The
recitation of Selichot – literally, “Forgivenesses” – will commence in
Ashkenazi communities this Saturday night and continue until Yom Kippur (Sephardic
Jews have been saying them since the first of Elul…).
Brewing
great coffee is one thing, but what is the work of Selichot? In a few
short days the day will arrive in which “the books are opened, and all
creatures are written in them, whom to death and whom to life” as the Talmud says
of Rosh haShana (Rosh haShana 16b).
These are the same books we sing about in uNetaneh Tokef: “On Rosh haShana we
are written, and on Yom Kippur sealed.”
What
is this book in which we are written? The Rabbis were fond of the book
metaphor, and used it various ways. Rabbi Yehuda haNassi describes it in the
following way:
Look
at three things
and
you will not make a mistake:
Know
that which is above you:
A
watchful eye,
an
attentive ear,
and
all your acts are being written
in
the book.
(Avot 2:1)
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והסתכל
בשלושה דברים
ואי אתה
בא לידי עבירה:
דע מה למעלה
ממך:
עין רואה
ואוזן
שומעת
וכל
מעשיך בספר נכתבין.
(אבות ב:א)
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The
books being read on Rosh haShana are the great record of life as written down
by the ever watchful eye. The work of Selichot is pre-empting the grand reading
of this book by assessing what was written in it. We collect our deeds, figuring
out what we did this year, as we line up our defenses, confess and come clean,
and hastily correct that which can be corrected – before the trumpet sounds and
court enters into session.
As
a child growing up, we used to wake up early and go to Selichot in the
Ashkenazi synagogue down the road. It was an incongruous combination of
chest-thumping, the guilty-Jewish kind, and hastily mumbled litanies. The
center of the Selichot is the recitation of the viduy, the
confession of sins, setting the stage for the grand confessions of Yom Kippur.
I was asked to read out my list of sins from that year (“I lied, I betrayed, I
disrespected my parents”) alongside sins that my pre-teen imagination was quite
confused by. Once confession was over, the work of penitence was to begin,
which seemed to be an ordeal by mumbling… The experience confirmed everything
that modernists disliked about religion: cowering slaves in fear of being on
trial by the all-knowing Lord, grasping onto the unintelligible and unending poetry
of long deceased ancestors.
I
resented the “book in which all is written”, and was alternately cynical and
terrified of the existence of a “watchful eye and an attentive ear.” It seemed
like the High Holy days were full of this ever-watchful God who – like the KGB
or Facebook – has spies everywhere and knows what I am up to at all times. This
panopticon
approach to religion is exactly what makes so many people stay at home on the
High Holidays: If that God exists, I’m not interested in playing; and if he
doesn’t exist – no need for me to show up anyway…
But I soon discovered that this was far from the
only experience of the High Holy Days. When I was 9, I was invited by my
teacher to Selichot at his synagogue, Barashi, founded by Jews from
Kurdistan. Here, Selichot were a different experience: cheesecake was served
alongside the prayers, sweet tea accompanied the confession. The poetry was
sung at a slow, loving pace, in beautifularab makams that showed all the vulnerability
of the human condition and the yearning for the presence of the Divine: “Human being, why do you
sleep? Rise and call out in supplication. Pour out your words, demand
forgiveness, from the one who resides on high.” In the context of this modest
Kurdistani minyan, the crisis was not that I had sinned – that was just part of
being human. The bigger drama was that by fessing up I was taking ownership of what would be
written in my book, and doing so in the compassionate presence of the “ever outstretched
hand.”
Inspired by that experience, I’ve come to
understand a different model for this
“divine book keeping”. In the Selichot we promise to “search our ways, and
investigate, and return to you” - נחפשה דרכינו ונחקרה, ונשובה אליך. Thus
the first step of Selichot is the gathering of our deeds, our words and signs
from the past year. As a seasonal Naomi
Shemer song goes:
Gather your deeds / the words and
the signs
like a blessed crop /too heavy to
convey.
Gather the blossoming /which has
since become a memory
What
happens when we gather our deeds? This is not an actuary act of “taking stock”
or “judging ourselves.” It is an act of storytelling: “all your acts are
written in a book”. By gathering ourselves the past year, we weave together our
own story, our autobiography as we would like it to be told. We take authorship
of the book of our lives. Having busily re-written our own book during those
early mornings of Selichot, we present it for “divine reading” on Rosh
haShana – and await review by Yom Kippur.
If in the Ashkenazi selichot of my childhood God felt like a harsh
judge, in that small Kurdistani synagogue I met a God who is more of a compassionate
editor: calling us out on the places we fudged it, demanding we snip out
certain pieces, but all in all a collaborator on the joint project which is our
life story. The watchful eye and the attentive ear are not waiting for me to
trip up, but rather act like a sharp editor who is as invested in the outcome
as I am.
Seeing
the process of Selichot as re-telling the narrative of lives is engaging
in what philosopher Jerome
Bruner calls “life-making”. Human beings are by nature
storytellers, says Bruner. He quotes Jean-Paul Sartre:
"A man is always a teller of
stories, he lives surrounded by his own stories and those of other people, he
sees everything that happens to him in terms of these stories and he tries to
live his life as if he were recounting it" (Sartre, "The
Words").
All
your acts are written in a book…
Indeed,
we are constantly telling and re-telling our own story. Never has this been true
as in the Facebook-era we live in, where we are constantly documented on a
“timeline” for all the watchful eyes and attentive ears to “like.” Scrolling
down the “newsfeed” gives a strong sense of being “surrounded by [one’s] own
stories and those of other people”.
Facebook
aside, the stories we tell of ourselves each year are too often concerned with external
achievements (“What did I achieve and conquer and win?”) and the narratives
that other people have written for us. Selichot is about taking ownership
of our story as we would like it to be, refocusing it on a realm of internal
attainment (“Who was I this year? How did I behave?”). Israeli
psychologist Mordechai
Rottenberg calls this “Midrashic
Autobiography” and uses it as a therapeutic tool. Selichot create
the setting for us to gather our deeds and write our own midrashic
autobiography.
The act of self-storytelling can be a very self-involved
work. Yet returning to Rabbi Yehuda haNasi’s saying with new eyes might serve
as a corrective: “Know that which is above you: a watchful eye, an attentive
ear, and all your acts are being written in a book.” The season of Selichot
invites us to write a book that is aware of “that which is above you”. Perhaps
we are no longer living in a world of divine “watchful eyes and attentive
ears”, but as much as we love our independence and autonomy, we also yearn to
be a part of something larger than ourselves. That something from above – call
it an “organizing narrative”, a “higher power” or a “larger project” – can serve
as the sharp editor we need as we inscribe our story into the book of life.
Selichot
is just as much about ensuring the future as it is revisiting the past. Bruner,
being the constructivist that he is, makes a further point: when we are telling
our story, we are not only reconstructing the past, but also setting the
schemes and routines of the future. By telling the story of the past year as we
would like it to be told, we are setting up the story that we will find
ourselves weaving in the year to come. Indeed, such “world making” is the
principal function of mind: we do it all the time, we might as well be
purposeful about it.
And
yes, this is best done by waking up early in the morning, making a strong cup
of coffee and taking in our lives. In the quiet before dawn, with the
smartphone still asleep and the stories the rest of the world tells of us not
yet awakened, we can slowly gather our deeds, the words and signs, and retell
the story as we would like it to be told, before the summer ends too soon;
before the books are opened up and read for another year.
May
we be written in the book of life, blessing, peace and prosperity;
we,
and the entire house of Israel.
בספר חיים, ברכה ושלום, ופרנסה טובה נזכר
ונכתב לפניך
אנחנו וכל עמך בית ישראל
Rabbi Mishael Zion | Bronfman Fellowships | Selichot / Ki Tavo | Text and the City
