(This sermon was delivered on Friday, August 9th, 2013 - Shabbat Shoftim)
Late
one night in the city of Chelm, known to be populated by fools, Shmuel happened
upon his friend Avrum. Avrum was down on
his hands and knees, underneath a streetlight, searching for something. Shmuel inquired as to what Avrum was doing.
“I’ve lost my keys,” he replied.
“Perhaps you’ll help me search.” Shmuel joined him. After half an hour, they still had no
success. “Avrum, where exactly did you
lose those keys?” Maybe we can concentrate our efforts.” Avrum replied, “I lost them in that alley over
there.” Shmuel was dumbfounded. “So why are we looking here!?!?!?” Avrum
looked over at his friend: “Why are we looking here? Because the light is better here- that’s why!”[1]
The
story seems a little silly, yet we know it hits on a real truth – one that
likely resonates deeply with many of us: that too often we choose to look where
the light is best, where it is easiest to see, even if that which we are
seeking is located someplace entirely different. When navigating our own lives and making our
own choices, we generally take familiar, well-lit paths - those routes we’ve
traveled many times, ground we’ve traversed before. It’s more predictable, more comfortable that
way. It’s also why we tend to fall into
the same patterns of thinking and behavior over and over and over again,
despite our “best attempts” at a different outcome.
That’s
why the period of time in which we find ourselves calls to us to try something
different. This Shabbat marks the first
Shabbat in the month of Elul, the 30 day period that serves both to close out
the past year and to prime us for the year ahead. Each day of Elul beckons us to step out of
our comfort zones, to search our lives, our thoughts, and our actions in ways
that aren’t always easy, to acknowledge both the enlightened parts of
ourselves, but also to confront the darker parts of our souls, all with hope
that such a search might positively impact our own process of teshuvah – that
call for repentance and return that is the essential demand of the High Holy
Days – now less than a month away.
There
are, in fact, many long-standing traditions associated with the month of Elul
to help this process along.
Traditionally,
the shofar is blown every day during Elul (except Shabbat), sort of like a
repentance alarm clock, to remind us of what is coming. And in case you don’t
have a shofar, and want to get in on the daily shofar call, there’s an app for
that!
Some recommend that in anticipation of the
High Holy Days, the every person should focus on repentance, prayer, and
tzedakah in advance for at least one hour every day. An hour a day – not so bad.
Others
advise compiling a cheshbon hanefesh – literally an inventory of the soul – in
which one documents their successes and failures over the past year generally
in light of their relationship with God, other people, and themselves, as sort
of a preparatory document and teshuvah business plan as it were.
But before any of these recommended steps can
happen, I believe there is a critical pre-step which might be the most
important thing any of us can do if we seek to engage in this challenging
seasonal work of teshuvah.
While hiking on Martha’s Vineyard with his
son, a storm came up and they had to take shelter in a little shack with a big
picture window. Rabbi Lew sat looking
out the window in the rain at the birds and other nature, none of which he
found very captivating after about 5 minutes.
His son, on the other hand, was having a much more interesting
time. He was not looking out through the
window at what was outside, but rather at the window itself. The window, he pointed out to his father, was
a very active world in and of itself, a nature preserve for insect life. It was clear that the window wasn’t just
something through which to view the world; it was a world in and of itself, a
place with a life of its own.
The shifting of our gaze from the big broad
world out there and how we engage in it, to the window through which we see the
world – our own lens of experience and consciousness - that is where the work of Elul and the High
Holy Days begins. Because that screen of
our perspective mechanisms is, according to Rabbi Lew: “not just a blank
transparent medium. Rather, it is a
world unto itself, a world teeming with life, and that life affects everything
else we see.” [2]
If the main work of the teshuvah process in
Elul is to travel back over the past year and essentially sight-see the course
of our lives and relationships, determining high lights and low points along
the way, then the pre-step to that process, this deeply inward focusing, might
be understood as soul-seeing, where we move our search light away from the
outside world and point it in a different direction, illuminating the activity
taking place in the window through which we view that world. The concept sounds complicated, but it’s
really not. Think about the expression
of what it means to look at or see the world through rose colored glasses, and
you’ll have a great example of what this means.
This
week’s Torah portion, Shoftim, offers us deeper insight into the type of
soul-seeing we need to do before embarking on the interactive work of teshuvah. Usually interpreted as a portion focused on
the establishment of an ancient judicial system, the Torah reads: “Judges and
officers you shall appoint for yourselves in all your gates.” What gates are we talking about? According to
Hasidic tradition, those gates mentioned in the text are more than the big city
gates. As Rabbi Lew also points out: we
learn that there are 7 gates - or better windows to the soul of every human
being. 2 eyes, 2 nostrils, 2 ears, and
the mouth. Everything that passes into
our consciousness must enter through one of these gates. And appointing judges
for those gates comes to mean that we seek to acquire discernment over that
which influences our consciousness, that which passes through our gates. So, the passage from the portion really
beckons us to look deeply into our own systems of discernment and opinion and
even belief, to understand that all of it is a lens that colors our impression
of the world and our relationships. [2]
As many
of you know, I spent the last 2 weeks of July in India as a part of American
Jewish World Service’s 2013 Rabbinic Delegation. Inspired by the Jewish
commitment to justice, American Jewish World Service works to realize human
rights and end poverty in the developing world.
One of the most difficult parts of the trip was coming to understand
that how I see the world and the characterizations I understand as defining
concepts like failure, success, liberation, and oppression are not universal,
but are in fact specific to the western cultural lens to which I am
conditioned. At one point, the women in
our rabbinic group had the opportunity to meet with the women of the rural
village in which we were working. We
asked the village women to tell us about their system of marriage and
family. They shared that in India,
marriage is not about individuals, but rather it is about families. When a
couple is married, they do not live separately in their own house but rather
move in to the groom’s parent’s house (in which sometimes grandparents still
live), where they will continue to live.
Boy did we have a hard time with this, and our immediate evaluation of
their system was really negative. What a
system of oppression – where were the rights of the individuals to choose
whether or not to partner with another,
and where were the opportunities for them, if they even did choose each
other, to start their own life together without the burden of their entire
family, I wondered? But then the village
women asked us to tell them about our system of marriage and family life here
in America. And when we explained first
that marriage in and of itself wasn’t mandatory, but for those who chose it,
marriage was really about the individual choices of 2 people to share their
lives – nothing more and nothing less, the village women stirred a bit. “But where do you live?” they asked. And when we said that often newlyweds share
their own apartment or home together, without other members of the family
living with them, they became even more uncomfortable. “But how do you take care of your parents and
grandparents when they get older and need you?”
And let me tell you – any negative judgment that I was feeling about
their ways was shared equally in the negative judgments they were feeling about
our ways. And so, when the conversation
moved to the topic of poverty eradication and human rights, we had to
understand that the things we assumed were base-line, shared systems were actually
completely different. That’s not to say
that the village women didn’t yearn for empowerment opportunities for
themselves, nor did it mean that they didn’t want to improve the living
conditions in their village no less their country – in turns out we shared the
same values and desires, but the way they envisioned what that might look like
proved entirely different than any Western ideal I know of. It wasn’t until we were able to
acknowledge our own lens of assumptions that we were able to find
common ground.
The same is true for our own selves and
souls. Before we can do anything that
begins to address the world outside of ourselves, we have to develop a keen
awareness of the driving personal forces behind the thoughts we think, the
choices we make, and the actions we take.
And there is no real way to account for, and certainly not to atone for
our choices and actions, until we can be aware of that window in each of us,
which refracts every one of our assumptions and thoughts, no less behaviors in
the world.
Because
we can’t begin to look outwards and assess our engagement with the rest of the
world until we attempt to search out those places where the light doesn’t
always shine so brightly.
So this start of Elul, take some time, maybe
it’s a few minutes, maybe it’s an hour a day, and take a good look at your own
window. Spend some time there and study
closely what you find. You just may
discover something that you didn’t even know you’d lost, but once found, will
lead you on a path of return, assuring that your life and the lives your life
touches will be all the better for it.
2 Lew, Rabbi Alan. This is Read and You Are Completely Unprepared.
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