his grandfather’s fingers fell asleep from stroking his great-grandfather’s damp forehead, when Abraham tested the knife point to make sure that Isaac would feel no pain, the Jew was able to know why it hurts. When a Jew encounters a pin, he asks, ‘What does it remember like?’”

So I feel this personally, very deeply. Maybe it explains why I was drawn to studying history, or my fixation with the mechanics of memory, both as something of a scientific mystery and a Jewish preoccupation. That line — “What does it remember like?” — suggests a way of encountering the world that looks constantly for an analogy to the past that we ourselves didn’t necessarily experience, but which has somehow burrowed itself into our consciousness as a part of who we are and as a mechanism to help us process the present.

This was my default move shortly after the events of October 7th. It was too hard, maybe, to just let those events be their own terrible moment, and it offered me some interpretive comfort those events instead be like a replay of stories from the Jewish past. I wrote an article in JTA a few days after the tragedy that “when unspeakable tragedy hits the Jewish people, we turn to memory. We ask not just what happened, we also ask, what does this remind of us?” 

And I argued, counter to what I was seeing online, that this was an okay thing to do. I wrote that I know about all of the risks that when Jews analogize all of their enemies to the Biblical villains, Amalek, we run the risk of wanting to commit genocide, or maybe even being inclined to do so, and that the analogies between the past and the present are always imperfect.

For instance, in the case of October 7th itself, many of us saw a pogrom, and we were reminded of the worst of those events, like the famous pogrom of Kishinev, in April 1903, which was one of the catalysts for Zionism’s global rise in popularity among Jews. What makes it such an imperfect analogy is that at Kishinev, 45 people were killed. What analogy do we have for 1200?

Even with these risks, I think that the instinct to look with memory at the present is important and valid and valuable. I think these tools of reading the world offer us comfort. They provide us with a sense of continuity because they leave open for us the possibility that a horrid present may one day settle into simply being a tragic past, all of which, in turn, offers us the promise of a redemptive future. 

Most of all, I think, memory offers us empathy. As I wrote in JTA, most of us know that the lachrymosity of our history has been material for the refinement of our moral sensibilities. The traumatic memories of our ancestors, that we carry in our stories, fuels our prayers and shapes our moral imaginations. 

But looking at memory is just one classic Jewish reading strategy. There’s another, and it entails looking at the world and seeing letters on a page. This is the practice of Jews who see the world through the prism of our textual traditions, those texts, which, for centuries, have been the repository of our interpretive instincts. 

I was in a synagogue once in La Jolla, California, and had the entire text of the Torah printed on the glass walls of the synagogue, so when you looked out at the world, you could only make out the world between the words of the Torah. The words of the Torah, in other words, gave the world meaning. And I sat there in that shul and said, “Yeah, this seems right.”

I know that this way of thinking about text is confusing to some modern people, this idea that books, or scrolls, or the records of ancient conversations, somehow find eternal resonance in their application to the events of the day. Even people who appreciate great books tend to treat those books as powerful artifacts of the moments in history when they were written. But for traditional Jews, the provenance and dating of a particular Jewish text is only a small piece of the story. Good Torah is eternal, just waiting to be found, and then re-deployed, at the exact moment in the present or the future it is needed.

The person in my life who most embodies this instinct, a true text person, who sees the world with text in mind and in hand and in heart, is Elana Stein Hain. Elana’s a colleague of mine at Hartman. She teaches in our many programs and develops Torah resources. She’s also here to be the person to ask when you kind of know what you’re looking for in the tradition and need help finding just the right source, or at least a little bit of help knowing where to look. 

Elana’s with Talmud the way that fish is with water. If she’s had a busy-schedule day without time built in to wrestle over just a few lines in whatever tractate she’s working her way through, you could almost see her shortness of breath. After October 7th, while I was trying to process what I was seeing through memory, I watched Elana grasping for text. Maybe it was for the Biblical books of Ecclesiastes, Lamentations, or Job, so that she could work through the problem of extreme tragedy and theological loneliness, or maybe it was for Talmudic tractates that define the way that Jews mourn our losses and show up for others. 

This, that instinct, that grasping for text, was the genesis of this idea for our newest podcast, which we recently launched, and to which I’m giving over this episode of Identity/Crisis today, the pilot episode of TEXTing, with Elana Stein Hain. In each episode, Elana responds to the news of the day by choosing one or two texts, and working through them slowly, carefully, expertly, and humanly, together with a rotating group of colleagues and friends. 

The show promises not merely great Torah, but a way of seeing the world, one that more of us should embody. In this pilot episode, Elana is joined by fellow Talmudist and Hartman Senior Fellow Christine Hayes, to wrestle with loss and uncertainty through a reading of a text in Talmud Tractate Chagigah. I hope you enjoy as much as I did. 

Elana: Welcome to TEXTing, where we consider issues relevant to Jewish life through the lens of classical and modern Torah texts. I’m your host, Elana Stein Hain. TEXTing is generously sponsored by the Walder Charitable Fund and Micah Philanthropies. This episode is also sponsored by Erica Schacter Schwartz.

Jews around the world have experienced a devastating combination of loss and uncertainty since October 7th. The massacre that day and the war that followed has and continues to shatter lives, but it also shattered certain assumptions about Israel and about Jewish life and belonging around the world. Personally, I am really feeling this viscerally, and I’ve invited a teacher of mine, Dr. Christine Hayes, to join me, to study a piece of Talmud that’s a window into what many of us are experiencing right now. 

Christine is a Yale University professor emerita of Rabbinics, and a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute. For years, she has taught rabbis and Jewish lay leaders, and her Talmudic scholarship has shaped and will continue to shape the field of Jewish studies for generations to come.

Welcome, Chris. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Christine: Thanks so much for the invitation.

Elana: Before we dig into the text, I want to talk about your sense of loss and uncertainty during this time. As a person who’s spent your life teaching Jewish texts, who has deep relationships to Israel and to the Jewish people, can you share with us what you’ve been experiencing? 

Christine: There are just many, many personal connections, and hearing and holding the fear and the terror and the pain and the grief of so many people that I know and love has been a very big part of my life. 

Elana: Yeah, I have to say, I sit very close to a university campus where I was as a student, Columbia as an undergrad, and as a grad student. and where my spouse is currently the Rabbi, and there’s a deep sense of loss that I’m feeling there too.

Christine: Yeah, I think that’s, that’s true. It’s been an interesting time, that has opened a window onto some things that perhaps we’d prefer not to see. I think that at Yale, and I am retired technically this year, I don’t have to be on campus much, but actually the events of October brought me back to campus wanting to show up and just be present.

Elana: Pretty remarkable. I mean, for anyone who knows you, Chris, I think I could have predicted that you’d be busier once you’re retired than when you worked. 

So I wanna learn some Torah with you. You know, after October 7th, I couldn’t open Talmud for weeks, except when I was preparing for teaching. My Torah study is inextricably intertwined with a desire to relate to the divine in some way. And it shaped my whole life. And October 7th just made me feel, I think the word is rejected, from a theological standpoint. So I just, I couldn’t immerse myself in learning, while the world and my people was going up in flames. 

But then I was going on a flight, and I brought a Gemara, I brought a Talmud with me on the plane. I figured, you know, no internet, no news, I won’t be distracted. So I opened up Tractate Chagigah, which starts with a conversation about pilgrimage to Jerusalem on three major festivals, and it felt really inviting. It was a message of, you’re not rejected. Come to Jerusalem, come to the temple three times a year. God wants to see you. And it was a real balm, it was a promise.

And then I get to page 4B and it just tells the stories of rabbis who cry when they realize that their living in a time when the Temple’s been destroyed, and their no longer invited to come on pilgrimage. It just hit me like a ton of bricks. I mean the rabbis were crying on the page. I was crying in my seat. And that’s the Torah that I want to learn from you. 

I know you know that feeling of kind of the emotions of the text, because they were written and given and discussed with emotion, and they, it’s palpable. So it goes like this. Babylonian Talmud Chagigah 4B.

When Rav Huna reached the verse (inviting Jews to appear before God on a pilgramage to the Temple in Jerusalem three times a year for major holidays), he cried. He said: A servant whose master expects seeing him, shall that servant be kept at a distance from him? 

And then Rav Huna quoted a verse about God keeping the Jewish people at a distance, not wanting the Jews to come on pilgrimage to Jerusalem. It’s from Isaiah. “When you come to appear before me, who asked this of you, trampers of my courts?” 

And another. Rav Huna reached a different verse, this time describing how the children of Israel would eventually cross the Jordan River and offer sacrifices. The verse is: “And you shall sacrifice peace offerings and you shall eat there.” And of course, Rav Huna cried thinking about this. He said, “A servant whose master expects to eat at his table, should that servant be kept at a distance from the master?

And then Rav Huna quotes a verse about keeping the Jewish people at a distance. God, not wanting the Jews to offer sacrifices. It’s from that same section of Isaiah. It says, “‘What need do I have for all your sacrifices?’ says the Lord.”

So let’s just pause and start with that, the sense of rejection.

Christine: Yeah, I think when you were first describing it, you used the word anymore. And I think that’s the point, is that it’s the change. It’s the shock. We had a relationship, we had, you invited us three times a year to come, not only to see you, but to be seen. Right. And the rabbis play with that aspect of the verse, the ambiguity in the verse.

It’s not just “yireh,” but “yeraeh.” It’s not just “yeraeh,” to be seen, but “yireh,” to see God. There’s this mutual seeing, they both recognize each other. There’s full awareness and knowledge and familiarity with one another in these three visits per year. And so suddenly to arrive at this, this verse in Isaiah, where God says, I don’t want you here. You’re trampling my courts, get away, I don’t want your sacrifices. And the harshness of that contradiction when there was this assumption of an intimacy. 

But it always raises the question for me. Is it linear? Are they saying it was this way and now it is no longer? Is this a cyclical thing? Is this what the relationship is like and what relationships in general are like, that they, we go through moments of intense closeness and intimacy and moments of alienation and rejection?

Elana: Well, it’s so interesting because the way the, the way the Gemara, the Talmud, puts it is, it’s almost like, Rav Huna is reading through the Bible, right? So because he knows the later books, he knows that God is gonna say, don’t appear before me. That God is gonna say, I don’t want your sacrifices.

When he reads the verses in, you know, Deuteronomy, “Come, appear before me. Go, give those sacrifices.” He says, but I, but I know how this ends.

Christine: Yeah.

Elana: But presumably you’re gonna read and reread the Bible over and over again. So after you read the end where we’re rejected, you’re gonna then read the beginning where we’re invited back in. It’s really very immersive actually.

Christine: So you almost wonder, what is the occasion for the tears? Is the occasion for the tears the loss, or is it the constant uncertainty? Which stage are we in and will one of them be final? So it’s not just a one-time loss, but this sense of how do you, how do you continue to live in a situation with such back and forth and uncertainty about the relationship?

Elana: I’m also pretty taken with the fact that doesn’t talk about spouses who love each other being separated. He talks about, it seems to be that there’s a servant who has a master who wants to see him, wants to eat at his table, and now it seems against any of the wishes of the servant, the servant’s been pushed away. 

What do you make of that kind of more hierarchical, almost, we might think less intimate approach?

Christine: It is interesting. I mean, but the idea of being able to do personal, just personal service to someone is very much an idea of intimacy. I mean, you think about rabbis and their disciples who serve them, “leshamesh,” you know, is always the word that’s used, and it is a mark of, of both mutual respect and admiration and affection and so on.

And you’re right, sometimes there is this, the husband-wife metaphor that’s used, but they choose throughout this sugya actually to use the master-servant or master-slave metaphor. Which does, I think, reinforce this sense of helplessness that there really is, no, this is being done to us, right? There’s, we’re willing, we even thought we were favored. We even thought we were invited. But we’re just cast off and rejected when we were offering service. We weren’t even demanding anything of ourselves. I mean, at least you could say in a husband-wife relationship, each is sort of obligated in some way. But here, no obligation. We were offering the service and attendance, and that’s rejected?

Elana: Yeah, and it’s, you know, I wanna look at a couple more of these sort of crying moments because I think they even push more into the uncertainty piece.

Christine: The two with Rav Huna is a sense of just, he’s sort of numb at this, turnabout, this just shock and disbelief that. Tears come for many different reasons, and they express many different emotions as we’ll see. 

So even though as we go through each time a rabbi’s crying, there’s some digging that has to be done to figure out what those tears are coming from.

Elana: Right. So let’s say we’re starting with shock, so I wanna move little bit later on the same page, on the same folio. We turn from this sort of shock at the loss and maybe some uncertainty within that to really digging in on the uncertainty. 

And here we’re just looking at destruction verses or verses suggested from within a destruction in some way, of maybe how to emerge from it. Maybe. Right. So it goes like this: 

When Rabbi Ami reached a verse describing the destruction of Jerusalem, from Lamentations that read the following: “Let him put his mouth in the dust. Perhaps there may be hope.” So, Rabbi Ami cried. He said all this, you’re gonna put your mouth in the dust. You’re gonna bury your face in the ground, mourning and suffering. And only perhaps there may be hope? You’re putting us all the way at the back and perhaps? Maybe?

And we’ve got another Rabbi Ami. When Rabbi Ami reached the verse, “Seek righteousness and seek humility. Perhaps you will find shelter on the day of the Lord’s anger.” And of course, he cries. He says all this, and only perhaps? I’m gonna seek righteousness. I’m gonna seek humility. I’m gonna try to be good. And maybe, maybe it’ll work out? I’m gonna be the best that I can and just maybe? 

And likewise, when Rabbi Asi reached this verse, the following: “Hate the evil, love good. Establish justice in the gate. Perhaps the Lord, God of hosts will be gracious to the remnants of Joseph.” He cried, all of this and only perhaps? We’re gonna be our best selves, and still only perhaps? It’s another level of despair, in my opinion.

Christine: Yeah, it is, and it is a harder question to answer. This is where the uncertainty comes in. What road do you even follow, right? If it seems like the rules of the game are not only gone, but the game is somewhat rigged against you. You’ve told us what to do and I’m prepared to do those things, but there’s no guaranteed result beyond that.

But on the other hand, I have to confess that, to me, that’s what makes these passages so important and so valuable because perhaps we shouldn’t need a guarantee of the results before we undertake something.

Elana: I think, I think that’s incredibly powerful. I remember, I remember somebody saying, we were talking about morality of war, and morality in war in specific, this was years ago, and somebody says, well, who cares what you do? The news is gonna report it against you anyway?

I said, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Who cares what you do? What do you mean? For its own sake? I said, God cares what you do. You should care what you do. And this sense that these verses are pushing and saying, you must do these things, you must seek justice. You must be humble. You must do your best. And you must mourn. And even so, we don’t know. We don’t know. There is something about saying you must carry on as a human being and as the best human being you can be, even if we don’t know how this ends.

Christine: Right. No guaranteed results. And in fact, if you were to engage in moral living only because of a guarantee that there are always just desserts, then is it really moral living? God just becomes a kind of moral automat, or kaspomat, what’s the word I’m looking for? 

Elana: An ATM machine. 

Christine: Just doling out, you put in and he dolls it out. Right? But it can’t be for those reasons that we do what we do. And so it’s really when one reaches that peak of feeling almost alone in the moral universe, that one feels completely the rightness of morality.

Elana: I actually, I wanna push us, cause we know, you know, anybody who’s listening, we have different kinds of listeners here, right? We have some listeners who are sort of like, I’ve reached my quota. And then we have some listeners who are gonna go back to the Gemara. They’re gonna go back to the Talmud, they’re gonna look. 

So for those who are gonna go back to the Talmud and look, and for those who are not, know that this conversation extends for pages, pages of crying, and we move from shock and mourning. We move, layers, layers, layers. But I actually wanna push us towards the end of the conversation. The way that this section is gonna end is gonna tell us a lot about where the rabbis want us to go, where they want us to land. 

But I notice something, the place where they land is in a conversation, and we’ll get into it and maybe Chris, you’ll read it for us, but we’ll get into it in a minute, they land on the word, the words, “hesther panim,” God’s face being hidden. Would you like to read the piece that picks up at the end of the page of Chagigah 5A and onto the page of Chagigah 5B.

Christine: Okay. So first they’re going to cite a very terrifying verse in many ways from Devarim, from Deuteronomy 31, “V’chara api bo, bayom hahu, v’azavtim v’histarti pnei mehem.” And it goes on, “v’haya leechol,” simply then my anger shall be kindled against him or them in that day, and I will forsake them, I will leave them, and I will hide my face, this is that same word, v’histarti, I will hide my face from them and it goes on to say, and they shall be devoured. It’s a terrifying verse in many ways.

But Rav Bardela bar Tavyomei said that Rav said “Kol she’eino b’hester panim, eino mehem, kol she’einu b’v’haya leechol, eino mehem.” Anyone who is not subject to hester panim, to God’s hiding of his face, is not of them, is not from the Jewish people, and anyone who is not subject to that last phrase in the verse, that they shall be devoured, is not mehem, from them, is not from the Jewish people.

Elana: What are we doing here? Is this supposed to comfort? Is this supposed to scare? What, what is he doing here?

Christine: It’s so interesting. It’s sort of, it’s snatching victory from the jaws of defeat in some ways, right? The very thing that you might think is the proof of God’s disconnect is actually proof of the relationship, which is amazing because God himself already and Devarim made it clear, there are going to be those times. I’m going to be angry. We’re going to be alienated. This relationship is going to have its ups and downs, but it doesn’t mean there isn’t a relationship. It doesn’t mean there isn’t still a them, a people, a covenant. 

So even in those times of fear and uncertainty and anger and despair, when you feel as if God has shut you away and is entirely absent, know actually that that is a part of the entire thing in the way that death is a part of life.

Yesterday, there was a piece, I think it was in the New York Times, just a short article by someone named Brad Stulberg, I just ran across this, called Not Everything Has to be Meaningful, I don’t know if you had a chance to see it,

Elana: I haven’t seen it.

Christine: But it was just a short reflection. Something, you know, terrible happened to him, six or seven years ago, health-wise, it really kind of was just a terrible trauma, but he tried to make sense of it. You know, and to try to find meaning in it. And at one point, feeling that he should be able to grow from this, right? He should be. And at one point, I guess a therapist or someone said to him that not everything has to be meaningful. Why are you working so hard? 

Sometimes things can really suck and we just have to kind of live with that. Otherwise, you’ll feel that you’re not even good at feeling bad, you can’t make meaning out of it. That’s only gonna make you feel worse. And sometimes we put pressure on ourselves to grow from every experience and suffering. And there are some things that are just too big for our hearts and minds to contain while they’re happening. And maybe 5, 10, 15 years down the line, it can make some sort of narrative sense in your life. But I think sometimes we are just expected to hold the pain and get through to the other side.

Elana: Yeah, it’s so, it’s so interesting. I’d love to look at the next line with you because it, I think it gives us someone else to hold the pain with us.

Christine: Exactly. Yeah.

Elana: Would you?

Christine: So this is now the Gemara coming in and citing another verse for us. This is a verse from Jeremiah 13, Yirmiyahu, “v’im,” this is God speaking now, where God says, if you do not heed me, and then this is such a great phrase, “bmistarim tivkeh nafshi mipnei gevah,” then my soul shall weep in secret, for your pride. 

And Elana, notice again, in secret here, is mistarim, that same root of satar, this hester root, of hiding, of secrets. We’ve been thinking, or at least the rabbis who have been interpreting these verses, as how can God reject us? This rejection, this alienation, he’s so cruel to us, and he’s harsh, and he’s unjust, and it’s all about me. 

And then all of a sudden we realize that this hiding of the face that God is doing is not just an arbitrary, cruel hiding of the face. He hasn’t become this dispassionate, unfeeling overlord. His face is hidden because he’s turned away to cry. It’s just such a completely different image and it reestablishes a connection. You are grieving to God. We are here grieving together.

Elana: You know, I feel like I have to turn away for a minute. It’s really something. I think. you know, as we’re learning this, two things are becoming sort of our, our, standing out in relief to me. One is the fact that there are many hostages who are b’mistarim, right. There are many, many hostages who are in hidden places, that we cannot find, that we do not know.

And we do not know what powers of resilience, what emotions, what moments of even divine connection are there for them alongside the other terrible and chilling moments. And so just that term is very powerful to me.

And the second thing is it feels like this passage, this whole sugya, this whole section has come full circle, because we started with Rav Huna crying when he got to a verse that says, I want you to come three times a year and appear before me at the temple in Jerusalem. I wanna see you. I want you to be seen. 

Christine: To be seen.

Elana: And it ends with, there are moments where God is not going to be seen. And not only that, we wanna hide. Perhaps there will be salvation in hiding, but know that God is still there crying over you, even if you can’t see, even if you can’t be seen. It’s incredibly powerful in this moment.

Christine: It is. The sugya actually has a real movement to it, you know, so that it moves you from these feelings of shock and anger and really terror and fear. But then by suddenly showing that it doesn’t stem from some necessarily arbitrary cruelty, but it still doesn’t even make sense because God is crying too, right? 

So, understanding that every relationship has these moments of intense intimacy, seeing one another full in the face. You know, really recognizing and seeing one another. Moments of searing alienation where you cannot see each other, you’re hidden. And sometimes the only response is not to try to make sense of it, but to just weep. And know actually that God is weeping too, and then gather your strength for the next day.

I can’t remember where it is now. I think it’s in The Little Prince, if I’m allowed to cite one of my other sacred texts, but there is a line there about, the place of tears is the loneliest place, that a person just is always entirely alone. And the most you can really do is wait on the other side for someone to emerge in time, if they will.

But yeah, the place of tears, and as God, God has, he’s b’mistarim, right? When God, that’s when God is b’mistarim. If you think there’s hester panim, the reason is God has to step aside and cry. It is the place where God has to be completely alone. 

Again, being alone doesn’t mean that there’s a complete dissolution of all connections. It is something that happens temporarily, until someone can emerge and just trust again and just step back into the movement of life again. But they have to step outside It sometimes.

Elana: Yeah, and I guess I, I would this and then I’m curious what you would wanna say as final thoughts here. I would end with the idea that when we started, it seemed like we didn’t know the reaction on the other side. Okay, I’m kicked out, I’m kicked out, and I feel terrible. I used to be invited to Jerusalem and now I’m not wanted.

But by the end, the notion that someone, that God has compassion on you, that God recognizes, you know, as I was reading Martha Nussbaums Political Emotions and thinking about this, that what does it take for compassion? Compassion requires not blaming you for what happened to you, taking seriously severity of what happened to you, recognizing like your humanity, essentially. And that recognition itself is a form of validation. It is. 

Christine: It’s a form of the seeing, right? Seeing is not seeing people. In the festival, during joy, when you’re showing up at the Temple, and right, seeing is also seeing people’s brokenness. And to me that’s, that’s where it’s, where it’s leading us towards the end. And just as the “yireh,” ”yeraeh,” will see, will be seen, has a mutuality to it in those times of joy during the festival, what they’re leading us to by giving us this portrait of God weeping alone, is that there is also this mutuality in the brokenness, that, which I think is a really powerful image as well. 

So tears can signal many things, and I’m not sure about God’s tears at the end. They certainly give us explanations. I mean, they, they offer a number different reasons. He’s, he’s crying because the pride of the Jewish people has been taken, it’s been given to the nations. He’s crying because they’ve been taken hostage, actually, if we wanna bring this back to this moment as well, that is one of the things that offered is that the Lord’s flock has been carried away, captive, as one of the reasons, so that’s kind of hard to read right now. 

But I got the feeling from the various explanations that the rabbis gave, that their focus was a little bit less on compassion and on true empathy, that God also feels broken. It’s the same feeling. And it’s not the,

Elana: It’s a mirror.

Christine: Exactly, exactly. It’s a mirror. Yeah. And so, so there really is a connection in that moment that we think of as being the place is the loneliness, loneliest of all land of tears, if you Right. But God is broken there too. 

Elana: It’s beautiful. 

Christine: Not offering compassion. Not offering compassion. Just offering companionship and complete and total empathy, which is all you can ever really hope for from someone when you are in that, that broken place of tears.

Elana: Right. We start with Rav Huna crying. We end with God crying. We start with being seen. We end with hiddenness, but we also end with being seen.

Christine: But also being seen for where we are in that moment, even though it’s not how you wanna be seen.

Elana: But I do think that that concept of a mirror is very powerful. And I think one of the things we’re trying to do in this podcast actually, and one of the roles that Torah plays right now, is in giving people a mirror to what they’re feeling, what they’re experiencing, and maybe even a window, to where they want to go with it. 

So I cannot thank you enough, Chris, for joining us inaugural episode. Learning with you and from you is always a privilege, really.

Christine: I could say exactly the same thing. Thank you so much, Elana.

Elana: And to our listeners, thanks for being part of the conversation. We look forward to continuing it with you.

Thanks for learning with us, and special thanks to my study partner this week, Christine Hayes.

TEXTing is produced by Tessa Zitter and executive producer Maital Friedman. M. Louis Gordon is our senior producer, and our intern is Tamar Marvin. This episode was mixed by Ben Azevedo at Bear Cave Audio, with music provided by Luke Allen. 

You can now sponsor an episode of this show. Follow the link in the shownotes, or visit us online at shalomhartman.org/TEXTing. We will of course acknowledge your gift on a future episode. We’re always looking for ideas for what we should cover in future episodes, so if you have a topic you’d like to hear more about, or if you have comments about this episode, please write to us at [email protected]. 

For more ideas from the Shalom Hartman Institute about what’s unfolding right now, sign up for our newsletter in the shownotes, and subscribe to this podcast everywhere podcasts are available. See you next time, and thanks for listening.