Before anything else, I want to welcome you to season 3 of Soulful Jewish Living—and to say thank you! You, along with thousands of other folks, are a member of our listening community. When we started this journey a couple of years ago, I really had no idea that so many folks would be moved by these short episodes of Jewish mindfulness practice. So from me, from my colleagues at the Institute for Jewish Spirituality, and from our incredible teammates at Unpacked and OpenDor Media: Thank you and welcome to Season 3!
Okay, on with the show.
For the last decade or so, every year around this time I find myself listening to the voice of poet David Whyte. Like, literally: I listen to him talking on a recording while I’m walking the dog.
Poetry on a dog walk? Yes. (If you’re a regular listener, you know to stay with me. If you’re new, welcome, it’ll come together, I promise.)
David Whyte grew up in Yorkshire, the child of an Irish mother and an English father. As a result, he has a unique and frankly enchanting accent. And that complements his beautiful poetry, which I and his many other fans find really personal and moving. He writes poems about big and challenging themes, like home and loss and discovering who we’re meant to be, but in this really intimate, evocative way. It’s wonderful stuff any time of the year, but I find it’s especially powerful during the Jewish month of Elul, which leads up to the High Holidays.
In 2014 I stumbled on this album of Whyte’s called “Solace: The Art of the Beautiful Question,” and I’ve been listening to it every Elul since. He doesn’t just recite his poems—tells stories and he breaks off into tangents, and sometimes tangents on his tangents. To a Talmud student, that feels familiar. And every year I find there’s a part that speaks right to me.
This year, that section was about 20 minutes he spends reflecting on grief. Because the past year has been so heavy, filled with so much grief for Jews and for all of us, really: grief over lives lost, over realities shattered; grief over ideas we thought were solid that, perhaps, turned out to be less stable than we assumed. And what’s made that even more challenging is that so many folks have not been able to grieve properly. Instead they–we–have been living in a constant state of activation, reactivity, and trauma. It’s like climbing a staircase without any landings: No chance for rest, no opportunity to breathe and metabolize grief.
Whyte tells the story of a man named Tom, who was his father’s best friend and an adopted uncle to David growing up. Tom died suddenly in his early 50s, which devastated both David and his father. And, being a poet, David wrote a poem about it. It’s called Last Night. I’ll play David reading the last verse himself:
For this loss I could not speak,
the tongue lay idle in a great darkness,
when I said, “He is no longer here”
that the night put its arms around me
and all the white stars turned bitter with grief.
To me there’s something so beautiful and true in this image of the night putting its arms around us, the stars crying along with us. And, listening to these lines before Rosh Hashanah, they bring my mind to the sound of the shofar.
As we talked about on last year’s Rosh Hashanah episode, the shofar ritual consists fundamentally of two kinds of notes: whole and broken. The whole notes are called tekiyah blasts. The broken ones come in two varieties: The shevarim, three mid-sized blasts that evoke a lamenting cry; and the teruah, nine staccato blasts that sound more like sobbing. The Rabbis of the Talmud understood that these middle sounds were meant to evoke brokenness—the kind of brokenness we feel when we cry.
Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav, one of the Hasidic masters of the 19th century, said that the brokenness of the shofar blasts was also meant to evoke a broken heart. Yet he adds—and this is really important—that what’s most significant is that what we’re really trying to do through the shofar ritual (and, let’s be honest, all of life) is to integrate the broken with the whole. That’s why we surround the broken blasts with whole ones.
The title of my Elul David Whyte album is “Solace: The Art of the Beautiful Question.” Solace is a strange word, not one we use in normal conversation. Here’s how Whyte defines it in one of his essays: “Solace is what we must look for when the mind cannot bear the pain, the loss or the suffering that eventually touches every life and every endeavor; when longing does not come to fruition in a form we can recognize, when people we know and love disappear, when hope must take a different form than the one we have shaped for it.”
I’m going to read that again. Because just like we repeat the sound of the shofar, David Whyte has taught me that we should repeat poetic words to let them really make a groove in us: “Solace is what we must look for when the mind cannot bear the pain, the loss or the suffering that eventually touches every life and every endeavor; when longing does not come to fruition in a form we can recognize, when people we know and love disappear, when hope must take a different form than the one we have shaped for it.”
I think that combination of grief and solace is what the shofar is inviting us to really touch into—every year, but especially this one.
So here is a meditative practice you can use to deepen your experience of listening to the shofar. If you’ll be in a place where you can hear a live shofar blast–a synagogue or someplace else–you might do this for a few minutes leading up to it. And if not, it’s still a good practice to do.
Begin by sitting upright. Take a good deep breath. Allow your eyes to soften and, if it’s good for you, close them gently.
Breathe through three cycles of long, deep inhalation and even longer, deeper exhalation. With each breath, allow your body to arrive a little more fully. Allow your mind to calm down.
Now, prepare for the tekia. See if you can bring to your mind-heart a sensation of wholeness–perhaps something from the past year for which you’re grateful, a relationship that brings you joy, work that makes you feel fulfilled. Or something else. Notice the sensations you experience here. This is a tekia sensation. Wholeness. Fullness. Being at home. [Play tekia]
Now prepare for the shevarim-terua. If you can, allow your mind-heart to go towards something more difficult. If you’re carrying grief, allow yourself to feel it. If you’re concerned that it’s going to be too painful or too much for you to do right now, that’s totally okay. Go where you feel you can go with a sense of safety and support. If you can, allow yourself to experience the sensations that come with contemplating something broken, something you might wish were whole. Allow yourself to feel these sensations. That’s the invitation of the shevarim-terua–to notice the brokenness, to feel, for a moment, not at home. [Play shevarim-teruah]
Now, see if you can allow yourself to gently let go of those negative sensations, and to let them let go of you. Allow them to pass. Perhaps feel the support of the chair, of the earth, of the natural world putting its arms around you, of the stars sharing your grief and helping you realize you’re not alone. Prepare for the second tekia. Go back towards wholeness–gratitude, joy, fulfillment. Again, notice the sensations here. And perhaps notice now what it’s like to experience this more at-home feeling on the other side of the tekia. Is it different than the first time? See what you notice. [Play tekiah]
You can do this practice once, several or many times. Hopefully it can help you to hold the brokenness you may be feeling this year—and to feel supported. Every year like clockwork Rosh Hashanah arrives and invites us to hold all of it–not to repress, but to see clearly all the pieces of our lives, the whole and the broken, and joy and the sadness, the hope and the despair. The shofar calls us to give each impulse its space. It reminds us that we can hold it all. And that, even in the midst of our grief, we can make choices and take actions that bring about more wholeness, more compassion, more kindness and interconnection now and in the year to come.
Before we end, let’s do another cycle of three breaths.
And now, if your eyes were closed, I invite you to open them.
As the new year enters, I want to offer you a blessing: that through our shared experiences of grief and loss, through our silent knowledge that we’re all in this together, we might come to also sense the love and support of the Creator and creation. I bless you with remembering that the Divine presence is always available, that the night can put its arms around us if we let it do so, that the whole notes embrace the broken notes in the cry of the shofar.
Shanah tovah, blessings for the journey of this coming year. Know that I’m on it with you.