I got an incredible, life-changing opportunity this year. Thanks to you, thanks to my incredible coworkers and lay leadership, thanks to my community, I took a sabbatical. At the age of thirty five, turning thirty six, I had six entire months, a winter into spring into summer, to do whatever I wanted. Within reason. I still had caregiving responsibilities at home and the limitations of financial realities, but I also had enormous freedom. I had fantasized about this time for years. What would I do? Would I get back into writing music, and playing with a band? Would I attempt to write and illustrate a children’s torah commentary? Would I try my hand at fiction, maybe write about my favorite Talmudic rabbi, Reish Lakish?
I surprised myself, and did none of the above. I became a certified yoga teacher in Costa Rica, completing two hundred hours of physical and anatomical and philosophical training. I came home and reconnected with my family, learning what it felt like to hang out with my kids with no time stress. I came so close to here, to the Library of Congress, and week after week studied kabbalah, the mystical offerings of our tradition. I started to write about it. I started to do yoga about it. As the weather got warmer, I started sitting under trees and meditating about it. I swept my alley thinking about it, snuggled with my family thinking about it, and read the wheatpasting along our streets thinking about it. I became a mystic, meaning, I took what was around me, my environment in real time, and found the meaning there, and the divinity. Merriam-Webster defines mysticism as “the belief that direct knowledge of God, spiritual truth, or ultimate reality can be attained through subjective experience (such as intuition or insight).” From my perspective, if you’re watching the rats skitter by your stoop at night and you find yourself learning from them, that’s mysticism. Mysticism doesn’t wait for some revelatory experience: it creates a much lower barrier for ongoing, daily, possibilities for revelation.
I spent my sabbatical seeking out transcendence. I wanted to feel more connected to other people, to nature, and to God. I wanted to feel that connection in a way that would have a material impact on my life when things got stressful, scary, or confusing. I figured that if I could train myself to think and feel in this way during a very easy, peaceful time – a sabbatical – then once things get harder, I’d have habits, thought patterns, and practices that I could rely on. Also – I’m a rabbi. I spend so much of my time thinking about spirituality. But as I sat on the ground on my first morning of yoga teacher training, trying to meditate but just wanting to open my eyes and start running my mouth, I realized that I didn’t spend enough of my time on a daily basis engaging in nourishing spiritual practices. I love services; I love davening with a group of people, and I love torah study, especially with a chevruta, a study partner, or in a group. It doesn’t always make me light up on the inside, but sometimes, it does. I decided that I wanted to get lit up on the inside more easily. For that, I needed to thin the imaginary barriers between myself and that which is most meaningful. In a word, I wanted to play with transcendence.
The settings of the Zohar, the ultimate Jewish book of mysticism, suggest that it’s easiest to engage in mysticism while on the road, or at least, not at home. It’s possible that the two most transformative places for me during the sabbatical were in Costa Rica, far from home, and then, later on in the spring, on my first ever bike-packing trip; cycling with a neighbor from our homes to Harpers Ferry and camping along the way. The unsteadiness of motion, of not being home, particularly in a new setting that you approach in a new way, is a good starting point for perspective shifts. But I think the real key is mindfulness – intentionally making ourselves aware of what’s going on inside us and around us; and attuning ourselves to each of our senses. For me, I’ve learned that the most surefire way to get there is some combination of the following: the company of at least one other person, sweat or a raised heartrate, nature and awareness of it, and a mantra, guiding principle, or intention that is interesting and profound. So for me, doing yoga, or taking a bikepacking trip with a mystically-inclined neighbor who frequently wanted to relate our journey back to God – obviously that was transformative. But for you, maybe you need solitude, or art supplies, or something that clearly links you to your ancient ancestry, or to science. Experiment with different tools and see what gets you to that place of mindfulness. From mindfulness, transcendence is just down the road.
This is a much easier thing to do when you have spaciousness in your life, because it’s so amorphous, and involves so much experimentation. When you’re deep in the thick of it, when you’re managing crises, or failing to manage crises, or watching world leaders miserably fail to manage crises, it’s hard to allow yourself to make time for spirituality. And then even if you pencil in that time, when you’re surrounded by horrors, or stressors, it can be hard to feel connected to other people. It can be hard to feel connected to nature, let alone to the ether; to mystery and to space. It can be hard to think of how that connection even matters. And it can certainly be hard to find even glimmerings of transcendence. But I’m back in the thick of things now, I’m right there with you, and I think that if I can keep that feeling of connection going, keep alive that sense of transcendence that I nourished during sabbatical, it’s going to help me walk through the hard times with purpose, courage, and grace. That is my goal for myself and for all of you who want to join me. Now that I’m back in the thick of things, I want to go on this adventure together.
Rosh Hashana is known as the birthday of the world, or even as the pregnancy of the world. I’ve been dreaming up ways to experience the world from a new vantage point, and I think one of them, or three of them, really, are coming up soon in our service. There’s a section of the Rosh Hashanah morning service called musaf, and I feel like we often rush through it,because it’s near the end of the service. But when I think about how we can think in a way that makes a positive, transformative impact on the way we live, I think of the three themes of the musaf service.
So, what is musaf? On Shabbat, there’s a tradition to luxuriate in the extra space in time to lift up our meditations, words and offerings once more with a musaf, meaning extra, section of the service. Progressive Jewish communities often get impatient with the repetition, thinking that there’s other things we’d like to be doing with our time on Shabbat than sitting in services even longer. So depending on your upbringing and the kind of services you typically attend, this may or may not sound familiar. But today, on the birthday of the world, the musaf section of the service isn’t just a repetition. We lift up three new theological vantage points in the Rosh Hashanah musaf. Points where we need something extra, right now, on the birthday of the world, to help us grapple with ourselves and our world, in honesty, caring concern, and love. I want to tell you about each one of these theological vantage points, and explain why I think they’re important; why I think they’re building blocks for this goal, this internal palace, of spiritual awakeness. I don’t think that just sitting through these prayers in our service this morning is going to get us there, but it’s a provocation. It’s an entrypoint to think about how we can bring these themes into our year – over and over again.
The first section is Malkhuyot – Sovereignty. Not as in, you’re a king, I’m a queen, we rule. More like, there is a ruler and it is not us. Maybe I call the ruler God. Maybe I call it nature. Maybe I call it life, or reality. But I am not in full control – not over what happens to me or to my loved ones. I’m dust and ashes. To the extent that I do have agency it’s a sacred and beautiful thing, but it is limited. And that’s true for every one of us. And so just as I am humbled, and just as I am so small from the standpoint of eternity, that’s also true for every one of us, and for every bird, caterpillar, and blade of grass. In an instant, we can be buried between tectonic plates. In that sense, we are so temporary, so vulnerable. But taken as a whole, as a planet, as a universe, we are part of God, divine and infinite.
How does an awareness of our vulnerability, and of this vastness, of Malchuyot, help us to cope with crises, take steps to repair them, and celebrate the world as it is? It’s the humility that allows us to empathize with the children who grow up being taught to fear us and people like us. Because they’re like us too, even if they don’t all realize it. If we reflect on how close we and our loved ones are to death – just one nuclear bomb away, just one car crash, just one tragic trip to the doctor away – we start to feel a lot closer to the other people in precarious positions, whether or not they’re on your “side” of the fight, and whether or not you share the same genre of vulnerabilities. Because, of course, you do share the same genre of vulnerabilities – that of being human, of being mortal. You see a man in handcuffs, you imagine him as your father. You see a woman on a gurney, you imagine her as your mother. You see a kid with a weapon, you imagine him as your son. The more precarious you realize you are, the more precious you realize we all are. If we want to be there for each other, if we want to be there for God, to be there for reality, it’s a critical broadening of perspective.
The next section is Zichronot – Memory. We think about our ancestors, our history, our role models, the people we have to learn from and look up to. We think about their stories in their fullness. We think about Abraham and Sarah, how welcoming they were to strangers, how brave they were to set out to a new land, how patient they were as they struggled with infertility, how harmful they were as they threw out Hagar and baby Ishmael, how crazed they must have been when Avraham almost sacrificed Isaac, when Sara found out what he’d done and her heart stopped. We take it all in. We consider their contexts, the gifts that they were given and that they gave back to the world, and the ways in which the world and its people hurt and were hurt by them. We read the stories of our ancestors and we imagine ourselves, as I was taught, as every character in the story, with every attribute of every character in the story.
That contextualizing develops our empathy and our understanding. Our nemesis isn’t just our nemesis. They’re someone’s child. We get into the practice of imagining their journey, their trauma, and their successes and failures that got them to where they are. As for mortality, once we allow the sense of Zichronot, or Memory, to flourish, we’re no longer thinking about just our own mortality. Because we see the way we remember our dead – with love, dedication, and real life takeaways – and so we develop a sense that we, too, will be remembered. That we are part of someone else’s context, or story, a story of an entire people, or a story of people in general. As we learn how our ancestors responded to injustice and to righteousness, as we learn from their wisdom and their mistakes, we grow more layers from which to reflect on our own choices in life. Our perspectives are broadened in transcendence.
The third musaf section is Shofarot – as in, the shofar. Sounds blasted from the horn of a dead animal. It’s so visceral; so raw. We hear Shofarot and we think about how valid it is to cry out. How natural, how good it is to vocalize our yearnings, dreams, and pain. Shofarot traditionally invokes the scene at Mount Sinai, all the Israelites from every generation past, present and future standing there together, the desert blooming with flowers like our bimah shows, but with thunder and lightning and the great blasts of a shofar, sensory overload. That’s how our tradition imagines revelation: wild, active, and vocal. That becomes an important mode for us to be able to inhabit ourselves.
When we lean into Shofarot, we get more comfortable with the outbursts and vocalizations of our neighbors, and we get more comfortable with our own, too. We practice listening without immediately reacting and rebutting. We practice saying how we feel, saying what we believe. We give ourselves permission to think, speak, and change our minds freely. We give ourselves permission to freely laugh, shout, and cry. We grow less threatened by the sound of others doing the same. We appreciate and vibrate with the music of humanity in all of its variety. We transcend the sense of cacophony, and we begin to harmonize.
Malchuyot, Zichronot, Shofarot. How vulnerable and how small we each are. How profoundly we each remember and learn from our ancestors. How much holy noise we each make. All of these lessons broaden our perspectives and our understanding. As our minds and hearts open wider, we feel closer to one another, and to the sacred life force that connects us.
On Rosh Hashanah, we read the story of Avraham and Sara – a story of relief and celebration, as well as persecution, violence, and salvation. Their story is rich and transformative, but not where I typically go to tap into a singular moment of transcendent inspiration. There are moments of transcendence in the Torah of Rosh Hashanah – but for today, I want to talk about the ones that aren’t completely filled with desperation, fear and trembling, and for that, I look to the experiences of their grandson, Yaakov. There’s a healthy dose of desperation and fear in Yaakov’s life, too. Like his grandparents, and like us, Yaakov lived in a time of systemic injustice and inequality. Like his grandparents, and like us, Yaakov perpetuated injustice and inequality himself. He was born into a zero-sum game, and he played it accordingly, with trickery and lies. But after he deceived his father and brother, and after he ran for his life, he lay down for the night in the open air with a rock for his pillow and he dreamed of divine connection, of a bustling, ever-shifting ladder reaching beyond him, connecting him to mystery, baffling and awe-inspiring. Instead of dissociating himself from connection, mystery, and meaning, his subconscious begs him to seek more than just his own material wellbeing.
Years later, with wives and concubines and children, and so much more to lose, he learns that his brother, Esau, is on his way to meet him, with an intimidatingly large group of people. That night, the Torah tells us that Yaakov wrestled with a mysterious stranger, got injured in the process, and, of all things, demanded a blessing from the stranger. So the stranger blessed him with a new name: Yisrael, One who Wrestles with God. The blessing he gains is that Yisrael and his people after him – we, the Jewish people, B’nai yisrael — will always be questioning, exploring, and wrestling as we ponder that which is most sacred, most holy, most unquestionable. For us, there will always be more perspectives to consider, more truths, more possibilities. Transcendence. The next morning, Yaakov and Esau held and kissed each other.
Like Yaakov, and his grandparents, we have plenty to fear. Like Yaakov and his grandparents, we are witnesses to great injustice and great pain. Like Yaakov and his grandparents, we are sometimes complicit. And also, like them, we have the opportunity to shake up the way we look at all of it; to open our hearts to people we never expected to empathize with, to imagine possibilities and ways of life we never thought would be for us. We may not have dreams, or mystical altercations, like Yaakov. But we are here, right now. We’re in a room full of ancient words, and immediate feelings, and loved ones, and strangers, and we’re going to hear the heart-wrenching story of Chana, and encounter our mortality with Unetaneh Tokef, and get roused by the shofar calls, and then, finally, as promised, move through the transcendent, transcending Musaf.
Even during these Days of Awe, it’s not always necessary to find rich meaning in every ritual or teaching. But maybe, if we’re lucky, there’s a word, a phrase, a note, a melody, a moment of eye contact with a stranger, or a feeling of the bench beneath your seat, something that feels worthy of focus. I started this sermon talking about the Musaf service, blowing our minds open to eternity. But for many mystics, spiritual practice isn’t about having light pouring out of your eyes all the time. It’s about moments; experiencing the divine; experiencing transcendence in small, distinct moments. We have this time now to locate a moment, and to focus on it, and maybe you can take that moment home with you, and roll it over in your mind. A mentor of mine says, “Let the days of awe work on you.” Rosh Hashanah, and Yom Kippur, and the ten days of teshuvah in between. Let them give you the space to find a moment of mystical resonance, a moment of transcendence.
So, since you all made my sabbatical possible, you might as well join me in benefiting from it. I challenge you to join me this year in a search for transcendence – or an unwillingness to settle for the status quo. I challenge you to join me in a search for compassion – for those you disagree with, who you argue with, as a spiritual practice and as a mitzvah. I challenge you to join me in questioning authority and wrestling with ideas. I challenge you to join me in a search for meaning.
May this journey we’re embarking on together translate into real shifts in the way we see ourselves and one another, our society, our planet, and God. May this shift in perspective, this shift in priority, help make this year a good, sweet year, for us and for all who dwell on earth.
L’shana tovah umetukah