The other day, our cantorial soloist and service leader Renée came to me to discuss a dilemma: she was having trouble with leading the High Holiday prayers, because on one hand, she wants to be authentic, but on the other hand, many of the prayer texts just don’t feel authentic to her. She said that she wants to have integrity as a prayer leader, and not just treat our services as a just another “singing gig.”
I appreciated this so much, and I shared with her that it took me many years for these prayers to feel authentic, and that my process with them involved putting them into my own words and making my own interpretive translations. The key for me has been to try to connect with the prayerful intentions beneath the words. Many of these texts are over a thousand years old, and some of them over three thousand years old. On top of that, reading English translations can sometimes bring up connotations of today’s America brand of fundamentalism, which only adds to their distance. But if we can connect the prayerful impulse beneath the words with our own prayerful impulse, then the ancient words can merge with our own prayerfulness, so that we pray not merely as individuals, but as voices in the chorus of our people and our history. But how do we do that? Ironically, when Renée came to me with her question about how to be authentic, in doing so she was being completely authentic! And what was that authentic impulse? It was to engage in a process of transformation – in this case, to find a way into integrity with leading the prayers. And in a sense, this is really the essence of these High Holy Days: to engage in a process of transformation – to become aware of how we want to change for the better in the coming year. That’s it – if each of us can bring that question into our lives and take steps to effect that transformation for ourselves, then we have done our job. But, in order to ask ourselves the question of how we might change in a true and deep way, we first have to do something even more fundamental: we have to become present with ourselves not as we’d like to be, but as we are. Life is busy and it’s easy to hide from ourselves and live only on the surface of the great Ocean of Being, amidst the movement of the waves of life. If we want to get below the waves into the depths of the Ocean Itself, we need to pause the momentum; we need to stop doing and take some time for just Being; we need to sing, we need to move, we need to contemplate, and on the deepest level, we need silence; we need meditation. This is why the most central practice of Rosh Hashanah does not consist of any of these problematic words; it is simply listening to the sound of the shofar. עָלָ֣ה אֱ֭לֹהִים בִּתְרוּעָ֑ה יי בְּק֣וֹל שׁוֹפָֽר׃ – Alah Elohim b’truah, Adonai b’kol shofar – “Elohim rises up in the blast, Adonai in the voice of the shofar.” These two Divine Names are so instructive: Elohim is plural – literally “gods” – hinting that all the forces of Existence are One Reality, and Adonai is really the four letter Name which means “Existence” or “Being” or “Reality.” Alah means “rises up,” hinting that our experiential sense of the sacred arises out of our connection with Reality – that is, with whatever is present in this moment, when we become present – that is the attentiveness called forth by the sound of the shofar. In this very real sense, “God” is not about believing in some deity. Rather, “God” is a relational word, like “friend” or “teacher.” If someone asked you, “Do you believe in friend?” – that would be absurd. “Friend” is not something to believe in; rather, it describes a certain type of relationship. In the same way, “God” describes a relationship of prayerfulness, awe and reverence that we can have with Reality; not a divine being, but Being Itself. Prayer then, in its truest sense, is a response to our recognition of the sacred. God has gifted us with this moment, with this life – what is our response? When our response includes the aspiration to be co-creators of ourselves, then we tap into the spirit of these holy days. וּלְחַנָּ֖ה אֵ֥ין יְלָדִֽים – and Hannah had no children… - I Samuel 1:2 This is why, in our haftara, Hannah is barren at first, but she longs for a child. When her longing reaches its peak, she expresses her aspiration in prayer. The description of how Hannah moves her lips quietly as she prays becomes the model in our tradition for the Amidah, the most core prayer in our tradition. Then, when her prayers are answered and she conceives and gives birth, she names her son Shmuel, which is Sh’ma – El; meaning, “listens to God” or “God listens.” Either way, it is the God within us, listening to the God all around us, waking up to that impulse of transformation, through us. May we all be inspired and encouraged in our grand pause and coming together (again) to listen…
Read past teachings on Rosh Hashanah HERE.
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Parshah Summary – P’shat
The parshah begins by instructing a ritual of gratitude to be performed when the Children of Israel cultivate the land: the celebrant should put the first-ripened fruits (bikkurim) of their orchard into a basket and bring it to the place where Hashem “chooses” to “make the Holy Name rest.” The celebrant then offers these first fruits, making a declaration of having come out of slavery in Egypt and into the “land flowing with milk and honey.” The celebrant then “rejoices” with one’s family as well as with the “stranger.”
The parshah continues with the laws of tithes given to the Levites and the poor, along with detailed instructions on how to proclaim the blessings and curses on Mount Gerizim and Mount Eival, as discussed at the beginning of Parshat Re’eh. The latter part of Ki Tavo consists of a long, harsh account of the curses—illness, famine, poverty and exile—that shall befall them if they abandon the Torah. It concludes with Moses’ words that “only today,” forty years after their birth as a people, have they attained “a heart to know, eyes to see and ears to hear.”
Torah of Awakening – Jewish Meditation Teaching
וְהָיָה֙ כִּֽי־תָב֣וֹא אֶל־הָאָ֔רֶץ אֲשֶׁר֙ יי אֱלֹהֶ֔יךָ נֹתֵ֥ן לְךָ֖ נַחֲלָ֑ה וִֽירִשְׁתָּ֖הּ וְיָשַׁ֥בְתָּ בָּֽהּ׃ וְלָקַחְתָּ֞ מֵרֵאשִׁ֣ית כׇּל־פְּרִ֣י הָאֲדָמָ֗ה אֲשֶׁ֨ר תָּבִ֧יא מֵֽאַרְצְךָ֛ אֲשֶׁ֨ר יי אֱלֹהֶ֛יךָ נֹתֵ֥ן לָ֖ךְ וְשַׂמְתָּ֣ בַטֶּ֑נֶא וְהָֽלַכְתָּ֙ אֶל־הַמָּק֔וֹם אֲשֶׁ֤ר יִבְחַר֙ יי אֱלֹהֶ֔יךָ לְשַׁכֵּ֥ן שְׁמ֖וֹ שָֽׁם׃ When you enter the land that Hashem your God is giving you as a heritage, and you possess it and settle in it, you shall take some of every first fruit of the soil, which you harvest from the land that Hashem your God is giving you, put it in a basket and go to the place where Hashem your God will choose to establish the Divine Name... - Devarim (Deuteronomy) 26:1-2 Parshat Ki Tavo
Once, when Rabbi Moshe Leib of Sasov was deeply absorbed in the mystical ecstasy of his prayers, he heard a knock at the window. A drunken peasant stood outside and asked to be let in and given a bed for the night. For a moment, the rebbe’s heart raged with anger and he thought to himself, “How can this drunk have the hutzbah to ask to be let into this house!”
But then he said silently in his heart, “And what business does he have to exist at all, when Existence is nothing but the Divine? But if Hashem gets along with this guy and allows him to exist in this world, who am I to reject him?” He opened the door at once and prepared a bed. It is impossible to perceive another person without them casting their image upon our consciousness; every being we meet, every situation and every experience appears to us as forms within our own awareness. To love another being, then, is simultaneously an embracing of one’s own inner depths. On the other hand, negativity toward others is a rejection of the form that our own awareness has taken; we resist not just the other, but the image of the other within, thereby creating an inner split, an experience of “exile,” of being not at home. The more resistance toward others that we accumulate throughout our lifetime, the more inner pain of fragmentation and alienation. It seems this is inevitable, for life tends to give us plenty of material to resist! What to do? Fortunately, the remedy is simple, and we can begin (again) right now. Welcome this moment as the form in which it appears. Whether it be a person, or a situation, or a feeling – it doesn’t matter – the hospitality we express toward the fullness of present experience allows us to be at home with ourselves, now. וְהָיָה֙ כִּֽי־תָבֹ֣וא אֶל־הָאָ֔רֶץ – It will be when you come into the land... While the natural impulse is to resist what we don’t like, creating the sense of “not being at home,” like Israelites wandering the desert, we counteract this כִּֽי־תָבֹ֣וא ki tavo – “when we come in” – that is, when we fully inhabit this moment. The key is כִּי ki: kaf-yud! כִּֽי־תָבֹ֣וא – It will be when you come in… Resistance is born of fear, the instinctual impulse to protect oneself. This is good and necessary, but the side effect is inner exile. To “come home,” we need to transcend the fear – know that you are not the fear. Fully accept it as part of the texture of the moment, without being caught by it; this is כ kaf: “courage.” כִּֽי־תָבֹ֣וא אֶל־הָאָ֔רֶץ – It will be when you come into the land…Then, in order to sustain the sense of Wholeness arising from letting go of resistance, we must rest awareness in the אָרֶץ aretz, in the senses and the physical world, rather than becoming lost in world thought; this is י yud: “simplicity.” וְהָיָה כִּֽי־תָבֹוא – It will be when you come in… Through this “coming in” to the moment and the senses, our inner split is healed, and there can arise the joy of הָיָה hayah, the joy of simply being. יי אֱלֹהֶ֔יךָ נֹתֵ֥ן לְךָ֖ נַחֲלָ֑ה – Hashem your God is giving it to you as a heritage… This moment now is literally our נַחֲלָה nakhalah, our inheritance; it comes to us from the boundless past, as an unearned gift. From the infinite possibilities of what could have been, here we are. This realization is both the spiritual goal and the path: אַחַ֤ת שָׁאַ֣לְתִּי מֵֽאֵת־יי – One Thing I ask of Hashem… We can read this not merely as asking for one thing, but as asking for Oneness itself. From whom do we ask? From Y-H-V-H, which is composed of the same letters as v’hayah וְהָיָה – it will be. Meaning, our “question” that arises from feeling not at home is answered when we turn toward the moment, intentionally of “coming into” our “heritage.” This is teshuvah, “return,” aided by the spirit of ב bet: “welcoming this moment.”
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