Oasis Songs: Musings from Rav D
Friday, September 27, 2024 / 24 Elul 5784
This will be my last weekly message until after Yom Kippur. I want to wish all of you productive High Holidays, as well as a sweet New Year. May we all enjoy good health and all the other blessings we need.
Summary: This week we read a double portion in the Torah, Nitzavim-Vayeilech. Nitzavim, in particular, emphasizes the importance of teshuvah. With Rosh Hashanah just days away, I want to explore some thoughts about teshuvah in the hope that it might be useful for your final preparations before the holidays, even as it is a reminder that there is something mysterious about how change occurs.
Reading Time: Six minutes
The other day, Rabbi Brad Artson, Vice President of the American Jewish University, and I were speaking. During our conversation, I lamented that although our tradition offers us many different models of change in its discussion of teshuvah, it’s really difficult to state whether any of them actually work. They sound good, and they have the advantage of giving us a sense of control over our lives that we often lack, but just because a concept is beautifully packaged doesn’t mean that it is effective. That’s one reason we can find thousands of self-help books. If we really understood what could help us, probably five or six books would more than do the trick. Still, most of us are suckers for shiny promises, at least on occasion.
At a certain stage of life, a rearward glance demonstrates that we have matured and grown, yet it is not easy to actually explain how active or responsible we were in causing those transformations. It seems that time itself, or our life experiences, work upon us, creating small incremental changes, often without our being aware. Then one day, we look in the mirror and notice what’s different. Rabbi Artson has a similar experience of this, and stated, “Wouldn’t it be great if instead of a sermon about teshuvah, which we don’t really understand, we could all sit silently in shul for twenty-five minutes? It would be more honest.”
There’s a similar line in Pirket Avot (1:17), our book of ancestral wisdom sayings:
שִׁמְעוֹן בְּנוֹ אוֹמֵר, כָּל יָמַי גָּדַלְתִּי בֵין הַחֲכָמִים, וְלֹא מָצָאתִי לַגּוּף טוֹב אֶלָּא שְׁתִיקָה
“Shimon, his son, used to say: all my days I grew up among the sages, and I have found nothing better for a person than silence…”
Many years ago, a therapist I was seeing stated that while no one has any idea why therapy works, all we know is that it does. There’s something about the relationship, or the commitment to change, or the power of recognizing and verbalizing our flaws…
But it is good to know it works, because we do change.
First, it’s worth putting this question before you: does the above description of how mysterious change is resonate with your personal experiences? How easy has personal change been for you? Without a doubt, there are cases in which I can clearly see how I effectuated personal growth, yet there are just as many incidents in which silence is the most honest explanation for how time works on and through us.
One area where our transformative efforts are quite visible is in skills acquisitions. If we decide to learn how to play the piano, for example, it’s straightforward to measure our progress. When it comes to improving our personality traits, becoming less reactive, or any of these other “softer” types of our identities, we lack the clear pathway that a caterpillar takes to become a butterfly, though even then, is the caterpillar itself aware of these biological processes?
As we prepare to enter into the Yamim Noraim, the Days of Awe, some of us may be thinking about how well we have performed from a skills perspective. It is certainly valuable to “up our game” in that regard, yet I would wager that the ways most of us “miss the mark” have more to do with those more intractable parts of ourselves: Perhaps we struggle with anger, depression, self-absorption, or a judgmental nature. Looking at the mahzor, our special prayerbook for the High Holidays, we see that our prayers and confessions are less concerned with improving our performance than with refining our souls.
For many years, precisely because change is not straightforward, I would dedicate one of my High Holiday sermons to a different model of teshuvah and growth. Like those thousand self-help books (or personal growth, as the market segment is often called now), I imagined that a different concept might better click in place for either congregants or myself.
While the mystery of personal change remains, there are some approaches or attitudes that seem like catalysts. The Slonimer Rebbe, author of Netivot Shalom, or Paths of Peace, has written extensively on teshuvah. Some of his concepts can be found in many parts of the Jewish tradition: it is better to return out of love than from fear; teshuvah is a continual process; rather than meaning atonement, teshuvah is a return to our inner divine essence. The latter is an idea I have encountered in Tibetan teachings as well. While that feels true, it doesn’t exactly map out an active pathway by which we can work on ourselves.
What we also find in the Netivot Shalom is the importance of nurturing joy while engaged in the work of teshuvah. Serving God with happiness opens the heart and allows for a more genuine return, he writes. Joy is indeed a powerful catalyst. For one thing, it lessens the paralysis that often accompanies any shame we might carry about our errant ways. Moreover, let’s not forget that active change takes energy, and our hearts, minds, and bodies are designed to conserve energy. By linking teshuvah to the pleasant sensations of joy, we are more likely to invest that effort because the process itself becomes more enjoyable.
Yet finding one’s way to joy, particularly if that is not an emotional state one readily enters, also is not automatic or easy, especially for adults. Children seem to have easier access to states of joy, laughter, and giddiness than most grownups. They haven’t trained themselves out of it yet.
But if we train ourselves to keep joy at a distance, we can also train ourselves to invite it closer. A technique that I have found helpful from meditation is to set aside some time each day to seek out pleasant sensations in the body. Once you identify them, remain with the sensation. Doing so reinforces pathways, just like going to the gym strengthens our bodies.
Finally, joy also reduces stress hormones and inflammation. Inflammation is the opposite of the flexibility we require for change to occur. Just as an inflamed joint in the body moves less easily, so, too, do our hearts and minds. In other words, dedicating a part of your day to joy is neither frivolous nor a waste of time. To be clear, even five minutes a day is sufficient to begin to shift something, and perhaps as the Slonimer Rebbe says, to open a gate back to our divine essence.
Shanah tovah u’metukah!
Rav D
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