A Partnership of Meaning
This is a season when many of us feel an extra call to show up - to ritual, to prayer, to text study, to community. These are the Days of Judgment, Days of Awe, Days of Repentance, Days of Joy (Sukkot). In short, these are days of Meaning with a capital “M”. So what happens when we show up but the Meaning doesn’t? What happens when we yearn to feel inspired, uplifted, spiritually challenged, ethically transformed… but nothing seems to happen?
On Shabbat Shuvah, in between Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur, we read Ha’azinu (Deuteronomy 32), a poetic castigation of future Israelite disobedience. Moses hands the people a flowery warning to do better. Seemingly, a fitting if harsh message for the season. (“Is this how you repay the Creator, O dull and witless people?!”)
After reciting the poem, Moses tells the people to take his warning seriously. “This is not an empty word for you (ki lo davar reik hu mikem). It is your life! (ki hu chayyeichem)” (Deuteronomy 32:47). A midrash reworks the phrase “empty word for you” to mean “if the word appears empty - it is from you”, suggesting Meaning isn’t absent, it just requires more effort to discover (or create). Meaning is a cooperative project between texts and rituals on the one hand, and the people who study and practice them on the other.
This isn’t to say there aren’t harmful texts and poorly done rituals. I do not believe we are obligated to suffer through them if it compromises our well-being. But I do think it is helpful to push ourselves into active partnership with the Jewish tradition wherever we find opportunities to do so. When something feels confusing, boring, uncomfortable, obvious, too familiar or too unfamiliar, imagine the experience as a desert well. If you dig a little deeper, you may unleash living waters, the unpredictable vitality surging underneath Jewish words and actions. It isn’t empty - it is your life!
We often try to reconnect with vitality by seeking newness - new places, new melodies, new translations and interpretations. An innovative interpretation is called a chiddush, something new. The impulse to seek lost vitality through newness might be captured by the phrase chadesh yameinu k’kedem - make our days full of newness [so we feel the spark] as of old. If the well of meaning has dried up, move on and find new ones!
But if we take the sages seriously when they say the words can never be fully emptied of possible meaning, we can try the spiritual practice of abiding. Writer Maggie Nelson captures the delight that can emerge from stubbornly sticking by the same old things. “I know now that a studied evasiveness [i.e. seeking the new] has its own limitations, its own ways of inhibiting certain forms of happiness and pleasure. The pleasure of abiding. The pleasure of insistence, of persistence. The pleasure of obligation, the pleasure of dependency. The pleasures of ordinary devotion. The pleasure of recognizing that one may have to undergo the same realizations, write the same notes in the margin, return to the same themes in one’s work, relearn the same emotional truths, write the same book over and over again - not because one is stupid or obstinate or incapable of change, but because such revisitations constitute a life.”
Whether you are innovating or revisiting in this season, may each word draw you in with endless curiosity, may each melody stir yearning and awe, and may each ritual fill you with meaning.
Shabbat Shalom!
Rabbi Jay LeVine
