Elul Day 20 - כ באלול

Dear Elul Writers,

I sometimes struggle with our kabbalistic traditions. I hit forty a few years ago, but, despite having reached the proper age, I still can’t wrap my head around some of the esoteric traditions that were passed down in the Zohar and elucidated by the Chasidic masters. That said, as a lover of word play, I am often most moved by the playful reads of the mystical Jewish masters. 

So, it gave me a special happiness to see a teaching that was transmitted by R’ Schneur Zalman of Liadi about the hidden meaning of Teshuvah. He breaks up the word and, in so doing, asserts that what we really accomplish in this process of return and repentance is to be ״תָּשׁוּב ה׳״ / tashuv-hey, to return to the ה. To return to the hey, he teaches is to hearken back to the primordial breath of life that we read about in our myth of creation. For those of us who have spent any time meditating, the idea of “returning to the breath” might be a little too familiar. Yet, in returning to hey, we are not only cultivating an awareness of breath, but inching our way back towards the ineffable. 

When it comes to an amazement that defies articulation, there is no better teacher than Abraham Joshuah Heschel. He writes, “Most — and often the best — of what goes on in us is our own secret; we have to wrestle with it ourselves. The stirring in our hearts when watching the star-studded sky is something that no language can declare. What smites us with unquenchable amazement is not that which we grasp and are able to convey, but that which lies within our reach but beyond our grasp… the ineffable.

DAY 20 PROMPT

While they refer to it as the ineffable, it feels like we often find ways of effing it up. Instead of embracing that which “no language can declare,” we search for the best filter in an attempt to capture and share our amazement. Instead of acknowledging that which is “within our reach but beyond our grasp,” we set our eyes on the next trip or the next experience that will amaze us. In this way, the process of teshuvah or returning to the hey can be a means of repairing our relationship to the world. To be tashuv-hey, is to seek a return to an unutterable, ineffable experience of creation. Where in your life can you experience the world, not with a desire to capture or control it, but with the mere desire to be within it? Where might you make do with less words, less utterances and just return to the hey of breath that fills our universe? Is there a place that you can go today, a quiet spot, where you can truly be tashuv-hey?

Take care,

Jordan