Feel Everything

On Joel (Haftarah for Shabbat Shuvah, Between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, Ashkenazi Tradition)

Yael Landman, Assistant Professor of Bible, JTS

During this time of ongoing, unendurable communal pain, I think of a few verses from the book of Joel, one of the biblical minor prophets. Amid bleak warnings of overwhelming catastrophe, “Most terrible—who can endure it?” (Joel 2:11), the prophet cites God’s call for teshuvah: “Yet even now . . . turn back to Me with all your hearts, / and with fasting, weeping, and lamenting” (2:12). Joel then demands, “Rend your hearts / rather than your garments!” (2:13). In incredibly difficult times, it is sometimes easier to focus on going through the motions of ritual, but Joel challenges us to feel everything, full-heartedly, however unbearable that may seem.

Despite a sense of intense despair in this prophecy, Joel invokes God’s attributes of mercy, reminding his audience that God is “gracious and compassionate, / slow to anger, abounding in kindness, / and renouncing punishment” (2:13). These attributes, variations of which we repeatedly recite throughout the High Holidays, may start to feel formulaic to the point of numbness. But after this list of attributes Joel adds, “Who knows but [God] may turn and relent” (2:14). In Joel’s “Who knows?” I hear echoes of pain and desperation, but also an expression of divine possibility. Today, let us rend our hearts as a community, in pain and in prayer, clinging to the hope that we shall also find ways to mend.

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