Breaking Down the Walls

It seems I have, once again, been shirking my posting duties.  It's a transitional time of year, which is SO not my thing, and I've spent the past few weeks both reacclimatizing to my life in the States, and preparing my classroom for a new crop of eight-year-olds who are scheduled to arrive tomorrow (yikes!).  Blog entries require a certain degree of contemplative thought, and the truth is that lately I just haven't had it in me.  But I have been reading a fabulous book called, This is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared by Alan Lew (come on--how awesome is that title?).  Meant to be read in the weeks between Tisha B'Av and Sukkot, the book takes the reader on a journey through teshuvah and the process of self-evaluation that this time of year requires.  

When writing about Tisha B'Av, Lew frequently uses the image of the walls of your house crumbling down around you, leaving you exposed and disoriented.  This alludes to the literal destruction of the walls of the Temple in Jerusalem, but also to the metaphorical walls we all have around our own lives--the routines and material items that protect us and allow us to ignore the true issues that lie beneath the surface.  The month of Elul is our opportunity to remember who we are, where we are, and where we are going.  Lew describes this as a journey of "self-discovery, spiritual discipline, self-forgiveness, and spiritual evolution.  It is the snapshot the Jewish people pull out every autumn of the great journey all human beings must make across this world:  the journey from Tisha B'Av to Sukkot, from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur, from birth to death and back to renewal again" (8-9).

I tend to be ambivalent about Elul; I love it conceptually but feel overwhelmed by it practically.  The idea of reflective self-assessment and teshuvah is beautiful, but actually doing it usually leads me to feel self-critical, frustrated, and sad.  Why?  Because no matter what improvements I've made over the year, inevitably there are still those few ways in which I have not changed or grown.  These stumbling blocks tend to be the same from year to year, and although every year I resolve to "do better," I don't follow through because doing so is just too hard.  Elul brings me face to face, once again, with the truth that if I want these things to change, then I have to change.  This is a problem because, as I've mentioned, I hate change.  So, you can see why this is a perpetual struggle.

Lew suggests that a critical first step in getting out of points of "stuckness" is acknowledging that we play an active role in keeping ourselves there.  He explains that, "spiritually, the only question worth asking about any conflict, any recurring catastrophe, is this:  What is my responsibility for it?  How am I complicit in it?  How can I prevent it from happening again?" (45)  In other words, I don't end up in the same struggle year after year because the world is against me.  I end up there because I allow myself to stay stuck.  So, I need to ask myself, "In what unproductive ways am I engaging in this conflict?  How could I do things differently in order to get out of it?"  Asking and answering these questions honestly requires that we allow our walls to come down, so that we can see what is truly underneath.

This isn't easy, but personally I think it's worth trying.  When I'm old, I don't want to look back on my life and see pockets of aborted growth and missed opportunities in places where I chose inertia over action.  While this approach to Elul and the High Holy Days will require a lot of effort, I think my life deserves that investment of time and energy.  We all deserve to give that gift of growth to ourselves.

Here are some key questions from Alan Lew to get us started:

"Where are we?  

What transition point are we standing at?  

What is causing sharp feeling in us, disturbing us, knocking us a little off balance?  Where is our suffering?  

What is making us feel bad? 

What is making us feel at all?

How long will we keep the walls up?

How long will we furiously defend against what we know deep down to be the truth of our lives?"

(62)