Rabbi Deborah Waxman (DW):          I'm Rabbi Deborah Waxman and I'm so happy to welcome you to Hashivenu, a podcast about Jewish teachings on resilience. Hashivenu means "return us." The "us" is the Jewish people asking to be renewed. Seeking renewal, cultivating resilience, these are central concerns in Jewish thought and Jewish practice, especially this time of year.

DW:            Focusing on resilience is one way to think about how the Jewish people and the Jewish civilization we've created have survived for thousands of years. Again and again throughout history, Jews have experienced catastrophe. I'm talking about living through shattering challenges that destroyed our communities, that made us rethink our relationship to God, our relationship to other Jews, our relationship to other peoples, and the world around us. 

DW:            And again and again, we have transcended these catastrophes. We have breathed new life into the Jewish people and the Jewish civilization. We have found pathways to repair. From trauma, we have had to heal, and we have done so by finding ways to cultivate resilience both individually and collectively.

Rabbi David Teutsch (DT):              For me, Yom Kippur is the day I like best all year long. People say, "Are you crazy?" But the truth is, what could be better than reconnecting to the divine and reconnecting to pure spirit and recognizing the incredible possibility in the year ahead?

DW:            In this first episode of the new year I am so happy to welcome Rabbi Dr. David Teutsch, my friend, my mentor, the former president of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, and professor emeritus. If you've had a chance to dip into A Guide for Jewish Practice, David was the editor and one of the primary writers of that series, and if you've had the opportunity to encounter Kol Haneshamah, the Reconstructionist prayer book series, David was the editor and the champion of that throughout its extraordinary, the 10 years of its creation.

DW:            We're going to talk today about this High Holiday season, about the Yamim Noraim, the Days of Awe. As the editor of the prayer book series, David was deeply involved in creating and in shaping the Reconstructionist Machzor. One of the things that distinguishes the Reconstructionist prayer book is that there is commentary below the lines, meaning that the Hebrew and the translation is set at the top two thirds or half of the page and underneath, below the line is commentary and interpretation and intention.

DW:            Even as David edited all that and brought it all together, he also frequently contributed beautiful, beautiful teachings that raise up the themes and the key points often intertwined of this powerful High Holiday season. So, David, welcome.

DT:              Thank you. It's a delight to be here with you, Deborah.

DW:            I'd like to start by asking you to read one of the entries below the line.

DT:              Delighted to. "During this season of the year, we struggle with images of God as judge and sovereign, even as we see God as a source of forgiveness and return. During the Kaddish at this time of year, we repeat the word "l'eilah." L'eilah, l'eilah, higher by far. This reminds us on the one hand that only true change on our part can reach through the many intervening layers to reconnect us with the divine in ourselves and in our world.  The liturgical repetition also reminds us how important, powerful and redeeming that reconnection can be. Go higher, settle for nothing less. It beckons us not to quit during the strenuous climb. True change is not easy, but saving ourselves depends on it."

DW:            So, we say "l'eilah, u'l'eilah" in the Kaddish, whether it's just the Kaddish when we're marking transitions between services or in the Mourners' Kaddish. I find, in High Holidays, it's this tension between liturgy that people know and are really familiar, and liturgy that they don't know. And here in the Kaddish, which a lot of people know, it gets interrupted and this extra word gets added in and that's such a beautiful explanation of why and how it can function.

DT:              And it seems to me that the whole period from the beginning of the month of Elul through Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur is a time when, in different ways throughout that season, we engage that struggle. For Elul, it's focused primarily on issues between one person and another, beyn adam le-havero, and the challenge there is to start by being able to acknowledge ourselves when we've hurt others, or in some other way, done them wrong, and reconnecting to them and rebuilding relationships. It strikes me, as I do that work, that often it's not just sins of commission that I need to think about, but sins of omission. Having just recently gotten up from shiva for my mother, I am acutely aware of how amazing it is, how many people visit, how many write notes, how many people send an email. And that, in turn, made me think back over the year and say, "Were there any kinds of moments in people's lives that I should have acknowledged and I didn't? Let me make it up now." This is a month for doing that kind of thing. Because the truth is, for a lot of us, the sins of omissions are more common than sins of commission. And-

DW:            So as we just kind of hurdle along, trying to get through the day ...

DT:              And if you read of an announcement in an email, to click on, I ought to respond to this right away, is really important. Because I know, if I don't do it then, it sort of gets lost in the continuous email avalanche, and I may never get around to doing it if I don't do it then.

DW:            That's a whole other conversation about how complicated electronic communication ... how it both is very facilitative, and can allow for the reestablishment of connections, so many stories of people reconnecting on Facebook who had lost touch with each other, but how we live this whole parallel life online and how much it means that sometimes the face-to-face transformative encounters can sometimes suffer.

DT:              One of the things to be thinking about as we do the work of Elul is how much more powerful it is to go and talk to people face-to-face, and if that's really impossible, then at least by phone. I don't think you can actually do a decent apology on email.

DW:            Yeah. In my acquaintance, I'm going to speak very carefully, there is someone who occasionally will just send a kind of an "e-blast" out, or a text ... group text out, to say, "If I've hurt you in any way, I'm terribly sorry." And on the one hand, I'm so moved by how seriously the command to do a Heshbon Hanefesh, to do a searching of the soul, and it does feel cheapened. It feels qualitatively different than even a one-on-one conversation. Conversely, I heard just the other day about someone who goes to every member of his community and sits with them and asks, "Is there any way I have hurt you?", and is at least willing to have the conversation, if not to really repair the relationship.

DT:              One of the things that I try to do is, at least for the people with whom I interact a lot over the course of the year, say to them, "I don't know of anything that's in the way of our relationship. I don't know of any damage. Do you know of any? Because I'd like to make sure we're clean before the start of the new year." Usually, the first time I do that with somebody, they're kind of startled, and they think and they say, "No, I guess not. I think we're clean!" But by the second or third year, they're not surprised by the question, and I think they're grateful for an opportunity to reflect on it. And it's such a happy moment when we can say, "No, we've got this clean relationship at this moment."

DW:            Yeah. I think about if one of the themes of Rosh Hashanah is the birthday of the world, and the newness, and that openness to creation, the fact that relationships get created and renewed the same way that the universe does. And that's what I feel like this is, is this opportunity to start anew. The year, and the relationship, and myself, and my intentions.

DT:              One of the other things I think about for Rosh Hashanah, though, is the fact that in ancient times, it was part of a re-enthronement ritual about renewing commitment to the sovereign, and putting the sovereign back in place. In a world where we are constantly pushed to think about anything but God, and anything but ultimate values, to come back to Rosh Hashanah and say, "Okay, what are the things that I consider the most important things in life, and what are the things that I have a sacred duty to support and honor, and what does that have to do with re-enthroning God in my life?" Seems to me that's central to Rosh Hashanah, and very often because people talk about Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur as one unit, they switch over to worrying about sin and transgression before they do the re-enthronement part, and the re-enthronement part is essential because it's what makes sense of how you judge yourself. If you don't have your mind focused on what's ultimately important, how do you decide where you went astray?

DW:            It's such an interesting point, David. I really used to struggle a lot with Malchuyot, with this idea of the enthronement of the divine king. I'm an American child, deeply committed to democracy, and it resonates very, very deeply, and the whole image of "melech" ("king") --  in my own liturgy, I'm much more likely to use "ruach", spirit, breath, as an animating metaphor, than I am "melech". It sounds a lot alike, it scans with the liturgy, and it really moves me very, very deeply, in a way that I resist with "the king". I really do think, born out of my modern American sensibility, I will tell you a huge shift for me was 20 years ago, I think.

DW:            Our colleague, Nancy Fuchs Kreimer, told me a story of German Christians struggling with how melech ... or maybe, I think Christians are essential to the story, but if you were to translate melech into German, it's "Führer." And how German Christians of faith in the second World War, during Nazi rule, refused to call Hitler "Führer," because they said ... the same way we say in Hebrew liturgy, "There is no king but God," here it was made explicit. There are no lords of the manor in my life. There's that American democratic, anti-aristocratic sensibility, but the idea of ultimate values, the idea of radical humility, the idea of service to something larger than myself, that feels absolutely essential to live a life of connection and meaning without clear markers. So that's how I found my way back to the enthronement without really just resisting it.

DT:              And part of what you said that I want to pick up on is the way in which enthronement, lifting up that high, is only possible if we adopt an attitude of humility. We are living in a society where every advertisement is encouraging us to think more highly of ourselves, and the system used for getting ahead is constantly bolstering egos. To come into the High Holiday season and recognize my own smallness, and recognize my frailty, and my finitude, and to recognize that those things that I treasure as the most important, those things are in shocking difference for me in my smallness. If I could hold that distinction, not only does it help me make sense of Malchuyot, and make sense of God's sovereignty, but it also helps me because when I manage to get my ego smaller, it makes me a much stronger person, and a person much more able to resist woundedness.

DW:            Yeah. That's really important, and beautiful. I think that understanding of interconnectedness, that in our contraction, it's about making space for everything else to rush in, rather than an erasure or a disappearance.

DT:              And Malchuyot is first because it sets the stage for the other two major themes of Rosh Hashanah, Zichronot and Shofarot.

DW:            So, Zichronot, about remembering and recollections. I've been thinking a lot about Zichronot this year. In another hat, I'm an historian and looking back, and also looking ahead, and how to hallow memories and not get lost in them, and not get lost in nostalgia, and not only look backwards, but to look backwards in order to look forward, and in that way, shape meaning and connection for myself and for the people around me. That's been a major preoccupation of mine. Like you, I also suffered a loss this year when my father died, and I think that kind of fuels the poignancy of remembering and also living into the present.

DT:              And "remembering" in the liturgy is interesting in another way, because not only does it cause us to remember personally, but it reminds us that God remembers. That is to say, to remember is to bring something back into existence from our past. That's what it means to re-member something. If we're thinking about Israel today, and the struggles around the Nation State Law, it's really important to remember the principles on which Israel was founded in the Declaration of Independence. As we struggle with issues in the United States, similarly, we need to remember the founding documents and the high hopes they held out for us. So remembering is very personal, and I always, at this time of year, in remembering my dad and other folks. The older I get, there are more and more and more of them to remember. But I also really dwell on the" God remembers". Because just as I remembered their best qualities, just as I treasured their stories, I also am remembering that God remembers us in our frailty. God remembers us in our struggle to recapture those ideals. And God remembers us, that is to say, brings us whole again, as we move through the process of the High Holidays. So we first reinstate God as sovereign, and then God remembers us.

DW:            So in like one minute, I want to talk about how to do this if one doesn't have a conception of a personal God. I think, for me, it's about attaching myself to something larger, as we were talking about with Malchuyot. The collective story, whichever it is, there are multiple stories that we're telling at all time, but the idea of our remembering, God remembering, for me, in the Jewish liturgy, the quintessential moment that we're remembering is redemption. We were slaves, and we rushed to freedom, and God redeemed us. And so, to join myself into that narrative, and then from that command to remember, to use it to turn to remember my own actions, my own ... that I want to be held accountable to something. It takes some work sometimes, I think, and feels really essential to put the effort and to come up with a conceptualization that really sustains.

DT:              Well, so one thing I would say about that is, while we talk about God as redeemer, we also talk about God as healer, but we know that through doctors and hospitals, we are God's partners in healing. In redemption, God may be the source of our ideals, but it is we who join together to act as redeemers. So for me, God isn't a guy out there somewhere. God is the unifier of the universe, and when I'm sitting in shul on Yom Kippur, and I feel myself surrounded by community, and I join with the community, and out the window there are the trees and rocks, and I join with the world, and I see that my task is being an enthroner and a redeemer, I don't see God as being out there, I see the divinity within us joining with the divinity that is the unity of the world, and together acting as redeemers. Redemption is not, for me, a once and finished project, as is implied by a Messiah, redemption is really a process in which we're constantly engaged, trying to overcome forces of chaos and evil. Insofar as we join with our communities for that task, we bring God as redeemer alive for us there. That's actually what prepares us for Yom Kippur.

DW:            I think there's a teaching of yours that I repeat very, very often when you're talking about community. Because you can take High Holidays, you can take the Machzor and go out into nature and read through the prayer book, and this is, I think, richest in community. You taught me to always remember that we're talking about horizontal community, the people who are sitting in the room around us, and also vertical community, our ancestors who came before us, and the children, metaphorical or real, who will follow us. And that, both experience of community, and an imminent presence of the divine in community, I think, is incredibly important and powerful, whatever the dynamic at hand, whether it's redemption, or healing, or remembering, or repentance.

DT:              Those things really tie together. There's a commentary of mine in the prayer book that I think speaks to that. When we pray for God to remember, we are reciting a list of things that we then collectively remember. This remembering of past good deeds and good intentions for future actions inspires us to higher thoughts and deeds. In praying for God to remember, we need to take responsibility for becoming the vehicles by which our prayer can become reality. It is only our subsequent actions that can prove our prayers are not in vain. 

DW:            Beautiful. Okay, we've covered Heshbon Hanefesh, the reflection that goes on in Elul, and as we begin the season of Teshuvah, we've talked a little bit about the birthday of the world, we've talked about Malchuyot, acknowledging God's kingship, and Zichronot. That leads us very clearly to Shofarot, the third major theme. How would you even translate ... Shofarot clearly is the reference to the shofar, that we blow on Rosh Hashanah, and at the end of Yom Kippur. In fact, if you're in a community that convenes every single day, from the beginning of Elul, will blast the shofar to help rouse our spirits and get ready for this season. I tend to translate Shofarot, kind of as ... in that rousing spirit, as a kind of awakening.

DT:              Well, I often quote one of the prophets that's quoted in the the traditional Machzor who says, "Blow the Shofar of our redemption." I think that's really where we are in the progression. We enthrone, we remember, and then we realize we have to join to bring redemption. If we think of the Shofar as a battle cry, which it certainly was in ancient times, the battle cry is not a cry to war, but to join together in the task of salvation.

DW:            One of the practices, in my little High Holiday community, we used to do is, I would call out the Shofar call, and then the entire community would call out the Shofar call. And then the folks who were blowing would sound out the blast. And part of it was both to get them directly involved, rather than as observers [inaudible] performers, as actors, and participants, and I would always hope that they would feel in their chest the vibrations and the trembling that the blast, at its purest, and at its loudest, I think really can crack us open.

DT:              There's a Hasidic meiseh (story) that I think gets at some of the challenge really well. The rabbi says, this is a call to battle, and the battle is an internal battle between the yetzer ha-ra, the evil impulse that resides in all of us, and the yetzer ha-tov, our essential goodness. When you hear that battle cry, it's about recognizing that it's up to each of us to make sure that good triumphs. Part of that is about recognizing that if good triumphs within me, it'll be because I'm acting with goodness in the world, and when we join together acting with goodness, we human beings are a powerful force for good.

DW:            Beautiful. So, do you think that that's the trajectory that points us right toward Yom Kippur, and toward the ...

DT:              Because Yom Kippur only makes sense if you accept the possibility of redemption. There is no point in admitting sin and transgression and failure unless you go into it recognizing your own finitude, and believing that you can emerge a stronger, better, person out the other side, and more able to experience meaning in the world. I tie Yom Kippur really tightly to something that's in the Birkhot Ha-shakhar ("Morning Blessings"section of the daily prayers, where it says "elohai, neshamah she-natata bi tehorah hi", "the soul you have given me is pure." It doesn't say, "was pure," it says "is pure." I think of Yom Kippur, about the task of stripping away all the schmutz on top of my soul, all the thoughts and deeds that have gotten in the way, so that my pure soul can shine forth and reconnect to the divine and thereby renew itself.

DT:              That's a very optimistic way of looking at the world. You have to believe that there is divinity in the world to which you can reconnect. For me, Yom Kippur is the day I like best all year long. People say, "Are you crazy?" But the truth is, what could be better than reconnecting to the divine and reconnecting to pure spirit and recognizing the incredible possibility in the year ahead? I always find it renewing and exciting, and while I'm always exhausted by the end of Yom Kippur, I also, and I'm awake in a way I might not spiritually be at any other moment in the year.

DW:            That's very interesting. I'm thinking, you're really just so not good at small talk ... the really meaty, substantial conversation, whether it's with other people, or yourself. I think, for me, I will really carry that with me this year. I think, for me, the piece that I resonate the most deeply with is the encounter with death, all the ways that Yom Kippur asks us to really face our mortality. It's not so much the mortification of the body, but just that recognition that we are this fragile container. But so often, I think the physical overtakes the spiritual, and so to ask the spiritual to take the forefront, and the physical to register and recognize, as you said, the finitude, and the fragility, and inevitability that all of us will encounter, and then to rise up from it renewed and ideally, as you said, cleansed. That to me has always been the animating metaphor that really works especially powerfully. I sometimes will try to compose ... there's an exercise of composing an obituary on Yom Kippur, and sometimes really try to look that hard about how would it have changed from last year, and what have I done, and what do I need to do in the year ahead for it to be the words that I really want to stand by?

DT:              The exercise that I do that's almost like that, or I did in the years when I was leading congregational prayer, was to ask people to imagine being present at their own funeral, and to listen to the eulogies that would be given now, and then to ask themselves what they wish could have been the content of those eulogies, and to make a list of things they need to do in the next year to move toward those eulogies. The truth of the matter is, for me, I don't really care that much what appears in the obit, I care a lot about how people will act because we've shared a life. I think much more essential than a legacy in words, though goodness knows I've written more than my fair share, is how have we touched others' lives so that they live redemptively?

DW:            What a beautiful place to end, David. I think, though, so many of the words you've written are in the service of that goal, and certainly the friendship that you've extended to me has been deeply sustaining. So as my teacher, and as my friend, I thank you so much for your time, and for your teachings, and for your example.

DT:              And I wish you a very sweet and redemptive new year.

DW:            Thank you. You too. Le-shanah tovah metukah u-mevorakh. ("A good, sweet, and blessed new year")

DW:            So I would like to thank my guest, Rabbi David Teutsch, for our wonderful discussion on the themes of the Yamim Noraim, the themes of the High Holidays. For more information, you can go to hashivenu.fireside.fm, and you can also find more resources on this topic on reconstructingjudaism.org and on ritualwell.org. I'm Rabbi Deborah Waxman, and you've been listening to Hashivenu, Jewish teachings on resilience.