In my Mussar course, my focus right now is on the power that our words have and especially on the value of silence. I have always been sensitive to sound, but all of a sudden, I realize just how much noise is around me. Especially, I’ve noticed the noise within me. The noisiest thing in my life is my own mind.
I aimed to begin finding inner stillness by having five minutes of silence each day, simply breathing with my hand on my heart and listening to whatever comes. It is surprisingly difficult for me! I think I fear what I may find there.
Perhaps my favorite: “The soul needs contemplative solitude in order to digest learning and experience and convert it into wisdom.”
Since mid-August, Jewish people around the world have been in the process of preparing for the High Holy Days, the 10 “Days of Awe” which begin today with Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. We have turned inward to focus on repentance, forgiveness (of others and of ourselves), and of becoming better, cultivating compassion, loving-kindness, and patience, as well as on reaching out to others to mend fences.
“Earlier I mentioned The Denial of Death
Against death, which we see as the ultimate failure, we offer up success. Against death, which we see as the ultimate emptiness, we offer up the acquisition of objects. Against death, which we see as the end of all feeling, we offer up the pursuit of pleasure. Against death, which we see as the final stillness, we offer up a ceaseless rage of activity. Against death, which we see as the ultimate impotence, we offer up the glorification of our own power.
But in the process, we give up our nefesh—the nothingness out of which life arises, the emptiness that gives our lives meaning. And we give it up because we are frightened of it. It reeks of all we are trying to deny. Consequently, we’ve become a nation of workaholics, a people who have come to believe that we can conquer death by dint of our own powers, by a ceaseless swirl of activity. To rest is to die, so we never permit ourselves a moment’s rest, a moment’s nefesh, a moment’s nothingness. We think we know how the world works. We think we even know how the mind works. We have become enchanted with how capable we’ve become with our computers, our jet planes, our space travel, our genetic engineering. We’ve talked ourselves into believing that we can solve any problem, overcome any obstacle if we just do more, if we just think about it long and hard enough, if we just try a little harder.
But our problem is not that we don’t try hard enough. It is that we try too hard. It’s that we have such an exaggerated belief in the force of our own effort that we never stop trying. Our pursuit of pleasure and success is relentless, feverish, sometimes bordering on the demonic. We never rest. We have portable computers and faxes and e-mail that we take on vacation. We have phones in our cars. We have call waiting, so that even our interruptions are interrupted. Even those small moments of contemplation—of nefesh, of nothingness—we used to enjoy on vacation or even just driving back and forth between errands, even these are denied us.
But in spite of our constant effort, there is failure and death all around us, on the downtown streets and in the testimony of our own bodies. We try not to see it, but the psychic squint we have to make in order to do this reduces everything in our line of sight, not just the void we are trying to ignore. And this squinting requires a tremendous expenditure of energy, energy we desperately need, and it never works anyway. Sooner or later we will find ourselves tied to a chair under the bare bulb of the truth.
Sexually, physically, and mentally, we humans peak in our early twenties. After that we decline. Our heart muscles weaken and we lose stamina and endurance. Our blood pressure increases and our arteries harden, and this affects our brain, heart, kidneys, and the extremities, and none of them take it well. The gastrointestinal system also begins to slow. The prostate enlarges. Our hormones slow to a trickle, making us look older and feel less energy and initiative. Our bones leach calcium and phosphates and become fragile. The skin thins, dries, and becomes discolored. Our brain atrophies. Our nerve cells waste away. We suffer memory loss, sometimes severe. Birth is our only real success, and even that success doesn’t really belong to us. It belongs to God. In the beginning, God created us out of nothing. It is all downhill from there, and that’s the part that belongs to us—the long, slow return to nothing.
But if we stop resisting it for a moment, it is precisely this return that can save us. It is precisely this return that can renew us.
Human renewal is one of the universe’s great mysteries, one we tend to take for granted. When our cars run out of gas, we fill them up with gas. When our batteries run down, we recharge them with electrical energy. But when we human beings run down, we simply plunge into nothingness. We sleep. Nothing happens to us when we sleep, and it is precisely this nothing that restores us.
When we lose touch with this sense of nefesh, of space, of emptiness, we feel overwhelmed, overstressed, overburdened. So for many of us the question is, How do we find our way back to heaven? How do we relocate that spaciousness out of which we emerged? How do we connect with our nefesh?
The Sabbath is a time when we inhabit ourselves this way. This may be the real reason so few Christians or Jews observe the Sabbath anymore. Work, commerce, and our usual frantic rush of activities are all devices we use to distract ourselves from ourselves, to keep from looking at who we are, to keep us from fully inhabiting our lives. Perhaps the real reason more of us don’t observe a Sabbath is not because it’s inconvenient—not because we are spiritually lazy—but rather because we are afraid. We are afraid of reflection because we are afraid of ourselves. We are afraid that if we ever stopped running long enough to catch a glimpse of ourselves, we would see something we didn’t like.
The real work we have to do at this time of year, I think, is to find compassion no matter what. But we have to find it for ourselves before we can be of much use to others. The real work is to look at who we really are, and to contemplate Who made us that way. This I can promise you: neither you nor your children conform to the ideas other people are trying to foist on you. You are the unique creations of God, and any attempt to pin you down to some idea will only diminish you. You are equal to your life. You have been given exactly what you need, not one thing more and not one thing less.”
