Seeing The Possible (Rosh Hashanah 2023)

There is a famous midrash that every blade of grass has a constellation of Angels urging it to Grow! Grow! (Midrash Rabba 10:6). Actually the real story is that every herb has forces or angels that strike it so that it will grow. And so it is with us: growth is a physical, emotional, and spiritual imperative that we may not always like, but cannot ignore. One of my favorite quotes about this is by Norman Mailer: "There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same" (The Deer Park). Perhaps that is why we read: Fortunate are the people who know the sound of the Shofar – who get an opportunity for a reset each year (Holy Days Siddur). As you all know, there are only two commandments concerning Rosh Hashanah: to do no laborious work and to hear the sound of the Shofar. That's it. It's a wonderful thing about Judaism that we have an actual date scheduled each year to grow. Not that we don't grow every day: our bodies change over time, our perspectives change, our relationship to the Divine changes, and our urges and desires change. In Judaism, however, we make an appointment to consider ourselves and the trajectory of growth that we would like to see in the coming year. It is as if God has said to us: I will give you 4 great gifts: intelligence, creativity, choice, and Holidays to have time to contemplate and use your creativity and choice to the fullest. This day is our opportunity to do what God commanded the Kohen Gadol, Aaron, the high priest, and later, the High Priest Joshua during the time of Zechariah: "Remove your dirty garments." (Levit. 16:23, Zech. 3:4) In other words: see what's really there, underneath the outer shell of your clothing, the pure light and pure love of you, all your possibilities. Love is our natural state. How do we know that? Because it feels so good when we love. We are going with life when we love. In Prov. 5:15-18 we read, "Drink water from your own cistern, Running water from your own well. Your wellsprings will gush forth In streams outside. They will be yours alone, … Let your fountain be blessed," This can mean, Bring yourself from outside yourself to your true nature. See the majesty that's really there. There is a wonderful quote I recently heard about: a nun, Macrina Wiederkehr, who was a spiritual teacher in a monastic community in Arkansas wrote: "O God, help me to believe the truth about myself no matter how beautiful it is!" We are here to feel loved, supported, nurtured, and to learn the inner truth about ourselves. R. Jonathan Sacks commented on the section of the prayer, Unetane Tokef, which means, the power of this day: "the great shofar is sounded and a still small voice is heard. It is the still small voice of our intuition, of God whispering to us. We intuit that we are truly great, but can't prove it, mostly to ourselves." There is a question asked in Judaism: When will God appear, today, if you listen to God's voice – the still small voice. This voice can guide us and each of us can hear it if we listen. The Chassidic masters said, everything is God. This means, in a certain sense, we are God too. The scientists, the quantum physicists, and all the spiritual teachers say, Everything is energy. Which is it? It, of course is both – everything is energy, God energy, and we are energy, God energy. If everything is energy, it's easy to see that energy can be changed. It's possible to change our energy. When we need to confide, to be comforted, to cry out, we relate to God as a personality, as contemporary theologian Elliot Dorff has written (Contemporary Jewish Theology P. 113), but at other times, we can relate to God as creative energetic force, as life itself, as Love, as Goodness itself. Not that there is no physical reality, but that there is an opportunity to make more changes to our state, our inner and outer states, than we have been taught. Much more is actually possible than we think. Here is an amazing fact to consider: Each year, each of our bodies create billions of cells: About 330 billion cells are replaced daily, equivalent to about 1 percent of all our cells. In 80 to 100 days, 30 trillion will have replenished—the equivalent of a new you. That means that we are all made of new cells – our cells are young! This creates much more opportunity for us to use the gift of intuition and creativity to make the life we want. I recently read about two studies from the Mayo Clinic that concluded that optimists live an average of 7 years longer than pessimists and live in better health. This tells us that by our mental and emotional states, that which we think and feel, we make actual physical changes in our bodies. Rabbi Joseph Gelberman, z'l, my teacher of blessed memory taught that each of us should be a possibilist. Here's a story from another research paper I read about. A group of men volunteered to participate in a study in which they went to a summer camp location for a week. They were given cues from their youth: the same music, sports, cultural references, in order to have them relive their lives of years ago and trigger them into believing they were young again. The men arrived with bodies that were typical of their ages - 60's and 70's - and somewhat creaky: They were measured, weighed, and their vitals were taken. At the end of the week, they were playing softball and other sports as if they were over 40 years younger. Their physical bodies had actually changed in measurable ways. I've spoken in previous years about taking the word hate out of my vocabulary. This year I've taken the word impossible out of my vocabulary and so can you. Had Sarah and Abraham not believed that having a child in their old age was possible, we would have no Judaism, and perhaps, no monotheism. If the Israelites had not believed Moses that they would have a miraculous deliverance from Pharoah's pursing army, there would be no Torah. In Rabbi & Author Rami Shapiro's first year at Hebrew Union college, he was told that he could either be a prophet or a clerk. Prophets tend to be unpopular. Rabbinic Clerks are accepted and respected. It's no fun being a clerk; it's exciting being a prophet, especially being a prophet to oneself: a leader of the self in marvelous directions. The prophet Jeremiah (15:19) gave us guidance for this. He wrote, "Assuredly, thus said The Eternal: If you turn back, I shall take you back, and you shall stand before Me, If you Extract the noble, or the precious, from the base, or the worthless." That's our task – to find the treasure of the possible within ourselves. The quantum physicist Max Planck wrote: All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind." So what does God think about life? That it is good. "Ki Tov," God said in Genesis (1:4). In our Holy days Machzor, our prayerbook which speaks about God as object outside ourselves, when we read, "God is exalted," it doesn't touch us unless we realize that there is no separation: the God in us is exalted, we are exalted. How can we exalt ourselves, extracting the precious from the worthless and fusing our energy with Divine energy? One way is to follow the wisdom of someone who spent her life extracting the best from the worst. I've adapted a quotation from her. Perhaps you can guess who said this: “People are often unreasonable, illogical and self-centered. Forgive them anyway. If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives. Be kind anyway. If you are successful, you will win some false friends and some true enemies. Succeed anyway. If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you. Be honest and frank anyway. If you speak with respect dignity and care, you may not be respected. Be respectful anyway. What you spend years building, someone could destroy overnight. Build anyway. If you find serenity and happiness, people may be jealous. Be happy anyway. The good you do today, people will often forget tomorrow. Do good anyway. Give the world the best you have, and it may never be enough. Give your best anyway. You see, in the final analysis, it is between you and your Divine Self. It was never between you and them anyway.” It's a quotation from Mother Theresa. She says that all struggles, conflicts, and challenges are really inner, with the self. As another teacher said, there's no one out there (Werner Erhard, EST Training). Another way to extract the precious from the worthless is by being a possibilist. By believing in goodness, in the miraculous, in the power of love, the power of optimism, the power of thought, the magic of the life force of the Divine within us; the possibility of our own exaltation in living as our best and highest self. If everything is actually energy, God energy, then anything is possible. Energy can be changed. We just have to begin to see the possibilities.

The Meaning of Shofar This Year, Rosh Hashanah 2020

Living is a contact sport. We are social animals and we crave interaction. Yet for six months we have been more isolated than at any time in our life’s experience. However, through this time we have been jostled and prodded in a sense, by forces which have contacted us, mostly non-physically: rather intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually. From Black Lives Matter to the environment to economic injustice and to immigration, these have all touched us. We know we are experiencing a shift – a major shift. What meaning people in the future will assign to this shift, we do not know. It is happening to us and because of that, what it means to us and what we are learning from it is much more important than what historians will say about it in the future. Rosh Hashanah is the holiday when we come together to eat well with family and friends. But no one knows what it’s really about. There is only one commandment in Torah concerning Rosh Hashanah, other than we are to do no work on our holiday. Rosh Hashana’s only commandment is to hear the sound of the shofar. That’s it. And no one knows what that’s about either. Perhaps we can explore what Rosh Hashanah and what the sound of the shofar can mean to us this year. Maimonides famously taught that the sound of the shofar means, Sleepers Awake! Scrutinize your deeds and return to God in repentance. However, this year is different. We have become different. We need a different meaning. The word T’ruah actually comes from the root R-UT, which means affection. It means friendship, neighbor, and even wife. This year God is calling to us – through events and through our gathering together to hear the sound of the Shofar. It’s sound says, I am calling to you in love. I am calling to you insistently: through events and through your seclusion, like the time of your wandering in the empty wilderness when you received the Torah, away from civilization, in a place of less distraction, a quiet, wild, and uncertain place. I am calling to you on an inner level to remember who you really are. You are me – me on earth, and I am you. Who you really are can be recalled from my intimate encounter with Moses which you call the 13 Attributes of God – a description of my personality – when I said, I am all Being. I am compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abundant in kindness an truth, forgiving and cleansing. Further, I am justice, I am caring – Eyl Kana - A God who cares passionately, I am loving, as I loved you into life, sustain, guide you, and teach you with my love, and I am within each of you – in your heart and in your mouth, as it says in Deuteronomy. God has come during these six months, to heal us and we are being called to grow. What’s interesting about the Holy Days is that we are commanded, not only to participate in our growth, by simply showing up for the holiday, but also to lead it: to lead and direct our own growth. The prophet Jeremiah taught that the wound is the cure. God said, “For I will restore health to you and heal your wounds. (Jer 30:17) and the midrash explains: The ways of God are unlike those of humans. For a person inflicts a wound with a knife and heals with a bandage, but God heals with the very things with which God wounds. (Ex Rabba 50:3) WE have come to life and to this time in our lives to HEAL – to heal ourselves and our society. In the midrash, a commentary on the Torah there is a classic teaching that each blade of grass has its very own angel urging it to Grow, grow! (Midrash Rabba, Bereshit 10:6) If every blade of grass has an angel, we certainly have angels, or energies from the Divine, urging us to grow. And during this time the angels, like the sound of the Shofar, are even more insistent. A quote from Norman Mailer echoes in my mind: There was that law of life so cruel and so just which demanded that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same. (Barbary Shore Chapter 26) Something is being asked of us. But exactly what is it? Albert Einstein famously said “We cannot solve the problems with the same thinking that created them.” We are being taken to an entirely new level of human functioning: much more interior - centered and much less exterior centered – more virtual and less physical, more energetic and less physically tangible. These urgent demands on us are changing us quickly. We think that the events of our lives are uncharted territory; however it’s really WE who are the uncharted territory. The Torah laid out the ethical bare minimum of moral deeds and integrity of speech and action. It is a floor and not a ceiling. The gems of Torah: Love your neighbor as yourself, and the very love-centered later book of Deuteronomy, asks us to love Being, Love life, Love Existence, Love goodness and love God with all our heart and all our souls and all our might. These gems of Torah point the way toward which we actually find ourselves now travelling. It is prophecy, not only commandment. You Shall love our neighbor as yourself! It will happen. You shall love Being, Life, Existence, Goodness, and God with all your heart, soul, and might. These teachings foretell the shift of the moment and point the way toward a manner of thinking: believing that it’s all possible, which can enlarge our metaphoric tent to include everyone, help us care for and care about each other, preserve and care for the earth, and even know energetically and perceptually when another is hurting – when there is a world situation that needs our attention, and even when someone is thinking of us and is about to call our cellphone. Moses achieved this. Abraham Joshua Heschl said, When I was young, I admired clever people. Now that I am old, I admire kind people. Once Moses merged with the mind and being of God, Moses could merge with and have empathy for everyone. I think there is a reason why we are called the Children of Israel. To God we are all still children, still a long way from the growth that being human hurries us to attain. As Moses merged with God, we can merge with the heart of God, becoming God on earth; not just God’s hands and feet, but God’s love, compassion, healing, blessing and generosity. One way to do a spiritual check is to ask yourself how big your tent really is. Who would you let into your circle of caring? Who would you let into your country? Into your community? Into your circle of friends, into your apartment, into your family, into your place of employment? Into your heart? Where do you stop? Each of us has a place where we pause or stop. Perhaps we can make our tent just a little bit larger, and perhaps events of these past six months have helped us to do that. All the spiritual teachers of today and many of the past speak about raising our energy or vibrating on a higher level. The Chassidic masters achieved this through joy, love, and ecstasy. With a change in energy comes not only expanded spiritual gifts but also reassurance, safety, protection, lack of fear, more love for ourselves and for others, more happiness, and much more joy. We can only find these gifts through seclusion, as we did in the ancient wilderness when we were so close to God. Henry David Thoreau wrote: “What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us.” The shofar this year calls us to remember the possibilities that live within us, just waiting for us to realize them. The shofar calls to us, I love you! I respect you. Remember the magnificence within you and bring it forth. There is within you a fierce love and a passionate caring - I know because I put it there. You are about to manifest a greatness only before achieved by the few: by prophets and great teachers. It is now available to you, to ordinary people, and it is your birthright. Sleepers, awake! Awake to a new reality of a deeper healing, a deeper love, a deeper caring than you have ever known. Become inspired to a greater expression of your own humanity, a level of holiness you are only now capable of. The events of this year have nudged us in this direction. Rosh Hashanah is our opportunity to celebrate our ability to become, to be drawn to our yet unimagined growth, and to realize that we are truly on the path of our becoming.

Flowing in the Zone - Rosh Hashanah 2015

In the book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Claremont University Graduate School psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote about a phenomenon many athletes describe as being "in the Zone." This has been written about for more than 30 years. He described this “flow” as a state in which people “are completely absorbed in an activity, especially one which involves creativity. During this peak time they feel “strong, alert, in effortless control, un-selfconscious, and at the height of their abilities.” They often “lose track of time and external concerns or stimuli, feel connected to something greater than themselves, and report having their ability and attention challenged but not overwhelmed in the completion of a task.” He studied flow because he was curious about what makes people happy, and his research suggests that being in the Zone applies across cultures and activities. You may be thinking, what has this to do with Judaism?

The Torah begins, B’reisheet bara Elohim, which is translated, in the beginning of God’s creating. In these first 3 words of Torah there is motion. The undifferentiated God essence is already creating, even before we come into the story, before we have contact with or knowledge of the Divine. God whose name is the verb, 'being or existence' may not only be a thing, but may be understood as process, and even more, as a creating process. Rabbi Zalman Shacter Selomi, who passed away this year, said in his book Paradigm Shift, “God is a verb. He went on to say: “Our current understanding of process requires that we create an interactive, not passive or active form of verb. The flag does not wave in the wind the wind does not wave the flag. The flag and wind are inter-waving.” One of his protegees, Rabbi David Cooper, wrote a book with the title, God is a Verb.

The movement of creation is very familiar to us. We live it. We know there is motion all around us: the earth turns, the wind blows, the air vibrates, our hearts beat, and we breathe. We never stop moving and creating, thinking and feeling. God and the Universe are all about motion and flow. This may seem obvious, however the constant creative movement of God and all life has something important to teach us. My favorite sage, the 19th Century S’fat Emet taught that we have to prepare ourselves to be a vessel in which God’s essence, which he speaks of as Torah light, can be contained” This wonderful teaching from about 100 years ago still instructs and delights; yet it feels a little static 100 years later. If God is process and not thing, then surely we have to be a different kind of vessel, a vessel for flow, allowing God Goodness to be expressed through us; a prism allowing God’s light energy to shine through us.

The Talmud speaks about this motion, saying “Mercy is a wheel that turns” (Betza 16a). On Shabbat, in the Lecha Dodi prayer from the 16th Century, we sing “ki hi makor ha-b’racha,” that Shabbat is a flowing spring of blessings; and a famous Chassidic kabbalist of the mid 18th Century Rabbi Elimelech of Lizensk, wrote about pipelines of blessings, or Shefa, which is flow. He said, “when we fall from our spiritual level lacking trust in our Creator, who is the true provider…we cause a blemish in the higher worlds…this disrupts the shefa. God then has to re-command or reconnect the flow of blessings anew, so that it can flow again" (Noam Elimelech, P. 201). This teaching is a slightly more modern approach, but perhaps we can go farther still.

Here is another understanding. Someone once said, people have been making money for thousands of years. Where did it all go? This quip tells us that having things and holding on to things is not the ideal state. Of course we need a place to live, we need food each day, loving friends and other relationships, a plan to provide for our elder years. However beyond the basic necessities, all else, such as: kindness, love, compassion, even money and possessions, are supposed to pass through us. Holding on to too much can stop the flow that is the natural order of things: life as it was meant to be. Looked at from a slightly different perspective, flow can also be about our ability to change and grow. It is easy for us to get stuck in who we think we are. The God-state of flow tells us that movement, becoming – is where we should always be. If we stop the flow of God’s goodness as it is expressed through our becoming, we prevent that goodness from being expressed in the world. Making a stoppage actually creates a lack of some kind. Anger and hatred, selfishness, hoarding, revenge, grudges, all the negative things mentioned in Kedoshim, the Holiness Code, Leviticus, Chapter 19, are a stopping of the flow, the God-ing to use a word that Rabbi Shacter Sheomi said. We are supposed to be agents of flow, allowing and helping all things to come through us as we ourselves are going forward in the flow. In this way we can be of help to each other and the whole world.

In the story of the Akedah, the binding of Isaac, which will be read on the second day of Rosh Hashanah, what is often missed is the amount of reassurance and help God gave to Abraham going into his test. God promised him numerous times that he would have many descendants, God told him twice that these descendants would come through Isaac. When Abraham asked if Sodom and Gomorrah would be destroyed if there were 10 righteous people there, God reassured him that God cares about and protects the righteous. And God kept every promise of prosperity, protection and offspring to Abraham. Going into the test, Abraham held the paradox, Isaac will have many descendants, on the one hand, and Kill Isaac on the other hand. They could not both be true. By giving Abraham this paradox, the Torah teaches us that God helps us with every choice, arranging the circumstances and guiding us so we can choose correctly, so that we keep moving forward, and keep growing in goodness.

How does one get to the zone? Of course it takes preparation. Athletes train for years to experience it occasionally. And it can be experienced spiritually too, but that also takes effort and much preparation, and patience. In a sense, living in the zone, sometimes, is our birthright. It is an unfathomable gift from the Divine. On the second day of creation God separated the physical universe from the spiritual universe. This is also what Maimonides taught. The Zone is not ordinarily accessible all the time, but by dint of our own energy and commitment, if one longs for a better way, we can live in the flow by being part of the flow, by living in consonance with its structure, by expressing it. Just like love, the spiritual currency of the universe, when we begin the flow of love, we have the possibility of experiencing its gifts. In this New Year, may we be agents of flow, clear prisms allowing God light to shine through us and helping us to move forward. May we be giving of ourselves, which is ultimately to ourselves. May we use our Energy not to withhold, but to keep it flowing, that goodness will flow to all those we touch and also out into the world.

Recalling the Sound of the Shofar

We gather on Rosh Hashanah, a day that the Torah describes as Zichron T’ruah, a remembrance of shofar blasts, a rest day, a day of Holy Assembly. On this day of remembrance, we are specifically asked to remember the shofar blasts we heard at Sinai. The passage in the book of Exodus is frightening, even spooky. It says: “There was thunder and lightning and a heavy cloud on the mountain, and the sound of the shofar was very powerful; the entire people that was in the camp shuddered. Moses brought the people forth from the camp toward God and they stood at the bottom of the mountain. All of Mt. Sinai was smoking because God had descended upon it in the fire. Its smoke ascended like the smoke of a furnace, and the entire mountain shuddered exceedingly. The sound of the shofar grew continually much stronger. Moses would speak, and God would respond to him with a voice.” Just after that, God spoke the 10 Commandments to the entire nation.

This is not the Rosh Hashanah we usually celebrate: the New Year, the beginning of a new season, a time to stir ourselves out of our summer pleasures, and return to a more active mode of working and living, a time of celebration: good food enjoyed with family and friends, a time of renewal. Of course, it’s also a time to begin the process of introspection, correcting our faults, leading up to Yom Kippur, but also a time for remembering our links to our families and to our tradition. The Torah asks something more from us – a response to the act of remembering. What did we learn at Sinai when we heard the sound of the shofar, getting louder and louder? What was aroused in us? Can we even put into words the content of that experience? Perhaps we can try.

There is hint after the giving of the 10 Commandments. At that time the people begged Moses to listen to God on their behalf, for the experience of God speaking to them was much too terrifying. Moses reassured them, that the frightening sounds and appearances were indeed to keep them away from sin and transgression. But surely the experience contained was much more that that. The sages say that a unification occurred that day – a special kind of connection that was unknown in human experience before this singular event. The Chassidic master, Rabbi Elimelech of Lisenzk said, “when a person draws God into the world, this is called unification.” We, through our partial physicality and our partial Divinity have the unique mission to live in both the physical and spiritual worlds, having the possibility of unifying earth and heaven.

Rabbi Zalman Shacter Shelomi in his book, Wrapped in a Holy Flame quotes Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach interpreting a Chassidic teaching from the 19th Century Rabbi Zakok HaKohen, who said, Some say the “world is getting less and less religious. On the contrary, the souls are becoming more and more refined.” Rabbi Carlebach taught that it looks like many people are breaking away from God…meaning formal religion, but on the inside, they are becoming increasingly holy.” This is happening in our society, to each of us, across religious lines, in a very broad way, as human consciousness evolves, through the death of one generation and the birth of the next. This is why although we have much to teach to the young, they also have much to teach to us. As we are changing, due to this evolution and also out of our own efforts to change ourselves from the inside, there is a great hunger for a reconnection to our spiritual selves; there is a compulsion not only to seek out spirituality, but also to express the expansion of our souls and the changed people we have already become. This is not to say that we have arrived at a state of holiness. Not at all! We are all still becoming. We are all, as I like to say, "Not Yet." But we are inwardly different from our parents, and our Judaism reflects that as well. This is one message of Rosh Hashanah: the possibility of living just a little more in the spiritual realm, a realm of great blessing beyond what we can even imagine. It is the realm of our potential.

In Judaism, the traditional view of humankind is that we are engaged in a struggle between the yetzer hatov, the impulse to do good, and the yetzer hara, the impulse to do the wrong thing. And it’s a useful view, up to a point. An additional perspective is that the struggle is always a battle between the old and the new: the people we have been and the people we can become, or will become. We see this also on a global scale. The Older understanding struggles against the Newer Understanding. The psalmist said, “you are children of the most high, all of you.” And we long for this special connection to the Divine. It can be achieved in many different ways, but most importantly by changing our inner dialogue. If we change ourselves from the inside, our lives will change and the world around us will change for the better. If we believe that the goodness of life, the goodness of the ultimate Divine can be and is expressed through us, then we can realize the spirituality that is our gift and birthright. We will live up to our potential. We will see great blessing from our growth, even miracles. We only have to make a commitment to the intention to express our holiness.

And this is not to suggest that we should go through life feeling spiritual. Rabbi Rami Shapiro, a teacher of meditation and mindfulness, has a great teaching about this. Once a woman said to him, I have no need of spiritual practices. I feel spiritual all the time…He said, the next time you have a spiritual feeling, take a cold shower. Then dry off and do something kind for someone else.”

Perhaps what we are called to remember today is who we really are and who we were created to be. The sage Ben Sira, quoted in the S’Fat Emet, said, there was one who found a glowing ember and blew on it, lighting up a flame. There was another who found a glowing ember and spat on it and the flame was extinguished. The S’fat Emet said, the ember is to be found everywhere, and I might add, in everyone. And the Apter Rebbe, Abraham Joshua Heschl of Apt said, there is only the ever present of God knowing and understanding God’s self. We are part of that self. We house the ember that can become a flame. I invite you to be inspired by this day, when we are asked to remember why we are here, why we heard the shofar and what is our mission of unification in this world. I invite you to be inspired by who your really are and by who you can be. Then shall it truly be a New Year.