Rabbi Rachel Gurevitz

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Category: Elul (Page 2 of 2)

Elul Reflections 9: A Muslim sister reflects on Ramadan

September 4, 2010 /

This year, the month of Elul has largely coincided with the holy month of Ramadan.  There are some specific rituals associated with Ramadan – a daily fast from sunrise to sundown for the month, the giving of charity, and a heightened consciousness around not engaging in gossip or malicious speech.  While there are differences, these two months share much in common – a time of spiritual purification and preparation, a time of atonement, and a time of re-centering ourselves in relationship to God and to others as we strive to be the best human being we can be.

Over the past four years, through the work of an interfaith group, The Tent of Abraham, our congregation has built bridges and created new friendships with Christians and Muslims in our local community.  We organize 2-3 dialog programs each year, and a parallel program brings our teenagers together each Spring.

Last week, our Rosh Hodesh group – the women’s spirituality group of B’nai Israel – was invited to Iftar – break-fast – with the women of the Bridgeport Islamic Community Center.  It was a wonderful evening of sharing and meeting and our hosts laid on a feast.  We are looking forward to reciprocating when we host an evening for Christian, Muslim and Jewish women during our Festival of Sukkot later this month.

This evening, our guest post is by Olga Shibtini.  Olga is the Vice-President of the Bridgeport Islamic Community Center, is involved with the Tent of Abraham and helps to organize our teen interfaith program.  She shares with us the meaning of Ramadan for her.  We wish all of our Muslim friends a Blessed Ramadan.  May our spiritual practice inspire us to reach ever higher and reach out as we continue to build the bridges between us.
Rabbi Rachel Gurevitz



My feelings for Ramadan have changed tremendously over the years since I first became a Muslim 16 years ago.  Initially, I didn’t like it because I didn’t undersand the true meaning and spirituality of the month.  I used to just look at it as another month faced with not eating or drinking anything from sunrise to sunset and actually being depressed over it. 


However, as the years passed and I began to really understand the true meaning of what it really means to fast, I started loving the month of Ramadan and even feeling sad when it came to an end.

Many times we are so busy that we cannot find the time to really connect with God.  Maybe we go through the motions of prayers and of everything else during the day, but we really don’t feel connected because we are so busy working, eating, etc.  However, during Ramadan everything changes.  We tend to slow down a bit and find more time to be with family and friends breaking fast together and praying at the mosque.  I remember the first time I really understood what it meant to sacrifice something for the sake of God, and how I felt ashamed of myself for initially seeing this month as an obstacle rather than as a reward that God gives us to cleanse our souls and be forgiven for our sins. 
And, of course, the realization that this is the month when God opens the heavens and closes the gates of hell made me feel like a fool for not appreciating the chance that God gives me to be forgiven by allowing me to live another year and make it to another month of Ramadan.  How blessed  am I that God grants me this reward.

I never really quite understood the meaning of our supplications being answered more during the month of Ramadan until my husband became very ill in 1998.  It was during the last 10 days of Ramadan and he was given a 50/50 chance to survive.  He was hospitalized in the intensive care unit at St. Vincent’s Medical Center.  I recall staying up most of the night asking God to save my husband so that my then 7 year old son would not be left without his father, and I remember feeling really connected with God and his giving me a sense of calm and peace during those nights when I didn’t know whether my husband would live or die.  I still remember when I returned to the hospital the second day and having the doctors tell me that my husband was going to make it.  I just knew God had really heard me.
This is my most cherished memory of Ramadan.

Olga

Elul Reflections 8: The Islamic Cultural Center in My Jewish New Year’s Prayers

September 2, 2010 /
This is a re-posting from ‘Torah Around the World’ – a weekly Torah commentary produced by the World Union for Progressive Judaism in their e-newsletter.  To subscribe to the e-newsletter, simply send an email with no subject and no message to wupjnews-subscribe@wupj.org.il
“The Islamic Cultural Center in My Jewish New Year’s Prayers” – on Akedat Yitzchak (Genesis 22:1-24)
By Rabbi Mark L. Winer, Senior Rabbi, West London Synagogue

At the season of the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hoshana, a time for taking stock has been established.  God commands us as Jews to confront the world in which we are God’s partners, and do something about making it a better place.  That is our mission, God’s purpose for Jewish existence,L’taken Olam B’Malchut Shaddai, “to repair the world under the rule of God.”

In this season of self-reflection and prayer, my heart reaches out to You, O Lord.  We need Your help.  This year when the Book of Life is opened and You judge us, we seek a pathway to reconciliation with You and our community.  We wish to act so that we may both honor our dead and preserve our values.  Please Lord Hear Our Prayers.

Give courage and strength to those who have lost loved ones. 
Comfort them in their grief and suffering. 
Give understanding and compassion to those of all traditions
who would build centers for cultural understanding.
Guard us from confusing those who would help us
with those who would harm us.
Bring us together in goodwill and peace, and not in pain, fear, and outrage. 
Grant us the vision to build bridges between our differences so that
we may honor our dead, preserve our values,
and create a more secure community.
May the bonds forged in our endeavors to bring peace and understanding to
Your world be an ever-lasting testament to Your grace and love.

Do not allow anyone to destroy what we would build with Your help and guidance.
Silence those who would exploit this conflict, pander to our weaknesses,
or use our pain to gain power for themselves.

When the Book of Life is closed at the conclusion of Yom Kippur,
may we know that we have done everything that we can to bring about
peace and reconciliation with You and our community.

Blessed are You O Lord our God who grants the greatest gift of peace to our hearts and our world.

Though these words have broad implications, they are, of course, about the building of an Islamic Cultural Center near ground zero.  I consider the Islamic Cultural Center as one who has spent my life’s work in Tikkun Olam – repairing the world through interfaith dialogue and action, trying to reconcile the members of God’s dysfunctional family of humanity.  For thirteen years I have lived and worked in the heart of Arab London.  Together with my Muslim neighbors and imam colleagues I have on a daily basis studied the ancient wisdom of the Talmudic dictum “one who makes peace within his neighborhood is viewed as having made peace within the entire world.”  I have read about the development of the controversy in New York, and I have been deeply saddened by it.  This is especially true because we share so much with Islam as this time of year so vividly reminds me.

The Torah portion Jews read in synagogue on Rosh Hoshana morning,Akedat Yitzchak, “the binding of Isaac,” has a parallel in the Koran.  In the Jewish version, God tests Abraham’s faith by commanding his willingness to sacrifice his only son by Sarah, Isaac.  In the Koran, God commands Ibrahim to sacrifice his only son by Hagar, Ismail.  In its essence, both versions are the story of Abraham’s near sacrifice of his son.  For both religions, this story plays a central role in its traditions.  For Judaism, the story is told every Rosh Hoshana.  For Islam, the story is central to the celebration of Id Al-Adha that comes at the end of the Hajj on the 10th day of the last month of the Islamic calendar.  In both cases, the sons of Abraham live, and there are indications in the Hebrew Bible that they come together afterwards.  The lesson for all of us is that human sacrifice is forbidden.

We seem to need this reminder.  We seem too ready to hate, and too slow to listen. We take pride in our intolerance, and despise anyone who disagrees with us.  I fear more the kind of world we would create with such responses than I fear the world that terrorists would impose upon us, because it is easier to fight terrorism than the worst in ourselves.

Our ancestors fought for the freedoms with which we have been blessed.  The people who died on 9/11 died for the way of life these freedoms gave us.  These freedoms are the basis of our strength and have encouraged our great diversity.  They have made us among the most inventive people in the world, and have given us a depth and breadth that is a source of ever-renewable wealth.  In our pain, please do not allow us to compromise these freedoms, and thereby weaken ourselves.  With hope, I will end my New Year’s prayers by tapping into the very diversity of our resources.

I pray that we allow the values of equality, charity, and hospitality
which are so much a part of the Muslim culture and tradition be extended to all.

I pray that we allow the respect for diverse understandings
that is so much a part of Jewish tradition be extended to all.

I pray that the love and grace that is integral to
Christian tradition be extended to all.

And finally I pray that all of our religious traditions teach us to seek
understanding because only a world filled
with understanding can be filled with Your presence, O Lord,
and Your great gift of peace.
We need Your Help; we cannot do it alone. Please God Hear Our Prayers.

_______________________________________________________________
Mark L Winer is the President of FAITH: the Foundation to Advance Interfaith Trust and Harmony and has been the Senior Rabbi of the West London Synagogue of British Jews since 1998 

Elul Reflections 7: On Inwardness

August 29, 2010 /

Today’s blog entry is cross-posted from Dani Shapiro’s blog, ‘Moments of Being’.  Dani Shapiro is an accomplished author whose most recent book’s include Black & White (Knopf, 2007), Family History (Knopf, 2003) and the best-selling memoir Slow Motion.  Her short stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, Elle, Bookforum, Oprah, Ploughshares, among others, and have been broadcast on National Public Radio. 

Her new memoir, Devotion, was published in February, 2010, and is now a national bestseller.  It is a spiritual memoir that has touched me deeply in its honesty and openness to reveal a journey of spiritual seeking that shares with us the spiritual wisdom found in practices such as yoga, meditation, and Torah study but ultimately is about a faith that arises from the many moments of being that are part of the tapestry of our lives, when we bring awareness to these moments.  It is a book about questions more than answers and, in this way too, it speaks to me.  On Rosh Hashanah morning I will be sharing excerpts from Devotion, as we journey together to find ourselves in the words of an ancient liturgy that needs some translation into the moments of being in our everyday lives if we seek to make our tradition alive and vibrant, responding to our questions and our lives as twenty-first century Jews.
As I read Dani’s blog posting of August 18th, I found her inner reflections and awareness of habits and behaviors that do not serve her if allowed to become out of balance to resonate deeply with some of the spiritual practice that I have been sharing in these Elul Reflections.  Again, like her memoir, Devotion, I am inspired by the honesty and truth revealed by these reflections.  May they inspire us in our inner reflections during this month of soul-searching.

I’ve long understood that I need to spend a certain number of hours a day alone.  If I’m not by myself, in a quiet room, reading, writing, thinking, doing yoga, staring into space, taking baths, for the better part of each day, I start to feel all jumbled up.  Uncomfortable.  Awkward and irritated, as if something is chafing me from the inside.  I am almost always running a monologue in my head–something I’ve learned, in my meditation practice, is often nothing more than detritus and noise.  But in order to move past the running dialogue, I require a great deal of solitude.  I’ve learned, over the years, to be able to move in and out of isolation, into family life, social life, community life, and then back out of it, back to the cave where I do my work.



But.  (You knew there was a but coming, didn’t you?)  I had the recent realization that inwardness doesn’t always serve me well.  It’s necessary, crucial for a writer to be inward-looking (and by this I don’t mean navel-gazing, but rather, the capacity for intense, interior contemplation).  But it’s equally important for a writer to look outside herself.  Lately I have noticed myself trapped in my interior life when, in fact, what was going on all around me was interesting, possibly even useful and important.  When I am thinking, rather than using all five senses–seeing, smelling, hearing, tasting, touching–I am not really using my whole instrument.  We are observers, aren’t we?  We carefully watch and listen to what is swirling all around us, and that in combination with our interior lives is what ends up making something rich happen on the page.  If a writer is entirely trapped inside herself, the result can be stultifying.  If a writer is entirely outward-looking, the result can be superficial and thin.  The goal, I think, is to balance oneself in the fulcrum between thinking about life and actually living it.
Dani Shapiro

Elul Reflections 6: Disordered Love & Pride

August 27, 2010 /

In ‘Jewish Spiritual Guidance: Finding Our Way to God‘, by Carol Ochs and Kerry Olitsky, a chapter on ‘Encountering Temptation and Sin’ offers some different language for thinking about sin.  Building on the definition of sin that I offered in Reflection 2, and the practice of divesting ourselves of behaviors and habits that no longer serve us that I described in Reflection 4, here are two examples based on these sections of Ochs and Olitsky’s book:


Sin as Disordered Love
Dante wrote, ‘Set love in order thou that lovest me’.  This is about priorities.  We have to work on having loving relationships with people.  If we are able to experience love in this world as a way of experiencing God’s love, we can become more open to both giving and receiving love.  We open ourselves to being a channel and become more aware of the things that we do or say or think that create barriers to the flow of love.  Sin can be the refusal to love, to recognize that we are loved, or jealousy in love.  We can begin by asking ourselves whether the things we do and the priorities we set – the ways we order our lives – reflect the love that we seek or the love that we want to give.  Do we love work more than family?  Do we love the things that we acquire more than we love the community of which we want to be a part?

Sin as Pride
Pride is when we put our self in a place where we ascribe our accomplishments and all the dynamics of our lives to ourselves.  In doing so, we become disconnected from the complex and interconnected web of life of which we are such a tiny part, and disconnected from experiencing Grace.  When we place ourselves in the center of our universe we are, paradoxically, isolating ourselves.  We can be left feeling alone.  When we forget how what we do is completely interrelated with the lives of others our forgetfulness can lead to hurtful and thoughtless behavior toward others.  We can ask ourselves, ‘Do I recognize the gifts that come my way through my connections with others?’  Or ‘Do people sometimes experience me as insensitive because I don’t notice how I’m affecting others?’

For all these sins, we seek to learn, to change, to return to a place of balance, and to open ourselves to the fullness of experiencing love, to the fullness of being present to another and, in so doing, to reaching toward fulfilling our potential as human beings.

Elul Reflections 5: Rosh Hashanah Kanye West style

August 26, 2010 /

A little bit of light relief today – one of this year’s Rosh Hashanah musical spoof videos.  But the message is no spoof – a nice little message in ‘paying it forward’ or, in the language of Pirke Avot (sayings of the fathers – a chapter of the Mishnah), mitzvah goreret mitzvah  – one good deed leads to another.
Enjoy!

Elul Reflections 4: How is moving home like preparing for the High Holydays?

August 23, 2010 /
The blog went a bit quiet this past week, as I was busy moving home – the second time in 2 months.  We moved out of my partner’s home of 24 years in New Jersey last month, had 4 weeks of transition with some items in storage while we packed up the condo that I have been renting in town near the synagogue, and moved into another rented condo with a bit more space this past Thursday.  The following reflections are edited from a sermon I gave shortly after the first move, in which I realized that our preparing, packing and moving process shared a great deal in common with the rhythm of the Jewish year from Elul through Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, up until Succot.
Rabbi Rachel Gurevitz
When it came to packing up the house in New Jersey, there was a great deal of effort involved with a house that had been a home for a family for 24 years.  For 4 weeks we sorted, divided, divested, and boxed.  It took 4 solid weeks to get things ready for the move.  We had to decide what we didn’t need to bring with us, what we wanted to have available almost immediately, and what we were willing to store away in the hope that it could be of use in the future when we finally buy a house.
When I moved out of my rented room in NYC to Blackrock, 4 years ago, it took about 2 days to pack.  But you acquire a lot of stuff when you’ve lived in a large house for 24 years, where 4 children have lived and grown into adulthood.  The longer you’ve been in one place, the more stuff you are likely to have acquired, and the longer you need to really go through it and decide what to do with it all.
Having packed for 4 weeks, we took a 10 day vacation – the timing might have been a bit crazy in the midst of such an enormous move, but this was really our only opportunity to get a break this Summer.  But the truth is, when you’re doing something as intense as packing up a house for 4 weeks, its good to take a break, to take stock, and also to take in the sweetness of the life transitions that are enabling or requiring this work to be done.  And they were a very sweet 10 days.  
Finally, the moving trucks came.  Things started a little later than they should have done which ended up making for a rather nerve-wracking evening.  The late arrival of the trucks in the morning meant that they ended up driving up from NJ during rush hour, further delaying matters.  Aside from making for a long day, why did this matter?  Because the gates that provide vehicle entrance to the unloading bays at Public Storage lock automatically at 9pm.  Two full trucks arrived at 7.30pm in the midst of a thunder storm, to be followed in the next 1.5 hours by two more intense thunderstorms where work had to cease for 5-10 mins at a time.  At 3 mins to 9 we ran over to our moving guys – ‘the gates are closing, the gates are closing!’ – you have to pull the trucks out now!  With one truck unloaded, they pulled out just before the gates became permanently closed.
Except that it wasn’t a complete closure.  The pedestrian gate remained open and, luckily for us, the unloading bay we needed for the second truck that was unloading into a second unit, was right by that front gate.  The unloading diligently continued until the job was done.
So what does this have to do with our High Holyday season?  The month of Elul is preparation time – there is wisdom in a tradition that understands that Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur become more meaningful and more transformational if we enter them having prepared.  What does ‘prepared’ mean?  It means looking at the landscape of one’s life and reviewing what one has acquired – not material things, but habits, behaviors, baggage.  Sometimes there are things that we recognize that we need to divest ourselves of entirely – these are behaviors or habits that add nothing to who we are or what we do in the world; some of them are just plain wrong, but others might have served us at previous times in our lives, but we realize that we have become locked into some habits that no longer serve us now.  We have to examine ourselves to be able to identify what these are and decide what we will try to do about them, and that takes time. 
4 weeks to organize stuff, divest, pack boxes – 4 weeks to review the emotional and spiritual stuff of our lives.
Then we arrive at 1st Tishri – Rosh Hashanah.  We talk about a Sweet New Year.  Rosh Hashanah is not only the Jewish New Year, but it is also the beginning of the 10 days leading to Yom Kippur.  If one really engages in personal reflection and assessment for 4 weeks – a very intense activity – one needs some release – to recognize the sweetness that comes with letting go of the past, apologizing for misdeeds, cleansing and consciously allowing the New Year to be a time of meaningful transition in our lives.
And then Yom Kippur arrives – the big day.  We gather up all our stuff and present it to the big moving company in the sky – please help to take care of this stuff for us!  As the day unfolds we engage with the words and thoughts and the silences and we review the progress we are making.  But we travel with a lifetime of stuff and we realize – even after all that preparation – that there’s still more to do.  As the day draws to a close, we read in our liturgy – ‘the gates are closing, the gates are closing!’  We have no choice but to exit with the rest of the community at the final shofar blast at the end of Yom Kippur.  But if we still have work to do, the truth is that the gates aren’t really closed.  There is still a way to continue.  Our tradition gives until Succot to continue what we may have started so that we really can feel able to enter into a New Year having dealt with our stuff – at least some of it – and can begin afresh.
The reflection pieces on this blog offer an invitation to reflect on the ‘stuff’ of our lives and prepare ourselves, so that we can enter into a Sweet New Year, and can begin again, feeling that we have made some progress in divesting ourselves of things and habits that we do not want or need. Put a little time aside each day to journal, or take a reflective walk; take time to talk with a trusted friend, make the calls and reconnect with the people that you feel distanced from.  Find one new thing that you would like to commit to in the coming year to enrich and enhance your social connections, family connections, community and congregational connections, and spiritual life.  In the words of the psalmist, ‘Teach us to treasure each day; that we may open our hearts to your wisdom, teach us to treasure each day.’

Elul Reflections 3: Walking on a path

August 16, 2010 /

I don’t remember the origins of the following story – perhaps something drawn from Zen Buddhism?  But I find it one of those life-resonating parables:
A seeker comes to a fork in the road and finds a wise, old man sitting there.  ‘Which way to enlightenment?’ the seeker asks the wise, old man.  ‘Take the road on right,’ answers the wise, old man.  The seeker takes the path on the right and, after walking on it for some time, out of nowhere there is an almighty ‘Splat!’.  He does not know what hit him, but he stumbles back to the fork in the road somewhat battered and bruised.  ‘Old man, did you not say that this was the path to enlightenment?’  ‘Yes’, answers the wise, old man.  ‘Take the road on the right.’  The seeker is confused but, thinking perhaps he had made an error further down the path, turns and goes back down the path on the right.  After walking on it for some time, out of nowhere yet again there is an almighty ‘Splat!’  Once more the seeker makes his way back to the fork in the road, feeling sore and demoralized.  ‘Old man, what are you trying to do to me?  I ask you for the road to enlightenment; you keep telling me to take this path on the right, and each time out of nowhere – ‘Splat!’ – and I am bruised and battered from my experience.  Are you sure that this is the right road?’  The wise, old man replies, ‘Yes, my child.  The path to enlightenment is just a little way past ‘Splat!’



Enlightenment is not typically the spiritual language of Judaism.  But there is the notion that, by returning to contemplate the path we are walking down in life, and desiring to refine our behaviors and our priorities, we may come a little closer to understanding the meaning of our lives and our purpose.  But the road of life is often strewn with moments of ‘Splat!’, where we find ourselves battered and bruised by our experiences, whether they be things that we brought upon ourselves by our own choices, or whether they came out of the blue and were completely beyond our ability to control.

We can expend a great deal of energy railing against the things that challenge us and bring us down.  We can wonder ‘why me’?  These are very human responses to the difficulties that we face in our lives.  But the parable suggests that any meaning we make of our lives, and any understanding we have of our purpose and who we are must necessarily be able to withstand the times when life goes ‘Splat!’  If we can only believe in God when life is good, when we can only give something to others when everything is going right in our lives, and if we can only keep anger at bay when nothing is provoking us, then we still have a way to journey before we come to a place of deeper meaning and understanding… a little way beyond ‘Splat!’

Rabbi Rachel Gurevitz

Elul Reflections 2: Another of those difficult words… sin

August 12, 2010 /

There is no doubt that the High Holydays, and this month of preparation leading to them, places before us some challenging stuff.  And that, in many ways, is how it should be.  But just as, in the first of this seasons’ reflections, I offered a way into the idea of prayer for those who find prayer challenging, it is important to grapple with a number of the challenging aspects of the spiritual work of this season because sometimes we let preconceived ideas about what they mean get in the way of making this work spiritually meaningful and transformative for ourselves.

And one of the biggest words that challenge us at this season is SIN.  Just as with prayer, there is more to be said on this than can be encapsulated here, and so it is a theme I’ll return to during the month, offering different ways to get past some of the commonly held misconceptions of this word that can get in the way of our willingness to examine ourselves and re-center ourselves as we prepare to enter into a New Year.  But here, in a nutshell, is one of the ways that I understand sin.  Sin is where we misidentify what we need to fill the hole we feel inside; our behavior, our reactions to someone, our craving or desiring of certain material things, are attempts to respond to a yearning that is, at its core, a spiritual one, but which we have misidentified as something else.  We know that we have misidentified our need because, however much we try to address our dis-ease, our sense of anxiety, or anger and frustration, our sadness, our pain…, with the wrong things, the feelings don’t go away.

In future Elul Reflections I’ll return to this theme with more specific examples.  But when you pause today for a period of meditation or reflection, consider this definition of sin, and allow some of the uncomfortable feelings that all of us, at times encounter, to arise.  Over time, if you allow yourself to sit with them for a while and watch where they come from – what encounters are you replaying over and over again, what story do you weave to ‘explain’ the feelings that you have… give yourself permission to examine these more closely and more lovingly.  If we get lost in the narrative we are more likely to continue to perpetuate the same stories.  If we get angry or frustrated with ourselves at our shortcomings or weaknesses, it is harder to heal.  But noticing the feelings and learning, over time, where they come from, can create the space we need to ask for guidance on how to heal so that we don’t continue to repeat the cycle of behavior over and over.  And that is where we can draw on prayer to help us.  May I feel healed; May I remain calm and centered; May I be at ease…


Rabbi Rachel Gurevitz

Elul Reflections 1: Beginning the Conversation

August 10, 2010 /

The four Hebrew letters that spell the month, ‘Elul’ are encoded, our tradition teaches us, with multiple meanings, each an acronym using these four letters.  The one that is best known is shown above – ‘Ani L’dodi V’dodi Li’ – I am my beloved and my beloved is mine.


As we enter this month, with an invitation to reflect and prepare for Rosh Hashanah – The Jewish New Year – and Yom Kippur – the Day of Atonement, Elul comes to bring us an important message.  The essence of love is also the essence of prayer – it is all about relationship.  But many of us find the idea of a relationship with God difficult.  We may not feel it; we may not know how to create it; we do not know what to say, or we feel foolish ‘saying’ anything to the Divine Presence which we cannot define or grasp.  We may have some clarity about what we don’t believe, but far less about what we do.


Beginning is the hardest part.  The questions and the doubts get in the way.  But what if, today, on the 1st of Elul, we responded to the invitation by committing ourselves to a month of spiritual practice? Something each day that we read and reflect upon, a time set aside for meditation or prayer.


Prayer can be a loaded word.  It conjures up images of subjects addressing kings on thrones – that is the ancient language in which many of our Jewish prayers were cast, and it takes time and practice to break through the allegorical barriers of the words and see the human desires, hopes, and yearnings that they point toward.  But we can start with something simple.  This month of Elul is a time to return to matters of the spirit; to brush away some of the distractions of the material world, at least for a short time, to remind ourselves of who we truly are, who we wish to be, and to ask ourselves whether our daily actions and deeds are truly reflective of the call of our soul.  We come to realize that we’ve been feeding some of the emptiness we feel with the wrong things, and we know they are wrong because the emptiness or the unease, the fears and anxieties aren’t going away.  Before we can spend some time trying to understand what lies behind these feelings and how we might address them, it is good to first spend some time affirming what we seek.  These can be different things for different people, but I suspect most of us would seek to affirm the following:

May I feel protected and safe
May I feel contented and pleased
May my physical body support me with strength

These affirmations are from Sylvia Boorstein, a Jew who is a practitioner and master teacher of Buddhist meditation, and they are her rendition of some of Buddhism’s ‘Metta’ affirmations – a practice of lovingkindness.  The practice can help to calm our own minds and bring clarity to the spiritual desires of our own hearts.  The next step is to bring to mind loved ones and friends and ask these things for them too.  Eventually, over time, the practice invites you to bring to mind those you have difficulties with; those you find it less easy to love or even to like.  I offer these affirmations here because I find that they resonate with the deepest yearnings of the soul and are quite universal.  For those of us who get a little stuck with ‘Blessed are You, O God, Ruler of the Universe…’ they offer another way in to reach toward the Divine.

In Dani Shapiro’s spiritual memoir, ‘Devotion’, which I will be referring to on several occasions during this High Holyday season, she describes her first experience of being introduced to this practice with Sylvia Boorstein.  Unsure of the metaphysical question – whom are we addressing – Sylvia explains that we don’t need to have worked that out; perhaps we are simply expressing a wish.  As Dani reflects upon this answer, she writes:
But really, what did it mean to fervently, wholeheartedly name a desire?  May you feel protected and safe.  To speak out of a deep yearning – to set that yearning loose in the world?  May you feel contented and pleased.  Could a wish be a less fraught word for a prayer?…  Maybe faith had to do with holding up one end of the dialog.

This is how we begin.  A daily practice, whether using the affirmations above, or simply sitting quietly and finding a way to express the deepest yearnings of your heart.  Let us begin the conversation and see where, during this month of Elul, it may take us.

During this month I will continue to post some of these reflective pieces, and they will be interspersed by postings from other clergy and educators at Congregation B’nai Israel, and postings from congregants who will offer their own reflections and experiences of the High Holyday season.  Please do use the comments to reflect on any of the postings, or email me at rgurevitz@congregationbnaiisrael.org if you have a longer piece that you would like to share.
Rabbi Rachel Gurevitz

Elul – URJ Webinar series to prepare for the High Holydays

July 30, 2010 /

Tuesday, August 10, is Rosh Hodesh Elul.  This is the Jewish month that leads us to Rosh Hashanah – the Jewish New Year.  This blog launched one year ago on 1 Elul.  This year we will once again post regular thought-pieces, meditations and practices to help in your own personal reflections, reviewing the past year, engaging with the path of teshuvah, enabling us all to enter the High Holyday season with greater intention and awareness.

In the meantime, the Union for Reform Judaism has a 4-part webinar open to all, beginning on Rosh Hodesh Elul, with some wonderful teachers involved.  I highly commend this program to you.  The details follow, with a link to the URJ page where you can register for the webinar.

Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Rachel Gurevitz

August 11, 2010 – Welcoming Elul: Spiritual Preparations for the Days of Awe

Part one of four part High Holy Days and Sukkot series with special guest presenter Craig Taubman.
Sue Levi EllwellLanie Katzew
The rabbis teach that ELUL is the month when Ani l’dodi v’dodi li: I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine. Join us on the first of Elul for an hour of interactive study and exploration of how this phrase from the Song of Songs can inform our daily study, practice and reflection as we prepare to enter the Days of Awe and the New Year. 
 
Led by Music Specialist Cantor Alane Katzew and Worship Specialist Rabbi Sue Levi Elwell with special guest presenter Craig Taubman

Title: Welcoming Elul: Spiritual Preparations for the Days of Awe

Date: Wednesday, August 11, 2010
Time: 3:00 PM – 4:00 PM EDT
Click here to register.

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