Last night I attended my nephew’s wedding in Jerusalem - a joyful celebration in the midst of the worst war endured here yet, with so many friends lost to the war, or unable to attend -- and yet present here to provide this young couple with blessings for their new path. The ceremony and celebration included many mixed emotions. I was not the only one with tears when my nephew broke the glass. Tears of joy and grief, combined, together. A paradoxical moment containing contradictions.
Paradoxical combinations sometimes help us make sense of the senseless, or of just how complex and layered life can be. Sometimes those are gestures or rituals that contain the kernel of the contradictory or the absurd. Such is always this ritual gesture of shattering a vessel as a union is cherished. How much more so these days.
This ancient custom, while a response to historical traumas, may have its origins in this second chapter of the PSlams.
This second chapter outlines the future days, with YHWH’s triumph, and then comes this instruction for the world’s rulers and kings, and for the rest of us, how to be in service to the divine authority who’s really in charge:
עִבְד֣וּ אֶת־יְהֹוָ֣ה בְּיִרְאָ֑ה וְ֝גִ֗ילוּ בִּרְעָדָֽה׃
“Serve GOD in awe;
rejoice with trembling.”
Ps. 2:11
There are many ways to translate this sentence - tremble with joy, be fearful while happy - just a few examples. Is this guilt-filled killjoy spirit - or good advice for life??
Biblical scholars such as Bratcher and Reyburn have commented that this line is ‘difficult if not impossible to understand’ because the verb ‘Gil’ which means ‘rejoice’, clearly contradicts the sense of dread or terror that ‘tremble’ suggests.
A Talmudic text explored this paradox and gave us the tradition for both how to pray - and why we break a glass at weddings:
“What is the meaning of rejoicing with trembling? Rav Adda bar Mattana said in the name of Rabba: One may not experience unbridled joy; even where there is rejoicing, there should be trembling…
One time, Mar, son of Ravina, made a wedding feast for his son and he saw the Sages, who were excessively joyous.
He took a valuable cup worth four hundred coins and broke it in front of them and they became sad.”
Maybe what this Talmudic attitude calls for here is a sort of equanimity - a state of mind named by this article as “The Holy Grail of Calmness & Grace.”
The avoidance of excessive emotion, familiar in Buddhist thought, brings a balanced sense of being, where joy and dread are somehow combined. Later Jewish traditions claim that this is the right attitude for prayer, as one stands in the presence of the Creator with both awe and happiness. This also became the reason for the breaking of glasses at weddings, and seems so resonant at this difficult time.
However we respond to trauma, show up for big moments, and whatever be present in the fullest and most collected way we can, this poetic fragment, like so much of poetry, offers one way to guide us towards better balance, fusing the complexities and paradoxes of the simple and more sacred days.
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