Suffering, Loss, and . . . Blessing?

I will not let you go until you give me your blessing.  Rabbi Jonathan Sacks spoke eloquently of happiness and the reality of suffering on a recent program on Krista Tippet On Being  .  Perhaps it was not accidental that he had just arrived at the panel discussion after “sitting Shiva”  , the Jewish ritual of mourning, for his mother.  Tippett had asked him how, with its well developed awareness of suffering, Judaism considered happiness.  And that is when Sacks referred to the story of Jacob wrestling all night with the angel:

That night Jacob got up and took his two wives,

his two maidservants and his eleven sons and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. After he had sent them across the stream, he sent over all his possessions. So Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him till daybreak. When the man saw that he could not overpower him, he touched the socket of Jacob's hip so that his hip was wrenched as he wrestled with the man. Then the man said, "Let me go, for it is daybreak."
But Jacob replied, "I will not let you go unless you bless me."
The man asked him, "What is your name?"
"Jacob," he answered.
Then the man said, "Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, [e] because you have struggled with God and with men and have overcome."

And so the people of Israel are named for the struggle with God.  But it struck me how Sacks, his cheeks still tasting of salt from his mother’s death, spoke so consolingly of dealing with tragedy, loss, and suffering.  Don’t we struggle with God when we lose a child, or watch the innocent suffer, or the evil prosper, or when we bury a mother?  Sacks’ advice was so compelling.  Struggle.  Struggle through the night if necessary.  But do not let go until the tragedy gives you its blessing.

Perhaps this is something worth wrestling with.  There is consolation in the idea that God is perfectly immanent and perfectly transcendent, within us and all around us.  Last night our granddaughters helped us hand out candy to the trick-or-treaters on our street.  As they hugged us goodbye repeatedly, which is their sweet custom, 6 year old Sonja said to me “I like the way you smell; you smell like wood.”  I had cut and split firewood earlier, adding to the stacks of it seasoning along the foundation of our house, drying for next winter.  And I had, all day, been feeding this year’s wood into the stove.    Despite having changed my clothes, it was apparent to Sonja that I was permeated with wood, with the dust of it in the cutting in its freshness, with the burning of it, as it found its second life in turning from substance into warmth and light. 

Sacks suggests that even (and perhaps especially) tragedy and suffering are permeated with God, that in the distance of the Judaic God, the nature and character of God’s tenacious and unearned love, the blessing in suffering can be as hidden as God, or the smell of wood.  But God is there, and so is the blessing.  Jacob was forever changed by the struggle, limping from the injury to his hip.  It seems dissonant that a limp would be a reminder of a blessing.  We are not called to emerge unscathed from suffering or loss.  We are merely called to find the blessing in it, to take our new name, and move on.