Stuff Gets To Me

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As I pack up to leave after my workout, someone asks me, “Hey, Rabbi, how are things going?”

I’m not one for small talk.
Especially after being called by my title.

“Well,” I reply. “I’m sad.”

“Why?”

“I’m thinking about the girls who went to school in the morning in Minab, Iran—over a hundred of them—killed by a bomb.”

“Oh,” they say.

I let a moment of silence speak for me.

They fill the space: “Well, I try not to let that stuff get to me.”

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Stuff gets to me.

The state of the world gets to me.

The world doesn’t look the way I imagine it should. Or could.

And I mourn that.

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Emotions are a natural response to the world around us. They are our response to being alive.

If we were lucky during childhood, we had teachers who helped us name our emotions, express them, and process them.

Some of us were not so lucky.

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I was a good high school math teacher.

Why?

One reason might surprise: it was because I didn’t have a master’s degree in the subject.

Studies show that the more advanced a teacher’s degree, the less clear their instruction—the thinking is that it just makes sense to them, so they don’t explain it so well.

I didn’t learn my emotions as a child. Maybe that’s why I’ve become pretty good at explaining them simply.

So, if I may —

GRIEF

Our natural expressions of grief, sadness, and mourning draw community to us, to care for us.

We share tears and stories of our loss until we feel heard, and then the worst of it passes.

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The purest expression of grief I have witnessed was my boy, at age two.

Emmett had recently tripped over the dog, knocking his own front tooth out.

Or so we thought.

Actually, he had fallen so perfectly that the tooth was pushed back up into the cavity from which it had descended.

Apparently, this is a thing, and it isn’t painful. If you’re lucky, the tooth will descend again.

We were lucky.

However, the dentist told us that if there was to be any chance of the tooth coming back, Emmett would have to give up his pacifier.

Emmett loved his binky, as his pacifier was known in our house.

“Em,” we tell him on the drive back home, “Dr. P. says no more binky.”

There is a pause as he puzzles out the meaning of what we just said, his eyes fill with tears, he covers his eyes with his hands, and then he sobs.

For five straight minutes, he sobs.

And then that was it.

He was through it. Grief expressed, he moved on.

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In response to the terrible news of the world, mourning is appropriate as it draws people—not my friend at the gym, though—to us, to comfort us in our loss.

I’m sad about the world.

This stuff gets to me.

💙rB