If You Knew (Portion Va-yelech)

What do we learn from our mortality?

On this, the first Shabbat of the new year—Shabbat Shuvah—we read from the shortest portion in the Torah, Vayelech.  As Deuteronomy winds to a close, Moses tells the Israelites that he will not be leading them into the land of Israel.  Shortly thereafter, God tells Moses that his death is imminent, and that he should prepare Joshua to take his place—which he does, with the extraordinarily generous charge, “Chazak v’ematz—Be strong and of good courage!”

Every year, as I read this passage, my heart goes out to Moses.  After guiding the people for forty years, it seems so unfair that he is unable to finish the job.

And yet his fate is ours.  Few of us get to leave this life with no unfinished business.  Even if we die at a ripe old age, there are tasks left undone, dreams unfulfilled, hurts left unhealed.  There is never enough time.  As Talmud teaches: “The day is short, the work is great. . . and the master of the house is knocking.”

The pressing question for us, then, in this sacred season, is:  Can awareness of our mortality move us to live more fully here and now?  Does it paralyze us with fear?  Or might it lead us toward generosity, as it does Moses?  Shabbat Shuvah, this Sabbath of Return, is a time for meditating on these questions and turning our mortality toward a positive end: making amends with those we’ve hurt before it is too late, embracing our better angels, and choosing life and blessing.

I’ll leave you with a powerful poem on this subject by Ellen Bass, and pray that we are all signed and sealed for blessing in the Book of Life for the coming year.

If You Knew

What if you knew you’d be the last
to touch someone?
If you were taking tickets, for example,
at the theater, tearing them,
giving back the ragged stubs,
you might take care to touch that palm,
brush your fingertips
along the life line’s crease.

When a man pulls his wheeled suitcase
too slowly through the airport, when
the car in front of me doesn’t signal,
when the clerk at the pharmacy
won’t say Thank you, I don’t remember
they’re going to die.

A friend told me she’d been with her aunt.
They’d just had lunch and the waiter,
a young gay man with plum black eyes,
joked as he served the coffee, kissed
her aunt’s powdered cheek when they left.
Then they walked half a block and her aunt
dropped dead on the sidewalk.

How close does the dragon’s spume
have to come? How wide does the crack
in heaven have to split?
What would people look like
if we could see them as they are,
soaked in honey, stung and swollen,
reckless, pinned against time?

How to Apologize

As the Days of Awe draw near, I’ve been thinking about apologies.  Our tradition offers this season as an opportunity to make amends, and Jewish writer Marjorie Ingall (who blogs at www.sorrywatch.com) recently shared an example of what it means to apologize well: an open letter by Chuck Klosterman.

Klosterman, who writes the New York Times “Ethicist” column, was responding to a post by Kari Wagner-Peck, a disabilities rights activist whose son has Downs syndrome.  She sharply criticized Klosterman for using the word “retarded” in a highly pejorative context in several of his published essay collections,  concluding: “. . . You appear to be an unrepentant hater of people with cognitive disabilities.”

Here is Mr. Klosterman’s brief but exemplary response, in its entirety:

Dear Ms. Wagner-Peck:

I have spent the last two days trying to figure out a way to properly address the issue you have raised on your website.  I’ve slowly concluded the best way is to just be as straightforward as possible: I was wrong.   You are right.

I should not have used “retard” perjoratively.  It was immature, hurtful, and thoughtless.  I have no justification for my actions.  I realize the books that contain those sentiments were published over 10 years ago, but that is no excuse; I was an adult when I wrote them and I knew what I was doing.  I feel terrible about this and deeply embarrassed.  I take full responsibility for my actions and understand why this matters so much to you.  I’m truly sorry.

Feel free to re-post this message on your website.  I deserve the criticism I am receiving, and I want other people to know that I realize I was wrong.  I would also like to donate $25,000 to whatever charity you feelis most critical in improving the lives of people with cognitive disabilities.  I have done something bad, so help me do something good.

Again, I apologize—and not just to you and your son, but to anyone else who was hurt by this.

Chuck Klosterman

Why is this such a great apology?  Marjorie Ingall points out that it is the rare example of one that follows five basic rules:

1.     Say you are sorry (with no “buts” to follow)

2.     Say the thing that you are sorry for—a good apology is specific

3.     Show that you understand the import of your misdeed

4.     Make amends

5.     Take steps to see that this same misdeed doesn’t happen again

Chuck Klosterman apologizes for his very specific failing, makes no excuses, demonstrates a genuine understanding of the impact of his insensitivity, makes amends ($25,000!) and, by publishing his response publicly, makes it harder for both himself and others to commit this same transgression in the future.

As we enter the High Holy Days, may we ponder—and act upon—these same principles, and in so doing, rejoin the path of true teshuvah—healing the world by healing our own brokenness.

Heaven in a Grain of Sand (Portion Re'eh)

“See, I set before you today a blessing and a curse.”

            -Deuteronomy 11: 26, opening of portion Re’eh

Numerous times in the book of Deuteronomy, God offers us the choice between blessing and curse, then urges us to choose blessing.  Why?  Surely this seems like no-brainer.  Who wouldn’t prefer blessings over curses?

But perhaps the choice is more difficult than it appears at first glance.  Before laying out the options, God implores us, see; indeed, the Hebrew word for seeing, re’eh gives our portion its name.  Here is the challenge: in order to discern the paths of blessing and curse, we have to look very carefully.  All too often in life, we pay half-hearted attention to what we are doing, and when we do this, it is easy to take the wrong way.  If anything, this is even truer today than it was for our biblical forebears, given the immense amount of distractions that our technological culture showers upon us.

With this in mind, our tradition gives us a full month before the Days of Awe to work on our seeing.  This is the first week of Elul, the Hebrew month of preparation for the High Holy Days.  Our challenge is to use this time to look carefully at both the world around us and the world within us—so that we might make better choices in both in the coming weeks.

How do we do this?  In his book This is Real and You are Completely Unprepared, Rabbi Alan Lew offers a suggestion that is both profound and realistically achievable.  He writes: “Focus on one thing.  It may not be realistic to expect a significant number of people to suddenly begin showing up at prayer minyans or mediation groups during the month of Elul. . . So I am pleased to inform you that it is perfectly possible to fulfill the ancient imperative to begin becoming more self-aware during this time without doing these things.  Let me recommend a simpler method, and you won’t even have to set aside a special time to practice this.  Just choose one simple and fundamental aspect of your life and commit yourself to being totally conscious and honest about it for the thirty days of Elul.  ‘A world in a grain of sand,’ as the poet Williamk Blake reminded us.  Everything we do is an expression of the entire truth of our lives.  It doesn’t really make any difference what it is that we choose to focus on, but it ought to be something pretty basic, something like eating or sex or money, if for no other reason than that these concerns are likely to arise quite frequently in our lives and to give us a lot of grist for the mill.  The truth of our lives is reflected in everything we do, and if we focus on even one small part of our lives, it brings up the entire truth of it.

Give it a try.  Choose one thing—just one thing—and pay really close attention to it throughout this month.  Then see—really see—re’eh—how you can bring a bit more holiness into your life in the coming year.

The Power of Surprise (Portion Korach)

All that is beautiful, true, always comes as a surprise.  So retain the capacity to be surprised.  Once you lose that capacity you are dead.  If things can surprise you, you are still alive.  And the more you are surprised by things, the more alive you are.

                                    -Osho, Above All, Don’t Wobble

As we grow older, it is easy to become jaded—to lose our capacity for surprise.  Like the world-weary author of Ecclesiastes, we may be tempted to declare that nothing is new under the sun.  We come to view all that is currently happening through the fixed lens of past experience.  When this happens, we lose our capacity to embrace change and novelty and thereby calcify our souls and our selves.

Torah seeks to jar us out of such cynicism and complacency.  Part of God’s calling is to keep us on our toes, attentive and open to surprise.  Consider this week’s Torah portion, Korach.   It tells the tragic story of the most heinous of several mutinies launched against Moses and his leadership.  The leader of the rebels, Korach, is ultimately swallowed up by the earth, along with his followers.  In both the biblical story and the many centuries of commentary that follow, Korach remains a symbol of greed and bloodthirsty lust for power.

Yet, lest we get too attached to a simplistic worldview in which Korach and his company represent pure and everlasting evil, when we get to the book of Psalms, we find that twelve of the 150 psalms (42-49, 85, 87, and 88) are attributed to b’nai Korach, the children of Korach.  What a remarkable surprise: just a few generations after the father of all rebellions is severely punished directly by God, along with his entire family, we find that his descendants are creating magnificent songs of praise to God that merit inclusion in the Psalter!

This is an important reminder for us to resist our negative preconceptions based on past experience.  If we seek to experience beauty—in music and art and poetry and, really, any aspect of life—we must be prepared to be surprised at its often deeply unexpected origins.    Life is far stranger than we often give it credit for being—thank God!

A Narrow Bridge (Portion Shelach L'chah)

The whole world is a very narrow bridge—and the main thing is not to. . .

I love this analogy from Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, which captures the risk and reward of living mindfully.  I think I’ve always identified with this teaching because I have a strong fear of heights.  My biggest challenge when I trekked in Nepal six years ago was crossing the numerous high—and very narrow—swaying suspension bridges that the trail took to make its way across deep Himalayan canyons.  Anticipating this difficulty after reading the maps and guidebooks, I spent hours prepping for the trip.  I met with a therapist who taught me the visualization and guided meditation techniques that enabled me to overcome my trepidation.  It was not easy but I made it.

But even after all of my preparation, with many miles—and narrow bridges—behind me, it was not easy.  I never really got past my fear.  I just powered through it.

This is why I’ve left off the end of Rabbi Nachman’s teaching, which is usually phrased “and the main thing is to have no fear at all.”  These words have never made sense to me.  We all have fear—that’s the human condition.  The main thing is not to be fearless, but, rather, to refuse to give our fear the last word.  And it turns out, Rabbi Nachman (not surprisingly) knew this very well, as scholars have found alternative versions of this quote with the word l’hitpached replacing the more common l’fached—meaning, “and the main thing is not to be paralyzed by one’s fear.”

In this week’s Torah portion, Shlach L’chah, Moses sends out twelve scouts to reconnoiter the Promised Land.  All of them see a place of abundance, but they do not agree on their assessment of the inhabitants of the land—and the prospects for success if the Israelites decide to invade.  Ten of the twelve urge a hasty retreat.  They spread fear among their people, insisting: “The country that we traversed and scouted is one that devours its settlers.  The people that we saw in it are men of great size. . . .We looked like grasshoppers to ourselves, and so we must have looked to them.”  Only two scouts—Joshua and Caleb—keep the faith and urge, “Let us by all means go up and gain possession of the land.”  Unfortunately, the masses of Israelites follow the pessimistic and fearful majority.  They complain bitterly, railing against Moses and Aaron, refusing to go forward into Canaan.  As a consequence of their rebellion, God decrees that this entire generation must die out before the Israelites can finally enter the Promised Land.  Forty years of wandering ensue.

What was the difference between Joshua and Caleb and the rest of the scouts (and the Israelites who followed them)?  I suspect Joshua and Caleb were also afraid.  But they overcame their fear and urged others to do the same.  Yes, the world is a very narrow bridge, and there is no shame in fear.  But if we wish to cross over to new things—to grow as people—then the main thing is to remember that we can move forward despite our fear.