blogs/brentspodek

When I was in high school, I used to speak a little bit of Spanish, and poorly at that.

Years later, when I was traveling solo in Central America, I discovered that I was not remotely equipped to negotiate taxis or meals in the market. I remember clearly feeling like a total idiot as I stood in a papusaria in San Salvador and was howled at by a row of working men as I tried to explain I wanted a vegetarian papusa. Sin carne, I said, SIN CARNE! I got louder and louder, hoping perhaps the problem was that the merchant were hard of hearing. It wasn't. 

If I could have fled, I would have. But I had no where to go, so I stumbled through, made lots of mistakes and probably ate some things I wished I hadn't.

I'm a richer person for my errors. I made my way into the countryside, studied with teachers who didn't know they were teaching me, learned a lot about myself and even a little bit about Central America as well.

I think that for most modern Jews, in this community and elsewhere, Judaism is as foreign as Spanish was to me in high school. We might know a smattering of things - a Hebrew phrase, the reason for a holiday, a recipe, but by and large it's a locked box. 

Even if we seek to find a way in by taking a class, coming to services or reading a book, it's so easy to get frustrated, to feel humiliated. We imagine others laughing at us as surely as those roughnecks were laughing at me in San Salvador. And so we run to more comfortable pastures where we know the culture, we speak the language. It is, in so many ways, easier to be at the playground, the farmers market, our couch.

There is a lot to be said for all those places, and yet, I think we are poorer for our inability to engage with our our souls.

As with Spanish, there is no way to learn Judaism without jumping in to the pool. Judaism is nothing more than people engaging with a tradition with more or less fluency, trying to draw sustenance from the past and reshape it for the next generation. I can guarantee that at times, Judaism will be boring, frustrating, insipid. But it is also beautiful, transcendent and inspiring - just not all the time. 

Perhaps you get this email because you've been intending to connect to a place of deeper meaning, to a community, to your past or to your future. Perhaps you've been searching for something, but you're not sure what. Perhaps you find the idea of a God proclaiming judgement to be laughable at best, yet you aren't willing to give up on spiritual possibility altogether.

By all means, come to a service, a talk, a meditation or a hike. Come and try to grow.

Come, and know that the richness of this culture reveals itself over time, so come, yes, but also, commit to growing beyond what you know now. Allow yourself to come to meditation regularly and allow the practice unfold. Commit to coming to the Yevarech service every month and let the liturgy become part of your mindscape. Take a class and know that frustration will precede insight. Judaism is a religion for adults, not a parlor trick for children.

In the words of the poet Dionne Brand, "Revolutions do not happen outside of you, they happen in the vein, they change you and you change yourself, you wake up in the morning changing. You say this is the human being I want to be. You are making yourself for the future, and you do not even know the extent of it when you begin but you have a hint, a taste in your throat of the warm elixir of the possible."

Make yourself for the future, and make a future that includes your mind, yes and your body, yes and your soul as well.