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

by Alan Lew

If we are human, we suffer. The heart holds our suffering.

As we begin the process of Teshuvah, we need to make a conscious effort to overcome the momentum of this denial and avoidance.

The great drama of this season is the drama of choice. The power of choice is immense. We can choose to let go

recite the great formula of Rebbe Nachman, for example—If anyone has hurt or harmed me, knowingly or unknowingly, I forgive them—

The Ten Days of Teshuvah are days of renewal, days when we are not only concerned with change and transformation, but also with reinvigorating, refreshing, and reimagining our lives, days when we are obliged to ask ourselves a number of difficult and unpleasant questions.

The great Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki wrote: It is hard to keep our mind pure and our practice pure…. The goal of practice is always to keep our beginner’s mind.

God renews the entire world every day.

Our first inclination is often to change the external circumstances of our life—to change our physical environment. Don’t just stand there, we tell ourselves. Do something. Do anything.

Spiritual deadness is a habit. Something in us wants to be dead—wants to escape our reality—and we’ve expressed this desire in a hundred little patterns and habits. So a physical shaking up of our stale routines might actually serve to loosen us up inside and lead the way to inner change.

Turn your mind toward God; this sounds like a simple, even a self-evident, proposition, but it’s an essential first step in the process of spiritual renewal. The first thing we should do when we feel we have lost all our passion is to try to find it.

What usually brings me out of such a dry spell is a simple inner turn. I simply turn toward that inner place, that radiant nexus of mind, heart, and soul, where I used to feel the presence of God, and lo and behold, God is still there waiting for me. Renewal often begins when we turn toward this place even when it seems utterly distant. In our tradition, this turning often takes the form of prayer.

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.

The present moment is the only place we experience ourselves as being alive, the only place we experience our lives at all.

Live this life and watch it come alive again.

When we recite the Kol Nidre, God calls out to the soul, in a voice the soul recognizes instantly because it is the soul’s own cry.

Your soul is hearing its name called out, and its name is pain, grief, shame, humiliation, loss, failure, death—or at least that is its first name.

It seems to have been composed during the reign of Reccared I, a sixth-century Visigoth king of Spain who ordered Jews to convert on pain of death. So Kol Nidre was originally a cry of pain, an expression of overwhelming grief at having had to commit apostasy. Spanish Jews chanted it when they gathered secretly to observe Yom Kippur.

The thing about the Kol Nidre is that it starts at this moment of heartbreak. This moment is its first assumption. And it comes on so suddenly, so abruptly. There is no buildup whatsoever. It’s the very first thing that happens at the evening service for Yom Kippur.

We are all Avaryonim. We are all imperfect. We are all sinners.

Not only are we all imperfect. We are all impermanent.

The tragic pain of the soul—the pain we hear in those first grieving notes of Kol Nidre—is the pain of loss, the pain of impermanence.

We express our unique and indispensable contribution to the great flow of life and then we pass on. We become one of the Avaryonim.

Many of us would rather try to keep our lives unexpressed, in potential, because we believe that if we don’t express our lives, we can hold on to them.

We remain weighted down by the burden of our unexpressed dreams.

The Kol Nidre expresses all this. Those first notes express this sadness, this impermanence, this heartbreak, this failure. But then there are the rising notes. Precisely because of this impermanence, this heartbreak, the soul expresses itself, expresses its singular onetime gift, leaps out of the water with joy, and then expires.

God calls to us from the depths of our despair. It is often the case, I think, that our soul hears its call in the midst of great trial and pain.

The song my soul recognizes, the song that gets my soul’s attention, is a song of loss,

This song is a deep song, a song of great truth, a song of great strength, and I draw strength from it as I rise.

Kol Nidre is about speaking true—about the power of speech.

they instituted a ritual for the annulment of vows, so that we wouldn’t have to bear the guilt of abusing the power of speech.

When we commit a sin, whether intentional or unintentional, and then we make repentance, we are obliged to make confession [vidui] before God, and this confession must be in words.

If we make verbal confession without sincerely resolving to change in our hearts,

Every spiritual tradition I am aware of speaks of a kind of layered mindfulness, a sensibility that works up and out of the body, to the heart and then to the mind and then finally to the soul.

The veil of unconsciousness is very thin, however, and as soon as we begin to speak, we pierce it, and we can’t ignore what we were doing any longer.

It is through speech that action begins.

And speech is intimately joined to the power of gesture as well.

Breath has primacy over speech. We can breathe without speaking, but we can’t speak without breathing.

When our speech expresses this deeper sense of things, we are on our way to Teshuvah.

Then Kol Nidre comes, and it is finally time to speak of those thoughts and feelings that haunt us.

Speak and let go. Speak and be human. Speak and be healed.

Parshat Matot begins with a discussion of vows, in which we hear the precise language of Kol Nidre.

The irony is that the subject of both Parshat Matot and Kol Nidre is the relationship between what we say and what we do.

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.

The Torah has a very strong sense of what is, and an equally strong sense of what ought to be, and it recognizes very clearly that if the second ever gets too far away from the first, the Torah will become a repository of irrelevant and impossible ideals.

Like God, each of us participates in the creation of the world.

The world presents us with a great chaos of information. Our speech encourages us to select certain possibilities out of this chaos and to discard others.

the compassion that usually comes when we realize that we and our fellow human beings are all fellow sufferers.

Spiritual discipline can help us make this transformation.

Most of us are afraid to inhabit ourselves, afraid of what we might find at the core of our being. This is how we are caught unprepared.

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.