Finding Strength in the Storm: Six Ways to Cope Through Crisis

When we change the way we look at hardships, the hardships we look at change revealing hidden strength and resilience

Melanie Sturm delivering her sermon at Temple HilMel services on Yom Kippur, October 12, 2024.

Have you ever felt trapped by someone deeply controlling and manipulative - a partner, friend or family member? I know from the response to my previous post – To Forgive is Not to Forget But to Remember Differently – that many have navigated very difficult relationships.

In my first two Persuasion Pearl newsletters, I wanted to share my story by drawing on the sermons I gave during last year’s Jewish High Holidays. Both sermons were informed by challenges I faced last year as I grappled with the impending death of my father, and then the agonizing aftermath.

My first post was about how the hardest person to persuade is often ourselves, especially when trying to forgive someone in the absence of mutual apologies.

This second post below is about the unexpected battle I was thrust into after he passed, not with grief but with his wife. As the pain intensified, my spirit and strength were tested in ways I never imagined. I even ended up in the ER with cardiac concerns.

And then the merciful hand of God appeared, as described in my last post, proving Rabbi Jonathan Sack’s observation that “the deepest crises of your life can turn out to be the moments when you encounter the deepest truths and acquire your greatest strengths.”

My mindset shifts not only enabled me to prevail, but I learned a profound lesson: though we can’t control what happens to us, we can control our response and attitude, which is the theme of this site – Think Again… you might change your mind.

I hope you’ll share your thoughts in the comments section below, or write me directly!

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Six Insights to Cope Through Crisis

On Rosh Hashanah I spoke about how the Jewish wisdom I’d gleaned from Hilary’s High Holiday readings over the years helped me manage my challenging relationship with my father, enabling me to honor and forgive him – and unburden myself — before he passed away on August 17.

I also mentioned the subsequent trauma related to his wife. First, she told me I wasn’t a worthy eulogizer of my father before allowing me to deliver a eulogy, albeit forcibly shortened. Then she launched a chaotic legal matter that escalated this week, making the period following my dad’s passing the most traumatic of my life.

Exhausted from sleepless nights and stressful days, I told Hilary that I wasn’t sure I could summon the clarity, humility and insightfulness to write a sermon.

How do I encourage self-examination and repentance while so angry, anxious and distracted? How can I personally seek the spiritual release of forgiveness when I find unforgivable the pain I’m forced to endure?

Ever the instigator of self-examination, Hilary said, “I’m sure at some point you’ll find a gift in the lesson of this difficult moment,” channeling Rabbi Jonathan Sacks who said, “the deepest crises of your life can turn out to be the moments when you encounter the deepest truths and acquire your greatest strengths.”

God knows I’m not the only struggler. There are others here who are undergoing painful transitions. There are people who’ve suffered through recent hurricanes. There are Jewish students who don’t feel safe on college campuses – supposedly the most enlightened places on the planet. And there are Israelis unsure how to repent when they’re still raging at God and man for the October 7^th atrocities.

Then there are hostages – both dead and alive – and their families who’s suffering is incomprehensible.

We all feel trapped, as if in a terror tunnel — though thankfully we’re not …

…and we don’t know whether the light at the end is a train that’s heading for us.

As Haviv Rettig Gur put it in a long tweet last night. “How do you enter the ‘headspace’ of Yom Kippur when it seems so detached from the anxiety that surrounds us?”

Thankfully this weekend grants a respite and the opportunity to reflect and think deeply. So, I’ve spent the last couple of days tapping into Jewish wisdom, and here are six insights I’ve gained:

First insight: when you’re struggling, it is important to have perspective.

As I pointed out in my Rosh Hashanah sermon, when you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change. Rabbi David Wolpe demonstrated this when he reflected on his year as a visiting scholar at Harvard where he had served and later resigned from its Antisemitism Advisory Group:

“What gives me hope is, I imagine myself in a conversation with my great, great, great grandfather,” he said. “I say to him, ‘you know, there is some antisemitism at Harvard.’ And he responds to me in shock, ‘you’re at Harvard?’

And I say, ‘Yes, but some of them hate Israel!’ He says again in utter surprise, ‘There’s an Israel?

And I say, ‘Yes, but you should hear how the administration is talking about shaving some of the aid to Israel.’ And he says, ‘America is giving aid to Israel?’”

And I say, ‘you’re right!’”

“Yes, we have problems, but to our great, great, great grandparents, we are blessed,” Wolpe wryly observed.

Second insight: remember, life is both bitter and sweet.

No one ever promised you a rose garden, to paraphrase the famous song. “Along with the sunshine,” the lyrics go, “there’s gotta be a little rain sometime.”

Yes, life can be tough, as it was for me this last week. But it can still be sweet, as it is right now….and will be when the break-the-fast buffet opens!

The truth is, the world is a tapestry of beauty and pain, and our job is to promote the good and work to eliminate the evil. Understanding this is why there’s no such thing as a pure celebration in Judaism – even at weddings the destruction of Jerusalem is mentioned.

This observation was made in a video on Daniel Gordis’ Substack where a diverse group of Israelis reflected on the past year since October 7th. One participant remarked, “our glass is not empty, and it never will be because there are too many heroes who, in their deaths, have ordered our life.”

“I want a glass half-full,” he continued, “but after the past year, we’ll settle for a quarter-full glass.”

“The pain is what shaped us,” another Israeli says, “and it’s [crazy] how death is so good at bringing us closer.”

Amazed by the remarkable support for them, the Israelis noted the millions of donations, the thousands of volunteers, the families who opened their homes to those who’d lost theirs, the food centers, and the people who journeyed toward Gaza to prepare BBQs for soldiers.

By believing that we’re God’s partners in making the world a better place, Rabbi Sacks argues that Jews are the people who not only survive, but thrive in adversity, renewing ourselves after every disaster, including the Holocaust.

That Israelis are demonstrating this yet again is not only inspirational, it grants us perspective.

Third insight: adjust your expectations.

On Rosh Hashanah, I spoke about my mindset trick: recognize when to hold onto long-term memories, like an elephant does, and when to let go swiftly, like a goldfish.

I managed to suppress unpleasantness by imagining my dad as an uncle, from whom one naturally expects less. And I became an elephant by recalling the adoring father of my childhood, helping me make peace with the challenging father of my adulthood.

Israelis have also undergone a mindset shift since October 7^th, adjusting to the fact that pain is an inseparable part of existence; an attitude that helps account for the fact that Jews are the ultimate survivors as the longest living people in the history of the planet.

Fourth insight, to make a better world, we must have courage

“Courage,” as Winston Churchill noted, “is rightly considered the foremost of the virtues, for upon it all others depend.”

The Jewish response to crisis and tragedy, notes Rabbi Sacks, is to say: “God, I do not know why this is happening, but I do know what you want me to do … We must wrestle with it, refusing to let it go until it blesses us, until we emerge stronger, better or wiser than we were before. To be a Jew is not to accept defeat. That is the meaning of faith.”

Doesn’t this photo of Israeli women soldiers capture this idea?

In the quarter-glass full video, one of the Israelis applauds the courage of the Jewish people: “We are all one body,” she says, “and no [bully] has yet risen to change that. We’re still here. And we’ll say it until every Israeli can live in peace, until every hostage returns home.”

May it be so!

Fifth insight: have faith by returning to our values

After all, returning to God and moral alignment is what it means to do “teshuva” (repentance) during the High Holidays. Yom Kippur asks us to confront our mortality in order to focus our minds on living righteously.

When Carnegie Mellon professor Randy Pausch was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, he delivered his famous “last lecture” knowing his talk would become his legacy to his children.

Though titled “Achieving Your Childhood Dreams,” Pausch closed by saying that his lecture wasn’t really about how to achieve dreams, but rather how to live your life. And “if you lead your life the right way,” he assured, “the karma will take care of itself, and the dreams will come to you.”

Pausch wasn’t Jewish, but he frames well the meaning and purpose of the High Holidays and the notion that in the long sweep of Jewish history, karma has tended to work out – just consider all those conquering empires that have come and gone, not to mention all the dead terrorists – and we’re still here!

I think it’s partly because we’ve been observing the High Holidays, among others, for countless generations. Each year we ask ourselves to think about the prior year and evaluate it against our values so that we can plan to do better in the coming year. And we do this not as individuals, but as a community so we can strengthen each other in this difficult task, a task made easier knowing that each of us needs to do this.

And finally, the sixth insight: no matter how dark the moment, do not lose hope.

Judaism is a religion of hope, and its great rituals of repentance and atonement are part of that hope. We are not condemned to live endlessly with the mistakes and errors of our past.

Rabbi Sacks spoke to this moment. “Optimism is the passive belief that things will get better,” he explained. “Hope is the active belief that together we can make things better.”

So, in these final moments of self-denial before breaking our fast, as we prove our commitment to actively making things better, I hope you’ll find solace in knowing that we can overcome adversity by:

1. having perspective,

2. remembering that life is both bitter and sweet,

3. adjusting our expectations,

4. having courage to fight,

5. returning to values so karma will take care of itself, and

6. having hope!

Just as it took God six days to create us and our wondrous world – calling it good – may these six insights help us restore wonder and goodness to our world, relieving our pain and suffering and sealing us in the book of life for another year of blessings.

Amen!

This post is based on my Yom Kippur sermon at Temple HilMel services on October 12, 2024. This and my Rosh Hashanah sermon – “To Forgive is Not to Forget But to Remember Differently” – as well as Hilary Cohen’s readings are intended to inspire a spirit of forgiveness and spiritual renewal during the High Holidays.