Treasures, Release & Bucket Lists

Yom Kippur Drash for Congregation Ner Shalom, 5775

הודיעני ה' קצי ומדת ימי מה–היא

Hodieni Yah kitzi umidat yamay mah hi.

"Yah," Psalm 39 says, "make my end known to me and the measure of my days."

The measure of our days - if only we could know such a thing! How we might be different, for good and for ill. How the entire emotional landscape of our lives would be altered. What would be our ambition? What would be the source of our calm? What are the things we would rush to do because there's no time to waste? What are the things we'd put off because there is?

But such knowledge is withheld from us. You'd think our cells could figure it out. That our DNA could speak it to our brains. Or that an angel might whisper in our ears who by fire and who by water, and when. But instead we live in this greatest of mysteries with this greatest of anxieties.  The measure of our days. Sometimes it gets us moving in meaningful ways. And sometimes it stops us in our tracks.

I made the mistake of picking up a National Geographic that was sitting in our house the other day. Between the manatees and the mammoth tusks, I found a report on changing average life expectancies in America. And of course, average just means average. As much above as below. But still, the ages colorfully printed on the US map looked like prognoses. No, worse. They looked like destiny.

I tried to make sense of the numbers and I noticed that my mother had outlived the average female life expectancy by four years. "Oh, good for her," I thought, as a parent might kvell over a child bringing home an A on their report card. Then after a moment I melted into bitter resentment that she only outlived the average by four years.

My eyes then, nebech, drifted over to the average life expectancy for men, and I didn't like that very much either. My remaining allotment, for so it felt to me, was far too short to accomplish the things I still want. I'll probably never get to master another new language. My days for rough travel are probably over, certainly if my achey back has anything to say about it. Doubtful I'll ever go to rabbinical school. Oh, and hadn't I intended to work out and get into shape some day? So many things I figured I'd get around to. Now I don't even know if I'll get through my old papers in the shed.

This mortality and this uncertainty about time. They are always the elephant in the room, especially on Yom Kippur. Looking over our shoulders into the prayerbook, pressuring us to make amends, egging us on toward a renewed future, or, frankly, just scaring the shit out of us.

How do we make our lives what we want them to be? Now that we're old enough to feel the finiteness, how do we make our unknown number of days count? In this year of loss, in what felt like the premature loss of my mother - and what loss doesn't feel premature? - my wandering mind wondered whether she got to the things that she wanted to get to in her time. And I've concluded that she did.

One explicit piece of evidence had to do with her bucket list. Now as a disclaimer, I think that this whole bucket list concept that has evolved over these last years is a mixed blessing. It might be good as a values clarification exercise; if it causes you to do something very beautiful or meaningful that you might otherwise not have thought to do, then it's a good thing. If it just dangles before you beautiful and meaningful things that you don't actually have the means to do, then it's just a final, eleventh-hour taunt. If you really want to be Julia Roberts in "Eat, Pray, Love," then you probably needed to have started earlier and to have been, well, Julia Roberts.

But on the subject of my mother's bucket list. Last summer, in 2013, I was back home and Mom and I had shabbos dinner with our friends Dawn and Eitan in Skokie. I don't remember how the topic came up, but my mother announced that she needed to have a bucket list. I had never heard her talk like this; she never acknowledged her mortality. We all leaned closer and asked her what would be on her bucket list. She thought for a moment, and then announced, "Well, I'm not jumping out of a plane." Everyone around the table was agreeable to this. So I asked her again what would be on her bucket list. She thought some more. "Well, I'm certainly not going bungie jumping," she said with a somewhat accusatory tone, as if we were just waiting to slap bungies on her ankles and knock her off a bridge. We sat for a while in silence. After a while I pressed further. "Mom, instead of telling us what's not on your bucket list, why don't you tell us what is." She drew a blank. She couldn't think of anything. In the moment it felt a little bit like failure of imagination: there must be things she wants to do or experience that she hasn't. Then she asked us for suggestions. Exotic travel and going back to school she dismissed out of hand. The suggestions that most appealed to her included hearing music, seeing theatre, and visiting her children in California. All things that she was already doing.

It wasn't failure of imagination. My mother had achieved her ambitions. She was doing just what she wanted to be doing. Her bucket list was actually a description of her life. It seemed the only thing missing was her being able to tell her friends that she had a bucket list. But otherwise, there wasn't really anything significant that she had put off, no loose ends sitting around obviously untied.

I don't know if this kind of outcome is rare. Or as we continue to get older, do our desires scale down to match what is already working well in our lives? Either way, this is something I shamelessly wish for myself and for everyone I know. That our desires should be simple and manageable, and that we should grow into a time, if we haven't already, when we are fulfilling our desires over and over.

Hodieni Yah kitzi, what are the number of our days? The question of how we handle this particular kind of not-knowing is articulated all too clearly on Yom Kippur. The possibility that this year could be our last year, tfu tfu tfu, is mentioned more than once in our liturgy. We sing it, we declaim it, we beat our breasts with it. Yom Kippur intends this face-off with mortality to be a motivator. To impel our cheshbon hanefesh, our accounting for ourselves in the face of God and this world. And it is meant to grease the wheels of resolution in our bumpy relationships, if not making real apology easier, then at least making it pressing enough for us to do it anyway.

But it also leaves us unsettled too, vulnerable in a way that might be good, but is nonetheless alarming. By the end of the Ne'ilah service, I often feel incredible pathos, I hear myself pleading, not fully knowing who I'm pleading with. With God? Let me live, God! Let me get another crack at this! Write me in that Book! Or am I pleading with the Universe? Let me live! Universe, let these cells of mine thrive and fight off disease for a while longer! Or am I pleading with myself? Irwin! Be careful! Be safe! Don't text and drive! Or maybe I'm not pleading with myself for my life but for a change in my life. Change, already, Irwin, change! Be the person you want to be! Embody the values that you insist are important!

Yom Kippur is a hugely important check-in for us, for our people. It's hard not to be affected by it. It's hard not to emerge from it without feeling some kind of bitul hayesh, a breakdown of the ego. (No worries, we'll rebuild our egos in a jiffy.) But for this day, to feel such openness, such vulnerability, is really quite something.

I find that on this holy day there's a lot that bubbles up. Stuff that I've stored away in my cells somewhere, stuff I don't look at even though upon reflection I imagine it's always somewhere in my peripheral vision. Old stuff. Disappointments. Longings. Grudges. Shame. Desires. Experiences. Emotional memorabilia. On Yom Kippur I get a chance to look at these things directly, to turn them over in my hand like rocks from a river - examining their shapes and heft and markings, and then putting them back down again.
I do this every year. But this year, in this shmitah year, this fallow year of the Hebrew calendar, I've determined to look at what I've stored away a little bit differently. I'm going to use a shmitah lens, or two shmitah lenses actually - sort of shmitah bifocals, if you will -  and I'll tell you what I mean by that.

First, just the quickest of refreshers. Shmitah is the sabbatical year - the seventh year in which Torah commands us to give the land a rest, not just a rest but a shabbos. As of 10 days ago, we are now resident in a real live shmitah year. Last week we talked about shmitah as being a kind of being-not-doing boot camp, teaching us to live in the not-knowing, to let go - for some period of time, maybe one seventh of the time - of our need to find out about and tinker with everything in sight.

BTW, anyone make any headway with that this week?

But there are two other elements of shmitah, two lenses that I think are worth using as we look at all of these things we've stored up over time, especially the painful things. The first shmitah lens has to do with looking for sustenance. In the shmitah laws laid out in Torah, God anticipates the people's concern that they will not have enough to eat to make it through the fallow period, the time of not-knowing. So God promises abundance in the 6th year that can carry the people through.

So the first lens that I want to use this year is that. What, of the things that I've sacked away in my spirit actually has the ability to offer me some sustenance? What of my old interests, friendships, skills, delights and longings are still in there somewhere? What are the elements of me that at some point I abandoned, perhaps because they didn't seem useful enough, or they were too time consuming, or they came to feel childish, or maybe other people told me not to value those things and I believed them. What are the things I felt shame about still because I was taught that those things are shameful, that now could offer me some real joy, some new energy, some delight, some strength, some wholeness? These life experiences, even the difficult ones, can be a source, a stockpile, of nourishment during times of uncertainty. Times of uncertainty like the Biblical shmitah year, like Yom Kippur, like, well, always. So with this first lens maybe I can identify what there is to haul out of mothballs. Even what we rejected in our younger years can still become a cornerstone of our future lives. Consider it an inheritance, a gift, a time capsule, from an earlier you.

The second shmitah lens also involves that collection of stuff stored in our psyches. And it connects to another element of the Biblical sabbatical year, and that is the release of debts. Not only do the fields stop being thrall to our will, so do our debtors. Obligations are let go.

So I think there's something here for us to consider on Yom Kippur about release of obligations. It closely parallels much of our Yom Kippur liturgy, including the Kol Nidre prayer, where we ask to be released from vows we made. But I'd like to propose we look at the obligations that we've carried internally, which might now be ready to be let go.

I've been learning a lot this year about letting go. My sister and I have spent weeks already going through our childhood home. It has a basement that has become legendary, carrying 56 years of family history: it is the repository of all the remaining treasures and undiscardables of grandparents, great grandparents, beloved great aunts, and relatives who moved away. It contains wedding cards and condolence cards and even a note from Jackie Kennedy thanking my Grandma Sade for her kind expression of sympathy. It also holds boxes full of my sister's and my childhood report cards, photos, compositions and, especially, art projects, many of which are living proof of the surprising longevity of Elmer's library paste.

Much of that stuff had a quality of being put away in anticipation. Socked away for later. But for what? My sister at last put words to this as she was looking through the umpteenth construction paper masterpiece of her grade school career. She said, "It was like all of this was put away so that it could be looked at and appreciated again. And now that's what we are doing."

And once she said that, it was as if something had been released. Our obligation to these things melted away even while our love for them didn't. They stopped being there for us to store for yet another generation. They were there for us to appreciate and let go of. And that's what we were able to start doing. Appreciate, maybe talk about, maybe even photograph in special cases, and then let go.
Now this happened to be lovely stuff, nostalgic stuff, but I think the same holds true about anything from our pasts that obligates us, that binds us: old disappointments, regrets, grudges, shame. Those things might be deserving of some appreciation too. We can appreciate them for what they say about who we were once; what we longed for, what we dreamed of, even if it didn't come true. We can appreciate them as souvenirs of what we suffered and what we survived. We can offer our appreciation and some forgiveness to those artifacts of difficult times. And we can also consider letting them go.

I know it's easy to just get up and say, "let go of the things that hold you back." It's not like that hasn't occurred to any of us before. It's not like we haven't spent good time and possibly lots of money on therapy trying to do just that. It might not even be doable. But still, on this Yom Kippur, the one that falls during the shmitah year, when we are released from obligations, it might be a good time to revisit this project. To adopt this shmitah view: that this year we are not under any obligation to our old grudges. We are not under any obligation to our hurt feelings. We are not under any obligation to old shame that continues to bully us even at this advanced age. So even though it's difficult, perhaps we can at least make the effort to imagine what it would be like to let go.

Imagining. After all, we're talking about the state of our spirits. It is something in that spiritual world that we wish to shift. And so using our imaginations is a legitimate tool. The Slonimer Rebbe gave the view that a way to enter Shabbat with a true feeling of Shabbat peace, is to imagine that all your work is done. Such an imagining is completely ineffective if your goal is to finish your work. But if your goal is to feel Shabbat, then it's the right prescription. Similarly, imagination can work here, I think. Of course it's difficult to let go of things we've held onto, even destructive things that for whatever reason have become in some way precious to us. But a reasonable first step might be to imagine. Imagine how it would feel if we were released from this bond. What lightness would enter us? What light - what Holy Spark - might we see reflecting in that now emptier mirrored chamber of our soul? Imagine feeling that way right now, as if the work were already done, the hard thing released. Feel it now, and perhaps that in itself will be a big enough step.

Hodieni Yah kitzi. Our time is uncertain, our future is uncertain. We come here for Yom Kippur, year after year, because the future is uncertain. We are ignorant of the measure of our days. We don't know if we will hit the National Geographic averages or, God willing, 30 years beyond them. We don't know whether we will meet sickness or sorrow or have a year in which we are blessedly, blissfully spared. But let us consider carrying these three shmitah lessons with us through this Holy Day and into the year beyond. And they are these:

(1) You have what you need to get through. Your abundant soul has stored away resources for you, resources that can sustain you. Look and see what's there! There might be some lovely stuff that you long ago shelved that could still become the cornerstone of your future self.

(2) You can let go of your obligation to what harms you. If it hobbles you, if it haunts you, if it's not helping you see your Holy Spark, maybe you don't owe it anything anymore. Appreciate what it's meant to you, offer it some love and forgiveness. And then let it go. Or, if that's too much to ask, at least begin imagining how letting go might feel. And finally,

(3) Your bucket list is now. There is no future that is certain. You can only be sure of what you are doing at this moment. So whatever you dream of inviting into your life so you can have greater richness later, you have to begin inviting now. There is a legend you probably know about the two angels that follow you home on Erev Shabbat. One is your defender, one your adversary. If your house is aglow and ready for Shabbat, your defender says, "So may it be next week," and the adversary is obliged to say, "Amen." But if your house is cold and unready for Shabbat, the adversary says, "So may it be next week," and your defender is obliged to say, "Amen." And although it is told in this folkloric way, there is an underlying real-life truth here. What you do now is in fact your practice. If you want Shabbat, you need to be doing Shabbat, not waiting for a time that is better suited, or Shabbat will never be your practice. The same can be said of anything on your bucket list. If you want it in your life, now is the time to invite it in. Resolving to invite it in later is no guarantee of anything. All it means is that today you have a practice of making resolutions about the future.

So that's it. The shmitah lessons. Activate your hidden resources. Release your obligation to what doesn't serve you. And live your bucket list now. Because we don't know how long we have to put it off. And when your angel sees that you are in fact living the life you want, the life you value, it will say, "So be it," and the adversary will be obliged to say, "Amen."


Here is a poetic treatment of these themes by Ner Shalom's Poet Laureate, Sally Churgel: Shmita Year for the Heart.

Some thoughts here were impelled by two chant settings by Rabbi Shefa Gold: "Inviting Our Future Selves" and "The Cornerstone."  Gratitude to Ellen Atzilah Solot for always making me think.

The Year of Not Doing (Quite So Much)

Rosh Hashanah Drash for Congregation Ner Shalom, 5775

I want to start by wishing you all a shanah tovah — a good year. In the American fashion people will sometimes say "happy new year," like you do on New Year's Eve, the way you might say "happy birthday." But of course it is more realistic to wish someone a happy birthday — a 24-hour stretch is easier to fill with happy-making activities that produce short-turnaround happy outcomes. But a year? A year is a long time to stretch out happy.

And so the Jewish way is a little less ambitious. Not a happy year. We wish each other a shanah tovah. A good year. Gut yor. We know that every year will carry with it its sorrows, its achievements, its disappointments. Happiness will not be waiting at every turn. Yet we hope that in the aggregate it will turn out to be a year that was good.

And who's to measure? Who's to say one year is better than another? Some years might be more exciting. More marked by big events. But in the simple day to day, how easy is it to make a comparison?

That said, I'm going to go out on a limb and say this last year was terrible. It was a terrible year. Terrible in many ways for many people. There were garden variety sorrows—I know I'm not the only person in this room who lost a parent or loved one over the year. But there were also public sadnesses that we all shared together. Violence in the world — kidnappings, murders, lost planes, suicides, trouble in Ukraine and Syria and Iraq and Gaza and our precious and difficult Israel. It was a terrible year and I am not sorry to see it go.

Despair is hanging in the air, at least that's what I perceive, and I blame this last year for it. 

As Jews we have a mixed relationship with bad times. We have a longstanding fatalistic streak, well justified. Anything bad that can happen, will happen, and often to us. There's an old Yiddish joke about the bear that escapes from the circus and the police give orders to shoot it on sight. A Jew starts packing his bags to get out of town. His neighbor asks, "Wait, why are you leaving?" The Jew says, "You know how it goes. They shoot first, and only afterward sort out whether it was a bear or a Jew."

Jewish fatalism. I see my grandmother shaking her head and saying gornisht helfn. "Beyond help."

But I think Jewish fatalism is only skin-deep. Because more often we respond to the deeply human compulsion to do something. We are, after all, a species characterized by being toolmakers. We are tinkerers, interveners, doers.

And all the more so as Jews I think. Torah contains 248 mitzvot aseh, i.e. commandments to affirmatively do something. Light candles, wash your hands, make sacrifices, give to the poor, pursue justice. We Jews are an action-oriented people. For many of us, action in the world is our way of being Jewish, which is why in the Western world there is barely a political movement or cultural phenomenon that is not statistically overpopulated with our people.

We don't just do to stay busy. We do because alongside our fatalism, we incongruously believe that the world can be a better place. That it is fixable—by us. Our mythos of Tikkun Olam, of the shattered world that can be repaired and redeemed, courses through us. We are cosmic fixers.

And we don't stop with the world around us. We fix us too. If the world is inherently broken, then aren't we inherently broken too? Don't we also need tikkun? Aren't these Days of Awe, with their chest-beating and confession, an enterprise based on the need to fix our brokenness? Heck, we don't even need a Jewish-driven reason. We have a consumer culture that tells us every day that we're not good enough; that there is always something we can do to make our lives better, our bodies sexier, our children smarter, our investments more profitable, our spirits more enlivened. And all those things can be gotten for the low low price of . . . , well, whatever the market will bear.

The constant striving to make ourselves, to make our lives better, to make the world better, is exhausting. And when our hopes for our lives or for the world don't come about, or don't come about as desired, we can only understand it as failure. This is why our helplessness over the  summer, over this last year, hit us so very hard.

So here's where, I think, I hope, our tradition offers us a bit of medicine: shmitah.

Now for some of you, this word might be new. So let me first tell you what shmitah is not. It is not a disparaging Yiddish term for ragged clothing or bad fashion, as in Did you see that shmitah that Meryl Streep wore at the Oscars?

And shmitah is not a nonsense rhyming word that you might blurt out defiantly, such as, PETA shmitah, I'm gonna wear the fur anyway.

Instead, shmitah is the Biblical sabbatical year. (See? Sabbatical sounds nice, doesn't it?) This is the  year in which Torah says let your fields go fallow. No tilling. No plowing. No planting. No monkeying around. Just let the field be already. Give it a little shabbes.

Okay, I hear you thinking, we don't own fields. So how is this medicine?

It's medicine because shmitah is more than about farming. Sure, on its face, it looks like an antiquated system to keep fields productive. But of course, if the mitzvah of shmitah were just for that purpose, Torah could have done it better. It could have created a crop rotation system in which each field gets its time off every seven years, but not all at the same time. Having every field in the Israelite economy go fallow simultaneously? That's shocking! Asking a whole population to sit on their hands and hope there will be enough food is a stunning demand for Torah to make; a demand that clearly is meant to be about more than agricultural productivity. It is meant to teach a lesson as well.

The 18th Century Rabbi Chaim Luzzato, in his masterwork Derech Hashem, the Way of God, suggests that every mitzvah has two purposes. One is simple obedience. You do the thing because God says do the thing. But the second purpose is to help perfect some quality in us, not in the world, but in us, the doers of the mitzvah. So what is the quality in us that is perfected by laying off of the plow for a year? Maybe we are perfecting our ability to sit. To sit still. Not to do those extra ten things you could've done. Maybe shmitah teaches us to be okay with uncertainty. Wait. Listen. Breathe. To remember what it's like just to be when there is nothing you are required to do. To let go of control. To be vulnerable. To allow things to unfold. To have trust that somehow we will be okay; that deep down we are already okay.

Patience. Trust. These qualities of patience and trust are very challenging. For me at least. I am not naturally a sit-and-wait kind of guy. I spend my life in a whirlwind of doing. I find it hard to maintain any single contemplative practice over a long stretch. I once did a 10-day silent meditation retreat, at the end of which I should have been calm and equanimous, but instead I was ready to smack the next yuppy Buddhist offering me soup and an enlightened smile. But Torah, through the shmitah laws, takes the Buddhist position. Torah wants you to know that you cannot control it all. Shmitah helps you absorb this hugely important information. That you are not the boss. Learn this, Torah is saying, or you are in for some significant suffering.

Shmitah reminds us to be humble in the world. It reminds us that the land doesn't belong to us. It may be yours to farm for six years; but every seventh you need to let it go back to its rightful owner, and that is not you.

Yet, I have to say, our sense of the land being here for our exclusive benefit is deep in our culture and our bones and very hard to shake. A few weeks ago I took a walk near my house on Sonoma Mountain. Along the road I came upon a large blackberry patch where, seeing that no one was looking, I proceeded to gorge myself - a childish and pitiable display.  That is, it was a beautiful nature experience. And I looked up, beyond this patch, and saw a vast bed of blackberries — maybe an acre of them. They were a distance off the road, through impassable brush, and at the foot of a steep incline. It was clear that no one could actually get to them. I remember looking at them and thinking, "Well, that's a stupid waste of blackberries." I heard this thought in my head and was shocked. As if the blackberry didn't have its own life whose purpose was not to feed me. I looked at my purple fingers and felt shame.

As much as I unconsciously think that the blackberry should be of use, I think that about me too. I judge myself by my own utility. Always so busy. Always doing. And if I ask the question, who is there underneath all this utility, I can't say for certain that I always know.

So I think this is my shmitah challenge. Can I — not all the time, but in this shmitah year, in this special shabbes-like year — step back? Make some room? Breathe? Get a little more comfortable with the me who's not so busy trying to do and fix and please?

After all, isn't that the highest possible act of teshuvah? Returning to the you that is there underneath all the shoulds, underneath the plans and expectations. Returning to your integrity. To your longing. Returning to your neshamah, that deepest and holiest part of you. To arrive there with love and forgiveness, and to say, in Abraham's words in the traditional Rosh Hashanah Torah portion, hineini — here I am. Ah, here I am.

Perhaps revelation is waiting. Perhaps shmitah will reveal you to yourself.

Maybe we all give this a try over these Days of Awe.

And in suggesting that, I should probably make a disclaimer. While shmitah as a guide for farming demands an entire year of disengagement, shmitah as a spiritual practice doesn't. So don't worry, no one here is suggesting you lay off of all your doing for the next year. No one is suggesting that you stop engaging with the world or working for justice or scheduling your kid's soccer practice. But the shmitah law does offer a sense of proportion, a recipe to help your field regenerate. One in seven. Just like shabbat. One in seven. If you can take every seventh day, or hour, or minute, to let go of control and notice and honor who you are inside, I suspect you will be better equipped the other 6/7 of the time. And you will be a better instrument of change when you go back on Tikkun Olam duty.

So let us pray that in this coming year we can allow more shmitah consciousness into our lives. That in that consciousness we may find balance between doing (doing, doing, doing) and being. That we give our ambitious and perfectionist selves a sabbatical. That we sit better with what we can't change. That we open up to all the beautiful surprises that could grow in our own gardens if we backed off and let  them. After all, as far as we know, Eden didn't need so much tilling, did it?

May shmitah give us the tools to make this new year, even if not always a happy one, a good year; a good, good year.

Shanah Tovah.


The lovely thought and turn of phrase of something "revealing you to yourself" emerged from my old friend, the wise Ezra Cole.