Transitions and Transformations

Shwa and I were working out at a gym in Salt Lake City, Utah when I got a text…Our surrogate’s water just broke. We should meet at the hospital. Just an hour later, I stared blankly at a clipboard as nurses were washing, weighing, and checking vitals on our baby, Stevie. “Please sign this form so we can administer care” - someone in scrubs said to me. I could hardly read anything through blurry eyes and pure shock…I signed at the bottom of the page and next to it was a line that said, “relationship to patient” and I wrote in slow shakey letters. M-O-M, and then I burst into tears- of disbelief, exhaustion, of gratitude. And there began a new journey.

I imagine almost everyone here recently started a new journey of some kind in the past year. Perhaps you’ve just gone off to college or became an empty nester, maybe you made a career move or recently retired. Perhaps you’ve treated an illness, divorced, became a grandparent, or lost a loved one- If you did; you are a hero just for having lived through major change.

I’m not using that word hero lightly, nor do I mistake you for a character with a cape and a mask. By making transition in life, we have taken the journey of a hero. 

Perhaps the most popular writer on myth, Joseph Campbell, published his famous work “The Hero with A Thousand Faces” in 1949. He argues that there is a universal “Monomyth” that can describe the journey of a hero in almost all cultures. Looking at famous “hero’s journeys”- we can see how a hero figure transforms by first departing off for an adventure from an ordinary world. Our hero is then tested through a trial or challenge that they must overcome. Finally, having prevailed, our hero returns home having changed and learned.

If this pattern sounds incredibly familiar it’s because it’s seen in almost every story from Star Wars, to Harry Potter, to most Disney movies. Our biblical heroes also follow the Hero’s journey. Moses, Jonah, King David, Daniel…almost all follow a similar structure of Departure, Initiation, and Return that Campbell outlines. (it is an archetype after all).

But as Abraham is in the parsha we read this Rosh Hashanah morning I'll stick with him for now. 

We first meet Abraham, then known as Avram, in the land of Haran right after the death of his father. At a pivotal moment in his life, Adonai appears to him and commands, “Lech Lecha.” (Genesis 12) Normally these words are translated as, “Go, leave, travel.” But what they also can mean is, “journey (lech) to yourself” (lecha). In other words,  Abraham- leave behind the circumstances that are beyond your control; the life that your father gave you. Instead, travel inward to find yourself. It is there — only there — that you may truly discover what it means to live your own life. Abraham has set out on his departure. 

Along the way Abraham faces the tests and trials, the initiations, that are key to a hero’s journey- the most famous being the Akeydah. If a hero must be tested through a trial, there is no trial more difficult than being asked by God to sacrifice your son. In stark contrast to the trial of Sodom and Gomorrah, this test is not a give and take with God. It’s not a chance to bargain or wish that he were dealt a different hand. It is simply a test of faith, or of acceptance. While many of us cringe at this ask from God, Abraham embraces the challenge knowing that the journey he chose isn’t easy or straightforward. In his book on Abraham, author Bruce Feiler  writes: “The lesson of Abraham’s life is that being human is not safe or comfortable. Being human is being uncertain, being on the way to an unknown place.” 

We read this same sentiment in our shabbat prayer book, Mishkan T’filah:

“Once or twice in a lifetime

a [Person] may choose

a radical leaving, having heard

Lech Lecha — Go forth.

God disturbs us toward our destiny

by hard events and by freedom’s now urgent voice

which explode and confirm who we are.

We don’t like leaving,

but God loves becoming.” (Mishkan Tefillah p.231)

In exploring the journeys we each take as a hero we first must begin with some internal truth that we hold with certainty. It could mean being in a comfortable place, or living an ordinary life, until we suddenly must depart from it. 

What comfortable truth have you been holding onto? Is it that going to the “right” school would secure your path in life? Or that you must preserve your marriage at all costs? Maybe you were taught to pursue every course of medical action to fight illness? Or that earning more money would bring happiness? For me, I held on for so long to the truth that becoming a mother would finally bring ultimate meaning and fulfillment that I had been so desperately seeking.

But the hero's journey is precisely about reframing these truths, sometimes all out rejecting them as we undergo the initiation of  different experiences and trials. It’s about living a life that is flexible and open to growth and change, even while knowing that losing those truths could mean a whole new understanding of who we are at our essence. So what is the new truth you learned about yourself on your hero’s journey?

Writer Jessi Klein in her newest series of essays describes an unspoken new truth about the transition to motherhood: “No one wants to know that after your mother finally placed you in your crib, she walked out of the room and screamed into a blanket, or cried in the bathroom, or drank a bottle of wine, or all of the above. No one wants to know that as she rocked you and sang you the tenth lullaby of the night, she was fantasizing about putting you down, walking out the door, and never coming back. A mother’s heroic journey is not about how she leaves, but about how she stays.”  

Now don’t misunderstand that I’m not totally smitten with Stevie. It’s just to say that in undergoing a major transformation, we have to be open to learning something new or unexpected in addition to what we may have previously imagined. 

And that’s where I  think we often misunderstand Abraham’s journey. We believe that he goes off from Haran on the promise of God’s blessing. That his descendants will be as numerous as the stars in the sky. But what he was really promised was only the journey. That he will indeed be challenged and changed.

Unlike the classical hero of Campbell’s archetype, Abraham never quite returns or settles again. Though the story of the Akedah definitively ends- God saves Isaac, and Abraham is rewarded for his faithfulness - the two emerge from their trial with deep psychological scars. Torah shows that he and Isaac are never in contact again after the experience on Mt. Moriah. His beloved Sarah dies at some unknown time during the incident. In fact, Torah doesn’t even acknowledge any more direct interaction between Abraham and God again. 

Abraham has indeed transformed and ends up in a new place as well. He eventually marries again, has more children and dies in old age. But Talmud refers to him as “old and well-stricken in age” (Bava Metzia 87a) His journey is arguably not the blessing God initially promised. Abraham's life isn’t a model for the anomalies of life. He’s a model for the regularities of life, teaching us that there is no guarantee of divine blessing on the other side of the trip. You can only count on the journey. 

So knowing that our essential truths, our identities, our lives may be totally different at the end of our journey, how do we even begin to take the steps that are full of such risk? What do we do when the journey feels overwhelmingly difficult? 

My only advice: Start with a good cry. Mourn what is lost, then try to reframe your loss to what could be gained. 

Shwa has a series of photos of me in airports before our vacations-in all of them I’m crying. He thinks it’s funny to capture me in moments when I am anxious, even panicking before a flight as I’m prone to do.  But I often find myself  crying before leaving one place and in anticipation of what a new journey may bring. And I learned I’m not alone. 

In 2011, the airline Virgin Atlantic ran a survey asking customers to describe their on-flight emotional experiences. Overall, 55 percent of travelers said they had “experienced heightened emotions while flying,” and a striking 41 percent of men stated that they had at one point, “buried themselves in blankets to hide tears in their eyes from other passengers.” (The Atlantic: Why we Cry on Airplanes) Crying on airplanes is apparently a thing!

We cry for complex and diverse reasons: we cry in grief, or in reverence of the self-sacrifice of another, or in awe of the beautiful and sublime, or alone in our bedrooms, screaming internally at our own inadequacies. All these multifaceted experiences do, however, share a common underpinning- powerlessness. We realize that so many aspects of our lives are beyond our control. Like passengers sitting in the cabin, we are at the whim of the elements around us. Even when tears are happy we recognize, deep down, that every connection we make in life could end up severed. The tinge of fear we may feel as our airplane soars towards our unknown destination is connected to the loss we feel as we travel further from familiarity.

So we release the tears. When we finally sit down in our small and uncomfortable airplane seat: our body shifts gears. We’ve reached the end of what was likely a stressful ride to the airport, and what could have been weeks of preparing, or even years of an important life phase culminating in an end. And that’s the time to have a good, long cry. 

Because surrounding our journeys is the often unspoken sense of loss and grief we experience when we undergo monumental changes in our lives: be they personal, geographical, or spiritual, even the most joyous of transitions come with loss.

So we must remind ourselves to mourn and remember. Who we were in our previous chapters remains a fundamental part of who we are in the present. So too with our journeys: even as we grapple with profound feelings of loss around a radical departure, we will use those pieces to shape our newness.

Soon, somehow, we cross an imaginary threshold where we regain strength to start anew. We realize we’re not really on a journey outward, to the most fantastic and farthest-flung places, but inward, downward, to the deepest parts of our strength, to the innermost buried core of everything we are made of but didn’t know was there.

What new identities have you taken on this past year? What did you mourn and how did they transform you?

For Connie, this was the year she had to say out loud “I have cancer.” And she thought the worst, and cried in fear. But in moments she was also able to shift perspective of what was important. She learned to ask for help. She found support in neighbors, family members, even strangers. She found newfound resilience that she didn’t know that she had. She became a hero.

For Antonio, this was the year he got to post online, “this is me with my boyfriend. I’m gay and proud.” And he  mourned some friends he lost, and risked new dangers, but by searching deep within, he affirmed who he was with the world. He was embraced by other friends and family. He found a new community. He felt authentic. He became a hero. 

Keiko  finally divorced her husband. And she mourned the family she imagined for her children, and she had to change the lifestyle that she was accustomed too, and let go of the happily ever after love story.  But she chose her own life, and freedom. She knew she deserved love. She became a hero.  

Maurice became a widower this year. And he grieved 50 years of marriage that had been happy. It had been a long, hard illness and the ending came with mixed emotions. Sadness, despair, loss, freedom.. Who am I now, he asked? He became a Hero.

And I became a mom. I wear my new identity with a lot of joy, pride and some sadness too. I try to have radical awe and immense gratitude for Stevie’s existence. But I also don’t want to forget the hard journey to get here- the pain, the tears, and terrible losses that challenged me to my core. I want to remember who I was before she arrived, but I also know I’ll never be able to return to that previous version of myself. I have departed. 

As I think about the end of my infertility journey, I realize it can’t only be about gaining Stevie- I don’t believe our journey’s end in rewards for our struggles. Instead I have been transformed - gained new insights, and grieved, and learned. And now, a new transformation into motherhood has begun and on this separate journey there will be new tests, trials, and loss, and more changes to come. 

My teacher Rabbi Larry Hoffman recently reflected on his 81st birthday: Life is properly likened to an art, the art of living, as if we are both the work of art and the artist…The art of living is more like a collage than a painting, because collage is three-dimensional, with layers on top of layers. So too with life: as we grow in years, we are never completely able to erase the more difficult or painful layers of what we were, but we can apply new layers over them. If we look honestly at our life as art, we see layers that are bright with joy, but also somber hues of unhappier times: traumas that came out of nowhere; the multiple ways we went wrong; times of embarrassing foolishness, even stupidity. Yet here we are: survivors. We are heroes.  

We often say Rosh Hashanah, the birthday of the world, is the open trailhead, calling us to hike down a new path. How is God calling this year to both journey outward and to journey inward to your deepest self? What new journeys, new identities are you taking on? Whatever your journey is- our lives are filled with these transitions both big and small. The key to making these journeys into Lech Lecha moments — journeys deep into ourselves — is in recognizing that in all these moments, we are ever-changing, growing, and becoming. And while we may not like leaving, God loves becoming.

Wishing you the journey of a hero in 5784. Shana Tova 

Sources:

Joseph Campell. A Hero With A Thousand Faces. New World Library, 2008 (re-published)
Bruce Feiler. Abraham: A Journey to the Heart of Three Faiths. Harper Collins, 2009.
Larry Hoffman. “Open Letter to my Students #49” Facebook Post. August 16, 2023.
Jessi Klein. I’ll Show Myself Out: Essays on Midlife and Motherhood. Harper Collins, 2022.
Elijah Wolfson. “Why We Cry on Planes.” The Atlantic. October, 2013
Jay Wolin. “The Akedah: The Maze of its Meaning.” UU for Jewish Awareness. www.uuja.org