This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared Quotes

“Forgiveness, it has been said, means giving up our hopes for a better past.”
― Alan A. Lew, This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation

“Only by being willing to experience loss—by letting the walls of memory crumble—could she have it. This is the bet life always makes against us. Life bets that we won’t be willing to endure the suffering it requires. Life bets that we will try to shut out the suffering, and so shut out life in the bargain. Tisha B’Av sidles up to us, whispering conspiratorially with a racing form over its mouth. Tisha B’Av has a hot tip for us: Take the suffering. Take the loss. Turn toward it. Embrace it. Let the walls come down.”
― Alan Lew, This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation

“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.”
― Alan Lew, This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation

“Every year before the Days of Awe, the Ba-al Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidic Judaism, held a competition to see who would blow the shofar for him on Rosh Hashanah. Now if you wanted to blow the shofar for the Ba-al Shem Tov, not only did you have to blow the shofar like a virtuoso, but you also had to learn an elaborate system of kavanot — secret prayers that were said just before you blew the shofar to direct the shofar blasts and to see that they had the proper effect in the supernal realms.

All the prospective shofar blowers practiced these kavanot for months. They were difficult and complex. There was one fellow who wanted to blow the shofar for the Ba-al Shem Tov so badly that he had been practicing these kavanot for years. But when his time came to audition before the Ba-al Shem, he realized that nothing he had done had prepared him adequately for the experience of standing before this great and holy man, and he choked. His mind froze completely. He couldn’t remember one of the kavanot he had practiced for all those years. He couldn’t even remember what he was supposed to be doing at all. He just stood before the Ba-al Shem in utter silence, and then, when he realized how egregiously — how utterly — he had failed this great test, his heart just broke in two and he began to weep, sobbing loudly, his shoulders heaving and his whole body wracking as he wept.

All right, you’re hired, the Ba-al Shem said.

But I don’t understand, the man said. I failed the test completely. I couldn’t even remember one kavanah.

So the Ba-al Shem explained with the following parable: In the palace of the King, there are many secret chambers, and there are secret keys for each chamber, but one key unlocks them all, and that key is the ax. The King is the Lord of the Universe, the Ba-al Shem explained. The palace is the House of God. The secret chambers are the sefirot, the ascending spiritual realms that bring us closer and closer to God when we perform commandments such as blowing the shofar with the proper intention, and the secret keys are the kavanot. And the ax — the key that opens every chamber and brings us directly into the presence of the King, where he may be — the ax is the broken heart, for as it says in the Psalms, “God is close to the brokenhearted.”
― Alan Lew, This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation

“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.”
― Alan A. Lew, This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation

“There is a story about Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite. One day his older brother died, and a newspaper got the story wrong and printed Alfred’s obituary instead. Alfred opened the paper that morning and had the unusual experience of reading his obituary while he was still alive. “Dr. Alfred Nobel, who became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before, died yesterday,” the obituary began. Alfred threw down the paper. That’s not how I want to be remembered, he said. That’s not what’s important to me, he said, and right then and there he decided to throw his entire fortune into rewarding people for bettering this world and bringing it closer to peace.”
― Alan A. Lew, This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation

“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.”
― Alan Lew, This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation

“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.”
― Alan Lew, This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation

“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?”
― Alan Lew, This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation

“Our suffering, the unresolved element of our lives, is also from God. It is the instrument by which we are carried back to God, not something to be defended against, but rather to be embraced.”
― Alan Lew, This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation

“Abraham, the first Jew, whose nickname, Ha-Ivri, may very well have meant “the one who crossed the river,” began his biblical journey by leaving the home of his birth—his father’s house, the land he was born in—and setting out for an unknown land.”
― Alan Lew, This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation

“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.”
― Alan Lew, This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation

“This image, this series of fasts, tells our bodies and our souls the story of the encroachment of emptiness: the story of impermanence. There was a Great Temple, a great nation with its capital in Jerusalem, but even such seemingly unshakable institutions as these simply slipped away into the mists of history. Yet even while it stood, the Great Temple was a structure that was centered around emptiness. The Holy of Holies, the Sacred Center upon which all the elaborate structural elegance of the Temple served to focus, was primarily a vacated space. It was defined that way in the Torah. The Holy of Holies was the space no one could enter except the high priest, and even he could only enter for a few moments on Yom Kippur. If anyone else entered this place, or if the high priest entered on any other day, the charged emptiness at the Sacred Center, the powerful nothingness there, would break out on him and overwhelm him, and he would die. So Yom Kippur is, among other things, the day we enter the vacated space, even if only by proxy, the day we experience the charged emptiness at the Sacred Center.”
― Alan Lew, This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation

“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. You would never have had Einstein if Freud hadn't convinced the world of this first. You would never have had nuclear physics.”
― Alan Lew, This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation

“Love is as strong as death, and marriage, if it contains even the slightest trace of love, lasts forever.”
― Alan A. Lew, This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation

“Profound transformation only manifests itself over time.”
― Alan Lew, This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation

“Baseball is a religion of winning. We identify with a team, and when they win we feel a lift—we feel as if we have won. When they lose, we just don’t pay very close attention. Even fans of perennial losers (a religion in itself) or those rare and true fans who appreciate loss for the depth of feeling it provokes, and for the wellsprings of compassion and affection it opens, begin with a yearning to win. Otherwise there would be nothing to lose in the first place. Yom Kippur, on the other hand, is all about losing. Losing nobly, perhaps, but losing nevertheless. As our friends the Buddhists cheerfully remind us, suffering is inevitable in life. It is, in fact, life’s first noble truth.”
― Alan Lew, This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation

“This, I believe, is the basis of psychotherapy. We speak our unconscious dysfunctions, and in so doing we disarm them. We call them out. We bring them up to the light of day, where, like the ancient river demons of the Near East, they lose their power. On a certain level, of course, we always know what we are doing. But as long as it remains unspoken, we can pretend to ignore it. 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.”
― Alan Lew, This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation

“information, but only for want of appreciation. The beginning”
― Alan Lew, This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation

“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. But this objection was raised: What happens if the circumstances in question don’t repeat themselves? How do we make complete Teshuvah then? Don’t worry, the Rambam replied. They always do. The unresolved elements of our lives—the unconscious patterns, the conflicts and problems that seem to arise no matter where we go or with whom we find ourselves—continue to pull us into the same moral and spiritual circumstances over and over again until we figure out how to resolve them. They continue to carry us into harm’s way until we become aware of them, conscious of them, and begin to change them. And we all have recurring motifs in the dark, unresolved corners of our lives—in the domestic unhappiness we replicate from one marriage to another, in the problems that seem to follow us from one job to the next, in all the mistakes that turn out to be the same mistake, which we make over and over.”
― Alan Lew, This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation

“There is a story about Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite. One day his older brother died, and a newspaper got the story wrong and printed Alfred’s obituary instead. Alfred opened the paper that morning and had the unusual experience of reading his obituary while he was still alive. “Dr. Alfred Nobel, who became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before, died yesterday,” the obituary began. Alfred threw down the paper. That’s not how I want to be remembered, he said. That’s not what’s important to me, he said, and right then and there he decided to throw his entire fortune into rewarding people for bettering this world and bringing it closer to peace. Yom Kippur is the day we all get to read our own obituary. It’s a dress rehearsal for our death. That’s why we wear a kittel, a shroudlike garment, on this day; why we refrain from life-affirming activities such as eating, drinking, and procreating. We are rehearsing the day of our death, because death, like Yom Kippur, atones.”
― Alan Lew, This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation

“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.”
― Alan Lew, This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation

“our problem is not that we don’t try hard enough. It is that we try too hard. It’s that we have such an exaggerated belief in the force of our own effort that we never stop trying.”
― Alan Lew, This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation

“We should eat only what our soul desires, only what our body requires, and not what our unconscious desires bid us to eat.”
― Alan Lew, This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation

“Spiritual practice won’t change what happens. Rather, it will help us to experience what happens not as evil, but simply as what happens. Spiritual practice will help us to understand that everything that happens, even the decree of death, flows from God.”
― Alan Lew, This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation

“Our power in this world is considerable, but also very circumscribed. It is only here and now, in this moment, in this place—in the present—that we can act. We cannot act in the past, we cannot act in the future, and most certainly we cannot act through someone else’s experience. So from a spiritual point of view, we need to ask, What can I do here and now, in the present-tense reality of my own experience?”
― Alan Lew, This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation

“Our souls are making this journey, yours and mine. The trip will go better for us if we know where we’re going.”
― Alan Lew, This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation

“The Book of Life and the Book of Death are open every day, and our name is written in one or the other of them at every moment, and then erased and written again the moment after that. We are constantly becoming, continuously redefining ourselves. This doesn’t just happen on Rosh Hashanah.”
― Alan Lew, This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation

“And this awakening is always a matter of the utmost urgency, not just in that last week before Rosh Hashanah, at Selichot. It is always something very real for which we are completely unprepared.”
― Alan Lew, This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation

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