The Vows We Break

Two years ago, during the first part of my Sabbatical, I made a promise to myself. I had hit my mid-40’s, had dealt with a bout of Long(ish) COVID in 2022 and felt at my weakest. I realized I was facing a fork in the road in both my life and health. I could continue down this path or turn things around. I hired a personal trainer at my local gym. I had never touched a dumbbell in my life and had low confidence when it came to athletics.

As I was processing this new experience, I took a big risk: I told all of you that I had started working out in one of my High Holiday sermons! In an instance, I had created hundreds of accountability buddies. I knew I couldn’t break my promise anymore.

That year, I extrapolated seven spiritual ‘exercise practices’ inspired by my new fitness journey: embracing love, making a positive choice, seeking a guide, pacing yourself, finding your tribe, being open and sharing the love you found.

I stuck with my promise. I built muscle, leaned out, got strong, lost weight. I started enjoying my workouts and inhabiting this middle-aged body of mine. All of a sudden, I could get off the floor without using my hands, deadhang from the bar for one-and-a-half minutes and carry groceries with more ease. I felt happy and healthy.

But something felt off.

A routine check-up with my new ophthalmologist for my ‘bad’ eyes spiraled into a clinical diagnosis, then genetic testing for a rare connective tissue disorder called Stickler syndrome, explaining (after decades of misdiagnosis) my severe myopia, mild hearing loss and joint hypermobility. This collided with another diagnosis of lipedema, another (much more common) hormonally-driven connective tissue disorder affecting women, leading to painful fibrosis, impaired lymph flow and swelling in the limbs. I had to change my diet and exercise routine, start wearing uncomfortable compression garments and pivot to integrating a new normal.

I was forced to internalize a difficult message: I have a chronic and progressive health condition. So much for getting fit and strong in the gym.

I’ve lived with this all my life and have been able to thrive and be active throughout so the diagnosis wasn’t life-altering. It was, however, a perspective-shifting one. I had taken my good health for granted. I realized that my body was more fragile and vulnerable than I knew.

I had kept a promise to myself through grit, discipline – and some amount of privilege. I lift weights and do treadmill cardio consistently three times a week. All of a sudden, I felt I was failing; I felt a deep sense of betrayal by my own body. In darker moments, I reflected on what these health conditions could mean for my future. In the worst case scenario, impaired vision, altered mobility and increased pain. In the best case scenario, expensive surgeries, a life-long commitment to an anti-inflammatory medical diet and costly daily management. All of a sudden I had to renegotiate fundamental truths about myself and my world. Good health and invulnerability, I realized, is an oath none of us can take. All of us are only temporarily-abled.

Last year, during our downtown Big Ideas Book Club, we read a thought-provoking book by Rabbi Julia Watts Belser: ‘Loving Our Own Bones – Disability Wisdom and the Spiritual Subversiveness of Knowing Ourselves Whole.’ It is a stunning book and a topic that is important but neglected. Rabbi Julia tells compelling stories of disability through our sacred texts and centers the experiences of our spiritual ancestors and their disability: the speech impediment of Moses, the blindness of Isaac and Jacob’s limp after he wrestled with the angel. Even more captivating is Rabbi Julia’s reimagining of God through Ezekiel’s vision of the Chariot. Julia uses a wheelchair, and as a contemporary mystic and disability advocate, she was inspired by the Prophet Ezekiel’s ‘ma’aseh merkavah’, ‘the vision of the chariot’. Rabbi Julia imagines that God in all of God’s splendor, might and glory, is ‘a God on wheels’. The Divine Being uses a wheelchair too! It is a radically inclusive, boldly honest and transcendingly inclusive vision of what it means to be human, holy and whole when the world labels you as broken.

This past year, I’ve had to sit with my own brokenness, and with the shattered promises of uncomplicated, good health. What does it mean for us to sit with our own vulnerability and loss, dig deep in what hurts or feels unresolved in both our physical and emotional selves, admitting that there are no easy answers? I knew that my connective tissue disorders could never be ‘healed’. Disability can be present at birth or progress through time; some of us become disabled through illness, injury or age. Our fate, determined by a split second accident or the slow-moving hidden processes of the body, marked by our genetics or impacted by our environment. A car accident, a viral infection, a genetic line-up beyond our control. In due course, age makes us all frail.

So many of us face disability or chronic illness; we carry our destinies quietly or publicly.

We live in an age where the edges around health and disability have been resharpened by a cruel social discourse led by administrative incompetence and thinly-veiled soft eugenics. Our autistic loved ones get demeaned as being a burden on society. The ‘R’ word has callously come back into fashion. We continue to turn a blind eye to the 18 million Americans who suffer from Long COVID. Public health outbreaks, whether it is cyclospora or measles or anything else crowd our news headlines. Many of the gains that disability activists had fought for, in terms of resources, community, accommodation and destigmatization are under stress, if not under threat. Despite the lack of care in our culture, we all know we will meet a moment where we, in the words of the Unetaneh Tokef, are ‘like a fading flower and like withered grass.’

What does it mean to find healing when there is no cure, to make promises that feel broken? Rabbi Julia writes in her book:

‘Cure points to the elimination of diseases, or at least the eradication of its symptoms. But healing? Healing has a much wider valence. We speak of healing presence, recognizing healing moments, and understand healing as a process; a movement toward greater wholeness, well-being, comfort and ease. This distinction between healing and cure affirms that healing can unfold for us, regardless of whether we experience physical change in our bodies or minds… Healing can happen for all of us.’

Kol Nidrey is when we think deeply about promises. About the ones we didn’t keep and couldn’t keep.

As the melodies and harmonies coil around our hearts, what does it mean to live with the reality of loss and frailty? What does it mean to know that we may not be able to honor the promises we so desire to make, or that healing may be incomplete, or on different terms than we expect it to?

The experience of failure is universal. This is why the Kol Nidrey prayer was written. This is also way it is so emotionally resonant when we hear its opening tones. But there is a special layer to disability – and that is the way that ableism colonizes and captures our expectations.Rabbi Julia talks about the momentous effort it takes to work on self-acceptance of the body you have rather than the body our society thinks we should have. It is hard work to accept and understand what is possible for one’s body. Our relationship with our bodies is mercurial; ever-changing, dynamic and unpredictable.

All of us have to reckon with what our bodies (and minds) can do. Ableism whispers in our ear that we do not try hard enough; that there is something wrong with us; ableism weaponizes our broken promises against us. We should powerfully reject that voice.

I believe that the Torah is the wisdom of the stranger; of those who live on the margins, and that the marginalized are often teachers and carriers of deep Torah. The entire premise (and promise) of the Torah can be summed up in a momentous mission to turn deep trauma into radical empathy.  We do this through our imaginations inhabiting a state of when we have been the stranger. This is what ‘you shall love the stranger for you were strangers in Egypt’ is all about.

I think of the many people who have taught me the deepest and most transformative Torah over the decades; those existing on the frayed edges of our moral consciousness or of our unyielding society. Racial, religious or ethnic minorities, the economically disadvantaged, the LGBTQ community, immigrants, and relevant to our learning tonight, the disability and the chronic illness community. If you crash into the bigotries of others or the physical constraints of self, what does it mean to seek and attain ‘refuah’, healing? We sit with this question in the middle of a much more silent COVID surge. As I alluded to before, 18 million Americans are struggling with Long COVID and about 1 in six people who contract COVID experience Long COVID. The pandemic has warped how we think about health and illness, recovery and collective responsibility. It has drained our wells of empathy.

‘Kol Nidrey’ – ‘All these vows.’

It means that healing is not a quick fix. It is not linear and not uncomplicated. Healing is deep and complex, contradictory and unpredictable. Healing is not about spiritual or moral bypassing, or about forcing your body or soul into a state it is not ready to receive. Healing can be hard, and hard work. Healing is much, much deeper. Healing is about release; this release makes space for dignity. Upon this dignity, do we build our sense of wholeness. In fact, we see this in the etymology of the word ‘healing’, which has an Anglo-Saxon root denoting ‘restoring to wholeness’. In short, a ‘refu’at nefesh’, a healing of the soul, means to bring us to ‘shleimut’, wholeness.

But healing is a group project, not just an individual task.

How can we help each other and ourselves heal?

Firstly, break down stigma. I have disclosed my health challenges to do exactly that – to defy the toxicity of the closet. To peel back the layers of pretense. To be authentic.  Let’s talk more about ability and disability. Let’s reframe the conversation away from ‘this is what I have’ to ‘this is what I need.’ Let’s consign shame to the dustbin of history.

Secondly, lean into release. Allow yourself to release yourself from the vows you could not keep. Maybe you, sitting here right now, tonight, need that release from broken promises and self-judgment. Build radical self-acceptance on a strong foundation of deep love: of other and self.

Thirdly, seek wholeness not through cure but through grief. This past year, I have had to grieve my own body and the ableist hopes I had for it. I had to recalibrate my expectations for the latter half of my life. Our wholeness, sheleimut, lies in the admission that it is okay for things to be broken; to feel broken. It is okay to hurt, to be sad and to mourn.

Lastly, we do not say Kol Nidrey on our own. We do not recite it in our homes before Yom Kippur begins. It is not a private confession. It is said here, with all of us in the room or the livestream; a public absolution, because our redemption is found in the care of the collective.

We destigmatize, mourn, find release, radically accept and grow love in holy community.

All of us here. Each and every single one of us.

This is where we fight for access, accommodation, research and mutual care. This is where we cultivate solidarity and resilience and endless horizons of a world lit up by disability wisdom.

Community is where we build a vanguard against today’s creeping dehumanization.

Community is where we affirm to the non-negotiable worth of each human being, created b’tzelem Elohim, in the Image of the Divine.

Here, on this holiest of days, we are imagined by God in God’s image and we get to imagine God in ours. With wheels. Or lax joints. Or Long Covid. Or as autistic. Or with an intellectual disability. Or contending with cancer. Or chronically ill. Or as a sagely, old woman, waiting patiently for our vows of compassion.

These vows we can keep.

G’mar chatimah tovah!