This Is Real (4): Selichot and Teshuvah

Selichot (p.94)

The Selichot service on Saturday night... serves as a kind of grand overture to the High Holiday season.

Empty but important traditions (pp.99-100)

Please imagine this: You are out for a social evening with those very close to you, family or close friends or both. The evening begins with a wonderful dinner, and then, out of some vague sense - or perhaps a very strong sense - of family tradition and obligation, you all go off after dinner to participate in a basically empty religious ritual. Or perhaps you are by yourself, but you attend this empty ritual because you have very pleasant associations of having done so with your family and friends back in Cleveland or Detroit or New Jersey [or wherever]. Or perhaps it is not so empty for you. Perhaps you feel a great deal at this service, but you're really not sure if it's you or the service; if it's the ritual itself or the peculiar pain you've been feeling in your heart lately. Or perhaps you feel very little, but every year you harbor the hope that you will feel something this time, even though you never really do, and you always feel a little disappointed about this. But you don't really mind attending the ritual. After all, it's tradition, and even though you are sleepy from all the food, the music is lovely and the officiant is sometimes mildly amusing when he speaks. But basically you go not because you anticipate that anything significant will happen, but rather because this is what the family does every year at this time.

Unpreparedness and insufficiency (pp.106-7)

All our resolutions and strategies for coping, all our attempts to manipulate reality, to get cute with life, are thin reeds in the face of this immensity. Even if we've spent months preparing, when we reach this moment, we realize we are utterly unprepared.

And this is what we call heartbreak. Heartbreak is precisely the feeling that we have done out best, we have given it our all, but it hasn't been enough. Not nearly enough. And that is what it means when we say, "God is close to the broken-hearted." And this is what it means when we say ain banu ma'asim - we have no good deeds.

...

We realize we have greatly overestimated our cleverness and our potency; we have overestimated the efficacy of our conscious behavior, and we have underestimated the persistence and the depth of our destructive tendencies. We realize that our attempts to do good are very small next to the unconscious havoc we constantly wreak to our right and to our left. "What is our life? What is our goodness? What our righteousness?"...

Gathering as a group (pp.109-110; p.211)

When we begin to acknowledge the fact that we are utterly unprepared for what we have to face in life, this is when the walls of the psyche begin to break down.

...

The first thing we do during the High Holidays is come together: we stand together before God as a single spiritual unit. We do this out of a very deep instinct...

We need each other now. We need each other deeply. Here in the full flush of the life-and-death nature of this ritual, here in the full flush of our impotence as individuals to meet this most urgent emergency, our need for each other is immense. We heal one another by being together. We give each other hope. ... by ourselves, ain banu ma'asim, there is nothing we can do. But gathered together as a single indivisible entity, we sense that we do in fact have efficacy as a larger, transcendent spiritual unit... (pp.109-110)

...

We are incomplete and imperfect and cannot survive without a spiritual community that can make us whole - that can give us what we need, what we don't have....

That sense of wholeness, of completion, that we have been chasing after all of our lives - but that always eludes us as individuals - is something so deep it can only be found in a whole community, in that shifting composite of need and lack and gift we create when we come together to acknowledge we need each other. (p.211)

And then second, v'hitvadu - we make confession. We open our hearts. We acknowledge the futility of our actions. We see our attempts to be cute with this life, to manipulate it, for the thin reeds they are, and we resolve to give them up. And we are able to find the courage to do this precisely because we are gathered ba'agudah achat - in one single spiritual unit...

And third, we perform this service, this ancient ritual of judgment and transformation, of forgiveness, of life and death. (p.111)

Vidui: Creating a Spiritual Action Plan - Rabbi David Jaffe

The word vidui comes from the Hebrew word for “acknowledge.” To make a personal vidui is to acknowledge clearly the reality of your life.

The first step is to take a good look at your life in the past year, and acknowledge one or two things that went very well, and one or two things you need to change.

Then create a concrete, visual image in your mind of a goal for how things would look in each case if you could, indeed, change what needed to change.

For something that went well, imagine what your life would look like if you could employ that strength on a more regular basis; for something that needs to change, imagine what it would look like if you made that change.

1. Do this visualization for each item.

2. Write a few words that capture the changed, new reality.

3. Then identify one or two soul traits that go along with each item.

For example, if you acknowledge that you speak disrespectfully to your adolescent children and your goal is to speak with them like you would speak with an adult, the soul trait might be patience (savlanut) or respect (kavod).

4. Then think of one concrete action you could take on a regular basis to strengthen your patience or respect.

Continue this with all the items you acknowledged.

You now have a personal vidui and a spiritual action plan for the year!

I write all this down on an index card and bring it with me to Yom Kippur prayers. After reciting the set vidui in the prayer book, I take out my index card and say my own, personal vidui.

I pray to God for forgiveness where I missed the mark, and for help in growing the middot, soul qualities, I need in order to make my vision a reality in the next year.

After saying this vidui five times on Yom Kippur, I revisit it every Rosh Chodesh (new moon), noticing progress and renewing my commitment to keep growing.

This passage comes from the companion to the High Holidays published by Hebrew College in 2016.

Teshuvah (p.157, 154, 156)

Teshuvah begins with a turn, a turn away from the external world and toward the inner realm of the heart. (p.157)

Transformation does not have a beginning, a middle, or an end. We never reach the end of Teshuvah. It is always going on. We are awake for a moment, and then we are asleep again. Teshuvah seems to proceed in a circular motion. Every step away is also a step toward home.

And it may never be clear to us that the work of transformation has borne fruit. This is usually the case in the realm of spiritual practice. Real spiritual transformation invariably takes a long time to manifest in our lives. Spectacular, immediate results - sudden changes in aspect or in the way we see the world - are always suspect, and usually suggest a superficial rather than a profound transformation. Profound transformation only manifests over time. (p.154)

The possibility of transformation always exists, but we have to consciously turn toward it in order to activate it. At the same time, our initiative can only take us so far. After that, we have to have faith. We have to depend on the universe to support the flowering of our intention. (p.156)

Avoiding the heart (pp.158-9)

But why does the heart require such an indirect approach? Why won't it just open wide when we ask it to? Why does it resist us so? We are sentimental about the heart, but the truth is, most of us spend a good deal of time and energy avoiding the heart at all costs. Really, we are afraid of what we might find there. We don't even know where it is or how we might find it, but somehow we understand there is a lot of pain there... The heart holds our suffering...

In either case we are inclined not to look at it. We live in a culture that conditions us to avoid suffering, and the consequence is that we live at some distance from our heart. We are not in the habit of looking at it, but of distracting ourselves from its content. As we begin the process of Teshuvah, we need to make a conscious effort to overcome the momentum of this denial and avoidance. That pain, that afflictive energy that rests on the surface of our hearts and just below it as well, will be the catalyst for our transformation.

...

This is the great gift of suffering. Intense afflictive states - anger, boredom, fear, guilt, impatience, grief, disappointment, dejection, anxiety, despair - are the great markers of our Teshuvah. By their very intensity, they call us to transformation.

God's forgiveness (pp.135-6; p.148)

Forgiveness - the desire of God to forgive us - is an irresistible force. It fills every space like the waters of a flood. It is one of the most powerful forces on earth, nothing less than the need of the world to be what it is; the need of the universe to have us be what we are. That's why we were created: to be the way we are and not some other way. It is precisely the way we are that is sacred in the first place.

And it is the nature of God to forgive. This God tells the angels in heaven, and this God tells Moses firsthand in the famous passage from the Torah that is embedded in the High Holiday liturgy: "Show me what you are like," Moses pleads with God, and God complies.

"My Name is Y-H-V-H. Y-H-V-H. I am gracious and compassionate. I am forgiveness itself." This is the very meaning of my name, God is saying, Y-H-V-H: the verb to be in the present tense. I am absolute presence, that aspect of the universe that accepts and forgives.

...

This is how God is different from Big Brother, who also knows everything we do and say, but who uses it against us. God watches the whole video with a boundless, heartbreaking compassion.

Choice (p.160)

We are responsible for the state of our own consciousness.

The great drama of this season is the drama of choice. The power of choice is immense. We can choose to let go of anger, boredom, fear, guilt, impatience, grief, disappointment, dejection, anxiety, and despair, and we can make this choice moment by moment, and we can make this choice in a broader way as well. We can let go of each constituent feeling as we become aware of it, and we can form a clear and conscious intention to let these feelings go.

Contemporary (singable) English translation of the 13 Attributes of Divine Mercy:

Yud hey vav hey

Compassion and tenderness

Patience, forbearance, kindness, awareness

Bearing love from age to age

Lifting guilt and mistakes and making us free.

10. Psalm 27: Translation by Roshi Norman Fischer
(from Opening to You: Zen Translations of the Book of Psalms)

You are my light and my help

Whom should I fear?

You are the fortress of my life

Whom should I dread?

When the narrow ones gather their strength to devour me

It is they who stumble and fall

Even if a royal army were camped outside my gate

my heart would not fear.

And when they struck out with terrible weapons against me

Even then I’d trust

One thing I ask for, one thing I hope - To live in your house

All the days of my life

To behold your loveliness

Every morning in the light of your temple dawn

Till on a doomful day

You secure me in your precincts

Conceal me within the folds of your covering tent

Place me high and safe upon a rock

My head lifted above the engulfing waves

With the joy of my heart

I will sacrifice

Within that billowing shelter

Singing and playing my abandonment to you.

Hear my voice when I raise it up

Be gracious - answer me -

Speaking with your voice my heart sang, Seek my presence

I will.

Do not hide your glowing face from me

do not reject me in anger because of my shortcomings

You have always been for me

Don’t cast me off now, don’t walk away

My helper, my friend

My mother and father forsake me

But you take me up

Show me the way! Guide my steps on the clear path

Against the ever-present cliffs and thickets

Protect me from the noise of desire and hatefulness

From false words and shouted accusations

If I did not have faith in your rightness

That is would bloom in this living land - It is unthinkable

I wait only for you

With strength and good courage -

I wait only for you.

Reviewing the Year

• Divide the past year into fall, winter, spring, summer. What were the highlights, achievements and themes of each quarter?

• What unfinished business remains from this past year?

• 'Four Worlds' check-in: what is going well, and where is there room for improvement in each of the following realms?

  • Physical health, fitness and wellbeing

  • Emotional wellbeing, intimacy, connection with others

  • Intellectual stimulation and growth

  • Spiritual connection and spiritual practice

Practices suggested by Melinda Ribner, Kabbalah Month by Month

Some Jewish Meditation Resources

Or haLev

https://www.orhalev.net/

Retreats online and in person - Classes and practice groups - Podcast, articles and more.

Institute for Jewish Spirituality, IJS

https://www.jewishspirituality.org/

Including Awaken, a 4 week online intro to Jewish mindfulness program, starts September 4 2022.

Also podcast, weekly Torah study, yoga and more.

Awakened Heart Project

https://awakenedheartproject.org/

Retreats online, including Aug 22-28 2022: Preparing for a New Jewish Year in a Changing World with Sylvia Boorstein, Norman Fischer, Joanna Katz and Jeff Roth) and in person.

Podcasts, practice instructions, videos of talks and more.