Caring for Yourself and Others in Times of Trouble: Some Spiritual Tips and Tools, by Alexander Levering Kern, Northeastern University

Breathe. Breathe. Breathe some more. Take time in your day, at any moment, to take ten deep even breaths. Carve out 5-10 minutes to meditate or practice  mindfulness or contemplative prayer. Start here, now, wherever you are.

Ground yourself in the present moment. Focus your awareness on something real, enduring, or beautiful in your surroundings. Look up often. Discover the wonder and awe that is already here.

Acknowledge your fears, anxieties, concerns. Offer them up in prayer, if you pray. Write them in your journal. Share them with others. Feel what you feel, honor it, and know that it is not the final word.

Remember you are not alone. Ever. You are surrounded by care and support. Reach out.

Create and sustain community. Show up for one another. Listen compassionately. Practice empathy. Even while avoiding “close physical contact,” message the people you care about. Stand with those most vulnerable and those who suffer the brunt of prejudice and fear. Check in on folks. Call your mother, father, guardian, mentor, little sibling, long lost friend.

Unplug, judiciously. While staying aware of developments, do not let the Corona-chaos govern you, but forgive yourself when and if it does.

Practice kindness. There is a temptation in health scares to view others as potential threats. Remember we are in this together. While practicing health guidelines and appropriate caution, remember to engage one another. Smile when you can. Bring good deeds and good energy into our world.

Stay healthy through sleep, diet, exercise. See healing and wellness holistically – mind, body, and spirit.

Make art. Discover, imagine, engage your hopes and fears, the beauty and ugliness of our world. Write, paint, sing, dance, soar.

Practice gratitude. In the face of crises, make note of the things for which you are grateful: your breath, the particular shade of the sky at dusk – or dawn. The color blue, the color green, the gifts and strengths you have other people in your life, the ability to laugh. A pet.

Connect with your spiritual, religious, humanist, cultural, or other communities. Find strength and solace and power in traditions, texts, rituals, practices, holy times and seasons.

Pray as you are able, silently, through song, in readings, through ancestors. Remember the long view of history, the rhythms and cycles of nature, the invisible threads that connect us all.

Practice hope. Trust in the future and our power to endure and persist, to live fully into the goodness that awaits.

Statement after Jersey City attack on kosher grocery, December 2019

We at the Scott Center are saddened by yet another fatal attack directed at Jewish people this past Tuesday at a kosher grocery store in Jersey City, NJ. Our hearts go out to the families of all the victims who were killed and injured in connection to this act of anti-Semitic violence. Please be in touch with any of us if we can help you process your feelings during these discouraging times.

A Message from the Scott Center

(This essay by Muslim Advisor Saifa Hussain appeared in the Middlebury Campus newspaper at the beginning of the semester.)

You do not have to have things figured out. Let me say that one more time: you do not have to have things figured out. In fact, college is the best time to bask in the unknowing. Your 18 years of experience is being radically challenged with every person you encounter, every academic article you read, every new relationship or breakup, and every destination you visit. You will encounter paradigm shifts that may rattle you, or you may encounter things that will intensify deeply held parts of you. Either way, you are transforming: molting, budding, and blooming. There will be inevitable growing pains. This process of growth can look messy at times. And that is okay ―  it is supposed to happen. That is why one of the best things you can do for yourself is to not only understand these growing pains, but hold space for them. The more you can do that, the more you can find the eye in the storm of these next four years. 

“Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.”

― Rainer Maria Rilke

There are countless ways to hold space for the growth and the messiness of the “unknowing” that you will experience. Experiment with tried and true methods of mindfulness and renewal such as meditation, journaling, a yoga class, prayer, or just spending time in nature. Pick something that works best for you, and make it as much as a priority as turning in an assignment or attending team practice. Hold tight to it. This, when done right, will not be at the expense of your academic life, but an anchor, and will make you a better student, professional, friend, and person.

Schedule times of the week when you are away from your phone, computer, and other distractions to be present with yourself. Go inward and check in deeply. When you are not doing well, know that there are resources on campus that are here for you. Too often, we hear students say they wished they had spoken to a counselor, chaplain, or mentor when things were difficult, but felt they had no time. In reality, we make time for things that we think are important. Understand that your well-being is just as much a priority for you as your academic achievement. Reaching out to a counselor or chaplain will never be an inconvenience!

Knowledge is multidimensional and involves the whole person. It is not enough to ask for grades, performance, and a great career. True knowledge and success incorporates your passions, your dreams, your personality, your wisdom, as much as a skill set or being book smart. Invest in your whole self in these next few years, and have certainty that the return on that investment will be a wiser, better, and truer you.

May you befriend the deafening unknown and ride the adventures ahead of you!

Sincerely,

Your Friends at The Scott Center

Poem from a Friend

We are grateful to Gary Margolis, Executive Director Emeritus of the Middlebury College Mental Health Services and Associate Professor of English and American Literatures, for sharing his new poem with us.

For As Long As You Need Them To

You say your church is weeding

on your knees in the garden.

Listening to the hummingbird

whir her wings. Burying a bulb

the voles ate, when there was a break

in winter. You say I can pray any time

I want to, inside a mosque,

a synagogue, a church. Or whispering

to myself. I wish the clouds would

unveil the sun. God is dirt

you say. Stones, worms

and rain. Every one syllable

word. And longer ones. Say

sentiment and sentimentality

and then say seed, dig and hole.

And come back in, when it rains

so hard, you have nothing more

to pray to the earth and your

mud gods, you tell me, will stay

caked to your boots, for as long

you need them to.  

A NOTE OF SORROW AND SOLIDARITY

We at the Scott Center are heartbroken and devastated at the news of the senseless violence perpetrated against innocent people at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. We long for a world in which acts of hatred, that are founded in ignorance about religious difference, will cease. Toward that end we will continue to educate for a deeper understanding of the ethical foundations of Islam, and to advocate for compassion toward all, as our wisdom traditions teach. Our hearts go out to Muslims everywhere.

Mark Orten’s Ash Wednesday Homily

Outside the window where I sit each morning for my daily prayers and meditation, the birds have been gradually picking clean the tree that has offered them without fail, through harshest cold and deepest snow, a feast of berries.  Little red juicy morsels, held out for them, at the ends of a thousand tiny twigs, like Francis of Assisi himself.

Where would we be without the seasons?

Our gospel lessons cautions us against ostentatious piety, the kind of religious or spiritual practice meant to persuade others or even ourselves of our goodness or our deserving.  Rather, it speaks about a kind of simplicity, an observance that plainly sounds our true nature and our true need, and that acknowledges simply that source of our most basic provisions—that of daily bread and right relation, of reconciliation with God, our neighbors and ourselves.

Thus is this season of Lent, a time of refrain and reflection, honed over centuries out of an ever-increasing culture of busy-ness and distraction, of rushing and rending, offered to us like juicy berries, our sustenance in the middle of strife and struggle.  In fact, not only our sustenance, but yes, even our salvation.

Let this time of deprivation be for our good.  Let this short six-week season of separations save us, ever so slightly, from ourselves, and restore in us the joy of sheer dependence on God’s moment-by-moment provisions.

May we feast on God’s goodness even in the barest of times, so that we may be conditioned to hear and see and smell and taste the news—the good news—of life in death, of light in darkness, of feast in famine as the ever so subtle, gentle, and sure turning of the seasons.

Dean Mark Orten’s Message in Response to the Killings in Pittsburgh

To the Middlebury community,

It is difficult to put into words the anguish and heartbreak so many of us feel at the horrific killings at the Tree of Life Congregation in Pittsburgh on Saturday. It was an attack on the Jewish people, on the spirit of our nation, and on humanity itself.

At this time, our thoughts go out to the people of Pittsburgh. For anyone in our community in need of support, I urge you to reach out to advisors, counselors, deans, chaplains, or any others who are available to support you.

Tragically, this is the kind of event, fueled by hatred, that we experience too often. Only days earlier, we were trying to comprehend the unfathomable act of mailing of pipe bombs to political figures and the media, or how we could stand collectively against efforts to exclude and marginalize individuals because of their gender identification.

It is understandable if members of our community experience these days as a time of sorrow.

And yet we must resist the pull of hopelessness.

We are not and can never be a perfect community, but we are a community united by firm belief in human dignity, and we stand against all acts of hatred and violence including, in particular at this time, acts motivated by religious bigotry and anti-Semitism. We stand with all of our Jewish companions, families, friends, and neighbors in their right to be safe without defense, and to conduct their religious observances in peace.

In this moment, let us re-commit to full inclusion of all religions, races, sexes, gender expressions, sexual orientations, and abilities. And let us always speak up against hateful and discriminatory speech or actions, wherever they occur.

Let me close by saying, in the tradition of the Jewish people, may the memory of the victims of Saturday’s shooting be a blessing for their loved ones and the world.

Wishing you peace,

Mark Orten
Dean / Director
Charles P. Scott Center for Spiritual and Religious Life

Burying the Sacred Texts

 

Burying the Sacred Texts

by Gary Margolis

Perhaps the geese are wondering
what we’re up to, next to the fall
field. Standing around a grave-sized
hole, a backhoe has dug. Blind,
as they are, to the words for ‘boxes

of books”, “pages and scraps of
texts”. We know they’re looking
for a field to spend the night,
to pick over the poles and flags
of corn stalks. To make

as much commotion as they can.
Murmuring and honking. Trying
to draw as many of their kind down.
To what, perhaps, we can call
their prayers, too. Watching us

lower a grave’s worth of boxes
into the ground. Rabbi Reichert
might have said was the earth’s
library on loan to us and the meadow
voles who live there, too.

And now have parchment pieces
of torah to read. Drilling their way
down, after the geese are gone.
Finding what there is left to eat.
These prayers and chants, their songs.

Rabbi Stillman’s 2018 Yom Kippur sermon

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.
–Leonard Cohen, “Anthem”

Forgive me for quoting one of the most oft quoted and therefore clichéd of the great singer/songwriter Leonard Cohen’s lyrics, but I couldn’t resist.

The message of recognizing and embracing our brokenness is embedded across these high holy day services—in the prayers we recite, in the Torah readings of human struggles (between Sarah and Hagar, the binding of Isaac) and human longings (Hannah’s prayer for a child) and in the calls of the shofar, one of which is named shevarim, which literally means broken—a series of three short, broken blasts that we hear many times on Rosh Hashanah.

However, the direction we are led into in our everyday lives is more toward perfectionism than brokenness. Perfectionism is something that I have had cause to reflect on frequently in my life, both because of my personal tendency toward it, and because some of my places of work have been elite colleges and universities, places that seem to attract and perhaps breed perfectionists. Present company excluded, of course. I’d like to use this sermon to reflect on the tendency, untenable as it is, toward perfectionism. I’ll begin with the personal.

Early on in my career as a Jewish educator, a frequent job interview question I was asked was to share some of my weaknesses. At the time of applying for these jobs, I was either too inexperienced or too reluctant to really reflect on that question, and I would answer that I was a perfectionist. This seemed like the perfect answer, in fact, because it hinted that even if I was annoying about getting everything exactly right, at least I would be doing just that—and who wouldn’t want that in an employee? It felt like a weakness that could secretly be interpreted as a strength. The truth was, though, that even then I had an inkling that my and anyone else’s perfection was actually a real weakness. I did finally land a job working with undergraduates at Harvard Hillel for a few years. I was only truly able to understand how challenging that work environment had been for me when many years later, I began an internship at Ursinus College for my final year of rabbinical school. Ursinus is a great, small liberal arts college outside of Philadelphia, with a terrible name. It is not ranked as high as Middlebury or my alma mater, and certainly it was not Harvard. The students were smart and interesting and fun to be with. They did their school-work, mostly, and they always cooked and served a spectacular Shabbat dinner, but they never took a lot of interest in organizing themselves or improving on the systems that were already in place at the Hillel, which were pretty shallow. They were there to get a good education, and some of them had jobs lined up when they graduated, and some of them didn’t. The surprise to me was that it was so much more fun to work there than at Harvard. The students were much more appreciative of any help they could get from me—it was a part-time internship—and they were accepting of the limitations they and I had. Many of the students at Harvard had led with a critical lens—much more eager to find fault and to compare, rather than to appreciate what they had—and what they had was substantial. Once I began to understand the vibe at Ursinus, I found it a place where I was willing to be more creative—to experiment with different approaches—because I wasn’t afraid of making mistakes the way I was at Harvard. The cultures were different. One, the Ursinus one, assumed that people were doing their best and appreciated that they all came from different circumstances with different situations and capacities. The other, the Harvard one, assumed that everything could always be better, and that everyone, regardless of their situation, had to conform to the same high standard at all times. Although there is nothing wrong with striving to change the world for the better, there was something constricting about the way so many of the Harvard students went about it.

This is a lesson I am constantly learning. When I started rabbinical school I informed my husband Matt that there were no grades at this school that I would be in for the next five years. He laughed out loud. “What, I asked?” “How are you going to survive without grades?” His point was well taken. The majority of my life at that point had been as a student, and as a student so much of my self-worth had been tied up with my grades. How would I operate in a system where that was not the final measurement? I always been an excellent student, but I had developed the unfortunate habit of always having a paper or two hanging over my head, from all the incompletes I would take at the end of a semester, because if I just had more time, the paper could be—perfect. It took a while, and I didn’t exactly shake that incomplete habit, but by the end of rabbinical school I was able to embrace my classmate Deb’s adage that “done is better than perfect.” The lack of grades at this school did not reflect a less rigorous academic approach—there was more reading and requirements than anyone could really do—but rather an emphasis on more than that. We were evaluated not only on our understanding of the academic material, but also on our capacity to be there for people, to grow internally ourselves, and to create environments of welcome and inclusion. These things are not reflected in grades as we conceive of them.

British novelist and essayist Rachel Cusk illustrates this tension between perfectionism and welcome beautifully in an essay for the New York Times Magazine entitled “Making House: Notes on Domesticity.” She writes that she has recently renovated and redecorated her flat, and lives in a state of constant worry that her teenage children will destroy it by eating on the couch. On the other hand, she writes:
Another friend of mine runs her house with admirable laxity, governing her large family by a set of principles that have tidiness as a footnote or a distant goal, something it would be nice to achieve one day, like retirement. In the kitchen, you frequently feel a distinct crunching sensation from the debris underfoot; the stairs are virtually impassable with the possessions that have accumulated there, the books and clothes and toys, the violins and satchels and soccer shoes, all precipitously stacked as if in a vertical lost property office; the children’s rooms are so neglected they have acquired a kind of wilderness beauty, like untouched landscapes where over time the processes of growth and decay have created their own organic forms. In the kitchen, the children make volcano cakes or create chemical explosions; somewhere in the upper regions of the house, a singing teacher leads the older ones in hollering out show tunes; in the corridors, there is always a multitude of friends and pets and hangers-on milling around. One day a hamster got out of its cage; it was found six months later, living happily with a brood of offspring in a wardrobe. My friend looks at it all with mock despair, then waves it away with her hand. If that’s how they want to live, she says, then let them. In this house, the search for happiness appears to be complete; or rather, in the chaotic mountain of jumble it is always somehow at hand, the easiest of all things to find. The foreground is entirely human here: The rooms may have been neglected, but the people haven’t been. It is clear to me that by eradicating the tension of the material, my friend has been able to give her children exactly what she wanted to give them — love, authority, the right advice — where for other people these things got mixed up and snagged on one another.

This is a kind of household that I fear, yet an attitude that I aspire to. One that elevates relationships and people over outward appearances and things. The stance of perfectionism seems to be focused on the opposite—making sure everything looks ok to the outside, even at the expense of real connection and relationship.

What I learned in rabbinical school was how important it was to “just” show up. Meaning to come whether or not you feel prepared, whether or not you have read the sermon over a zillion times or know every detail of the history of the prayer. But showing up is so much more than the “just.” It means to be there next to someone who is sick or mourning and to bring your whole presence, even when you have no idea what you will say, or what the right thing to say is, as if there is a right thing anyway. It means to show up at a community event even when you might not have anything obvious to offer, and to be present to what may unfold. So by showing up I don’t mean showing up somewhere physically but then taking out your smart phone and commencing to remove yourself from where you are. I mean showing up with presence. Showing up with attention. Actually being where you are instead of worrying about where you are not, or what else you should be getting done, or who else you could be with. Perfectionism is sometimes a barrier to showing up, and showing up is its potential cure.

My first Sukkot working at Ursinus College we didn’t leave enough time to put up the sukkah before people started to arrive for the dinner we had that night. Because of this, I was pretty stressed out. There was food to be cooked, and bamboo to be thrown on the roof, and lights to be strung and tables to be brought out—and not enough people to do it all before everyone arrived. It was clear that we would not be ready before the so-called guests got there. But the guests were just other students, and when they did begin to arrive, we suddenly had enough people. Everyone pitched in, and in little time the sukkah was decorated, the tables were standing, and the food was brought outside. No one seemed to mind that things were a little later than scheduled, or that they had needed to pitch in. In fact, it was the opposite. The students who had helped felt more invested in the event than they would have if they had just shown up and been served. They had participated in the mitzvah of decorating the sukkah and extending hospitality. They had invested in the dinner by helping set it up, and therefore they owned it—exactly the outcome that I was looking for, but achieved in a very accidental way.

It’s not that I recommend never preparing or leaving everything to chance. My critique of perfectionism is in no way a critique of trying your best, of striving to do things better, or of trying to improve the world. Brene Brown, noted researcher and professor of Sociology writes extensively on this in her book: “The Gifts of Imperfection.” I only have time to cite a fraction of it, although I recommend the whole thing. She writes:

“Perfectionism is not the same thing as striving to be your best…[it] is the belief that if we live perfect, look perfect, and act perfect, we can minimize or avoid the pain of blame, judgment, and shame. It’s a shield…Perfectionism is, at its core, about trying to earn approval and acceptance. Most perfectionists were raised being praised for achievement and performance (grades, manners, rule-following, people-pleasing, appearance, sports). Somewhere along the way, we adopt this dangerous and debilitating belief system: I am what I accomplish and how well I accomplish it. Healthy striving is self-focused—How can I improve? Perfectionism is other-focused—What will they think?” (56)

She goes on to explain that, ironically, perfectionism actually hampers success. It makes us risk averse—we are afraid of failure, and so we avoid opportunities and we don’t allow ourselves to try new things. And it’s not that trying and failing is going to feel amazing—perfectionists are right that it might not feel great—but that these feelings are part of human life. And the more we avoid them, the more painful they will probably be when we do inevitably experience them. The antidote to this is, quite simply and quite challengingly, self-compassion. She explains that when she interviewed hundreds of people who exhibit the positive characteristics of whole-heartedness she found: “They appeared to operate from a place of ‘We’re all doing the best we can.’ Their courage, compassion and connection seemed rooted in the way they treated themselves.” (59)

This notion is brilliantly illustrated in Rebbe Nachman’s folk story of the Chacham and Tam, the clever man and the simple man, or I may suggest translating it as: The Perfectionist and the Whole-hearted one. The story goes that there are two friends who grow up together in the same town, but they couldn’t be more different. One is exceedingly clever, and one is exceedingly simple. The clever one leaves his childhood home and moves to a large city, where he becomes a doctor and an expert in all manner of things, and the simple one stays put and becomes a mediocre cobbler. Here is a taste of what life was like for the clever man, as told by Martin Buber in his Tales of Rebbe Nachman:
Thus it happened one day that he needed a garment, and he sent for the best tailor in the town to whom he gave exact instructions as to the nature of the costume. The master took many pains so that it would turn out well, and in general the result was excellent. Only the cuff of the sleeve had not been made entirely as the wise man had deemed proper and had desired, and this circumstance enraged the learned man, for he was anxious lest in Spain he would perhaps be derided on account of this improperly sewn sleeve cuff, even though here in this country the people understood little enough about suitable clothing. (81)

The simple man, on the other hand, was almost always happy, because he could not even discern when people were laughing at him and his simpleness. He thought the best of everyone.
After some time, the King learns of these two men, and he calls for them to come to his court. Messengers are sent out—a clever one to inform the clever man, and a simple one to inform the simple man. The simple man is thrilled to be asked to see the King, and leaves right away. He meets the King and is so open and unassuming, that the King, who has just had to fire a governor who was misusing the office, and longs for an honest person for the job, makes the simple man the governor. Martin Buber writes:
As governor, he now conducted himself simply and honestly, as he had at the time when he had been a poor shoemaker, and since he himself had passed his life without intrigues, he knew how to see into the heart of right and wrong, and his judgements became respected everywhere. His people and his advisors came to love him, and his fame soon penetrated to the king who wished for nothing so fervently as to have at his side a man of such strict virtue and simple understanding. Thus it came about that he appointed the simple man as his prime minister and had a palace built for him not far from his court. (87)

Meanwhile, what becomes of the clever man? He doubts that the King would ask to see him—it doesn’t seem logical. Eventually he denies that there even is a king, convincing the clever messenger that he has no proof of a king either, and they travel the world to convince others of the non-existence of the king, losing all their wealth in the process. Wherever they went, other people seemed to be mad and deluded to them, for believing that there was actually a king; for believing anything at all.

In Judaism itself we see a tension between perfection and imperfection, between wholeness and brokenness. The offerings of the priests, and the priests themselves, had to be without defect—perfect specimens of the animal that was to be given to God. Yet they were being offered to atone for the mistakes of the humans who offered them. The modern analogue to this is, of course, Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. There may have been a longing to give of the best to God, but there was also a constant recognition that the human condition was not one of perfection.

In Exodus 32: 19 we learn that when Moses came down from Mt Sinai with the two tablets of the ten commandments, written by God, he became so enraged at seeing the people worshipping the golden calf that he “hurled the tablets from his hands and shattered them at the foot of the mountain.” Moses then has to plead with God to receive the commandments and tablets again.

The Talmud later learns that the broken pieces of the tablets were placed in the Ark along with the whole ones. (Bava Batra 14b:6)

Another tractate of the Talmud directly relates this to the compassionate act of embracing the imperfect:
R. Joshua b. Levi said to his sons,…be careful [to honour] an old man, who has forgotten his learning involuntarily: for we say that both the whole tables of stone and the pieces of the broken tablets were placed in the Ark.” (Berakhot 8b:5-7)

What broken pieces of ourselves can we admit to and carry with us? How can we receive them compassionately, like an old person who no longer has the same ability that they once did? How can we recognize that this, our brokenness, is also our humanity, and that to strive to erase it completely is to give up human connection? This is what we are doing here together today, and it is our work for the whole year ahead. May it be an imperfect one, full of wonderful, unplanned surprises and relationships.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.
–Leonard Cohen

Rabbi Stillman’s 2018 Rosh Hashanah Sermon

Shana Tova—

Happy New Year!

Welcome to new students, to returning students, to Havurah members, faculty, staff, and special guests.  I am delighted to have you all here, to see you all gathered at the very beginning of Rosh Hodesh Tishrei, the new moon of the month of Tishrei, the new Jewish year of 5779.

But what does it mean that we are all gathered here, and who am I to be welcoming all of you?  What, exactly, are we doing here tonight?  It is an auspicious time, to be sure, the date set out in the Hebrew Bible as we will read tomorrow in the maftir aliyah, Numbers 29: “In the seventh month, on the first day of the month, you shall observe a sacred occasion: you shall not work at your occupations.  You shall observe it as a day when the horn is sounded.”  And I am a rabbi, trained, if imperfectly, to lead services for these holidays, although it is really Aaron, our cantor who is doing all the work here as you will see as we move through services over the next couple of days and Yom Kippur.

But what is my real work, what is our work, and how are we to do it?

I believe we are here together on Rosh Hashanah for a purpose, and the purpose goes beyond showing up because your parents want you to, or because you think you will somehow be judged badly if you didn’t go to services—by your family, by your friends or others in your community, even by the Divine mystery that in Judaism we name Adonai, or God.  All that may be true, but I believe that we wouldn’t be here together if we didn’t truly want to acknowledge the new year on a deeper level.  This is not a performance. It may have some trappings of a performance—microphones, people in front of you reading and singing, a certain choreography and certain props—but that is not the true nature of this holiday, or these services. My job is not to entertain, but rather to remind you of the larger purpose of why we are here.

We are here, because this is our chance to start again.  This is our chance to reflect on how we have been doing, and to set new intentions. This is our chance to figure out who we need to seek forgiveness from and then seek it in the next ten days before Yom Kippur. This is our chance to support each other in becoming more of who we already are.  We need this holiday, the date set and the horn blown, in order to help us set aside time and to remind us all of the need we have to reflect and change.  Otherwise, we are just too busy—and it may be just too uncomfortable—to make time for this inner and relational work.

Our tradition offers us a multitude of tools for doing this kind of work of return and renewal.  One of the tools is prayer, and that is what I want to speak about here tonight.

You’ve noticed, if you are returning, that we have a new High Holiday prayer book this year.  In Hebrew the High Holiday book has a special name—it is called a machzor, from the root Chet- Zayin- Resh, which means to return, or review. This book is a tool to help us review our past year, to do Cheshbon HaNefesh, an accounting of the soul.  For those of you who yourselves are new at the college or in town, everything, including the prayer book may seem new just to you.  You may assume that we have been using this one since it was first published in 2010.  Rest assured that everyone here will be as lost as everyone else this year, as we all get used to this new book.

The liturgy, though, is not new. It is very old.  And one of the reasons we chose this prayer book was because it did honor to the traditional liturgy. There are some important differences to our old machzor, for instance the Hebrew of the Amidah or standing prayer did not acknowledge the founding mothers alongside the founding fathers in its text, even though we always chanted them into it anyway.  This book puts them down on paper.  But mostly the liturgy is the same, it is the one that has been passed down throughout the generations.  The liturgy itself is not static—it has been embellished over centuries with special High Holiday poems called piyyutim, and it has been updated to reflect the times of each generation—we see this most in the section we will experience on Yom Kippur when we remember those who lost their lives because they dared to express their Judaism—sadly, there is no shortage of stories there to bring us through to contemporary times. And, like every year, we will update the liturgy with our own poetic choices, our own poetry, our own tunes and chants and styles of prayer—even as we recite some of the oldest melodies and words and poems that have been passed down.  This machzor, Lev Shalem, which means a “whole heart,” does a good job of keeping the liturgy central while adding in commentary and poetry from throughout the ages.  And I believe there is good reason to keep the liturgy central.  There is immense value in knowing that our ancestors who authored this prayer book had the same concerns, fears, mistakes, moments of gratitude and needs for connection as we do.  They prayed for the same things that we do—a good life, a year of joy and health, safety and love.  We are not so unusual in this age, even though it feels like this is one of the strangest periods on earth yet, and that is an important perspective.  People have been through strange times before, and prayer—these prayers–is one of the tools they have used to help get them through.

The side notes explore the origins and structure of the prayers, and they offer commentary or additional material.  I invite you to explore those side notes as you feel moved to.  It’s a great thing to do if you feel bored, or you are not following the Hebrew, or you need something to wake you up or remind you why you are here.  I also invite you, if you would like, to ignore the side notes and focus on the prayers.  The majority of us here, including myself at times, don’t understand every word of the Hebrew prayers.  Some of us don’t read the Hebrew alphabet.  For those people, it can be hard to even follow along on the page, and the one major flaw of this machzor is that it contains very little transliteration of Hebrew into the English alphabet.  The committee of people: students, faculty, staff and Havurah members, who helped choose this book were aware and concerned about that.  There are some prayers that are transliterated, and you can find those in the red ink on the left pages of the machzor.

Whatever your facility with Hebrew may be, here are some suggestions for how to enter into the prayer service. These suggestions also point to what makes all prayer an effective tool for looking into ourselves in order to return to the truth of who we are, and for connecting to something larger than ourselves.

  • The efficacy of Hebrew: You can let the music and cadence of the Hebrew take you into a different zone. One way that prayer can work is by bringing you out of your habitual, discursive thinking. Hebrew itself is a sacred language, and many people believe that the words themselves are efficacious—by chanting them or listening to them we are able to connect to the mysterious world of the divine in a different way than we do in a vernacular language. So whether you yourself can join in by reading the Hebrew or the parts that are transliterated, or whether you are just listening to Aaron and those around you, you can open to the possibility that something is happening by being surrounded by these ancient words.
  • The meaning of the words: If you don’t understand all the Hebrew, you can use the beautiful and accurate English translation that is side by side with the Hebrew. Other schools of thought about prayer, including the great Rebbe Nachman, one of the great teachers of Hasidism, a devotional school of Judaism, encouraged his students to pray in their own language—the language they spoke in their homes on a daily basis (which for most of them was Yiddish) and the language of their hearts. When I pray as a congregant in a service, I switch pretty seamlessly between reading the Hebrew and the English on the page, and adding my own thoughts and prayers that are particular to me at that moment.
  • Space to become present/transcendent: You can use the moments of contemplative time that are provided throughout the service in the form of Silence, Chanting, Reflective prompts and Poetry to listen for what is true for you in this moment, and for this new year.
  • Praying the words in order to know ourselves: Often the rhythm of the prayers acts as its own meditation, allowing our minds more freedom to gain insights into the truth of our lives. Allow me to quote Rabbi Alan Lew at length, who writes in his book about the High Holidays entitled “This is Real and you are Completely Unprepared”

 “It is the case that there is something about the mechanics of prayer that causes us to know ourselves.  Like all spiritual activities, Jewish communal prayer has a point of focus; in this case, the words of the prayer book.  We tyr to concentrate on these words, but inevitably our mind wanders and we lose our focus. When we realize that this happened, we bring our focus back to the words of the prayer book, and as we do, we catch a glimpse of what it is that has carried us away.  This is an important thing to see.  The thoughts that carry our attention away are never insignificant thoughts, and they never arise at random.  We lose our focus precisely because these thoughts need our attention and we refuse to give it to them.  This is why they keep sneaking up on our attention and stealing it away.  This is how it is that we come to know ourselves as we settle deeply into the act of prayer.  Most likely we are utterly unaware of all this.  After all, it operates well below the level of consciousness.  Nevertheless, sitting there with the prayer book in our lap, we begin to become aware of the things we have been trying to avoid; we begin to see things from which we have been averting our gaze; unconscious material begins to make its way toward the surface of our consciousness.” p

Those are some ideas about how to approach prayer in general.  I like to think of it like the walking labyrinth up at the Knoll.  About a year ago students and others built that labyrinth by laying large stones that delineate a prescribed container—one that sets a circular path toward the center and then out again.  The discipline of the path is exactly what allows the mind to relax.  For those moments of walking, the mind does not have to choose which way to go.  This in turn allows it to connect more readily to what is: whether that be a deeper truth about our own selves, about the world we live in, or a greater connection to something that is bigger than just what we see before us.  A prescribed liturgy of prayer can function in a similar way.  You may notice a lot of repetition in the High Holiday services.  Trust me, there is.  You will be saying the Amidah, the standing prayer, 3 times between this evening and tomorrow morning’s services: silently tonight, and out loud together tomorrow at two different points.  And this is actually less than in some more traditional followings of the liturgy.  There are some differences between those three instances, but many of the words are exactly the same.  And there are many more prayers we repeat—Avinu Malkenu on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the Vidui: a list of our sins that we say multiple times on Yom Kippur, the prayers that open our time together and the ones that close it.  While this repetition of the form could bore you, or could just go right by you if you aren’t familiar enough with the service to realize you are repeating things, please know that this is the container.  These words are the delineated path, the rhythm, the mantra that allows the mind to relax.  The words and the forms are guiding us toward something, and depending on one’s world view, they could be guiding us toward God, toward a truer understanding of self, or both.  The language that the tradition uses is the language of God, and the metaphor is of a King and a parent, but those are just some of the rocks that reveal the path along the way.  The stones showing us this path are thankfulness and gratitude, praise for the thing that connects us all, humility and the words to help us acknowledge that we all make mistakes, and the desire to be given a chance to keep trying—to be written again for another year in the big, messy, unpredictable Book of Life.

Use whatever metaphor you wish—this machzor contains a map to the wilderness, the stones that show us the way in the labyrinth, the mantras that invite us into reflection and meditation, the ancient Hebrew words of our ancestors’ deepest prayers and stories.  What it does not contain are dead words that only belonged to an older generation who we cannot relate to.  The prayers in here are alive and well because we make them that way, year after year.  Aaron and I are deeply humbled and honored to be your guides in this.  May these holidays be the container to hold you this year, and for many years to come.