selichot – no power in the 'verse

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.

so it begins

I just completed my first week of school (well, sort of). Sunday and Monday were orientation, and Tuesday through Friday were the first four days of a pre-semester seminar. My classes will start in earnest next week.

It’s hard to relate all of the feelings I’ve had in the past week. Frankly, it’s been overwhelming, but in the best way possible. I’ve loved meeting my new classmates, the returning students, and the faculty, as well as beginning to learn as a class and to pray as a community.

I’ve also spent a fair amount of the week in a kind of emotional suspended animation: I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop. “It can’t really be that for once in my life I am in the right place.” “I can’t actually be doing what I supposed to be doing.” I know that not everything about this school and my experience as a student is or will be perfect. But I have never known peace like this.

First things first! The best thing about rabbinical school so far: I get to sing every day, and no one cares if (that?) I sing out of tune. I get to sing during morning prayers, and most communal time starts with a niggun (wordless melody). Even my class does! (Indeed, the fact that my admissions interview ended with a niggun solidified for me that Hebrew College was the right place for me.)

hebrew college’s selichot leader; photo by dena trugman (via instagram)

One of my favorite parts of the last week has been selichot, which unfortunately won’t be a regular occurrence throughout the year. Selichot are poems and prayers said during the Jewish month of Elul, which precedes the High Holidays. They explore themes of penitence and G-d’s mercy — not, perhaps, the most cheerful of topics — and at Hebrew College start at 7:00 a.m., before the morning service — giving an idea of how moving they must be to draw a crowd. (I have a limited music vocabulary, so I can only try to explain why.) In fact, more than one returning student told me that, despite the early hour, they were not to missed. Many of the tunes have strong beats and feature repeating lines, facilitating participation. And the Hebrew College tradition in many of the songs is that anyone can take a verse, while we all take the chorus together; I’ve loved hearing the variety of experience, accuracy, and ability that results. In this setting, not everyone sings well, but anyone can sing. I’ve never had an experience like selichot before, and I find that the songs stay with me all day.

Orientation was great mix of practical and spiritual. We met administrators, did icebreakers, told and heard personal journey stories, and started learning about core elements of the Hebrew College curriculum: personal and spiritual growth, tefila (prayer), beit midrash (literally, “house of interpretation”) and hevruta (study partners), and (good, old-fashioned) learning. I was particularly struck by something the director of admissions said as he welcomed us to orientation. He noted that school begins at an odd moment in the Jewish calendar, during the month Elul, a time of preparation for the High Holidays in which we reflect on teshuvah (literally, “return”). We atone for our sins by trying to make right our relationships with our fellow human beings and with G-d. Taking the first step in a new journey may feel out of sync with the prevalent theme of repentance, but, he said, “I know that for many us this beginning may represent a return in a very real way.”

This combination (which doesn’t even include the practical side of rabbinic education, which is to come in the curriculum), exemplified in the orientation schedule and in the introduction to the core elements of the school’s curriculum, is the essence of what I was looking for in a graduate program. I know I would not have been happy in a purely academic setting (as for example a Ph.D. program). I ultimately want to use my knowledge of Judaism in the service of others, and I am so excited to be an institution that recognizes the importance of spiritual and personal growth.

hannah, whose story is read on the first day of Rosh Hashanah

The seminar for first-year students is about the passages from the Tanakh that we read in synagogue on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. We’re looking at the primary texts in the Hebrew Bible as well as a variety of commentary on them: sections of Talmud and other rabbinic sources, modern and contemporary perspectives, and Israeli poetry. The rabbi who teaches the course is our class advisor (and will be teaching one of our fall semester courses); he assigned a text, Beginning Anew: A Woman’s Companion to the High Holy Days, as part of his commitment to looking at the primary texts through a feminist lens. I am thrilled that this perspective is given such importance, especially since so many of the High Holidays’ stories feature women.

This week marked for me the beginning of the hevruta study experience, as mentioned, a hallmark of the Hebrew College curriculum. Every morning after selichot, shacharit (morning prayer), and our facilitated Elul reflection, the first-year students split up into pairs to work, in the beit midrash, on the assignments for class that day. We switch partners every day (although we will eventually choose permanent study partners for the year). I was nervous about this part of the learning process. I’ve had a few experiences with hevruta learning, but nothing this consistent or systematic, and I have always thrived well in a very traditional, individual learning setting (lecture by professor and supplementary reading). I wasn’t sure I was going to like working in hevruta. To be sure, I chose Hebrew College in part because of its emphasis on hevruta learning, but I did so with trepidation, anticipating that it would be a challenge, pushing me out of my safety zone.

On Tuesday my first partner, who spent last year in Israel studying in hevruta, told me that it would ruin me for me classroom learning. I’m not sure I’m ready to go quite that far, but I have absolutely loved this week, completely confounding my expectations. It helps that I’ve jibed well with the four classmates that I’ve worked with so far: I’ve really appreciated their different strengths, and partnered learning has helped me to realize my own strengths (to wit, and unsurprisingly, grammar and translation of the Hebrew texts).

My final thought from this first week takes me back to the first day of orientation, Sunday — and my birthday. When I first found out the week’s schedule, I had the fleeting thought that it would be an odd way to spend my birthday (not least because I’d be among a fair number of strangers), but the more I considered, the more I thought that it might actually be perfect. The director of admissions in particular made a big deal of it, leading the group in “Happy Birthday” singing not once but twice, and when I thanked everyone after blowing out my candles, I said, “There is no place or group of people I would rather be on my birthday.”

And it really was true: I am incredibly privileged to be able to pursue this dream. What better gift could I ask for on my birthday than to be taking the first step on that journey?