So You’re Scared. What is that Your Business?!

Kol Nidrei Sermon 5780

The theme we’re focusing on this Yom Kippur is The Capacity to Change.  What a valuable theme.  What a challenging endeavour.  On a day that is focused on repentance, renewal and change, it is important to be honest about how difficult it is to change.  When we are wired for survival and the pull of self protection is strong and steady, it is very difficult to set up our lives against inertia, against what is inert, and to choose Life, to choose transformation in an ongoing and lasting way.  So I want to explore what is actually going on in your life, in my life, so that we understand what holds us back and we can grow our capacity toward the kind of change that our hearts deeply yearn for and that this world so deeply needs.

            Please askyourself – where do you get stuck? Where are you asleep, choosing numbness orwillful blindness?  Where do give up onyourself or on other people – deciding not to fight for something more real ortrue or alive? Where do you fall into the familiar habits of reactivity andsuffering over and over, and causingthe same kind of sufferingover and over?  Where do your actions notmatch the values you espouse?   And wherein your life do you shrink from being big, morally daring and in the fullnessof vitality? 

            Dear ones,you are broken.  So am I.  That’s not a terrible thing.  We are all broken.  Our world is so very broken.  This is just the truth.  And you know that you’re broken or youwouldn’t be here. 

            It is alsotrue that all of us are brave and doing our best, working at healing andchanging aspects of our selves and how we engage with the world. This is alsotrue, or you wouldn’t be here.

            But in thosebroken places, it can be hard to tell that we want to change.  It can be easy to rationalize and decide –‘this is just who I am, these are my limitations, at this stage in my life, Idon’t really want to change, I’m good enough, and even if I wanted tochange, I don’t think I actually can.’ Is that voice familiar to you? 

            But as soonas we turn a patient and attuned ear to our resistance to change, most likely,what we hear is the voice of fear.  Ifind it helpful that this is one of the core themes of Torah, of our guidebookfor transformation.  Every time theIsraelites are on the verge of change, being challenged to grow from theirstunted, enslaved ways of being and to stretch toward maturity, liberation,courage and the gifts of mutual relationship and responsibility, they freakout!  They become terrified, they fallinto habits of complaining about the food or picking fights with each other orwith God and they want to go back to Egypt, back to comfortable, familiarsuffering.

            In thelanguage of Mussar, the practice of Jewish spiritual and ethicaldevelopment, the capacity to change begins with identifying the meniyah,the specific hindrances that block our path to change and equally obscure our desireto change.

            When youimagine changing any of the ways that you are stuck or struggling, what are thefears that surface?  We might be afraidwe’ll fail, we’ll make things worse, we’ll make someone angry or upset orthey’ll leave us.  We’re afraid we’ll doit all wrong and be humiliated. We’re afraid of what we will have to face oncewe start dismantling the self-protective constructions we’ve created.  We’re afraid of how much work it will taketo undo decades of entrenched patterns and to be diligent about makingdifferent choices, not once, but over and over until it becomes a positivehabit.  We’re afraid of all theuncertainty of what will unfold on the other side.  And we’re afraid of how unpleasant anduncomfortable the whole process will be. It doesn’t sound like a good sales pitch for change, does it?

            You mightknow John Assaraf’s saying – “a comfort zone is a beautiful place but nothingever grows there.”  Discomfort isessential for growth and change.  Mussarteaches that the only way we will be able to wade through the muck of a meniyah,a hindrance, is by clarifying and strengthening ratzon,desire.  Different from the more shallowwants that tug at us, ratzon entails the core desires of our souls, theessential desires for connection and closeness, for dignity and liberation, forlove and transcendence.  The more we can awakenand feel specific expressions of these core desires, the more we will actuallywant to put our faces right into the fear and discomfort, so we can setthem free.

            I’ve beenpracticing sticking my face right in this kind of fear and discomfort in someways that are new for me.  I want to tellyou a little about it as a way to make this all more concrete and to see whatmight resonate in your own process of change. 

            Even thoughI’ve been composing melodies for Jewish prayer for the last 20 years, sharingit in prayer services and in workshops in Canada and the US, Israel and Europe,and even though people have been asking for recordings of my music for years, Ihave been too afraid to record an album. My reasons were clear – I don’t know how to read sheet music.  I don’t know how to work with professionalmusicians.  I felt clear that my voicewasn’t developed enough.  The music isn’tgood enough.  I could lead song andprayer in the role of rabbi, but I’m not an artist.  Interestingly, these reasons didn’t feel likefear or resistance to change, they just felt like truth and I was fine goingabout my life not stretching beyond them. 

            A coupleyears ago, the right partners reached out – funding came in, the right producerstepped forward and brought other singers and instrumentalists, and basicallyput in my lap all the conditions and support for this project to happen.  Well, crap! The entire story I had in my head about the reasons I couldn’t moveforward, evaporated!

            That’s whenthe real fear that had been holding me back all these years reared itshead.  What was being asked of me was toshow up fully and offer my whole being in a totally new way –  to show up, vulnerable, imperfect, beautifuland totally visible.  And that wasterrifying and excruciatingly uncomfortable. 

            I would bein my voice teacher’s studio practicing, or at a gathering for the Jewish musicfellowship I was part of, and I would suddenly be flooded with waves of fear –heart racing, unable to catch my breath, crawling out of my skin, tears runningdown my face, collapsed into the fear. It dragged up dark and mean thoughts and feelings of worthlessness andshame.      

            This examplemight sound like it lacks the important moral implications that a Kol Nidreisermon should have.  But as changestarted to unfold with the decision to record the album and to wade into thefear, I was starting to understand that anytime fear limits our ability to growand change, it causes harm.  Fear tricksus into thinking that our contracted self is who we are and all that we canbe.  That is a kind of self-harm.  I was living in a fear-body – defended,constricted, self-absorbed.  I wasleaving part of my self in exile and I could tell that this same fear washolding other parts of my life captive. It was preventing me from looking outside myself with the ease andresponsiveness I thought I was committed to. I wasn’t reaching out to people as lovingly and attentively as I could,and I was avoiding people who were creative and brave in ways I actually wishedI was.  I could not locate a live desireto record the album.  But a deeper ratzonstarted to emerge, a core desire to participate in the flow of life in a waythat is more energized, more connected and more free.

I’m relieved that Moses, the greatestleader of the Jewish people, struggled with similar challenges. He had beenliving as a shepherd for years, far from Egypt and the palace he grew up in andfled, far from the enslaved people he is part of and was separated from.  

            He wasliving a seemingly comfortable life until he saw a bush that was on fire butwas not consumed and, turning toward it, he heard the voice of the Divineconveying his mission, “I will send you to Pharaoh to free my people.”  Of course, recording an album is not quitethe same as coming face to face with a tyrant and freeing a people fromoppression, but this is the call of sacred aliveness and purpose, saying – ‘goto the heart of everything that terrifies you, everything that keeps you in Mitzrayim,in the place of mayztar, narrowness and constriction, and transform itinto freedom.’  This is the fundamentalJewish journey, the mission we are all tasked with for ourselves and on behalfof others, and the capacity to change sits at its centre.

            Moses comesup with a list of reasons to avoid taking on this calling – He cries out – “Whoam I that I should go?”  “Who shall I saysent me?”  “What if they don’t believeme?”  “I’m not a speaker.  I have a heavy tongue and a heavymouth.”  “Please, send someoneelse!” 

              In order to do what God is asking of him, hewill need to move right through all his insecurities and fears.  God does not give him the option to stay withthe sheep and go back to his small life, but the Holy One gives Moses three instructionsto enable him to change into the person this moment is calling him tobecome.  God tells him to: 1) take yourbrother Aaron – he will be your mouth; 2) gather the Elders and 3) I will be with you.  I find these to be very helpful instructionsto draw upon.

            1) TakeAaron.  Aaron is the companion, thefriend.  We all need an Aaron – someonewho can walk alongside us, who doesn’t collude with all our fears, and canmirror for us what we are capable of; someone who holds us accountable, andpartners with us to roll the stone away from the mouth of the well.  This could be an actual friend, a partner, atherapist or coach.  It can be community,like this one, where we can decide to truly practice together in an ongoingway, not just on Yom Kippur, so we support each other to change and grow, forthe sake of decreasing suffering and amplifying moral vitality and wisecompassion.  Now that’s a shul worthjoining! 

            At the sametime, we read the Torah’s metaphors into the workings of our inner lives aswell as our outer realities.  Acting asMoses’ mouth, Aaron is that part of you that is able to turn toward the fearand speak to it, turning toward the inner tyrants that arise whenever weexamine the ways we are stuck or whenever we dare something new.  People who are agile at growing and changingare people who know how to sit with, and befriend, discomfort.  It is the doorway to more of ourselves.  And when we grow the muscles to meet andobserve what is unpleasant with loving awareness, we discover that none of itis solid, that it changes and shifts, that as we harmonize our breath withwhatever is showing up, it loosens its grip and we can finally know ourselvesas much larger and more resilient than it is. I found this to be an essential practice.

            For me, inthe hardest moments of resistance and fear, when I couldn’t find the ability tobefriend the cesspool of horrible that was surfacing, at the very least I coulddecide not to make it my enemy.  Aaron isalso the peacemaker.  Bringing Aaron withus is a decision not wage war against ourselves or against reality becausenothing changes by hating it and fighting against it.   

            2) Moses istold to gather the Elders.  Theirs is the voice of wiseperspective, the wisdom of other generations. The biblical Elders are Israelites. They have been in slavery and so they can bring a much wider picture ofwhat liberation needs to be, because they understand what is at stake and theyare connected to the larger arc of transformation.  

            I gather inthe wisdom of the Elders every time I study our sources, when I learn Torah orHasidism, whenever I pray.  These arevoices of insight and guidance that are so important in broadening myperspective.  As it turns out, I also receiveda very clear message from the Elders when I was in the bathroom of theGermantown Jewish Centre in Philadelphia. I was in the middle of a musicfellowship retreat and I was in the throes of fear and constriction, strugglingto find my voice, struggling to move into new ways of being, and in thebathroom, I heard the voice of an Elder, clear as day, an Ashkenazi woman’svoice with a thick New York accent shouting out, “So you’re scared!  What is that your business?!”

            What abrilliant and helpful voice on the road to change!  So your scared.  What is that your business?!  You have a job to do in this life. You are aparticipant in a much greater endeavor that needs you but is vastly bigger thanyou.  AudreLorde, the Black, womanist poet and activist brilliantly put it this way –“When I dare to be powerful – to use my strength in the service of my vision –then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.”

            Maybe mymusic isn’t very good.  Maybe my voice isrough and unskilled.  SO WHAT?! Iunderstood from the voice of the Elder that it was my job to make the album asgood as I was able, but the album was the small project.  It was just the vehicle for growth atthat time. 

            The biggerproject is the daring, audacious holy job of becoming ourselves in the serviceof a greater unifying vision.  The biggerproject is aliveness, liberation, living a life that pushes nothing away, thatis available to everything and responds to it. Because it is only then that we can really show up for each other ingenerous and loving service. 

            What is theconcrete and specific project that will serve as the vehicle for yourgrowth this year?  Can you throw all yourweight behind it while knowing the voice of the elders, bonking you on the headwhen your view gets too precious and narrow, giving you a wide-angle view ofthe sacred project that is actually your business.

3)  God says – Iwill be with you.Ani eheyeimach.

            When Mosesasks “Who shall I say sent me?”  The HolyOne answers “Eheyeh asher eheyeh. I will become what I become.”  That’s my name.  Tell them, “Eheye/Becoming” sentyou.  Forget what you think you know orbelieve or don’t believe about God.  Inthis fiery encounter with Moses, it is revealed that the very essence of theDivine is constant change.  Perpetualunfolding.  God’s name is not ‘I will bewho I used to be’ or ‘I will be who I’ve always been.’ 

            How often dowe hold tightly to an outdated idea about who we are?  The truth was that I was already singing andtraining and working with musicians, but my awareness hadn’t caught up yet withthe ever-unfolding reality of my becoming. What ideas and beliefs about ourselves, about others, about the world welive in need the revision of Eheye-consciousness?  When we believe the permanence of theobstacles and fears that keep us from changing, we are suppressing the Divineflow of life within us.  But the way anacorn already contains the entire oak, our capacity to change into the peoplewe are meant to become is already in us. When we open to it, when we ride the wave of transformation in all ofits awkwardness and discomfort, in its exciting, fumbling, frightening,graceful magnificence, we inhabit Divine becoming and we become more able toparticipate in transformation toward wholeness everywhere we turn.

            On Yom Kippur, we deliberately sit in discomfort. We don’t eat, we don’t drink, we’re in shul all day, we listen to long sermons with multiple endings, we stand for long periods of time. With the vidui, the confession of our mistakes and willful harm, we sit in the emotional and psychological discomfort of facing our destructive tendencies and lack of awareness.  In an artificial way, we create the conditions to be uncomfortable and to stay with it, to turn toward it with the loving attention of Aaron, to expand around it with the widened perspectives of the Elders, and to awaken fresh, daring possibilities for Becoming in our own lives, for our society and for our planet.  May our capacity to change this year be fueled by enlivened ratzon, our deepest desires and daring vision of our souls.

Join me for a 4 part series of Mussar practice.  For more information – click here.

You can hear my album, Zeh HaYom – this is the day, at: store.cdbaby.com/cd/miriammarglesandthehadarensemb