Ghosting God, Ghosting Self
Day 99
Welcome to Rosh Hodesh Elul! This is the beginning of the month of Elul in the Hebrew Calendar and it is the start of our countdown to Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur. We the People, whether Jewish or not in my opinion, are entering a time of “no-time”, a period of days where we begin to prepare ourselves for the new year, clean up the wreckage of our old year(s), acknowledge the good we have done and how to enhance our basic goodness of being more in the coming year. This is a time that is set aside for We the People to look at how often and in what ways We Ghosted God and Ghosted Self in the past year(s). It is also a time where we have to, as Simon and Garfunkel teach us, welcome “darkness my old friend”. This is a moment, period, in time, where “darkness” can truly become “my old friend”, a moment when We make “darkness” a teacher and a motivator, a warning and a joy to recognize earlier and earlier, a way that is no longer fearful, it is a way we embrace because we know it is part of the creative process. For the next 40 days, this blog is going to explore the ways We the People can make “darkness, my old friend”.
In this “time of no time”, as my teacher Rabbi Jonathan Omer-man taught me, We the People are taking care of the business at hand, living our lives one day at a time, being in the moment AND watching the video tape of this past year(s), reviewing our actions, our inactions, our foibles, our strengths, our joys, our sorrows, etc which testify to the person we were in this past year(s), when we gave into our fears, when we resisted the temptation to run after the majority to do evil, when we rebuked our neighbor from a place of love, fear, and care, when we were holy, when we were loving and welcoming the stranger, caring for the poor and the needy, standing up to immorality, injustice especially when done in God’s name!
On this first day of Elul, We the People need to begin this process of making “darkness my old friend”. To do this, we have to stop hiding from ourselves, stop lying to ourselves, stop rolling around in self-deception like a pig rolls around in shit! This is a tall order for most of We the People, especially for we the people who desire power, wealth, retribution for whatever slights our fragile egos could/can not handle because of their inability to hear, deal with and act on TRUTH!
Hiding from truth is the #1 culprit in our Ghosting God and Ghosting Self! It is at the core of all our “missing the marks” throughout our lives. Hiding from Truth is the foundation of the grifter, the autocrat, the narcissist, the ‘good old boy’, the Non-Christ following ‘christian nationalist’, the desecrators of God’s Name, non-Torah ‘orthodox jews’, etc. Elul has to begin with We the People watching the retrospective of our year without editing out the ‘bad’ parts, without making excuses for our wrongs, without being shamed by our indifference and our own evil actions. Rather, We the People are called to view this retrospective with equanimity, with a curious mind, with a mind excited to learn more about our self, to learn more about how to live well, and to learn more about how to BE HUMAN.
Being HUMAN, of course, means being fallible, being imperfect, being able to withstand falling down over and over by Getting Up each and every time. This is another GIFT of THIS 40 DAYS! Being able to see how we recover from our errors over the past year and prior years, being able to imbue the wisdom of the Bible, the call of the Prophets, the words of Psalms, the demand for Justice by Abraham and by Moses, is a GIFT! This gift allows us to never despair, it reminds us that the only constant is CHANGE, it tells us to discern when someone is “a scoundrel within the bounds of Torah” and when someone is a Torah Scholar because their wisdom and their actions are in service to something greater than themselves, because they see the Image of God each and every person is created in and treats them with dignity, knowing they have infinite worth and never needing them to ‘be like me’ because they embrace their uniqueness.
I have been watching these videos for all my life, up until 40 years ago, I was not motivated to change, I was too afraid to change, I was too into hiding, I was too afraid to face the “darkness” and had no idea how to make it “my old friend”. I have learned to do this in these ensuing 40 years, I also recognize my actions over the years that hurt some people and made/make TShuvah for them. I don’t apologize for being me, I do apologize for being a caricature of me, I don’t apologize for my efforts to help another in the way I believed to be best and I do apologize for any hurts people experienced because of my way of doing this. I don’t apologize for being an advocate of the soul of another and I do apologize to those whom I could not speak to in a way they could hear. These are some of the ways I have reconciled and connected with “darkness, my old friend”.
ACTION STEP: BEGIN WATCHING THE VIDEO TAPE OF THIS YEAR
God Bless, Stop Ghosting God, Ghosting Self, Rabbi Mark