This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation

by Alan Lew

Anger is a choice. Boredom is a choice. Fear is a choice. No one can hold a gun to our heads in this regard. No one can make us feel this feeling. No one can crawl inside us and alter us. We are responsible for the state of our own consciousness.

What do we do when everything we do seems dull, when life seems barren and drained of color and taste, when the landscape that used to thrill us with its beauty now lies before us flat and dull, its radiance drained away? What do we do when we can’t summon the enthusiasm we used to have for our work or for our marriage or even for a simple walk through the world?

What do we do when we realize we are suffering from that contemporary epidemic, the burnout syndrome? What do we do when our life becomes characterized by a sense of meaninglessness, by a loss of passion, by fatigue and depression? What do we do, that is, besides divorce our spouses, drink ourselves into oblivion, drug ourselves insensate, drown ourselves in shopping or television or sports, or try to simulate passion with gambling, pornography, or illicit sex?

Or in the words of the scholar and philosopher Martin Buber: When we do not believe that God renews the work of creation every day, then our religious practice becomes old and routine and boring. As it says in the Psalms, “Do not cast me off when I am old.” That is, do not let my world become old.

There are people who are dead even when alive. Rashi, the great medieval Torah commentator, suggests that when we read in the Book of Deuteronomy, “I have put before you this day life and death, a blessing and a curse, therefore choose life,” the verse is talking about spiritual life and spiritual death. The blessing is refreshment—the renewal of the soul. The curse is boredom, staleness, frustration, failure.

Marcia Falk, whose Book of Blessings offers us a radical retranslation of traditional liturgy, shakes up the classical liturgy so thoroughly that cracks appear in our apprehension of it, and more than once I have found God coming in through these cracks.

Prayer creates space for this renewal. Prayer galvanizes our will. Prayer opens us to the possibility of change so that we notice when an opening arises, which we might not have noticed without being so prepared.

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.

Kol Nidre

When I finally stopped trying to be who they wanted me to be and pursued my own path, my real talents began to emerge. I finished at the top of my graduate school class. I finished at the top of my class at rabbinical school, and my parents hardly noticed.

The soul is pushed down and then the soul rises up again. The salmon leaps. This is precisely the struggle Kol Nidre depicts.

Every year, around ten weeks before Kol Nidre, we read a strange foreshadowing of this night in the Torah, in Parshat Matot. Parshat Matot begins with a discussion of vows, in which we hear the precise language of Kol Nidre. “When a man makes a vow to God or swears an oath which is binding on his soul, all vows and all bonds on his soul shall stand [cal nidareyah vcal isar asher asrah al nafshah yakum].” I always get a chill of fear in my spine when we read this. It’s the first distant echo of the High Holidays, of Kol Nidre. What will I do this year?

In the account of creation we read every year in the Book of Genesis, God literally speaks the world into existence. And the Talmud affirms the creative potential of speech. Did you know that abracadabra is a Jewish word? The Aramaic words Avra c’dabrah mean “It came to pass as it was spoken,” a popular talmudic dictum that expressed the widely held talmudic belief that things do indeed come to pass because they are spoken, that speech has the power to cause the world to come into being.

None of us is whole by ourselves. A spiritual community is one in which we find wholeness, completion with others. What we lack is provided by somebody else. Now I know, this is a positively un-American idea. The John Wayne in us balks at it furiously. We are indoctrinated by our culture to see ourselves as self-sufficient. One of the hardest things I have to do as a rabbi is to convince people who are ill or in trouble to accept help from others. In this culture, needing help from others is seen as a sign of weakness, as something to be ashamed of.

Suddenly we understand why the Great Temple of Jerusalem was an elaborate construction surrounding nothing. There at the sacred center, at the Holy of Holies, a place

we only entered on Yom Kippur, and even then only by proxy, only through the agency of the high priest, there at that center, is precisely nothing—a vacated space, a charged emptiness, mirroring the charged emptiness that surrounds this world, that comes before this life and after it as well. Now we understand the deep wisdom of the poet Robinson Jeffers, who wrote:

And this is what Shlomo would say to anyone who asked him this question: “I only have one soul. If I had two souls, I would gladly devote one of them to hating the Germans full-time. But I don’t. I only have one soul, and I’m not going to waste it on hating.”

His sister was quiet for a while, and then, speaking with great difficulty, as she was very close to death, she said, “The people here feed me. The people here keep me clean. I’m surrounded with love. I have everything I need. There’s no blame.” When this big tough cowboy with the Stetson hat and the belt buckle as big as a football heard these words, he dissolved. His face was consumed first with an infinite sadness, then with wonder and amazement, until finally it looked like the face of an innocent child. He was transformed by his sister’s forgiveness. In a moment, in an instant, he had been relieved of a lifetime’s pain.

Kaparah, the Hebrew word for atonement, means a covering over. The idea is not that atonement effaces our sins. It cannot. They will always be there, along with everything else we and everyone else has ever done—an endless and indissoluble concatenation of cause and effect, stretching back to the beginning of time and reaching forward to its end as well. When we make atonement, kaparah, we are covering over our wrongdoing with the will to behave differently.

Compassion heals. Loving-kindness heals. Justice heals. Meditation heals. Prayer heals. The Sabbath heals. Yom Kippur heals. All these activities reenforce each other, depend upon each other, and taken together they purify us of our delusion of separation and its attending sense of absurdity. They impart a sense of the sacred to us, an immediate sense of our connection to everyone and to everything, and the imperative for engagement with the world which flows out of this sense.

So every year at Neilah, I declare war on God. I turn the full force of our spiritual armamentarium on God and I say, Give us one more year or else. Give us one more year of life, one more year of sun and rain and wind, one more year to labor and to love on this roiling green-and-blue ball. Give me one more year to love my wife, one more year to watch my children grow. Promise me this or else. Promise me this while there is still a small, charged opening between heaven and earth. Give me one more year of life. Promise me this before the gates come clanging shut.