It’s that time of year again. The summer is coming to a close and we are in the month of Elul. We are attempting, once again, to wake up. We slowly try and climb out of the slumber of endless busyness and numbness, petty dramas and endless mental acrobatics. We rub the sleep out of our eyes and try to really see, know and understand the truth about our lives. How are we living? What are we doing with the miraculous gift of this moment? Who are we helping? Are we living holy lives? Are we expanding the reaches of our heart and growing wider than our conceptions of ourselves?
Parsha Ki Tavo, read at this spiritually significant time, asks us to do this cheshbon-ha-nefesh – literally, spiritual accounting, of our lives. Moses doesn’t mince words. If you don’t live up to your relationship with Holiness, he says, you will be cursed. Examples include “shortages, confusion and turmoil in every one of your endeavors” (28:20), and “insanity, blindness, and bewilderment” (28:28). If you honor your relationship to God, you will be blessed. Examples include “surplus in the fruit of your womb, fruit of your livestock, and in the fruit of your soil,” and enemies “fleeing from you in seven directions.” Although the long and gruesome nature of the curses reads like a biblical “Scared Straight” program, frightening us into “good” behavior, Rabbi Alan Lew writes that it is more like a description of the essential choices available to us in every moment “Everything depends on our seeing our lives with clear eyes, ” he writes, “seeing the potential blessing in each moment as well as the potential curse, choosing the former, forswearing the latter” (This is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared, 66).
It takes a while to see the truth of what is in front of us. Sometimes it takes forty years
Devarim, Chapter 29
1 And Moses called all of Israel and said to them, "You have seen all that the Mystery did before your very eyes in the land of Egypt, to Pharaoh, to all his servants, and to all his land;
2 the great trials which your very eyes beheld and those great signs and wonders.
3 Yet until this day, the One has not given you a heart to know, eyes to see and ears to hear
The miracles, the deliverance, the connection, the potential, and the Divine was always right in front of us. Before your very eyes, the text says. And yet we could not see it, could not hear it, and could not know it. What were we doing that we missed those “signs and wonders”? What on earth was more important than showing up for them?
One December, on a Jewish meditation retreat I attended, the teachers asked the participants to get into small groups to discuss the parsha (Torah portion), which that week included the account of Moses at the burning bush. In my group, we talked about the moment that Moses stopped and turned his head to see the burning bush. I was in a group with an elderly man, and mid-way through the discussion, he broke into tears. “I’m an old man, ” he said, “and I’m sad for the hundreds of thousands of burning bushes I walked right by without stopping to look.” We all teared up. We could all think of times we were too busy, confused, preoccupied or self-absorbed to notice the miracles of daily existence. We had all missed opportunities to see, to hear, and to know.
And yet, there is great hope and faith in Moses’s statement. Rashi interprets the phrase “heart to know” as a heart that is able to recognize the kind acts of the Holy One, and to cling to God. Moses is saying, it’s true, we have missed so much, but this day, we have the ability to see clearly, to wake up, and to experience true intimacy with life. It is not easy, and it takes effort, but the capacity is within us. This is the promise of Elul and this time dedicated to waking up.
Practice Guidance:
What is the mechanism by which we awaken to our lives? What is our spiritual alarm clock that rings us back to the present moment? Rabbi Lew suggests meditation in the days leading up to Rosh Hashana as a particularly useful practice for making teshuvah and returning back to what is true over and over again. He cites physiologist Herbert Benson, who identified the fact that many of the physiological and brain-based changes that people experience after meditation (calm, equanimity, peace) are triggered exactly at the moment when we realize that our attention has drifted and we resolve gently to bring it back. The moment in meditation we often think we have “failed” is actually the first part of waking up.
As we focus on our breath, we notice the contents of our mind. We notice that we are not our thoughts. We begin to see what we are carrying and know whether we owe it to ourselves, to others and to God to do better. As Rabbi Lew says, “we come to see ourselves more clearly We come to see the things we either will not or cannot see” (This is Real and You’re Complete Unprepared, 71). We also come to see all the ways we are connected to one another, all the ways we permeate the world and the ways
in which the world permeates us. Once we see and hear and know through this process, we can choose and re-choose a life of blessing.
Mary Oliver writes in her poem, “The Summer Day”:
I don't know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I have been doing all day. Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do With your one wild and precious life?
Moses asks us the same question, beckoning us to remember that this day we have everything we need to be the people we are meant to be. What do we plan on doing with our one wild precious life?
The Institute for Jewish Spirituality’s mission is to develop and teach Jewish spiritual practices so that individuals and communities may experience greater awareness, purpose, and interconnection.
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