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?

Blog Elul: Choose

Everything is about choices. This kind of hit me as I was running from one thing to another all day today, and I realized that everything, not just my social life, is about choices. And I could talk about the choice of how to think about things, but we have David Foster Wallace for that, and I don't think I'm doing such a great job at that whole thing right now anyway( if you have no idea what I am talking about, read DFW's brilliant commencement address This is Water here).

I choose who I want to maintain relationships with. I choose who is important to me. I choose who and what to worry about (although sometimes anxiety chooses that one). And I choose how to spend my time. I don't think whole thing was as clear to me this year because I came in to sophomore year with an incredible group of friends. I felt like I didn't need to "choose" anything; I was just lucky. But I need to choose to maintain those relationships especially as we approach the most celebratory and also some of the most meaningful times of the Jewish year. I can choose to be a little bit less anxious about High Holidays, and a little more excited to be spending them with my best friends in one of the best places on earth. I can choose to be grateful for the mentors and resources that are helping me to stay sane as I plan the services I have to plan. I can choose how to look at the things in my life. And in some ways, even though that means I have to make more decisions, that's freeing.

Blog Elul: Believe

I've been thinking quit a bit about belief in two ways recently. The first one is in an academic setting: we spent a large part of my Ancient Greek History class yesterday talking about whether we can take the Iliad and the Odyssey as believable sources for history, that is, are they true? This question gets very messy, partly because we don't actually have much else to go off of from that time except for a couple pieces from the archaeological record that haven't proven themselves all that helpful, and partly because they are literature. To some extent, at least, they are myths that can tell us something about the people who wrote them, but can we believe them completely? That's your decision because I don't really want to get in to that debate right now, and I want to talk about the other thing I was thinking about.

I believe in God. It's no secret to anyone around me or who has talked to me, and I'll talk about that in a later blog post if you want, but that's not what I've been thinking about. I've been thinking about how much I believe in other people. How much I cheer my friends on and try to make them see that they can get over whatever seemingly impossible hurdle they are facing at the moment. And as I've been thinking about this, it's hit me how truly horrible I am at believing in myself. And I should try to work on that, as cliche as it may seem. But how do we believe in ourselves when there is aways another hurdle to jump over or mountain to climb? How do we fight the urge to compare ourselves to others? I guess I should talk to myself like I talk to my friends and take my own advice...

Blog Elul: Understand

I don't understand my life. And I think that anyone who says that they do understand their life is either lying or quite delusional(or lucky, I guess). I don't understand a whole lot of the things I read for class--granted quite a few of them are written latin and greek, but still. But more importantly, with all joking aside, I don't really understand why many things have happened in my life. Don't get me wrong, I am very grateful for the people and things I have, but sometimes I feel like I don't deserve them or like I'm faking it. And I don't understand the bad things that have happened either. I'm not saying that they have happened to me because many of my trifles are not about me, and my perspective on many of them have changed over time.

I don't understand what's good or what's bad. I don't understand what's going on in American political discourse at the moment. I don't know. And in a way, it's kind of freeing to say that. We live in an age in which most pieces of information can be accessed just by picking up one of the tiny computers that we carry in our pockets all of the time. But we don't know the answers. I don't mean to questions that can be accessed with a quick search. I mean the answers to the big questions, the overwhelming ones. Will we every learn to accept the fact that there will always be so much that we don't know?