#BlogExodus: Praise

Today I flew from Boston to Chicago, and while I was on the plane, I was thinking about how grateful I am for the people who have supported me. I feel like we tend to feel like we can criticize people all we want, but in a way, praising people is substantially less socially acceptable. It is less socially acceptable for me to tell people how great of a job they are doing than it is for me to correct their grammar. This is a problem, but not one that I know how to fix, but I try to fix it in my own little way. If you have known me for a long period of time, you know that I tend to write notes to people at the end of things or on days that I think with be very hard for them( i.e. unit heads on the first day of camp, etc). I absolutely love doing this, and I'm a little mad at myself that I haven't done it more this year--although I have plans for the end of the year-- because those little praising notes seem to mean a lot to people.

I think that this prompt was intended to be about praising God for bringing us out of Egypt, which i will do when I lead my seder tonight, but I don't think, at the moment, the it's nearly as important as recognizing that the people around us are also worthy of praise. I want to keep this appreciation in my mind as I approach Passover as well.

#BlogExodus: Accept

"May God grant me the serenity to ACCEPT the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."

Acceptance is one of the hardest things that we must do. Part of being a part of a community is accepting the other people around us, not as who we want them to be, but how they actually are. No human is perfect. Not even the ones who we place on a pedestal.

Accepting ourselves is hard: it requires holding ourselves to a high standard while still keeping in mind that we are human. It requires accepting the fact that there we have feelings and sometimes those feelings may be complicated and not what we think that we should be feeling, but that's okay. There's a concept in Dialectical Behavioral Therapy that really relates to this: it's called radical acceptance. Radical Acceptance is the idea of accepting everything that happens as a thing that happened and everything that you are feeling as a thing that you are feeling and letting it be part of your life without feeling the need to judge yourself for it. This is a skill, that like everything else, requires practice. It requires practice to stop blaming the world for the final that got moved up two weeks or the fact that you broke your headphones two days before traveling and accept that those things happened. The only way we can actually deal with problems is if we accept that they are present beforehand. Accepting the reality of a situation turns a reactor into an agent. We now choose what to do.

#BlogExodus: Discover

The Jews have spent a long time wandering in their history. Sometimes it was running away and sometimes it was just well, wandering. We have spent a whole lot of time looking, but what I can't seem to wrap my head around is what we found. Have we become a stronger people? I think that we have. At this point, the Jewish people can survive almost everything (although I wouldn't want to test that). I talked a lot about this is regards to Purim, but I think it applies a fair bit around Passover as well: We had a past. We spent time wandering and being persecuted. And to an extent, we can never fully escape persecution. But living in the mindset that we held when we left Egypt is not a good way to discover life. Avadim Hayinu. We WERE slaves. We are no longer slaves. What we choose to seek out now is our choice. And we need to be conscious of what we are discovering even as we try not to forget how we got here in the first place.

#Blog Exodus: Rejoice

It's applicable to this week, the fact that the first thing that I think about when I hear the word rejoice is Miriam's Song after crossing the Sea, the rejoicing of the Israelites after being freed from Egypt. And we always rejoice after we are freed, however, the question that I'd like to ask is where do we go from there? Where do we go after the initial happiness at the freedom from Egypt has left our bodies? Sure, we can try our bests to hold on to a peace of that joy, but by definition, one cannot be in a place of rejoicing all the time.

We celebrate, but then what? Do we go back to our normal lives? Do our attitudes change? I think our attitudes really do need to change, and that's something that we can certainly learn from the Israelites' mistakes on. The Israelites ended up wandering in the desert for 40 years because they couldn't get themselves out of their slave mentality. I don't know about you, but I'd like to get to my Promised Land in less than 40 years. So how do we take off the shackles of the things that have been enslaving us but no longer feel the metal against our wrists? Looking to the future helps. The future holds promise and a new land away from the slavery. But we must, at the same time, not forget our past. And in turn, living in the present seems to me to be the best option(keep in mind, I am absolutely terrible at this). We really, really need to learn to be here now.

#BlogExodus: Unite

I apologize for the lack of blog post yesterday, life got in the way of writing and school took priority. That being said, on to the post for today:

Unity. Unity is an absolutely beautiful concept in general. It's the idea of coming together whether because of a common trait or a desire for a common goal. Its the feeling that we get when we join our hands together and dance in a circle. I felt the unity within my community last night as we made complete fools of ourselves dancing at Hillel formal. I realized how many incredible friendships I have made. I realized how much I have changed and how much we really can come together when we put aside the disagreements of the day and just agree to have a good time. And it feels wonderful.

#BlogExodus: Deepen

There's a beautiful poem by Adrienne Rich called Diving into the Wreck which reads: 

I have to learn alone

to turn my body without force

in the deep element.

We have to learn to deepen our lives in a way that makes them more meaningful. This could mean both staying up all night talking to a friend or going on a trip across the world to deepen one's understanding of a place. We need to delve into our identities in order to deepen them. Going deep in the ocean is scary. After all, the further you get away from the surface, the darker it gets and the harder it gets to know where you are or where you're going. But in the deep is the treasure. The true meaning of one's life. The true identity that you were not allowing in because of fear. And traveling to the deep is terrifying alone or with others. Being alone in the deep cn lead to a spiral of self blame and despair, but "diving into the wreck" with others is terrifying because the deeper you get, the more vulnerable you become. And vulnerability is important, but that doesn't make it easy. I challenge you, as we go into his new week leading into Passover, to go just a little bit deeper with someone in your life. Perhaps you'll even find some treasure. 

#BlogExodus: Examine

Examine sounds so clinical to me. What are we examining? Our health? The cleanliness of my room(sorry, I just spent 2 hours cleaning for Passover/Shabbat)? Or should we be examining our lives? Our relationships? Biblically, Nisan, the month that we are in right now, is a new start. For me, its also an end. Last programs, last Shabbatot spent with my community here at Brandeis, last days of classes. It's the end of my first year of college.

When I started this blog, I had no idea how much I would have changed by the time I ended my year. I had no idea that I would end up with this incredible support system and incredible mentors. I had no idea I would become the kind of person who was able to tell my friend what time Shabbat ends without looking it up. Don't get me wrong, I'm thrilled at who I've become. I just hadn't gotten perspective until I started comparing my journey through #BlogExodus to the journey I took through #BlogElul.

But I don't want to examine my life too much. Because then I'll miss the beauty of the moment. Anyone who knows me can tell you that I am a compulsive planner. But I realized that especially this Shabbat, I need to temporarily forget about the two papers and piles of homework that I need to do and focus on the love that surrounds our community. May you have a restful and rejuvenating Shabbat if you celebrate.