We Don't Know What Comes Next: Teshuvah, Exile, and Impermanence

For more, see: https://www.kol-tzedek.org/rabbis-teachings-we-dont-know-what-comes-next-teshuvah-exile-and-impermanence.html

It is my understanding that in Black churches, when the pastor rises to preach, the congregation prays for the pastor. That they may be able to say what needs to be said and what needs to be heard. So I am asking you all this morning, pray for me.

Last Rosh Hashanah, more than 500 of us crowded into the Calvary Center. It was our first time gathering like that since the shooting in Pittsburgh. I invited us to settle into the fear and vulnerability that accompanied coming together in this way. And the strength and resilience we created together.

It is truly inconceivable that we arrive at this Rosh Hashanah, and I stand here, in this room that still echoes with our voices, alone. Fear and vulnerability profoundly present, as we are physically unable to gather.

But not really alone.

Once again I invite you to take a deep breath and feel into the presence of 500+ bodies breathing, longing, grieving, willing. Here.

It is really something. Welcome to Kol Tzedek in diaspora.

My teacher Rabbi Benay Lappe recently told me a story about a friend of hers and I'd like to share it with all of you.

When her friend was a teenager he got a job at a sleepaway camp as a counselor. He was assigned to a bunk of first-time campers, kids seven and eight years old.

On the first day of camp, the young campers were warmly greeted as they got off the bus, led to a welcome-to-camp gathering, met their counselors and bunkmates, and were then shown to their cabins to unpack their clothes and get settled.

After the kids had unpacked, the counselor noticed one little kid sitting on his bed, crying. The counselor tried to find out what was wrong, but the kid just kept crying and wouldn't talk. "Did you forget something at home?" He shook his head no. "Do you miss your family?" Again, still crying, he shook his head no. After several more failed guesses, the kid was finally able to eke out a few words through the tears:

"I don’t know what comes next."

There is perhaps no greater way to describe the times we are living through.

We don't know what comes next.

The uncertainty of the last six months has been unsettling at best and incapacitating on many days. The presence of a deadly virus and the wondering who will get it, who will die from it? The loss of routines that sustain us, the not knowing what to expect from a day or a week. The fear of public spaces and of each other. I know from my own life and from talking with all of you, that we are struggling with profound anxiety and depression as a result of it.

It seems in conversation with friends, the best comfort we can offer each other is "day by day," "Take it one day at a time."

And if I pause long enough to feel into that seemingly trite advice, what arises is actually tremendous relief. One day at a time. Thank God, we are finally taking it one day at a time.

Everything is possible.

In this way, the pandemic has been profoundly destabilizing. It has been, in a word, chaos. And it has also been profoundly hopeful. Ideas that were once fringe, like defunding the police, are being actualized in city governments.

As a practitioner of Buddhist meditation, I have always been captivated by its clarity of conviction. Its ability to tell you what is true and everlasting in this world. All the more so now, when every routine has been upended and every truth has been cast in the shadow of doubt, I have been asking myself:

In what can we take refuge? In what can we place our trust?

For Buddhists the answer is clear.

It is the principle of impermanence. The idea that everything will ultimately and inevitably change.

When we sit on the cushion in meditation, we limit the variables, and come to see the ever changing nature of our own experience as if under a microscope.

To see the way the pain in our knee arises, the way the mind grasps at it, assumes it will never go away, assumes we must move to alleviate or avoid such discomfort. But then we turn our attention to it, greeting the sensation with curiosity, noticing its warmth, its pulsing, its presence - and then in an instant, the pain in our shoulders calls our attention. Or our unresolved anger at our partner. Or regret about a decision we made, or we start to plan what we will have for our next meal.

Maybe the pain in our knee returns, maybe it doesn't.

All of this is explained by the principle of impermanence.

It is on the cushion that I first learned, with great resistance, that we truly don't know what comes next.

For about two years, Rabbi Mó and I have been struggling with some of the logistics of our Friday night services. Looking for a space that would be both intimate and accessible. Looking for chairs that would be compact but comfortable. Looking for a prayer book that would be legible, affordable, lightweight, and fully transliterated. For months we worked with a group of lay leaders in the Gabbai Coalition, surveyed our options and then surveyed the community, ordered samples, and deliberated.

On March 11, after a lot of back and forth about the budget, we finally purchased 60 new prayer books and a dozen new cushioned chairs.

On March 12, we canceled all in-person services. The siddurim arrived a week later and have been sitting in an unopened box.

We don't know what comes next.

On March 13, as I hustled to set up Zoom links for Shabbat services, canceled the Purim party that had been months in the making, stocked up on toilet paper, and hurried to pick up my kids from school for the last time for the foreseeable future, I thought of these words:

This is real Ari Lev. And you are completely unprepared. And then I thought, impermanence is real.

For months I have been hugging the concept of impermanence like an old oak tree.

Which was high on the list of unexpected pandemic experiences because I have lived most of my days at odds with impermanence. I usually feel like the kid at summer camp, profoundly uncomfortable when I don't know what comes next. But in the face of true uncertainty, there was nowhere else to turn.

Yet I longed to find Jewish language for this experience, to feel that my own tradition could support me in this time.

And so I began to search with determination for a Jewish concept of impermanence.

I stared longingly at rabbinic indices and skimmed my most beloved Jewish books. Tanakh is replete with stories of fear, loss, and uncertainty. The binding of Isaac. Abraham's journey in Lech-Lecha. Hagar and Ishmael in the desert. The entire Exodus story. The destruction of the Temple. The list goes on.

While fear, loss, and uncertainty describe my inner experience, I was looking for a truth that describes the world.

Then I read stories for which the punchline is "Gam zeh ya'avor - This too shall pass." And while that phrase has been supportive it feels like a branch on the tree. And I am looking for the trunk.

And so I gave up. I said maybe next year.

And then just as I turned my attention elsewhere, it came to me - it came through me.

Teshuvah is the Jewish concept of impermanence. Everything can and will change, including ourselves.

Teshuvah as a word contains the very reality it describes. Literally meaning to turn, to return, to transform, it is a word about motion pointing to a world that is itself in constant motion.

And it is one of the core practices of the Days of Awe.

Teshuvah is often understood as the practice of forgiveness, a means to healing relationships, for saying you're sorry.

But as Rabbi Eliyahu Touger explains in his introduction to Hilchot Teshvuah, the Path of Teshuvah, "The Rambam emphasizes that Teshuvah is not merely an individual mitzvah, but rather, an all-encompassing approach to the service of God."

Which I translate to mean, an all-encompassing approach to life in general and spiritual practice in particular.

And once I realized this, it was everywhere.

According to the rabbis,

Teshuvah was created before the world was created. (1)
Teshuvah is woven into the fabric of the cosmos.
So great is Teshuvah that it brings healing to the whole world. (2)

Before we commit ourselves to Teshuvah as an essential spiritual practice, we must understand Teshuvah as a fundamental truth that makes the healing of the whole world possible. A truth that is at once prescriptive and descriptive. A truth that the pandemic has revealed to us, like an offering, an anchor, a guide.

Teshuvah is what makes it possible for us to transition to renewable energy and an economy built on cooperation and care. Teshuvah is what makes reparations and abolition possible.

To paraphrase Kol Tzedek’s Rabbinic Intern, Dr. Koach Frazier, "There was a time before slavery and white supremacy and there will be a time after it."

To take refuge in Teshuvah is to trust in the inevitability of change, the spiral-like return of the universe on itself. To take refuge in Teshuvah is to come to know our inherent capacity and obligation to heal.

Pema Chodron writes:

Teshuvah is to the human experience as tides are to the ocean. High tide comes and high tide goes. And then it returns 12 hours later. And in between the phases of the moon and the contours of shore lines change dramatically. Mudflats become waterways and then return again.

To quote Richard Rubinstein’s theology of nothingness, "God is the ocean, and we are the waves."

And to quote Octavia Butler:

This is Teshuvah.

Just when we think we have arrived, the ground shifts.

This has been one of the greatest challenges of the last six months. And it is how we know that the necessary transformation of our world is more than possible.

In the words of the Rambam,

Teshuvah is spiritual technology invented by the rabbis.

You see, it used to be that to connect with God or atone for missing the mark, you journeyed to the temple in Jerusalem and you offered an unblemished goat, and the odor appeased the Holy One. But then the temple was destroyed, more than once. And the people were exiled from their spiritual routines.

And from their sacred spaces. Sound familiar?

In the aftermath of the destruction of the Temple you can imagine there was weeping, and when asked why, the answer endures:

We don't know what comes next.

But they did not allow it to distance themselves from each other or from God. They took refuge in Teshuvah.

What I have come to realize is that the experiences of the last year have been utterly unmooring but they are not new and they are certainly not unprecedented.

We are the inheritors of a tradition that is intimate with catastrophic loss. Everything that we have come to know as Jewish spiritual practice was born of exile and nurtured in the diaspora.

We need to lean into these practices with all of our souls and all of our might and all of our resources. And trust that these practices will sustain us through this time.

Because they have. And they will.

But it will take effort and commitment.

If my time on the cushion has taught me anything, it is that when discomfort arises, the mind's first response is to call it a problem and to try to eliminate it. Which is why Teshuvah requires that we increase our capacity to be with discomfort, to be with uncertainty.

To not know what happens next.

Teshuvah was born of exile. And it also is facilitated by exile.

The Rambam teaches:

Exile softens us.

This too has been my experience.

It reminds me of the words my friend and comrade Rev. Naomi Leapheart-Washington posted on social media way back in March.

"Things won't be the same after this. I hope one of the things that persists is the way most people seem to be moving more gently, more graciously around each other...the way every conversation begins with 'How ARE you?' and ends with 'Be well.' and we seem to *mean* it. You know?"

Exile softens us. It ripens us. And this makes Teshuvah more possible.

In fact, the root of the word exile, gimel lamed heh, means to expose, reveal, or uncover. To be in exile is to be exposed. It is a vulnerable place to be, dispersed from our center of protection. But it is also a powerful spiritual state. Because in the state of exile, everything is revealed.

It is inconceivable to imagine how, after years of worrying that there would not be enough seats in the Calvary chapel, I am standing here, alone. In a room that echoes with your voices, a room we have filled with our tears and our dancing.

We are living in exile, we are kept from each other and from our gathering places.

This a vulnerable place to be. And a powerful place. A place of tremendous potential.

In fact it is the very fact of our vulnerability, that softens our spirit, that allows us to see ourselves more clearly, to care for each other more fully.

The reason that galut, that exile, is so uncomfortable is because we are exposed.

And the reason it is so powerful is because everything is exposed.

The pandemic has most impacted those of us who are most vulnerable. Black and Indigienous folx, folks with disabilities and chronic illnesses, our elders. And it has also revealed the truth about systemic racism and state violence, ableism, ageism, and the endless greed that causes people with power and wealth to exploit people and our planet.

For several millennia Jews have been living in this state of exile, through scarcity and abundance, through narrower times than these, and finding ways to mark sacred time, to celebrate life, to grieve our dead and gather as we are today.

Rabbi Alan Lew writes:

Teshuvah is our spiritual inheritance. And it is at the root of our existence.

As we enter this new year and the Aseret Yemei Teshuvah, the days of Teshuvah between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, days in which the seams of the world and of our own souls are loosened, I invite you to take refuge in Teshuvah.

Turn your attention towards it.
Place your trust in it.
Take this practice seriously.

For me this includes taking some quiet moments to consider who in my life I feel distant from and setting aside time to reach out and connect.

It includes setting aside time to reflect on my relationship to racism and ableism: Where have I missed the mark? What do I need to learn so that when faced with the same situation in the future, I can act with greater integrity and awareness?

All of this can be facilitated by making a shinui, a small change in your routine.

For starters, I plan to walk to work, instead of biking, to give myself time over the ten days for slowing down and reflecting.

Start small and take comfort in the words of the Holy One, spoken to the Israelites in a midrash:

"My children, create for me a small opening of Teshuvah, as tiny as the head of a pin, and I will open for you openings that even wagons and chariots can pass through."

We don’t know what comes next.

May your practice of Teshuvah this year sustain you through the uncertainty.
May your experience of exile soften you.
And may it bring much needed healing to you,
and to the whole world.

And to that end, let's end fascism and have a sweet new year!
Shabbat Shalom.

(1) Genesis Rabbah 1:4.
(2) B.T. Yoma 86a.
(3) Parable of the Sower, p. 3.
(4) Mishneh Torah, Hilchot Teshuva 1:3.
(5) Mishneh Torah, Hilchot Teshuva 2:4.