In the Field

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This week���s Torah portion, Re���eh, begins:

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See, this day I set before you blessing and curse��� (Deut. 11:25)

Blessing, if we follow the mitzvot; curse if we turn away. This can feel simplistic, even counter to the world as we know it. (We all know that doing the mitzvot is not a guarantee of good fortune.) But it lands with me as a deep teaching about the kinds of choices that are open to us in every moment, choices about who we want to be and how we want to be in the world.  

My teachers at the Institute for Jewish Spirituality like to say, ���We are in choice.��� We can choose to doomscroll, or to roll up our sleeves and create. We can choose to coast through life half-asleep, or we can choose to wake up.  On a related note, this weekend is Rosh Hodesh Elul. It���s almost new moon. I���m never ready to hear this, but the new year is on its way.

This month it���s traditional to hear the shofar every morning. Some people blow shofar every day, or go to a place where they can hear its blasts. (Some of us rely on YouTube.) To Rambam, the shofar calls out: "Wake up, you sleepers from your sleep, you slumberers from your slumber. Search your deeds and return to Me in teshuvah!" 

To our sages, the calls of the shofar are a spiritual alarm clock designed to wake us up to the urgency of living. In those cries they also heard wailing: the cries of childbirth, the cries of Rachel lamenting for her children, the cries of a heart that breaks for all that is painful in our world. It���s easy these days to be in touch with that brokenness, especially if we read the news. 

In one of my favorite teachings, the cycle of shofar calls from tekiah (one blast) to sh���varim (three shorter blasts) to t���ruah (nine very short blasts) back to tekiah says, ���I felt whole, I have felt broken, I will feel whole again.��� I love that because it���s a circle, a cycle, a coming-back-around. It reminds me that times of brokenness are never the end of the story. 

I think of the Jewish year as akin to a walk around the Guggenheim museum ��� you know, the one with a spiraling walkway that goes in circles all the way to the top. We come around the spiral of the Jewish year and here we are in Elul again, but it���s not the same as last year. We���re not the same as last year. We never are, even if our external circumstances haven���t changed.

The name of the month Elul can be an acronym for Ani L���dodi v���Dodi Li ��� ���I am my Beloved���s, and my Beloved is mine,��� a line from Song of Songs. The Beloved in this metaphor is God* (*whatever that word means to us ��� God far above or deep within, the still small voice, the force of love and justice and hope in our world.) This month is a time for connecting with the holy. 

Our sages imagined God as a monarch, distant and transcendent. This month, they envisioned that monarch leaving the palace and walking with us in the world. I love the idea of God walking with us in the fields. I picture what it looks like here: newly-shorn grasses becoming hay, or goldenrod and purple loosestrife blooming in their late-summer splendor��� 

This can be a hectic season, especially if we or our children are going back to school in a few weeks, and especially if we���re part of the team preparing the synagogue for the high holidays. I���m inviting us this month to slow down, even if we feel like slowing down is impossible. (Maybe especially if we feel like slowing down is impossible.)

Slow down and notice the season and the sky. Slow down and walk in the fields with God. This can be an actual practice: walk in the fields or the woods and literally speak out loud with God, saying whatever it is you most need to say as this year draws toward a close. If you feel awkward about doing that, you can hold a phone to your ear. 

Or write in a journal. Or talk to God in the shower. Or talk with God as you���re driving alone in your car. Following the practice of my teacher Reb Zalman z���l, I imagine the Shekhinah ��� the Divine Presence ��� sitting in the front seat of my car wearing bluejeans. I talk to God the way I talk to my best friend, without holding anything back. 

This month I find myself saying to God: I���m sorry I got distracted this year. I���m sorry I spent so much of the year caught up in despair over the news of the world, and that I allowed that despair to dull my capacity to take ethical action and do something about what���s broken. I���m sorry about the places where I fell down on the job of being the person I most aspire to be.

And also: thank you for the sunsets. Thank you for the scent of basil leaves and rosemary. Thank you for the people in my life. Thank you for Torah study and for learning with others, because I always forget how much that moves me. Thank you for harmony and for singing with others, because like prayer, singing always uplifts my heart. Thank you for the fact of my life. 

What do you need to say ��� to God*, to the universe, to yourself ��� as we enter the last few weeks of this year? That���s the question into which I invite us this Shabbat. 

And if this is a week when life has left us feeling broken, like the stuttering cries of the shofar, may the gentle embrace of Shabbat help us return to feeling whole. 

This is the d'varling I offered at Kabbalat Shabbat services at Congregation Beth Israel of the Berkshires (cross-posted to the From the Rabbi blog.)