"At the Threshold"

Reading:

?A Little Fable? by Franz Kafka (1883-1924)

"Alas," said the mouse, "the whole world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into." "You only need to change your direction," said the cat, and ate it up.

Sermon:

The first page I flipped to described a moment in the life of a little boy named Ofer, who had just taken his first steps. He leaned away from the coffee table, took two steps, and then sat down, rather suddenly. Through the eyes of his mother, Ora, the narrator described ?the greatness and wonder of the act, the bravery of her little astronaut?The soft, padded bump as his diaper hit the rug. The heavy head rocking back and forth. The insult at being surprised in this way, and the wonderment on his face as he turned to her, only to her, as though asking her to interpret what he had just done.?

What caught my heart was how I could just see the expression on his face, full of wonder, and how surprised he was, of course he was. Our littlest children have faces unschooled in deception, they show every emotion, they invite those around it to do the same, to follow their example. I used to ride the subway in Boston with my young daughter, and the faces around us would open up like flowers, unguarded, silly, flexible, free. For her, for the baby, who hasn?t learned how to put on a mask for traveling, keep the privacy of her own self when surrounded by others. It was very humanizing, carrying a baby.

The novel is called, in English, To the End of the Land. It is by the Israeli author David Grossman, and it is about a woman whose son has grown up and is serving in the Israeli Defense Force, the Israeli army. And his mother, Ora, has decided that as much as she cannot bear to sit at home and wait for Ofer to come home, it is even more true that she cannot sit at home and wait for him not to come home. She knows that the notifiers come to the door of the household, to the threshold, and they ring the bell or knock. And then they wait for the mother to come to the door, and then they stand in the doorway to say her son has been killed. Perhaps every parent of every child who has served in war has imagined this moment; for sure too many parents have experienced it. Ora cannot bear thinking of it, and so she decides that she will not be home when they come, and thus she will protect her son, she will not allow him to be a casualty of the conflict. If the notifiers from the army cannot tell Ora that her son is dead, then he cannot be dead.

She knows this is magical thinking. But she has no choice. The reality of her life has become too narrow to be endured. Her world has gotten too small, and she aches to find a sense of spaciousness that will make her reality bearable. She is scared stiff, unable to go forward, until she gathers a companion to keep her company, and they decide to walk to the end of the land, all across Israel. As she walks, she narrates her son?s life to her companion, her son?s biological father, who has never known him.

In the course of writing this novel, the author?s own young son came of age to join the IDF and during the summer of 2006, he served in a conflict unit on the border with Lebanon. Two days before his discharge date, he was killed along with three other young men in a tank on the border. Unlike the protagonist of his novel, Ora, Grossman and his family did not try to flee the notifiers. They were home when the army came to the door to say his son has been killed.

Always the news arrives at the doorway, at the threshold. The doorposts hold up the sagging mother. The notifiers are not allowed in. But their news creeps and seeps in, all on its own. In a previous collection of essays about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Grossman wrote, ?The daily reality in which I live surpasses anything I could imagine, and it seeps into my deepest parts.?

It becomes impossible not to read Ora?s story through the lens of Grossman?s life, and then to imagine it through the lens of one?s own.

I look up at the door to the house I grew up in. I imagine what it would be like to send my child to war. To live in this house and look at the door and imagine at every moment of every day where my child is, what she is facing. Would I be able to tell, if she were hurt? From my life I leap back into the lives of others, for who am I to say my child is the only one to worry about? Right now too many parents in this country and around the world watch their doorways for the notifiers. They do not sleep easy until their children sleep at home.

Is our world, so full of conflict and violence, of worried parents and children at war, is our world getting narrower, as the mouse in Kafka?s fable believed? Should we be scared stiff, unable to keep going? In May 2007, David Grossman wrote an essay for the PEN World Voices Seminar called ?Writing in the Dark,? in which he said,

? after many years of living in the extreme and violent reality of a political, military and religious conflict, I can report, sadly, that Kafka?s mouse was right: the world is, indeed, growing increasingly narrow, increasingly diminished, with every day that goes by?

?I feel the heavy toll that I, and the people I know and see around me, pay for this ongoing state of war. The shrinking of the ?surface area? of the soul that comes in contact with the bloody and menacing world out there. The limiting of one?s ability and willingness to identify, even a little, with the pain of others; the suspension of moral judgment. The despair most of us experience of possibly understanding our own true thoughts in a state of affairs that is so terrifying and deceptive and complex, both morally and practically?

Most of all, I?m better off not feeling too much ? at least until this shall pass. And if it doesn?t, at least I relieved my suffering somewhat, I developed a useful numbness, I protected myself as best I could with the help of a bit of indifference, a bit of sublimation, a bit of intended blindness and large doses of self-anesthetization.

In other words: Because of the perpetual ? and all-too-real ? fear of being hurt, or of death, or of unbearable loss, or even of ?mere? humiliation, each and every one of us, the conflict?s citizens, its prisoners, trim down our own vivacity, our internal mental and cognitive diapason, ever enveloping ourselves with protective layers, which end up suffocating us.

Grossman?s language comes from his daily experience of living in an Israel at war with its region, internally divided about its Arab neighbors, about the prospects of the kind of peace they must create with the Palestinians that can surmount, that can overcome, generations of mutual destruction and conflict.

If you travel to the Holy Land, you will see in the shuk, the marketplace of the old city, tourist posters for sale. One of them is called Doorways of Jerusalem, showing photographs of the ornate thresholds of the city, lintels in stone and carved wood, painted wooden doors open or locked with iron rings. The open doorway always holds a sense of possibility to me ? are you going in, or going out? Either way, there is a sense of movement, of spaciousness. But of course, most of the doors are closed, and many of them are locked.

In the same essay, Grossman continues,

Kafka?s mouse is right: when the predator is closing in on you, the world does indeed become increasingly narrow. So does the language that describes it.?

Actually, this process is all too understandable: after all, the natural riches of human language, and their ability to touch on the finest and most delicate nuances and strings of existence, can hurt deeply in such circumstances, because they remind us of the bountiful reality of which we are being robbed, of its true complexity, of its subtleties.

My thoughts relate not only to the conflict in the Middle East. Across the world today, billions of people face a ?predicament? of one type or other, in which personal existence and values, liberty and identity are under threat, to some extent. Almost all of us have a ?predicament? of our own, a curse of our own. We all feel ? or can intuit ? how our special ?predicament? can rapidly turn into a trap that would take away our freedom, the sense of home our country provides, our private language, our free will.

The mouse?s trap is not only the limits of the community, the institution, the government, the nation. It is also the trap of a limit of words alone, it is an unwillingness to grapple with complexity, and to reach for the horizons of language that will allow us to meet one another, face to face. In her graphic novel autobiographies, Persepolis and Persepolis 2, the Iranian artist Marjanne Satrapi talks about living under total state authority, about the cost to the human spirit of total obedience. She and her friends, as children, used to push up against the barriers of the dress code, they used to dare one another to wear lipstick. These small rebellions were still quite dangerous ? they could be arrested and beaten for this transgression- but Satrapi writes about how their life energy was eaten up by small transgressions, which limited their ability to ask still more critical and dangerous questions. She writes,

We confronted the regime [in Iran] as best we could. In 1990, the era of grand revolutionary ideas and demonstration was over. Between 1980 and 1983, the government had imprisoned and executed so many high school and college students that w no longer dared to talk politics. Our struggle was more discreet. It hinged on the little details. To our leaders, the smallest thing could be a subject of subversion: showing your wrist. A loud laugh. Having a walkman. In short? everything was a pretext to arrest us. I even remember spending an entire day at the committee because of a pair of red socks. The regime had understood that one person leaving her house while asking herself: Are my trousers long enough? Is my veil in place? Can my make-up be seen? Are they going to whip me? no longer asks herself: Where is my freedom of thought? Where is my freedom of speech? My life, is it livable? What?s going on in the political prisons?

Perhaps it should not be so surprising that a storyteller?s deepest response to being scared stiff, to despair, to heartbreak ? the artist?s and the world?s ? is to find companions and tell them the story. For into this narrowed, diminished reality, both Satrapi and Grossman bring the power of vital life energy, imagination, and creative force. Grossman writes,

Writers know that when we write, we feel the world move; it is flexible, crammed with possibilities. It certainly isn?t frozen. Wherever human existence permeates, there is no freezing and no paralysis, and actually, there is no status quo. Even if we sometimes err to think that there is a status quo; even if some are very keen to have us believe that a status quo exists. When I write, even now, the world is not closing in on me, and it does not grow ever so narrow: it also makes gestures of opening up toward a future prospect.

By cracking open the door of storytelling, of writing, by leaving the threshold and entering into a new life-giving space, David Grossman escapes the trap of paralyzing conflict, of dehumanizing daily realities, and reclaims the horizons of human creativity. He does not live on the threshold, waiting for the notifiers; he does not allow himself to be caged in one view of reality, no matter how entrenched, no matter how despairing.

How powerful it is to stand with him, to move with him, and see what he sees at the threshold: not the narrowness of the gate, but the openness of all that might yet lie beyond it. To see not the narrowness of the doorway, but the openeness of all that might yet lie beyond it.

In this reality [writes Grossman] we authors and poets write. In Israel and Palestine, Chechnya and Sudan, in New York and in Congo. Sometimes, during my workday, after several hours? writing, I lift my head up and think ? right now, at this very moment, another writer whom I don?t even know sits, in Damascus or Tehran, in Kigali or in Belfast, just like me, practicing this peculiar, Don-Quixote-like craft of creation, within a reality that contains so much violence and estrangement, indifference and diminution. Here, I have a distant ally who doesn?t even know me, but together we weave this intangible cobweb, which nevertheless has tremendous power, a world-changing and world-creating power, the power of making the [voiceless] speak and the power of tikkun, or correction, in the deep sense it has in kabbalah.

Here we stand, fearful, hopeful, unsure, powerful, here we stand on the threshold of a new year. Through that open doorway we can see that it is true: the world is not getting narrower. The good news is that we can find the words to tell a new story, we can move into the unknown, into a greater sense of spaciousness and complexity, even when the world tells us it can?t be so, that we are trapped, that we are limited.

Revelation is not yet sealed. Our survival will spring from that surviving, creative power that allows us to form and transform ourselves and our world. Our despair is great, but so is our hope. So is our hope.

May it be so.