From the Rabbi, September 2000

“IF YOU’RE NOT OUTRAGED, YOU’RE NOT PAYING ATTENTION.” That’s the text of a bumper-sticker I found in a book store this summer. It’s a good text for this time of year. For any time of year, come to that, but especially now. We’re in the month of Elul. If we prayed together every morning, during this month someone would blow the shofar at each service. If that’s not a call to attention, I don’t know what is. One of the ways of hearing the shofar. is, surely, as WAKE UP!

But from what? And to what? For the moment, let’s just say from dalled perception to sharpened perception. As we go through the year, most of us (I trust I’m not projecting) do accumulate layer upon layer of insulation, of distance. Some of that is right and natural; we often couldn’t get from point A to point B knowing what we know, feeling what we feel. But some of it acts to cut us off, from each other, from ourselves, from the world, from God. Or if cutting off’ sounds too dramatic, try dampening, or dulling, the connections.

So the work of Elul is to wake up, to pay attention. Waking can be painful. It lets in fear, and emptiness, and that sense of helplessness which is the seed of despair. But it also lets in anger, and love, the twin sources of that potential energy for creative action which is the seed of hope. What we have to pay attention to, what we can’t lose sight of for a moment, though in reality we do lose sight of them all the time, are the connections, the inextricable connections between each of us, each other, the world, and God. Now, I know that for many of you ‘God’ is at best an unnecessary hypothesis and at worst an instrument of tyranny. For me the word refers to a reality, however inexplicable, unlikely, paradoxical. And remember, “The sleep of reason breeds monsters”, and while I would never abandon reason, we have to keep in mind that its waking life has not done too well either.

Anyway, these connections – I suppose the one I have most in mind right now, and the one that makes me love that bumper-sticker, is the one between us and the world we live in, which, while beautiful, is also unspeakable, so full of inequity, corruption, opportunism and mendacity that I hardly know where to begin. But the connection is there. We can’t stand aside, however much we might want to.

There’s a wonderfully funny anecdote told by Edith Wharton about Henry James. They were driving, and stopped to ask directions of a local. James launched into paragraph after paragraph of elegant but convoluted prose, the burden of which was simply “Where is X?” Finally, finally, the local man grasped what James was after, and said “Yer in it.” Well, we too are ‘in it’, and of it, up to our eyeballs.

One of the questions we as a community have to think hard about this year is how we are ‘in it’. What is our stance to be? What can it be? If we wake up, and pay attention, if we really look and listen and feel, what then? What do we do, and how do we do it? If we are outraged, or become outraged (I really don’t see how we can not be), how do we live with that constructively?

As you prepare for the Days of Awe this year, however you can and however you do, try to keep that whole web of connections in your consciousness, and see where it takes you. And as a preliminary to that, imagine each morning a shofar blast coming at you with prophetic force from the heart of the world, calling you to responsibility-that is, calling you to answer with your life. If that scares you, believe me, it scares me too. But when we come together, we can shore each other up, and get some real work done.

SHEILA SHULMAN