Holiday Angst

I suppose I should stop being in denial about the arrival of Tishrei?

For those of you interested in keeping track, the month of Tishrei contains the following in the span of three weeks: Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot, AND Simchat Torah. That's SEVEN festival days if you live outside Israel--seven days on which no melachot are supposed to be done, seven days of going to shul and eating festive meals. Is it any wonder that I love the following month, Cheshvan? It has no holidays!

Now, you might be thinking, "But holidays are fun! Don't you love celebrating, marking sacred time, connecting with the Divine, and all that?"

To which I would reply, "No! I actually don't! I like regular days. I love my routine. Holidays are disruptive. And I can connect with the Divine JUST FINE on regular days, thank you very much."

Though I will admit, hearing the shofar always gets me. And I do love Kol Nidrei (Yom Kippur gets major points for being only one day). But the main truth is, holidays are hard for me, and I often feel alone in that because while everyone else finds them so meaningful and so beautiful (or, at least, they say that they do), I find them somewhat meaningful and beautiful but also majorly stressful and anxiety-provoking. And it's not just the logistics of all those festival days that is a struggle, it's also the sheer magnitude of what these days represent: Book of Life? Book of Death? Genuine teshuvah? Making lasting positive changes to my life? It actually hurts my brain to think about it for too long, because what if I can't truly do teshuvah in the way it needs to be done...WHAT THEN??

If I'm being reflective, though, I guess these are relatively good hangups to have around the holidays, because I used to not be able to get anywhere past the food. And there is a LOT of food, usually in the form of festive meals with family and/or guests. I used to be so stressed out about those meals that I couldn't think about the rest of the holiday at all, and often passed up invitations to meals because it was just too hard. Today, I am proud to say that while I still have some anticipatory anxiety around these meals (How long will they be? When can I leave?), the food is not really an issue anymore; it's the schmoozing that is the tough part. While I don't LIKE disrupting my usual eating routine, I CAN do it when I want to. I can be a good guest and participate in conversation and eat like everyone else, because I am in recovery and I have earned the distinction of blending into the crowd. Just how I like it.

As for the rest of it, I am trying my best with the positive self-talk, reminding myself that I CAN take a couple of days off work to do things a little differently, and it will be fine. I have a new book that I am saving to start on the first day of Rosh Hashanah, along with my annual holiday reading of This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared by Alan Lew, and Return by Erica Brown. I accepted invitations to some meals, but didn't over-commit. And with regards to the pressure to make shul a super-meaningful affair, I think I am just accepting that shul is a challenge for me and isn't where I feel most connected to G-d. I'll go and spend the many hours there because that's what we do, but I am not expecting to feel anything out of the ordinary and I don't think G-d expects that of me, either, since He knows how I roll. I'm a "find G-d in nature" person, so I'll be having my Yamim Noraim chat with G-d while feeding an English muffin to the fish during Tashlich.

And here's a little secret: the holidays stress everyone out, even the people who are all spiritual and who love cooking. So if you're privately (or publicly) freaking out about this interminably long stretch of "islands in time," don't worry--you're not alone. Make it as bearable for yourself as you can, and find ways to see beauty even in small things. Give yourself permission to take breaks and relax. Push yourself a little, but not too much. And know that, like a light at the end of the tunnel, Cheshvan is coming!

"Lapses and Crises"

I know I've mentioned the importance of self-compassion many times, and I do genuinely believe in it...but I'll be honest and say that sometimes it's really hard for me.  As a teacher, I'll gladly work with a student all year on one particular skill, but when it comes to myself, I expect proficiency right out of the gate.  Lately, this has been a problem for me regarding religious observance--although I've been steadily increasing my religiosity over the past two years, I'm still far from where I'd like to be in terms of "religious fluency."  To be fair, I was raised in a secular environment and still operate in one on a daily basis. There are times when my interactions and relationships with the many non-observant (or non-Jewish) people in my life lead me to make compromises and adjustments to my practice that I wish I didn't have to make--but I do make them, because I'm not yet always confident or assertive enough to say, "This is what I need," or "That won't work for me."  When I consciously do something that I know is in violation of Jewish law, the self-judgment voice  starts yelling, "You know better than that.  You're supposed to be taking this seriously.  How can you say you are religious and then go and do that?  You're a fraud.  You will never get better than this." 

As this latest round of Jewish holidays neared its end, I struggled with this critical voice because I felt I hadn't observed the last couple of festival days as thoughtfully as I would have liked.  Never mind that I did observe them more carefully than I had the year before...it wasn't perfect, and I knew I could have done better.  I should have done better.  In the middle of this overwhelmingly negative self-assessment, it dawned on me that this entire routine seemed awfully familiar--this was the same way I had talked to myself in the beginning of my recovery, every time I would give in to the urge to use an eating disorder behavior.  Once I knew how I should be acting, there was no excuse for mistakes.  I judged any slips into the eating disorder as signs that I wasn't taking recovery seriously, that I was insincere, that I was weak, and that I would never get any better than I was in that moment of lapse.

When I noticed that I was having these thoughts about myself as a religious person, I did what I often do in times of self-doubt:  get advice from someone who knows more than I do.  In this case, the person I consulted was Adin Steinsaltz, Jewish scholar extraordinaire and my newest intellectual hero.  I'd been reading his book, Teshuvah, and in light of my current mood I decided to reread the chapter called, "Lapses and Crises."  In this chapter, Steinsaltz emphasizes that stumbling is part of the process of advancement--not a negation of it.  The people who aim the farthest are going to have more opportunities to trip along the way, and the struggle involved in moving from stage to stage is inherent to growth.

This does not mean, however, that we shouldn't take slips seriously...but, neither should we use them as an excuse to abandon the process entirely.  Steinsaltz cautions, "The seriousness of individual lapses should not be minimized, but neither should even the worst of them be allowed to lead to despair and total abdication."  In other words, acknowledge errors and take steps to correct them, but then move on--no mistake is worth resigning oneself to failure.

Steinsaltz understands that once we decide to change ourselves for the better in a specific way, we want our progress to be smooth and linear--and immediate.  But, he teaches, this usually isn't how it works.  He explains, "A person who confronts the necessity of making a change in his life or of pressing on with renewed determination must also reckon with internal resistance, partly conscious and immediate, partly unconscious and revealed only with the passage of time.  He cannot simply 'turn over a new leaf' and start afresh; even after he sets out on his new path he will be hounded by those parts of him that remain unreconciled to his decision.  The very struggle to ascend gives one the feeling of being at the bottom of the ladder; but this is only a trick of the senses and the imagination, for the ascent is, in fact, well underway."

Although he is writing specifically about the process of becoming religious, his words also resonate with me in terms of recovery.  Both processes entail major life shifts in both behavioral and emotional realms, and we need to be patient with ourselves and understand that we will stumble along the way.  When we do experience a setback, we should interpret it not as evidence of failure, but as a testament to our desire to strive higher...after all, if we were content to remain static, failure wouldn't be an issue.  A healthy dose of frustration may propel us forward, but we must stop short of getting so discouraged that we quit altogether.  Remember what Steinsaltz says:  if you're stumbling, it's because you're already moving along the path.  May we each keep this wisdom inside our own hearts as we aim to progress forward from wherever we are!  

"Why Should I?"

Although I initially planned to spend each week of Elul looking at a different theme of the month, I've decided that for the time being I'm going to stick with teshuva, on the grounds that there is just so much to explore within that one theme.  The more I thought about what I wrote last week, the more it occurred to me that in explaining a reason why the process of recovery can be so painful, I had really addressed only half of the issue.  What naturally follows from that is the question, "Well, if recovery hurts so much and is so uncomfortable, why should I bother putting myself through that in the first place?" Convincing someone (or yourself) that enduring the unpleasantness of early recovery is a worthwhile process can be a tough sell, but recently I came upon some words from--you guessed it--Rav Kook, that I believe both validate the paradox of a painful recovery and offer a solid argument in favor of sitting with the discomfort:

"At the inception of creation it was intended that the tree have the same taste as the fruit (Genesis Rabbah 5:9).  All the supportive actions that sustain any general worthwhile spiritual goal should by right be experienced in the soul with the same feeling of elation and delight as the goal itself is experienced when we envision it.  But earthly existence, the instability of life, the weariness of the spirit when confined in a corporate frame, brought it about that only the fruition of the final step, which embodies the primary ideal, is experienced in its pleasure and splendor.  The trees that bear the fruit have, however, become coarse matter and have lost their taste...But every defect is destined to be mended.  Thus we are assured that the day will come when creation will return to its original state, when the taste of the tree will be the same as the taste of the fruit."  (Orot HaTeshuva)

Here, Rav Kook acknowledges the reality that oftentimes, the process by which we achieve what we most desire is not, in fact, pleasurable.  If full recovery is the "fruit," then the process of getting there is the "tree"...and I think we can all probably agree that the journey is nowhere near as sweet as the destination.  Rav Kook validates this and also normalizes it by teaching us that this is one of the imperfections of life on earth, a less than ideal situation that is familiar to anyone who has ever traveled a long, arduous path toward a much-anticipated goal.  But, he also reassures us that someday the "injustice" of this reality will correct itself, and we will find ourselves in a world where both the process and the result are full of delight.

You might be thinking, "Okay, great.  Someday far, far in the future, this yucky situation will no longer be the reality.  But what about NOW?  How do I deal with it in the present as it happens?"  I have received many valuable answers to the question of how to cope with the discomfort and have personally tried a wide variety of "distress tolerance skills" and methods of "cognitive restructuring."  While not every strategy hit the mark, there were many that did help me manage the uncomfortable feelings and sensations that came along with early recovery.  However, another critical contributor to my ability to push through the unpleasantness was the underlying sense I had that all of the struggles I was enduring were serving to teach me something important.  Even in the moment, underneath all my stubbornness, resentment, and fear was a glimmer of understanding that if I could just pull this off, I would end up stronger for it.  Rav Kook reinforces this idea when he says,

"Penitence does not come to embitter life but to make it more pleasurable.  The joy of life resulting from penitence emerges out of all those currents of bitterness in which the soul is entangled in its initial steps toward penitence.  This is the creative higher prowess, to know that sweetness is drawn from all bitterness, life from all the pangs of death, abiding delights from every disease and pain." (Orot HaTeshuva)

For me, this has proven to be true.  While I would never, ever wish an eating disorder on anyone, I also would not want to give back all the insight and understanding that I've gained through the process of recovery. This does not erase the significant pain I often felt or the very real losses I incurred along the way...but it helps me to accept that this struggle was given to me so that it might teach me something important, and I believe it has.  In that light, my hope for all of us is that we find the courage to radically accept the discomfort, move through it, and emerge stronger on the other side.

No Pain, No (internal) Gain

I would be remiss in my exploration of Elul themes if I did not venture into the realm of teshuva--certainly a central focus of this month preceding the High Holidays.  Teshuva (תשובה) is often translated as "repentance" or "penitence,"but there's more to it than that.  The Hebrew root of  תשובה is שוב, which means, "return."  When a person does teshuva, he or she repents for his or her sins, turns away from destructive patterns and actions, and returns to a life in harmony with Hashem.  Teshuva also signals new beginnings and a restoration of balance within oneself.  For years, the focus of my High Holiday teshuva was always apologizing to Hashem for yet another year spent engaging in eating disorder behaviors, a year in which I had, once again, fallen short of my "best self" in what felt like so many ways.  So, I prayed fervently for forgiveness and promised that in the year to come, I would really try to "do better" in recovery.  This happened year after year after year...and each time, I fully intended to follow through on my promise.  So, why didn't I?

I was a classic case of ambivalent teshuva.  I yearned to change, and yet I didn't.  It was puzzling and endlessly frustrating...and yet, it seems, not uncommon to the experience of many people who undergo teshuva for a variety of reasons.  In his brilliant work, Orot HaTeshuva, Rav Kook deeply examines the concept of teshuva.  (For more of Rav Kook's ideas, see this blog post.) This past Tuesday was 3 Elul, Rav Kook's yahrzeit, and I set aside some time that day to explore Orot HaTeshuva.  As I read, I came upon a passage that, I believe, gets right to the heart of why it was so hard for me to turn away from my eating disorder, even though I wanted to.  (Note:  instead of reading this text and making a direct inference that your eating disorder is "evil" or "sinful," perhaps think about it more generally as a negative force in your life.)

"The pain felt in the initial inspiration to penitence is due to the severance of the evil layers of the self, which cannot be mended as long as they are attached to and remain part of the person, and cause deterioration of the whole spirit.  Through penitence they are severed from the basic essence of the self. Every severance causes pain, like the pain felt at the amputation of deteriorated organs for medical reasons.  This is the most inward kind of pain, through which a person is liberated from the dark servitude to his sins and his lowly inclinations and their bitter aftereffects." (Orot HaTeshuva)

Rav Kook hits the nail on the head:  I clung to my eating disorder for so long, despite genuinely wanting to change, because separating from it was too painful.  Even though I knew anorexia was harming me, it had become so enmeshed in who I was that detaching it became a labor intensive, often excruciating process of pushing, pulling, and probing.  My eating disorder was killing me; yet, it felt integral to my being.  Letting go of it did, at times, feel as agonizing as if I was chopping off a limb.

But, Rav Kook is also correct about something else:  the necessity of distance to the process of repair.  When we are entrenched in a problem, it's often hard for us to see it clearly for what it is and figure out how to untangle it.  The same is true of eating disorder behaviors--when we're in the middle of using one, we're hardly in a position to view it objectively and make a plan to get rid of it.  For me, the magic of therapy was that it gave me a safe place to detach from my behaviors and observe, with the help of my clinicians, what function each behavior served and how I could begin to chip away at them one by one.  Being willing and able to separate from my anorexia in that context was what allowed me to internalize the tools that I needed in order to dismantle it.

So, for any of you who find yourselves wondering this month why you spent another year engaging in your eating disorder despite having had a genuine desire to kick it to the curb, remember what Rav Kook says:  it hurts to separate from part of yourself, even from a part that is negative.  And, like most people, you do your best to avoid pain.  But, remember also Rav Kook's message that separation is the key to repair.  If you allow yourself some distance from your eating disorder, you will be able to see it more clearly for what it is.  This year, may you be able to tolerate the pain of this separation, and may it lead you to lasting recovery, once and for all!

Teshuva

I used to really dislike the High Holy Days. First of all, I had to dress up (which I hated), and spend hours in a synagogue where I felt ill at ease. Then, there was the Yom Kippur fast, which was anxiety provoking when I observed it and equally stressful when I did not. Finally, there were the hours passed contemplating all of my shortcomings for which I was supposed to atone: I had not been a sufficiently devoted daughter; I hadn’t called my grandmother often enough; I’d told lies; I had withheld myself from my friends. And, of course, there was the eating disorder, the biggest sin of all. Every year, I would vow to make the coming year the year when I would “really” recover; and yet, when the next Yom Kippur rolled around, I was forced to admit that once again, I had failed.

Looking back, it’s no wonder to me why those High Holy Day experiences were so overwhelmingly negative. One thing that might have helped would have been an understanding of the real meaning of teshuvah, one of the central themes of the time between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur. I’d been taught that teshuvah meant “repentance,” which inevitably led me to feel remorse and regret. Recently, however, I learned that what teshuvah actually means is, “return.” The idea is that within each human being is a divine spark of G-dly potential. This is our true self, but it gets buried underneath superficial deeds and concerns. Teshuvah is the process of reconnecting with our inner light, of returning to our connection with Hashem.

When I understand teshuvah in this way, instead of experiencing guilt and sadness, I feel joy and hope. Judaism teaches that even when I am feeling hopelessly far from holy, the divine spark still burns inside of me and links me to Hashem. My job is not to sit and lament all of my misdeeds; rather, my task is to actively find ways to clear out the clutter and fill the space with mitzvot, which then bring me closer to Hashem.

There was a long time in which I was so full of self-hatred that I couldn’t have seen my inner light if it had been shining directly into my eyes. Ironically, it is the process of recovering from my eating disorder (formerly Sin with a capital S) that has led me to recognize the potential of my true self and the strength of my desire for connection with Hashem. This year, I enter the time between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur with excitement. I am finally able to be fully engaged in the journey back to my divine source, and the endless possibilities of what I might discover along the way have me feeling energized. What I hope for myself in the coming year is not that I be “better” than I was in years before, but that I be “truer.” May we all experience truth and reconnection in the year to come. Shana tova!