5767 has gone by, and 5768 starts.
I’m not motivated this week to comment on a passage we will be reading from Torah for Rosh Hashanah or for Shabbat Shuvah. This Rosh Hashanah is such a personal milestone for me I have a lot to reflect on besides that.
I have commented many times before about my view of being inscribed in the Book of Life or the Book of Death. Although part of the tradition, I’m not the biggest fan of the concept. Instead, I’ve looked at the Book of Life as the Book of Fully Living. We each have our own book, one that we fill with narrative; it may be exciting, joyous or adventurous. The book may be sad tragic, or even boring and pointless. Put together it becomes, to mix the metaphor, a tapestry. It is a wonderful testament to a life that affected other lives. If we experience and contribute to the beauty of God’s Creation, then we live fully. If we don’t, it is living something less than full, even to the point of a living death.
Have I been fully living? In the contemplative mood of the annual opening of the gates of repentance, I’m wondering what I have really done to make my book a Book of Fully Living. This reflection, if not brooding, is strong in my mind due to a few things which began five years ago.
Just before Shabbat Nachamu five years ago, I received an e-mail that was sent to the congregation I was involved with at the time. The e-mail was one filled with slander against a candidate for a rabbinic position at the synagogue. Although for my own reasons I had a lot of doubts about this candidate, I wrote back to the congregation in defense of the candidate, a piece about the Torah portion of the week and Lashon Hara. Because I enjoyed writing it so much, I wrote another Torah Commentary the week after, then the week after. It’s become a habit really. At the time, my niece had an obsession with Sesame Street’s Elmo, and the Elmo segments “Elmo’s World.” Somehow when singing the tune to Elmo’s world, I changed the words to “Shlomo’s Drash” and this column got a name (and a theme song).
Five years ago, I began to learn Aramaic. This in itself wasn’t remarkable, as I had just finished learning Biblical Hebrew. What was remarkable was this was the first of many classes leading to my Master’s in Jewish Studies. I’m now finishing the last two appendices of the last paper of that degree. I have had pause to look back, and to look forward. Looking back I see all the things I learned and all the perspectives that changed. I’ve struggled with some of those issues right here, and some I’m still formulating about what to do. But with the end of this part of my life, I feel like many graduates: I have a lot of fear. For five years I knew where all my brain power would be directed. Now I’m not so sure.
In that same five years I changed from an employee to a business owner. Given the status of my business, this is certainly the least proud part of my life. I’ve yet to become as successful in my profession as I would have liked, nor am I as respected in my industry as others. There are lots of things I can attribute to that, not least of all my intense attention to graduate school. Trying to fill the shoes of the previous owner, a man of mythic proportions to the clients, didn’t help. A grasshopper getting out of a shadow of a giant is never an easy task. Nor did being the proverbial corner tailor when Wal-Mart came to town, nor being a luxury item in a lot of very tight budgets.
For the first Rosh Hashanah in a long time, I keep asking myself the question "What now? Where do I turn next?” Instead of turning the page in my book of fully living with enthusiasm, I dread it.
The key word of the next two weeks is the word t’shuvah. In English we translate this word as repentance. Its root ShVB(ש××) actually means to turn. Repentance is really turning, reversing our direction. Earlier this year I motioned this in terms of Abraham Joshua Heschel’s notion of God in Search of Man. Humanity, since the Garden of Eden has been hiding and running away from God, who keeps asking “Where are you?” Most often, we run away from holiness. At any time, we as humans can merely turn around, reversing our direction and move towards holiness, declaring what cantors worldwide will sing over the holidays “Hineini! Here I am!” While we spend a lot of time asking God to forgive our sins, those things we did to run away from God, we need to also think about reversing direction and moving towards God and holiness. It is in that sense that the Talmud writes:
If one says: I shall sin and repent, sin and repent, no opportunity will be given to him to repent. [If one says]: I shall sin and the Day of Atonement will procure atonement for me, the Day of Atonement procures for him no atonement. [Yoma 85b]
On the path where God is in search of Man, and we do t’shuvah, turning towards holiness, we need to turn 180°, not 360°. Yet often we turn completely around, look towards holiness and then go back to the path we were already on.
A decade ago, I did change paths. Another use of the word t’shuvah is return. The word Baal in Hebrew means master, lord, or husband. A Baal T’shuvah is therefore a master of returning. Ten years ago, I was hardly even Jewish. I’d probably call myself a Taoist back then, and avoid virtually anything Jewish if I could. Yet, I somehow turned. Here I am today finishing a paper explaining a folio of Talmud after translating the whole thing from the Aramaic. Here I am getting ready to read and chant Torah on Yom Kippur. Here I am nearly every week, writing commentary on the Torah using Talmud, Midrash, and Targums.
Actually, I do remember the last time I felt so lost and directionless. It was a bit over ten years ago, when I graduated with my Master’s in Education from Loyola University. It was in that directionless vacuum that I became a Baal T’shuvah. Graduation seems to do that to people I guess, at least it does it to me. Maybe when we are walking on the road of life, or plotting the pages in our book of fully living, it’s hard to change direction while we are moving. We really do need to completely stop, or leave part of a page blank to start a new chapter. The thing that makes us stop more than any other is getting lost. When we are lost, we need to stop and take stock of the directions in front of us, and the direction we just came from.
The Days of Awe are a graduation of sorts. We made it through another year. Yet it also is a time to be a little lost, a little directionless and look around and get our bearings. It is only then we can pick the right path and turn towards holiness, because we know where it is. Hopefully we’ve learned what paths move away from holiness and which one looks promising. Then we move forward in the right, best direction.
Many books leave blank spaces between chapters. The Ten Days can be that blank space, the pause between chapters, so that the next one can be different than the last one. Books which repeat the last chapter are pretty boring, it’s when the characters change or deal with new things in a new way that we are engaged in the book. So too in our own books of fully living, to fully live means we need to change and do things differently. To remain static and do things as we always have is to be inscribed in the boring book, the book of living death.
This High Holiday season, I therefore wish you:
May your journey be towards holiness
In 5768, May you write a fabulous adventure in the book of fully living.
And of course
L’shana Tovah! Happy New Year!
No comments:
Post a Comment