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livSo, it's the Ten Days of Awe between the New Year and the Day of Atonement, which is a good time for spiritual reflection, and I think better in a DW entry box than most other ways. As ever, you're completely allowed to skip.
At the start of the pandemic I got religious in some ways. Partly because somebody had suggested that they way to get through the catastrophe was to keep both physically and spiritually in as good shape as you could manage. Partly because everything back in spring of first lockdown had a weird intensity. I felt slightly as if death might be imminent or as if the life I know might disappear under me even if I personally survived. First few weeks I was almost manically productive at work, and a bit fervent in my prayers, and there wasn't much else.
There were other things that contributed. The novelty of Zoom ceremonies. I tried to make a big effort to take a spiritual attitude towards the weird, empty ceremonies, not just messing around on my computer, and of course making a big effort to be fully present usually means you get more out of prayer. Likewise the community and leadership were making a big effort to make everything meaningful in the new world, away from most of our usual props and context. The Rabbinic training college started doing daily morning prayers on Zoom, and it was really good to be able to participate, to pray with a community, and with the leadership of keen bean trainee rabbis who put their all into leading even regular daily services.
I come from a religious tradition that has a lot of responses to collective suffering, including plagues. So I found a lot of new meaning in liturgy and texts that had previously been just background, not emotionally real. Religion became a way to channel my increasing anger at botched national responses to the disaster. I've never really been sincere before this year in praying for the destruction of the wicked, and I've usually reasoned away any direct reference to suffering as punishment. But those parts of tradition started to make a lot more visceral sense to me. Not that some individual dying horribly is an example of Divine justice, more that collectively there was perhaps some meaning in thinking of plague as punishment for ignoring our responsibilities as a society to protect the environment, to look after the welfare of the poor and excluded, for racism and political apathy and voting for short-term self-interest over ethical values.
For the first spring and summer at least, I tried to be more appreciative of my closed-in world, paying close attention small changes as the seasons progressed in our own garden and the few streets around. It's awful to have that closedness enforced, but it is a common spiritual practice to spend a chunk of time absorbed in small details.
The High Holy Days a year ago were mostly an awful blur. Good in some ways, particularly the rare experience of being just a congregant, not making experiences or meaning for other people. But religiously, things went rather downhill from there. Most of our important festivals sit between Passover (Purim was just at the start of things getting real, in most countries) and the autumn festivals, and normally that's fine, that's the rhythm of the year, and winter through early spring are times to move on with everyday life. But the sense of half the calendar just having vanished, and no end in sight, meant that my earlier fervour gave way to feeling mostly low and hopeless.
I stopped praying, mostly. I continued attending weekly services but I didn't fully commit to being present any more, I started feeling bored and distracted. I let the start of my working day drift a bit later; I haven't really fixed that tendency, I'm usually starting work at about 10 am these days and even then doing a bit of playing with email and catching up on feeds before I really start. Which meant I wasn't ready in time for communal daily prayers, and we shifted from emergency responses to 'this is life, now', the College stopped doing daily services. Other communities took over, but it turned out that having to look up whether there were prayers available today and sometimes needing to email for the Zoom link and the times varied, was just too much of a barrier.
I saw what eventually became the January peak coming by late September. So I was as much as possible withdrawing from the world. In the first wave, everybody was stuck at home and everything was online, but by the second, lots of in person stuff was permitted, and those of us who wanted to be cautious had much less going on, whether socializing or cultural events. I was starting to have some FOMO, some events that went ahead without me because I didn't think it was safe to do stuff in person, instead of being cancelled altogether. Also instead of the acute terror of the first wave my mental state was a sort of background dread, much less conducive to heartfelt prayer for God to save my life and my loved ones and the world.
In some ways the early part of 2021 was less bad than that worst trough. In some ways, because obviously tens of thousands of people dying over the span of just a few weeks is not in any way a positive thing. But the government and people around me started taking the pandemic seriously again, children were educated remotely, there was a serious lockdown, nobody was talking cheerily about the pandemic being "over". And we were steadily working through vaccinating the most vulnerable categories, so there was at least something to hope for. Pre-Delta, I started thinking that maybe by this summer things would actually improve.
Still being under severe restrictions for a second Pesach was obviously disappointing, but actually it was pretty much ok. Partly because I was by then permanently bubbled with my partners, so we could at least have seven of us at the same table while the rest of the family joined us on Zoom. And we'd got better at Zoom services in the course of a year, and we were able to visit and sit in the garden as opposed to not seeing my family of origin at all.
During the Omer this year, the counted seven weeks between Passover and Pentecost, I decided more or less on a whim to try a colouring based spiritual practice, #ColorTheOmer. The colouring worked for me in some ways, because unlike traditional meditation, I didn't have to 'clear my mind' or focus very intensely on breath or mindfulness, I could do something with my hands and have a bit of space to think. Setting out with an intention, which I stuck to pretty well, of doing this every day for seven weeks, meant that I did in fact make the effort to do some every day, even if I wasn't in the mood or it ended up being a bit rushed just before sunset, and that was helpful too. I wrote reflections for the theme of each day, and I deliberately made myself write in coloured pencil and in a defined space in the colouring book, so that I didn't edit, and I (mostly) didn't write at too great length so that the task would become time-consuming and daunting. And publishing the finished words and images on Twitter was also good for me, because I thrive on feedback from others even in what started out as quite a personal practice.
I also ended up doing the neo-kabbalistic connection of the matrix of 7x7 days to seven of the ten "Spheres" or mystical characteristics of God. I generally find this kind of thing far too woo, but actually thinking about the different attributes and how they applied to my life was a positive experience if I didn't have to take it too literally. The main conclusion though was that although I like colouring and journalling, mystical and spiritual practices don't really work for me, and I get more out of the more traditional thing of just saying the same fixed prayers every day. So I went back to that, and it was easy and right and I didn't bother going through agonies of feeling guilty about having stopped my regular practice for a few months. Basically, I've been laying tefillin every day for most of my life since my bat mitzvah, but there have been quite a few several month gaps in there, and I'm more or less accepting that that is in fact they way I am, it's better for me to generally have the intention to do this and sometimes fall short, than to never do it at all.
The good thing I did over the summer for my religious growth was to gently break up with my chevruta and find myself a new one who is much better suited to me. Old chevruta was a lovely person; we were matchmade by Project Zug and enjoyed learning together so much that we carried on past the prepared material of the shiur series and just learned some of Masechet Kiddushin for several months, we had nearly two years of good conversations. But it was time to move on, mainly because she's in the US and once she was vaccinated and started living her post-pandemic life, it was really really hard to find time to learn together, with the time zone difference meaning we can really only do Sunday evenings. And partly because she's younger and less confident than me and a bit reluctant to take intellectual risks, so we weren't perfectly yoked.
With new chevruta, we're following R' Ruttenberg's series of Reflections on Torah. She's an amazing teacher and her creation of some weird hybrid between an internet discussion forum and a yeshiva is masterful. There is loads of good material, some classical (and we're close reading the Torah texts under discussion most weeks), and some modern and original to the rabbi. For me, really committing to Torah study, doing it regularly, and taking each shiur seriously, is much more spiritually meaningful than a lot of what's offered as "spiritual" practice. And my chevruta is wonderful and amazing and I wasn't sure if they would be willing to join me on this path but they were.
And now the New Year has come round again, and I really, really, really didn't want to be on Zoom a second time. A second Pesach, that was one thing, but another new year?! Despite having absolutely no community responsibilities this year, I did not at all follow through on my plans to take on another daily spiritual practice for the month of Elul leading up to the High Holy Days. I did manage one thing, which was to listen to a lot of Elul-themed playlists. I earwormed myself very much with fifty-seven versions of Adon haSelichot which isn't really even part of my own nusach or liturgical tradition. This one I'll be your mirror is definitely my favourite, it's primarily secular music but really carefully put together. And![[twitter.com profile]](https://p2.dreamwidth.org/e0caa790ec10/-/twitter.com/favicon.ico)
velveteenrabbi posted this wonderful poem which unlocked some of what had got snarled up for me.
And actually, Rosh haShanah at the start of this week was perfect. We have a draft version of a new prayerbook, and last year I didn't really pay close attention to it because of *expansive gesture*. This year I started to explore it, read some of the really inspiring and well-chosen readings, and wow, what a thing, imagine having an entirely new prayer book for this most hidebound and well-worn service! It turns out I can no longer cope with the prayer about God deciding the fate of the world in the coming year, but I think it did me some good to just cry through counting how many will die before their time, from plagues, from fire and floods and violence.
In the evening between the two days of the festival, we had a proper celebratory meal with my partners. I made a giant apple challah and tzimmes andghoti_mhic_uait made a feast of different curries and fivemack made his signature baked apples, perfect for the festival. It turned out my non-Jewish partners didn't even know that there's supposed to be a Rosh haShanah meal, because every other year since we've been dating I've been far too busy running things, usually with travelling, to sit down and eat with family. So it was wonderful, we talked about theological things and 9yo Andreas picked up the skill of shofar blowing, almost immediately getting the hang of varying the pitch and blowing fully resonant tekiahs. I didn't teach him, I can't get a sound out, ghoti_mhic_uait did, thanks to hatam_soferet who acquired a shofar for her some years back.
The second day was the hottest of almost the whole summer, and the whole quad were able to walk down to the river together for tashlich. So yes, everything is still awful objectively, but I think possibly I'm reconnecting to religious life at a sort of normal level, not the fevered intensity of 18 months ago, not the slump of a year ago, but on my way back.
So, happy new year if this is a time of renewal for you.
At the start of the pandemic I got religious in some ways. Partly because somebody had suggested that they way to get through the catastrophe was to keep both physically and spiritually in as good shape as you could manage. Partly because everything back in spring of first lockdown had a weird intensity. I felt slightly as if death might be imminent or as if the life I know might disappear under me even if I personally survived. First few weeks I was almost manically productive at work, and a bit fervent in my prayers, and there wasn't much else.
There were other things that contributed. The novelty of Zoom ceremonies. I tried to make a big effort to take a spiritual attitude towards the weird, empty ceremonies, not just messing around on my computer, and of course making a big effort to be fully present usually means you get more out of prayer. Likewise the community and leadership were making a big effort to make everything meaningful in the new world, away from most of our usual props and context. The Rabbinic training college started doing daily morning prayers on Zoom, and it was really good to be able to participate, to pray with a community, and with the leadership of keen bean trainee rabbis who put their all into leading even regular daily services.
I come from a religious tradition that has a lot of responses to collective suffering, including plagues. So I found a lot of new meaning in liturgy and texts that had previously been just background, not emotionally real. Religion became a way to channel my increasing anger at botched national responses to the disaster. I've never really been sincere before this year in praying for the destruction of the wicked, and I've usually reasoned away any direct reference to suffering as punishment. But those parts of tradition started to make a lot more visceral sense to me. Not that some individual dying horribly is an example of Divine justice, more that collectively there was perhaps some meaning in thinking of plague as punishment for ignoring our responsibilities as a society to protect the environment, to look after the welfare of the poor and excluded, for racism and political apathy and voting for short-term self-interest over ethical values.
For the first spring and summer at least, I tried to be more appreciative of my closed-in world, paying close attention small changes as the seasons progressed in our own garden and the few streets around. It's awful to have that closedness enforced, but it is a common spiritual practice to spend a chunk of time absorbed in small details.
The High Holy Days a year ago were mostly an awful blur. Good in some ways, particularly the rare experience of being just a congregant, not making experiences or meaning for other people. But religiously, things went rather downhill from there. Most of our important festivals sit between Passover (Purim was just at the start of things getting real, in most countries) and the autumn festivals, and normally that's fine, that's the rhythm of the year, and winter through early spring are times to move on with everyday life. But the sense of half the calendar just having vanished, and no end in sight, meant that my earlier fervour gave way to feeling mostly low and hopeless.
I stopped praying, mostly. I continued attending weekly services but I didn't fully commit to being present any more, I started feeling bored and distracted. I let the start of my working day drift a bit later; I haven't really fixed that tendency, I'm usually starting work at about 10 am these days and even then doing a bit of playing with email and catching up on feeds before I really start. Which meant I wasn't ready in time for communal daily prayers, and we shifted from emergency responses to 'this is life, now', the College stopped doing daily services. Other communities took over, but it turned out that having to look up whether there were prayers available today and sometimes needing to email for the Zoom link and the times varied, was just too much of a barrier.
I saw what eventually became the January peak coming by late September. So I was as much as possible withdrawing from the world. In the first wave, everybody was stuck at home and everything was online, but by the second, lots of in person stuff was permitted, and those of us who wanted to be cautious had much less going on, whether socializing or cultural events. I was starting to have some FOMO, some events that went ahead without me because I didn't think it was safe to do stuff in person, instead of being cancelled altogether. Also instead of the acute terror of the first wave my mental state was a sort of background dread, much less conducive to heartfelt prayer for God to save my life and my loved ones and the world.
In some ways the early part of 2021 was less bad than that worst trough. In some ways, because obviously tens of thousands of people dying over the span of just a few weeks is not in any way a positive thing. But the government and people around me started taking the pandemic seriously again, children were educated remotely, there was a serious lockdown, nobody was talking cheerily about the pandemic being "over". And we were steadily working through vaccinating the most vulnerable categories, so there was at least something to hope for. Pre-Delta, I started thinking that maybe by this summer things would actually improve.
Still being under severe restrictions for a second Pesach was obviously disappointing, but actually it was pretty much ok. Partly because I was by then permanently bubbled with my partners, so we could at least have seven of us at the same table while the rest of the family joined us on Zoom. And we'd got better at Zoom services in the course of a year, and we were able to visit and sit in the garden as opposed to not seeing my family of origin at all.
During the Omer this year, the counted seven weeks between Passover and Pentecost, I decided more or less on a whim to try a colouring based spiritual practice, #ColorTheOmer. The colouring worked for me in some ways, because unlike traditional meditation, I didn't have to 'clear my mind' or focus very intensely on breath or mindfulness, I could do something with my hands and have a bit of space to think. Setting out with an intention, which I stuck to pretty well, of doing this every day for seven weeks, meant that I did in fact make the effort to do some every day, even if I wasn't in the mood or it ended up being a bit rushed just before sunset, and that was helpful too. I wrote reflections for the theme of each day, and I deliberately made myself write in coloured pencil and in a defined space in the colouring book, so that I didn't edit, and I (mostly) didn't write at too great length so that the task would become time-consuming and daunting. And publishing the finished words and images on Twitter was also good for me, because I thrive on feedback from others even in what started out as quite a personal practice.
I also ended up doing the neo-kabbalistic connection of the matrix of 7x7 days to seven of the ten "Spheres" or mystical characteristics of God. I generally find this kind of thing far too woo, but actually thinking about the different attributes and how they applied to my life was a positive experience if I didn't have to take it too literally. The main conclusion though was that although I like colouring and journalling, mystical and spiritual practices don't really work for me, and I get more out of the more traditional thing of just saying the same fixed prayers every day. So I went back to that, and it was easy and right and I didn't bother going through agonies of feeling guilty about having stopped my regular practice for a few months. Basically, I've been laying tefillin every day for most of my life since my bat mitzvah, but there have been quite a few several month gaps in there, and I'm more or less accepting that that is in fact they way I am, it's better for me to generally have the intention to do this and sometimes fall short, than to never do it at all.
The good thing I did over the summer for my religious growth was to gently break up with my chevruta and find myself a new one who is much better suited to me. Old chevruta was a lovely person; we were matchmade by Project Zug and enjoyed learning together so much that we carried on past the prepared material of the shiur series and just learned some of Masechet Kiddushin for several months, we had nearly two years of good conversations. But it was time to move on, mainly because she's in the US and once she was vaccinated and started living her post-pandemic life, it was really really hard to find time to learn together, with the time zone difference meaning we can really only do Sunday evenings. And partly because she's younger and less confident than me and a bit reluctant to take intellectual risks, so we weren't perfectly yoked.
With new chevruta, we're following R' Ruttenberg's series of Reflections on Torah. She's an amazing teacher and her creation of some weird hybrid between an internet discussion forum and a yeshiva is masterful. There is loads of good material, some classical (and we're close reading the Torah texts under discussion most weeks), and some modern and original to the rabbi. For me, really committing to Torah study, doing it regularly, and taking each shiur seriously, is much more spiritually meaningful than a lot of what's offered as "spiritual" practice. And my chevruta is wonderful and amazing and I wasn't sure if they would be willing to join me on this path but they were.
And now the New Year has come round again, and I really, really, really didn't want to be on Zoom a second time. A second Pesach, that was one thing, but another new year?! Despite having absolutely no community responsibilities this year, I did not at all follow through on my plans to take on another daily spiritual practice for the month of Elul leading up to the High Holy Days. I did manage one thing, which was to listen to a lot of Elul-themed playlists. I earwormed myself very much with fifty-seven versions of Adon haSelichot which isn't really even part of my own nusach or liturgical tradition. This one I'll be your mirror is definitely my favourite, it's primarily secular music but really carefully put together. And
And actually, Rosh haShanah at the start of this week was perfect. We have a draft version of a new prayerbook, and last year I didn't really pay close attention to it because of *expansive gesture*. This year I started to explore it, read some of the really inspiring and well-chosen readings, and wow, what a thing, imagine having an entirely new prayer book for this most hidebound and well-worn service! It turns out I can no longer cope with the prayer about God deciding the fate of the world in the coming year, but I think it did me some good to just cry through counting how many will die before their time, from plagues, from fire and floods and violence.
In the evening between the two days of the festival, we had a proper celebratory meal with my partners. I made a giant apple challah and tzimmes and
ghoti_mhic_uait made a feast of different curries and fivemack made his signature baked apples, perfect for the festival. It turned out my non-Jewish partners didn't even know that there's supposed to be a Rosh haShanah meal, because every other year since we've been dating I've been far too busy running things, usually with travelling, to sit down and eat with family. So it was wonderful, we talked about theological things and 9yo Andreas picked up the skill of shofar blowing, almost immediately getting the hang of varying the pitch and blowing fully resonant tekiahs. I didn't teach him, I can't get a sound out, ghoti_mhic_uait did, thanks to hatam_soferet who acquired a shofar for her some years back.The second day was the hottest of almost the whole summer, and the whole quad were able to walk down to the river together for tashlich. So yes, everything is still awful objectively, but I think possibly I'm reconnecting to religious life at a sort of normal level, not the fevered intensity of 18 months ago, not the slump of a year ago, but on my way back.
We’ll love each other fiercely: in the end
there is no greater work that we can do.
So, happy new year if this is a time of renewal for you.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-09-09 10:16 pm (UTC)I totally hear you on this.
*
I'm so glad that #ColorTheOmer was fruitful for you!
t turns out I can no longer cope with the prayer about God deciding the fate of the world in the coming year, but I think it did me some good to just cry through counting how many will die before their time, from plagues, from fire and floods and violence.
Oh I hear you on that too. The only way I can handle that prayer now is by reading the "who by fire and who by flood" parts as descriptive (that's what our world looks like, dammit) and then focusing on teshuvah, tefilah, and tzedakah as our tools for dealing with the world we've got.
And I'm glad you got to have a festive meal with partners, and shofar, and all those fine things.
*
Also, I am moved by your response to that COVID sonnet. :-D
(no subject)
Date: 2021-09-09 10:57 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2021-09-10 12:37 am (UTC)Glad the New Year was positive despite the continued Zoominess. Shana Tova!
(no subject)
Date: 2021-09-10 05:30 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2021-09-10 12:41 am (UTC)My synagogue has an outdoor tent now, and my husband is one of the shofar blowers, so I did attend outdoor Erev. Also outdoors Tashlich I needed to bring my 16 year old as the Ba'al Tekiah, on a work day for my ger toshav spouse.
5782 - is here, officially, but I'm still waiting to feel renewed for another year.
Synagogue rules right now: Attestation about being vaccinated, fully masked inside the building at ALL times, if you're neither vaccinated nor comfortable masked, please log into the Zoom service. So many services were hybrid, and I only still felt safe attending the outdoor services. I had my chair pulled far away from everyone else, too. 😷💔✡️
I have congenital heart defects, and open heart surgery in August 2017. I still wake up from nightmares about the ventilator experience, but I can fall asleep afterwards. COVID means that my experience can help counseling the families, now. I didn't want to be that relevant! 💔
(no subject)
Date: 2021-09-10 05:38 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2021-09-10 07:14 pm (UTC)My hope is that this year is better than your best year. We could all use something like that.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-09-14 12:54 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2021-09-17 01:42 am (UTC)