Rachel Barenblat's Blog, page 121

The Dream of a Better Past - a sermon for Kol Nidre 5776

תשובה / Teshuvah is letting go of the dream of a better past.

That's a riff off of a famous phrase. Originally the teaching was that forgiveness is letting go of the dream of a better past. Depending on who you ask, it either comes from the actor Lily Tomlin, or from noted Jewish-Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfeld.

Either way, I think it's equally true of teshuvah. An essential part of teshuvah, of re/turning ourselves in the right direction again, is letting go of wishing that the past had been different.

If only I'd taken that job...
If only I hadn't hurt her feelings...
If only I'd married someone different...
If only I'd known then what I know now...

We all fall into the habit of wishing that things had been different. We tell ourselves stories about how much better life might be if we had made different choices, or if we hadn't been dealt a particular hand of cards.

The human mind loves to tell stories. We tell ourselves stories about the past; we tell ourselves stories about the future. I do this all the time! Sometimes it's as though I am listening, in my mind, to the voiceover narration of the book of my life. "She stood at the Torah reading table in her beloved small synagogue, reading aloud the words of the sermon she had written and rewritten all August long..."

There's nothing wrong with the mind telling stories. That's what it was designed to do. We are meaning-making machines. We take in life experience and our minds strive to make meaning from them. But it's easy to get so caught-up in the stories that we lose sight of the present moment. And it's easy to get so attached to our stories that we get stuck in them.

Who am I, really? If I set aside all of my "if onlies," what am I left with? If I set aside my stories about who I used to be, and my stories about who I might become, who am I right now?

Yom Kippur asks us to look inside and answer that question. Who am I right now? Who do I want to be, and where have I fallen short? And am I willing to let go of my fantasies about how if only something had gone differently, I would be in a better place than I am today?

It's not an easy question to ask. Not if we ask it with our whole hearts, with no sacred cows, with everything on the table for examination.

Teshuvah is letting go of the dream of a better past.

It is human to hold tightly to old narratives and old resentments. We tell ourselves stories -- maybe about how a parent didn't love us enough, or a spouse let us down, or that teacher who was supposed to care about us turned out not to give a damn, or that person who we admired let us down.

Sometimes telling ourselves these stories can be a healing technique, because we can write the next chapter. "It felt like my parent didn't love me, but I've learned how to love myself, and now I feel whole." The stories become springboards to a better future.

And sometimes telling ourselves these stories can be a way of getting stuck. We never write the next chapter because we're too caught-up in the last chapter. "I've never forgotten that thing he said to me. It's like shrapnel, the wound won't heal." Or "The minute I said those words I wanted to take them back, but I couldn't, and I've never been able to forgive myself."

The stories we tell ourselves about who we've been, what we've done, what's been done to us, become self-fulfilling prophecies. Every time we retell them, literally or subconsciously, we reinscribe them on our hearts. And then we get trapped in the grooves we ourselves have carved, which become like canyons with walls stretching up toward the heavens.

Yom Kippur asks us to notice the stories we habitually tell ourselves... and then to recognize that sometimes those stories don't serve us, and to let those stories go.

 

Teshuvah is letting go of the dream of a better past.

Accept for the moment that the past can't be changed. Whatever we did in the last year, we can't un-do. Whatever we did five years ago, ten years ago, fifty years ago, we can't un-do.

And whatever was done to us: yesterday, a year ago, ten years ago -- we can't undo.

We have control over exactly one thing: how we respond to this moment. And to this moment. And to this moment.

I mentioned Jack Kornfield earlier. Here's a quote:

I'll tell you a story. A reporter was asking the Dalai Lama on his recent visit to Washington, "You have written this book, 'The Art of Happiness,' which was on the best-seller list for two years -- could you please tell me and my readers about the happiest moment of your life?" And the Dalai Lama smiled and said, "I think now!"

Happiness isn't about getting something in the future. Happiness is the capacity to open the heart and eyes and spirit and be where we are and find happiness in the midst of it. Even in the place of difficulty, there is a kind of happiness that comes if we've been compassionate, that can help us through it. So it's different than pleasure, and it's different than chasing after something.

Happiness, says the Dalai Lama, is the capacity to open the heart and eyes and spirit and be where we are and find happiness in the midst of it.

On a day when everything is going right, that may be easy. But we all have days when everything isn't going right. Days when sickness, or grief, or fear, take center stage. How can we learn to seek the happiness to be found even in the midst of sorrow or difficulty?

Even on a good day, reaching the version of happiness described by Jack Kornfeld can be challenging. Opening my heart, my eyes, and my spirit to where I am requires recognizing my flaws, my mistakes, the choices I made which I might wish now that I hadn't made. And it requires recognizing the choices other people made which I might wish now that they hadn't made. And it also requires noticing the stories I habitually tell myself about those choices, and discerning when those stories are healthy for me and when they are holding me back.

One of the best tools I know for cultivating the kind of happiness that Jack Kornfeld is describing is teshuvah -- repentance and return. The first step in teshuvah is opening our hearts, our eyes, and our spirits to who and where we actually are. And then teshuvah calls us to open our hands and let go. Let go of our mistakes. Let go of other people's mistakes. Let go of our resentments. Let go of the old stories which no longer serve us.

I've never flown in a hot air balloon, but I have seen them ranged across the sky, soaring and majestic and beautiful. I like to imagine that the soul is like a hot air balloon. As we discard all of our old stuff, all of those stones which have been weighing us down, our spirits cannot help but rise.

 

Teshuvah is letting go of the dream of a better past.

One of my teachers in this work is my dear colleague and friend Randall Miller, with whom I am blessed to be leading High Holiday worship at CBI again this year.

Some of you may have had the experience of asking Randall, "How ya doing?"

His answer is always the same: "Never better!"

One day this summer, hanging out with Randall at a Jewish Renewal gathering in West Chester, PA, I told Randall how much I admire the fact that this is always his answer.

In return, he told me a story. He had a friend many years ago who used to give this answer. People were dubious: how can the answer always be "never better"? And that friend of Randall's challenged them to try it for a week and see what would happen. So for one week, any time anyone said "how are you?" Randall made a point of answering "never better!"

He discovered, he told me, that as a result people reacted to him in a very particular way. People smiled at him more. They seemed happier. Their own burdens seemed inexplicably lightened by his response. So he decided to keep the response. He's been saying it now for thirty years.

If I took on the practice of saying "never better," I would be saying: no matter what's going on right now, no matter what I'm feeling, I know that God is at the heart of things; that good is at the heart of things; that love is at the heart of things.

One of the things I love about hanging out with religious Jews is that when someone asks "how are you?" the answer is likely to be "Baruch Hashem, I'm good." Baruch Hashem means "Bless God," but colloquially it's used the way that we in English might say "Thank God." How are you? Thank God. How is your mom doing? Thank God. I know there was a meeting you were worried about, how are you feeling about it these days? Thank God.

I love the practice of responding to the question "how are you" with "thank God." Because in truth, there is almost always a negative answer one could offer to that question. To be sure, there is value in being able to speak the name of what's broken and what hurts:

How am I? There's something making me sad.
How am I? A loved one is in dire straits and I am grieving.
How am I? I made a mistake and I can't unmake it.

And yet there's also almost always a potential positive answer to that question, too:

How am I? Marinating in gratitude.
How am I? I'm grateful for the presence of my loved one in my life.
How am I? I screwed up, but there's always tomorrow. Baruch Hashem.

I'm not advocating suppressing what hurts, or pretending that it isn't there. But I have found that my life shifts when I am able to face what is difficult, and then to make the existential turn of seeking the blessing even in a difficult experience, the moment of sweetness even in a difficult day.

Another way of saying "existential turn," of course, is the Hebrew teshuvah. In order to answer "never better," or "baruch Hashem / thank God," I have to be willing to make teshuvah and let go of my if-onlies. To let go of the dream of a better past. To work with the past I actually have, and the present I actually have. To stop wishing that things had been different, and instead to move forward from where things are.

That's the work of Yom Kippur. Over the 25 hours between the start of Kol Nidre and the end of Ne'ilah, we are given an incredible opportunity. We are given this one night and this one day to dedicate to the work of opening our eyes and letting go.

Who am I, really? Who am I when I let go of the narratives about how things might have been different? Can I let go of my own mistakes -- and, maybe more difficult, can I let go of the mistakes I think other people have made -- in order to stand before God without excuses and without pretense?

Join me in spending the next 24 hours doing this work. Join me in looking deeply at the stories we habitually tell about ourselves, and letting some of those old stories go. Let Yom Kippur serve as a mirror into which you can gaze.

Teshuvah is letting go of the dream of a better past. May Yom Kippur facilitate our journey into this holy letting-go. And as we discard our old ballast over the next 24 hours, may our spirits soar.

Revising my sermons; revising me

One of the things I talked about last week at Kenyon, with my students who were there to learn how to blog, was the question of whether one is an external or an internal processor. Some people think and ponder and mull and then sit down to write and everything pours onto screen (or paper) fully-formed. Others sit down to write, and as they do, the piece takes shape. The writing is integral to the thinking.

I am an external processor, for sure. I do my best thinking through writing. I suspect that this has always been true -- ever since I started writing in a cloth-bound diary at the age of ten, which I did for years. "How do I know what I think until I see what I say?" asked EM Forster. I know the feeling! Of course, revision is always part of my process. But I think best when I have keyboard at hand.

This is one of the reasons why my high holiday sermons go through so many iterations. I start jotting down ideas in early summer -- sometimes a quote, or a thought, or a yearning. Then three of those questions or ideas sprout their own documents, and when I can make the time, I sit down and write. Eventually I have drafts which are the right length -- but that's still only the beginning of my process.

I let them sit. I come back to them a day or a week later and notice, sometimes, that what I had thought was extraneous is actually the heart of the thing. Time to tear it apart and rewrite around that. Or I discover that what I've written would make a fine lecture for a class on a subject in which I am interested, but it isn't a sermon, especially not one for the Days of Awe, this lofty and powerful season.

The stakes feel high. When it comes to many of those whom I serve, this feels like my one chance this year to reach them -- to make them feel something, to awaken something in them, to give them hope and inspiration. And there's a lot going on in high holiday services: melodies we don't hear at other seasons, prayers we don't otherwise recite. Can I cut through that to reach people where they are?

By any ordinary count the journey toward the High Holidays has yet to begin. Some begin with Tisha b'Av, the emotional low point of our liturgical year, and from there count the days up toward Rosh Hashanah. (See, e.g., Rabbi Alan Lew's tremendous This Is Real And You Are Completely Unprepared.) Some count the 49 days between Tisha b'Av and Rosh Hashanah, a reverse Omer.

Some begin their preparations for the holidays at the start of the month of Elul, and dedicate those weeks to a process of internal teshuvah, repentance / return, perhaps focusing especially on relationship with self and with God in order to be able to focus on interpersonal teshuvah during the Ten Days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. (See, e.g., See Me: Elul poems.)

But for those of us who are blessed to be in my line of work -- and I mean that wholeheartedly; I still wake up some days and marvel that I get to do this! -- preparations for the Days of Awe begin months in advance. My community maintains a 90-item to-do list on a wiki page which begins with "seek and find cantor" and ends with "get volunteers to take down the sukkah after Shemini Atzeret."

There are a lot of balls to keep in the air. A lot of cats to herd, if you prefer that metaphor. A lot of details to manage. The danger for me is that I can get so caught up in the details that I don't do my own inner work of preparation. Over these last five years, I've learned that working on my sermons in bits and pieces all summer can be part of my inner work. As I revise them, I'm also revising me.

 

Airport havdalah

Sun slides behind the concourse.
It's still today, but the coming week
encroaches. My mind clicks through
obligations like prayer beads.

Then the chat window opens.
You type the first words of havdalah.
Behold! The God of my redemption.
I open to the week; I am not afraid...

Suddenly though among strangers
I am not alone. You are with me.
Your emoji and your texts
-- they comfort me.

As I board the plane
I catch a whiff of someone's perfume.
The seatbelt sign glows. In its light
my polished fingernails gleam.

Bless the One Who separates
and bridges. Even at a distance
we aren't really apart.
My cup overflows.

 

This poem was written on my second plane home from Beyond Walls. I was traveling on Saturday evening and there was no way to make havdalah in any formal sense, but this experience -- and the writing of the poem which ensued -- became my ceremony of separation between Shabbat and week.

Havdalah is celebrated with the scent of sweet spices (to revive us as the "extra soul" of Shabbat departs) and by holding up our hands to the light of the braided candle. The final havdalah blessing speaks of God Who separates; I follow a Jewish Renewal custom of adding "and Who bridges."

On being a blogging rabbi

Photo by Rabbi Jason Miller.

On Friday morning at Beyond Walls I gave a talk about being a blogging rabbi. I talked about how I began Velveteen Rabbi, the journey through rabbinic school and becoming a congregational rabbi, the gifts and shadow sides of blogging as a clergyperson, how blogging is part of my spiritual practice, living spiritual life in the open, how to begin blogging, and why I still think blogging is worth doing.

Here are the slides from that talk. In general I try to use slides to spark the things I say, rather than to contain all the words I'm going to say, so the slides aren't a reconstruction of the talk -- but they'll give anyone who was there some visual cues for remembering what I talked about, and for those who weren't there, they'll offer a glimpse of some of what I had to say about the clerical blogging life.

 

Kenyon talk blogging as a rabbi from Rachel Barenblat

A mincha beyond walls

There has not been formal prayer at Beyond Walls, though each morning and evening someone leads a meditation which features some silence and some words or prayer or song. Midweek, one of the Jewish participants suggested that we gather to daven mincha, the short service named after the afternoon grain offering which was once shared on the altar at the Temple in Jerusalem. We met on the patio behind the dining hall just after dinner on Wednesday night. The dining hall was beginning to cast long shadows across the lawn, but we walked through those shadows and into the sunshine.

We were a group of perhaps ten Jews and at least twice as many curious Christians. Rabbi Jamie said a few words explaining mincha and led us in an ashrei chant which I know and love and have sung often -- and which I did not know was his own composition! Then I led the weekday amidah: the first three blessings in Hebrew, and then the remainder in extemporaneous English. As I came to each of the bakashot (requests) I glanced at the Hebrew in my tiny pocket Koren siddur, connected with its meaning, and sang out a sentence or two in English before closing with the chatimah, the final line.

This is a mode of prayer I learned from the teacher of my teachers, Reb Zalman z"l (of blessed memory -- see Remembering my rebbe.) It seems innovative, but is actually a very old way of approaching prayer in general and the amidah in particular. Once upon a time, the shaliach tzibbur ("delegate for the community," e.g. prayer leader) would riff on the set themes of the blessings; only the final words of each blessing, which express its theme, were fixed. I love davening the amidah in this way, especially when I'm with a mixed-faith group for whom the pure Hebrew would not hold meaning.

Rabbi Jamie led us in a wordless niggun as our prayer for peace, and then an ein od chant as our aleinu. Meanwhile, my eyes were riveted on a clump of mown grass near us where a glorious orange butterfly was resting. At one point it rose up and flew away a bit, but it returned to another nearby clump of grass. I liked imagining that perhaps it was listening to our prayer. (Can butterflies hear?) Afterwards as people were thanking us for the service, others noticed the butterfly too. "It's probably dying," noted Rodger Kamenetz wryly. "What -- I'm a realist!" Well, at least we gave it a sweet send-off.

A butterfly very like the one we davened with.

Shabbat shalom to all who celebrate! And to everyone else, may your weekend be sweet.

Bedtime angels

On Tuesday evening I was blessed with the opportunity to lead our evening meditation at Beyond Walls. I had planned to sing two prayers, with some silent meditation in between, and that's exactly what I did -- first the ma'ariv aravim prayer which blesses God Who brings on the evening, and then the hashkivenu prayer which asks God to spread over us a shelter of peace as we head toward bed. But as I was finishing that second prayer I realized that there was something else I wanted to sing, something I sing to our son nightly: the invocation of the four angels who watch over us as we sleep.

The invocation of the angels is part of the liturgy of the bedtime shema. I grew up reciting the simple one-line shema at bedtime, but didn't learn about the other parts of the traditional liturgy until adulthood. One piece of that liturgy is a beautiful prayer of forgiveness (both seeking it, and granting it) which I have written about before. (See The vidui prayer of Yom Kippur...and of every night.) Another piece is birkat ha-mapil, which asks God to protect the sleeper to lie down in peace and rise up in peace in the morning. And a third piece is an invocation of a quartet of angels.

Here are the words to that invocation, as I learned it at Elat Chayyim many years ago:

בשם ה' אלוהי ישראל
מימיני מיכאל
ושמאלי גבריאל
מלפני אוריאל
ומאחורי רפאל
ועל ראשי ומעל תחתי שכינת אל

B'shem Hashem, elohei Yisrael
B'ymini Michael u-smoli Gavriel
Milfanai Uriel, u-me'acharai Raphael
V'al roshi, u-m'al tachtai, Shechinat-El

In the name of God, the God of Israel
On my right is Michael, on my left is Gavriel
In front of me is Uriel, behind me Raphael
And all above, surrounding me, Shechinat-El.

Sometimes this is called "the angel song." It invokes the presence of four angels. On the right is Michael, which in Hebrew means "Who is Like You, God?" -- in simple words, Wonder. On the left is Gavriel, which means "God's Strength" -- in simple words, Strength. In front is Uriel, which means "God's Light" -- simply, Light. Behind is Raphael, "God's Healing" -- simply, Comfort. And above us, and surrounding us, every present with us, is the Shechinah, the immanent divine Presence. (The idea of naming each angel with a one-word quality comes from the children's book The Bedtime Sh'ma.)

If you can't see the embedded video, above, it's here on YouTube.

The melody I used at Beyond Walls was one by Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach z"l, and it's the one I most often sing to our son at bedtime. (Though when I was at Getting It... Together a few weekends ago, I learned a beautiful new melody for these words, written by Shir Yaakov.) I love this little prayer. I love the idea of invoking these four angelic presences to watch over us while we sleep. I love the fact that in our tradition there is an angel of Wonder, an angel of Strength, an angel of Light, an angel of Healing. And I love the use of this lullaby to gentle the transition out of waking and toward dreams.

The Talmud teaches that sleep is 1/60th of death. When we go to sleep, our tradition teaches, we place our souls in God's keeping -- and when we rise and sing the modah ani, we thank God for restoring them to us and for the gift of another day. Sleep means letting go of whatever we've been carrying all day, and letting go of control. When we sleep we have to trust that our hearts will go on beating and that the world will keep on turning. For me, invoking the presence of these four angels is a bolster against anxiety and a comfort. I'm grateful that I was able to share this practice with this community.

 

Related:

Calling all angels, 2010

Bedtime prayers and the alphabet, 2013

Vayechi: a blessing at bedtime, 2015

Beyond our broken walls

On the Jewish calendar we're in the period called bein ha-meitzarim, "between the narrows" or "in tight straits." This three-week journey began with 17 Tamuz, the day when we remembered the long-ago first breach of Jerusalem's city walls.

It will end with 9 Av, the day when we will remember the destruction of both the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem, and many other heart-wrenching catastrophes besides. This is a time of year for recognizing what is broken.

There's no shortage of brokenness to notice. Any dive into world news reveals tragedy and trauma. History is filled with broken places, and we carry those with us. And there are broken places in our individual lives. Relationships which have fractured, institutions which are damaged,  sorrows which make our hearts ache. I think we all know the feeling of being trapped in something that is broken.

And yet.

The brokenness isn't an end in itself. The year doesn't end with Tisha b'Av. On the contrary, some see Tisha b'Av as the first step toward Elul and the Days of Awe, the first step toward reorienting and realigning ourselves, toward our annual spiritual rebirth. Every life contains brokenness, but the brokenness doesn't need to define the life. Our broken places can also be openings for something new. As the great sage Leonard Cohen teaches, "There is a crack in everything; it's how the light gets in."

There's something interesting about reflecting on these broken walls (both historical and personal) while I am teaching at Beyond Walls, a retreat which encourages clergy to think about how our writing can take us beyond the walls of our religious communities, beyond the walls of our institutions, out into the world. Can we experience our broken walls as openings to a place of connection? When our walls break, can we respond by building doors? What holiness might we then be able to let in?

More from Kenyon

Last night Marie Howe gave a poetry reading. I'm a longtime fan. I still remember a commencement address she gave at the Bennington Writing Seminars some years ago, and I read an excerpt from her poem "What the Living Do" every year during yizkor (memorial) services at my shul on Yom Kippur.

Her reading was lovely -- from the serious (including the aforementioned poem, of course; and she also read one of my very favorite Jane Kenyon poems ever, "Let Evening Come") to the raucously hilarious (I can't wait until that Mary Magdalene poem is published so I can point y'all to it.)

Today may be my most densely-packed day of the week. From morning meditation to teaching all morning; to an afternoon book-signing along with Marie, Rodger, and Amy Frykholm; to teaching an evening workshop; to leading the evening meditation -- it's going to be a very full day, but a sweet one.

There's much about the experience of this retreat which feels familiar to me. Being in a temporary  community of people who seek to be spiritually open is familiar to me from ALEPH. Sitting down at meal tables and talking about writing life is familiar to me from long-ago Bennington residencies.

But when I've done writing retreats in the past they've been secular, so the integration of writing and spiritual life is a new adventure. And when I've done spiritual retreats in the past they've been Jewish, so being in spiritual community also with Christians of various stripes is also a new adventure.

I'm grateful this morning for the modah ani melody running through my head; for those beloved to me who while physically distant are nonetheless in my heart; for breakfast table conversations about prayer gear and retreat centers, and for discovering more about how interconnected we all already are.

First post from Beyond Walls

I'm spending this week at Kenyon College as faculty for the Kenyon Institute's first-ever weeklong writing workshop for clergy, spiritual directors, and seminarians, Beyond Walls.

Last night at dinner I enjoyed a delightful dinner table conversation which ranged from "what we hope to get out of this week" to different weekly lectionaries, different death and funeral practices (I mentioned the hevra kadisha, or volunteer burial society, about which I first wrote in 2005: Facing impermanence), and the idea of "liturgical east." It was a lot of fun. (The fact that I find these conversations endearing and enjoyable is probably a sign that I have chosen the right line of work!)

I'm here this week to teach blogging, which I think is going to be neat. For advance assigned reading I chose six thoughtful, thought-provoking, interesting blog posts to share with my students. It occurred to me that y'all might be interested in seeing the advance reading too, so I'm sharing the links here:

Eucharistic Mitzvah, Tertium Squid

Struggle, Ima Bima

Psalm 75, Yedid Nefesh

Finding an authentic spiritual voice this Ramadan, Wood Turtle

Reflections on Holy Week 2012, The Cassandra Pages

Explicit, tacit, explicitly, 如 (thus) 是

I wanted the assigned reading to feature a range of writing styles; a range of religious traditions; and a range of forms (from the short poem/psalm at Yedid Nefesh to the multipart essay at The Cassandra Pages.) These are all bloggers whose work I regularly follow; three of these six bloggers have become dear friends of mine "offline" as well as online, though we initially met via our blogs, and we continue to maintain our correspondence and our friendship in part through this digital medium.

I'm looking forward to teaching my first workshop this morning, and hope to share some gleanings from my week with y'all as time permits.

Beloved

Again the ache
    floods my ribcage,
        wets my face with salt.

Missing you
    wells up in me:
        painful undertow.

The water is wide
    and I can't see you
        on the distant shore.

What use my hands
    if I can't touch you,
        my heart if it's alone?

When you're with me
    I can see new colors.
        All creation gleams.

What can I give you?
    My words, my offerings
        could never be enough.
        
I close my eyes.
    Maybe before I wake
        I'll see your face.
        
       

Jewish tradition is rife with poems of yearning written to God. I would feel chutzpahdik in the extreme were I to place myself alongside Yehuda Halevi or Solomon ibn Gabirol or the author of Yedid Nefesh (hear that poem sung by Nava Tehila, or read it in Hebrew and in Reb Zalman z"l's English translation at Open Siddur)...but perhaps this poem arises out of a similar yearning for the face of the beloved.

I think of this poem as the other side of the connection evoked in Your voice knocks. I seem to be writing a series of these; the third is already in progress. Stay tuned...