Dark Days on The Road to Return

"Lopes Street Before the Fire" by Pete Hocking*

So already, it's the Hebrew month of Elul, the specially designated time of the year during which many Jews dedicate themselves to teshuvah, or return, or repentance, or atonement--whatever you might want to call the process of getting it right with God and oneself. Or perhaps I should call it the annual opportunity to get it right, to come back into meaningful relationship with oneself and God.

For a number of years, the way I prepared for the High Holy Days and the Days of Awe--the ten-day period beginning with Rosh Hashanah and culminating with Yom Kippur--was by doing all or most of the exercises in Simon Jacobson's 60 Days: A Spiritual Guide to the High Holidays.**

But this year, I knew instinctively that this wasn't the right course for me: I just couldn't imagine writing a letter to God--one of the early exercises--because I was feeling too rebellious, too alienated, too fundamentally angry to go down this path with any sort of authenticity. "Stiff-necked," I suspect, might be the apt biblical adjective to describe me this year. God, say many Jewish sages, gets closest to the brokenhearted; my problem has been that not only have I been feeling hardhearted (perhaps because of the coronavirus pandemic, our current racial pandemic, our current political climate), but I've been relishing feeling hardhearted--maybe because I feel like I'm being the real me.

Picture at the Top of an Article on the chabad.org Web Site

And at the same time, the real me is Jewish. So to pay no attention to the Jewish ritual and ceremony associated with this season would also feel inauthentic and wrong. So what should be my 2020 solution, I wondered, given my rebellious state?

My husband and I were headed to our cabin just west of Williamstown around the time I was contemplating this, and my instincts told me to be sure to pack Rabbi Alan Lew's This is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation.*** I'd read it twice before, gratefully; my memories of Lew himself were that he welcomed and wrote for the sometimes egotistical, sometimes hardhearted, and always humanly flawed (like himself) whom modern Judaism understood both as normally American--and as spiritually workable.

As I had in recent years, I'd paid attention to the Jewish holiday of Tisha B'Av, observed several weeks before our trip, by reading Lew's chapter about the walls--those of the Temple in Jerusalem and other more metaphorical ones--falling down. I'd thought about the human experiences of brokenness, loss, disorientation, and despair, but I kept feeling anger rather than despair: I couldn't help thinking about the dangerously irresponsible ways so many critical situations in our country have been handled by our President and his henchmen in recent months. There were always going to be walls falling down, but some of them didn't need to crush the life out of so many people.

Then, out at the cabin, on the Wednesday afternoon right before the beginning of Elul, I read the chapter entitled "The Horn Blew and I Began to Wake Up: Elul." At first, I felt disconnected: more generalities about the importance of introspection and self-evaluation. Really, I thought? Weren't those two things largely responsible for my rebellious state? Lew calls Elul "a time to clarify the distinction between the will of God and our own willfulness" (67). Not only did I know that I generally neglected most of the mitzvot that distinguish the Jewish righteous (though I am a pretty good daughter to my two elderly parents), but I also knew that I was relishing my willfulness because I didn't want to submit to all of those rules and become invisible even to myself.

Then Lew recommended three routes to self-honesty: prayer, meditation, and focus on one thing. Prayer and meditation: ugh, I thought, imagining how phony I'd feel undertaking them this year. 

But Lew's third option intrigued me, and felt like something I might be able to do with whole-heartedness****: "Just choose one simple and fundamental aspect of your life and commit yourself to being totally conscious and honest about it for the thirty days of Elul" (72). Paraphrasing some directions in Deuteronomy about eating after making a sacrifice, Lew explains, "We should eat only what our soul desires, only what our body requires, and not what our unconscious desires bid us to eat" (73).

During this pandemic, when I've tried to moderate my eating desires, recognizing that some of them are about the stress, sadness, and the disorientation induced by the pandemic, I did so thinking about my physical health: I didn't want to gain the COVID 19. But it had never occurred to me to think spiritually about my desires to eat, to think that all food could be soul food.***** That said, it did occur to me how "different" it felt to eat the results of trying a carefully chosen new recipe.****** As Lew explains, "The truth of our lives is reflected in everything we do, and if we focus on even one small part of our lives, it brings up the entire truth of it" (76). I hope this is true. Meanwhile, I'm thinking about when and how our fulfilled and unfulfilled desires harden, soften, or break our hearts.

Lew further engaged me when he advised "shifting our gaze from the world itself to the window through which we see it, because that window [is] the screen of our consciousness" (77). It made sense. I'd heard of rose-colored glasses; I'd also had moments as a driver when I realized that I needed to put on the defroster or to wash that film of green pollen off my windshield before driving one block further. 

I don't know what the pandemic does to our personal windows, or what too much news-watching and news-reading does to them, but I do know that we can easily interpose something between us and "the world" that fosters our not seeing clearly. I mean, there I was, reading Lew's book through the window of my rebellious anger. I give him a lot of credit for breaking through my anger, which he did by making so much sense and making teshuvah something anyone could do.

Lew explains that the distorting and obfuscating schmutz on our windows is in huge part made up of our desires, recognized as such or not. Not only is desire "a significant component of  . . . [our] consciousness," but it's "perhaps the most significant component" (91). Too often, our desires tamper with our fields of emotional and spiritual vision, sometimes even blind us. We wish and we want; we hope, and sometimes we hope against hope fervently. It becomes all too easy to chastise ourselves for those desires that don't materialize. But that self-flagellation won't help us.

That's why I love it when Lew gives us all teshuvah hope by reminding us that desire is real, inescapable, and inherently neither bad nor good: when it's a "beautiful delusion" (91) that ultimately harms us and those we love and care about, it's a problem; when it exists as "the basis of our creativity, our productivity" (89), it's a motivator, source, and inspiration." There's no doubt that there are a lot of different kinds of desires in between those two extremes.

Don't ask me how and when I got it through my head that I shouldn't want what I didn't already have. But I went through a period of many years trying to ignore desires, especially those that might reveal my pride, ambition, self-confidence, or any kind of dissatisfaction with my personal status quo. I felt permitted to want new, big, beautiful things for others but not for myself. 

I'm glad to say that I don't feel that way any more, but I do regret that I spent so much time feeling that I shouldn't have desires, and sometimes that regret turns to anger: I wasted so much time, and our time on earth is limited. It's hard to admit how much energy I put into trying to desire nothing when I might have put it into creating and sharing something beautiful and true--which is my desire now.

So yes, I'm angry this year. Not enraged, but angry. Not as angry as I was a few weeks ago, but angry. Currently, I know so many people who, during this time of pandemic and presidential ugliness, are consciously trying to be grateful for things--not insincerely so, but very deliberately. I'm not. My goal is to know exactly what I am actually feel when I'm feeling it. I've already spent a lot of my life trying to feel grateful for things that didn't really satisfy.

The authentic self is calling the shots right now, and I'm listening. So while others are naming what they're grateful for, I'm staring into the darkness. I'm less afraid of darkness and uncertainty, of being awake and alone in the dark, than I used to be when sleeplessness felt like failure. Funny how The Wizard of Oz comes back at moments like these: I've always been pretty good in the brain and heart departments, but not in the courage department. The first kind of courage I'm cultivating is the courage to be me. The second is the courage to get to know the dark, so that I can experience and appreciate it as just as natural as the light. I'd like to feel equally at home in the dark and the light. That's a desire.

Teshuvah is about turning and returning. You would think that feeling authentic would be comfortable, but I'm not used to not requiring myself to be "on board" with the prevailing goodness currents and happiness best practices. Authentic selves can get rusty when they sit on shelves for too long, and I'm very curious about how they change and don't change over time. Meanwhile, I'm paying attention to what I eat: sometimes food isn't what my soul is hungry for, but other times, it's just what the authentic me needs. I can't believe how much peanut butter and whole wheat bread the authentic me requires these days!! Happy New Year!

 

Addendum on Sunday, August 30: It's funny how writing a blog post like this moves you forward to a new place, in the sense that when you press "Publish," you actually liberate some part of your brain, creating space on the disk of your mind. Until I published this, I had forgotten that I had been reading Psalm 27 "anyway"--even though I'd been feeling alienated from prayer (despite the fact that I prayed a lot when my mother had COVID-19, with need--and after she recovered from it, with gratitude). Psalm 27 is a really good "darkness" psalm. I really like Rabbi Brant Rosen's version of it.

 

* A photograph of Pete Hocking's "Lopes Square Before the Fire" in a Provincetown art gallery in June 2018.

** Jacobson, Simon. 60 Days: A Spiritual Guide to the High Holidays. 2nd Revised ed. New York: Kiyum, 2008. Print.

*** 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.  

**** Photos by Debra Vilinsky. 

***** By the way, Lew also advised that the same mindfulness could be applied to money and sex, among other things that people sometimes do mindlessly.

****** Ground lamb, rice, and zucchini