Kol Nidre 5773: Jumping in to the New Year, unexpectedly

Jonah son of Ammitai wakes up one morning. A new week has begun, and he is ready to get to work. Everything is planned for the hours and days ahead. He’s going to be so productive, his hand itching to etch off the first item on his stone tablet to-do list. He turns to his stone tablet inbox to get started.

Hmmm…in the sender line of his first stone message there is a name inscribed that he didn’t expect to see. God? A message from God?

Curious enough to risk the possibility of unleashing a tablet plague, he reads the message.

“Go at once to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim judgment upon it; for their wickedness has come before Me,” it says.

Nineveh – the capital city of our Israelite nation’s worst enemy! Are you kidding me?
He smashes the tablet on the floor. “Ugh. I can’t deal with this right now. It must be Spam.”

But instead of getting to work, he scans the travel obelisks looking for a good deal on a cruise. He has a couple of vacation days left to use up anyway.

Tarshish, he thinks to himself –perfect – it’s several days journey in the exact opposite direction from Nineveh. He should be able to put some distance between himself and God real quick if he can get on a boat from Jaffa tomorrow. And there are some great casinos there!

The moment Jonah boards the ship and it sets out from port, an enormous storm comes upon the sea. So violent is this storm that the ship is in danger of breaking up. While the crew and passengers are desperately throwing cargo overboard to make the boat lighter, Jonah finds his cabin down below and falls asleep.

The storm gets worse and worse, so that the crew casts lots, trying to identify who is responsible. The lot falls on Jonah. The captain finds Jonah and shakes him awake – “How can you be sleeping so soundly! Help us out here! How have you brought this misfortune upon us?”

Jonah then knows that the message really did come from God. God has caught up with him , and he cannot flee the truth of his situation. There is no way out of his mission.

All of his plans. All of his preparations – his expectations of what his life would be. – Gone! In the instant that God’s word came to him, everything changed.
This is real, and he is completely unprepared.

Ah yes, so many plans. So many expectations. We think we know what is important – we get wrapped up in our daily stresses, our egos, our preparations. And then, whammo!
She had only recently left a job she hated for a new one in which she was finally having success and satisfaction in her work. She is settling in, making friends with co-workers, setting goals for the year ahead. When one day, out of nowhere, she learns that the source of funding for her job has run out. Time to look for a new job – again!

Life is rolling along, and things feel good and solid. Somehow he has managed to hold on to his job through the recession, he is putting away money for retirement. The kids are married and he now has the sweetness of grandchildren in his life. He goes in for a routine physical exam. Something isn’t quite right, and he leaves with orders for some tests. The results come back : cancer.

I know that the night before our house fire in April, I was up late worrying out about something. For the life of me I can’t remember what it was that was keeping me from falling asleep. Whatever it was, I must have thought it was very important at the time. But at 4 ‘o-clock in the morning when we discovered the fire and had to get everyone out of the house – whatever it was that I was worrying about? Gone!

In one instant, everything can change. It happens so quickly sometimes, that our psyches defend us from the shock by buying us some time to catch up. We live in denial, we resist reality for a while. We go to sleep or delete the email or escape in the opposite direction. But eventually we see that the lot has fallen on us. The truth confronts us wherever we turn.

This is real, and you are completely unprepared.

Often known as the “Zen Rabbi,” Rabbi Alan Lew, of blessed memory, wrote a book with that title: This is real, and you are completely unprepared. His book describes the spiritual journey we make every year over the course of the High Holy Days.

In an interview,http://www.beliefnet.com/Faiths/Judaism/2003/10/Time-Of-Spiritual-Emergency.aspx Lew says,

We spend most of our lives preparing like crazy–we prepare for our professional lives, we prepare for our health by doing exercise, we do self-improvement, we always anticipate tomorrow, but the mounting evidence is that what we anticipate almost never occurs tomorrow. We live life like a kind of Maginot line–the line of defense that the French built to ward off the Germans and they ended up coming from a completely different direction. Our life is like that–it comes at us from a different direction than we think it’s going to. It circumvents all our defenses and leaves us feeling very unprepared.

When asked if the title of his book is meant to frighten people, Rabbi Lew replies:
I don’t mind if I scare them a little. The title to me describes the essential transformation that is part of the holidays. The phrase “completely unprepared” . . . strikes a deep chord. It names something deep and pervasive in the human psyche.

Although we’re not often in touch with this feeling, deep down we all feel unprepared. If we look at our lives honestly, [as we are called to do on Yom Kippur,] the events . . . that really make us who we are, are the events we didn’t prepare for, or we couldn’t prepare for, like a serious illness, the loss of a loved one, the failure of a relationship. . . . Or suddenly a child appears surprisingly, or we fall in love. These are the things that really shape our lives.

Rabbi Sheila Peltz Weinberg, our scholar-in-residence a couple of years ago, shares about what it was like to visit her elderly mother in a nursing home as her dementia progressed. Towards the end, her mother only had a few words left in her vocabulary. Two of the words she used most frequently were: “unexpectedly!” and “temporarily.”

“Ma! You’re looking great today!”, Sheila would say.

“Unexpectedly!” was her mother’s response.

“It’s good to see you.”

“Temporarily…”

“Are you feeling better today?”

“Unexpectedly!”

“It’s time for lunch now. Are you hungry?”

“Temporarily.. .”

Remarkable how these two words were basically all she needed to describe her life. In fact, Rabbi Weinberg teaches, these two words probably describe a good portion of our lives. No matter how much we plan or prepare, our experiences, our thoughts, our feelings come upon us unexpectedly. And they are with us only temporarily.

Rabbi Lew was, and Rabbi Weinberg is a teacher of Jewish meditation and mindfulness. The practice of meditation brings awareness to the human reality of “unexpectedly” and “temporarily.” As you sit and focus on your breath you begin to notice that the breath comes unexpectedly, and it is only with us temporarily. The same with thoughts and feelings. They arise, they stay with us for a time, and then they depart.

Similarly, the rituals and prayers of our High Holy Days are meant to increase awareness to that core human experience. Unexpectedly, the sound of the shofar pierces my consciousness. Temporarily, I awaken to my own mortality. Unexpectedly, I awaken to something larger than myself.

According to Alan Lew, “The inevitable result of becoming more aware is that we realize we’re not really prepared for our lives. The things that are significant in our lives are not the things we spend all of our energy defending against and trying to manipulate.”

“Yes,” I think. “This is true – I am not really prepared for my life.” “But then,” my anxious brain asks, “what do I do with this awareness? Now that I know that I am never going to be prepared, do I stop making plans altogether? Have we no choices? No power?”

Lew goes on to explain that awareness is “only half of the journey. The other half is that once we realize that our preparations and our attempts to manipulate life don’t work, we also realize we can let them go, that we don’t need them. That is a great relief and a great healing.”

At first Jonah thinks that he can manipulate his life by running away, by going to sleep. Yet, all along, a storm is brewing, not only in the sea, but more importantly, in his soul. At a certain point he make a powerful choice. He chooses to let go of his resistance to what must be, and he jumps with both feet, into the raging sea, into the unknown.

As soon as he lets go, the storm subsides, and God provides a huge fish to swallow him. There in that fish belly, Jonah lets go of the fact that Nineveh was not the direction he had prepared to go with his life. He accepts that he is not fully in control of his life, and that Nineveh is where he must go.

Relieved, he prays to God with gratitude :

In my trouble I called to the Lord,
And God answered me;
You cast me into the depths,
Into the heart of the sea,
The floods engulfed me;

I thought I was driven away
Out of Your sight:
The waters closed in over me,
The deep engulfed me.
Weeds twined around my head.
I sank to the base of the mountains;
The bars of the earth closed upon me forever.
Yet You brought my life up from the pit,
O Lord my God!
. . . .
They who cling to empty folly
Forsake their own welfare,
But I, with loud thanksgiving,
Will sacrifice to You;
What I have vowed I will perform.
Deliverance is the Lord’s!
(Book of Jonah, JPS Tanakh)

Jonah hasn’t even made it to Nineveh yet, to complete his mission, but his soul has already been on a journey – the same spiritual journey we are called to take over the course of these Days of Awe.

Again, in the words of Rabbi Lew:

The journey begins [seven weeks before Rosh Hashana,] at Tisha B’Av, the day we remember the destruction of the Temple. . . . Tisha B’Av is the day that we acknowledge our estrangement–from God, from each other, from ourselves. That’s how you being a journey of reconciliation–by acknowledging your estrangement. Here we are at Tisha B’Av, sitting on the floor mourning this broken house (the Temple was called the house).

Months later, at the end of the journey, [after Yom Kippur,] we’re sitting in another broken house, the [rickety] sukkah [that lets in the rain and the wind.] Only now, we’re rejoicing.

At first we saw the fact that the house was broken was a great catastrophe. And now we see we don’t need it.

We can sit outside with the stars in our hair and the wind in our face, and we’re perfectly fine. And that’s the real journey. It has two major parts–the first coming to the realization that we are completely unprepared, that we are in a state of urgent and desperate emergency. And then second realizing that it’s alright.

She never thought she would be collecting unemployment, but here she is, depositing the check. She desperately needs the money, and she is thankful for the cushion it provides while she searches for a job. She hopes that it will only be temporary, but for now, she is relieved. It will be alright.

He never imagined he would have to live life without his constant companion, his wife of decades. But now she is gone. And here he is, getting together with friends once a week for breakfast, finding rides to synagogue, allowing his children to dote on him. He is rebuilding his life. He is okay, and, unexpectedly, even happy at times.

I was not planning on spending the bulk of this year living in a place not my home and rebuilding half of what was my home. A new dream kitchen was never our dream, and I can’t wait to get out of my rental house which still, on a humid day, smells like the previous tenants’ dogs. But we are alright.

In the moments when we can let go of what was supposed to have been, there is a sense of relief. The storms in our souls subside. We see more clearly that there is so much to be thankful for. Now there is room for peace, for equanimity and balance. This peacefulness can actually help us feel more prepared to accept and then let go of the next wave of the unexpected and the unknown.

I recently learned that the service that we do on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur is taken almost word for word from the prayer service that went along with the public fast. Public fast was something practiced in ancient times for public emergencies, the kind of things you couldn’t prepare for–drought, a ship lost at sea, a city under siege. It’s a liturgy for a spiritual emergency, for an urgent desperate matter you can’t prepare for. The shofar is like an ancient air raid siren–it was something that we blew at a really desperate, urgent time.

The emergency we are facing at this time of year is that a New Year is beginning, and we don’t really know what is coming. We desperately want to prepare and plan for this year ahead, but it is full of uncertainty. Who shall live and who shall die? What message will appear tomorrow morning, on my tablet? We cannot know. But what we do know is that in tomorrow morning’s Torah reading, we will hear God’s call to us, to choose life again.

And so we come together, we fast, we blow the shofar, we let go of the year that has passed. We hold hands, we close our eyes, and we jump into the New Year together, praying that it will be alright.