October 2008

REsources For Living

BY LYNN UNGAR, MINISTER FOR LIFESPAN LEARNING, CHURCH OF THE  LARGER FELLOWSHIP

How do you wake up in the morning? Do you use an alarm clock? Does someone come in and wake you up? Do you just pop up wide awake all on your own? My daughter uses an alarm clock to wake up for school, but then she slithers out of bed and just lies there on the floor until the dog sits on her and licks her face until she can’t breathe. That kind of jumpstarts her brain and gets her up and moving for the day.

Waking up is a daily activity (or, for some people, a daily chore), but it’s also a spiritual practice. One of the important teachings of many religious traditions is that being truly awake means more than just having our eyes open. We should be fully aware, alive to the present moment, awake in our spirits as well as our bodies. There is a type of Buddhist meditation in which people sit in silence, but every now and again the leader loudly whacks together two wooden blocks. The startling “whack!” in the silence is a reminder to those doing the meditation that they should wake up, that they should let go of whatever thoughts might be running around their heads and come back to being fully present, spiritually awake.

This time of year the Jewish tradition offers another way to wake up the faithful. On Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, there is a special wake up call during the religious services. A person called the Tokea, which means the “blaster” in Hebrew, blows on a special kind of trumpet called the shofar. The shofar is made out of a hollowed-out horn from a male sheep or goat. (Or, if you’re getting fancy, the long, twisty horn of a kudu. But if you can’t do a kudu anything you can do will do. Except a cow. No cows.)

Where was I? Oh, right, the shofar. On Rosh Hashana the Tokea blows 100 blasts of the shofar, in a particular series of short and long notes. (You can hear the sound of the shofar online by doing a Web search of “shofar audio.”) Jewish tradition says that the reason the shofar is played at the New Year is to wake everyone up, to rouse people from their slumbers. Now, although the Rosh Hashana service can be long, the rabbis of old weren’t talking about literally waking people up who fell asleep during the service. Like the wooden blocks in the Buddhist meditation, the job of the shofar is to remind people to pay attention, to look lively, because something important is coming.

What’s coming? Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Yom Kippur, Jewish tradition says, is the day when God closes the Book of Life which was opened at Rosh Hashana. The ten days in between, the Days of Awe, or Days of Turning, are your chance to have an effect on what is written about you, in hope that you will have a good year to come. So those ten days are a time to apologize for things you’ve done wrong, make peace with friends and family and generally make sure that your life is on the right track. We “wake up” to our spirits by taking a good look at what might be keeping us from being our best selves and by trying to fix those things. The Yom Kippur service is full of prayers asking for forgiveness, covering all the bases of what anybody in the congregation might have done to hurt or offend someone else. And then, at the very end of the Yom Kippur service, the shofar sounds again.

Why? Why have a wake-up call after the Book of Life is closed, after you’ve already finished the test and handed it in? Well, there’s all the rest of the year left. It’s never too early to start remembering to be awake to your best self.

So even if you’re not going to be hearing the shofar sound in the synagogue, why not think of this month as the time to wake up to the year? In what ways have you just been stumbling your way through, not caring about things that matter? Have you been doing your best to care for the environment? Do you really listen to your friends when they talk, or is your mind actually on what you want to say next? Do you remember to thank the people who do a lot for you (like—ahem—your parents)? Do you always follow through when you say you will do something?

The list of questions could go on and on, but the idea is the same for all of them. How do I wake up to the ways that I do or don’t live up to my best self? How do I stay awake, and keep trying?

Maybe if you do wake up to an alarm clock, you can imagine that beeping of your clock is actually the blast of the shofar, calling you to be truly and fully awake as you open your eyes to the new day.

L’shanah tovah! May you have a good year!