Rabbi's Blog

Waking up, Waking up more! Rosh HaShanah 5775 – First Day 

Wake up!  Wake up!  Wakey wakey, rise and shine.  Good morning, boker tov….Boboboboker tov!!! How do you like to be woken up in the morning?  There are so many ways we can transition from sleeping to waking.

On July 4^th this year here in Boulder was the funeral of someone who will for sure be seen as one of the generation’s greatest spiritual leaders. I still can’t quite believe that Reb Zalman is no longer with us.  What a gift that Boulder got to be the home of this extraordinary legend of a rabbi for the last twenty years, and that many of us at Bonai Shalom had the privilege of his presence.  Last year, just days after the flood, Reb Zalman led our congregation in the prayers for rain. No one else could have done it. These prayers at the end of Sukkot will not be the same without him.  Reb Zalman was controversial and challenging for sure, but what an enormous legacy he leaves.  There are so many stories and teachings and memories that I have and I still feel Reb Zalman’s influence on my life very strongly. When I first him over 15 years ago, I asked him if he would give me smicha, rabbinic ordination.  About 2 months before he died he gave me a secondary ordination in the form of a transmission and a certificate that is hanging on the wall of my brand new office.  As far as I know I was his last musmach, the last recipient of this blessing and I feel proud and so grateful and humbled that I, along with Reb Tirzah, got to officiate at his funeral up at Green Mountain.

A favorite story that Reb Zalman used to tell was when his daughter, as a young girl, said to him one morning. “Abba, if when we’re asleep we can wake up, when we’re awake, can we wake up more?”  Reb Zalman, I believe, woke us up more and is still, in his gentle, loving way, nudging us to wake up even more; to be more aware, more mindful, more present, more awake.

What does it mean to wake up and how do we do it?  The sound of the Shofar is definitely a wakeup call for the soul, stirring us out of our slumber, calling us to action, urgently alerting us to be here. There is the sound and then there is the penetrating silence after the sound that ripples through us.

Our tradition has good advice for how to wake up each morning, with a sense that our soul has been restored to our body, renewing us with unending potential for a new day.  We say modeh ani l’fanecha Melech chai v’kayam – I am eternally grateful before you, the living and enduring source of life.  Gently waking ourselves up with a sense of appreciation and gratitude.  Often a harsh alarm clock accompanied by anxiety of what awaits us and then an automatic reaching for our smart phone or some other device is how many of us start our day.  Our nervous systems jump into action, adrenalin pumping, as we then find our caffeine of choice to activate our systems even more.  Now, we’re really awake!  Ready to take on the world.  But what are we really ready for with our overloaded systems in shock?

“Hitor’ri, hit’or’ri, ci vah orech kumi ori; uri, uri shir daberi, c’vod Adonai aleich niglah.  Wake up, wake up for your light has come: rise and shine.  Awake, awake, break out in song, for God’s glory is revealed to you!”  These words, based on a passage from Isaiah that was read a few weeks ago, are the fifth verse of L’cha Dodi, the hymn that brings in Shabbat.  Interesting to note that these stirring words of awakening, herald in a day of rest, not a day of work.  The charge seems to be for a wakefulness that is beyond arousal and preparedness of the physical body, calling us to be spiritually awake, emotionally ready.

The very first words of the Shulchan Aruch, the classic Code of Jewish law are: yit’gaber c’ari l’amod baboker l’avodat boro – to make ourselves strong like lions to stand up in the morning to serve our Creator.  Yes, this is about physical strength and vitality, mighty like a roaring lion, but really it is about service, tuning in to the fact that so much of what we do in this world is about being called into action.  Reb Zalman used to say that we have all been deployed in some unique way and each morning as we wake up, we try to tune into what our task is.  The instructions for this are probably not in that email that we just opened that is causing us stress, but somewhere deep within ourselves, embedded in our own hard drive, not in any device.  If we allow ourselves, and I very often don’t, to wake up slowly, mindfully, in prayer, mediation, song and reflection, we may be able to find a point of stillness in our heart that wakes us in a different way.

Ani y’sheina, v’libi ayr – I am asleep, but my heart is awake,” declares Shir HaShirm, The Song of Songs (5:2).  In the context of this epic love poem, this seems to be describing the intoxicating power of love, which is traditionally seen also as a metaphor for God’s love for us and our love of God; yet it also seems to suggest that we can be physically asleep, but emotionally and spiritually awake, alive in our hearts.  I think for many of us, in this chaotic, ADD, over-stimulating, frightening, distracting, multi-tasking world, the opposite is true; we are physically awake, pumped up even, with our adrenal glands working hard, but spiritually and emotionally asleep.  Could this be what Reb Zalman’s five year old daughter meant in her question?

Our society is in a crisis that is putting our collective nervous system at risk.  We have somehow bought into the illusion that to be awake means that we constantly have to do more, produce more, acquire more and be constantly in touch with networks across the world.  It’s so exhausting!  A July article in The New York Times called “No Time to Think” opened like this:

“ONE of the biggest complaints in modern society is being overscheduled, overcommitted and overextended. Ask people at a social gathering how they are and the stock answer is “super busy,” “crazy busy” or “insanely busy.” Nobody is just “fine” anymore.

When people aren’t super busy at work, they are crazy busy exercising, entertaining or taking their kids to Chinese lessons. Or maybe they are insanely busy playing fantasy football, tracing their genealogy or churning their own butter.”

The article includes some research that suggests the many of us are so afraid to stop because of what thoughts might arise; an experiment showed that many people would rather consciously inflict physical pain on themselves than face the difficult feelings that might emerge in silent and solitary time.

The article mentions a video by the comedian Louis C.K. that has been watched nearly eight million times on You Tube, in which he describes that not-good feeling. “Sometimes when things clear away and you’re not watching anything and you’re in your car and you start going, oh no, here it comes, that I’m alone, and it starts to visit on you, just this sadness,” he said. “And that’s why we text and drive. People are willing to risk taking a life and ruining their own because they don’t want to be alone for a second because it’s so hard.”

We are addicted to our devices and this can hardly be called being awake. We don’t give the small, still voice a chance to emerge within us.  Recently I fell off my mountain bike coming down the Marshall Mesa trail.  I was cut up and bruised and scraped and then, to my horror, noticed that my smart phone was smashed and not working.  Before I paid any attention to my body, I spent two hours in the Sprint store replacing my phone.  When I finally got myself to Urgent Care, I was in quite a lot of pain and it turned out I had a small fracture in my right wrist along with the scrapes.  The realization that the urgent care of my device was somehow more important than my body, a broken phone taking priority over a broken bone, was pretty horrifying to me.

Today, Rosh HaShanah, is actually the first day of the shmitta year, the 7^th year in the cycle in which we allow the earth to rest, according to the Torah.  Even though the strict laws around planting, harvesting and general production and distribution apply to the Land of Israel, many in the Jewish world are asking how some of these principles of a sabbatical year can apply to us.  The essence of shmitta is about stepping back, about appreciating what the earth naturally wants to give us, so that we can receive and honor the earth rather than bleed the soil dry by overproduction of crops.  Our world is about constant motion and production, shmitta is about rest, reflection, even introspection to stop and notice just how much abundance there is in the world, without us having to do anything.  The other day I spent some time in a contemplative garden in the Zen tradition, right in this neighborhood and the Abbot and gardener shared with me the great peace and harmony that comes from sitting in nature, hearing the bird song and the sun shining through the leaves.  He told me that in this kind of garden, the idea is to contact our spirit. I felt it and it seems that one way we may honor this shmitta year is to appreciate our natural world with this kind of consciousness.  Without any electronics! Something that many of us do easily in Colorado!

Amichai Lau Levi, the founder of Storahtelling and Lab Shul has actually proposed a “digital detox” for the shmitta year.  Unplugging and trying to create more spaciousness in our lives. He asks how those of us who are not farmers, don’t feel obligated by Jewish law, and don’t live in the Land of Israel make use of this concept of laying fallow to better balance our lives and a fast-paced world.  He suggests reinterpreting “land” as “digital landscape” and has ideas for us such as: no screens while eating, no emails in bed – pre/post sleep, no GPS for a month – more face to face, less clicks.  I would add, powering off our computers and phones for Shabbat, regardless of our level of observance. I bet even the thought of this type of unplugging makes many of us quite anxious, but it might slow us down, calm our agitated nervous systems and even let us refocus our attention on what is really important, hearing the subtle voice that calls us to our own authenticity, our own vulnerability.  Many Jewish communities around the world are using the shmitta year as a time to set sustainability goals for the food we serve and eat and grow, supporting a more local food system, consuming less, stepping back from a mentality that says I can eat whatever I want whenever I want it and sharing the harvest with those in need.  We are certainly having these discussions at Bonai.

A teacher of mine, Rabbi Alan Lew, may his memory be a blessing, in his excellent book on the High Holidays called, “This is Real and You are Completely Unprepared,” puts it like this, “our problem is not that we don’t try hard enough.  It is that we try too hard.  It’s that we have such an exaggerated belief in the force of our own effort that we never stop trying.  Our pursuit of pleasure and success is relentless, feverish, sometimes bordering on the demonic.  We never rest. “

“How good it will be when you really listen,” is Reb Zalman’s translation of the second paragraph of the Shema, “v’haya im shamoa tishm’u.” This passage from the Book of Deuteronomy suggest that the delicate balance of the earth can be altered by our willingness to listen, observe, obey natural law, with the assertion that there are consequences to us not being in right relationship,  manifest in withholding of rain and famine.  Among other things, Reb Zalman produced a wonderful translation of the daily siddur, the prayer book.  There is a phrase in this second paragraph of the shema “v’avadatem m’hera,” which is usually translated as you will be quickly destroyed.  Reb Zalman’s translation is “your rushing will destroy you.” Shabbat, Shmitta, Shofar, daily prayer practice are all powerful traditions that invite us to slow down, to breathe, to hear and see what we might actually be called to do in the world right now, rather than perpetuate our busy lives that might be leading us to our destruction.  Slowing down does not mean going to sleep.  In fact, it might mean waking up more.

One of the ways that we need, I need to wake up is by noticing more what is going on in front of us, in the people around us.  Recently our Inclusion Committee, working towards creating more inclusive space in our community, especially for people with different abilities, brought in a remarkable speaker, in partnership with Har HaShem.  Elaine Hall was a top Hollywood acting coach for children, whose life was turned around when the son she had adopted from Russia was diagnosed with acute autism.  In her First Friday talk at Bonai Shalom, she told a very moving story.  Her son Neal was obsessed, it seemed, with car wheels and they could barely walk down a street without him having to stop and gaze at the wheels everywhere and trying to show them to his mother.  Naturally, Elaine would get impatient, way too busy to keep stopping by all the cars, she would try to grab Neal’s hand and move him along.  Neal was completely non-verbal so could not clearly communicate what he wanted or even what he was really seeing.  One day, Elaine did something different and crouched down to her son to see his perspective and realized that what he was trying to show her was how beautiful the reflection of the sun’s light was in the shiny metal hub caps.  She shared the wonder of this vision with Neal and after that he never stopped again.  I felt so moved by this story, because in our relationships with each other, we often don’t slow down enough to see what the other is seeing, to hear what they are hearing, to enter their world.  Imagine what might happen if we all did that more with people in our families, our community, our neighborhoods and ultimately globally.  In any conflict, whether personal or national, if we are willing to take the time to see the world from the perspective of the other, who knows what impact it could have?  Yet, we are too busy to stop.  We are physically awake, but spiritually sleeping.

The world feels scary and we feel out of control with so much pain, uncertainty, doubt, violence, conflict, terrible disease, climate change. We fear what might happen as a result Islamic State, ebola, or climate change and, of course Israel.  Thankfully Scotland remained part of the union so that’s one less thing to worry about!  There is a collective sense of anxiety that comes, in part, from our constant connection to information, to news sources and to each other and it can become obsessive without being helpful.  Of course we need to be awake and aware of the world around us, supporting causes where we can, reaching out where we can, but being over-anxious news junkies may not be helping anyone!  This shmitta year can teach us that being awake may just be about doing less, rather than doing more.

Waking up begins each morning with a choice of how we start our day.  Do we immediately reach for our smart phone and a cup of coffee, or can we find a way to wake up mindfully, prayerfully, consciously with a sense of appreciation, gratitude and wonder.  I invite each of us to consider incorporating some kind of spiritual practice into our daily transition from sleeping to waking.  It could be saying modeh ani l’fanecha, stretching our bodies as we recite the morning blessings, ritual hand washing, sitting in meditation, saying the shema. In a short collection, the poet Mary Oliver opens with this wonderful poem called “Why I Wake Early,”

Hello, sun in my face.

Hello, you who make the morning

And spread it over the fields

And into the faces of the tulips

And the nodding morning glories

And into the windows of, even, the

Miserable and the crotchety –

Best preacher that ever was,

Dear star, that just happens

To be where you are in the universe

To keep us from ever-darkness,

To ease us with warm touching,

To hold us in the great hands of light –

Good morning, good morning, good morning.

Watch, now, how I start the day

In happiness, in kindness.

How do want to start this Jewish year, but in happiness and kindness, slowing down so that we can wake up to the world around us with compassion, presence and seeds of hope.  Just as the consciousness with which we start each day can affect the quality of the whole day, how we start this year, the commitment to wake up more by doing less, may shed its light on the whole year! Shanah Tovah!