Strange New Light on the Road to Return

So already, it's the time of year when Jews are bidden to take stock of their spiritual and daily lives and to reconnect (or connect) with G-d. The King is in the Field, we're told, particularly predisposed to hear us throughout the month of Elul. There He'll be until the Days of Awe, the ten-day period book-ended by Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur during which we pray that we'll be inscribed in the Book of Life for the next year.

But preparing for the Jewish High Holy Days has been even more difficult than usual for me this year. 

In other years, I've used Simon Jacobson's 60 Days: A Spiritual Guide to the High Holidays* to guide me. But this year when I sat down with that book that's been like a friend to me, I felt like that field was nowhere in sight--even though I was sitting at the upper edge of the field right in front our cabin. Each day I felt worse--like I was feigning repentance, going through the motions of teshuvah.** I love the spirit of Jacobson's book, but I was heading away rather than returning. I understood that the goal of this was not to feel failed, hopeless, unworthy, and therefore deeply sad. So I stepped back and hoped another path might reveal itself. 

While I hoped and waited--some might call that prayer, but I didn't--I finished reading Jeannette Walls' memoir, The Glass Castle, and Lauren Groff's recent short story collection, Florida. As I finished Groff's riveting book, I realized I'd spent the last four days reading stories in which "home" offered little to no protection: some characters were living in states of physical and emotional neglect in places that were literally crumbling around them, some had been exiled by nature's destruction, some had drifted into homelessness voluntarily or involuntarily, some felt sad or angry within the walls of what others viewed as "happy homes," and some experimented with leaving homes that didn't feel like home in pursuit of something that was eluding them. Love and danger couldn't have been more intertwined, their combination most poignant and disconcerting in the stories with children.

The Jewish significance of all of this is that the fragility and impermanence of dwelling places, thus homes, is a major theme of the High Holy Day season. It's why my Jewish birthday,15 Tishrei, the first day of the holiday of Sukkot, begins a week of living, figuratively if not literally, in huts--an individual one is called a sukkah--deliberately constructed not to shield us from the elements. As Jacobson explains in 60 Days, 

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"During this time, we dwell in little huts (or booths) with a roof of palm fronds, branches, reeds or bamboo, in which we eat all our meals and conduct all the activities of the day which we would regularly do at home.

"These huts remind us of our total dependency on G-d--that our seemingly sturdy man-made shelters are nothing in the absence of His care. (118)

But to embrace a week of starlit, outdoor suppers in a symbolic structure is hardly to endure the separation from home, and the accompanying loss and the pain, that result from exile, expulsion, wandering, and dispossession, all of which abound in biblical and post-biblical Jewish history. In fact, the whole Days of Awe pre-season kicks off with the mid-summer holiday of Tisha B'Av, the anniversary of the destruction of the Second Temple--a whole nation's loss of the physical center of its collective spiritual life.****

Those of you who read my blog from time to time may already know that I've thought more about the significance of Tisha B'Av this year than ever before, hence my July post entitled "American July and the Three Weeks." Last week, I downloaded a book mentioned in a High Holy Days-related message from the American Jewish World Service because its in-your-face title--This is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation*****--seemed to speak directly to my newly Tisha B'Av-aware self. Tisha B'Av, as the book's author, Rabbi Alan Lew, explains, marks the calendar moment when we turn, keenly aware of what we've lost, toward the Days of Awe, toward the deliberate encounter with ourselves in preparation for them, toward G-d.

I began reading Lew's book right away. Immediately, there were connections between Lew's words and the complex separation from home that had dominated my fiction reading experiences of the week before. The power of Groff's stories in particular seems to reside beyond her language but because of her language: the crisp vibrance of her words and images evokes a substantive, wordless world that evades full exposure. The sensed reality beneath the surfaces her stories clamors for our brave attention and feeling, our persistence in the face our own uneasiness. Even when the world we're encountering is fictional, we often keep uneasiness at arm's length!

Lew begins his book with an italicized dream sequence: "Then the walls of the great house that surrounds you crumble and fall. You tumble onto a strange street, suddenly conscious of your estrangement and your homelessness" (12). Later in the same chapter, when his writing becomes more expository, Lew explains that "the houses we live in never afford us real security. Their walls and roofs are never complete--they never really keep us from the world or from harm, and it is only when we realize this that we are truly home." A little later, he explains how the very things we have put into place in our lives--"constructs" and constructions--"have been keeping us from the reality of our lives--how we have been using them to give us distance from the gnawing suspicion that we have no house . . . " (22).

Frankly, I wasn't sitting there nodding as I read this. But it did seem to suggest why I sometimes felt strangely alienated in some circumstances that many people deliberately cultivate and often prize, and strangely safe, comfortable, and "alive" in some "less desirable" places and situations. 

What made me know I would keep reading was Lew's summarizing statement at the end of the first chapter that likens the "concatenation of ritual" that carries us from Tisha B'Av to Sukkot to a "dance" that "begins with the mournful collapse of a house******* and ends with the joyful collapse of a house" and then explains that it "stands for the journey the soul is always on" (23). That "joyful collapse" gave me hope--it was just oxymoronic enough to feel like it might be a good fit for me.

I've kept reading--I'm now around page 60--sometimes understanding a great deal, sometimes wondering, sometimes feeling very confused. But generally feeling that I'm drawing nearer. Whereas in other years, I've envisioned the King in the field, this year, I'm thinking more about the collapsed house right beyond the field.

But gravitating toward a metaphor can't be confused with completing the process that it suggests and that I've just begun. There's so much in the first 60 pages I need to contemplate, and then there are all of those chapters I haven't even read yet. So in case you too are on a similar or related journey, I will leave you with several quotations that have made major impressions on me, and a few comments about each:

"Forgiveness, it has to be said, means giving up our hopes for a better past" (46). This makes perfect sense, but I've never quite heard it phrased this way. Its value is that it focuses us on what's present and future, not what's past and immutable. Forgiveness is a matter of letting go--not so much in order to be generous and admirable as to move forward and beyond. And that doesn't just apply to those things we believe other people have done "to us"; it also applies to those things we ourselves have done that we can't undo and that we can't forget doing, even if we've already atoned for them.

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"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 is capital in Jerusalem, . . .. Yet even while it stood, the Great Temple was 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. . . .Yom Kippur is, among other things, the day we enter the vacated space, even if only by proxy, . . ." (50). A couple of weeks back when I was feeling like any kind of authentic teshuvah was beyond me this year, I kept thinking about "the still, small voice" in the story of Elijah. I can't say that I think of "empty" space Lew describes as "vacated," something I might do easily if I were a Jewish Buddhist. I'm struggling with the whole idea of the Sacred Center and the Great Temple needing each other.

"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" (55). I had an intense positive experience the other night. Unable to fall asleep, which is unusual for me, I decided to act on Tisha B'Av's hot tip. I began listing in my mind all the things that made me sad. I cried quietly for a short time. And then I began breathing more deeply than I had in a long, long time--and not because I was trying to. I kept breathing that way for a while, then stopped, again not as a result of a decision I made. I felt different and better, though "nothing" had changed. Then I went to sleep. When I woke up the next morning, I still felt better. I felt as if I'd been cared for.

"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" (35) Rabbi Lew's Buddhist practice and beliefs strongly come to the fore in this quotation, I think. I want to agree with him, but I haven't lived my life with such a construct to guide me. And on the other hand, the few times I've drawn anything in my adult life, there's always been some kind of a house, some kind of a river, and some sense of all emanating from one source.

I hope to blog more about this book and my latest teshuvah efforts this holiday season--but I may not: I have a lot to read and do before the holidays begin a week from tonight. And so just in case I don't blog on this topic again, I leave you with a final quotation, especially important for anyone just beginning to think of any of this: "And when it is invested with our awareness, Yom Kippur, the day itself, has the power to heal, to atone" (31). I like the idea that the day itself is on our side! Whenever we begin to turn, it's not too late. May we all be inscribed for a sweet new year!

* Jacobson, Simon. 60 Days: A Spiritual Guide to the High Holidays. 2nd Revised ed. New York: Kiyum, 2008. Print.  
** As 60 Days explains, "The Hebrew word for 'repentance' -- teshuvah -- actually implies the opposite.  When you repent, the implication is that you're leaving the wrong path, regretting that you ever took that turn in your life. But teshuvah literally means 'return,' which implies that you are not leaving something, you are coming back to something" (48). 
*** Screen shot of photo found as part of this blog post: Oringel, A. (2015, September/October). What is the meaning of Sukkot? [Web log post]. Retrieved September 02, 2018, from http://www.townvibe.com/Bedford/September-October-2015/What-is-the-meaning-of-Sukkot/
**** The book I talk about in the next few paragraphs interprets this event as an important catalyst in the adaptation and "improvement" of Judaism--it's on page 53.
***** Lew, A. (2018). This is real and you are completely unprepared: The Days of Awe as a journey of transformation. New York: Back Bay Books/Little, Brown and Company. (e-book downloaded onto my Nook)
* (6) Screen shot of photo included in the following blog post: Akwisombe, S. (2014, October 12). What to do when it feels like your house is falling apart [Web log post]. Retrieved September 02, 2018, from http://www.sarahakwisombe.com/blog/2014/10/12/what-to-do-when-it-feels-like-your-house-is-falling-apart 
* (7) Weiss, A. (2016). The Second Temple Jerusalem [Painting found in Pixels]. Retrieved September 2, 2018, from https://pixels.com/featured/the-second-temple-jerusalem-aryeh-weiss.html