Rachel Barenblat's Blog, page 145

Poetry + video = transformative works

I've been remiss in not mentioning this (though perhaps I can be forgiven for that, given the intensity of the High Holiday season), but The Poetry Storehouse is having its first anniversary and is celebrating that with a contest.

The Poetry Storehouse is a curated collection of "great contemporary poems for creative remix." All of the poets who have shared their work there are delighted to have our works transformed, both through being read aloud and through visual media (sound collage, videopoems, art, etc.) The first anniversary contest offers options for remixers (create a remix based on any poem currently on the site) and for poets (write a poem in response to one of the three featured videos,) and the winning entries will be published and shared widely.

If you are a poet or a remix artist, check it out!

And on a related note, I'm delighted to be able to share that Vimeo.

It's a delight to see my words given new life in this way. In watching the video, I experience my own poem anew; the images Dave chose are ones I would never have imagined, and they work beautifully. This is a stunning videopoem. Go and watch!

Practice Makes Practice (a sermon for Yom Kippur morning, 5775)

The 20th-century American writer Dorothy Parker famously said, "Writing is the art of applying the tush to the seat." (She didn't say "tush," but the word she used isn't exactly appropriate to the bimah; you can extrapolate.)

This is one of my favorite aphorisms about the writing life. Writing isn't, or isn't only, a matter of talent or genius or having great ideas. One can have all of those things without ever writing a word. Writing requires perseverance. It requires showing up, day after day. It requires putting fingers to pen, or in my case fingers to keyboard, when the inspiration is there and also when it isn't there yet.

Over the years I've learned a variety of techniques for times when I don't "feel like" writing. Sometimes I promise myself a treat if I manage to write something. Other times I give myself a set period of time -- "thirty minutes and then I can get up and do something else." I can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. What matters is that I write.

The only way to get good poems is to write a lot of poems, and to accept that although some days are going to be better than others, I'm committed to continuing to write.

This is how spiritual life works, too. There are days when I wake up with prayers on my lips, when I can't wait to settle in to morning davenen, when I feel in-tune with the Holy One of Blessing from the get-go.

Those tend to be days when I'm on retreat. When someone else is taking care of the logistics of ordinary life, like meals and dishes. And childcare. And the to-do lists. And my responsibilities. It's remarkable how easy it is to feel prayerful and connected when someone else is providing for all of my needs.

But most of the time I am not on retreat. My spiritual life mostly happens in the "real world," where I have to juggle priorities, where I sometimes feel cranky, or get my feelings hurt, or make mistakes.

The best way to prime the pump for writing is to start writing and trust that some of what I write will be worth keeping. And the best way to prime the pump for spiritual life is to maintain my spiritual practices. There's a reason we call them "practices" -- because, like poetry, they require repetition, trial and error, showing up on the days when the spirit doesn't necessarily move you. Spiritual life requires putting your tush in the chair.

But it doesn't necessarily require putting your tush in the chair for hours on end. In fact, it's arguably better if you don't.

Here's a question for you. You don't have to raise your hands; just listen to the question and think about your answer. Have you ever tried to get in shape?

Maybe it's when January 1st rolls around: you realize it's midwinter and you've eaten a few too many latkes, and you resolve to start going to the gym, or to train for a 5K, or to return to yoga or aerobics classes. It's a new year's resolution! You're really going to do it this time!

I can't speak for all of you, but based on the sample set of the two adults who live in my house, I have the feeling that this happens a lot.

And there are a lot of ways that resolve can fail.

Here's the one to which I am prone: I think about the effort it would take to go to a gym regularly, I imagine trying to squeeze workday and childcare around that extra commitment, and I give up before I even begin.

Here's the one to which my husband is prone: he decides to get in shape, goes to the gym, lifts far too many weights, and is then in so much pain that he can't do it again for days, by which time other life commitments have shouldered in and pushed the gym out of the way.

Both of these are the opposite of helpful. What we really need is something modest and sustainable. Over the years we've figured out that the answer, for us, is walking every day. It's manageable, which means we actually do it. And the more we do it, the more we want to do it. It's self-perpetuating.

Spiritual life is a lot like exercise. What we need is something modest and sustainable.

I love Yom Kippur. But I have to admit that it's the opposite of modest and sustainable! Yom Kippur is a marathon. It's long, it's intense, and it features some of the most theologically and emotionally challenging liturgy of the year.

Showing up for our hardest day of the year is like going to the gym and lifting a whole lot of weights: it's easy to overdo it, to come away feeling exhausted, to strain spiritual muscles we haven't consciously exercised in a long time. This is not the way to get in shape.

Yom Kippur is also not great preparation for the other spiritual marathons in our lives, which -- unlike today -- may not have distinct endpoints. There are periods of depression, times when God feels distant and life feels unbearable. When our son was born and postpartum depression knocked me flat, I couldn't find God anywhere. And I couldn't imagine that life would ever feel different, would ever feel good, again.

There are periods of grief and loss. The loss of a job; the loss of a relationship; the loss of a pregnancy; the loss of a loved one. Even the anticipation of grief to come can be overwhelming. I have known times of waking up in the morning, remembering a reason for grief, and bursting into tears. I will surely know them again.

We never know how long these will last or how frequently they will recur. So how do we prepare for them?

We learn in Pirkei Avot, a collection of rabbinic wisdom, that Rabbi Eliezer used to say: make teshuvah one day before your death. But how do we know when we're going to die? Ahh, well then, make teshuvah every day.

The same goes for preparing for life's crises and curveballs. It would be great if the universe gave us advance warnings. But it doesn't. The best way we can prepare to weather life's storms is to develop practices for every day.

What might regular spiritual practice look like? One Jewish answer is praying three times a day, using the words in our siddur. I like that answer. But it isn't always possible for me, and I know it probably doesn't appeal to all of you.

Another Jewish answer is making blessings: over food, over a beautiful sunset, over a moment in time. Using the words we've inherited from our tradition, or using the words of our own hearts.

A third Jewish answer might be the bedtime shema: pausing at bedtime to say the shema and to offer a prayer which reminds me to forgive those who have wounded me, as I pray that those I've wounded will forgive me in turn.

Or perhaps you might like Anne Lamott's practice of distilling all human prayer into three words: please, thanks, wow. Three words. Ten seconds, tops.

Or maybe the suggestion, from Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh, that between hearing the phone ring and picking it up, we can pause to breathe. Three rings; time to set the intention of answering with compassion and kindness.

In recent years, my teacher Reb Zalman (may his memory be a blessing) frequently suggested the practice of talking aloud with God while driving in the car. He used to say that he imagined the Ribbono Shel Olam -- which is to say, God -- wearing bluejeans and sitting in his passenger seat, lovingly listening as he poured out whatever was on his mind and in his heart.

I suspect that Reb Zalman borrowed this idea from Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav, the Hasidic master who prescribed talking aloud with God while walking in the fields. Here's what I love about this: we don't have to go anywhere out of the ordinary. Even driving-to-work time can be an opportunity for spiritual practice.

Our sages taught that within each of us is a good impulse and a bad impulse, the yetzer ha-tov and the yetzer ha-ra. My yetzer ha-ra knows how to talk me out of doing what's good for me.

Sometimes it says: don't pray in the car; listen to the news instead, and notice how broken the world is. Sometimes it says: You can't pray the whole service with full attention to every word, so don't even bother to try. And sometimes, when it joins with what I now recognize as the voice of depression, it says: you are broken, and the world is broken, and life will never be any different, so you might as well give in to despair.

Reb Nachman, the Hasidic master who prescribed chatting with God while walking in the fields, suffered from depression. And he had things to say about despair.

He taught that "Losing hope is like losing your freedom, like losing yourself." And he also taught that "No matter how far you have strayed, returning to God is always possible. Therefore, there is absolutely no place for despair." Here is his prayer:

God, I stand beaten and battered by the countless manifestations of my own inadequacies. Yet we must live with joy. We must overcome despair, seek pursue and find every inkling of goodness, every positive point within ourselves – and so discover true joy. Aid me in this quest, O God. Help me find satisfaction and a deep, abiding pleasure in all that I have, in all that I do, in all that I am.

One of our tradition's best tools for overcoming despair is teshuvah, turning ourselves in the right direction again. Teshuvah means there is always grounds for optimism, because we can always be forgiven.

I try to make hope one of my core spiritual practices. But during times in my life when I've wrestled with depression, I haven't been able to live in hope at all. I'm not there now, thank God, but I remember what being there was like.

When depression whispers its insidious vitriol into my ears, I fall back on my spiritual practices. I rely on them to help hold me up while I reach for the secular tools at my disposal: regular exercise, therapy, and antidepressants. I make a bracha over my antidepressants every morning. Torah study, prayer, singing, making blessings, saying thank You to God: these have helped me defeat depression when it has risen up to engulf me.

One in ten Americans is suffering from depression at any given moment. That's one in every minyan. I know that some of you are in that narrow place. If hope feels impossible right now, the rest of us will hold it for you, lovingly, until you are able to claim it as your birthright again.

If you are struggling with depression in any of its forms, I hope that you will come to me. I will listen to you with love, and I can help you get the help you need.

The great 20th-century rabbi and scholar Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote that "the greatest heresy is despair." In this he followed in the footsteps of Reb Nachman. Reb Nachman saw despair as the greatest sin of all, because when we despair, we give up on the possibility of healing and redemption. And as Jews, that's exactly what we are called not to do. Despair is an aveirah, a sin, because it is antithetical to hope.

The hope for a better tomorrow is central to Judaism. For centuries that hope was expressed through messianism, the belief that moshiach would walk among us heralding a transformed creation. For some Jews today that belief has been transmuted into the hope for a messianic age in which we will each have done our part in healing the world. Whether or not you think in terms of a messiah, the hope remains.

As Jews, we're called to hope that after every week will come Shabbat; that after every sorrow will come joy; that after every shattering will come wholeness. No matter how dire the circumstance, cultivating hope is a Jewish spiritual practice.

I began this morning by saying that the writing life requires keeping one's tush in the seat, and so does the spiritual life. You've all done something extraordinary this morning: you're here. You took the leap of putting your tush in that seat. Now your challenge is to show up again tomorrow.

Not to show up here for another day like this, because oy, who among us could handle that?

(Though you could show up tomorrow at 2 to help build our sukkah.)

My hope is that your tomorrow will contain a little pearl of spiritual practice.

Not a marathon, but a short walk. Walking works for me because I already know how to do it, and I can do it as I am. Spiritual practice can be like that too. You don't have to master Hebrew, or purchase a set of tefillin, or change who you are, in order to have spiritual practices. Spiritual practice can be as simple as saying "Thank You" to God, day in and day out.

Every day is a chance to write a new story in the book of our lives; a chance to say please and thanks and wow again; a chance to make teshuvah again. A chance to walk on the treadmill again, both literally and metaphorically.

Faced with this kind of repetition, we have a choice. We can say "ugh, you mean I'm not finished -- I have to do this again?" Or we can say, "wow, I'm a work-in-progress -- I get to do this again!" The circumstance is the same either way. The difference lies in how we receive the circumstance we've been given.

We can choose to practice gratitude and hope. We can choose to practice forgiveness; to practice mitzvot; to practice teshuvah. We can choose to practice counting our blessings, hearing every ringing phone as a call to consciousness, talking with God in the car. Saying thank You. Remembering that we didn't make the universe, and that our inability to control everything isn't a flaw in us -- it's a gift.

When we embrace these little spiritual practices, day in and day out, we become grounded in habits which will help us stay steady and whole.

They say that practice makes perfect. Here's another way to think about it: practice makes more practice. As long as we are alive, there is opportunity to practice. That's what's perfect: the fact that we can keep trying.

What matters isn't the destination, but the journey. Not the end of the song, but the singing. Not being "finished" with the work of perfecting one's character, but the practices which make up our lives along the way.

Longing and belonging (a sermon for Kol Nidre 5775)

 

Do you know what it's like to feel out-of-place? Have you ever walked into a room and felt uncomfortable? Or maybe you can remember, or imagine, standing with a cafeteria tray in your hands and realizing you have no idea which table to sit down at. Maybe it's an experience of walking into a cocktail party and noticing that everyone else seems to know each other. Or you show up at an event in your finest suit, only to discover that you're the only one who didn't know it was a jeans-and-sandals affair.

There is nothing easy or comfortable about feeling as though you don't belong. And it's hard enough to walk into a room full of strangers and feel out of place; it's even more painful to walk into a room of people you know and feel out of place there. To feel like the square peg in a round pegboard. To feel isolated by invisible circumstances, depression or illness. To feel as though you just don't fit.

We have all felt that way.

Have you ever traveled far from home and felt lonely? Been away from your family, or away from familiar settings, and felt alien and alone? Maybe it was your first night away at summer camp. Or a business trip where you found yourself in an anonymous motel. Or your first time traveling abroad in a place where you didn't speak the language and couldn't find your way around. Have you ever been far away and thought, "I just want to go home"?

Or maybe you've felt that way without even going anywhere. Maybe you've yearned to return to childhood when everything was safe and someone else took care of you. Maybe you've wished you could return to the time when your parents or grandparents were still alive. To a moment when things seemed easier. To the time before you had experienced sorrow. Or maybe you've yearned to return to the childhood you didn't have, the one where everything was safe and someone else took care of you. Maybe you've sat in your own home and felt distant from your surroundings, distant from your family, lonely in the midst of a crowd.

We have all felt that way, too. The poet William Stafford writes, in his poem "Great Blue Heron:"

Out of their loneliness for each other
two reeds, or maybe two shadows, lurch
forward and become suddenly a life
lifted from dawn or the rain. It is
the wilderness come back again, a lagoon
with our city reflected in its eye.
We live by faith in such presences.

It is a test for us, that thin
but real, undulating figure that promises,
“If you keep faith I will exist
at the edge, where your vision joins
the sunlight and the rain: heads in the light,
feet that go down in the mud where the truth is.”

Not only everyone, but every thing, in the world feels "loneliness for each other." And, Stafford teaches, if we keep faith -- if we believe -- real connections will exist, "at the edge," rooting us down "in the mud where the truth is."

Many years ago I went on my first week-long Jewish Renewal retreat at a place called Elat Chayyim. I spent my mornings practicing Jewish meditation, and my afternoons studying tikkun olam, the Jewish imperative to heal our broken world. I tried "interpretive" morning services in a white yurt, a little round house where we sat on the floor barefoot and chanted pearls from the morning liturgy. And then came the Friday morning when we were starting to get ready for Shabbat.

My meditation teacher, Rabbi Jeff Roth, assigned us a walking meditation after the practice of the Hasidic master Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav. We were to walk in the fields and speak quietly with God as we went. I dutifully walked out to the meadow and as I walked slowly through the wildflowers and high grasses I murmured out loud. I felt a little bit ridiculous, but I did it anyway.

You need to know that at that time I had been feeling alienation from Jewish community for some years, ever since I became engaged to a man who had Jewish heritage but did not consider himself Jewish, and rabbi after rabbi said no to sanctifying our marriage with their presence. We did eventually find a rabbi who would officiate for us, but the experience left me feeling deeply wounded. Alienated. Unwelcome.

So as I walked in the fields, I said quietly to God that it had been really nice spending this week together; that I hadn't realized I had been thirsty for Jewish community or for Jewish prayer; that I had loved learning these new ways of opening my heart to connection with my Source.

And then I said, "I'm really going to miss You when I go home," because I knew that once I left the magical grounds of that retreat center I was going to be spiritually alone again.

And suddenly I knew, as clearly as if the words had been spoken right into my ear, that God was saying "I'll be there. I was always there, even when you felt most alone." The weave of my bat mitzvah tallit, which I was clutching around my shoulders, became God's embrace. My heart's outcry at having to bid farewell to God was the key to my realization that God had been with me all along.

And I walked in the meadow and I wept, shaking, because I suddenly knew that I was not alone; I had never been alone. I realized that God had loved me, even when I felt as though my community didn't.

By the time I went home on Sunday, I also knew that I had found a community of spiritual seekers who would accept me where I was. I knew that even with all of my quirks and unorthodoxies—my intermarriage, my feminism, my politics, my yearnings—I could be part of Jewish community, and I could be in relationship with God. I knew that there was a place at the table for me. That there was someplace where I belonged.

The High Holidays are a season of coming home to where we belong.

Some of us haven't been inside these walls much since last year's high holidays ended. Some of us have been here so often that it's come to feel like another place of workday volunteer obligations. In either case, these awesome days offer us an opportunity to return, either literally by stepping inside this room again, or emotionally and spiritually by shrugging off that workday consciousness and entering into this as a different kind of space, a spiritual space.

That's what teshuvah is. We usually translate the Hebrew word teshuvah as "repentance," though it comes from a root which signifies turning around. Teshuvah is return. "Return again, return again, return to the land of your soul."

This is a time of year for coming home to who we truly are. A time to set aside our usual occupations and expectations, the scripts we write in our minds about who other people expect us to be.

This is a time of year for coming home to a place where we belong. I don't just mean belonging to the congregation, as in, you sign up, you pay some amount of dues to help us keep the building standing and the driveway plowed, your name appears on our roster. I mean belonging in a deep and unshakeable way.

This is a time of year for coming home to the One to Whom we all belong. The One Who is always with us, even when we feel most alone. The One who waits, with infinite patience, for us to stop blundering in the wrong directions of unkindness or gluttony or hardness of heart or insincerity or abuse of power. The One who yearns for us to make teshuvah, to re/turn in the right direction again.

The great halakhic thinker Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik wrote:

When man sins he creates a distance between himself and God. To sin means to remove oneself from the presence of the Master of the Universe. I was standing before You and Sin came and estranged me from You and I no longer feel that I am "before You." The whole essence of repentance is longing, yearning, pining to return again. Longing develops only when one has lost something precious. Sin pushes us far away and stimulates our longing to return...

To sin, he says, means to remove oneself from God's presence. Our misdeeds estrange us from God and make us unable to feel that boundless love and limitless welcome and deep sense of home.

This may not be how most of us think about "sin," but I find his interpretation both beautiful and powerful. When we miss the mark, we alienate ourselves from our Source.

And teshuvah, he says, is longing, yearning, pining to return to that Presence. The good news is that the very acts which pull us away from God, away from home, stimulate the beginnings of our longing to return. The missteps which pull us away from home contain within them the seeds of our yearning to come home again.

When we realize that our misdeeds have pulled us away from connection, far away from love and peace and belonging, our hearts break. And it is through that brokenness that we can become whole. As the great Jewish sage Leonard Cohen has written, "there is a crack in everything / that's how the light gets in."

In the Talmud (Taanit 26b), we learn the following:

Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel said, "[in the old days] there was no holiday in Israel like Yom Kippur... The unmarried girls of Jerusalem would go out to the vineyards dressed in white to dance, and invite the unmarried boys to join them."

Why was Yom Kippur a day of dancing and joy? Because, our sages say, this is the anniversary of the day when Moses returned from atop Mount Sinai with the second set of tablets. Maybe you recall that while Moses was up there the first time, receiving the Torah for forty days and forty nights, the children of Israel panicked. We demanded a god we could see and touch, and we formed a golden calf and began to dance around it. When Moses came back down the hill and saw the depths to which the people had descended, he shattered the first set of tablets: maybe in anger, maybe in heartbreak.

One way or another, on the tenth day of Tishri -- that's today -- he returned from the mountaintop with the second set of tablets, a sign of God's forgiveness. That's why this was a day of white dresses and dancing for joy: because it's the day when we remember that God forgives us, and we experience our bond with God anew.

This is our day of repentance and return.

This is our day of knowing that there is a place where we belong, a home in which we are always welcome, a loving embrace which is always open to us. No matter how alone or out-of-place we may have felt at other moments in our lives. No matter who we are, or what we've done wrong, or where we've fallen short of who we meant to be. No matter how we've been hurt, or how we've hurt others in turn. This is the day when our longing to belong is most completely and wholly filled.

We can't return to childhood, but we can return to our Source. We can't undo our misdeeds, but we can be forgiven for them. We can't erase our experiences of alienation, but we can bring them to an end. This is our day of coming home.

The poet Mary Oliver writes:

Coming Home

When we are driving in the dark,
on the long road to Provincetown,
when we are weary,
when the buildings and the scrub pines lose their familiar look,
I imagine us rising from the speeding car.
I imagine us seeing everything from another place--
the top of one of the pale dunes, or the deep and nameless
fields of the sea.
And what we see is a world that cannot cherish us,
but which we cherish.
And what we see is our life moving like that
along the dark edges of everything,
headlights sweeping the blackness,
believing in a thousand fragile and unprovable things.
Looking out for sorrow,
slowing down for happiness,
making all the right turns
right down to the thumping barriers to the sea,
the swirling waves,
the narrow streets, the houses,
the past, the future,
the doorway that belongs
to you and me.

"Looking out for sorrow, / slowing down for happiness / making all the right turns[.]" May our prayers and togetherness today prepare us to enter this new year as Mary Oliver has described. May this be the day -- may this be the year -- may every moment be the moment -- when we know that we are not alone; when we know that we belong; when we can feel that we are home.

Before Yom Kippur

Prayer Before Yom Kippur



I now prepare
to unify my whole self—

heart
mind
consciousness
body
passions

with this holy community
with the Jewish people everywhere
with all people everywhere
with all life and being
to commune with the Source of all being.

May I find the words,
the music, the movements
that will put me in touch
with the great light of God.

May the rungs of insight and joy
that I reach in my devotion
flow from me to others
and fill all my actions in the world.

May the beauty of God rest upon us.
May God establish the works of our hands.
And may the works of our hands establish God.


(Rabbi Burt Jacobson)

Yom Kippur begins tonight and will continue through tomorrow night. This year it once again coincides with Shabbat -- the two holiest days of the year, layered atop each other.

May this doubly-holy day offer all of us opportunities for inner work and transformation.

I hope that you can forgive me for my imperfections this past year: times when I wrote something you didn't like, or failed to write about something you consider important; times when I didn't respond to comments or didn't do so quickly enough; times when my writing revealed unconscious racism or was hurtful in other ways.

For my part, I have done my best to let go of my internet-related frustrations from the old year -- the posts and emails and comments which were hurtful or frustrating for me -- and aspire to move into Yom Kippur bearing no grudges, with no cosmic or karmic baggage weighing me down or blocking my journey of teshuvah.

May this Shabbat-and-Yom Kippur be meaningful, real, and sweet. G'mar chatimah tovah -- may we all be sealed for good in the year to come.

Three psalms from Leonard Cohen before Yom Kippur

6.

Sit down, master, on this rude chair of praises, and rule my nervous heart with your great decrees of freedom. Out of time you have taken me to do my daily task. Out of mist and dust you have fashioned me to know the numberless worlds between the crown and the kingdom. In utter defeat I came to you and you received me with a sweetness I had not dared to remember. Tonight I come to you again, soiled by strategies and trapped in the loneliness of my tiny domain. Establish your law in this walled place. Let nine men come to lift me into their prayer so that I may whisper with them: Blessed be the name of the glory of the kingdom forever and ever.

 

19.

You let me sing, you lifted me up, you gave my soul a beam to travel on. You folded your distance back into my heart. You drew the tears back to my eyes. You hid me in the mountain of your word. You gave the injury a tongue to heal itself. You covered my head with my teacher's care, you bound my arm with my grandfather's strength. O beloved speaking, O comfort whispering in the terror, unspeakable explanation of the smoke and cruelty, undo the self-conspiracy, let me dare the boldness of joy.

 

43.

Hep me in the rain, help me in the darkness, help me at my aimless table. Bend me down to the rain, and let the darkness speak to my heart. Blessed are you who speaks from the darkness, who gives a form to desolation. You draw back the heart that is spilled in the world, you establish the borders of pain. Your mercy you make known to those who know your name, and your healing is discovered beneath the lifted cry. The ruins signal your power; by your hand it is broken down, and all things crack that your throne be restored to the heart. You have written your name on the chaos. The eyes that roll down the darkness, you have rolled them back to the skull. Let each man be sheltered in the fortress of your name, and let each one see the other from the towers of your law. Create the world again, and stand us up, as you did before, on the foundation of your light.

 

These can be found in Leonard Cohen's Book of Mercy (McClelland & Stewart, 1984; re-released, 2010.)

A Communal Al Chet for 5775

I experienced my first Jewish Renewal Yom Kippur at the old Elat Chayyim in Accord, New York ten years ago. One of the practices which moved me most was a practice of collaboratively writing our own Al Chet prayer.

The Al Chet prayer -- "For the Sins (Which We Have Sinned Against You By....)" -- is a laundry list of places where we have missed the mark in the last year. That year at Elat Chayyim, before the holiday began, we each wrote down the places where we felt we'd missed the mark in the previous year. Then the index cards containing our words were mixed up and re-distributed. When it came time for the Al Chet prayer, we sang each others' words. The intimacy of that experience moved me deeply.

For the last several years, we've adapted this practice at my shul. At Selichot services on the Saturday evening before Rosh Hashanah I play quiet guitar music while people write down places where they've missed the mark, things they feel they need to release in order to reach forgiveness on Yom Kippur. Some of our Hebrew school kids engage in this same practice during Hebrew school. Then I collect the basket of cards and type up what's in it, and that becomes the Al Chet which our student hazzan and I chant on Yom Kippur morning.

For those who are interested, here's my community's Al Chet for this year. I share it in hopes that it might speak to you, too, and might help this prayer come alive for you in a new way

 

Our Al Chet 5775

For the sins we have sinned against You by giving in to fear and worry,
and the sins we have sinned against You by not learning to let go;

For the sins we have sinned against You by not being available to our parents,
and the sins we have sinned against You by not being present to our children;

For the sins we have sinned against You through impatience, worry, and frustration,
and the sins we have sinned against You in thoughtless and hasty speech;

For the sins we have sinned against You by stealing money from Mom's wallet,
and the sins we have sinned against You by yelling at our parents;

וְעַל כֻּלָּם, אֱלֽוֹהַּ סְלִיחוֹת,סְלַח לָֽנוּ, מְחַל לָֽנוּ, כַּפֶּר-לָֽנוּ.

Ve’al kulam, Elo’ah selichot, selach lanu, mechal lanu, kaper lanu.

For all of these—God of forgiveness— forgive us, pardon us, grant us atonement.

For the sins we have sinned against You by nurturing resentments,
and the sins we have sinned against You by letting fear overwhelm compassion;

For the sins we have sinned against You through feeling anger at You,
and the sins we have sinned against You through feeling anger at ourselves;

For the sins we have sinned against You by not respecting our teachers,
and the sins we have sinned against You by not nurturing our students;

For the sins we have sinned against You by railing against what we can't change,
and the sins we have sinned against You in anger at those whom we don't know;

וְעַל כֻּלָּם, אֱלֽוֹהַּ סְלִיחוֹת,סְלַח לָֽנוּ, מְחַל לָֽנוּ, כַּפֶּר-לָֽנוּ.

Ve’al kulam, Elo’ah selichot, selach lanu, mechal lanu, kaper lanu.

For all of these—God of forgiveness— forgive us, pardon us, grant us atonement.

For the sins we have sinned against You by not being caring;
and the sins we have sinned against You by letting perfectionism paralyze us;

For the sins we have sinned against You by interrupting in haste without listening,
and the sins we have sinned against You by contributing to another's pain;

For the sins we have sinned against You by hurting ourselves,
and the sins we have sinned against You by hurting others;

For the sins we have sinned against You by failing to live in the moment,
and the sins we have sinned against You by feeling guilt about our own failings;

וְעַל כֻּלָּם, אֱלֽוֹהַּ סְלִיחוֹת,סְלַח לָֽנוּ, מְחַל לָֽנוּ, כַּפֶּר-לָֽנוּ.

Ve’al kulam, Elo’ah selichot, selach lanu, mechal lanu, kaper lanu.

For all of these—God of forgiveness— forgive us, pardon us, grant us atonement.

For the sins we have sinned against You by feeling pity and hate,
and the sins we have sinned against You by drowning out the voices of others;

For the sins we have sinned against You by fearing those who are unlike us,
and the sins we have sinned against You by taking pleasure in gossip;

For the sins we have sinned against You through only listening to people with whom
    we know we agree,
and the sins we have sinned against You through ignoring inconvenient voices;

For the sins we have sinned against You by not giving as much as we could,
and the sins we have sinned against You by being too proud to receive in return;

וְעַל כֻּלָּם, אֱלֽוֹהַּ סְלִיחוֹת,סְלַח לָֽנוּ, מְחַל לָֽנוּ, כַּפֶּר-לָֽנוּ.

Ve’al kulam, Elo’ah selichot, selach lanu, mechal lanu, kaper lanu.

For all of these—God of forgiveness— forgive us, pardon us, grant us atonement.

 

Rabbi Alan Lew z"l on these ten days of teshuvah

For ten days, the gates are open and the world is fluid. We are finally awake, if only in fits and starts, if only to toss and turn. For ten days, transformation is within our grasp. For ten days, we can imagine ourselves not as fixed and immutable beings, but rather as a limitless field upon which qualities and impulses rise up with particular intensity...

These are the words of Rabbi Alan Lew, may his memory be a blessing, in my favorite book to reread at this time of year -- This Is Real And You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation.

For ten days -- ten magical days -- the aseret y'mei teshuvah, "ten days of teshuvah" -- we inhabit a liminal space, a space of in-between-ness. We have entered the Days of Awe through the gate of Rosh Hashanah; we will exit them through the gate of Yom Kippur; but for now, we float in the middle.

For now, if we are fortunate, the experience of Rosh Hashanah (or the liturgy of Rosh Hashanah or the Torah reading or the experience of being with family and friends or the experience of not being with family and friends) has opened something up in us.

If we are fortunate, we are having moments of wakefulness, moments of realizing oh my goodness, this is my life, this is the only life I have. Moments of feeling the urgent tug toward change. Moments of knowing that whoever we have been, whoever we think we are, is not the only way for us to be.

Transformation does not have a beginning, a middle, or an end. We never reach the end of Teshuvah. It is always going on. We are awake for a moment, and then we are asleep again. Teshuvah seems to proceed in a circular motion. Every step away is also a step toward home.

And it may never be clear to us that the work of transformation has borne fruit.

Rabbi Alan Lew teaches that teshuvah, turning and re/turning and re-aligning ourselves in the right direction once again, is an endless process. When we stray from the path, make mistakes, get ourselves into trouble, our very predicament can become a gift, "the agent of our turning."

It is because we are imperfect that we are able to strive toward becoming better. It is because we are imperfect that we are able to imagine transformation and to pursue it. Even as we feel that our mis-steps are pulling us further away from the home for which we yearn, those missteps are also always the seed of our return.

[W]hy does the heart requires such an indirect approach? Why won't it just open wide when we ask it to? Why does it resist us so? We are sentimental about the heart, but the truth is, most 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... 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.

I think that avoiding the heart is human nature. It is natural for the heart to ache. If we are paying attention to the world, we will feel sorrow. And we will also feel joy! But both sorrow and joy require attentiveness to the heart. And sometimes it feels easier to opt for pasting on a smile or numbing ourselves or both.

Every year is the same, because being human is the same. And every year is different, because the events of my life have led me to someplace new. This year my heart is caught between wanting to turn away from the grief of knowing that someone I love is suffering, and wanting to be present to what is even when "what is" is painful.

These ten days of teshuvah invite me to open the doors of my own heart, to walk inside, and to sit there with all of my emotions. With my hope and my exultation and my fear and my grief and my love and my sorrow and all the things I wish I could change but can't.

The great drama of this season is the drama of choice. The power of choice is immense. We can choose to let go of anger, boredom, fear, guilt, impatience, grief, disappointment, dejection, anxiety, and despair, and we can make this choice moment by moment, and we can make this choice in a broader way as well. We can let go of each constituent feeling as we become aware of it, and we can form a clear and continuous intention to let those feelings go.

This paragraph leaps out at me every year. "We can choose to let go..." When I encounter people who frustrate me, I can choose to let go of that frustration. When I get annoyed (with the world; with my child; with myself), I can choose to release that annoyance instead of focusing on it. When I meet my own grief, I can choose to feel it and then to open my hands and let it float away.

This is part of what I find in the Unetaneh Tokef prayer which we recite during these awesome days. (See Every day I write the book, 2005.) We do not know, cannot know, what the coming year will contain. But we can always choose the path of teshuvah, the path of sustaining spiritual practice, the path of reaching out to those in need. We can always choose.

I can choose to open my heart, to sit with what I'm feeling even when it hurts, to be awake to who I am and who I have been and who I want to be in the year to come. To acknowledge my failings not in a self-flagellatory way, but in a way which will be the "agent of my turning," in Rabbi Lew's words -- a way which will help me come home again.

 

Yom Kippur, Eid, and remembrance of sacrifice

This coming weekend, when my community will be observing the solemn-yet-joyful fast of Yom Kippur, the Muslim community will be celebrating Eid al-Adha, "the feast of the sacrifice," commemorating the story of how Abraham was ready to sacrifice his son and God provided a sheep for the slaughter instead.

Jewish readers may be nodding along in recognition; after all, we read that story just last week at Rosh Hashanah. (In my community, as in many communities, we read the story of the casting-out of Hagar and Ishmael on the first day of Rosh Hashanah, and the story of the akedah, the "binding of Isaac," on the second day of Rosh Hashanah.)

Of course, there are differences in how our two traditions have memorialized this shared story. In Torah, the son who was almost sacrificed is clearly named as Yitzchak (Isaac.) In the Qur'anic account the son is not named, though there is a passage in which the son consents to what is to come, which becomes a model for the virtue of gracefully acceding to God's will.

In the class on Islam I took several years ago, I learned that there are Muslim commentators who  taught that the son in question was Isaac, and others who taught that the son in question was Ishmael. Muslim tradition offers support for both viewpoints; Wikipedia notes that

Though it is generally believed by Muslims that Ishmael was the son who was almost sacrificed, among scholars and historiographers of early Islam there is much debate. There are such persuasive arguments for both, that in fact, it is estimated that 130 traditions say Isaac was the son, while 133 say Ishmael.

(If this subject interests you, don't miss Was Abraham commanded to sacrifice Isaac or Ishmael?, which cites a wide variety of Muslim sources on each side of the debate, and also includes both the Torah text and the Qur'an text in English translation.)

I remember learning that classical tafsir (Muslim exegesis / scriptural interpretation) was "polyvalent" -- in other words, it presumed that sacred text naturally supports more than one reading. But as the tradition continued to develop, commentators began to lean toward resolving ambiguities. The Persian scholar al-Tabari (d. 923 CE) argued that the almost-sacrificed son was Isaac. Later commentators, among them al-Tha'labi (11th century CE) and al-Kathir (d. 1373 CE) argued instead that it was Ishmael. Perhaps these later commentators were writing with the intention of further differentiating our communities, and asserting the primacy of their narrative and genealogy over ours.

Today most Muslim sources indicate that the son in question was Ishmael. And Ishmael's willingness to allow God's will to unfold makes him the paragon of islām, the spiritual virtue of surrender or submission to God, from which that religious tradition takes its name. That Arabic word comes from the 3-letter root s/l/m, which connotes peace and wholeness. Peace and wholeness are found when one is able to "let go and let God," to borrow a phrase from the Twelve-Step lexicon.

Over on this side of the family tree, that same root -- ש /ל/ מ -- is at the heart of the word shalom. And our tradition too contains interpretations in which the son indicates his willingness to be sacrificed. (In my Akedah cycle, poem #2 draws on the midrash which depicts Isaac saying to Ishmael that if God were to ask him to be sacrificed he would not object. In that midrash, God promptly replies, 'This is the hour,' and sets the akedah in motion.) I wondered whether that version were influenced by the Muslim telling of the story, in which the son's submission is a central virtue -- but then I realized that Bereshit Rabbah was written down in the 5th century C.E., and Islam began in the 7th century C.E., so the arrow of causality isn't so clear.

(And, of course, on the Christian branch of this family tree, the son's willing submission to the will of the father is exemplified by Jesus' willingness to die on the cross. But that's a whole other post. Maybe I'll manage to write about that before Easter.)

I spoke in my Rosh Hashanah sermon (Children of Sarah and Hagar) about the the Isra'iliyyat, the body of interpretive traditions transmitted during times of close connection between early Muslims and Jews. It seems to me -- in broad generalization -- that during times of tension, both comunities have pulled back from accepting (or even acknowledging) our influences on one another. I'd like to see us instead choose to honor our cross-pollination and interconnection.

Our traditions both hold dear the story which says that God provided a ram for sacrifice in the place of the boy. Jews celebrated that story last week in shul, and will link back to it again at the end of Yom Kippur when we blow a tekiah gedolah on the shofar which reminds us of the ram God provided so that Abraham's son might live. Muslims will celebrate that story this coming weekend, with feasting and prayer and providing food (mutton, from sheep sacrificed in remembrance) for those in need.

In both versions of the story, God sends an animal to stand in for the child. My friend and teacher Rabbi Arthur Waskow has suggested that we can read this story as a divine instruction not to kill our children in the name of faith, but instead to pour our zeal into feeding those who hunger. What might our world look like if every nation could take that instruction to heart?

I am perennially moved by the ways our traditions have shaped and informed each other. To me this is one of the most beautiful things about being a person of faith in the world: exploring the differences and similarities in the ways we tell our sacred stories of encounter with the Infinite, and honoring how others' stories have informed and impacted our own.

To my Jewish readers: g'mar chatimah tovah, may you be sealed for good in the year to come. To my Muslim readers: eid mubarak, a blessed festival to you!

 

Related:

Abraham and the idols in midrash and the Qur'an, 2008

On Yizkor

I've just shared a post about Yizkor on my congregational blog. It's sparked by the fact that we'll recite the prayers of Yizkor, our memorial service, twice in the span of two weeks: once at Yom Kippur, and again at Shemini Atzeret. But what is Yizkor, and why do we say it twice in such rapid succession?

Here's a taste:

The word Yizkor means “Remember!” — and the service with that name is when we remember our beloved dead. We say the prayers of Yizkor four times a year. I follow the tradition which maps these four Yizkor services to the four seasons: Pesach – springtime. Shavuot – summertime. Autumn – Yom Kippur. Winter – Shemini Atzeret. (Even though mid-October won’t be winter yet, thank God. Some sources hold that the fourth yizkor of the year was once held in midwinter, but was moved to Shemini Atzeret for practical reasons of seasonally difficult travel.)

Shemini Atzeret means “the pause of the 8th day.” Sukkot (in Israel and in the Reform tradition of which we are a part) lasts for seven days. On the 8th day, our tradition teaches, God says to us: wait! don’t go! Linger with Me a little longer? We call that day “the pause,” or “the lingering,” of the 8th day. And it’s on that extra day after Sukkot, when Sukkot is over but we haven’t yet pulled away from God’s presence, that we recite Yizkor for the second time during this fall holiday season.

The experience of Yizkor is different at each of these holidays...

Read the whole thing here: The Yizkor of Yom Kippur, the Yizkor of Shemini Atzeret -- What is Yizkor, anyway?

A transformative Yom Kippur

I wonder how many of y'all reading this blog now were reading ten years ago when I attended my first Yom Kippur retreat at Elat Chayyim? I had felt for years as though Yom Kippur were eluding me. I could tell that it was supposed to be transformational, but I'd never been able to entirely find my way in. I always came out of it feeling that I wanted more.

And then I went to the old Elat Chayyim for a Yom Kippur retreat, and the experience opened me up. It was everything I had barely dared to dream the holiday could be. From then on, I went on retreat every year for Yom Kippur, until midway through rabbinic school when I began serving others during the Days of Awe instead of going someplace to be filled-up myself.

I took a few minutes this morning to reread my post about that first Jewish Renewal Yom Kippur. I am humbled and moved to discover how many of those teachings have become integral to my sense of what Yom Kippur is and can be. Here are some glimpses:

I learned a new interpretation of the practice of beating the breast during the recitation of missteps: rather than castigating ourselves, we're knocking gently on the heart, asking it to open...

At one point, we went outside to talk individually with God for ten minutes. My insight during that walk was that talking to God from Elat Chayyim is like making a local call! I said as much to the group when we reconvened, to much laughter. The fact of laughter on Yom Kippur surprised and warmed me...

Teshuvah is like climbing a ladder, but the rungs are spaced farther apart than we can reach. We can't reach one rung while remaining safely on the previous one. There's nothing to do but leap...

One of the refrains of the holiday is "On Rosh Hashanah it is inscribed, and on Yom Kippur it is sealed." From this we can intuit that while the heart may be solid on Rosh Hashanah (so words can be inscribed on it), it must be soft like wax in order to be sealed on Yom Kippur. So it is incumbent on us to soften our hearts...

Read the whole thing: Yom Kippur at Elat Chayyim (2004.) And thank you, again, dear Reb Elliot and Reb Jeff*, for the immeasurable gifts of that retreat: gifts which are still unfolding for me in my rabbinate, my service, and my experience of the holiday even now.

 

 

Related:

13 Ways of Looking at Yom Kippur (an Elat Chayyim / Isabella Freedman Yom Kippur retreat report from 2007)

 

*In this case I mean Rabbi Jeff Roth, of the Awakened Heart Project -- not the other Reb Jeff, though I thank Rabbi Jeff Goldwasser for everything he taught me about high holiday prayer and leadership too.

Also: if you have no plans for Yom Kippur and are in (or can get to) New England, there will be an amazing retreat at Isabella Freedman; read all about it. Or, if paying for a retreat is beyond you, you're welcome at my shul, where we do not have tickets; all are welcome.