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Five A.M. and Awesome

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Picking up the “awesome” theme from the other day. This morning I got up before dawn and stumbled over to one of the local synagogues to meet up with a few other bleary-eyed Sephardi guys to pray Selichot.

I’ve been doing this since Sunday (my first Selichot service ever – say a Shehechianu, everyone!) although we started at a more reasonable 7am on that day (as well as Monday since it was Labor Day). Yesterday and today, however, was the “real deal” – the groggy and froggy singing that I’ve heard people talking about for a few weeks.

My contribution, it turns out, was to bring “the awesome”, in the form of my two boys (11 and 8 yrs old).

No, they didn’t count toward the minyan, but believe me when I tell you they COUNTED.

Even though they were unfamiliar with the prayers and the tunes (hey, so was I!); even though they spent half the time watching the other guys instead of looking in the Siddur; even though they shuffled their chairs and tapped on the table and fidgeted their way through 45 minutes like any 2 boys would… Even so, their presence had a palpable impact on the group.

The guy blowing shofar blew louder and longer because he saw the wonder reflected in their eyes. During the “round-robin” readings where each person takes turns singing a verse in Hebrew, the men sang just a bit fancier as they watched the boys heads whip around to see how such a sweet voice could come from our wrinkled and stubbly faces.

It was like a Sephardi version of Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, the story where Mike and MaryAnn could dig just a little bit better the more people watched them.

Before and after the service, several guys incredulously asked me “how did you get them to leave their bed and come?”.

“We get hot chocolate!” they announced, holding up their mugs.

It was a trick I had heard about last year while we were in Israel – synagogues making a community event out of Selichot, waking up together, serving pastries, tea (and yes, hot chocolate) so that rather than struggle through a month of obligation, people looked eagerly forward to (and then wistfully back at) the month of Elul.

In the original “awesome” post, Redefining Girlie asked:

There was a time when you were five years old,
and you woke up full of awesome.
[…]
Do you still have it?
The awesome.
Maybe you just need some hot chocolate.

Rethinking Humble

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Yesterday I posted about viewing ourselves as awesome, and how many of us don’t – possibly because of our belief that it’s not humble.

I think, in this month of Elul, we should re-examine what is “humble”. Because Elul is (as I understand it) all about honesty and clarity in our self-examination.

It doesn’t do any good to gloss over our faults. Equally, it doesn’t do any good to hide our successes under false modesty.

Being humble does not mean never admitting we did anything right. It would be frustrating to teach someone a skill, and see them execute it perfectly, only to have them invent reasons why they did it wrong. At best, your excitement would turn to pity at their low self-esteem. At worst, your excitement would turn to apathy in the face of insincere humility.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t particularly want God to feel either way about me. I want God to be cheering me along and to share in the inner radiance we feel when we are successful. After all, God put that there too, right?

Which brings me to another of my favorite quotes:

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

– Marianne Williamson

On Writing, and On Praying

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“I guess I’m just not someone who prays. It’s probably something you’ve either got or you don’t.”

The comment stuck with me because it echoed the thoughts in “On Writing, Not Writing, and the Writing Life” by Kathryne Young where she says:

“My mother told me […] when I was young: you don’t get to choose whether you’re a writer; your only choice is whether to be a writer who writes or a writer who doesn’t. What she didn’t tell me then, though I’m certain she knew, is that if you’re a writer and you’re not writing, you will never quite be happy.”

Her comments ring true for me. I don’t consider myself to be “a writer”, but writing is something I have done in one form or another since… well, a long time. When I can’t, I feel like things are slipping away from me unrecorded and unremembered.

But does the same thing apply to prayer? Are some of us born innately as pray-ers, while others aren’t? And if so, which am I? Because whether or not we are natural born writers, the reality is that LOTS of people write regardless, and write well even if they don’t feel an affinity for it. Why shouldn’t the same be true for prayer?

Ms. Young’s words drew me back into the comparison:

“I’d like to think that my writing self is different from [her every-day self]. I’d like to believe […] that she comes out of hiding on certain early mornings when the time is right and the coffee is rich and hot, that she writes a few stunning pages and slips back into bed while my other self drives into Palo Alto to make a living. Perhaps this division appeals to me because it makes me feel less guilty when I haven’t written anything in a month: only my writing self can write, and she’s moody. If the conditions aren’t perfect, she can’t be expected to emerge.

But in the end, there is only me and my busy, imperfect life. The days that I write are victories. And even after the most discouraging, least productive sessions, I never regret writing. I learn over and over that time spent writing is time well spent.”

Similarly, I can’t create some “prayerful me” persona who exists independently. There is just regular old me. And if the time is not right, the coffee neither rich nor hot I still have an obligation – not a nice-to-fit-in-if-you-can, but a real live commanded-to-do-it obligation – to pray. Even when it’s hard. Even when I don’t feel up to it. Even when I’m certain it won’t be very good.

A very health-conscious friend tells me “The hardest part of my exercise routine is where I bend down to tie my tennis shoes, then stretch to pick up my keys, and walk out the door to go to the gym. After that, I’m pretty much home free”. The same goes for lacing up tefillin, wrapping my tallit around me and “getting to work”. The way I see it, I’ve got a lifetime to find out if that part ever gets easier or not.

As Ms. Young states:

“This gives us a great deal of time to follow Samuel Beckett’s famous imperative to ‘fail, fail again, and fail better’. To succeed, we have to fail. To fail, we have to try. To try, we have to put ourselves on the line—risk freezing our limited, myopic worldviews onto the page for everyone to scoff at. We don’t “discover” our writing selves. We build ourselves into writers by realizing that our busy, imperfect lives are the writing life.”

The writing life… the praying life. It has a nice ring to it. Originally posted on The Edible Torah

 

Full of Awesome

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(originally posted on The EdibleTorah)

I was inspired this morning by a post over on Redefine Girly. (“Waking Up Full of Awesome“). It reads (in part):

There was a time when you were five years old,
and you woke up full of awesome.
You knew you were awesome.
You loved yourself.
You thought you were beautiful,
even with missing teeth and messy hair and mismatched socks inside your grubby sneakers.
You loved your body, and the things it could do.
You thought you were strong.
You knew you were smart.
Do you still have it?
The awesome.
Did someone take it from you?
Did you let them?
Did you hand it over, because someone told you weren’t beautiful enough, thin enough, smart enough, good enough?
Why the hell would you listen to them?
Did you consider they might be full of shit?

Here in the month of Elul, we stand before true awesomeness – God – and try to honestly assess our work this past year. We ask forgiveness for the times we fell short of the best person we could be.

But do we also celebrate those moments when we measured up? Made in the image of our Awesome Creator, do we take a minute to say “Hey, I was awesome too! Thanks for giving me the ability and the opportunity to be ‘all that’. I totally rocked that time. I hope you are proud of me, because I am!”

We probably don’t. Because it’s not politically correct. Because we’re taught not to blow our own horn. Because we are told to be humble.

I think we need to rethink that. I’ll write more on that tomorrow.

But for today, I’ve got an assignment:

  1. Go back to bed. Not really. Just GET back in bed.
  2. Spend 5 uninterrupted minutes remembering times you were awesome this year.
  3. Get out of bed.
  4. Take another full minute to thank God for giving you those chances to be awesome, and for giving you the ability to take hold of those moments and be your best self in them
  5. Carry around that feeling – of self worth and gratitude – for the rest of the day.

Tomorrow, and for the rest of the month of Elul, you have the same homework. It’s OK to copy from yesterday’s homework.

Because that’s how Awesome works.

Of Prayers and Potholders

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Courtesy of ufoadministration.blogspot.com

Most weekday mornings I hang out with a great bunch of guys. They are down to earth, come-as-you-are, non-judgemental and yet also passionate about and committed to their Judaism. They appreciate differences. They accept people for where they are in the Jewish spectrum.

They also pray like a heavy machinery auctioneer hopped up on a combination of Jolt Cola and 4 shots of triple-espresso.

By contrast (at least at this stage of my Jewish growth), my prayer is thoughtful and heartfelt. It is also halting, clumsy and slow.

Praying with these guys is an exercise in creative editing. I’ve learned that there are parts of the service I can skip. I’ve been told I can meditate on the theme of each bracha with intense kavannah, sending the avodah (work) of my heart heavenward like the sacrifices of old. And of course God speaks English, so I shouldn’t feel ashamed to do so as well.

Are you buying any of this? Cause I’m not. In real life, those sincerely-offered instructions equate to some prayers only half-said (because I have to jump ahead lest I become irrevocably lost), some prayed in jarringly-out-of-sync English, and moments when my “mediating on the theme” leaves me feel disconnected from the group, from myself and from God.

When you are surrounded by people all praying with confidence, fluency and familiarity – in Hebrew – it’s very very (did I mention “VERY”?) frustrating to be doing anything but.

I confided this to a Rabbi recently. “God knows what’s in your heart,” came the answer. “and no matter how insufficient you feel it is, you have to believe that it is cherished for what it is, coming from the person you are today.”

His words were less than comforting. I feel – quite acutely at times – that I am standing before my Creator, pouring out the best I have to offer, and it is an incomprehensible babble of half-uttered thoughts and disconnected ideas. I feel that God has asked for the intricate tapestry of my prayers, and I’ve shown up with a potholder.

I get it. I honestly do. My kids all made potholders at various grades in school (it must be part of the art curriculum). Each one is uniquely cute, funny and adorable. They were given with great ceremony and enthusiasm. They are cherished.

They are also useless, even as potholders. They are knotted, uneven, garish and full of holes. Very much, I fear, like my prayers.

My wife likes to knit. She makes intricate, useful and extremely gorgeous things. We’re talking people-on-the-street-offer-$200-for-the-sweater-off-my-back kind of gorgeous. I want my prayers to be like that.

I know that prayer – like life – is a process. It’s not a single product nor is it a race or a contest. I know that I’ll look back in a month or even just a week and realize that I have, in fact, improved. In my less whiny moments I recognize that it’s happened already, and (God willing) will continue.

I also have had chances to glimpse the journey of others, and take comfort in the knowledge that they weren’t simply born with a talent I lacked. Like me, they started learning on a particular day in their life, and that learning continued.

The other day, as we continued the (seemingly endless) work of unpacking ourselves into the new house, my wife pulled out a ratty, pinkish, mis-shapen square.

“It’s a potholder.” she explained. “I made it the day Grandma Hetti taught how me to knit.”

There may be hope for me yet.

Originally posted on The Edible Torah

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