#BlogElul: Writing the story of your life #takeaseatmakeafriend

One of the images found in the High Holyday liturgy is 'The Book of Life'. The traditional language makes it sound like a kind of ledger, with accounts being recorded, added and subtracted. At the end of the accounting, God decides if we've enough credit in the bank to make it to the next year. If you grew up being taught it this way, as I was, you may be mightily put off by it all. All these invitations to engage more deeply in the High Holydays may be falling on resistant ears.

A number of years ago I arrived at the belief that if my experience of life and my way of understanding the world around me didn't correlate with an 'idea' of God that I thought my tradition had conveyed through its liturgy and the philosophy of Rabbis from centuries past, it was the old ideas that had to go. They were, after all, only the putting into human language of a God too 'other' to truly grasp, and so carried with them the limitations of the humans who wrote them. To truly have a relationship with God, I had to be present to my experience and trust it.

And so, I could no longer believe in a God filling out a ledger, at least not in a literal sense. But I liked the image of the 'Book of Life' and the pages that were filled. But I am the only one holding the pen. Whether I like what has been written, and whether what is still to be written will be worth reading is up to me. Sometimes we can be harder on ourselves than the God we imagine is forgiving us and erasing the bad lines and paragraphs to give us the chance for a re-write. But when we recognize our agency in writing our own Book, it can be incredibly freeing and empowering. For sure, we do not get to write every twist and turn in the plot. There are many things that life brings to us that are not of our design or our asking. But we write the response. We are always able to write the response.

We cannot decide how the next chapter will go if we are not willing to read what we've written so far. Now is the time.

#BlogElul: Every person is my teacher #takeaseatmakeafriend

It's easy to learn from the people we like. What about the people that we find more challenging? It is a spiritual practice to do as the quote above proposes to us. It is hard to do such a practice consistently. But sometimes I learn something about myself. Why are my buttons being pressed? Sometimes, if I open myself to listening with greater compassion and less judgment, I come to know something about a person that underlies the behaviors that I find challenging. My heart opens a little more.

There is a concept in Jewish thought - tikkun. You may be familiar with the phrase tikkun olam, which is often mistranslated as 'social justice.' Indeed, social justice is one way of acting in the world that brings about tikkun, but the word means much more. It is literally a 'repair' - to repair the world. To fix, or repair can happen on many levels. When I hear someone more deeply and a challenging relationship is turned into something more understanding and more loving, that is a tikkun.

When I think back to interactions in my life that have been transformed in this way, I recognize that these moments have contained within them some of the most profound teachings in my life.