On God Avoidance and Other Activities in the Garden

So already, the other night as I was getting ready for bed, I realized I had no interest in reading other people's stories, fictional or not. That surprised me, because the week before I'd finished reading Daniel Mason's North Woods, which I loved--so much so that I'd gone to the library a couple of days later to borrow an earlier Mason book. And two weeks before that, I'd finished reading Omo Moses' The White Peril: A Family Memoir, which I also loved, so much so that I blogged about in February.

It's my habit to read a little before I go to sleep, and I wanted to take in some words, but not the kinds of words I'd been taking in during the weeks before. As I climbed into bed wondering, "What words, what words?" I realized I hadn't given God much thought or attention in the last few months. 

Why that thought at that moment? Probably for three reasons.

 

The first was that a couple of days earlier, I'd recalled how last fall, after my mother died, I'd gone to synagogue a couple of times and felt very disconnected spiritually. Despite the kindness of so many in my congregation, I knew I was not connecting with God through the services' formulaic prayer and familiar language, nor did I feel like making the effort to do so. My feelings were in no way a criticism of God, my fellow congregants, or liturgical prayer; they were simply an expression of my orbiting in this strange new mother-less galaxy.*

The second was that twice quite recently, God had entered my mind. But He'd stayed there only briefly, as if in passing.

 

The first time was while I was walking--something I hadn't done much recently because of February's stubborn ice, low temperatures, and gusty winds. As if to say "enough" to winter's persistent harshness, I headed out to my usual salt marsh on the last day of February when the potentially lethal ice had finally vanished from the trails. Being there reminded me that Donald Trump and Elon Musk don't have dominion over everything--certainly not over the salt marsh and the ducks' seasonal rhythms.

 

The second time was while I was reading Peter Beinart's Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning. The book explores the assumptions and priorities of various Jewish individuals and groups as Beinart understands them politically, culturally, and historically; offers his opinions about their practical and moral costs and benefits; and asserts that a consideration of Jewish values and teachings can and must guide Israel's way forward. In particular, I appreciated his discussion of Jewish chosen-ness, which is all about relationship to God and the obligations associated with that, and its implications for the future of Israelis, Palestinians, and American Jews.

 

The other night as I sat in my room, I found myself missing having some kind of an ongoing connection to God. But I also still wondered what part of my "what words, what words" conundrum was a response to Donald Trump's degrading treatment of Volodymir Zelenskyy  in the White House on a recent Friday, and what part of it was the latest expression of my experience of the loss of my mother--which is more akin to emptiness and disorientation than to sadness. 

 

Next to my bed was a book of daily meditations called Healing After Loss, a gift of a good friend, that I hadn't been reading regularly--only because I was feeling more weird than bereft. But seeing it there did remind me that I had a couple of other books written by rabbis that offered daily meditations, or short enough "chapters" to lend themselves to bedtime reflection. So I pulled out both Floating Takes Faith: Ancient Wisdom for a Modern World by Rabbi David Wolpe and Restful Reflections: Nighttime Inspiration to Calm the Soul, Based on Jewish Wisdom, written and edited by Rabbis Kerry M. Olitzky and Lori Forman. 

 

I read the first entry in the former and the March 3 entry in the latter. Remarkably, they both spoke to me, tempering my profound sense of puzzling absence.

The March 3 meditation in Restful Reflections, entitled "The Voice of God Has Never Stopped," talks about the Shema, translated as "Hear, O Israel"--the prayer that's known by heart in both Hebrew and English by virtually every American Jewish person, regardless of how they feel about being Jewish and how observant they are. The meditation's author, Rabbi Levi Meier, explains,

The 'Hear, O Israel' is a statement of faith, love and commitment to listen to God's voice. And to live that belief means bringing oneness and wholeness into the world. It means bringing people together, bringing unity and peace into the lives we touch. (51)**

For the last months, I've been wondering why I do what I do--literally, why I fill my hours with what I fill them with. Rabbi Meier reminded me that lots of what I routinely do, whether I'm an organizer or simply a member of the group, brings people together to do something meaningful and even pleasurable together. If that "meaningful" has peaceful aspects, my glass is half full, despite my nagging sense of absence.

 

A paragraph later, Rabbi Meier reassures that if one opens one's ear and heart sufficiently, "then the voice of God will enter your mind and your heart, and your actions will testify to the fact that God dwells here, now, in your room." Those words spoke directly to the possibility of lessening the distance between God and me, put there by me: what could be more distance-diminishing than having God come into my own room? It was as if I'd pressed "pause" on my personal spiritual CD player in late October, but the music had kept playing in the cosmos, ready always for me to press the button that would make the divine music "resume."

Next, I turned my attention to Floating Takes Faith. Actually I'd met Rabbi Wolpe once when he'd attended Shabbat services at my synagogue several weeks after October 7, 2023; he was the rabbi who had resigned from Harvard's antisemitism task force because he felt the group lacked a sense of urgency about the work it was doing. His column entitled "The First Question"--for some time, he'd published a column regularly in The Jewish Week--dealt with the first question God asks in the Hebrew Bible--to Adam, in the Garden of Eden, in Genesis 3.

"'Where are you?'" God asks, no doubt knowing that Adam is in the Garden of Eden--where else could he be? That was the part of the story I remembered. What I didn't remember was Adam's answer. As Wolpe explains, "Instead, it is a question of spiritual geography. Adam, understanding the import of God's question, answers that he was frightened, so he has been hiding."***

"Spiritual geography" immediately spoke to me since I've long been fascinated with inner landscapes. But Wolpe's reminder that Adam was hiding out of fear practically took my breath away. Just the week before, during my voice lesson, during a part of a Fauré song **** when I should have been singing out a beautiful ascending line, my voice teacher had said to me, "You sound like you're hiding."

I told her I probably was. My sisters had always hated my singing, so I had always felt I needed to conceal it around the house--and right now, I was singing in the house, my house. So my habit pulling back when I ought to be letting it rip was a well-established one. It won't surprise you to know that part of what I'm learning to do in my voice lessons is to let it rip--at least within the bounds of good vocal practice.

 

Letting it rip musically depends on a number of vocal factors, and one of them is having enough air, enough breath--and I often count on the experience of breathing deeply--whether I do so intentionally or suddenly realize I am doing it--to tell me that God is with me, or that there's the chance that God is with me.  

 

Wolpe's column comments, after talking specifically about Adam, that "Where are you"

. . . is not only the first question: it is also the eternal question. At each moment in our lives, this question is addressed to us: Where are you? Where are you spiritually? Where are you morally? What have you done with life, and what are you doing with it now? Are you proud of your conduct in the garden?"

Frankly, I don't want to deal with the question of what I'm proud of or not. I think there are any number of things I could be proud of, but an emphasis on being proud of how morally or ethically good I'm being (or striving to be) would too easily foreground judgment, put and keep myself at the center, and apply constant pressure.

 

But I like the other questions well enough, and I'd like to think more deliberately about what I'd like to do with my life going forward, should I be lucky enough to remain of sound mind and body. For sure I'd like to listen and hear. And I'd also like to get really comfortable with letting it rip, vocally and otherwise: the idea of not hiding out of fear appeals on every level.

So here I am, standing in the Garden. Except right now, for me, it looks a whole lot like my dining room, where I've been sitting for the length of this Sunday afternoon alternating between writing this blog and listening--to Ned Rorem songs (The Prince Consort's On an Echoing Road CD is beyond beautiful), to Paul Moravec songs (specifically to Jennifer Cano singing "A New America"--magnificent), to Gabriel Fauré songs. I am sure God is in these songs, and therefore He is in my dining room. Maybe it's the beginning of something--like less avoidance, or the renewal of something, or something altogether new. Time will tell.

* Screen Shot of Oort Cloud Formation Metal Print by Science Photo Library: https://fineartamerica.com/featured/oort-cloud-formation-claus-lunau.html?product=metal-print

** Olitzky, K.M. & Forman, L. (2001). Restful reflections: Nighttime inspirartion to calm the soul, based on Jewish wisdom. JEWISH LIGHTS Publishing.

*** Wolpe, D. (2004). Floating takes faith: Ancient wisdom for a modern world. Behrmann House, Inc.

**** Screen shot of "The Effect of Moonlight "(also known as "St. Valery Canal"), a painting by Eugène-Louis Boudin (1891), in the following blog: JDB. (2017, March 20). Clair de Lune redux. Wordpress. https://augenblickblog.com/2017/03/20/clair-de-lune-redux/

The Devil of Perfectionism

So already, when a word comes up in multiple places in a short period of time, I pay attention to it. Last week, I read the word "perfectionism" in three different places, all of which warned people away from it.

 

In my experience, perfectionists invariably want something good, and want to do something good. What separates them from others similarly motivated is their belief that doing everything right, that doing every little thing "excellently" and to the highest standards, is the best path toward their cherished aspirations. 

 

Being perfectionists, they're often both comforted and intimidated* by the word "best." They're often accustomed to doing things very, very well, and they fall back on the old habit of striving to meet high individual standards when they don't know what else to do in pursuit of their goals.

The irony is that according to what I read, pursuing perfection is precisely what gets in their way. Too much attention to doing things perfectly often blinds them to other possible if less "certain" ways of working toward their goals. Forsaking perfectionism, they might find themselves listening more to others, thinking more about  others (as opposed to the idea of others); writing really rough, really terrible rough drafts; or wondering at length what the neighborhood crows have been cawing about all morning.** Forsaking perfectionism, they might find themselves in less self-inflicted pain, even if there's other pain to be felt.

So what kinds of problems and challenges make us nervous and uncertain enough to fuel our perfectionist tendencies? pull us out of our comfort zones? proclaim to us that we're not fully in charge? make us feel stupid and small, even lost--and sometimes, dangerous and harmful?

I wasn't surprised that Julia Cameron talked about perfectionism as counterproductive in Walking in This World: The Practical Art of Creativity:

In light of all of this, I am not sure where we got the idea that in order to be 'real' artists we had to do things perfectly. The minute we see the world 'perfect' . . . , spontaneity goes out the window. . . . . (78) ***

When the goal is creating art, regardless of the type of art, we absolutely need to play and to experiment--and need to appreciate that "Anything worth doing well is worth doing badly" (79). In fact, creating bad art is generally believed to be a prerequisite for making good art. And the good news is that bad art, generally kept out of sight and earshot of others, usually doesn't harm them.

 

The next place I saw a take-down of perfectionism was in Rabbi Daniel Klein's column on the Hebrew College website. In "Elul: Beginning the Journey Home," Klein encourages his Jewish readers to examine their customary approaches to "teshuvah (repentance/returning)," often understood exclusively as "the process of reflection on and assessment of our actions and direction in life, making amends for misdeeds, and striving to live better lives."**** Having recently read in "a contemporary Hasidic book on spiritual practice" that "proposes that the core of teshuvah is not the self-assessment elements that lead to behavioral changes," Klein reveals that he is focusing his teshuvah efforts this year on "living with and in response to the God we find within ourselves and, of course, everyone we encounter"--and encouraging us to consider doing the same.

 

Not that how to do that feels obvious to all Jews. But relegating self-assessment to a secondary position makes being Jewish less intimidating during the annual High Holiday season of God's "judgment."***** The good news, according to the book Klein read, is that “'The Holy Blessed One does not require perfection, rather that we strive to serve with all our might….'" When it comes to teshuvah, the combination of sincere, effortful striving and loving intent atones, brings us closer to God, even when it doesn't yield "results." 

And that's the purpose of teshuvah: "reconnection to our unconditionally loving Source."  The key word is "unconditionally"--not conditioned on our achieving certain behavioral standards--which is not to say that we shouldn't strive and that we won't feel "regret for and sadness about our misdeeds." But perfectionism misses the point.

It misses the point in schools, too, where education--students' learning itself, students' coming to trust in their capacities to learn--cannot transpire outside of the relationships among teachers and students, each of whom bring with them each day the realities of their "traditional" positions in schools and society. And it misses the point in schools in which primarily BIPOC****** (black, indigenous, and people color) student groups, historically systemically deprived of the same quality of education as their white peers, are taught by white teachers.

 

I mention this because the third place I saw a critique of perfectionism was in From White Folks Who Teach in the Hood: Reflections on Race, Culture, and Identity, co-edited by Chris Emdin and sam seidel. Unlike so many educator critics who pick up their pens to call out the failures of school policies, political leaders, and other educators, the educators whose essays appear in this book put themselves under the interrogator's spotlight and share personal painful, discouraging educator moments. These moments led them to understand that their commitment to social justice and educational equality, especially as pursued by questing after mastery of their teaching craft--teaching perfection--could not make their whiteness a neutral reality for their students or themselves.

 

In the book's first essay*******, Maya Park discusses how, as a first-year teacher, she came to view "my imperfections as a teacher as inseparable from my racism," which led her to embrace perfectionism as "my tool against racism" (4). After a particularly disturbing and probably harmful interaction with a student, she concluded that "To pursue perfection was to dehumanize us both" (6). Needless to say, she needed to try something different; and she did.

 

In a later essay, Adam Seidel also explores the temptation to resort to perfectionism, even when it doesn't seem like the best response to a perceived problem, because what a better response might be seems vague and potentially self-incriminating. Seidel describes a moment in a summer staff meeting when, instead of trying to make sense of some disturbing data about the college graduation rates of their former students, the teacher group recommitted to their usual approach to preparing their students for success in college: "we are going to have to work harder to make sure our lessons are vigorously prepped and practiced, our school systems and expectations are tight, and we build a culture that celebrates academic achievement" (128).********* In a nutshell, they said to themselves, "Let's get even better at what we're always trying to do better rather than even think about doing something really different."

"The Man Who Swallowed a Bird" by Scott Ketcham

But Seidel recognizes the problem with this: "we
were working to turn passion into a pathology--one that builds on a foundational belief that 'better is good enough' or more specifically that 'better than is social justice,'" which he comes to understand "in the context of white supremacy" (129). In light of this realization, Seidel changes his behavior in his own classroom: "on my best days, I shifted my practices, hovering above my interactions with students, listening with a closer ear to my language an how power and whiteness were held between us" (129).

But he doesn't quite know how to lead his staff to the same realization and to co-created shifts in practice that might lead to "true" educational quality and social justice. Toward the end of the essay, he explains, "I wasn't confident enough to try and be wrong. The stakes feel obvious now, and I'd like to think I would do things differently if I could go back, but whiteness and power and perfectionism were holding me back" (130).

Adam is my former student (as is his brother sam), and it pains me to read about his "shame and fear" (130). But I so admire his courage in "going public" with his story of coming up short and regretting it in retrospect. And I also know that his sharing of his story, along with his analysis of what was operating inside of and around him, and his feelings about it then and now, is an act of leadership that encourages the rest of us to be brave enough to stumble into this difficult problem space with others and be as genuine and unguarded as we can be. Again, perfectionism is not the answer, and when it becomes the comfortable fallback when we don't know what else to do, it uses up the valuable time and energy that could be devoted to a critical problem.

One of the biggest problems with perfectionism is that it's too often accompanied not just by disappointment, but by crushing self-loathing.********* There's work to be done--whether it's the work of making art, doing teshuvah, or doing right by one's students. Self-critique must necessarily be part of that work at some point. But this is where Julia Cameron again comes to the rescue, often reminding her readers to "Be gentle with yourself while you grow accustomed to your new mental and emotional terrain" (Cameron, 141). In my experience, the devil retreats when the pressure to be perfect dwindles, then disappears. After that happens, the real work can be done, even if it takes a while, is often discouraging, and almost always refuses to conform to a linear path.

 

* Illustrations and quotations about perfectionism accompanying the following: MacNaughton, W. (2024, April 14.) On perfectionism. DrawTogether with WendyMac. https://club.drawtogether.studio/p/on-perfectionism-69a

** Photo included within the following blog: Petrak, C. (2014, March 4). A murder of crows. Tails of birding . . . and things with wings. http://tailsofbirding.blogspot.com/2014/03/a-murder-of-crows.html

*** Cameron, J. (2003). Walking in this world: The practical art of creativity. Penguin Random House.

**** Klein, D. (2024, September 1). Elul: Beginning the journey home. Hebrew College. https://hebrewcollege.edu/blog/elul-beginning-the-journey-home/

***** Original drawing accompanying Green, E.C. (2021, March 5). The triumph of teshuva. Times of Israel. https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-triumph-of-teshuva/

*(6) Screenshot of photograph included in the following: Chatterji, R., Campbell, N., & Quirk, A. (2021). Closing advanced coursework equity gaps for all students. Cap20: The center for American progress. https://www.americanprogress.org/article/closing-advanced-coursework-equity-gaps-students/

*(7) Park, M. (2024). Can we water ourselves and our students at the same time? In Emdin, C.& seidel, s. (Eds.), From white folks who teach in the hood: Reflections on race, culture, and identity (pp. 3-11). Beacon Press. 

*(8) Seidel, A. (2024). Much like all of the last. In Emdin, C.& seidel, s. (Eds.), From white folks who teach in the hood: Reflections on race, culture, and identity (pp. 125-130). Beacon Press. 

*(9) Photo accompanying the following: Sheryl. (n.d.) Say goodbye to perfectionism, and unleash your creative genius. thecreativelife. https://thecreativelife.net/goodbye-to-perfectionism/

Fielding Questions As a New Year Begins . . .

So already, when is a field a mountaintop?

1. When it offers a "peak" experience.
2. When, since you were a child, you've been unable to hear the song "The Sound of Music" without envisioning Julie Andrews* singing it exuberantly while running across a rolling meadow high in the Austrian Alps.

I bring this up because recently, I've been thinking again about the field in front of my husband Scott's and my cabin just over the New York border from Massachusetts. As some of you know, I've written about the field in past years as I've prepared for the Jewish High Holidays, often in conjunction with Simon Jacobson's 60 Days: A Spiritual Guide to the High Holidays.** In particular, I've written about the difficulties I've had stepping into the field, and especially with walking up to God--the King in the Field--and asking Him for what I want or need:

"When the king is in the field . . . every person has the opportunity, without petitioning for an audience, to go over to him, say hello and ask for whatever he or she needs. The king is smiling,  . . ., and he is predisposed to grant all requests. . . . It is a profound message of hope that we don't have to wait for Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur to find G-d. We can go out to meet Him now" (26).

For reasons I don't fully understand, this particular "invitation" to connect with God has always filled me with feelings of both yearning and failure. Though on rare occasions I have spoken directly and personally to God on my own behalf, my inclination is not to do so.

But here's the irony: I love the field and  generally feel that God is there as a presence, though not as a King. I associate the field with a state of integrated heart and mind that I seldom achieve in other places. Its natural beauty, seasonal cycles, and inherent spirit, combined with the quality of the time Scott and I spend together there, often makes the time I spend there a peak experience for me, so much so that when it's time to go home, I often find myself musing on the idea expressed on the back cover of Jacobson's book: "It's one thing to find happiness and life affirmation  when we escape to a mountain; it's quite another to be able to experience it when we are immersed in cruel, material life." Much as I may want to sustain the field feelings when I'm back home, I know too well from experience that I won't be able to for very long.

But am I confusing peak experience with some other kind of important positive experience? The bliss that I feel on my best trips to the field is not momentary; it extends over a period of days and leaves me deeply at ease rather than breathless with wonder. Can an experience be considered "peak" if it doesn't take one's breath away? And do such distinctions even matter? Isn't it enough to know there are multiple kinds of really positive experiences?

A funny thing happened to me on my way way to Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur this year: as I was yet again working my way through 60 Days, I encountered some statements about the field that I'd completely overlooked in previous years:

Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur are holidays. Elul [the Jewish month during which Jews prepare themselves for these holidays that happen early in the month of Tishrei] is amid workdays. We are in the field, we are still living our normal lives. Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur have a very powerful energy, because on those days we petition the King in his inner sanctum. But in Elul, we petition the King on our turf (26).***

The field as my turf? In how many blog posts had I positioned myself on the edge of or at top of the field that I had characterized as sacred and set apart from the places where I transacted the daily business of living among other people in the world?

 

Why had I overlooked this idea of the field, I wondered. My only explanation was that for decades. so much of my daily life has largely transpired on city streets and subway trains, in traffic jams and crowded squares, and in buildings and courtyards--places not at all reminiscent of fields. So in my life, the Berlin field and others not only represent, but actually are departures from "my turf."

But wait. Why was I obsessing over this? And about the criteria for peak experiences? "What a waste of time," I said suddenly said out loud --and then turned off my computer in disgust. 

 

But as I did, I remembered one of the questions I'd posed to myself as I'd begun my Elul reflections: "How can I break the habit of letting my mind get in the way of my heart?" Clearly, I hadn't made very much progress in this focus area.

The next morning, I awoke with no insights, and got busy with my day. I planned to visit my dad's grave at Sharon Memorial Park--it's Jewish tradition to visit the graves of loved ones before the High Holidays--before heading over to see my mother on the Skilled Nursing Floor at Orchard Cove. I shoved Sarah Hurwitz's Here All Along: Finding Meaning, Spirituality, and a Deeper Connection to Life--in Judaism (After Finally Choosing to Look There) *(4) into my bag just before leaving: I always a bring a book with me in case my mother takes an extended nap while I'm with her.

 

As usual, I got lost in Sharon Memorial Park. And I just had to laugh when I realized that now I lost in both the maze of the cemetery and the metaphor maze of my mind's making.

 

Finally, I found my dad's grave, where I spent some time imagining his voice and seeing his smile. And then I thought about how he is feeling increasingly gone to me: after all, my new grand-nephew--my dad's second great-grandson--could only have been given my dad's name--Benjamin David--if my dad were dead. And at the same time, I recognized that through this naming, my dad is somehow living on in the person of this beautiful little baby boy who will never know his voice and smile.

I would have liked to stay in the cemetery just a little bit longer, but the clock was ticking, and I didn't want to be late to Orchard Cove: for sure my dad would have wanted me to spend more time with my mother than at his grave. He always put her ahead of himself; he always put life ahead of death.

 

My mother was very cheerful when I arrived at her place, but she did sleep for about a third of my visit. So I had the opportunity to read most of the "Freeing God from 'His' Human-Shaped Cage in the Sky" chapter in Hurwitz's book.

 

It turned out to be just what I needed--a book that had questions that mattered and some answers to them. So thrilled was I to come upon them that I actually thanked my mother, my father, Sarah Hurwitz, and God (variously conceived, imagined, and explained in Hurwitz's chapter) for having combined forces to give me the opportunity to read it.

Early in the chapter, Hurwitz explains that "a God-shaped wall" had stood between her and God because she knew only one way to think about God: as "a Father/King in the sky who performs miracles, rewards us if we're good, punishes us if we're bad, and really enjoys our repetitive prayers to Him" (53). That wall began to crumble only after she went on a multi-day Jewish meditation retreat, and, in its aftermath, continued studying Judaism, but with a new understanding of where she had been going wrong before*****:

That retreat was when I first realized that I had been approaching the question of God backward. I had been starting with theology rather than experience. And even worse, I had been focusing on one particularly difficult theology--a theology that serves as a wall to the Divine for many modern Jews. (60)

It turned out that, like me, Hurwitz was generally prone to follow her mind before following her heart. As I reflected on the shift she knew she had to make, I realized again that the field is somewhere I actually did experience the Divine--until I tried to shoehorn that Divinity into the form of the King, to whom I should be speaking directly and am not.

Hurwitz further comforted me--and  included me--when she said, "While there are few things Jews agree on, there seems to be consensus that we cannot fully understand or adequately describe God" (62). After the retreat, she studied various Jewish conceptions of God; in fact, her book describes--yes, it seems somewhat contradictory that she would set out to describe them--at least nine different conceptions. There were more choices than I knew.

In retrospect, Hurwitz learned another important  lesson from doing her research, a companion lesson to the first that she learned: that "theology could be a gateway to even greater experience, expanding my sense of where and how the Divine could be" (63). Personally, I was glad that Hurwitz didn't talk about any fields--she'd said the Father/King was in the sky, not in the field--since I was tired of trying to apply metaphors to "spiritual realities" and, in the process, further distancing myself from the reality of the Divine.

 

For Scott, the field is the field—a place, not a symbol or metaphor, even though he experiences it and natural places generally as imbued with "spirit," a word he doesn't worry about capitalizing or not. If it offers an invitation to him, it’s an invitation to explore, to observe, to inquire, and sometimes to paint and draw. Earlier this month when I asked him why he'd extended the path around the field a few years back, he explained that his one purpose was to lessen the threat of Lyme Disease to both of us: where there are deer, there are deer ticks, and on a recent morning, we had seven deer in the field.

 

From Scott's perspective, the field and the path around it are one, despite the path's shorter grass, courtesy of his new weed-wacker. During his childhood summers, he simply walked through the fields on his grandparents' property in West Stockbridge, seeking to avoid only the shorter thorn bushes that occasionally cropped up among the tall, hissing grasses as he made his way through them. He still misses those days of parting waist- and chest-high grasses with his arms. 

 

For me, the field and the path around it are both places and symbols. The path represents my personal journey around and in relationship to the field, the more traditional symbol of the potential for connecting with God during the month of Elul.

Sometimes I envy Scott his less complicated but no less profound relationship with the field and the path: there are certainly times I would rather just be at the field and not think about it what it stands for and requires. And on the other hand, sometimes I like  thinking about the field as being more than a field. 

 

Since reading Sarah Hurwitz, I feel newly empowered to choose between, or even to alternate between,"just a field" and "more than just a field." As Scott said this morning, "Metaphors aren't truth." They're merely products of imaginations intended to guide us or enlighten us. If certain ones don't work for us, or cease to work for us over time, we should push them to the side and find ones that do.

Tonight begins the new Jewish year. Shanah Tovah U'metukah! May 5784 be a sweet, beautiful new year for us all, one in which we find the tools and truths we need, or they find us.

* from the Amazon web site:  https://www.amazon.com/Sound-Music-40th-Anniversary/dp/B0006OR0VC/ref=asc_df_B0006OR0VC/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=385619273957&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=10310214093701885398&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9002014&hvtargid=pla-403761234434&psc=1&tag=&ref=&adgrpid=82333347721&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvadid=385619273957&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=10310214093701885398&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9002014&hvtargid=pla-403761234434

** Jacobson, S. (2008). 60 days: A spiritual guide to the high holidays. New York: Kiyum Press. 

*** Pieter the Elder Bruegel The Corn Harvest (August) Oil Painting Reproduction https://www.pieter-bruegel-the-elder.org/The-Corn-Harvest-August.html

**** Hurwitz, S. (2019). Here all along: Finding meaning, spirituality, and a deeper connection to life--in Judaism (after finally choosing to look there). Spiegel & Grau. 

*(5) X image for @HereAllAlong: https://twitter.com/HereAllAlong/photo

A Month of Sabbaths

So already, in a recent post about the Sabbath, I promised to write again once I'd finished reading Judith Shulevitz's The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time.*  

 

Today, having finished this book, I am fulfilling that promise. As you can imagine, I've been thinking a great deal about Sabbath historically, religiously, and personally in these last weeks.

 

I encountered Shulevitz courtesy of a show hosted by Ezra Klein: Shulevitz was Klein's guest in January, and at a friend's suggestion, I listened to it--well, actually, downloaded and read the interview transcript. That interview led me to a rereading of Abraham Joshua Heschel's The Sabbath, a first reading of Shulevitz's book, and then a rereading of the interview transcript. 

 

Why the rereading of the interview? Because I sensed that something had changed in Shulevitz's own "Sabbath life" between 2010 when she'd written the book in and 2023 when she was talking about it with Ezra Klein. 

 

Just to be clear, more than a spiritual autobiography, The Sabbath World is a cross-cultural, cross-religious history of the concept of Sabbath and the practices and requirements associated with it.

 

As a result of reading it, I have new and deepened understandings of Sabbath's "development" and differentiation over time. For example, while I always understood that "Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy" urged the distinct separation between the first six days of Creation and the seventh, I now understand that various religious and political leaders over many centuries urged the distinct separation between Jewish and non-Jewish--though not necessarily Christian--Sabbath observance. The book also reminded me that Sabbath observance, like virtually everything else Jewish, varies for different Jewish individuals and groups.

 

Thanks to Shulevitz, I also now know more about Transylvanian Unitarians, Anabaptists, and Puritans than I ever did before, and I understand that the original rationale for today's abundant Sunday afternoon concerts and other artistic performances was much more about improving "other people" than profiting off the general population's interest in entertainment, distraction, and enrichment.

But despite its offering plentiful historical and sociological nuggets, The Sabbath World  is still in part a spiritual autobiography, as Shulevitz reminds us in the opening sentences of the book's final section (211).** Anticipating her readers' wanting to know how she keeps the Sabbath "now," she explains, "I have not changed all that much [in how I keep the Sabbath], and everything has changed for me" (211). What I couldn't tell was what that "changed everything" was beyond her much enlarged understanding of Sabbath's development and differentiation. 

 

I got excited when in that same paragraph she admitted that "I still like the idea of the fully observed Sabbath more than I like observing it," since I could recognize similar feelings in myself. 

 

But two pages later when she defined God as "the ungovernable reality commemorated by ritual" (213), I felt her retreating back into brainy historian mode, and I was disappointed that most the book's final pages were devoted to a dispassionate analysis of the costs and benefits of ritual.*** On the basis of that analysis, she seemed just a little too ready to distance herself from her longing for Sabbath ritual and observance. The mind and the heart don't always walk hand-in-hand.

What I had liked about her Ezra Klein interview--and maybe it was because he was particularly interested in the whole question of how a Jewish person observes the Sabbath while the other inhabitants of dominantly culturally Christian America go about their busy Saturdays--was that Shulevitz seemed to know just when to apply her vast knowledge of the Sabbath to his question. Maybe I was finally seeing the "everything changed for me" aspect of her experience that I hadn't grasped while reading her book.

 

The best way I can think of to tell you how this interview helped me approach Sabbath observance is simply to quote from it and offer an occasional comment****:  

 

• In response to Klein's question "'What are the Sabbath rules attempting to create?" Shulevitz explains, 

"'I would argue that they're trying to create meaning. I think of all the rules around the Sabbath . . . as creating a kind of frame,  . . . you could think of it as a proscenium around a stage, or you could think of it as a break after a line of poetry.'" *****

Because I like to read and write poems, I was taken by her line break metaphor: a line break separates what would otherwise remain connected and undifferentiated, slows things down, creates a space for breathing, for envisioning, for making meaning.

 

• Shulevitz's discussion about Sabbath puts at its center God and the created world, not the individual person's--or even the group's--merits and shortcomings. Its focus is not repairing the individual's strained or broken relationship with God and/or other people, though it may have that effect. It's about how "good" Creation, which includes us, is, not how "good" the individual is, can be, should be. It's a day about peace.

    "' . . . Sabbath is the time you're supposed to stop acting on the world. . . . You're supposed to let the world rest, as well as you. . . .

    "'And then on seventh day, God rests. But God doesn't just rest. He makes rest. . . . God was creating this system of meaning, which is based on stopping and looking back over what God had created to say, is that good? And it turns out it was good.'"

In this context, rest is a state of being, an orientation toward the created world, rather than a primarily self-referential not-doing or not-working. As Klein explains, quoting Heschel,  

“'Menuha, which we usually render with rest, means here much more than withdrawal from labor and exertion.' He [Heschel] goes on to say it’s something closer to, quote, 'tranquillity, serenity, peace and repose.' And I want to get at the distinction between rest, as defined by something you’re not doing — rest is I’m not working — versus rest as a kind of state I’m achieving."

Shulevitz has come to understand that at least for her, this "state of being" rest cannot be achieved in isolation: 

"'And the great lesson I learned from writing this book was, I don't have to yell at myself for not doing it. I can't do it until I become part of a community that does it, that makes rest something pleasurable, that makes it festive.'"

Shulevitz's lesson learned, with its emphasis on the joyful aspect of the communal Sabbath, coupled with her permission to fall short when observing Sabbath in isolation, reminded me of a stanza from the poem "Let Them Not Say" that Jane Hirshfield read on another Ezra Klein show:

Let them not say:  they did nothing.
We did not-enough.

With Shulevitz's and Hirshfield's words in mind, I can aim and aspire wholeheartedly to observe Sabbath without chastising myself for falling short of achieving and maintaining a state of rest--and how much can rest really be rest when it's coupled with the word "achieve"? 

 

• Later in the interview, Shulevitz further developed this idea of the welcoming aspirational  Sabbath when she talked about the Jewish idea of holiness (I'm just not sure if her discussion of holiness holds for other religious traditions):

"'One thing I would say about holiness is it means setting apart and perceiving as special. Certainly in the Jewish tradition, it is literally conceived as that, which is set apart. So we’ve already talked about creating these boundaries around time and setting it apart.

"'One of the things that fascinates me, and in a way it’s why I called the book “The Sabbath World,” is that it’s a sort of enclosed world that we can never reach. And holiness is a little bit like that. It’s this thing that’s beyond us. It partakes of a different order of being. It’s God’s order of being. We’re never going to get there.

"'The Sabbath sort of has nostalgia for the pure Sabbath we can never achieve built into it. And this is constant throughout — the rabbinical legends. There’s a wonderful legend about a Sabbath river that lies beyond our world. It’s always going to be just beyond our reach. The perfect Shabbat, the perfect Sabbath — we’re never going to attain it.'"

This wonderful Sabbath that none of us can really attain, but that we can sense sometimes, that we catch a glimpse of out of the corner of our spiritual eye, that we can experience for fleeting peaceful moments, that we can rest toward (as opposed to work toward) in the company of others or by ourselves--this is the idea I keep in mind that keeps me aspiring. 

An important benefit of reading The Sabbath World for me was that it also allowed me push aside the theories and uses of Sabbath that weren't a good fit for me. The book carefully delineates the many theories and uses of Sabbath across times, national boundaries, and religious traditions, some of which were deliberately designed to diverge from anything strongly or remotely Jewish. Consequently, I could recognize a number of non-Jewish Sabbath ideas that are and have been so mainstream in America that they shaped my ideas about Sabbath, even though they conflicted with the ideas of Sabbath I encountered in my Jewish education. Before I read Shulevitz's book, for example, the idea of resting on Sabbath for the sake of recharging, refocusing, and re-inspiring myself in preparation for "the work" of next week or next month completely overshadowed any notion I had of resting for God and in appreciation of Creation.

 

Essentially, what interests me now is trying to fulfill the commandment "Remember the Sabbath Day, to keep it holy." But unpacking the meaning of that commandment isn't easy. 

 

I have always known that "holy" had many different meanings and criteria for different people. But in these last weeks, I've also been thinking a lot about the word "keep"******--reading its many definitions, exploring its etymology. It can denote observe, but also mean to preserve and maintain, even to safeguard that which might be dismissed, tainted, or destroyed. Shulevitz talks about a revered German rabbi who raised the question of "what is there to safeguard the world from man" and then answered it with "the Sabbath." In this case is that it's the world, not the Sabbath, that needs safeguarding. But maybe both need safeguarding.

 

In conjunction with the idea of respectfully "keeping" valuable "things," the idea of covenant has been coming into my mind again and again. To my surprise, I find myself wanting to keep the Sabbath out of my sense that I'm part of a mutual promise and relationship between God and the Jewish people, and in solidarity with other Jewish people also trying to rest in order to keep the Sabbath Day holy.  

Trying to keep the Sabbath is getting easier for me. Notice that I said that it's the trying, not necessarily the keeping, that's getting easier. But, as my earlier blog post explained, I can feel myself resting in different places and ways. 

That's why I love the photo of The Sabbath World as it appears on Shulevitz's website--so much so that I'm posting it here again. Its cover photo is more lively and colorful than the one on the book that I purchased; not only does it present a slice of Creation, but it locates in it two companions strolling and being, suggesting that they're experiencing and appreciating both Sabbath's and Creation's peacefulness. Furthermore, the book sits atop a copy of the cover photo, emphasizing both Sabbath's connection to and separateness from Creation. It looks like a good Sabbath to me--a time set apart; an experience of Creation, relationship and rest; and maybe even the opportunity to experience a momentary sense of that Sabbath ever beyond our reach.

 

All of this brings me back to a poem I met at the end of my junior year of high school and fell in love with immediately, "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" by William Butler Yeats*******:

  I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

  And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;

  Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,

  And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,

Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;

There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,

And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,

I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

You can't clutch at peace, commandeer it, insert it on demand into your busy self- and world-centered life. You can only prepare yourself for it in hopes that when it "comes dropping slow," you can perceive and receive it, and then commune with the gift of it as it reminds you of your inclusion in the transcendent, unified scheme of things. And then, if you're lucky, you'll be able to remember it, to "hear it in the deep heart's core" even when life demands that you traipse the "pavements grey." 

I'm trying to give Sabbath the chance to come dropping slow. And I'm hopeful about the prospects of that since I'm thinking about Sabbath more as an opportunity than as a challenge I will probably screw up. I thank Shulevitz for helping me think about how best to create the space-in-time that might let me embrace that opportunity.

* This photo appears on Judith Shulevitz's website on the "Book" link: https://www.judithshulevitz.com/book/.

** Shulevitz, Judith. The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time. Random House Trade Paperback, 2011.

*** Multimedia Artist from Montreal | Valeriya's Art: Multimedia Artist from Montreal | Valeriya's Art Valeriya Khomar artist in Montreal creates abstract, contempo acrylics, mixed media paintings. Custom orders are welcome. Giclee prints are available. https://www.pinterest.com/pin/109001253472030797/

**** Illustration by Sefira Lightstone accompanying Chabad.com article entitled "Shabbat: An Island in Time": https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/253215/jewish/Shabbat.htm

***** Klein, Ezra. “Sabbath and the Art of Rest: Judith Shulevitz Shares the Wisdom of the Sabbath and Its Offering to a Modern World That Struggles to Umplug.” The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/03/podcasts/ezra-klein-show-transcript-judith-shulevitz.html. Accessed 3 Jan. 2023. 

*(6) WordHippo definition of "keep": https://www.wordhippo.com/what-is/the-meaning-of-the-word/keep.html

*(7) Photo included in the March 29, 2011 post in the blog A Mountain Hearth: Tale of Modern Homesteading and Modern Adventure:  https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjB3tOzhh0eBI2iLCRjExSz5ojF8I5ujvkBKtTRP_2qxTCiFxkc_ODPS6kzIsoqwwtZSVG1PRpSg3t0ITxy-aJtoilAagWRSvBBAPPgZK6ll2yuGHX5fETvd-V93OpVIg-8qeghltZAUKY/s1600/Innisfree+2.JPG