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This is Real and You are Completely Unprepared

Rosh Hashanah, Day 2 5786
September 24, 2025
Congregation B’nai Jacob

Although I have often thought about doing this book, This is Real and You are Completely Unprepared, for the Big Read, I have always hesitated to do it in this context. It is, as I said, one of my favorite books, on that small shelf of books I return to again and again, and it is also a more spiritual book than we have read together. I realize that while we are ostensibly engaged in a spiritual activity here during these holy days, for some of you, this may not be your cup of tea. You might not consider yourself a spiritual person.

So here’s my first spoiler! If you’re human, if you feel awe and gratitude and joy, you’re spiritual! If you have a soul, and I believe that everyone has a soul, you’re spiritual. Of course that begs the question, what is a soul? I think, most simply, the soul is the breath of God within you, the animating force that makes you alive and human. It is both the part of you that is most essentially you, and therefore, by definition, the part of you that is most deeply connected to God.

We live our lives busy with all kinds of plans and thoughts and ambitions, often unaware of what our soul is up to. But there are moments in our lives — sometimes because we sit quietly in mediation or engage in another spiritual practice, sometimes because of things that happen, sometimes because we find ourselves repeating old patterns or stuck in a life we are not fully inhabiting, when our often shy soul, if given the space, reveals itself to us. The goal then, of the high holiday season, is to strive to listen to the whisper of our souls. As the medieval poem says, “Simu lev al haneshama,” pay attention to the soul!

And here’s the thing. Whether or not you believe you have a soul, your soul is making this journey. You were born; you will die. Those are the incontrovertible facts. You will sometimes wake up to your soul’s voice and you will return again to sleep. That is also inevitable. The question is, the challenge of these days of awe is, can we tune in a little more closely to our souls? Can we understand our life’s journey a little more clearly so that we can make better choices, live more fully, live closer to our essence? Can we understand ourselves as deeply part of one another and of the cosmos, to which our souls are inextricably joined, to which we will return like the river to the ocean? Lew writes, “Every soul needs to express itself. Every heart needs to crack itself open.” Whether you choose to notice it or not, we are, all of us, on this journey.

I think that when I read this book it was the first time I understood that the journey of the High Holidays begins with Tisha B’Av, and not just Rosh Hashanah, as I had learned as a child. Later, I I learned that the whole month of Elul which precedes Rosh Hashanah, was a preparatory month in which we blow shofar daily, we read the 27th Psalm, and we ultimately begin offering selichot prayers asking for forgiveness. But Lew sets the clock way back at Tisha B’Av, the fast day commemorating the destruction of the Temple, a full seven weeks before Rosh Hashanah, as the beginning of the High Holiday season.

It makes so much sense that this is a seven week journey. Pesach to Shavuot, when we count off days and weeks, counting the omer, from the time we left Egypt until the time we received the Torah, is also a seven week period. Seven is always an important number in Judaism, signifying completion. And I love the idea that we begin this journey with the destruction of the Temple, the walls falling down, literally the end of Judaism as it was then known. For Lew this is analogous to the times in our lives when our walls of defensiveness and personality also crumble — when we see clearly that the roles we play are just that and that there is a deeper part of ourselves longing to express itself; when we are brought up short by things we have done, the ways we have hurt people we love, and we are forced to look at the movie we prefer not to watch, the movie of our failures, not our successes. At Tisha B’Av, the crumbling of the walls is a tragedy.

And so we embark on this journey of transformation, allowing the walls to crumble, turning to what remains. “This is a journey from denial to awareness, from self-deception to judgment. We will learn our Divine Name. We move from self-hatred to self-forgiveness, from anger to healing, from hard-heartedness to brokenheartedness. This is the journey the soul takes to transform itself and to evolve, the journey from boredom and staleness — from deadness — to renewal.”

A small number of times in my own life, my own walls crumbled. The identity that I was clinging to, the identity that seemed so important to me, that defined my very self, fell apart. Although I never welcomed these occasions, something new was always born. One of those times was when I was in my late 20’s on the eve of being ordained as a rabbi. I had been married for three years and, to tell the truth, things were not going well. Still, I held on to my identity as a wife. I was, after all, becoming a rabbi — being married felt like a prerequisite. I had been offered a job in Berkeley, California and we planned to move there together. Then, weeks before we were supposed to move, I had a dream in which I saw clearly that the marriage was over. I woke up frightened and spent a week not telling anyone about this dream, hoping against hope that I would have a new dream that would contradict the first dream. After a week in which I came up short, I told my then-husband about the dream. I told him that he could either come with me to California and we could live separately and try to work things out, or he could stay behind. Twenty four hours later he said he wanted to come with me, and my heart immediately sank. I knew deep inside, as the dream had made clear, that the marriage was over. I went to California alone.

I spent many months after that crying, sometimes trying to reconnect to him and save the marriage, often lonely and frightened. But in hindsight, it was a defining moment of my life. I let go of what I thought I was supposed to be to become more deeply who I was.

Looking back over my life, there have been perhaps a handful of defining moments like that. And there were many more small turns, when my idea of what I should be or what reality ought to be, gave way to what was, when patterns of thought and behavior that I believed defined me were revealed as just that — patterns that were no longer serving me. None of these were easy moments; all of them changed me.

And at the end of this journey, as Lew writes, we will again sit in a broken house, a sukkah, echoing the destroyed Temple, but this time we will rejoice. When the walls fell, back at Tisha B’Av, we panicked. “Who are we, what is our life, what is our goodness?” the mahzor cries. In the face of God’s judgement, we realize that our subterfuges and evasions were useless. We have arrived here all the same. By the end of the journey, we find ourselves in our sukkah, flush to the world and joyful; the walls fall down and we discover that we didn’t need them anyway; a new truth is born.

We do not make this journey once in our lives and then we are done. Nor do we make this journey only during these two months of the year. “…the walls of our great house are crumbling all the time, and not just in midsummer at Tisha B’Av…. Every moment of our lives, the sacred house of our life — the constructs by which we live and to which we hold on so fiercely — nevertheless falls away. Every moment we take a breath and the world comes into being, and then we let out a breath and the world falls away. …The gate between heaven and earth is always creaking open. The Book of Life and the Book of Death are open every day, and our name is written in one or the other of them at every moment, and then erased and written again the moment after that.” We are constantly becoming, redefining ourselves. This doesn’t just happen on Rosh Hashanah.

Nevertheless, we have this calendar, these holidays, to focus our attention, which is usually focused on other things. We have this calendar and these holidays to bring us together so that we don’t make this journey of tshuva, of returning home, alone. Amazingly, shockingly, we do this deeply intimate and personal thing together, shoulder to shoulder. We support and are supported by one another. We understand that we cannot make this journey alone, it is too difficult. We accept that we are not and never will be whole by ourselves; we are only whole together, in community, “in that shifting composite of need and lack and gift that we create when we come together to acknowledge that we need each other.” And we acknowledge this at this moment, at the turn of the year, this very moment between between summer and fall, a moment of ripening and rotting all at once, a moment when we believe that the cosmos, the gates of tshuva are open wide for us.

Finally, our transformation is never complete. Even after big life-changing events we inevitably fall back into old ruts and patterns. For more than two decades now I have gone once or twice a year to a weeklong spirituality retreat — we mediate, we pray, we eat our meals and spend our days in silence. These times almost always feel magical to me and the shifts within my consciousness toward more generosity, more softness, and more compassion seem profound.

In the early years when I would attend the retreats, I would come home feeling transformed only to have a massive fight with David within the first 24 hours of arriving home. I was so open — and he was, blessedly, the same. The disconnect between my expanded self and real life with all its responsibilities was jarring. Thankfully, over time, we stopped doing this. But did the fact that I lapsed so quickly into old patterns mean I had not changed? Nothing had happened? I don’t think so. If I look back on my life, I know that I have changed, that decades of retreats and spiritual practice have changed me, that I have become more accepting, more patient, and more kind. I have obviously not become a boddhi satva. But transformation happens slowly, and often enough it doesn’t look like much from the outside.

Another thing I really love about this book is the whole idea of, “This is real.” Lew unpacks this idea with regard to the high holidays but it is actually a wonderful key to understand any ritual. On Rosh Hashanah, our liturgy says that God opens up a big book, reviews our deeds, and inscribes us, either for life or death. Many people get stuck right there. God opens up a big book? I don't’ believe in God, much less a God who opens a book? And it’s decided on Rosh Hashanah who will live and who will die? So that means that that wonderful person whom I loved, that person who I sat next to in synagogue last year, didn’t measure up, sinned a little too much, and was punished with death?

What Lew makes clear is that despite the fact that this is a metaphor, like any good metaphor, it is completely real. The inescapable truth is that each of us is born and each of us will die and one day all of us will not be sitting here. We have a finite number of trips around the sun and we had best use them to do what we need to do before it is too late. Lew writes, “…this is real whether you believe in God or not. Perhaps God made it real and perhaps God did not. Perhaps God created this pageant of judgment and choice, of transformation, of life and of death. Perhaps God created the Book of Life and the Book of Death, Tshuva and the blowing of the shofar. Or perhaps these are just inventions of human culture. It makes no difference. It. is equally real in any case. The weeks and the months and the years are also inventions of human culture. Language and stories, love and tragedy, are inventions of human culture. …Or perhaps God made the reality that all this human culture seeks to articulate. Perhaps God made a profoundly mixed world, a world in which every second confronts us with a choice between blessings and curses, life and death; a world in which our choices have indelible consequences …and perhaps we have chosen arbitrary spiritual language to express these things, or perhaps God made human culture so that we would express these things precisely as we have in every detail. It makes no difference.”

“What makes a difference is that it’s real and it is happening right now and it is happening to us, and it is utterly inescapable, and we are completely unprepared. This moment is before us with its choices, and the consequences of our past choices are before us, as is the possibility of our transformation. This year some of us will die, some of us will live, and all of us will change.”

I find this profoundly helpful. Ritual — this ritual of God enthroned in judgment, of the High Priest pronouncing God’s ineffable name in the Holy of Holies, of sending the scapegoat with our sins into the wilderness, the music, the beating of the breasts, the boredom, the repetition — all of this is part of a kind of play, a great dramatic container which we imaginatively enter. This is true of every ritual, Shabbat, Pesach — each with a different essential truth at its core. And if we give ourselves over to the drama, if we inhabit it, it works. And it works not because of magic or theology — it works because it is true, because, in the case of this ritual, some of us will live and some of us will die and the moment is before us, ripe with possibility for us to choose. We are hammered into place by chance and destiny, by the sum of all of our choices and all the choices made by our ancestors and by humankind long before we were born — and yet, still, in that very place, our choices matter, our choice to live into the blessing, to hear the cry of our soul, to feel the brokenness of our hearts, and to become, become, become. God is always waiting for us to come back home.

I want to conclude with Lew’s analysis of Kol Nidre because this is one of my favorite parts of the book. Lew says that when we recite the Kol Nidre, God calls out to the soul, in a voice that the soul recognizes instantly because it is the soul’s cry.” I see this every year, when we hear the cello play kol nidre, and when we chant it. People always cry. There is something so haunting about this music. It pierces us; it opens our hearts. The music of Kol Nidre calls us home.

Lew notes that the opening notes of Kol Nidre begin with a fall, a descending minor tone which goes on for two full phrases. We begin in heartbreak, the core heartbreak of being human. Life is loss and in the end we will, all of us, lose everything — the people we love, our jobs, our keys, our minds, our spouses, our lives. We try to hold onto life and look away from that truth, but we can’t. That’s where kol nidre begins.

Lew makes an analogy to the salmon run. Bear with me. A few years ago I was fortunate enough to get to see the salmon run in Alaska myself. The salmon are born in ponds inland and then they swim out to the ocean where they live their lives, often for years. Then, at the end of their lives, they swim up the rivers of Alaska, to spawn and die. No one knows exactly how they find their way to the place of their birth, but they do. There they rage, they spawn, their life force dims and they die. You see it right before your eyes. Their scales blacken, their jaws lock. But in this moment, again for reasons no one can explain, the salmon jump from the water. They leap out — high and often. It’s amazing to watch. It was explained to us that this is in fact a seemingly stupid thing for the salmon to do — the bears are sitting next to the ponds and streams and when the salmon leap up from the water they are easy prey. Nevertheless, they leap.

Lew writes, “This is nothing less than a picture of the journey the soul takes through this world. This is a picture of the soul’s journey to itself, to spawn, to create what it was put on this earth to create, and then to make a leap of great joy. And the soul makes this joyous leap in spite of the fact that it knows that as soon as it expresses itself, it will begin to die, it will begin to fade away. We rise up and we fall away. We express our unique and indispensable contribution to the great flow of life and then we pass on.” We are avaryonim — just passing through.

Lew shows how the music of kol nidre expresses this. It begins with the song of loss which first grabs the soul’s attention. “Unexpectedly we have barely had a chance to take our place, barely had a chance to settle into our own lives and there they are, those tragic notes, pulling the soul from its scabbard.” But then, after two full phrases of falling, the notes finally begin to rise. Lew writes, “I rise with them, in my full strength….I draw strength from the song as I rise.” “Thank God, he writes, “for this one run up the river, this blessed, silvery sliver of a moment in which we may, like the salmon, leap for joy, in which we may express our divine gift or not.”

I feel this so strongly. My life feels like it has hardly begun, and yet here I am, six months shy of going on medicare, my children grown, my parents elderly. I feel as if I have barely taken my place in the sun, and it is already setting. I will retire from this pulpit, maybe the pulpit rabbinate, in a few short months and soon, God willing, I will become a grandmother. The next generation rises up.

And yet I feel in the core of my being what a great gift my life has been, just to able to breathe in this blessed life, to take in the vastness of the forest, its green majesty, to see the hawk winging overhead by day and hear the owl’s piercing cry at night, to feel the strength of my body, even as it ages, to still be lucky enough to love, to work, to write, to laugh, to give.

And so I pray for one more year to live this blessed life, “a year of sun and rain and wind, a year to labor and to love on this roiling green and blue ball of ours.” One more chance to leap up like the salmon, to sing my song, to sit in the sun, to uncover the blessings of each moment. To love David and my children, to learn, to grow, to find new work, to write my book, to ride my bike, to see the world, to welcome my new granddaughter, all this before I die, before the gates come clanging shut.