Beth Schafer
There is something about the Days of Awe that makes us feel, briefly, like we live on a mountaintop. The music swells, the sanctuary is full, and for a few hours we glimpse what our best selves might look like. It is real. It is also not where we live.
We live closer to the ground. We live in traffic, in difficult conversations, in not knowing what the next months will bring, in bodies and families and jobs that do not pause for reflection just because the calendar asks us to reflect. So, the question worth asking in these ten days between Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur is not how to get back to the mountaintop. It is how to find inspiration down here, in the mess, where we actually spend our lives.
There is a Buddhist teaching that offers something useful here: that the way through discomfort is not to resist it, but to sit in it and let it teach us. Not to distract ourselves from it, not to rush past it, but to stay. The same is true of uncertainty. We cannot predict what is coming, personally or globally, and no amount of worrying will grant us that knowledge. But we cannot let the not knowing keep us standing still. We are asked to keep moving through hard times without the reassurance of knowing how they end.
This is, I think, exactly what these interstitial days are for. Not a countdown to Yom Kippur, but a practice ground for it. Every act of honest self-reflection this week, every uncomfortable truth we let ourselves sit with instead of push away, is rehearsal. We are training ourselves to stay present inside discomfort in small ways, so that we are ready when Yom Kippur asks it of us in full. That day will ask us to be transparent, to be broken open on purpose, with the explicit hope that we come out the other side changed. That kind of openness is not something we can manufacture in the moment. We have to practice it.
If you are looking for a place to practice this week, I am offering one. This Friday at 10:00 am, I am leading a “God Walk and Talk” on our Teva Trail, a different setting for the work of these Ten Days of Awe. We will trade the sanctuary for the outdoors, sitting still for walking, the mountaintop for the ground itself. On a trail, you do not know exactly what is around the bend, and you keep walking anyway. That is not so different from what this whole season asks of us. Surrounded by trees rather than stucco, we will set an intention, sit with a question together, and let the walking itself become a kind of prayer.
The Holy Days show us what our best selves can look like. The days between them are where we practice reaching for it, one uncomfortable, uncertain step at a time. I hope you will join me on the trail this Friday, or create your own time and space for honest reflection, and find out what the ground has to teach you.
G’mar Chatimah Tovah, may you be sealed for goodness in the coming year,
Beth Schafer
