Blog Elul: Accept

Accept. Acceptance is really freaking difficult. The truth of the world is really difficult to accept.Childhood was for fantasies, but we are now grown ups and we now have to accept that there are bad things in the world as well as good ones. But we cannot simply accept hatred. hatred has no home in our communities. We cannot accept it.

But there are things that we must accept, with radical acceptance no less--the concept of accepting things as they happen, not passing any judgment upon them. We must accept that we are only human, and as much as we would like to be superheroes, human emotions exist and physical and emotional limitations exist. Let our power be found in that acceptance. Because when we accept our emotions and the things that come to us, we have to power to find empathy and compassion, and more than acceptance, our world needs empathy and compassion more than anything.

Blog Elul:Choose

Our lives revolve around choices. We choose what to do every day. We choose how to live our lives, and most importantly, we choose what to believe in. We can choose to have faith in humanity and in ourselves, or we can choose to give up our choice and go by what the media or other people are telling us. But at the same time, we can choose to hold fast to our beliefs and not allow others to alter them. We can choose to believe that we have the power to change the world. Because, truly, we do. Every action that we choose to make. Every single choice. That choice impacts someone or something else.

And we can choose how to think. We can choose to think with empathy and compassion, to think that maybe that person who cut in front of us at the grocery store is trying to get home to a sick child or maybe that person who just snapped at us is having a really hard day. We can choose to be this way.

So this is my call to you. Choose action. Choose to believe in your power, and we can all be superheroes. Choose to believe in hope. Make your choices and make them known.

Blog Elul: Prepare

I was watching an episode of Grey's Anatomy from Season 1 the other day, and I noticed that the title sequence portrayed getting ready for surgery like getting ready to go out. This got me thinking about preparation. This whole week for me has been about preparation. The beat before. The anticipatory anxiety that every student feels before a school year, but Elul is about preparing us for something more, the High Holidays. Of course, I've started planning out services and brainstorming for my D'var Torah is at the top of my to-do list, but there's some emotional preparation I've yet to do.

How do we prepare our souls for the High Holidays? How do we prepare to start over? How do we prepare to forgive? Is it like preparing for school? Can I go out and buy something that can help me. Or is it all internal? My preparations for this High Holiday season involve a lot of journaling, long walks outside, and making sure to take time out of my day to talk with friends. How do you prepare?

Blog Elul: Hope

Hope is the light at the end of a tunnel.
Hope is the smile in a sea of frowns.
Hope is the music that floats in my window in hour four of my homework.
Hope is the thing with feathers.
Hope is what was left in the bottom of Pandora's box.
Hope never leaves.
We may forget about it. Make ourselves believe that it isn't there.
It there it will stay. Just hanging around, under all of the guilt, discord, and doubt.
Ready to come out and fly away.

Blog Elul: Begin

Rosh Hashanah is the beginning of the year. I've always liked it better than the Gregorian new year because Rosh Hashanah is actually at the beginning of my year. Sure, i've been at school for a bit, but it still feels like the dust hasn't settled so much on the year to come yet. But really any time can be a beginning if you decide to define it as one. The beginning of each day is a new start and one can make a conscious decision to live one's life anyway they please.

Beginnings, while exciting, also contain a lot of uncertainty, and there is very little I dislike more than uncertainty. But I am confident that this next year will bring happiness and sadness and love and trust and a myriad of other things that I cannot even imagine. And I'm looking forward to it.

Blog Elul: End

I really hate endings. I hated leaving camp--I basically cried for the last 48 hours. I hated leaving school in the spring. But the end of this year feels a whole lot more like a beginning that it does an ending. The ending of this year allows me to think back to the beginnings of so many important relationships and to think about how I will strengthen them and myself in the coming year. The ending of this year means that at some point I will be able to stop worrying about High Holiday logistics. The ending of this year means the beginning of the next. And I get to bring in the next year with my best friends. The people who I feel like I can avoid endings with. With whom it will always be see you later instead of good-bye. And that's a blessing. With endings come beginnings. And both require the same blessing.

Blog Elul: Love

Love. One word that means so much.

A command. From God and from social pressures.

An emotion. Felt towards individuals and group.

The warmth one feels after making a new friend.

The fire while discussing Torah on Shabbos morning. 

The tight hug of a family member.

Love is complicated. It can cloud our judgment.

Cause us to act too selfishly. And also not selfishly enough.

Cause us to spend more time on things irrational.

But love isn't supposed to make sense.

Love is important.

It helps us breath.

Through pain and through joy.

It's refreshing and hopeful.

And with it, we couldn't live without.

Blog Elul: Fulfill

One of the greatest mitzvot(commandments) that Jews are to fulfill is "laasok b'divrei torah," which is defined as "to engage with the words of Torah." Now, many rabbis and people much smarter than me have different interpretations of how one goes about fulfilling this commandment, and I honestly think that I forgot how to fulfill this mitzvah until the other night.

Yesterday, at my rabbi's suggestion, I began studying Jewish text on my own, specifically Psalms because she thought they would bring me comfort. Directly after spending a bit of time studying by myself, I joined some friends in our house of study (Beit Midrash) to learn about the Torah portion for the week. Walking out of that building, late at night, I felt different than I had in a long time. I felt alive and filled with the words of my tradition, and the world, my stress about everything going on in my life had melted away if only for a short moment. And I was reminded of why I love being Jewish and why I want to grow up and be a professional Jew.

Blog Elul:Judge

I am an INFJ. I'm proud of it. But I'm not proud of how judgmental I can be. My initial instinct is always to judge someone on the clothes that they are wearing or the way they talk, but that's not the way to a successful life. I started out by just not saying those things out loud, but now, now I have trained my brain to stop judging, at least for the most part. And that's something I can be proud of.

Blog Elul: Ask

We all ask similar questions. Why are we here? Who are we? How do we make meaningful use of our limited time on this earth? Is there a God? Does that God require something of us? What do we worship? 

But we answer these questions in different ways. With science and religion. Or a combination of the two. We don't debate as to whether these challenges exist. We know that they do. We argue over how they are addressed, and that is an entirely different issue.

Blog Elul: Awaken

Wake up.
Wipe the film off of your eyes and use your senses to see what is happening around you.
From the tragedies of the world to the bad grade on your homework
Don't just sit there.
Do something.
Pray. Learn. Write. Speak.
You are not alone in waking up.
But your voice is the only one that occupies your head.
Make the choice to help yourself. Or to find someone or something that can.
Make the choice to be empathetic and loving.
You could change someone's life.
It's a beautiful and broken world we live in.
Wake up.

Blog Elul: Pray

I pray that God has control of that which I do not.
I pray that God instills me with hope and with kindness for myself and others.
I pray that God protects all who I care deeply about.
I pray that God helps my mind to think and my body to function.
I pray in doctors' office waiting rooms and sitting in the wilderness.
I pray in bed before I fall asleep and as I walk up the stairs to class.
Prayer is something I can do. Prayer isn't easy. Prayer is giving up control. But prayer is what I have.
So I pray. So I pray.

Blog Elul: Change

 Every summer at camp is life-changing, but as I've gotten older(most specifically this past summer and the preceding one), I have found myself learning and changing huge amounts. I grow up a little each year. I learn how to do my job better; I change based on my evaluations and based on my mistakes. I change because I am older. I saw this when i was a kid as well, but it wasn't as obvious. But one of my favorite things about camp is that very few things change--and by this I mean major things, not the addition of the pool or anything like that. The traditions of camp, especially in Tiferet, the arts unit in which I found my home, have not changed since I was a camper, and from what I hear, they have endured from well before that. We sing the same combinations of melodies of L'cha Dodi every single week; we decorate the walls of the Beit Am; we dance during Miriam's song. And there's something magical about getting to go back home to that. There will be a longer post specifically on why Tiferet is so special after we get through High Holidays, but I have to say, the melodies of Oseh Shalom may change and there will always be new faces, but the comfort of home remains. I am in a period of my life when a lot is changing, so I'm unbelievably grateful to get to have camp as a place that doesn't change in the important ways.

Blog Elul: Learn

I spend most of my day learning. Learning about the Ancient Greeks and Romans, their language, their culture, how they were and weren't like us. Every day, every struggle, I learn a little more about who I am. I learn a little more about my body, my limitations, my capacity for love. I learn to forgive and to help and to take care of myself. And I hope to never stop learning. Because learning, whether it be in a Jewish context or otherwise is one of the the most important things in my life. Fittingly, the day that this will come out with be Shabbat, which I will spend learning Torah with our rabbi and my friends and learning about how I can use Shabbat as a way to take care of myself.

Blog Elul: Remember

I spend too much time remembering, but I think to some extent, it's really important. It's really important for us to remember where we have been so that we can have some idea of where we are going. And really important to keep those who we no longer see every single day in our minds. Because just because I now live halfway across the country from many of the influential people in my life does not mean that they are any less important to me.

I think a lot about influence. The people and the places and most of all, the experiences that have led me to where I am today, whether they be good and bad. And we can't ignore the past, especially in these days of reflection because ignoring the past will do us more harm than good. Instead we must remember the journey we have been on, but still look forward to the next great milestone.

Blog Elul: Forgive

This whole High Holiday season is supposed to be about forgiveness, although for me it has mostly been(so far) about finding Torah readers and handling logistics, but never mind that. Forgiveness scares me because forgiving means the pain has disappeared. I know longer feel the wound, but that does not mean I must forget about it. We must forgive not for the other person, but for ourselves because we cannot move on from something if we have not made peace with it beforehand.

And we must forgive ourselves. This is the hardest part. We must forgive ourselves for not being perfect. We must forgive ourselves for the pain we've inflicted upon our own bodies as well as on others. We must forgive ourselves for all of the shoulda coulda wouldas over the last year. Because forgiveness allows us to heal and to step into the new year determined to not make the same mistakes again.

Blog Elul: Trust

Trust is hard to form and easily broken. 

Trust is a careful balance between too much investment and fear that everything could just fall apart. 

Trust is vulnerability.

Trust is showing someone the parts of you beneath the mask. 

Trust is difficult.

Trust is terrifying to me. 

But trust is important.

Because those people you trust, the good ones, they are the ones that enrich your life.

So fear is to be expected. It hurts because they matter.

But I matter too.

So trust is worth the work. 

Blog Elul: Count

I spent so many years counting down the days. Counting down the days until the next NFTY event or the next time I got to go to camp. Every day that everything hurt, i would open the app of my phone and find out how many days there were until my next respite. But if you only count down, you lose time. You lose the small moments in every that make every day count. Even if it's just a chocolate bar that you forgot was in a drawer or a friend sending you a text asking you how you are, every day counts. And I am so happy that I stopped counting down the days and started making the days count, or more accurately, realizing why every day should count.

Blog Elul: Observe

This weekend, I helped to run the first year Shabbaton for Hillel which was a marvelous experiences is many ways, but some of the conversations that I had really related to "observe."

Observing the way that others practice their Judaism is positively fascinating to me. And I really try to just observe, not to judge because you learn so much less if you judge while you watch. And this weekend, I got the opportunity to watch many of these incoming first years, who have only been at college for a few weeks, figure out how they want to celebrate Shabbat and how they want to be Jewish on campus. I observed many of them leaving their comfort zones and talking to someone from outside of their denomination for the first time.

I've always been a very observant person. my friend joke that I can read minds because I can read mircoexpressions(which for the record is reading emotions and not minds, and I don't read micro expressions just for the fun of it). I see a lot, which is exhausting, but it's also a gift. A gift I am very grateful to have as we step into this season of reflection.

Blog Elul: Hear

Hear.
Voices from all directions.
Inside and outside of my restless mind.
Someone needs me. So does someone else.
Who is suffering more?
How do I choose what to hear?
Can I choose what to hear?
Why do I have to hear so much?
I hear so much pain that has no solution.
All I can do is hear. And try to listen.
But can I listen to everyone?
I can surely hear their cries, but how many voices can my mind truly hold?
and how will I know when I am hearing too much and acting too little?