Pushing Forward to Get Back Home

In his incredible book, “This is Real and You are Completely Unprepared,” Rabbi Alan Lew writes of how each of our lives “is a strange dance of pushing forward to get back home.”  Pushing forward to get back home. And he writes of the power of this particular quarter of the year in which we find ourselves right now (no, not the summer, but the period of months that begin just before Tisha b’Av and continue through the High Holy Days) to impact our path on that journey, all through the process of teshuvah – that turning and returning to the best of who we can yet be.  For most, I think, teshuvah-talk doesn’t really start until Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, but the truth is, Jewish tradition begins the teshuvah conversation much earlier – seven weeks earlier to be precise, marking the start of a period of time that many, myself included, believe is of real consequence.

On Tisha b’Av, we lament the calamities of our people throughout history, but we also lament the calamities of our own lives.  The Temple is always a metaphor for the soul’s wholeness, and when we mourn the Temple’s destruction, we mourn too the brokenness of our own souls, of our relationships with each other, of the brokenness and destruction in our world.  Something that this year in particular wasn’t hard to do.  According to Lew, “Tisha b’Av is the moment of turning, the moment when we turn away from denial and begin to face exile and alienation as they manifest themselves in our own lives – from God, from ourselves and from others... Teshuvah is the gesture by which we seek to heal this alienation and find connection, reconciliation, and anchoring in our lives.” 

And so this Shabbat, the first Shabbat after Tisha b’Av represents our first step out from the exile and despair of Tisha b’Av.  It is called Shabbat Nachamu- "Shabbat of Comfort," referring to the opening verses in the Haftara we recite tomorrow morning, where the prophet Isaiah eases the people’s anguish after the destruction:  Nachamu nachamu ami – take comfort, take comfort my people.  So whereas Tisha b’Av immerses our souls in a place of darkness, this Shabbat of nechama, of comfort, comes to teach that although desolation and alienation feel so all-consuming, we must not give up hope, we cannot shut your eyes from seeing our self and our world from the way they might yet be.  

But how do we do that?  How do we move from immersive despondence to eyes and heart open to the promise of a better tomorrow?

This week’s Torah portion, which is always read on Shabbat Nachamu offers a powerful insight right as it opens, as Moses recounts what is perhaps one of, if not the most heart wrenching part of his own story.  Speaking to the generation that will cross over into the Promised Land, Moses shares this with them: I pleaded with God, I begged God with all my soul “O God, You let me see the works of your greatness and your mighty hand. You whose powerful deeds no god in heaven or on earth can equal! Please, let me cross over and see the good land on the other side of the Jordan.”

But God says, no.  Moses continues: “But God would not grant me my wish and said, “Rav lach!” Enough!  Never speak to me of this again.”

Moses - the only one to see God face to face - so longs just to touch, to step onto the land, to which he’s dedicated his life to lead the Jewish people that he literally begs God to take back the Divine punishment that forbids him to get there.  “God, you can do anything, he says, I’ve seen you perform miracles.  Please, do this one thing for me, your most loyal servant.”

And still, God says no, rav lach, you already have so much Moses.  This is enough.   Moses, who has had it all, is left with one thing he can’t have. He is left longing for something else. 

So many of us understand this story as one of failure or God’s abandonment, but I think we read it on Shabbat Nachamu because it is in fact just the opposite, as it gives us back our sense of life.  We don’t ever get there – to the finish line.  It’s why every year at Passover, we always say “Next year in Jerusalem.” We never get there.  None of us do.  And the truth is, every arrival that seems like a finish line, really only turns out to be another starting point.  But there is a beauty and a gift of longing deeply for something.  It gives us something to strive for, something to move towards, in particular in times when it would otherwise seem like we couldn’t go on.  Robert Browning must have known this deep Torah truth when he famously wrote: “Ah but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp.”

So this day, this Shabbat of comfort, amidst a still shattered world, we are called to rise up from amidst the ashes, and ask ourselves what is it that we long for? What is it that we ache for? What triggers in us a sense of yearning that is strong enough to drive us forward out of yesterday and into tomorrow?  And then, can we hold on to that longing, that yearning to really feel it sink it and move us? 

So as we move forward for the next seven weeks leading us up to Rosh Hashanah, the renewal of our world and our souls, we need to awaken this longing in our souls. We can ask ourselves: in what way are we trading in our deepest desires for something less than – in what way have we placated our souls with nourishment that doesn’t truly sate us?  And how can we raise up our awareness of our longings so that it might become a vehicle turning us toward teshuvah, pushing us forward to get back home? 

It’s not about destination.  It is always about the journey.  It is the longing that pulls us toward wholeness.  It is the longing that will bring us back home.

The Climate of Our Hearts

From the Washington Post earlier this week:  “On July 23, 2012, the sun unleashed two massive clouds of plasma that barely missed a catastrophic encounter with the Earth’s atmosphere.  …Had this event occurred a week earlier when the point of eruption was Earth-facing, a potentially disastrous outcome would have unfolded.”

There but for the grace of God, right?

There is so much that is out of our control, all the time.  And take that on any level: from the small stuff that seems big when it is happenings – like getting stuck in traffic jams when we have someplace to be to the big stuff that is actually immensely significant – like life-altering events that we’ve done nothing to invite.  For a species that thinks itself so powerful, perhaps we’ve missed something along the way.  

I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately.  As some of you know, I am a participant in a 2 year fellowship of the Institute of Jewish Spirituality.  In addition to intensive study year round, the fellowship includes four 5 day retreats, one from which I just returned late last night.  The retreats are silent, meaning that the only sounds participants intone for the majority of the time are words and melodies of prayer during worship time.  We spend significant time in contemplative meditation, Torah study, and embodied practice.  Most of my time during this last retreat was spent contemplating this issue:  in this world where so much doesn’t make sense, where so much seems beyond our will, what is within our grasp to hold on to? What are the atmospheric conditions of our lives that we can actually control?

The Chasidic masters of Jewish tradition answer that question: The only thing that any one person can actually control is the climate of their own heart.  Is my heart warm and open today? Or is it cold and closed?  That is it.  And that, they say, is truly a matter we can direct.  The condition of our heart is the seat of our dominion.  And who and what we let into our hearts is ultimately the only measurable that matters.   

I confess I am with you this Shabbat with an aching heart.  The pain of our world, both near and far, is something that I feel most deeply.  And with each divide, each blinded us versus them, each skewed news report stewing in its own sanctimoniousness, each hateful remark, each tunnel and bullet and bomb, the walls of self-justification amass higher and higher, obscuring the light from entering our hearts.  And I swear to you I can feel the cosmos cracking.

I do not want to speak with you tonight about right and wrong.  About justification.  About what is fair or not.  About any of the things that speak to those parts of us that stimulate our egos.  If there is a time and place for those things, it is certainly not in this moment.  I don’t want to speak with you about Israel or Hamas, about politics and media, about Europe and anti-Semitism, about a shot down airplane carrying the world’s best hope for a cure for AIDS now lost along with hundreds of other souls, about families that have no home or food, children alone on a border in Texas or shot down in Chicago’s streets. About people who sit with us together tonight here in this sanctuary who feel more alone than we could ever know.   I want to talk about how our hearts respond when we encounter any of these and more.

This Shabbat puts us smack dab in the middle of the three week time period called Bein Ha Meitzarim that carries our people from day we memorialize the walls of Jerusalem being breached to Tisha B-Av - the day we remember the destruction of the Beit HaMikdash, the Temple in Jerusalem.   Of note is that, although there is certainly historical detail about the events leading up to the Temple’s destruction and our people’s subsequent exile, our tradition frames our memory of the events differently.  When explaining why the Temple was destroyed, instead of citing reasons like the enemy army’s strength, the Talmud instead teaches that the Temple was destroyed on account of moral failures, the most well-known narrative rooting the cause of the destruction to something called Sinat Chinam – translated most often as baseless hatred, but if taken literally, it is the condition of hating graciousness – the denial of benevolence, the abnegation of mercy, the rejection of compassion.  What, according to Jewish tradition, led to the destruction of the place where we felt most connected to the Divine?  The condition of closed-heartedness.

What leads to the destructions of our deepest connections to ourselves, each other, our world, to the Divine? In our day as well, the condition of closed heartedness.

We cannot control the disasters that loom in the universe or the wars that rage on battlefields and in other’s souls.  The only question for us is what is the climate of our heart?  Is it heat or ice? Vulnerable or locked up tight?

I wonder what it would be like if we could go through our days entirely open-hearted?  I wonder if our hearts could sense the echoes of isolation, fear, and despair that our ears cannot perceive? I wonder if we could find a way to hold each other with increased sensitivity and compassion?  I wonder if we could heal the brokenness in each other’s hearts with our own hearts?  And if we did so, what sort of Seat of Holiness, what sort of Mikdash we might build together again?  Shabbat Shalom

Simultaneous Joy and Pain: The Wisdom of the Counting of the Omer

(Originally published on Huffingtonpost.com, based on a sermon I delivered on April 29, 2013)

This year at our Passover Seder, I experienced something deeply powerful -- something I had not felt in the context of Passover before. Like many, we spend much of our Seder going around the table, each reading a section from the Haggadah out loud. Generally, because our Seder is populated partially by adults and partially by very young, mostly illiterate children, we move from adult to adult, skipping over the smaller folks at our table. But this year, when my husband finished reading his part, my Kindergarten age son said he'd like a turn to read.

And all of a sudden, space and time expanded for me, while I assume it continued at a normal pace for everyone else. It felt like a worm hole opened, and in what must have actually been only a second between my son saying he wanted to read and his starting to pronounce the Haggadah's words, his entire life so far from his birth until that moment flashed through my mind. And in that 5 1/2 years contracted down into 1/60th of a minute, I felt the most profound, overwhelming joy, and at the very same time, an all-consuming sadness. Joy at the fact that my son could actually do what he was doing: he could read, was somehow growing up, increasingly less toddler like and more and more fully real. Sadness that my son could actually do what he was doing: he could read, was somehow growing up, increasingly less toddler like and more and more fully real.

This is the time of year when we Jews find ourselves in the middle of the annual observance known as Sefirat haOmer, the Counting of the Omer. As such, beginning on the second day of Passover, each day (technically evening since Jewish days start at night) we say a blessing and literally count which day and week it is in the seven-week cycle, leading us up to Shavuot, which falls on the 50th day. What began as an ancient agricultural-spiritual holiday to mark the weeks between barley and wheat harvests has evolved significantly over time.

Thanks to the rabbis of the Talmud, we understand the Counting of the Omer primarily as the communal spiritual re-enactment of our ancestor's process of journeying from the Egypt for 49 days to the Torah being given to them at Mt. Sinai.

Thanks to the Kabbalists, we also understand the Omer time as an individual opportunity to refine and perfect areas of our own lives as we leave our own individual Mitzrayim -- whatever narrow and constricted parts of ourselves hold us back, and then travel to a place where we too can be open and receptive to whatever Revelation awaits us.

In either case, most important is the idea that we count up, not down, to express our ancestors and our own increasing excitement as they and we step closer and closer toward Revelation.

But the period of the Omer, as you might know, is also overshadowed with the tone and rituals of mourning, thus the associated prohibitions against haircuts, shaving or getting married, except on Lag B'Omer , the 33rd day of the Omer. The question is: Why? Why the sadness and mourning, if the time should have been completely celebratory? Think about it: Our ancestors were finally free -- no Egypt, no taskmasters. They could live life on their terms and would soon culminate their seven-week trip with the most momentous, holy experience of meeting the Divine and receiving of the Torah. Not much to be sad about, right? There are a few explanations for the mournful tone of the Omer period, mainly having to do with a plague that was said to have ravaged a Jewish community at the time of the Mishnah's composition. But I wonder if there isn't something more at play?

When we think about our own journeys out of whatever enslaves us, into moments of liberation and redemption and then ultimately to moments of real awakening and revelation, what are they really like? Are they filled only with excitement and joy? Or are they more complicated than that?

As a person whose job privileges her to share many important moments in people's lives, I have seen this complexity -- simultaneous overflowing joy and sadness -- particularly, but not exclusively at life-cycle events, made manifest in tears. Tears that society and Hallmark card commercials suggest are wholly joyous, but which I know also contain an honest sorrow. Both feelings evoked by the same experience, at once deep happiness for the arrival at a new marker, and also grief that the arrival at said marker comes with the knowledge that all the previous markers won't be sought out and reached again. It's in these moments that we live in both worlds, but out of which we all have to make a choice: which sensibility we will choose to let color our experience? When we arrive at these crossroads, one the path of joy and optimism and one the path of sadness and regret, how do we choose which route to take?

The Omer tradition, linking Passover to Shavuot, gives us the answer. This set of seven weeks, each made up of seven days, enables us to live in the real, complicated world of emotional complexity, fully, experiencing both joy and sadness -- incarnate in each day of the counting. But when the last day of the Omer concludes, the mourning ends. There is a reason that the moment of Revelation happens the first day of the eighth week, the 50th day -- the day after the last day of the counting. Because to experience Revelation, we can't be in mourning. We have to release it, and take that deep breath that acknowledges that we have a choice to make: Will we view life as some sort of diminishing, increasingly limiting count down to the end -- a road that ultimately leads us back to Mitzrayim, to the death of the spirit -- or will we see life as opening to an unending fount of opportunity, hope and joy -- a road that is the promise of a Revelation at a mountain point in an open, awaiting, uncharted land?

The wisdom of the Counting of the Omer is that it enables us to live in both worlds for a bit. The moments in between, those moments where only a second in real time passes, but a lifetime flashes through our mind's eye, those moments between Mitzrayim and the Mountain, that's when the real awakening happens. But you can't stand at Sinai unless you are awake -- heart, mind, body and spirit not somewhere back where you've been before, back in Mitzrayim, but open to the only place and moment there really is: the Present.

Back to our Seder: So I'm in this out-of-place-and-time experience, fully immersed in my seemingly conflicting feelings. And then, I hear my son carefully sound out: "God -- took -- us -- out -- of -- E...E...E...g...." And just like that, I am back. Back from this journey into the realm of my own reflections and emotions, because my son needs my help. "Egypt" I say. "Egypt with -- a -- strong -- hand..." he continues. And my eyes well. And there is no longer any sadness. But neither is there joy. I am simply and only and entirely filled with the most deep and overwhelming sense of gratitude and wonder instead.