Small
Voice
“There
is nothing so whole as a broken heart.”
Kotzker
Rebbe (1787-1859)
There is a wonderful
article in the Fall 2018 issue of Parabola titled, “The Still Small
Voice” by Eliezer Shore. It is an exegesis of the story of Moses
and the Burning Bush—in other words, about listening to God's call.
In it he quotes the eighteenth century Hasidic rabbi known as Kotzker
Rebbe. The gist of this particular quote about the wholeness of a
broken heart is that we are sometimes inflated by our spiritual
ideology and think ourselves to be saintly and in the know when it
comes to God. We see a lot of that these days—on all sides. When we
are so certain that we have, or at least our particular brand of
religion has, all the answers and the only correct answers, that's a
time when that still, small voice may fail to show up. It goes
silent. Sometimes, events happen for which there is no explanation,
that don't respond to our prayer and beseeching for the Almighty to
clear things up. It kicks the bricks out from under our certainty.
Eliezer Shore writes, “After all the crying, the calling, the
beseeching God to return, what remains is the humble acceptance of
one's limitations, a recognition of the truth, a 'heart of flesh.'”
Our hearts may be broken, but now we have humility enough to listen.
Often, God calls us to do
things we don't want to do. Certainly, Moses tried to argue his way
out of going to Egypt to save his people—in spite of burning bushes
and holy ground. No one likes to abandon the agenda of their
self-driven life to do what they never would have chosen for
themselves. And most of the time, we say, “No thank you. I believe
I'll just keep doing what I'm doing. Get somebody else to do that
onerous thing.” Speaking for myself, here. I'm a lot like Jonah,
who didn't want to go to Nineveh. We sometimes have to end up in the
belly of the whale to get the message.
God's call is not just
for Moses and the Old Testament characters. It is the still, small
voice that calls us to take care of the least of these, to open our
hearts to those who are in travail—even if it disturbs our neat,
predictable, important little lives. We can try to run away from it,
but we do so at our own peril. Sometimes broken hearts, and broken
egos, are the only whole things we possess.
In the Spirit,
Jane
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