C.S. Lewis writes in The Screwtape Letters:
Humans are amphibians—half spirit and half animal… As spirits they belong to the eternal world,
but as animals they inhabit time. This
means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their
bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time
means to change. Their nearest approach
to constancy, therefore, is undulation—the repeated return to a level from
which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks… As long as he lives on earth periods of
emotional and bodily richness and liveliness will alternate with periods of
numbness and poverty.
Peaks and valleys are our lot in life, and our trouble
begins when we forget the truth of this.
I often think of this undulation principle when observing a friend going
through a difficult season. It is much
easier to notice it and remark on it when one is on the outside looking in, rather
than the other way around. When we are
inside it -- in the valley or the trials -- we forget that “this too shall pass”
(a well-known phrase that comes not from the Bible, but from a Persian fable). The phrase is also at the center of the
sublime song by the American rock band, OK Go (and shown in not one official music video, but two of them). To be sure, the Scriptures give us this theme
(“weeping endures for a night, but joy comes in the morning”), which is perhaps
why we associate the phrase with the Bible, rather than with Medieval Sufi poets.
“This too shall pass” and CS Lewis’s “law of undulation”
have been on our mind as we consider the Hebrew word for distress: TSARAH (צָרָה). The
Hebrew Bible gives us this word 73 times.
…then let us arise and go up to Bethel, that
I may make there an altar to the God who answered me in the day of my DISTRESS and
has been with me wherever I have gone.
Genesis 35:3
Go and cry to the gods whom you have chosen;
let them deliver you in the time of your DISTRESS.
Judges 10:14
But you have this day rejected your God, who
saves you from all your calamities and your DISTRESSES; and you have said, ‘No!
but set a king over us.’ Now therefore
present yourselves before the Lord by your
tribes and by your thousands.”
1 Samuel 10:19
The word TSARAH derives from TSARAR (צָרַר), a verb which means “to bind or tie up”. It can also mean “to be restricted, narrow,
or cramped”. And the evocative power of
Hebrew comes crashing through: to be in distress is to be in a tight spot. Our hope in distress lies in the fact that it
is only temporary; it may endure for a season, but “joy comes in the morning”.
Recently, however, we have come across a different reading
of the word TSARAH which gives a fresh slant to its meaning.
Since the Fall, suffering and distress have vexed humans –
indeed, all creation. Explaining why
there is pain in the world is man’s philosophical and religious quest. Indeed, the problem of pain (as the philosophers
name it) is often the atheists’ argument against an all-knowing and all-loving G-d. “If He is omnipotent and loving, why is there
suffering in the world?”
The Jewish sages are no different in asking why there is
pain. But they are different in how they
have answered the question. In their
view of the question, it is physically impossible for the human brain, with its
limited abilities, to grasp an infinite G-d, or, for that matter, to understand His ways. The medieval Jewish sage, Yosef Albo, wrote, “If
I knew Him, I would be Him.”
This leads us to a new reading of TSARAH. One of its meanings is “narrow”, which certainly
can mean a “tight spot”. But what if it
has more to do with how we see the world?
We are given only a narrow, subjective view of the world and our place
in it. We experience our suffering as
the totality of existence. As the Dread Pirate
Roberts tells Princess Buttercup in The Princess Bride, “Life is pain,
Highness.”
But this is only so because our view is necessarily
limited. We do not see the whole
picture, but only fragments. We see the
narrow window of our valley, unable to see the peak we have left or the peak
which awaits. All valley, all of the
time.
The Jewish sages connect words that share letters. So TSARAH is connected with other words which
share its consonants, in their thinking.
One word with which TSARAH shares consonants is TSOHAR (צֹהַר), which means “midday or noon”, but practically
means brightest light of day. It occurs
24 times in the Hebrew Bible, but the oddest one is in the story of Noah
building his ark:
You shall make a WINDOW for the ark, and you
shall finish it to a cubit from above; and set the door of the ark in its side.
You shall make it with lower, second, and third
decks.
Genesis 6:16 NKJV
While the NKJV translators are consistent with the KJV,
NASB, and Wycliffe, other translators have struggled with the English meaning
of the word. Most render it “roof”,
which is odd for a word that means “noonday” everywhere else. What gives and what does this have to do with
distress?
The sages connected “suffering, distress” with “window” or “noonday”
because suffering opens a window into our deepest recesses,
allowing us to become aware of, and gain access to, dormant potentials and
deeper reservoirs of energy and insight that might have otherwise remained
unrealized.
This is one of the hidden blessings of the valley seasons –
the pain and distress in life: they allow us to pause, reflect, dig deep, and
grow beyond what we ever thought was possible. Pain pushes us out of our comfort zone and
goads us to do the hard work of adaptation and evolution. Without it, we might simply stay safe in our
own status quo and never risk becoming who we were ultimately meant to be.
Moreover, pain can also create a window into other people’s
experiences. Therefore, another blessing
of pain is that it can serve as an agent of empathy, enabling us to connect,
relate, and understand suffering and situations other than our own, thus
expanding our heart and worldview.
The Messiah teaches us to give thanks in all things. Our Scriptures teach us that in all things –
including suffering – G-d works for the GOOD of those who love Him. TSARAH is a narrow view, but it might just
give us a TSOHAR to the bigger picture if we hold fast and look for it. This is not a “let go and let G-d” stock
phrase. But rather an orientation on the
Truth of G-d working in all of our circumstances – even the hard ones which
press us tightly.
