On Being Found By What We Need

In the period leading up to the Jewish New Year I feel like an explorer who first has to set up base camp, as it were, in preparation for the expedition ahead of him. On a good day I think of what will follow as an annual adventure into the spiritual and psychological terrain of the so-called ‘Days of Awe’, the Yomim Noraim - an opportunity for reflection and re-evaluation during the ten days between Rosh Hashanah (the New Year) and Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement).  It’s a time of potential renewal. But on a bad day, I’m reminded of the myth of Sisyphus, condemned to push the same boulder up the mountain over and over again: a thankless task.

The Selichot service, that takes place during an evening preceding the New Year itself, is an opportunity to check the route ahead, discover if we have the right provisions - even if we don’t quite know what provisions we might need – and maybe have a look at the maps drawn by those who have gone before us (which also seems to involve questioning whether their maps will be of any help for us). Some of us intuit that our journey – if we wish to take it - will require us to draw our own map rather than relying entirely on the routes that others have taken.

So, the questions for the evening circle around: what’s our route looking like this year? what provisions do we need? what resources can we draw on? This expedition is fraught work, filled with uncertainty and insecurity. At least initially. And who amongst us can claim to be an expert? At best we may feel like a willing amateur. And sometimes not so willing - for the resistance to this work can be strong.  

Over the years I’ve found it helpful to find a text to start me off – usually a text that might not seem an obvious starting place for a Jewish journey of inwardness: it might be something from Waiting for Godot, or King Lear, or a few lines of Seamus Heaney; even something from Alice in Wonderland has provided the springboard. I’m seeking out help to get myself deeper into the themes of the season. 

Now I say that I ‘find a text’ but that isn’t strictly accurate; it’d be more true to say that it often feels that the texts find me. If I’m working in a congregational setting I don’t go looking for good texts to bring to the community, like a mother bird searching out some juicy worms for her fledglings; but something will come my way, randomly, unexpectedly, unplanned, in the days or weeks leading up to the Selichot service; and it’ll get me thinking, and it won’t let go of me until I’ve done something with it, until I’ve used it as a building block in the flimsy construction of words (otherwise known as ‘a sermon’) which I offer as a starting point as the community sets off on its religious expedition.

This year it occurred to me that the process I’m describing – of being ‘found’ by a text – might offer a clue to one approach to the themes and the work of the High Holy Days. Those themes are the same every year: teshuvah - returning, seeking forgiveness, repentance, renewal. This is the heavy-duty religious baggage Jews grapple with over these weeks. And this stuff comes with so many expectations, that we may need something that helps to subvert these expectations.

The expectations may come from community, or family, or the liturgy, or are just expectations we put on ourselves, about change and transformation. We are weighed down by beliefs about what we ‘should’ be doing, or ‘should’ be feeling: and these expectations can get in the way of just experiencing what happens to us (and in us) during these weeks. Our prior expectations and beliefs about what we ought be doing, or feeling, or thinking, can block us being open to what actually happens, moment by moment: what happens naturally, we might say.

So when I talk about texts ‘finding’ me I’m offering a model that might be helpful in a wider sense:  that the things we need (the words, the ideas, the hope, the confidence, the resolve, the ability to forgive ourselves, the ability to forgive others: whatever it is we need) - they find us. They find us if we are open to them. So what  I’m describing, struggling to describe - because it’s hard to put into words – what I’m talking about is a stance in relation to the spiritual and religious work of these days.

Maybe I can describe it as ‘wandering attentiveness’ – even ‘distracted attentiveness’; it’s akin to what Shakespeare described, incomparably, in the words he put in Polonius’s mouth in Hamlet: “By indirections find directions out”.

So, if I had to summarise what I am saying, it’d be something like: ‘What you need to help you on this expedition through the High Holy Days is waiting for you - but you don’t need to work too hard to search for it, or seek it out, because it will arrive, it will come to you – your job, the job of each one of us, is to wait and be open to see it or hear it when it comes, to receive it into our hearts, our souls’. But when I say it like that, it makes it sound almost too easy, or inevitable: too deterministic.

So I want to say it tentatively, hesitantly, because, as Franz Kafka understood and described, in our times there is no longer a “broad…smooth road” leading from, or to, “Mount Sinai”[i]; there are no straight paths to religious revelation, no certainties, no programmes that will automatically get you there, no practices or rituals guaranteed to lead to enlightenment or inner change.

There’s no single Jewish text or prayer that will open up a failsafe surefooted pathway to heaven. (Although it’s also the case that there’s no single Jewish text or prayer that might not, on one unforeseen occasion, suddenly speak to you in a new, unexpected way: a word, or a phrase, or an idea, can pop out of the text and offer you a new thought about some aspect of your life).    

But I know that for many people now, it’s not usually the texts and prayers of tradition that light the way. As Rabbi Lionel Blue helped us understand, what is revealed to us that we need on our own journey through life can come from all sorts of places undreamt of by formal Jewish tradition: it may be a conversation that we overhear in the supermarket, or a headline on a stranger’s paper on the tube, it may be something a grandchild says, or a remark from a neighbour we bump into in the street, it may be an act of kindness we witness that highlights how we’d like to be, or an act of cruelty that we see that reminds us of, maybe shames us about, what we too are capable of, and makes us resolve to live from our better selves.

It may be a piece of music we hear that is new to us that we experience like an oasis in the desert - or music that we hear as if for the first time after hearing it a 100 times before. It might be a scene from a film, or a moment in the garden, or a sentence from a book that’s been lying around at home and that we decide to pick up and we open it up and there’s a thought or a phrase that penetrates some outer layer of indifference in us, that stirs something in us, that makes us realise something about ourselves – that we are a better person than we judge ourselves to be in our harshest moments, or that we have hurt someone and we need to do something about it, or any one of a thousand small revelations that can piece us, and change us, just a millimetre. But that millimetre is everything. This is teshuvah, the teshuvah of small moments – which are huge.  

But the thing is that we can’t search out these unexpected moments of revelation in everyday life: they find us; they arrive; they are for us; it can even feel that they are aimed at us – like the call of the bugle in Kafka’s parable that he hears but the servant doesn’t. We can’t make these experiences happen - but we have to be open to hear them, see them, feel them, to think about them. That’s down to us. That’s our work: we are receivers of revelation, we are given glimpses into a deeper reality, signs of deeper truths about life: about our life.

And it can be so frustrating that we can’t create these moments, we can’t plan for them, we can’t control them. Because we may have a real wish to change, to be the recipients of new insights, new understanding – and our tradition encourages us to strive in that direction – but it can end up with us empty-handed and feeling flat or disillusioned or angry. And if that happens – and it does - it’s probably because we are working too hard, too determinedly, too consciously, when what we need to do is wait, wait without hope (as the mystics said), “for hope might be hope for the wrong thing” (T.S.Eliot, Four Quartets). Often we are hoping for the thing we think we want, rather than the thing we need. So this year I’m suggesting that in this frenetic world maybe we can try to wait - patiently, without too much striving - wait with what I rather inadequately described earlier as a ‘wandering attentiveness’. 

For me this waiting – when I can bear to let it happen - is done in the spirit of that  wonderful short text from Kafka, which reads:

It is not necessary that you leave the house. Remain at your table and listen. Do not even listen, only wait. Do not even wait, be wholly still and alone. The world will present itself to you for its unmasking, it can do no other, in ecstasy it will writhe at your feet.

That’s the promise of these Jewish ‘Days of Awe’, Yomim Noraim:  if we remain open and attentive, we will be given what we need.

[adapted from a sermon given on Selichot evening at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, September 1^st 2018]

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[i] Many people prowl around Mount Sinai. Their speech is blurred, either they are garrulous or they shout or they are taciturn. But none of them comes straight down a broad, newly made, smooth road that does its own part in making one’s strides long and swifter.