DRAPER'S PAPER ROUTE
Kiddush HaShem
by Adam Carroll Draper
It is Easter. Spring brings me a sense of renewal. The flowers are blooming. The grass is green. The sap is rising in the trees as the world awakens. But Easter always reminds me that I am here for a reason. I would be happier in heaven, in a bliss won for me by Yeshua. I am only here now to share that good news. Just saying this has become offensive to some, but this is why I am alive. I will not stop showing it in joy, in love and in peace.
This renewed life of spring awakens from death and cold and prolonged darkness. That, too, seems as though it gapes at me in springtime. What hath winter cost? What is gone? What remains? There is a term in Hebrew for holding on to God’s nature and trusting in His goodness no matter what we have experienced. Kiddush HaShem means hallowing, making sacred, God’s name – His nature. The writer of the book of Hebrews says in chapter 12 that trusting God’s nature and His goodness in the face of this world’s pain and darkness is His discipline, the Hebrew word for which is musar.
In context, it becomes clear that the writer of Hebrews is saying that God’s discipline (musar) comes within the angst we suffer while enduring in faith regardless of what we encounter in contradiction of our expectations of God (what we think He should have allowed). That is, the calamities and pains and nadirs themselves are not God’s discipline because He does not inflict them upon us. The musar is in remaining faithful to Him (unyieldingly certain of His goodness) despite the circumstance. The Father disciplines His children in exhorting us to be resolute in our refusal to accuse Him of being anything other than perfect despite the terrible contradictions to that truth that are endemic to our experience in this life. We endure the musar, even though we don’t like it, because it yields the fruit of peace and righteousness in us. It is as if our spiritual faith collides with our physical experience, and the endurance of this experience while resolutely relying on His goodness as a certainty (kiddush Ha’Shem) gives us a spiritual history and connection with God. This connection through endurance (musar) annihilates our former ways of looking at reality, yielding renewed minds. The problem for us is that this annihilation of our former world view (consciousness annihilation, if you will) is not pleasant. In fact, we experience this the same way Elijah did in the cave in that it feels something like “the ones that serve You get abandoned.”
The Orthodox Jewish Version translates Hebrews 12:11, “All musar (discipline) for the moment seems not na’im (pleasant), but seems to bring agmat nefesh; yet afterwards to those who have been taught by musar, it yields the p’ri haShalom (the fruit of the peace) and the p’ri haTzedek (the fruit of the righteousness).” Agmat nefesh is anguish and disillusionment. In The Language of Judaism, Simon Glustrom writes that the concept of agmat nefesh is rooted in the experience of the Jewish people, and that its true meaning is something like the disillusionment that comes from being betrayed when you did not deserve it, as with the dismay at the holocaust - a collectively groaned, “Why?”
This cry, this yawp of human disillusionment, is burned and left as dust when we endure this discipline (musar) of remaining resolute in the truth that God cannot be other than good. This is kiddush Ha’Shem (the hallowing of His Name, His nature) in the face of our experience and despite agmat nefesh (feeling abandoned and betrayed like Elijah). For Christians, it is by God’s grace that we hold steadfast in our faith that we are atoned by the blood of Yeshua’s sacrifice. It is that sacrifice and His triumph over death and the grave that we celebrate this weekend, trusting that because of what He did, we are free to love here - free in the certainty of the bliss that awaits us. Yeshua HaMashiach (Jesus The Messiah) is the rock (Tzur) on which we stand, carrying our cross of faith daily, defying this life’s very real contradictions to our expectations of God.
Examples of those making God’s nature sacred in dire circumstances become monuments of faith for us, and these monuments have become part of our holy history (heilsgeschichte, as the German higher critical scholars call it). Although I experience this kiddush HaShem as a follower of Yeshua, I can think of few greater examples of conspicuous and resolute insistence upon trusting in God’s goodness than I found in a printout for a seminar on The Holocaust and Jewish Faith. It is the account of Rabbi Yekutiel Yehudah Haberstam at the gates of a concentration camp.
“I can testify to this from my own experience. When we reached the extermination camps…we stood there, naked and with nothing, without clothing and without coverings for our heads, and with the wicked ones beating incessantly with the batons in their hands; the situation was terrible. I turned to those standing around me and I shouted, ‘Fellow Jews – know that the holy God is waiting for us there, inside the camp…and let us not forget that God is with us.’ Throughout that entire year I worked on this – strengthening myself and not forgetting that God was with us, and that the entire world is filled with His glory – even in Auschwitz and Dachau, and that no place is devoid of Him…” (Rabbi Yekutiel Yehudah Haberstam, Shefa Chayim, Divrei Torah, Chanukah - Faith Despite Everything).
There were many who lost their faith in a concentration camp, and who am I to say one thing about that? What stands out in eternity, in our celebration before all of heaven, however, is the faith of this man, who remained resolute in the certainty of God’s goodness while he endured unabated horror. It is inherent in our nature to question God’s goodness. In fact, to that extent, it is absolutely understandable and even unavoidable from our tainted perspective. Yet the writer of Hebrews makes it very clear that this resolute trust in His goodness is not only discipline, but obedience. I am quite certain that I am not capable of such magnificent obedience. But “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” Philipians 4:13.
I wrote the following poem several years ago at this time. Please forgive me for inflicting my poetry on you, but it fits here – and I will leave you with it.
Kiddush HaShem
The salt of my tears and the myrrh in my joy
Taunt the anguished certainty of your goodness.
As the hounds of darkness encircle my wounds,
I reel in the stench of death’s gaping disdain.
How can groaned elation, this comforted terror,
Be still in explosive silence, but that I am yours
To heal the world, to bleed upon the ground,
Smiling as torrents track the residue of tragedy
Down my cheek into my clotted mouth’s song.
You are here, seated with me in majesty,
Aghast against the broken dawn to come.
Why am I blind in abandon, living in death,
Putrid in birth, in the throws of being aware?
You chose, so I do too, this brief candle’s light,
These charred remains, proclaiming it is new.
Adam Carroll Draper
March 20, 2016
Happy Easter. The Lord is risen and He will come again!