Shabbat Shuvah, 5787

Tonight is a special Shabbat—the Sabbath between Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish new year) and Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement) also known as the High Holy Days. 

Like all New Year traditions, it’s a time a renewal and reflection, of repentance and repair, and of commitments made to do and be better in the year to come. 

There is a Hasidic teaching Rabbi Alan Lew (author of “This is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared”) loved to repeat:

“There is nothing so whole as a broken heart.”

At first, this sounds like a contradiction. We know what heartbreak feels like. It does not feel whole. It feels like something has gone catastrophically wrong: a rupture, a break; a relationship has ended, a hope has failed, a person we love is gone, or we have finally seen the harm our own choices have caused. We may arrive at the High Holy Days carrying shards of ourselves we would prefer not to examine too closely…

But Rabbi Lew asks us to distinguish between a shattered ego and a broken heart.

The ego shatters when the story we tell about ourselves can no longer be maintained: 

I am always right. 
I am in control. 
I am the injured one. 
I would never cause harm. 

When that self-image is threatened, we may become angry, defensive, or ashamed.

But a broken heart is different. A broken heart is undefended. It no longer has the strength—or the desire—to pretend. It says: 

This is what happened. 

This is what I did. 

This is what was done to me. 

This is what I cannot repair alone.

And, according to Rabbi Lew, this is not a spiritual failure. It may very well be the beginning of new kind of spiritual life.

Jewish tradition gives us an extraordinary image for this. Moses descends from Sinai carrying the first tablets of the covenant, carved by G-d. When Moses sees the Golden Calf, he throws them down, and the tablets shatter. Later, after anger, grief, pleading, and reconciliation, Moses carves a second set with his own hands.

Jewish tradition teaches that both sets were then placed in the Holy Ark: the whole tablets and the broken pieces. The remnants of the “perfect” tablets, and the ones constructed from a place of grief and repentance. 

The shattered tablets were not discarded. They were not treated as an embarrassment to be hidden outside the camp. They were carried in the very holiest place, beside the tablets that had remained whole.

Shabbat Shuvah is an invitation to our hearts:
May our hearts become like that Ark. 
May we carry what is whole in us—our generosity, courage, wisdom, and capacity to begin again. 
But we also carry the broken pieces—the promises we did not keep, the grief we could not prevent, the words we cannot call back, the selves we once believed we had to be. Our brokenness is not the whole of who we are. But neither is it refuse. When held honestly, it too can become sacred.

This is the work of teshuvah. We often translate teshuvah as “repentance” but its deeper meaning is turning or returning. 

We turn away from illusion and toward reality. 
We return toward the people we have neglected. 
We return to the truths we have avoided. 

We return to the self beneath our defenses. 
And in doing so, we discover that we have also returned to the Divine.

Forgiveness, then, is not a matter of persuading a distant deity to become merciful. Mercy is already woven into reality. The prophet Micah tells us that G-d does not retain anger forever, but delights in steadfast love; that G-d returns to us in compassion and casts our misdeeds into the depths of the sea.

Yet mercy does not require us to deny what happened. Rosh Hashanah confronts us with din—the clear, unsparing vision of judgment. We must first see. 
We must name. 
We must stop hiding. 
Only then can we experience the spaciousness of rachamim on Yom Kippur—the spirit of compassion.

This is why, during these holy days, we gently strike the heart as we confess. Some say we are punishing ourselves for our misdeeds. I see this differently. We are not punishing ourselves by beating upon our breasts. We are knocking on the doors of our hearts, crying out:

“Open, oh fragile and resilient heart of mine. 
Open to what you regret.
Open to what you have lost.
Open to the person you have harmed.
Open to the ways you, too, have been wounded.
Open to the possibility that honesty need not end in shame or humiliation.
Open to mercy. To forgiveness. To compassion. 
It is already here” 

We cannot force such an opening. 
The ego cannot muscle its way into surrender. 
We can only become willing: willing to be vulnerable, willing to relinquish control, willing to stand before the Divine without disguise.

Rabbi Lew wrote,

“Every soul needs to express itself. Every heart needs to crack itself open.”  

These are not new needs. They are among our most ancient human yearnings: to move from anger toward healing, from denial toward consciousness, from numbness toward renewal.

So perhaps the question before us is not, “How can I make myself perfect enough to be forgiven?”

Perhaps it is: “Can I become honest enough to be found?”

May we have the courage in 5787 to carry both sets of tablets: what is whole and what has shattered. 
May our hearts become holy arks, spacious enough to hold them both. 
And through the openings in those hearts, may compassion enter.

Open our hearts.

And help us begin again. 💜

 

©Nick Bantock (who else?) 

 

On The Isle of Skye: a Tale of Temperance

There are landscapes so beautiful they are said to render a person speechless. Exhibit A: 

 

The Isle of Skye: Showing off. 

Unfortunately, none of these vistas have yet been proven effective on one particular American Gen X empty-nester from Westchester who begins the majority of his sentences with “Well, actually...” I know this because Alec and I recently took a 3-day minibus tour (that we won pretending to be rich people in a silent auction last Robert Burns Night). The tour was a thorough historical and geological deep dive into Scotland's gorgeous jewel of the Inner Hebrides, the Isle of Skye, a place of such unreasonable beauty that it appears G-d may have become briefly competitive: 

Mountains rise out of nowhere. 

Water appears wherever water just, like, feels like appearing. 

The light changes every eleven seconds.  

There are literal Faerie Glens. 

Sheep stand on hillsides looking all smug because their rock has better views than your rock.

And there I was, inside all this geological majesty, on a minibus, contemplating committing felony assault. Not actual assault, obviously! The theatre-person kind, where you spend hours imagining the immaculate delivery of a singular devastating sentence so perfect the offending party evaporates into the Scottish mist...
…. 

      Just me? Oh.... Okay...

Our particular provocateur was a fellow American possessed of that magnificent conversational impulse to improve every statement made by another human being. A fact could not merely be offered by our intrepid, fully-trained, scholarly, fabulous tour guide Jamie. It had to be amended.

 

          “Well, ACTUALLYYYYY—”

 

Every point clarified. Expounded upon. Corrected. Enhanced by information no one had requested. 

          "Aren't Americans the worst?" 

They'd scream from the back of the minibus, proving their own point, accompanied by the ear-stabbing laughter of his (actually perfectly nice) wife as they sat immediately behind us. 

For three days.

 

Reader? I began to hear his "Well, actually" and the wife's sanity-pummeling laugh in my spinal cord. On Day 2, the group experienced a magnificent vista at the top of one of Skye's highest mountains. Jamie (again: the fantastic, patient AF tour guide) told us there were two paths up to the top: the gentle winding path, and a slightly tougher “scrambly” one. Of course, Well Actually Guy took the scrambly path, and at the top proceeded to tell the rest of us that "WELL ACTUALLY THE PATH WASN’T ANY HARDER THAN A HIKE WE DID EARLIER TODAY."  

 

........Okaaay. 

I cracked my knuckles. Did a take to an invisible audience. I moved on. Breathed in the sea air. Then to Alec, I vocalized that I was experiencing awe. The emotion human beings experience when life feels "beyond us." I'm going to go to Merriam-Webster: 

"AWE: NOUN. An emotion variously combining dread, veneration, and wonder that is inspired by overwhelming greatness (as in beauty, power, or size)."

Awe can be positive and negative. It is part of awe's power. The negative part of awe is, in fact, the root of the awful, which is what this man was, and I would like Merriam-Webster to consider including his picture in the next printed edition. 

 This moment atop the mountain with Alec felt special. Sacred. Not only because we have both had such expansive and life/career altering half-years, but special because we get so few opportunities to experience this kind of natural awe in the modern world. 

I said this aloud. I felt I uttered it privately, to my husband. But guess what? Before I could finish a breath, I hear: 

          "Well. actually, I recently read a book called AWE, that says we can train ourselves to experience modern awe if you just put you mind to it...”  

This man was so lucky I didn’t fling him from the top of the cliff straight into the North Sea. Oh, okay. So my lack of daily awe was a me-problem. (I also seriously doubted he had interpreted this book's research and thesis point accurately.) I thanked him for his feedback, and promptly ran (ran!) back down the mountain.

Literally: Awesome

 

You think he’d get the message. 
But no. 

The following morning at breakfast—at 7:30AM—before COFFEEFORTHELOVEOFGD, seated next to me at our B of our shared BnB, he just wants to “pick up on our conversation yesterday about modern awe…” I hadn't slept well. I already despised him and had attempted to be polite the day before. This was too much. Well Actually Guy proceeded to tell me every single way in which he say awe in the modern world ("the subway, the electrical grid, Broadway!") Oh FFS, he brought Broadway into the chat? Did he want me to choke him with the black pudding? Was his hypothesis that I was jaded, deficient at seeing beauty and experiencing sufficient gratitude? Sure sounded like it. But I hadn't had enough sleep or coffee or alone time to know that with certainty. 

 

I tried. I nodded. I attempted silence. Cogent points that defended my right to feel or not feel emotions however was authentic for me. But turns out, I was too depleted to truly bear it. Unrelenting in his TedTalk, I pushed back. 

• "I don’t believe in a forced gratitude posture, I find it is part of the #GoodVibesOnly movement that potentially represses important emotions like grief and disappointment that do truly need to be processed."
• "Thank you so much for sharing what YOU find awesome in the modern world" 
• "I wonder if you would feel the same way if any of those were your every day reality—is there a possibility that you might not feel that way? If so, I think that is allowed." 

He wouldn’t let up. And I hadn't had enough caffeine. I finally looked at Alec across the scrambled eggs and begged aloud, not even that quietly: “HELP ME,” and Alec escorted me in a side conversation before I could commit murder over toast points. 
_______________

*EXHALE* 

_______________

All of this irritation presented a problem you see, for I have recently been making an effort to become a psychologically evolved, emotionally mature person, and psychologically evolved, emotionally mature people presumably do not spend vacations silently composing closing arguments against irritating know it all strangers. 

 

Ugh. 

 

So naturally I did what I have always done: I made my extreme irritation mean something: that obviously I am a monster. Fine. So maybe this guy found me cynical. Or jaded. Or intellectually lazy. Or perhaps I just… annoyed him as well. Who knows? 

 

Was I intolerant? 

Ungenerous? 

Depressed? 

A bad traveler? 

Had I become one of those awful middle-aged women who simply hates everyone? 

Shouldn’t I be GRATEFUL? 

LOOK AT THE ISLE OF SKYE! 

Alec is SO HANDSOME AND HAPPY! 

There are GOATS! SHEEP! WATERFALLS!! 

Why are you thinking about pushing Well Actually Guy into one?!
 

But somewhere during those three days, something surprisingly profound shifted. I realized I didn’t have to hold a trial. On either of us. There did not need to be a prosecution, a defense, witnesses, or a final ruling from the Supreme Court of Alexandra Silber declaring either THIS MAN IS OBJECTIVELY INSUFFERABLE and/or YOU ARE A TERRIBLE PERSON FOR FINDING HIM SO. Sometimes two perfectly decent adults have different values about how one occupies shared space.

And they irritate the shit out of each other on a minibus.

And that can be the whole story.

 

This might sound ridiculously small. For me, it isn’t.

 

I am a sensitive being. There are pros and cons to this. I'd like to think that my sensitivity is part of what makes me an artist of excellence. But it also makes me enormously sensitive to human stimuli: a person's volume, moods, interruptions, energies, and proximity; strong smells, bright lights, and in general, whether human beings are considerate of a shared, collective space. Add crowds, travel, reduced agency and twelve people sealed inside a moving metal tube, and my nervous system begins processing every human quirk as though NORAD has asked me personally to assess the threat. 

 

For years, I have hated this quality in myself and done everything in my power to "toughen up." I have, thus, compounded my innate sensitivity by adding morality to it: 

First comes the irritation.

Then comes the shame about the irritation. 

Then comes the analysis of the shame about the irritation. 

...Until a blowhard talking too loudly and too much has somehow become a referendum on whether I deserve citizenship among humankind.

 

What if I simply… didn’t do that?

What if irritation is information?

What if I can notice it, make room for it, perhaps move seats—and decline to construct an entire philosophy of good and evil around it?

"Too much input. Too little agency. You are irritated. No big deal." 

Because the other, very real truth is that Skye WAS magnificent.

I felt things there I had worried I was no longer capable of feeling. After years of struggle and a numbness that likely helped me bear an adverse physical existence, awe came back. Wonder surged . Pleasure returned in flashes so clean they almost startled me! I looked at my beautiful Alec—watching him experience a country and landscape he loves, that has given us both so much, watching the particular happiness of my husband being fully himself—and felt enormous pride and tenderness.

 

And none of that—none—was cancelled out because a couple of loud American Gen Xers on the bus annoyed me.
 

Perhaps this is one of the quieter freedoms of growing older: discovering that contradictory feelings do not annihilate one another.

We can be overwhelmed and grateful.

We can love humanity and need humanity to please STFU.

We can stand before something staggeringly beautiful and still be tired, hungry, irritable, preoccupied, or desperate to be alone.

Scotland does not need me to perform wonder for it.
The mountains are not taking attendance.

And honestly? if Scotland doesn’t know how much I love it this, of all years? It never will.
 

Maybe emotional maturity isn’t finally becoming so healed that nothing bothers us. Maybe it is becoming spacious enough to allow things to bother us without making the bother mean everything. 

 

On Skye, I noticed the weather passed over the land with astonishing speed and drama: 

Sun, rain, mist, wind, brightness again. 

No condition appears embarrassed by the one before it. 

The mountain does not panic when the cloud arrives. 

The cloud does not apologize for obscuring the view.

It just... passes. 
 

Perhaps feelings are allowed the same dignity and irritation can simply be weather.
 

And perhaps, once we stop interrogating every cloud, we have considerably more time to behold the mountains. And feel the awe that arrives within our heart, naturally.