a fall fast, and a fast fall
The High Holidays just wrapped up this weekend, and I will admit that I am a bit relieved. I had a job at a synagogue in Revere, reading Torah for both Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur; it was my first time both chanting these parts of the Torah and using the special melody for the High Holidays. I spent a lot of time this summer, and even more these last few weeks, preparing and practicing. Plus, I was nervous. So the Yamim Nora’im didn’t afford me much chance for the reflection and repentance that typically characterize this time of the year.
Song of Songs IV, by Marc Chagall
Luckily, the Jewish calendar also provides time for spiritual preparation for the New Year and the Day of Repentance during the month of Elul, which precedes the month of Tishrei, in which both Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur fall. The rabbis say that Elul is in fact (in Hebrew) an acronym representing the famous line from Song of Songs: ani l’dodi v’dodi li, “I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine.” This teaching is a reminder that the soul-searching we do this month is towards the greater end of self-care, intimacy with ourselves, and, potentially, drawing closer to Gd. The work of Elul should be a labor of love. Elul practices include blowing of the shofar, saying Psalm 27, and reciting selichot, special penitential prayers.
I did a lot of soul work during Elul, which began, fortuitously, on my 36th birthday. According to gematria — a mystical tradition that assigns a numerological value to Hebrew letters — the letters het (ח) and yud (י) add up to the number 18: The het has a value of 8 and the yud has a value of 10. Put together, the letters spell the word for “life” (חי). As a result, 18 is an important number in Judaism; many give to charity in multiples of 18, for example. Thus this birthday marks my double-chai year. (I guess technically this is my 37th year, but I’m going to go with the numeral, not the ordinal.)
My dear friend Rabbi Jordan Braunig sent daily prompts during Elul, and I took 15-20 minutes each day to write in my journal in response, a practice I’ve never undertaken in any regular way. I’ll share one prompt here as an example:
For those of us in the States this day after Labor Day has become a day with great symbolic significance. This is the day when we return, not in the teshuvah sense of the word, but more in the begrudgingly dragging ourselves back to the routines of daily life sense of the word. In many ways this is a return to the same; not to the changed or transformed, but to the frustratingly fixed. This is a type of return that we must flee.
Though we might take some solace in the fact that now not every piece of correspondence we send will be met with an away message, during Elul we would be wise to aspire to maintain that summer-like distance from our habits and routines. How might we hold on to a sense of being away, and communicate that state of being to the world?
Prompt:For today’s piece of reflective writing, I invite you to write an away message/out-of-office reply for this season of the year. Where are you? What are you doing? Who will you be upon your return? Can we expect to hear from you?
I was amazed at how elucidating the practice of daily writing actually was. I was able to articulate my regrets and my fears from the past year, my hopes and my goals for the coming year. And since there are afoot some big changes in my life right now, the work felt nourishing and healing.
fall is nigh in jp; photo by salem pearce (via instagram)
During Elul I also decided to undertake a month-long, sunrise-to-sunset fast, a practice that was also completely new to me. I was inspired by a conversation I had with a Muslim woman I worked with this summer in New York: For her, fasting during Ramadan is a significant spiritual experience. I wasn’t sure what to expect, or even if I could actually do it (especially in the absence of a community with the same practice, which seems to me a key component of Ramadan). But I decided to try: I fasted (no food or drink) from sunrise to sunset, from August 27 through September 24, excluding Shabbats. Each day I got up about 30 minutes before sunrise and gulped a cup of tea and as much water as I could stomach, as well as at least a small amount of food; come sunset, I would again down a bottle of Gatorade, along with lots of water, and also eat a bigger, more leisurely meal.
It wasn’t as hard as I imagined it might be. My body adjusted pretty easily to the pace of food intake, and I noticed that I seemed to have more time during the day. Food preparation and consumption take up so much energy and thought, particularly since my school location and schedule aren’t conducive to eating out; if I am to eat lunch during the weekday, I have to bring it with me. I often spent my lunch break responding to Jordan’s writing prompts, and I think I had sharper focus in class because I wasn’t snacking. Even more significantly, I had a keen awareness of the changing season: I got email notifications from My Zmanim for the times of sunrise and sunset, and though the differences from day-to-day were just minutes on each end, the cumulative effect over a month was almost two hours less of daylight. I’ve never had such an acute sense of how quickly summer transitions into fall.
Sukkot begins tonight. The holiday is known as z‘man simchateinu, “the time of our rejoicing.” I am looking forward to the full force of fall, my favorite season.
birkot hashachar
ברקת השחר collage; photo by salem pearce (via instagram)
בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה יְיָ אֱלֹהֵֽנוּ מֶֽלֶךְ הָעוֹלָם
. . . אֲשֶׁר נָתַן לַשֶּׂכְוִי בִינָה לְהַבְחִין בֵּין יוֹם וּבֵין לָיְֽלָה.
. . . שֶׁעָשַֽׂנִי בְּצַלְמוֹ.
. . . שֶׁעָשַֽׂנִי יִשְׂרָאֵל.
. . . שֶׁעָשַֽׂנִי בַּתּ חוֹרִין.
. . . פּוֹקֵֽחַ עִוְרִים.
. . . מַלְבִּישׁ עֲרֻמִּים.
. . . מַתִּיר אֲסוּרִים.
. . . זוֹקֵף כְּפוּפִים.
. . . רוֹקַע הָאָֽרֶץ עַל הַמָּֽיִם.
. . . שֶׁעָֽשָׂה לִּי כָּל צָרְכִּי.
. . . הַמֵּכִין מִצְעֲדֵי גָֽבֶר.
. . . אוֹזֵר יִשְׂרָאֵל בִּגְבוּרָה.
. . . עוֹטֵר יִשְׂרָאֵל בְּתִפְאָרָה.
. . . הַנּוֹתֵן לַיָּעֵף כֹּֽחַ.
Blessed are you, Lord our G-d, sovereign of the universe: who gave to the rooster ability to distinguish between night and day; who made me in G-d’s image; who made me a Jew; who made me a child of freedom. G-d gives sight to the blind, clothes the naked, releases the bound, raises the downtrodden, treads the earth upon the water. G-d provided me my every need has made me everything I need, has made ready a person’s steps. G-d girds Israel with might, crowns Israel with glory. G-d is the one who gives to the weary strength.
This week my tefila group focused on Birkot HaShachar (“blessings of the dawn”), a series recited at the beginning of the morning service. The blessings focus on praising G-d for the renewal of the day and mirror the order of activities upon rising. Like elohai neshama, the liturgy speaks directly to G-d, but here as “our G-d” instead of “my G-d.” Some of the reflections are personal; others, more communal.
As part of our commitment to considering the transitions between prayers, we began our session with elohai neshama, singing it a few times through to an arrangement by a classmate. We then went outside for stretching and birkot, and then came back inside for korbanot (next up in the liturgy), a series of blessings that reference temple sacrifice.
As with last week, the form and content of our principal prayer meshed perfectly. It was a great choice to go outside for birkot hashachar; by doing so we were able to see the more literal side of some of the blessings. It was a beautiful, crisp morning, and I looked up at the sun beginning to shine through the trees, and I felt like I could fly as my tallit billowed around me.
We sang birkot hashachar to an arrangement of yet another classmate (so much musical talent in the Hebrew College community!), set to the song “One Voice” by The Wailin’ Jennys. My classmate leading the prayer shared a kavanah from yet another classmate: Over its duration, “One Voice” progresses from “[t]his is the sound of one voice,” to “[t]his is the sound of voices two,” to “[t]his is the sound of voices three” and ends with “[t]his is the sound of all of us.” In a similar way to birkot hashachar, it mirrors what happens as we move through our day. At first it’s just us, and then voice after voice adds to our experience.
I often feel this way about my morning. I get up alone, and when I get to school I begin greeting people, and we begin davenning. Usually at some point in the service, we have one voice in prayer — and it’s an amazing experience. I sometimes stop singing myself and just listen to all the voices.
Before Tuesday I actually hadn’t heard “One Voice.” I did have the sense while we were singing that I wish we could have gotten progressively louder. But there are only six of us in the group. So when I access my memory of our singing birkot hashachar, I imagine us as we were, standing outside, looking at G-d’s creation, singing in “One Voice.” And I imagine that we resound.
one voice – the wailin’ jennys
* Thanks to a classmate, whose translation of the phrase שֶׁעָֽשָׂה לִּי כָּל צָרְכִּי I prefer to my original.
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This post is part of a series about my year-long tefila (“prayer”) group. Read other posts about the group here. View my artwork inspired by the group here.
morning
File this under “things I worry about when I think about rabbinical school.” I imagine this post to be a first in a series. The issue today is prayer and exercise.
tefillin barbie by jen taylor friedman
I think about prayer a lot these days, more than I used to, which was generally on Friday nights and Saturday mornings. There are several reasons for this. My year-long b’nai mitzvah class at Sixth & I began by exploring some philosophy of prayer: We read Reuven Hammer’s Entering Jewish Prayer and Abraham Joshua Heschel’s Man’s Quest for God. We then moved on to learning the parts of the different services (Shacharit, Mincha, and Ma’ariv) — and talking about the differences between the services on weekdays and on Shabbat. We learned how to put on tallit and lay tefillin. And we’ve been encouraged by the rabbi to at least begin saying the Birchot HaShachar, the thirteen morning blessings — perhaps as practice towards expanded morning prayer.
And in the Talmud class I’ve been attending once a week, we’ve been reading the tractate Berakhot, which deals with the logistics and requirements of prayer, especially the Sh’ma and the Amidah.
Finally, my applications to rabbinical school have asked me to reflect on my relationship with G-d, of which prayer is certainly a part. And at every school that I visited, I had the chance to attend at least morning prayers. I’ve already realized that davening at rabbinical school is likely to be a unique experience: The minyan is most likely more committed than average, as you might expect from a roomful of aspiring rabbis, leading to perhaps a more spirited and spiritual experience. The students run the services and are oftentimes encouraged to experiment and innovate with the liturgy. Plus, in the institutions with cantorial schools, the services can make use of unbelievably beautiful music.
That’s prayer. On to exercise: It’s taken me a fair amount of my adult life to realize that consistent, almost daily exercise is key to my mental health. And for me, that exercise needs to happen first thing in the morning. It makes my whole day better. Plus, if I’m going to exercise, I’m more likely to do so in the morning: At the end of the day, I just don’t have energy to work out.
And the conflict: At all the schools I visited, Shacharit starts before 8:00 a.m., sometimes as early as 7:30 a.m. This doesn’t preclude morning exercise, but it certainly makes it trickier than it has been here in D.C., when I’ve started work at 9:00 a.m. or later. (Plus, my current morning commute is just 15 minutes of walking. My commute in school could be 30 minutes or more on public transportation, further shrinking the morning exercise window.)
I want to have a meaningful prayer life in rabbinical school and participate in communal prayer services. I also want to practice self care through morning exercise. So, I’ve got some thinking to do. And maybe some afternoon exercising to get used to.
no power in the 'verse 