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

by Alan Lew

YOU ARE WALKING THROUGH THE WORLD HALF ASLEEP.

A great horn sounds, calling you to remembrance, but all you can remember is how much you have forgotten.

Then the great horn sounds in earnest one hundred times.

They are days when it is perfectly clear every second that you live in the midst of a chain of ineluctable consequence, that everything you do, every prayer you utter, every intention you form, every act of compassion you perform, ripples out from the center of your being to the end of time.

A great wall of speech is hurled against your heart again and again; a fist beats against the wall of your heart relentlessly until you are brokenhearted and confess to your great crime.

You are a human being, guilty of every crime imaginable.

Sigmund Freud, he said, was the one who had introduced the single great idea upon which all the significant developments of the twentieth century had rested: the invisible is more important than the visible.

Judaism came into the world to bring the news that the invisible is more important than the visible.

If the purpose of ritual is to render the invisible visible, then what is the profound, universal, unseen, and unspoken reality that all of this ritual reflects? What journey of the soul, what invisible journey of transformation, does all of this make visible?

It is the journey from little mind to big mind, from confinement in the ego to a sense of ourselves as a part of something larger. It is the journey from isolation to a sense of our intimate connection to all being. This is the journey on which we discover ourselves to be part of an inevitable chain of circumstances, the journey beyond death, the journey home.

Every soul needs to express itself. Every heart needs to crack itself open. Every one of us needs to move from anger to healing, from denial to consciousness, from boredom to renewal.

Israel was completely dependent on rain. The rains came in the eighth month. So the seventh month was a time when the nation of Israel felt its life hanging in the balance. This utter dependence on the heavens seems to have given the ancient Israelites an intense sense of their dependence on God.

But what seems to have been most clearly true of this Day of the Blowing of the Horn for Remembrance is that it was both connected with and preparatory to Yom Ha-Kippurim, the Day of Atonement.

A Vidui—a confession of sin—had to be recited as we offered the propitiatory sacrifices; it had to be recited on Yom Kippur; and it had to be recited on the deathbed as well. This recitation activated the considerable power each of these moments possessed. If there was no Vidui, this power was lost. Awareness made this power actual and active in the world.

we have to become aware that we are not operating in a spiritual vacuum—that there is, in fact, a transcendent consciousness out there watching us with unbearable compassion as we blunder through the world. Moreover, we have to become aware of the precise nature of our blunders.

Rosh Hashanah had become, above all, Yom Ha-Din, the Day of Judgment, the day when we began to see ourselves through the eyes of a consciousness beyond us. But it was not a final judgment.

The liturgy, however, makes a very different claim, namely that prayer, righteousness, and Teshuvah will not change what happens to us; rather, they will change us.

The process of transformation began to expand from what originally occupied ten days to what now takes just over two months, stretching out into a period of time long enough to hold the journey the soul had to make. The period of preparation became both longer and more complex, being divided eventually into several components. And we began to see the Days of Awe as stretching beyond themselves as well, concluding not with the great closing of the gate at the end of Yom Kippur, as they used to do, but extending out to the end of Sukkot, nearly two weeks later.

The business of transformation was going on all the time. It never stopped.

The great journey of transformation begins with the acknowledgment that we need to make it. It is not something we are undertaking for amusement, nor even for the sake of convention; rather, it is a spiritual necessity.

We are constantly becoming, continuously redefining ourselves.

We are called to judgment at every moment. Our response to every moment is a judgment on us, one that is continuously unfolding, and subject to continuous modification.

So this concatenation of ritual—this dance that begins on Tisha B’Av and ends on Sukkot, that begins with the mournful collapse of a house and ends with the joyful collapse of a house, this intentional spasm that awakens us and carries us through death and back to life again—stands for the journey the soul is always on.

It is a word that points us to the realm beyond language, the realm of pure motion and form.

The home we leave to begin this journey is necessarily a different place than the home we arrive at in the end.

The dream of the lost home must be one of the deepest of all human dreams. Certainly it is the most ancient dream of the Jewish people,

We spend most of our lives, I think, in this strange dance—pushing forward to get back home.

What we call Teshuvah is a primal gesture—a primordial sense of the healing power of the journey we make through life—the time spent circling the bases.

We see this urge also in what psychiatrists call the repetition compulsion, the unconscious craving to master the unresolved elements of our life. According to this theory, we never leave the age at which trauma occurs.

I think one of the things we learn in the course of the long journey home is to keep our eye on the ball, on the starting point, on the things in life that are essential, that sustain us. One of the ways our lives heal us is to teach us this.

Judaism believes in the particularity of time, that certain times have special spiritual properties:

But they have these special properties only when we are mindful.

Death, the destination of our journey through life, also heals. Teshuvah is the little death that connects us to the big one.

What our tradition is affirming is that when we reach the point of awareness, everything in time—everything in the year, everything in our life—conspires to help us. Everything becomes the instrument of our redemption.

Consciousness and the passage of time heal. Loss is inevitable, but as time passes, what we really have and who we really are begins to become clear.

Our home is a river, a fluid place, a place where there is no stopping point—a place where we can stop clinging, and stop being driven out of life. A place of Teshuvah, a place that will return us to ourselves, where we can feel our lives flowing, healing, toward home.

the Hebrew calendar is the only one in the world that is both lunar and solar.

Every Hebrew month follows the cycles of the moon quite precisely. Each new moon is Rosh Chodesh, a minor religious holiday, and most of the major holidays occur on the full moon. But the years follow the cycle of the sun also, albeit with somewhat less precision. We simply throw in an extra month every couple of years (we call this process intercalation), and this ensures that the Jewish year will never be more than a week or two out of phase with the earth’s revolution around the sun. So we feel both the sun and the moon in our lives.

If the sacred calendar traces the path of the soul, then the Torah is the path of the heart.

Tisha B’Av is a day associated with the various calamities that have befallen the Jewish people

Tisha B’Av always coincides with the beginning of our reading from the Book of Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy—the second telling—consists for the most part of the repetition of stories and laws we have already heard earlier in the Torah. The first story it tells is the story of a calamity.

Calamities continued to occur at this time of year and they all became part of the Tisha B’Av mythos. There was an expulsion from England in the thirteenth century, a fifteenth-century expulsion from Spain, and the various massacres connected with the Crusades. Even the assassination of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand at Sarajevo, the event that precipitated World War I, took place on the ninth day of the month of Av. While this was not a specifically Jewish calamity, some historians see it as the precipitating event of the Holocaust.

But the destruction of the Temple and the exile it occasioned were signal calamities, and the tendency to telescope calamities around this date served to give form to a significant spiritual feeling, the sense that the same thing was happening over and over again but in slightly different form, and the corresponding feeling that our unresolved tendencies—the unconscious wrong turns we keep taking—carry us back to the same point on our spiritual path again and again.

Tisha B’Av comes exactly seven weeks before Rosh Hashanah, beginning the process that culminates on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

Rambam, the great medieval philosopher and synthesizer of Jewish law, said that Teshuvah, this kind of moral and spiritual turning, is only complete when we find ourselves in exactly the same position we were in when we went wrong—when the state of estrangement and alienation began—and we choose to behave differently, to act in a way that is conducive to atonement and reconciliation.

they were spiritual leaders, and spiritually, the only question worth asking about any conflict, any recurring catastrophe, is this: What is my responsibility for it? How am I complicit in it? How can I prevent it from happening again?

What is the recurring disaster in our life? What is the unresolved element that keeps bringing us back to this same moment over and over again? What is it that we keep getting wrong? What is it that we persistently refuse to look at, fail to see?

there is no such thing as a gentle occupation—that occupation corrodes the humanity of the occupier and makes the occupied vulnerable to brutality.

I wonder how many of us are holding on very hard to some piece of personal history that is preventing us from moving on with our lives,

Tisha B’Av is the beginning of Teshuvah, the process of turning that we hope to complete on Yom Kippur, the process of returning to ourselves and to God. And the acknowledgment of the unresolved in our lives, as a people and as individuals, is the beginning of the sacred power the Days of Awe grant us—to transform our lives in this moment when we feel the pull of both the waning moon and the setting sun; in this place, in this life, here and now.