Guiding Letters for The Days of Awe 5783
Weaving Jewish devotional liturgy, yearning, non-dual awareness, and ancestral reconnection during the ten days between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur.
Graffiti art on Park street, Bushwick, Brooklyn NY USA
The letters below have been sent to a group of individuals daily throughout the period in the jewish calendar referred to as Yamim Nora’im, Days of Awe in the year 5783/2022. The opening of Rosh Hashana and closing of Yom Kippur, often experienced in community in a synagogue, are filled with lavish and long liturgies. These letters were written in mind to close gaps between how these services are often delivered, especially for meditation practitioners. The recipients were eclectic and diverse, including people who do not identify with Jewish practice or heritage.
Deeper into the Days of Awe (9/28/2022)
Dear friends,
As we deepen into the days of Awe, I wanted to share a quick finding from psalm 126
שִׁ֗יר הַֽמַּֽ֫עֲל֥וֹת
בְּשׁ֣וּב יְ֖הֹוָה אֶת־שִׁיבַ֣ת צִיּ֑וֹן
הָ֜יִ֗ינוּ כְּחֹֽלְמִֽים
A song of Ascension (Shir Ha'maalot, Insight, wisdom penetration)
When YHWH (Presence) returned to Zion(its home, its city, its lover, its place of dwelling)
We learned we had been like dreamers.
I was shocked how obvious the language of this psalm was. Hinting to me that returning into awareness has to do with a sense of reckoning, perhaps playful, perhaps remorseful, that the way we saw life - our own sense of self - before, was like dreamers. What a unique way to enter Rosh Hashana. No judgment, just how it is. But discernment - What is the quality of this dream, right now? What is the dream we are creating through habits, and what is the dream we yearn to create with our wakeful intention?
The days of awe is a ten day are dedicated to Tshuva, return. They are a doorway. A portal, as I learned to call it from Violet Catches, my adopting Lakhota older sister, an elder from Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe reservation in the USA. In your meditation and prayer, perhaps have your prayer as a 'landing pad,' to bring your awareness back, focus, as you place it back on your breath. This portal is a time to charge the Godhead of mystery, the source of emanations. It is also the time to simply bask in the presence of this open portal. Let your presence recharge back from the source. Let yourself be loved.
Just before entering the service for the second day of Rosh Hashana, I texted Violet, whether she has a prayer she'd like to be added to the open portal of days of Awe. She immediately text me back:
"-- [pray] that our people heal from the traumas and they start focusing on their souls! I think that's what is missing from our people! Everywhere! Our nations need healing prayers! Collectively! Wophila txanka! In much gratitude for that! I too will pray for that!"
I am adding that into the portal.
Attached, a recording of a niggun I could only find as referred to as 'Niggun to the students of the Besh"t", to bring the ancestors, and the portal, closer.
Much love,
Rami
Et Ratzon, Time for Yearning (9/29/2022)
Dear friends,
Rosh Hashana, means either commonly 'beginning of the year', or, just as literally 'the source of change.' It invites us to change, by holding opposites while being rooted at the source. Beginning and end, alpha and omega, constraint and liberation, unbound infinite awareness, and -- this very personal self we each, privately, carry. It is because we often don't close that loop in our own body - FEEL our own yearning, we seek to be seen and heard by others.
The liturgy of the Days of Awe are filled with opportunities for that - Consider chanting these 'prayers' as part of your practice that you - YOU - are the hearer of these supplications - your own constraint self, with all of its upsets, vindictiveness, jealousy, outrage, depression and loneliness, is yearning to be heard but none other than the source, your own simple, direct awareness, which is the doorway to Mystery itself.
If this sounds like cognitive kung fu, try this: fully surrender into that constrained feeling. Instead of doubting them, fighting them, debating them. Let them take over completely. Sit by yourself in a room, or thrash ecstatically in the nearest park, whisper your yearning out in the woods or call them out at beach. Let your body reverberate with the truth-telling energy of that yearning.
And then -
be still.
Let yourself be seen.
("By what? By whom?" see that as just another yearning, to understand.)
Just.
be.
still.
And listen.
If your own personal words seems to not flow, or reach the depth of your yearning, turn to the text of the liturgy. That is its function - to give language to what we often don't have words for, or courage to pronounce. I offer a recording of that, linked at the bottom of this email.
A moment that touched me during the 2nd day of liturgy was a supplication before the torah ark, describing something called 'Et Ratzon,' often translated as 'opportune time,' or 'time of volition', or -- "time for yearning." Two simple lines that repeat three times, asking, begging, to be heard. "Āneni! - Answer me!"
I invite you to chant that, be the supplication and the hearer. disappear into the outcry, the outrage, the isolation, the heartbreak, and, reappear in your spark of awareness. Unify the particle and the wave. the beginning and the end, the alpha and the omega. return to the source of change.
Original Hebrew:
V'Ani tefilati, lecha, adonai, Et Ratzon
Elohim, b'rov Hasdekha,, Āneni, Āneni, B'emet Yishuatekha"
Translation:
And me, embodied in my prayer-awareness, to you, my holder, time of yearning.
Great mystery, with all lovingkindness, answer me!, ANSWER ME!, in this truth is my liberation.
Much love,
Rami
Shabbat Shuva: Be Blossomed Like a Lily (9/30/2022)
Shalom,
I am writing this as Shabbat Shuva slowly arrives with dusk here in Massachusetts USA.
Jewish sages have held the sabbath between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur in the highest regard, with lavish liturgies and prophetic readings, to describe a heavenly realm.
אֶהְיֶ֤ה כַטַּל֙ לְיִשְׂרָאֵ֔ל יִפְרַ֖ח כַּשּׁוֹשַׁנָּ֑ה וְיַ֥ךְ שרָשָׁ֖יו כַּלְּבָנֽוֹן׃
I will be to you like dew; Make you blossom like the lily,
Strike root like a Lebanon tree. (Haftrah Reading from Hosea 14:6)
Regardless of the calendar year and the holiday cycle, though, Shabbat appears.
It is the one thing that never changes. Clockwork.
A supernal realm of no creation.
Mystics say that this Shabbat is in fact the basis of all reality - the nature of all things, and permeates all other days, entire creation.
That thing that is so superb, never changes, doesn't create and yet is the basis of all things?
How is that different from
this -
moment of awareness?
Clear, simple, direct.
A Lebanon tree.
-
This holiday cycle that started with the fast of 9 b'Av and will end with the end of Sukkot in a couple of weeks, is a sophisticated, skillful, lavish technology of transformation. At its core is the ability to plug into a collective 'dream.' Rosh Hashana services, these days of Awe are, the anticipation to Yom Kippur, language of 'chet' (sin) and forgiveness, the emphasis on yearning, inner personal accounting, generosity, teshuva (return) and tikkun (repair of the world) are parts of that dream too. I cannot ignore that war is still raging in Ukraine. South Florida is flooded. Human rights are threatened. Economies are collapsing. These collective experiences are very VERY real too. And they need tending. And, what we do with them in our minds, collectively, are the dreams.
Shabbat Shuva reminds me, in the midst of this sophisticated layered dream, that in fact, it is still all founded on something that doesn't change. The mind is habituated to perceive the world as in a dream. Contemplative practice is not about killing the dream, not ejecting from the dream. It is realizing the dream, the dreaming, and the nature of the dreamer. This is an opportune time to practice non-awe-ttachment. Being so plugged into this sophisticated dream of the self, AND, be steady, impartial, creating nothing.
It doesn't end with awareness tho.
In steady awareness, a doorway to mystery
opens.
The portal is open, now cease doing.
Reaching for infinity. Yearning. Forgiveness. Repair. Cease it all.
The merit of your practice and prayer will now play out in the karma of your body and mind and ripple beyond.
Not in your control. Never has been.
Let it all rest this shabbat, like a golden sail in space, receiving the rays of Sol.
Shimmering
Like dew
Let yourself be blossomed
like the lily.
Shabbat shalom.
Rami
Tending the Fire, Attuning the Instrument, The Gate in View (10/2/2022)
Shalom all,
After Rosh Hashana, Shabbat Shuva, we are in the home stretch, Yom Kippur will commence in two days. The Gate is in view.
This is the time I concentrate on weaving the two channels of practices:
The first channel is the channel of the dream - the yearnings, the feelings that Yom Kippur evokes. It may be the personal inner inventory I have made, my regrets, my aspirations. My sense of not doing enough, not enough action to benefit the world, enough work on my self, all that. It may bring up outrage - "what is this nonsense? Who believes this archaic language?" The liturgy conducted at the synagogue, the gravity of its language, the melodies that I have sent you, all this talk about portal opening - these are all fuel. Fuel on the fire of my mind. That's the content of the dream. It is my self. living this life. In that way, it is real.
The second channel - is the instrument. What is the instrument? The instrument is my awareness - the altar on which this fire is burning. That which perceives the dream of self. This instrument is universal, there is nothing Jewish about it. None what-so-ever. This awareness has neither a name, nor language. It does not discriminate between the elements of the content of the dream. Between Yom Kippur and every given Tuesday. This channel is what I cultivate on the meditation cushion, bringing my awareness to my breath moment after moment. Releasing my hold from the screen of the mind, the narrative, the captions - while being firmly grounded in the body, the seat of this awareness.
Like the burning bush, the bush itself is not consumed, even while it burns. Isaac, whose story of near-sacrifice we read on Rosh Hashanah, was afraid to be burned by his father. He was caught in the dream. Perhaps Isac's instrument was not attuned yet to withstand the fire. Avraham's instrument was attuned, he saw the dream of the fire, and so, he did not hesitate.
Yom Kippur is the biggest bushfire.
Avraham's awareness is right there with us - the second channel.
It works its ways on me, my mind, my body, my heart, my Isac. Perhaps in some way you feel the same.
And so
Just like the blue pill and the red pill in the movie the Matrix - one returned Neo into the dream, and the other awakened him. I take both pills
I go deeper into the dream of my karma during the days of awe, I feel the terror of Isac, and, I embody my Avraham - steady, clear, loving.
I am less interested in catharsis. Waiting for the voice of the redeeming angel in Avraham's story. My aim is to gain insight into the process of the dreaming. All this is revealed, naturally, without effort; without doing.
In that non-doing,
When the heart yearns
and the fire burns
And the instrument is attuned
the dream is penetrated
Something else
opens
Something else
connects
Awareness, no longer an instrument
Fire, no longer a dream either,
All, a portal
A gate
With every breath, return to this gate
Be that gate
open
close
All the same
and yet so deeply personally, felt
*
These days before Yom Kippur, practice being at the foot of that gate. I encourage you to bring more time to your meditation. Attune the instrument, tend to the sacred fire. To support that, I am linking to the niggun of Reb Asher of Nikolayev, an 18th century Ukrainian sage. It's been accompanying me since the month of Elul.
Entering the Gate (10/4/2022)
Dear friend,
Tonight we shall arrive at the gate.
It is time to step through. How?
Weave the channel of the self, the channel of the simple, loving, non attached awareness, with the final channel - that of mystery.
An intricate, infinitely complex web of causality. Every point on this web - an ancestor. In human, insentient, and gaian form pourusly make up what we call our very own self and the world.
Yom Kippur begins with the three calls of Kol Nidrei, a prayer of release. Within this channel of Mystery, realize, or at least imagine, that releasing a simple thought is redeeming an ancestor. Closing a loop that has been surfing emanations of karma for unknown, or unimaginable time.
Concentrate each repetition of Kol Nidrei to one of these channels, three aspects of a gem, an aspeklaria - a luminous prism.
Yom Kippur cleanses this prism. Today's recording that I share is of the repeated refrain throughout Yom Kippur, the thirteen attributes of an awakened mind, the qualities of penetrated mystery:
Adonai, Adonai, El Rakhum v'Khanun, Erekh Apaim, u'gdal Khesed v'emet, Notzer Khesed l'alafim, Noseh avon va'peshah, 'v'chet' v'nakeh
My Holder, My Holder, emanation of compassion and generosity, patient, loving and truthtelling, treasurer of good deeds for multitudes, carrier of burden, wrongdoings, and cleanser of them all.
Play this recording throughout your day, so it may become a 'turning phrase,' arising in your mind spontaneously, or at will, showering your mind with these attributes.
The haftarah reading on Yom Kippur, from Isaiah, starts with
Sulu! sulu! Panu derrekh, harimu mikhshol miderekh ami.
Lay tracks! lay tracks!
clear the way
lift all obstacles
from the way of my seekers.
These tracks, the three channels I may suggest, lay a foundation, and a path.
Set your wheels on these tracks.
Clear the way.
Pass through.
Release it all, release the awareness, the yearning, the ancestors. Let everything unbound. Fasting helps. Following the prayer book helps. Keep it simple, focused. Err on the side of awareness.
Isiah reminds that repairing the godhead must also happen in the world of doing. Orienting to our return from our journey to a very real world that demands our loving attention, and action.
But with what kind of mind?
May we step through the gate
May we release and redeem our ancestors in our minds, and which are our mind
May we return & rebuild
The tracks are the way, the gate, and the destination.
Gmar Khatima Tova, ('may you have good closure,' a common Hebrew greeting on Yom Kippur)
The Koan of Yom Kippur (10/6/2022)
The day after yom Kippur.
Here in Massachusetts it's sunny, even a bit warm. Clouds overcast the last few days gave way.
Just like that, a new day.
After every yom kippur, I am astounded over the power this day, and the days leading to it, are such a hard-wired shamanic technology for people of jewish ancestry or practice. It gives us a koan - a fully digestible reality-making framework, adding fuel to our fire-mind, creating a vivid, stark dream. What was yours?
Mine included guilt and worthlessness, sense of belonging and exclusion, spiritual attainment ("I am ready for you catharsis!") and not-enoughness. My father is a veteran of the Israeli Yom Kippur war of 1973. The sacred day triggers his memories and throughout the week up to Kol Nidrei, over facetime and email, I bore witness to his terrible war stories. Legs sore from standing up for the majority of 12 hours in synagogue prayer.
I am grateful for the three channel lens - Throughout the day, regardless of what dream, what 'rabbit hole' manifested and the emotional tone that accompanied it, I could always lean on my presence, simple awareness of my body, senses, my breath. Once grounded, I'd invoke and recognize how everything around me, my own feelings, all my perception, is a testament to my ancestral - living karma. It connected me to something larger, adding space where previously I was tight.
Then, just like that,
With a blow of a horn
It's over.
The portal that started with Rosh Hashana and ended last night is both a portal into mystery, something IS being moved, generated, charged - a collective field orienting in one emanation in an ever expanding universe. And it is a portal to our own mind, nervous system, its mystery, its particular (jewish) synapses and tissues and its universal and matter-of-factness.
I was moved by many bits of the liturgy of the day, but I stayed with one line from a slichot piyyut (poems of forgiveness,) called "Ki hineh k'khomer,' translated to 'Thus Is Like Dough/Matter/Unformed.' The refrain, weaving contemplation between grand mystery and our smallness, reads, encourages:
La'brit Habet, v'al tefen l'yetzer
Look to the covenant, and don't turn to habit
Before, during and following the great storm of Yom. Kippur, (with hurricane Ian at its backdrop), the one thing I can always do, is return to my awareness - 'the covenant' I read as this *agreement* with reality - I will turn to you with my awareness - you, reality, will meet me as you are, true, real, simple. If we both do that - a land of milk and honey will manifest. In this way, "practice" is not a chore, or one-sided thing that I "do" -covenant-practiceis being in a relational advance with mystery, towards mystery.
May this call for practice, a turn towards awareness, ever return as a refrain, leading into a life that is wakeful, aware, responsive, and
filled with Awe.
Much love in this new year, may it bring ease, repair and love,
Rami
