Tag Archives: teshuvah

August 23, 2021 · 6:48 am

T’shuvah

Chris Farrar (Columbus, OH)

I’ve been Jewish all my life, but for the first 17 years I didn’t know it.  It’s fair to say that I didn’t really know what “Jewish” was.  In fact, once when I was 8 or so, I went with a friend to Mass, and then told his mother – to her great delight – that I was definitely going to be Catholic.

Well wouldn’t she be surprised.

My father was raised Baptist but really had no interest in religion.  My mother’s family was Jewish, but very secular. 

I, my sister and brother were raised without any religion or religious connection.  Due to my father’s influence, I imagine, we always had a Christmas tree, we went on Easter egg hunts and generally did the things that Christian families did.  But nothing Jewish.

I grew up without any of the normal Jewish childhood experiences.  No Yom Kippur.  No synagogue.  No Passover.  No summer camp.  “David melech yisrael” would have been just a string of sounds in a catchy tune.

It was as if my mother’s Jewish heritage didn’t exist. 

So here’s what happened.

Some time in the middle of high school I underwent knee surgery and had to stay home for several days.  After exhausting all the science fiction in the house I was desperate for something to read.  The only thing I could find was “The Source” by James Michener.

This novel takes place in Israel in the early 60s.  It looks at the history of the Jews through the lens of an archaeological dig.  The site is a fictitious tel named “Makor.”   In Hebrew the word means “source.” 

When I finished that book I knew I was Jewish and I grabbed at it with both hands.  I read book after book on the history of the Jews.  I took courses.  I even joined the Jewish Defense League for a while, until I came to understand them better.

Later I lived on a kibbutz in Israel and learned Hebrew.  I taught it at the university as a TA.  I married a wonderful Jewish woman and raised three amazing Jewish children.  And now there’s a Jewish son-in-law and a new generation of Jewish grandchildren.

Early in my relationship with Judaism, after I returned from Israel, it seemed to me that the only way to be Jewish was to be ultra-Orthodox.  The Chasidim were the saving remnant, the keepers of the sacred flame.  I moved into the Lubavitcher Chabad House at UCLA.  I put on tefillin every morning.  I kept kosher.  I kept the Sabbath. 

This lasted a month.  At the end of the month I knew I couldn’t be Jewish in that way.  I wasn’t even sure I believed in God.   Not, at any rate, the way I needed to in order to live the Lubavitcher life.  That wasn’t going to be my connection to Judaism. 

Instead, as it has developed over the years, my connection has been to the Hebrew language, to the holidays, to my family and to the history of the Bible and of the land of Israel as understood through the perspective of archaeology.

So.  T’shuvah.

On Yom Kippur we think of it as repentance.

What it really means is “return.”

For me it’s been a return to a history that is my history, to a language that is my language and to a land that is my land.

And it’s a return to a book of writings so compelling in its message that it has become the foundation of our whole concept of the obligations of our shared humanity.

 And for me, more even than this, it means a return to wonder.

Who were these people, my ancestors? How did they live? How did they think?  They were a tiny outpost of humanity, living in a poor nation, smaller than many US counties.  They were ravaged horribly by powerful nations, not once but over and over again.  They lost their Temple and their sacred city but somehow, uniquely among ancient peoples, they didn’t lose their God. 

How did they, among all peoples, develop the moral, ethical and spiritual foundation now embraced by half the world’s population?

If they could see how the power of their belief has cascaded down the centuries, what would they think of it?  What would they think of the re-emergence of their nation in its own land, of the resurrection of their language?

Would they recognize their God?  Would they see Him in the miracles of the Tanakh?  Would they see Him in the rebirth of the land of Israel?  Would they see Him in the spread of their vision through Christianity and Islam? 

Or maybe they would see Him in the way a day of teenage boredom can change a person irrevocably, sending reverberations not only down the decades of his own life but also down the lives of generations to come.

So, back to t’shuvah.  Return.

Not just a return to history; but rather, perhaps, a return to the future.

Chris Farrar grew up in southern California, earned a doctorate in linguistics, and worked in technology marketing and, eventually, in data analytics. His first novel, By the Waters of Babylon, follows twelve-year-old Ya’el as she’s deported to Babylon after the siege of Jerusalem in 586 BCE. The novel is available on Amazon,  Barnes & Noble, Kobo and Apple Books. If you’d like to learn more about Chris and his work, visit his website: christopherfarrar.com.

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September 21, 2015 · 6:00 am

Poem and Direction of the Heart for the Tenth Day of T’shuvah

By Marcia Falk (Berkeley, CA)

In her new book, The Days Between: Blessings, Poems, and Directions of the Heart for the Jewish High Holiday Season, renowned poet Marcia Falk re-creates key prayers and rituals in poetic forms from a contemporary perspective for those in search of a contemplative approach to the High Holidays. Here is an excerpt:

What Do You Have?

Not this earth, not even dust—
Not yours, caw invisible crows
like doors swinging shut.

Not your memories, rising
and burning in the air
like leaf-dew in sun.

Not your thoughts, poking in
and darting out
like hummingbirds in the blossoms.

Only this bit of time (like clouds unforming)—
even as you point to it,
gone.

Nothing

Nothing. You began as nothing and you will end as nothing. And in between—everything, and nothing. In between—joy and sorrow, beauty and decay. Everything yours to partake of, yours to bear. Yours to see, to know, to give birth to—and to let go. None of it yours to have.

Not even you are yours to have. You belong to a wholeness so great you cannot even conceive of it.

No, it is not a belonging; nothing owns you. You are simply part of it. You came out of it and you will return to it. You do not ever leave it, you are part of it forever.

And this is your moment to be alive.

Marcia Falk was born in New York City and raised on Long Island in a Conservative Jewish home. She received a B.A. in philosophy magna cum laude from Brandeis University and a Ph.D. in English and comparative literature from Stanford.  A university professor for fifteen years, she taught Hebrew and English literature, Jewish studies, Bible, and creative writing at Stanford, the State University of New York at Binghamton, and the Claremont Colleges. Her classic verse translation of the biblical Song of Songs was released in 2004 in a new edition, The Song of Songs: Love Lyrics from the Bible (Brandeis University Press).

For more information about her work, visit: http://marciafalk.com/

The material posted here is excerpted from The Days Between: Blessings, Poems, and Directions of the Heart for the Jewish High Holiday Season By Marcia Falk (HBI Series on Jewish Women, Brandeis University Press) and reprinted with permission of the author and publisher.

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October 3, 2011 · 6:36 am

The Bridge Between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur

by Janet Ruth Falon (Elkins Park, PA)

It’s a long bridge, and high,
with pilings deep in the water,
dug into the foundation of earth.
It takes ten days to cross,
by foot,
(more, with baggage),
and you have to walk it yourself.
No one can carry you.
People have been known to jump off
but miraculously, survive,
as long as they’re willing to try again
the following year.
Each person decides
how many times to pay a toll
and to whom
along the way.
And you pay with words,
tokens of your repentence:
“I forgive you.”
“Please forgive me.”
But what’s most amazing
is that you’re supposed to keep turning around
as you walk,
turning around
to face four corners
and everything in between,
turning around
to make sure you’ve seen every person
and the scope of your past year
so you can pay up and start fresh
on the other side.
And instead of getting dizzy
as you cross
you feel lighter, and cleaner,
more at-one with yourself
and all the other travelers
and the earth below the water
beneath your feet.
Venice has its Bridge of Sighs;
but this is the Bridge of Awe.

Janet Ruth Falon, the author of The Jewish Journaling Book (Jewish Lights, 2004), teaches a variety of writing classes — including journaling and creative expression — at many places, including the University of Pennsylvania. She leads a non-fiction writing group and works with individual students, and is continuing to write Jewish-themed readings for what she hopes will become a book, In the Spirit of the Holidays.

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September 13, 2010 · 7:25 am

An Argument for Jewish Observance

by Orah Friedland Zipper (Denver, CO)

I received a comment from “Anonymous” on my previous post (http://lady-light.blogspot.com/2009/12/archeological-find-proves-ancient.html), which was about the archeological find  of a 2000+ year old cave from the time of the Hasmoneans.  The commenter asked why that could be a reason to become a religious  Jew.  Good question.  To the average non-Jewish person, perhaps, the find might be interesting in a general way; to an archaeologist or historian, it would be interesting as a historical find which would validate and increase our knowledge of the past.

For a Jew, however, such a find as this means so much more.

Look at it this way: we live today in the “Information Age,” right?  We are bombarded with information and have been for years, through the media–through radio, television and newspapers, and in our high-technology era on the Internet through virtual news sites, blogs and now social-networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.  How can we assimilate all this? How do we know what is truth and what is fiction?  And, for that matter, how can we know how to behave, in general, and how to react to events?

Now, we Jews have been blessed with a ‘code book’ which we’ve had for thousands of years, which tells us how to act, and tells us why we are here on this Earth.  This book is called the Torah.  It consists of the Written and the Oral Law, as well as the history of our people.

In our ‘modern’ times, however, people are constantly questioning and arguing religion versus science.  Which one offers the real explanation for the existence of the world? Now to me, there is very little contradiction between science and religion–they are one. Both science and the Torah are a means of explaining the truth of existence.  The more we learn things through scientific study (think ‘Big Bang’ and ‘Quantum Theory’), the more we understand about the nature of G-d (can you tell I’m reading Gerald Schroeder’s books?), and the more it seems to (yikes!) match the depiction of G-d as written in the Torah.

But you’d never know it by listening, reading or watching debates on which one, science or religion, is “correct.” This can–coupled with global anti-Semitism towards Jews and Israel, (which according to many can ‘do no right’ in this world)– really confuse one, especially someone who might be searching for the meaning of his existence.  Doubts abound.  Are any of the religions valid? Maybe Judaism is no more valid than any other major religion?

And then, a Jew goes to the kotel and has a “spiritual experience.” Or a Jew goes to a grave of one of our Tzaddikim, prays before the grave, and is greatly moved–by something—what? Or he visits and walks around, say, Emek ha-Elah, where the future King David, as a young boy slew the giant Goliath, and he (the visitor) is in awe, and his soul is stirred.

Or, a secular Jew, who went through life without a strong connection to his Jewishness, unearths a two-thousand-year-old cave while digging out his basement, which he discovers is the burial place of the last Hasmonean king.  Furthermore, the cave has an inscription on the wall in his people’s alt-neu language, the language in which his Torah was written, and which was revived in the twentieth century as a spoken language.

Is that not awesome?  Is that not enough of a spiritual experience to touch one’s neshama?  Is that not enough that it says to that Jew, ‘evidence of your history in your historical homeland  is before your eyes being unearthed and is unfolding, bit by bit, and proving that history true.  Jew: Is it not time to return?–to return to your Jewish roots?’

If that is not enough of an experience for one’s neshama to do teshuva, I don’t know what is.

Orah Friedland Zipper, a former Hebrew/Judaic Studies educator currently living in Colorado has also worked in various incarnations as translator/transliterator, administrative assistant, test evaluator and team trainer, as well as website writer/editor.  She currently teaches Hebrew privately to adults, writes and is an avid blogger.  Her blog, Tikkun Olam, can be found at http://www.lady-light.blogspot.com, where this article was first published.  In addition, she is also the proud mother of five grown children, bracketed by her eldest daughter, a successful new product inventor and entrepreneur, and her youngest daughter, recently discharged from active duty in the IDF as a Commander in the Combat Engineering Corps.

Three of her children live in Israel , and she has six grandchildren.  She sings soprano, too!

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August 30, 2010 · 7:05 am

On Teshuvah

by Louis E. Newman (Northfield, MN)

All of us at one time or another have had the experience of losing our way. Sometimes, perhaps when we’re traveling in a foreign place, we become completely disoriented. At first we think we know which way to head, but when we set out in that direction we discover that our own sense of direction has failed us. When we realize that we don’t have the foggiest idea where we are or how to get to our destination, we are thoroughly lost. Such moments can arouse profound feelings of helplessness and even despair.

Being morally lost likewise involves a sense of despair. We have fallen into the same patterns of hurtful or self-destructive behavior so often we feel that we’re beyond the point of being able to change. We don’t know which direction to turn in order to find our way back to a life of honor and integrity. And before long we may come to believe that, for us at least, there is no way back. I have known many addicts who have lived for years with such feelings of helplessness.

Ultimately, though, the point of all these metaphors of movement is that the same steps that led us into the ditch of transgression can lead us back to the high road of ethical living. Teshuvah—returning—is the name Judaism gives to this process of retrieving our sense of direction. Repentance is the ultimate form of return. After turning our gaze away from God and straying from the straight path, we can still find our way back. And it is as simple as taking just one step in a new direction. For turning in a new direction, by as little as one degree, will lead us over time to a wholly different destination.

Louis Newman has been thinking, teaching, and writing about Jewish ideas for over 30 years.  One of the country’s leading scholars of Jewish ethics, he is the John M. and Elizabeth W. Musser Professor of Religious Studies and the Humphrey Doermann Professor of Liberal Learning at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. His most recent book is Repentance: The Meaning and Practice of Teshuvah (Jewish Lights 2010).

This excerpt is from Repentance: The Meaning and Practice of Teshuvah @ 2010 by Louis Newman (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights Publishing). Permission granted by Jewish Lights Publishing, P.O. Box 237, Woodstock, VT 05091. www.jewishlights.com.

To read more about Dr. Newman and his work, visit http://www.jewishlights.com/page/product/978-1-58023-426-9

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