(21) Turn us to You Adonai and we shall return; Renew our days as in the beginning!
During the Three Weeks and Tisha B’Av, we do not only bemoan a recurring past. We also stand in a spiritually secure place, in the presence of community, and ask ourselves the existential questions that every individual and community must ask. And when we sit on the floor and follow the haunting melody of Eikha, we pause at the second-to-last verse. It is read by the congregation as a whole, and then repeated again at the conclusion: “Turn us to You, O Lord, and we shall be turned; renew our days as of old” (Lam. 5:21). We close with a plea – take us back. Reconcile. Bring us to the love and longing that we once had, as individuals to our God, as a nation to our sacred spaces, and as a people to our land, Zion.
Rend your hearts
Rather than your garments,
And turn back to the LORD your God.
For He is gracious and compassionate,
Slow to anger, abounding in kindness,
And renouncing punishment.
Rabbi Sharon Brous
We cannot ensure long life, but we can find meaning, purpose, and celebration in the life we have. Though we cannot live forever, we can choose to make a life worth living.
Rabbi Deborah Waxman on her podcast, "Hashiveynu"
... To better understand the terrain I’m exploring in Hashivenu, let me take a step back and frame the Jewish idea of resilience. The American Psychological Association defines resilience as “the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats and even significant sources of stress.” Harvard University psychologist George Vaillant suggests that resilience can be understood as a “twig with a fresh, green living core” that springs back and continues to grow after encountering pressure.
Judaism, writ large, is about resilience. Across the span of Jewish history, Jews have experienced extensive trauma, even catastrophe, and we have survived – as a people and as a civilization. After each catastrophe, the prevailing paradigm was inoperable: we no longer knew how to understand ourselves in relation to God, to other Jews, and to other peoples. And, throughout our history, Jews have ultimately transcended catastrophe after catastrophe. We have repeatedly breathed new life into the Jewish people and the Jewish civilization and we have found pathways toward repair. From trauma, we have had to heal. We have had to recover and re-vision, regenerate and re-seed vital Jewish life. We have found ways to cultivate resilience, both individually and collectively.
הוא היה אומר לא עליך המלאכה לגמור. ולא אתה בן חורין ליבטל ממנה.
[Rabbi Tarfon] used to say: It is not your responsibility to finish the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.
Dr. Ron Wolfson
Perfection is not the goal - perfecting is. You go about perfecting the self and perfecting the world through repentance, prayer, and charity.
The stars are shining on the top of my head, the wind is in my hair; a few drops of rain are falling into my soup, but the soup is still warm. I am sitting in a sukkah, which I have erected in my backyard. A deep joy is seeping out from the core of my being and filling me body and soul. It began as a kind of lightness. I felt it as soon as the shofar was sounded to signal the end of Yom Kippur... I felt all the weight, all the heaviness of the day - all the death and the judgment and the yearning, all the soulful thrashing and beating of breasts - falling away all at once, suddenly gone. I felt light and clean.
The next day I went into my yard with a hammer and started to build my sukkah. Now I am drinking soup in my sukkah, a booth not quite surrounded by walls, with a roof that must admit starlight, and a deep joy is welling up inside me, a curious, naked joy. During the Days of Awe, I was stripped of everything, all my hope, all the illusions to which I had been clinging. Now I feel clean and light a full of joy.
-Rabbi Alan Lew, This Is Real and Your Are Completely Unprepared