This Is Real (5): A Day of Remembering

A Map of the Journey (pp. 3-4; pp.113-4)

You are walking through the world half asleep. It isn't just that you don't know how or why you got here. It's worse than that; these questions never even arise. It is as if you are in a dream...

A great horn sounds, calling you to remembrance, but all you can remember is how much you have forgotten. Every day for a month, you sit and try to remember who you are and where you are going. By the last week of this month, your need to know these things weighs upon you. Your prayers become urgent.

Then the great horn sounds in earnest one hundred times. The time of transformation is upon you. The world is once again cracking through the shell of its egg to be born... (pp.3-4)

...When the shofar blows one hundred times, it blows open the gates of heaven. When the shofar blows one hundred times, it forms a bridge between heaven and earth, and we enter heaven on that bridge. When the shofar blows one hundred times, it cracks the shell of our awareness wide open, and suddenly we find ourselves in heaven. When the shofar blows one hundred times, we hear the voice of heaven in it. We experience Revelation. God's voice comes down to earth on the same bridge we used...

...

Rosh HaShanah is Yom Harat ha'Olam - the Day the World Is Born; the day heaven gives birth to the earth.

Rosh HaShanah is Yom Ha'Zikaron - the Day of Remembrance; the day we remember that our roots are in heaven, the day heaven remembers us. (pp.113-4)

A Day for Remembering (pp.10-11)

While there is no mention of Rosh HaShanah in these calendars [of the holidays mentioned in the Torah], there is a special day mentioned ten days before Yom Kippur, on the first day of the seventh month, precisely the day that would later become Rosh HaShanah. In biblical times, however, this day was called Yom HaZikaron, the Day of Remembrance...

But who was to remember what? Was it a day when God was supposed to remember us? Were we supposed to remember God? Or was it a day when we were to begin to become mindful of our moral circumstances in preparation for the Day of Atonement that would soon be upon us?

Was the sound of the ram's horn (the shofar) a mystical nexus between heaven and earth or, as suggested by the Rambam (Maimonides, a medieval philosopher and legal authority and a towering figure in the world of Jewish thought), was it a wake-up call for us... crying out to us,

"Awake, awake, you sleepers from your sleep... return in repentance, remember your Creator... look to your souls"?

Rosh Hashanah as Preparatory for Yom Kippur (pp.11-12)

...What seems to have been most clearly true of this Day of Blowing of the Horn for Remembrance is that it was both connected with and preparatory for Yom HaKippurim, the Day of Atonement.

...In order for Yom Kippur to effect atonement for us, we have to find a way from unconsciousness to consciousness; we have to become aware of our spiritual condition… Moreover, we have to become aware of the precise nature of our blunders.

The Day of Remembrance, or the Day of the Blowing of the Horn for Remembrance (or the Day of Mindfulness, for the Hebrew root zakar, as in Yom HaZikaron, suggests both remembrance and mindfulness), was the day when we began to cultivate such an awareness. So it was that by talmudic times, Rosh Hashanah had become, above all, Yom HaDin, the Day of Judgment, the day when we begin to see ourselves through the eyes of a consciousness beyond us. But it was not a final judgment. This judgment always stood in relation to Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement; [this initial judgment] could always be atoned for. "All are judged on Rosh Hashanah and the verdict is sealed on Yom Kippur," says the Tosefta, an early compendium of Talmudic teachings.

Life From the Void (p.116)

Life bursts into being out of nothing, out of the void the Torah had fallen into after the death of Moses...[when] the round of weekly Torah readings halts and remains suspended for several weeks until the long round of [fall Jewish] holidays is completed.

There is something of this feeling about Rosh HaShanah as well. Rosh HaShanah is, among other things, Yom Harat Ha'Olam - the Day the World Is Born. Rosh HaShanah is also the day that the world burst into being out of nothing, falls away, and then rises up again.

The Whole Life-Cycle in Brief (p.214)

The High Holidays are also a bridge, a compressed journey - k'fitzat ha'derech - the journey from birth to death in ten days' time. Rosh HaShanah is all about birth, and Yom Kippur is about death. Rosh HaShanah is Yom Harat ha'Olam, the Day the World Is Born, and Yom Kippur is the day we rehearse for our death by wearing a shroud and by abstaining from life-giving activities, like eating and sexuality.

Rosh HaShanah: New Possibilities (p.125; p.123)

On Rosh HaShanah, the gates between heaven and earth are opened, and things that were beyond us suddenly become possible. The deepest questions of our hearts begin to find answers. Our deepest fear, the gaping emptiness up ahead of us and back behind us as well, suddenly becomes our ally. Heaven now begins to help us. (p.125)

Without this connection to heaven, we can't make Teshuvah. We can't forgive others or ourselves without it. We can't know ourselves. These things are simply too difficult to do. Our capacities, our vision, our powers, our tolerance for pain, are too limited; our capacity for self-deception and rationalization too persistent. (p.123)

Holiness (p.127)

The Days of Awe ... convey a quality of holiness we can all feel, even if we feel it only dimly. It is precisely this holiness that helps us forgive ourselves.

These days create a context of holiness, and if we pay close attention, we begin to notice that everything in our lives is suffused with holiness, even those 'faults' we thought we had to forgive ourselves for. Even that behavior we took to be wrongful, we now realize, has a holy spark at its center waiting to be released. This is the essence of self-forgiveness.

Seeing Ourselves (excerpts from Chapter 6)

We keep trying to pose for the snapshot of our life, but at Rosh HaShanah our deepest need is to see the tape. (p.140)

...

What would we read about ourselves if our children wrote a book about who we were? How does our family see us? What would the tape reveal when our guard was down? (p.145)

...

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... The heart holds our suffering... [and] 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.

(pp.158-9)

...

We are terrified of the truth. But this is a needless terror.

What is there is already so. It's on the tape. Owning up to it doesn't make it worse. Not being open about it doesn't make it go away. And we know we can stand the truth. It is already here and we are already enduring it.

And the tape is rolling. The hand is writing. Someone is watching us endure it, waiting to heal us the moment we awake and watch along... Watching with unbearable compassion. (p.150)

Self-forgiveness is the essential act of the High Holiday season. That's why we need heaven. That's why we need God. We can forgive others on our own. But we turn to God, Rabbi Eli Spitz reminds us, because we cannot forgive ourselves. We need to feel judged and accepted by a Power who transcends our limited years and who embodies our highest values. When we wish to wipe the slate clean, to finalize self-forgiveness, we need heaven - a sense of something or someone larger and beyond our self.

Though self-forgiveness may end with God, it begins with us. Self-forgiveness is difficult largely because we hold ourselves to such high standards, higher than it is possible to live up to. And it is precisely when we are hardest on ourselves that we are most tempted to bury our misdeeds - to hide from our reality, to deny weakness, to deny that we've done anything wrong. (pp.126-7)

...

To forgive ourselves, we must be willing to give up our ideas about how we might be better.

We need to give up one of our most cherished beliefs - that there is something wrong with us, that we are bad, inadequate, somehow defective and lacking in goodness. Disciplining ourselves, rejecting ourselves, beating ourselves, leads us farther away from this goodness, not closer to it. (p.130)

Rebbe Nachman (p.128)

Inner healing requires self-acceptance. Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav offered the following strategy: When all we see and feel is negativity, we must search within ourselves for an aspect of goodness, what he called a white dot within the black, and then find another and another until these dots form musical notes. Our task, he said, is to find enough white notes to form a melody - a melody that will define our core and affirm our fundamental goodness.

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.

Changing Circumstances (pp.164-5)

What can we do when we find ourselves spiritually dead while still breathing? How can we transform this curse into its corresponding blessing?

Our first inclination is often to change the external circumstances of our life - to change our physical environment. Don't just stand there, we tell ourselves. Do something. Do anything. This is actually a solution Jewish tradition sometimes suggests as well. "Change your place, change your luck," the Talmud tells us. Perhaps if we make a major life change, if we actually move to another city or another state, our luck will change as well.

The conventional wisdom these days is that you can change your situation but your problems will continue to pursue you. And while this is often true, sometimes the situation is the problem, Sometimes we just have the wrong job [or] stuck in a bad relationship...

Most of the time, however, the conventional wisdom is correct...

As the writer and meditation teacher Jon Kabat-Zinn reminds us, wherever we go, there we are.

Changing Habits (pp. 165-6)

Sometimes... a simple change in routine might really suffice to set off the kind of inner change the problem demands... Moshe Cordovero, the great medieval Kabalist, recommends a kind of intentional maladjustment as a strategy for returning to God. "It is a good idea to make some sort of alteration in your food and drink and in your clothing," he writes. "For example, one week do not eat fruit; another week, do not eat meat or drink wine, or do not eat hot food."

Clear Out the Old (p.173)

When we feel dead inside, it is often because there are old ideas we no longer believe in or haven't challenged in far too long, old feelings we really don't feel anymore but cling to desperately, afraid of what might happen if we admit we don't feel them. Without realizing it, these things have suffocated us, crowding the life out of our soul. Sometimes they can be reinvigorated, refreshed or reimagined. But sometimes they must be removed. We must simply let go of them...

Shunryu Suzuki writes:

"If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything; it is open to everything. In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities; in the expert's mind there are few..."

Releasing Old Hurts (p.235)

Anger can never produce love. Only love can produce love. Only compassion can free us from the prison of our own anger: the compassion we feel for others, and the compassion we feel from them, and the compassion we feel for ourselves...

Letting go of our anger and the leverage we imagine it gives us against others is one of the hardest things a human being can do.

Persistence / Beginning Again (pp. 173-5)

Rebbe Nachman's chronicler and close disciple Natan tells the following story [about Rebbe Nachman]:
"... He fell a thousand times, but each time he picked himself up and served God anew.

The most difficult thing was to begin serving God and accept the yoke of true devotion. Each time he would begin, he would find himself failing...

Whenever he fell from his particular level, he did not give up. He would simply say, "I will begin anew. I will act as if I am just beginning to devote myself to God and this is the very first time."

This happened time and again, and each time, he would start all over again. He would often begin anew many times in a single day."

An Inner Turning (p.167-9)

"You should turn your mind toward God before you pray, before you study Torah and before you eat," says Rabbi Moshe Teitlebaum. Turn your mind toward God; this sounds like a simple, even a self-evident proposition, but it is an essential first step in the process of spiritual renewal.

The first thing we should do when we feel we have lost all our passion is to try to find it. This involves a kind of inner turning, an expression of will, an expression of faith, the belief that like God, this passion exists even though we neither feel it nor see it at the moment.

...In my own religious life... there are long dry spells... and I begin to doubt myself and wonder if [the strong and immediate sense of the presence of God] ever happened, or if I simply imagined it. What usually brings me out of such a dry spell is a simple inner turn. I simply turn towards that inner place, that radiant nexus of mind, heart and soul, where I used to feel the presence of God, and lo and behold, God is still there waiting for me. Renewal often begins when we turn toward this place even when it seems utterly distant.

[As Herman Hesse writes at the culmination of Siddhartha:]

"Everything needs only my agreement, my assent, my loving understanding, my turning toward."

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 and in person.

Podcasts, practice instructions, videos of talks and more.

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 2017.