A Different Type of Preparation - How my stay in the hospital got me ready for Rosh Hashanah

What a difference a year makes.

Last year, at this time, as we approached the time for selichos, I was ready. I'd spent time going through Pachad Yitzchak on Rosh Hashanah, Rav Amiel's Yamim Noraim derashos, and some of Rav Kook's Orot HaTeshuva. I. Was. Ready.

This year, I did not prepare. I'd wanted to, but hadn't followed through as the trip to Israel I took with my son approached, and became a major focal point. I kept telling myself that I'd get around to learning and preparing (I sometimes mistakenly see those two as the same), but it didn't happen. The trip came along, went remarkably well, and I figured I'd get back into things during the week leading up to Selichos. I figured it would be a bit jarring to go from the high of trip to the mundane reality of "normal life", but I was ready for it. God had other plans for me.

If I thought that the difference between a trip to Israel and being home would be a bit challenging to navigate , going from my return home to the hospital in less than ten hours, was over the top. I had no time to come down from the high of the trip, or even to see each of our children who were home. Before I knew it, I was being rushed to the hospital by Hatzolah, as I writhed in pain.

When I was told that I had a large kidney stone, which would require me staying over in the hospital, and a medical procedure in the morning, I was rather devastated. I didn't have much time to process what made it so hard, but now that I'm home recovering, I do. 

Beyond sleeping in a noisy hospital room, shared by a stranger on the other side of a thin curtain (with a mouth like a truck driver, and a predilection for fantasy football), and the pain of the procedure, there was something deeply humbling in realizing how little I truly control. Having researched and planned the trip to Israel, I felt good knowing I could put together such a meaningful and fun experience for my son and I. Now, I wasn't even in control of my body, or even where I slept. As I've recovered, simple tasks feel overwhelming. I continue to feel somehow let down by my body. Beyond the physical healing, it will take me time to get past this. 

So here I am a year later, ready for Selichos in a very different way. Without the cerebral experience of opening a sefer, I'm aware of how little I control, and how much I depend on Hashem for everything. It's not the preparation that I would have chosen, but apparently it's the one I needed. 

Letting Go- On teshuva, religious experience, and the intellect

When I think about what I’m experiencing, I am scared. I feel myself changing, and that leaves me feeling vulnerable. I also find myself questioning the change and my motives. Is this real? Am I fooling myself? If I really change, what else goes along with it?

For a while, I’ve associated teshuva with brokenness, and gravitated to Torah where brokenness and even darkness could be found either explicitly or implicitly. Rebbe Nachman and Rav Shagar spoke to me, while other more optimistic approaches like that of Rav Kook did not. The reasons for my preference were not hard to understand. In the battle between my father’s pessimism and cynicism, and my mother’s ever hopeful optimism, life had mostly pushed me towards the former. I struggled to not fall into skepticism, or even worse, cynicism. Little by little, I tried to stop dreaming dreams, fearing getting hurt once again, if like Charlie Brown I convinced myself that this time I’d succeed at kicking the football.

I can’t put my finger on why things changed this year, but somehow the dark shadows receded, and I found myself connecting to Rav Kook’s Torah. I felt hopeful, and started believing that I could really change in a way I’d long thought impossible. Still, I struggled to just go with it. The fears of what this change would mean to me and those around me, and whether what I was experiencing was real, attacked me, refusing to let me go without a fight. I felt like a faker, pretending to be what I am not. A friend’s recommendation to take things a day at a time rather than worrying about the future helped, but only partially. Then I learned a section in the Piaseczna Rebbe’s Derech Hamelech this past Shabbos which I think might allow me to take a big step.

In the ninth perek of Derech Hamelech, the Rebbe gives strategies for working on Avodas HaShem. As with other places in his writings, he touches on the power of the imagination and how it can put you deeper in an experience than merely thinking about it intellectually. At one point he suggests a partial way to attack thoughts and feelings coming from the yetzer hara. Essentially, he suggests intellectualizing the experience. By looking at the thought and questioning where it comes from, the power of the feeling dissipates, as you stop experiencing it, and switch to thinking about it. In discussing this with my chavrusa, I recognized that this is the opposite of what the Rebbe suggests with davening, where he warns against intellectual thoughts and assessing whether davening is going well, as this prevents being in the tefillah.

Here, in the moment where an optimistic and hopeful teshuva feels possible, and my connection to God real,  intellectual scrutiny will be destructive. Putting these experiences under the microscope will dry them up, sapping them of their power and vitality. For now, I will simply be in my experience of teshuva, and not worry about ramifications, authenticity, or what comes next.

Speechless Before the Judge- Some thoughts on teshuva

I was lucky. Being the one giving the shiur, I got to choose the subject. I picked a topic that I could speak about with confidence. I chose the topic that doesn’t scare me, the one that doesn’t keep me from sleeping comfortably. I stayed away from the topic where I would have sounded less rabbinic, the one where I can hardly serve as an example.

 

There is a story that is told about a non-observant professor who had a conversation with the saintly Rav Aryeh Levine. The professor suggested that those who are religious are lucky, as they can do teshuva, as they have the religious texts which show them how to do so. The rabbi responded that for that very reason, it is difficult to do teshuva. I think I understand the story. I’ve opened the sefarim, read the words, and tried to apply them. Still, I am not sure I have done teshuva, at least not in the way I want to. No, the way that I need to.

 

So I chose to speak about teshuva, and how it relates to God. I spoke about moving from an approach of fear, to one of joy. Of seeing teshuva not as a way to avoid punishment, but as a way to become the person we wish to be, and the person we were created to be. I spoke about this because I could. It’s a message I’ve mostly eternalized in my own life. This year, I’ve worked on the religious side of things in my life. I am no longer as scared as I once was of Divine punishment. I see a deeper aspect to religion. Unsaid in all of this was how I think about teshuva as it connects to my relationship with others, and with myself.

 

I couldn’t and can’t speak about those things because I just don’t know what to say. When the things I’ve done wrong to others go from disconnected mistakes to expected patterns, what does teshuva even mean? How does one continue to apologize for wrongdoings that have become habits, and seemingly taken on a life of their own? How do I stand before God and say that this year will be different, when I have no reason to believe that to be true?

 

There was a moment this past Rosh Hashanah where this thought hit me, and I’ve been reeling ever since. It was a moment of recognition where I realized that so much that troubles me about who I am when I’m not in front of a classroom teaching Torah, or away from the public eye, did not just happen, but came about through choice. At that moment, all of the excuses simply faded away. As I let that thought settle over me, there was no fear of punishment, and no thought about how God might judge me. There was something worse. I sat not before the proverbial beis din shel ma’alah (the Heavenly court), but before a much harsher judge and jury. I sat facing myself, having no idea what I could possibly say.

Seeing Double?- Explaining the seeming redundancies of the end of Sefer Shemot (audio shiur)

Many people think of this week’s parshiyot, Vayakhel and Pekudei, as a mere recap of parshiyot Terumah and Tetzaveh. In this week’s shiur we discuss the seeming repetition of the design and building of the mishkan and the bigdei kehunah in the two double-parshiyot. We show that, in fact, there were two different conceptions of what the mishkan needed to be, one before the Cheit HaEigel, and one after. We explore how the two versions of the aron, along with the two sets of luchot, reflect two different perspectives.

This shiur can also be accessed on YouTube by clicking here.

Running time: 39 minutes

Sukkot Shiur- forgiveness, unity, humility and hope

Here’s a recording of my latest shiur/class. This one is about Sukkot, it’s connection to the Yamim Noraim, wealth, hope and more.

Symbolism, forgiveness, king and queen, messianic figures, unity. This shiur has it all.

Teshuva for Turbulent Souls

I can’t imagine testing potential medicines and chemicals on myself, yet in the 19th century, it was not so rare for scientists to use themselves as their own guinea pigs. In one of the chapters in  “A Short History of Nearly Everything”, Bill Bryson tells the fascinating and often humorous stories about those who did so.

Of the philosophers, both general and Jewish, whose works I have read, I have seen two approaches. The first is what I would call clinical. Their discussions of various topics are logically arranged and scientific, or at least, as scientific as philosophy can get. The second group is made up of turbulent souls, to borrow a phrase from Stephen J. Dubner. They study philosophy, not as dispassionate analysts, but as if there very existence depends on it. They are not just trying to understand things. They are seeking to know God and themselves.

As Yom Kippur gets closer, I have been doing quite a bit of reading and studying. As I read some of Heschel’s “Man is Not Alone” on Rosh Hashana, I had to put it down. This was no rationalist discussion of proofs of God. Heschel’s words gave me the discomfort of standing in the presence of God, as opposed to merely thinking about Him. Rav Shagar’s “Shuvi Nafshi” is nothing if not penetrating, intimate and revealing. Coupled with the viewing of a documentary about Rav Shagar, I was left with the sad yearning to sit and study at the feet of this open and honest man, who left the world before his time.

What is teshuva and do I even aspire to understand, let alone to act on that understanding? As I force myself to remember to add the words “HaMelech HaKadosh” to the Amidah, I have not sufficiently looked for Him inside of it. Late at night, as I prepare for a shiur I will be delivering on teshuva, I am, alternatively challenged and pained by Rav Shagar’s words, and the need to pull back and distract myself by checking Facebook. Dare I discuss and try to explain teshuva, when it is only in my mind, and, I fear, likely to go no further?

I have (I am?) a turbulent soul. How do I cross from the clinical understanding of teshuva, the almost voyeuristic experience of seeing Rav Shagar’s exposed soul, to looking inside myself? I don’t know what scares me the most; what I might see, that I might fail, or that I might succeed. The door of this dark room is open before me, showing a glimpse of the light outside. Dare I exit, or will I, once again, merely wonder about the Source of the light?

Who Am I?- Becoming the people we wish to be

“You spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.”

-Jim Bouton

As I took up running to help lose 100 pounds, I wondered when I would actually be a “runner”. Was it running my first race? My first half-marathon? Beating a certain time? Eventually, I became a runner. I ran marathons, I had a blog about it, and spoke, read and wrote about it whenever I could. I ran six days a week, and then seven. I ran in the snow and rain, and I ran when I was sick and when I was fasting. I had become a runner. I find myself wondering whether that was a good thing.

Where is the line between merely doing something and being someone who does that thing? What does it mean to identify with an act so strongly that you are not sure where you end and it begins?

As with everyone else, I sometimes do things wrong. There are days when I don’t feel like davening with a minyan, or davening at all. There are times when I am inconsiderate and hurtful to the people I love the most. Who am I at those moments? Is there a moment when I cross the line from a person who davens poorly to becoming a bad davener? From sometimes acting like a jerk to being one? The Yamim Noraim in general, and tekiat shofar and teshuva in particular, seem to be about making this distinction. God, as it were, asks us to look inside and figure out who we really are, and to think about how we can prevent our actions to go from being a verb to being an adjective. The shofar is a primal cry from the inside, from where our deepest sense of being can be felt. Who am I on the inside, on the real inside that only God, and possibly myself see? This is followed by the time of confession and teshuva, when we are given a chance to examine whether our actions and attitudes are forming the kind of habits that will turn our behavior into almost permanent traits.

Teshuva becomes a challenge to the degree that we allow our misguided actions and attitudes become addictions. When, to paraphrase Jim Bouton, we stop holding them, and they grab hold of us. The gemara in masechet Sukkah speaks of the yetzer hara as being as thin and light as a single strand of hair and as massive and unmovable as a mountain. It starts out as the former, but, unchecked can become as permanent as the mightiest mountain. These Yamim Noraim, days of awe, are, in fact, quite awesome. They give us the opportunity to break away from habit, of both the physical and mental variety, even those that have become addictions, and to think about how we can behave in a way that will more permanently lead us to becoming who we truly want to be.

I hope to use the long hours that I will be in shul to look inside and think about who I wish to be. After a summer where I got away from running, I am slowly getting back out there. I hope to get back in shape, but I hope to not become a runner. There are so many more important things that I want to be.