The Heart of Many Rooms

Rabbi David's Rosh Hashanah Talk 5787

Last year on Yom Kippur, I spoke about the teaching from the Talmud  that says that more than one thing can be true at the same time. Tractate Eruvin says "Ilu v’ilu divrei Elohim chayim" - “Both these and those are the words of the living God.” I've spent this past year trying to figure out what that teaching actually means in everyday life - not as a theoretical idea, but as a real practice. On one level, this might seem obvious - anyone who's paid attention to their own life knows that nearly everything we love is mixed. Our favorite books and movies, our chosen careers, our closest relationships - all of these include things we really like and feel good about, and also things that we don't. I think that anyone who is honest with themselves would agree with that statement.

But actually living with that idea can be complex and difficult. It's one thing to know, intellectually, that nothing is ever entirely the way that we want it. It's a whole other thing to hold that truth in our minds and our hearts on an ordinary Tuesday, and then to actually live it - to truly accept that every relationship, with every person we like and love, includes moments of real frustration and disappointment, and also to accept that when those moments happen, it doesn't mean that there's something wrong with the relationship, or the person. I feel like we live in a culture that pushes all of us to think of everything and everyone as being 100% right or wrong, to not accept that problems, flaws, mistakes, and disappointments are normal and expected, and aren't reasons to run away from something or someone. Judaism doesn't believe or teach that last part - which I am happy to point out. But knowing that doesn't make it any easier to figure out how to live that way. So this morning, I'd like to share a few Jewish teachings that I've come to believe can actually help — not just as ideas we can agree with, but as actions we can actually put into practice. This starts, of all places, in the words we say every day, right before we recite the Shema.

Every night and every morning before the Shema, we read a prayer about love. In the mornings, we pray about the abundant love we believe God has for us, Ahavah Rabbah, and at night we pray about God's abiding love, Ahavat Olam. On the surface, Ahavat Olam, eternal and abiding love, is a description of how God loves the Jewish people: not with a conditional love, one that rises and falls with our behavior, mood, or performance, but with a love that is always there and that simply persists, regardless of whatever else is happening. The more I've thought about this prayer over the past year, the more I've come to believe that the kind of unconditional love it's talking about isn't only something that God shows for us - it also describes the deepest kind of love that human beings are capable of showing for each other.

Think of the love within a long-lasting romantic relationship, or the love of a parent for a child. That love doesn't require you to feel warmly toward the person in every single moment, in order for it to remain real and whole. In the very same breath, you can be disappointed in your spouse and yet love them completely. You can be let down by your child, and still love them without reservation. The disappointment doesn't cancel the love - it barely even competes with it. It simply exists alongside it, in the very same heart.

This, I think, is exactly the everyday version of ilu v'ilu that I said I've been trying to figure out this past year. It's one thing to say, abstractly, that more than one truth can coexist. It's another to say: I can be disappointed in you, and love you without limit, at the very same time. And, to recognize that neither of those truths threatens the other.

There's a line from the Tosefta - a compilation of teachings that was written at the same time as the Mishnah - that gives us a physical image for exactly this. Tosefta Sotah 7:12 says: "Make for yourself a heart of many rooms." A heart of many rooms. The text is specifically saying to make room for the teachings of both Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai, the two primary schools of Jewish learning at the time, which often competed with and disagreed with each other. It's essentially telling us to make room in our hearts for multiple contrasting ideas, at the same time. I love this image, because it turns an abstract idea into something almost architectural. Our hearts are not single rooms where only one feeling can live at a time. They're literally organs with multiple chambers, but they're metaphorically more like houses - houses with many rooms, each one capable of holding something real - maybe even something that contradicts what's happening in the room next door. 

One room might hold Ahavat Olam - the abiding, unshakable love you feel for your spouse, your parent, your child, your dearest friend. And another room, just down the hall, might hold your disappointment in them - something that can be, real, current, unresolved. There can be more rooms than these, as well - you might have rooms of frustration, elation, pride, or any of the other innumerable feelings that people can bring out in us. These many different rooms can contain multiple experiences, real truths, and diverse lived realities, all at the same time. You aren't being inconsistent, or ungrateful, or a bad partner, parent, or friend, when you experience more than one of these feelings at once. You are simply following the Tosefta's instructions and living with a heart with more than one room - which, it turns out, is the kind of heart that Judaism has always assumed that we have.

This is not just a poetic idea. It's a genuinely radical one - especially in a culture that seems to incentivize and reward us for choosing a single, clear feeling, and sticking to it. We are told, both explicitly and implicitly, that mature love should be steady and uncomplicated - that if you really love someone, the hard feelings should resolve quickly, or shouldn't arise much at all. Judaism seems to know better. Judaism knows that a love that has to eliminate every difficult feeling in order to remain love is not durable or sustainable. All the more so, it's not realistic. The love that actually lasts, the love that is true and genuine and real, is the love that can hold complexity without collapsing.

At this time of year, the architecture of the multi-roomed heart is very relevant to another kind of relationship - not just the ones defined by love, but also the ones that are complicated and consumed by hurt. As we engage in the High Holy Day work of teshuvah, of atonement and return, many of us are thinking about people who we've wronged, or who have wronged us. I think we often assume that teshuvah requires a kind of emotional completion: that if I forgive you, I should also, eventually, stop being angry, stop being disappointed, and go back to trusting you the way I once did. But the heart of many rooms suggests something different. It suggests that forgiveness can live in one room, while the wrongness of what happened is allowed to sit, honestly and openly, in another. Offering someone a measure of kindness, even real forgiveness, does not require us to pretend that what they did was fine, or that we've fully moved past it, or that our trust in them has been restored. Having multiple rooms in our heart might mean being able to extend forgiveness to someone while still sincerely hoping that they will make the kind of amends we actually need from them. It might mean recognizing that forgiveness is not a zero-sum game — that it doesn't require us to give up every other honest feeling in order to be real.

I think this matters because so much of the language we've inherited around forgiveness is so absolute. We talk about forgiving and forgetting as if the two have to travel together. We talk about "moving on," as if any lingering feeling is a sign that we haven't really forgiven at all. Judaism, I believe, asks something more honest of us. It asks us to be correct about what happened - to not pretend, to not minimize, to hold the truth of the harm clearly - without needing to be absolutely right in every emotional register all the time. We can offer someone real kindness, and at the same time, in another room of our heart, not fully trust them. Maybe, not fully trust them yet. Both can be true. Neither one needs to "win."

I'd like to bring one more text into this conversation, because I think it takes everything we've just discussed out of the realm of the purely emotional, and makes it something we are actually required to do. In Exodus 23:4, we find one of the most striking, practical commandments in the Torah: “Should you encounter your enemy’s ox or donkey wandering, you must return it (to them).” You are not permitted to walk by or ignore your enemy's lost animal - you are required, you are commanded, to help. Please think about that. The text doesn't ask you to first resolve your feelings about this person. It doesn't require any kind of reconciliation or apology, or even a conversation. It assumes - plainly, and without embarrassment - that you might genuinely dislike this person, that they might genuinely dislike you, and that that's ok. And, it commands the act of care, anyway. The Torah does not wait for the heart to catch up. It simply says: whatever room your feelings are currently sitting in, there is also another room in you, in your heart, that's capable of action, of decency, of showing up. Jewish people aren't allowed to avoid that room.

This, I think, is the most practical teaching there is for us about relating to other people. The image of the 'heart of many rooms' gives us permission to hold complicated feelings. The commandment of the donkey gives us instructions for what to do - regardless of which feeling currently has the upper hand. You do not need to like someone, trust someone, or to have fully forgiven someone, in order to be obligated to treat them with basic human decency. Judaism does not ask you to wait until you feel differently. It asks you to act now, and it trusts that the feelings will find their own way, in their own time, in their own room. The room in our hearts that we have to act from, that we always have to visit, isn't the room of love, or aversion, or any other feelings. Those rooms come after the room of action, of care.  

I opened this morning by telling you that I've spent the past year trying to figure out how to live with ilu v'ilu - not just as a way of reading sacred text, but as a way of living an actual life. A heart of many rooms is where that effort has led me. It's the same teaching, brought all the way home - into our friendships, our professional and communal lives, into our marriages, our families, and into our own complicated, contradictory selves. Judaism has never needed us to resolve every tension into a single, simple truth. It has actually always trusted us to hold more than we think we can hold, and to find that this is a strength, not a burden.

As we begin these Ten Days of Awe together, I invite you to take some time to visit the many rooms of your own heart. Somewhere in your life, right now, there is very likely a person who you love with an abiding, unshakable love, for whom you also feel a real and current frustration, disappointment, or hurt. I invite you to first tell yourself that this is ok, that your feelings about this person can occupy more than one room, and that you're allowed to live with the tension that comes from that. I encourage you to tell yourself that you don't need to pick one feeling and evict the other - you are allowed to walk into these Ten Days with a heart of many rooms, tending honestly to what's in each one. And when you have the chance - when you come across the donkey, so to speak, of someone who has hurt you, or someone who you've hurt - I hope you'll remember that you don't have to wait for your feelings to sort themselves out first. You're actually not supposed to. You can act with care today - hayom in Hebrew, as we repeat over and over again in one of the last prayers of every High Holy Day. You can act with care hayom, in the room where care lives - even while things are still working themselves out in the other rooms of your heart. 

May 5787 be a year where each of us makes for ourselves a heart of many rooms - hearts that are spacious enough to hold our whole, complicated, honest selves, and generous enough to act with love - even before every room has found its peace.

Ken yehi ratzon — may this be God's will.

And let us say: Amen.

Shana tovah, everyone.