For Whom The Shofar Blows

Weird is the word. Everything is weird. Adult-ing is weird. But actually, there is very little that is familiar or routine right now, and in the in-between time of being on the high from arriving and really settling into life, there is a period of discomfort and awkwardness and weirdness.

This week,  for the first time in my life, I woke myself up and got myself to Rosh HaShanah services. In college, I did go, but always as the guest of my adoptive Denver-mom would would knock on my door and urge me on. It feels different when you set your own alarm and travel alone to services.

It's possible I'm remembering wrong, but I swear when I was a kid in Day School, we'd prepare for the holidays for months. We'd learn about the holiday and the blessings, sing songs about it,  marker tons of coloring books, and do art projects. So I would anticipate every Jewish holiday. At that point in time, the holidays were meaningful to me in a way I haven't been able to re-capture. 

Starting in high school, but really in college, the high-holidays seemed to appear in front of me, an unexpected interruption to my life, but usually a welcome one. I wanted that anticipatory feeling back though. I wanted to walk into services feeling prepared for the Real experience of the Days of Awe. 

I thought that this year, being in a Jewish community, I would prepare more for the holidays, get myself into the right mentality before the services and be ready to pray. It didn't really happen though and I walked in as un-prepared as always.

After finding a seat, I experienced the same odd sense that I've been having the past few years:  expectation coupled with resignment, knowing that I won't be fulfilled. Cold-calling religion just doesn't work. The services can't provide spirituality if you're not in a receptive head-space. Once I'm finally sitting down, all I can think about is how I'll possibly pass the next 4-6 hours of services.

Rabbi Sharon Brous says that she felt similarly during the high holidays of her youth.  In her interview for the podcast On Being (you should listen to it, she's amazing), she talks about high holiday services feeling irrelevant to her day-to-day life and being a spectator to her own religious experience.  

She says, "We found ways to busy ourselves during services... we found things to do to occupy ourselves because it was treacherously long and completely uninspiring for us."

Then later on she explains, "We came into this space only out of obligations, not out of religious obligation, but out of familial obligation and we'd sit for hours and hours in desperate boredom kind of waiting for the service to end..."

But I went to services alone, no one would have noticed had I not shown up. So why was I feeling obligated? And to whom?

When I walked into services, I immediately felt out of place, but after singing some of the songs and reading familiar poems, I began to connect. 

Rabbi Aaron Alexander's sermon really drew me in. It was a hard to summarize sermon with many examples and stories, but here are the highlights: 

He zeroed in on this unattributed quote: "We need to stop taking ourselves so seriously and learn how to be serious about ourselves."

He explained: 

"When we take ourselves too seriously, we tend focus on the superficial, the fleeting - flashy presentation over depth and substance.But being serious about ourselves points toward the heart, asking life's most essential questions of meaning. It's... everything to do with intentionality."

Intentionality is a word that catches my ear. If I had to define my time with Avodah in one word, at this point I'd say intentional. 

The point of this was to focus on the question of how can we be more serious about ourselves, especially and distinctly as Jews. How can we take our Rosh Hashanah services and take what we learn outside of the 4 walls of a synagogue?

 He went on to ask and answer these two questions:

1) How do we take God and praying to God, seriously?

2) How do we take Humanity seriously?

He answered the first question by suggesting that we make God small when we focus on ourselves and in prayer and relationship to God, we must think on the communal level. In turning towards each other, we turn towards God. 

In response to part two, he again affirmed that we must never dismiss each other, that we are all made in God's image and to be serious Jews "our heart-space must reach beyond the comfort zone of those who look, think, and act like we do." While I don't have the quote, he did specifically call out the problems faced by people of color in our own communities. 

I had never heard a Rabbi talk this like from the pulpit, and never in person. Clergy fighting for justice had always been from another religion, or speaking to me from a computer screen. But here was a man talking to his congregation on one of the most important days of the year about the importance of social justice, not as a feel good issue, but as a structural issue that we can play a role in. 

We talk about the shofar blast as a wake-up call for ourselves and the way we live our lives. As part of his sermon, he did not address the individual's reflection, but the community's reflection. What have we, as a Jewish people, done to help our neighbors yesterday, or last month? How have we fought for a more just world? The answer for many, sadly, is that we haven't.  Many of us are complacent or down-right deny the privileged status that we have attained. 

The Jewish community needs a wake-up call to fight for a more just world. That is part of what I hope to achieve in my year with AVODAH. This is what I hope I can instill in my family, friends, and community. 

So therefore never send to know for whom the shofar blows; it blows for thee.