Rachel Barenblat's Blog, page 116

The Shabbat of Return

Return again, return again, return to the land of your soul...

The Shabbat between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur is called Shabbat Shuvah, "the Shabbat of Return." This Shabbat invites us to come home to our deepest selves. To join together in that existential move of teshuvah: turning ourselves around, returning to who we most deeply yearn to be.

On one level this season -- especially these Ten Days of Teshuvah -- is a time for taking stock of who we are and repenting for our missteps. We ask forgiveness from those whom we've wronged. We try to learn how to forgive ourselves for the places where we've fallen short or missed the mark.

On a deeper level this season -- especially these Ten Days -- is a time for making teshuvah for our distance from God, our distance from our own souls, our distance from love and from holiness and from our deepest yearnings. Shabbat Shuvah is a time to re/turn to God. To re/turn to ourselves.

What do you yearn for? From what wholeness do you feel exiled? What part of yourself have you been denying? This Shabbat is time to come home. Come home to the Source of All. Come home to your own soul. No matter how far away you feel, you can always return. You can always come home.

Wisdom from R' Alan Lew for the Ten Days of Teshuvah

Longtime readers know that I maintain a practice of rereading Rabbi Alan Lew's This Is Real And You Are Completely Unprepared: the Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation at this season. I begin reading it at Tisha b'Av, and finish reading it at the end of Sukkot. That's the period of time which the book covers, and Rabbi Lew annually enriches my journey through those two months and through my own spiritual life. 

One of the things I love about reading this book is that I have been underlining and making marginal notes in my copy for many years. There are passages I've underlined, and places where I drew exclamation marks in the margins. Blue ink, black ink, pencil markings. Each year my eye is drawn to the passages I marked in previous years, and often those passages still resonate for me. And each year my eye is drawn to something I haven't underlined before which is speaking to me in a new way this year because of where I am or what's on my mind and heart.

Here are some of the lines which leapt out at me this year.

First of all, we learn that Teshuvah can arise in the most hopeless circumstances... Most of us only embark on the difficult and wrenching path of transformation when we feel we have no choice but to do so, when we feel as if our backs are to the wall, when the circumstances of our lives have pushed us to the point of a significant leave-taking... Transformation is just too hard for us to volunteer for. Interestingly, God is depicted as the one who is doing the pushing here. We are in the predicament that has brought us to the point of transformation because God has driven us there. In other words, that predicament is part of the process. It is a gift, the agent of our turning.

It's easy for me to be glib about teshuvah, repentance / return. This year I am resonating with his point that sometimes transformation is most possible when we have exhausted every other alternative. Sometimes we aren't ready to change until we've tried everything else we can think of. Sometimes we only become ready to seek transformation when it becomes clear that the status quo is untenable. We may not know where we're going or who we're becoming, but we know we can't stay here.

We are sentimental about the heart, but the truth is, mot of us spend a great deal of time and energy avoiding the heart at all costs. Really, we are afraid of what we might find there. We don't even know where it is or how we might find it, but somehow we understand there is a lot of pain there. If we are human, we suffer. The heart holds our suffering. The pain we most need to deal with is sitting right there on our hearts in plain sight, or else it is just inside its dark chambers.

In either case we are not inclined to look at it.

It's easy for me to be glib about the heart, too. How wonderful the heart is! How wonderful it is to love, to feel awe, to marinate in gratitude and joy, to be connected with other human beings! And yes, of course all of those things are wonderful. But they are not the only things the heart contains. They are not the only things my heart contains. Teshuvah -- a real re/turning, realignment, return-to-God -- may require me to look closely at sorrow, at grief, at loss, at anger. To accept all of those in me.

When we feel dead inside, it is often because there are old ideas we no longer believe in or haven't challenged in far too long, old feelings we really don't feel anymore but cling to desperately, afraid of what might happen if we admit we don't feel them. Without our realizing it, these things have suffocated us, crowding the life out of our soul. Sometimes they can be reinvigorated, refreshed, or reimagined. But sometimes they must be removed. We must simply let go of them. The altar must be emptied so that the light may keep burning.

Rabbi Lew writes beautifully in this chapter about the challenges of discernment. Sometimes, he writes, we delude ourselves into thinking that if we could just change X or Y thing in our lives, everything would be great -- and then we change X or Y thing and discover that life has not materially changed, because what needed changing was something internal to who we are. And sometimes we really do need to change X or Y thing. Sometimes we need to let go of ideas and feelings to which we were once attached but which are no longer alive The challenge is figuring out which one of these is true.

This is the work of this time of year. Somehow in between the workdays and the schooldays, packing lunch before the bus comes, figuring out what to cook for dinner, this is the work this season calls us to do. Right now, before it's too late. Not just because Yom Kippur is coming and we want to have done this internal work before we enter into that day of prayer and contemplation -- though it is and I do. But because this work is the gift of this season. And while I could in theory do it at any time, there's strength and comfort in knowing that others in my community are doing this work now too.

20 minutes of Reb Zalman's wisdom on Yom Kippur

Back in 1988 Reb Zalman spoke on Yom Kippur at Fellowship Farm. That talk has been edited and remastered, and ALEPH has just released a 20-minute recording, broken into different tracks for easy listening. There's a sample track on YouTube; the rest is available as a digital download for anyone who donates any amount $5 or more.

I just made a donation and am downloading the recording now. Speaking as co-chair of ALEPH, I hope you'll donate as generously as you are able, to help support the work of Jewish Renewal which is so central to my spiritual life and to my heart. Donate and receive a download link here.

 

Track Listing

Releasing Vows on the Body (3:01)
The Torah of Yom Kippur for Our Day and the Psycho-Halachik Process (12:20)
Davvenen Process (1:03)
Torah in the Middle (0:49)
God Save the Queen (Omnam Kayn) (1:05)
Metaphors for Letting Go (1:52)

G'mar chatimah tovah - may you be sealed for goodness in the year to come!

20 minutes of Reb Zalman's wisdom about Yom Kippur

Back in 1988 Reb Zalman gave a talk about Yom Kippur at Fellowship Farm. That talk has been edited and remastered, and ALEPH has just released a 20-minute recording, broken into different tracks for easy listening. There's a sample track on YouTube; the rest is available as a digital download for anyone who donates any amount $5 or more.

I just made a donation and am downloading the recording now. Speaking as co-chair of ALEPH, I hope you'll donate as generously as you are able, to help support the work of Jewish Renewal which is so central to my spiritual life and to my heart. Donate and receive a download link here.

 

Track Listing

Releasing Vows on the Body (3:01)
The Torah of Yom Kippur for Our Day and the Psycho-Halachik Process (12:20)
Davvenen Process (1:03)
Torah in the Middle (0:49)
God Save the Queen (Omnam Kayn) (1:05)
Metaphors for Letting Go (1:52)

G'mar chatimah tovah - may you be sealed for goodness in the year to come!

#blogElul 29: Return

I wouldn't be here without you.
Because you read, I want to write;
because you listen, I sing again.
How can it already be a year
since the holidays last called me home?
Deep breath, get ready, time to turn.

To everything, turn, turn, turn --
the only thing that's constant is you.
I'm not always sure where to find home.
Sometimes it's in what I write,
the daily chronicle of the old year
manifesting in my poems again.

I know it's time to look again
at where I missed the mark, to turn
my attention toward the old year
for one last time. I know that you
forgive me for the words I didn't write,
times when I couldn't be a home

for you or even for myself. Home
means the safety to start over again,
to shine so that everything I write
illuminates. I want to return
to the safety I find when I'm with you.
I want to live in that place this year.

What is the thing for which I yearn
the most? Only this: to be at home
in my skin, to be at home with you
in the temple of Shabbat again
and again. To sanctify every turn
my life takes, be brave enough to write

my way to who I really am. Rewrite
my heart, rewire my synapses. This year
I want to see your face at every turn.
Because I'm not alone, I'm always home.
With every heartbeat say thanks again
for enlivening me, for being you.

May the words I write bring me home.
May the new year help me begin again.
May I always turn with love toward you.

I'm participating again this year in #blogElul, an internet-wide carnival of themed posts aimed at waking the heart and soul before the Days of Awe. (Organized by Ima Bima.) Read #blogElul posts via the Elul tag; last year's posts are now available in print and e-book form as See Me: Elul poems.

#blogElul 28: Give

What can I give you,
I ask, and you reply
do the work you need to do,

don't hide your light.
Fine, I say; I hear you,
I'm working on that, but

what can I give to you?
Can't I make offerings
to sweeten your day?

I want to scatter
rose petals in your path,
to enrobe you in light.

I want to lay all my words
at your feet, to nourish you
with the work of my hands.

And you just smile.
You know the only gift
I can really offer is love.

I'm participating again this year in #blogElul, an internet-wide carnival of themed posts aimed at waking the heart and soul before the Days of Awe. (Organized by Ima Bima.) Read #blogElul posts via the Elul tag; last year's posts are now available in print and e-book form as See Me: Elul poems.

#blogElul 27: Bless

When I wake (to awareness of you)
and am not alone: I bless.

Bless the early light
gilding the birch leaves, bless

the peach I cup in my hand
as tenderly as I would touch

your face. I seek your face.
Bless even the yearning, even

the ache. Bless the evening sky
blue as the one thread which winds

around the white, the thread
which binds me to you. Every knot

a blessing. Every heartbeat:
I wake to awareness of you.

I'm participating again this year in #blogElul, an internet-wide carnival of themed posts aimed at waking the heart and soul before the Days of Awe. (Organized by Ima Bima.) Read #blogElul posts via the Elul tag; last year's posts are now available in print and e-book form as See Me: Elul poems.

New Year's Poem 2015 / 5776

When the list of school supplies arrives
my heart skips a beat. I'm not ready.

How can I be surprised? I've known all along
how one month follows the next, but

kindergarten looms. (Not, though,
for the five year old. Time renews itself

every time he opens his eyes.) When the days
of awe appear again on the horizon

my heart skips a beat. I'm not ready.
How can I be surprised? I've known all along

how the spiral of the year recycles end
into beginning again. Another summer

yields with less or more grace to fall
and I do too. Sometimes my gears grind,

I wish tomorrow would come sooner
or yesterday would return. I blink

and a month disappears. Where was I?
How can I be surprised? I've known all along

without my attention next new moon won't be
the world's birthday, just a night with less light.

And this impossibly precious moment
when I could be cupping my hand

to the side of your face with tenderness --
gone like the numbers on a digital clock.

But if I stop to see what's in front of me
and choose the blessing in it, if I

sanctify the threshold between now
and what comes after now, and after now,

then every moment gleams, infinite
as the love which links your heart and mine.

 

לשנה טובה תכתבו ותחתמו
May you be inscribed for a good and sweet year!

From me and my family, to you and yours.

 

(For those who are so inclined, here's a link to my archive of new year's card poems... and here's the new year's poem I co-wrote with my ALEPH co-chair Rabbi David Evan Markus.)

#blogElul 26: Create

"If you believe you can destroy, believe you can create." That's a quote from the Hasidic master Reb Nachman of Bratzlav. I've been thinking about his words a lot lately.

One of our tradition's ways of imagining God is as the One Who speaks the world into being. A prayer in our liturgy describes God in exactly that way, and I love it, every time I daven it.

I love the idea that not only did God create the universe once upon a time with speech, but God continues to create all things with speech even now. Speech is an inherently creative act.

In every moment, our tradition imagines, God is saying "let there be..." Let there be creation. Let there be a universe. Let there be every atom, every particle, every thing that is.

Torah teaches that we are made in the divine image. One of the ways that's true is that we too can impact the universe with our words. Maybe we can't literally speak things into being, but our words can make a difference. Our words can hurt. (Just ask anyone who's been called a painful name, or who's heard awful news and can't un-hear it...) But it is equally true that our words can create repair.

In these final days of the old year, I'm thinking a lot about the worlds we create with our words. How our words can feel like weapons, and how our words can feel like balm. What are the words I need, in order to repair some of the brokenness around me as the old year draws to its close?

Reb Nachman reminds me that if words can destroy, they can also (re)build. If I believe that words have power to harm, then I also have to believe that words have power to heal. What do I want to create with my words during these final days of 5775?

 

I'm participating again this year in #blogElul, an internet-wide carnival of themed posts aimed at waking the heart and soul before the Days of Awe. (Organized by Ima Bima.) Read #blogElul posts via the Elul tag; last year's posts are now available in print and e-book form as See Me: Elul poems.

#blogElul 25: Intend

Only to stretch out
toward the sun; to bloom.

To unfurl my tender heart
like a banner billowing.

To draw water in joy
from the living well.

To open a channel
and let myself through.

I'm participating again this year in #blogElul, an internet-wide carnival of themed posts aimed at waking the heart and soul before the Days of Awe. (Organized by Ima Bima.) Read #blogElul posts via the Elul tag; last year's posts are now available in print and e-book form as See Me: Elul poems.