Abacaxi Mamão

When I heard the shofar in shul on Rosh Hashanah, the broken notes spoke to me in a deep, visceral way. It sounded like a simple instrument that was trumpeting, loudly, the brokenness of the world. I don't know if the shvarim (which literally means "broken") and truah blasts had ever hit me in quite that way before.

The world feels so broken to me right now.

The world has collectively and countries/municipalities have individually decided to dispense with any virus mitigations that might cut down on transmission, aside from recommending that everyone get vaccinated and stay up-to-date with boosters. A vaccine-only strategy is not enough to cut down on transmission. It is not enough to prevent more and more people from becoming disabled due to Long Covid or, G-d forbid, from suffering any of the specific sequelae that can happen after a Covid infection, including significant cardiovascular complications or neurological and psychiatric complications, if not death. It is not a pretty picture! Some of these complications happen to people after even very mild cases of Covid.

It's just hard to believe that people really care about other people getting sick, including very seriously and/or with ongoing, complicated symptoms, when they won't even bother to mask or ensure good air filtration/ventilation when gathering with others.

Broken. The world feels broken.

It felt good to hear that sharp, painful, sinking realization echoed in the cry of the shofar in shul on Rosh Hashanah.

In contrast, the tekiah always sounds siren-like to me. It's an alarm. It's a call to arms. It's a piercing sound, designed to enter straight into the heart and inspire one to action.

The three sounds together--two broken and one sharp and piercing--felt like a really good thing to hear this Tishrei. (I did not hear any shofar blasts in Elul this year, since I didn't attend any shul in Elul.)

"Wake up! Wake up!" the shofar seemed to say. "Don't you see that the world is broken? Look at the brokenness--really look at it!--and resolve to repair what you can."

Labels: Covid-19, life, Rosh Hashanah, Torah (broadly defined)

It seems unlikely that I will be able to write Part 2 of this this week. Hopefully next week.

Labels: meta, Rosh Hashanah

I haven't gotten into the Elul/Rosh Hashanah mood yet. I've been saying Psalm 27 almost every day (more or less), and went to selichot two Saturday nights ago, but haven't been feeling it.

What I am feeling right now, and have been feeling since the first of Elul, is some combination of overwhelmed, exhausted, burned out, apathetic, and scared. I was feeling particularly bad about that last Thursday, when it occurred to me: I am feeling all of those things because I am changing. A lot. (Heck, I have change to spare if you need some.) And if Elul/Rosh Hashanah isn't about taking a close look at one's life and deciding to change, I don't know what it's about. It's just that I made the decisions to change (= to do teshuva) several months ago, and now I am living out the results of those changes in real life and real time. And man, it's hard...

Why is change so hard? Why am I so resistant to doing the things that would most help me in life? Why is it sometimes so easy to do the wrong thing and so hard to do the right thing? Why, even when we make changes that we think are for the best, does it still not feel good? Should I interpret this general weariness as a sign that I have made a big mistake in uprooting my life, quitting my job, and transplanting myself to a new country, or just as a sign that I have uprooted my life, quit my job, and transplanted myself to a new country--and those things are exhausting, hence the weariness? Is this what we call a "difficult transition"?

One of the things that has been particularly difficult in this change is my new environment of intellectual challenge. Simply put, I am studying difficult texts, with relatively little support from people other than my chavruta [study partner], and shiur [class] is difficult for me to follow, at least partly because I don't get through all of the sources before shiur begins. Like this summer, there is a relatively wide range of background and experience in the shiur, but unlike this past summer, I feel like I fall out on the lower end of things rather than the higher end of things. This is not a feeling that I am accustomed to, and not because I am especially brilliant, but because I've always gravitated towards the things that I was naturally better at, and avoided the things that were more difficult for me. Thus, it is hard for me not to understand everything, and to accept that I won't be able to understand something in particular. I have so much to learn and I can't learn it all instantaneously. That's what I'm here to do, right? Learn? So I need to accept being with not understanding things and not asking the most brilliant, penetrating questions, and just listening sometimes, without necessarily taking anything in.¹ This goes against my nature.

All in all, I would say that this Elul, I am changing and learning to live better and differently. It's not, as I sometimes feel our classic liturgy impresses upon us, to feel bad, unworthy, and guilty. It's about closely examining the way things are and learning to live in a way that is productive, rather than constantly damning. It's about learning, in my case, to understand less, rather than always pushing to understand more and feeling stupid for failing at it.

My blessing for my readership is: May this coming year of 5769 bring you to the changes that will sweeten and deepen your life. May you have the courage, as I am trying to, to do things that are difficult and to be open to admitting their difficulty--let's agree not to pretend that everything is easy, okay? May the things that inevitably begin with difficulty this year bring immeasurable rewards in the end. May you be able to appreciate the fullness of those rewards in their time.

To change!

______________________________________________
1. Moving down to an easier class is not an option. The next lower class would be too easy. Also, since I almost always understand more than I think I do, I am assuming that that is true in this case, too, and that I am getting more out of just sitting, listening, and not understanding than I think I am. If that makes any sense.

Labels: life, Rosh Hashanah, Torah (broadly defined)

I had no idea if or when I was going to think of something seasonal to write. Then I read Steg's post about judgment and I got all kinds of interesting ideas in my head. But I have way, way too much work to squish into this rare 5-day workweek to have time to blog. Ack!

So, in lieu of a real post here, go read Steg's beautiful post, ruminate a bit, read my comment there, and hopefully I'll have time to actually write something about judgment, regret, and forgiveness before Yom Kippur.

Shana tova to everyone! Happy New Year!

Labels: Jewish holidays, Rosh Hashanah, Torah (broadly defined)

Nuqotw posted an amazing Rosh Hashana dvar Torah, also suitable for other occasions. I can't post a laudatory comment about it on her blog because I'm a loser without a LiveJournal ID (I jumped on the blog bandwagon after it was old news to my more geeky friends--and I use "geeky" in the best sense of the word), so I'll post them here.

It's just one idea, but I like it so much that I can't stop turning it over in my head. Go read it in her original inimitable style, but the basic thought is: Yehuda (Genesis 38) is the first person in the Torah who does what we now call teshuva, but taking responsibility for his wrong actions and admitting, in public, that they are wrong. This happens when he says, "צָדְקָה מִמֶּנִּי," "She was more righteous than I." The Yehuda and Tamar story, which interrupts the flow of narrative in the latter part of Genesis, is irksome on so many levels, but this new insight may be enough to redeem it in my eyes.

I shall have to think about it some more.

Labels: Jewish holidays, links, Rosh Hashanah, Torah (broadly defined)

I was walking to work on the first day of September when I realized that by at least one measure, summer was over. People were starting to ask me, "So, how was your summer?" not "So, how is your summer going?" My stock answer was, "It was the same as the rest of the year," because, unlike friends of mine who were on academic calendars, I had worked all summer at the same job as I had the rest of the year, with only one brief vacation to visit my grandmother. But the summer is not exactly like the rest of the year despite my no longer being a carefree youngster with two or three months to play in the sun. Its end hit me harder than usual this year.

Summer still signifies freedom and possibility in ways that fall, winter, and spring do not. The end of summer is the end of free concert and movie season in New York. It's the end of "Maybe I'll go to more events in the parks this summer," because there are no more free events in the parks this summer. I will have to wait until next summer. The end of summer means that I will never have a proper 2006 summer vacation. I will have to wait until next summer. In short, the end of summer brings the end of a certain freedom, a certain possibility that almost anything might happen (in a good way).

This year, the end of summer also brought the end of a seven month relationship that began with the first, hopeful lengthening of days in January and was now ending as the days became noticeably shorter and the night lengthened.

As summer ends, nature is about to shut down and die for the winter (at least the non-evergreen part of nature). The leaves are about to fall off the trees. In Central Park, which I see on an almost daily basis, the gardeners are raking up the few leaves that have already dried up and fallen listlessly to the ground. What's still green is no longer the bright, happy, hopeful green of early spring, nor the deep, verdant green of mid-summer. It's the tired, dusty, exhausted green of September. Nothing will be bright and shiny and new again until the snow starts to melt and the first crocuses of spring appear in late February or early March.

As I was walking and thinking, it occured to me that Rosh Hashanah was around the corner and that seemed even more ludicrous. How can we celebrate the beginning of a new year when everything good is ending or dying or leaving? Why does the year begin just when the possibility of freedom--the possibility of possibility!--is snatched away and we begin to hunker down for the cold days ahead? "How cruel can God be?," I wondered.

Then I remembered (finally!) that I am not the center of the universe, and in other parts of the world, far away from New York, the parched days of summer are coming to a close, and the first rains of winter are only a month away. Things that died back for lack of water over the summer will become revived. New saplings will grow, and if we are lucky, the trees will bear fruit and the fields grain. In other hemispheres, the winter is ending and summer is on its way. The world does not revolve around the agriculture of Central Park. Other things are going on in the world, unbeknownst to me. Babies are being born; relationships are growing; houses are being built; people are starting on paths of study that will lead to new and wonderful things. New beginnings are about to blossom. It's only a matter of remembering that there is life outside of my own small, contained universe of vacations that didn't happen this summer and relationships that ended with people I loved. It's only a matter of watching and waiting patiently for my own new beginnings to show.

Rosh Hashanah is here, in other parts of the world the fields are about to sprout brand new greenery, and God promises us an infinite number of new beginnings as we make our way through life.

Here is to the possibilities of new beginnings and of growth, even as the leaves fall wearily off the trees in Central Park. Here is to the hope that this year will bring new, better relationships, the capacity to go off on a relaxing vacation, time spent with family and friends, and hale health for all. Here is to the wish that we may all find strength when we are tired, hope when we are sad, faith when we want to give up, and supportive friends wherever we turn. May 5767 be all that you hope for and more.

Labels: Jewish holidays, life, Rosh Hashanah, Torah (broadly defined)

Hi. Still largely content-less here, but I thought that this post by Zackary Sholem Berger was terrific. And some other year, perhaps I'll even be motivated enough to take its message to heart, and shock myself into action with early-morning wake ups in Elul, and possibly parts of Tishrei as well.

I went to shacharit yesterday morning in honor of the Fast of Gedalia and, in some strange way, because I felt bad for being such a massively unfocused davener on Rosh Hashanah, to the point of missing communal shacharit and Torah reading and nodding off during musaf both mornings. Shacharit yesterday morning was lovely. I made it in time to say one regular piyut of selichot with the congregation, and managed to stay through Torah reading. I am bone-tired today, though, and may have to sleep through Shabbat to make up for it. It's always a trade-off, isn't it?

Labels: Jewish holidays, Rosh Hashanah, Torah (broadly defined)

In an ideal world, I'd have come up with something original to share for Rosh Hashanah (or the day after), but luckily for us, there remains much to repair in this world before it's ideal. (Can you imagine how boring life would be if we were born in utopia?) So, instead, I share someone else's words instead.

This is from Nafka Mina, whose blog I sometimes read. I really liked it. It resonated.

Shana tova umituka! May you be inscribed for a sweet, fulfilling, healthy, and happy year. (Or if not happy, at least growth-oriented.)

Labels: Jewish holidays, links, Rosh Hashanah, Torah (broadly defined)