Dvar for Rosh Hashana Day 1 5786

by Lila Sarene

I spent the last two weeks gathering stories I wanted to share with you today and when I spread my harvest out around me, I saw a picture of how how my relationship with gd has changed over the last few years. As I share these stories I want to invite you to notice what feels true about your relationship with gd, in this moment. Judaism loves names for god, loves having an abundant bouquet of names to choose from for each occasion. I only recently fell for the “g word”. I used to cringe at its sound, because of who and how it has been used around me. But one day it started feeling like the most relational, the most intimate English word I have. I invite you to hear in these stories whatever names for the sacred, the divine, the goddess, the universe, the creator, the earth, the ancestors, the interconnectedness of all life that are your favorite names.

In March of 2020, when I first had nothing on my schedule for the foreseeable future, I experienced gd sitting down across from me, their presence like a relaxed posture and a satisfied smile seeming to say “at last I have your full attention.” I felt entirely altered by the weeks of communication that followed and I spent the next many years working to keep the connection close and to tell the truth about its new place inside me. But I consistently felt like I wasn’t succeeding at either of these efforts.

Last year right around this time I tried sharing some of what I was receiving. I had been in a deep inquiry about the holocaust stories I grew up with, the ways I was taught I was descended from people with superhuman abilities to keep themselves alive, was taught pride in my relatives’ ability to outsmart their tormentors and pride above all else about the moments when their actions kept someone they loved alive another day. I was trying to understand what exactly in these stories had given me the message that the most significant human accomplishment is to never become full of hate, no matter how many times hate comes to your doorstep. This message had never been directly spoken, but was implied in every story. Alongside the message that this skill is at the core of what it means to be Jewish. 

As I turned to the robust infrastructure of our high holiday rituals looking for connections to the messages of my childhood I found many. I saw an intricate guide for processing trauma in the ark carrying us from Tisha b’av to Yom Kippur. In the invitation to fully grieve every loss, in the scaffolding of teshuvah through Elul, Rosh Hashana, and the days of awe, in the transition from personal inner work to the collective hakippurim, atonements. I saw the meticulous combing of our insides, through weighing all of our actions, patterns and choices, a way to make sure the impulse to harm doesn’t ever fully take root inside us, even if it visits for a season. I heard from ancient ancestors who know the greatest danger of suffering is when it hardens inside, and the most critical awareness is what lets us accurately discern the difference between resistance, between fighting to survive and becoming abusers, becoming oppressors. I heard ancestors explaining our high holidays as only a trial run, with a nice neat timeline, that the real healing, the real teshuvah can take years, sometimes even generations. I heard from ancestors who knew there would come a time when our people would collectively be the most lost we had even been from this knowledge of how to heal, how to come home spiritually.

While these ancestors had my ear they also started gently encouraging me to visit some of the places my recent ancestors called home. I of course ignored them and they of course started, knocking all the vases of the tables. I was told there was a story I needed to hear about my ancestors unbroken relationships to land. The first several people I repeated this message to assured me I would find nothing but uninterrupted antisemitism in all of Ashkenazi history. 

In January I visited Ukraine for 10 days, I could feel both my Bubi and Zeida with me as I walked the streets of their home towns, could feel their joy and their exhales. I visited the death camp on the Polish Ukrainian border where their immediate families, extended families and entire communities remains are. There happened to be a hundred students from a yeshiva in Monsey NY also visiting when we arrived. While their hauntingly beautiful songs made wild echos through the huge cement memorial, and their circle of braided arms swayed like one body, I sobbed so hard, I touched, I think for the first time, the enormity of the inherited grief I carry. I visited towns in the Rhine valley whose first jewish communities were likely in the 4th or 5th century. Places of origin of the Yiddish language and so much Ashkenazi culture. I visited the shul my Bubi and Zeida were married in. I attended a weekend long ceremony in a small town in Latvia, created by a friend whose family was deported from there over a hundred years ago. There were 30 of us filling the town’s old synagogue with song and prayer for the first time since before the Shoah. 

I visited a brilliant museum in Warsaw, created with the aim of collecting the entirety of Polish Jewish history. I learned that for the 400 years, pre-enlighemnt, while surrounding empires prided themselves on conquest, subjugation, and antisemitism, polish kings valued peace, preferring self sufficiency amongst their various peasant populations over restrictive and extractive laws and helping to settle disputes and conflicts rather than encouraging them. This is the explanation of why, even after antisemitic laws finally took hold in the 16th century and even after all of Poland was conquered and partitioned into neighboring empires, when Poland regained independence in 1917, 50% of Ashkenazi Jews lived within its borders. For 1000 years as Jews were regularly massacred, expelled and fled from homes throughout central and Eastern Europe most of the Jews who came to Polish lands stayed. I know of 6 generations of my Zeida’s family who lived in and around the town he grew up in. I don’t know when my direct ancestors first arrived in Poland but whenever they did they became part of communities with vast unbroken relationships to home. 

I returned to Minneapolis in late May after 6 months in Europe. It was the last week of the counting of the Omer just before Shavuot. I was realizing what happened to me across the water was more than profound reconnection to history, culture, ancestors and land. I was remembering a daily practice of listening to guidance, of being in collaboration with god in all the small moments, a practice I believe many of my ancestors knew intimately.

As I was integrating I did some learning about Shavuot, particularly the 120 days between Shavuot and Yom Kippur that carry the stories of moshe’s three 40 day journeys up mount Sinai. Moshe first ascends on Shavuot and returns after 40 days with tablets written by god. He sees the people worshipping an idol, a golden calf, rages at them and breaks the tablets. He goes back up, spends 40 days asking for forgiveness then returns again. This period has become the time in our calendar when we observe three weeks of mourning and Tisha b’av, a day of grieving our greatest losses. Moshe’s 3rd 40 days, begins on the 1st of Elul and ends on YK, is now the entire period we are encouraged to be in the work of teshuvah, of repair, atonement, return and realignment. Moses spent this time writing a 2nd set of tablets himself and successfully bringing them to his people. 

I want to pause here and make small note that I am, personally, 100% pro idol worship. I think our tradition's ban on idol worship is patriarchal, anti goddess, anti sacred feminine BS. I have seen a lot of Jewish teachers I really trust compare idol worship to things we definitely should not be doing, like worshipping capitalism, individualism, greed… and I agree. But I think the real thing, the good old fashioned actual idol worship of our ancestors was great! And I think the golden calf was a really smart art therapy project thought up by a whole bunch of very anxious Jews. You may notice the presence of this opinion in how I interpret moshe’s story.

I started looking at Moshe’s journeys through a mystical lens (an interestingly similar lens to that of a therapeutic modality I recently started studying called IFS, also known as parts work). From both lenses we can see an external set of interactions as a parallel to the interactive multiplicity inside each of us. I was seeing in moshe’s journey a reflection of the last few years of my life, where a part of me would regularly ascend into an expansive state, but there were usually be voices inside, I would ignore, that were afraid of this new direction for my life. I would often come crashing down from my god high with no tolerance for the insecurities I found waiting. I would even sometimes blame the insecurities when I felt I had lost all the revelations.

In this inner analogy of these stories I felt pretty certain that fearful parts and the things they do to self soothe are not the problem. I think the challenge represented in these stories is how full of vulnerability we are in the moment after a direct encounter with god. There are parts missing feeling so connected while reuniting with parts that were afraid to ever feel so open. Parts reaching for a sense of secure attachment with god, through the peaks of valleys of feeling connected, colliding with parts needing assurance that chasing god will not eclipse doing the laundry, will not become an excuse to shame, silence and punish their needs, their contradictions and their fears. My question is what kind of after care can hold all that vulnerability, can support the communication needed for healthy integration. 

At the end of the summer and of a long rabbit hole of research I found a piece of conversation between god and moshe tucked in a corner of parshat va’etchana, the parsha for Shabbat nachamu, the Shabbat of comfort right after Tisha b’av. The conversation went something like this: God explains to moshe that their plan at sinai was for every single person to hear their voice directly. God shares that they knew it might be a bit much for the people if god revealed their face so they sent their voice out from a flame, but they wanted every person present to have a direct experience of them. Moshe tells god I know but the people came to me and said ‘who are we to hear the voice of god, people can’t just go around hearing the voice of god all the time and living, if it keeps happening surely we will die.’ Moshe tells god the people want me to listen and tell them what you say. And god, though seeming disappointed, agrees.

I was struck by learning that the original design for our tradition was for each and every one of us to be a prophet, for each of us to have direct experience of god and a direct line to prophecy. I found myself wondering about the thousands of years of inheritance and legacy of our ancestors deciding the prophetic belonged only in a few rather than in all of us, wondering how the echoes of that decision might still be alive today. Wondering about traveling back in time to that moment to overturn the decision. I found myself wondering what it would take for those of us and those parts in all of us who feel afraid of the voice of god to reconsider outsourcing the job, to consider listening directly. Of what it would take to get all of us up mt Sinai.

I was struck by an image of us, having so much prophecy to draw on, to gather around us, to quilt together as we face the overwhelming amount of oppression, terror, violence and overgrowth of destruction in our world in this moment. I wondered if maybe we will only make it if each of us has our thread of prophecy tucked in our back pocket, guiding us in our fight, in our work, our care and our rest, in our healing and our celebrations, and in our teshuvah, 

My teacher, Hadar Cohen, loves the Rosh Hashana Mishna story in which god puts on a talis and shows Moshe the structure of the pray. Moshe had just accused god of being too angry and god gives Moshe the 13 attributes as a tool to shift god from judgement into mercy. Hadar acknowledges how many of us have the question: if our idea of god has such a bad temper is that really god? But what she wants to lift up in this story is the idea that we can impact god, that we change god. 

Hadar describes this time of year as a time of grappling with existing inside a wild and unwieldy creation that is always seeking balance, of the hand of love and the hand of boundaries, of discernment and compassion, of judgement and mercy of creation and destruction. We are trying to help the world come back into balance in all of the places it has lost its center, and we do that by coming back into our own balance, our own center. It is because we are an intricate part of the whole of creation that when we realign ourselves we can realign the world, we can realign creation, we can change god. Hadar talks of the truah, the sound of the shofar as not just to a call to awaken ourselves and each other but also to wake up god. 

Hadar shares that from an earth based and agricultural perspective the entire cycle of teshuvah is just about preparation for Sukkot for saying the prayer for rain. For our ancestors whether or not the rains came determined whether they lived or died. And they believed it was the power of their rain prayer that determined whether they lived or died. They believed it was possible to so fully ground themselves spiritually, to sit so deeply in their spiritual center that their prayer was irresistible. They did teshuvah together, so they could pray powerfully together because they would either face the drought or receive the rains together. For our ancestors this was safety. It was how they practiced community safety, it was how they kept each other safe. They made sure they were each spiritually whole, so their collective prayer was unstoppable. And they meticulously recorded this vision of safety so we would still have it today.