Walking Blindly Towards Life

Some thoughts for Yom Kippur

A particular memory has been surfacing repeatedly over the last month.

Several years ago I visited an educational farm outside of Modi’in – a town in the middle of Israel, surrounded by the nation’s green lung, the Ben Shemen forest. The farm offered experiential programs for young adults to get their hands dirty and learn about sustainability and ground themselves in nature and meditation and eating straight from the earth. Over the course of the weekend, the farmhands led our cohort in a series of activities centered around team-building and spiritual awareness. One afternoon, we were brought to the edge of the forest, just across the road from the farm’s entrance.

Upon entering the woods, we were asked to form a single-file line, holding onto the shoulders of the person in front of us, forming a continuous chain. One of the farm’s instructors – the kind of guy who you’d rarely catch wearing shoes – walked down the line, blindfolding all fifteen-or-so of us and asking each person to confirm that they could not see. He explained the rules:

You must follow the person in front of you. Do not let go of their shoulders. Do not break the chain. You must remain blindfolded. You cannot speak.

The man, our seeing leader, made his way to the front of the line, where he held the hand of the first person. We walked.

The first several minutes felt like an eternity. There was a tension that materialized like an electric shock between shoulders and palms. Nervous giggles emanated sporadically as feet stumbled over tree roots and toes bumped into heels. Nobody spoke, but everyone held their breath. The forest, despite being the lush oasis in the expansive desert of Israel, is itself hilly and vast. Its floor is anything but flat, and it took absolute concentration to reorient your body as the land changed from steep, grassy inclines to harsh, rocky earth to damp, sunken dirt. We would often brush against a thorny brush or feel a low-hanging branch catch briefly in our hair. All the while, we held on to the shoulders in front of us, not speaking, not seeing.

Soon, nobody laughed or gasped or whispered small grievances at a stumble or thorn or stub. It was silent except for the sound of the sacred earth beneath our feet, birds and crickets calling out to one another, the gentle hush of a breeze among the flora. Walking blindly started to feel natural. Our human chain fell into a slow and certain rhythm. A new way of being took hold – moving through space was no longer an exercise of sight. It was an exercise of listening for cues by the texture of footfall up ahead. It was a practice of feeling the flow of the person in front of you, understanding that the movement of this shoulder means a slight step up and a slight lowering of the other means a turn slightly to the left.

Any concrete perception of time had dissipated along with the need for sight. There was no indication of when we started walking or when we would end, and the time in between was as full as it was empty – a heightening of senses in pursuit of nothing, nowhere.

Eventually, the person in front of me stopped, and I stopped, and the person behind me stopped. A voice came from up ahead, telling us we’d completed the task. We took off our blindfolds to find we were back where we’d started. It had been a full hour of walking blindly through the forest. It had felt like both an instant and an eternity on an ever-changing path with no distinct boundaries, no questions asked and no answers offered.

The timing of this memory coming up seems serendipitous, but not accidental. The High Holidays are a time of tzedakah, tefillah, and teshuva – charity, prayer, and repentance. This year, the concept of teshuva has been especially compelling for me. As with everything in Judaism, the meaning of these talmudic imperatives aren’t as straightforward as their common translation. Most years, I think a lot about repentance – what I’ve always believed is the core of Yom Kippur. Who have I wronged? How have I misjudged? Where can I improve in the new year?

Over the Days of Awe this year, I’ve been stuck on the concept of teshuva in its most literal sense – turning. Turning and returning. During this period, the Jewish tradition gives us an opportunity to turn in so many ways – turning towards life, towards joy, towards faith. And perhaps most critically, turning inwards, towards our self – a rare feat in a life that is focused so much outside of ourselves. It’s this kind of turning that has stirred up a spiritual deluge in my life lately. I think it’s this process of turning – returning – to the core of my being, that brought up my memory of the Ben Shemen Forest, because that blind walk of faith was a lot like teshuva. When I look inside myself, past the distractions of modern life, past the egotism and vanity, past the fears about my own inadequacies, past my endless material want, past the mundane things we do to fill time and space and every waking moment, I find something very full but also very empty. Something like the memory of walking through the forest blindfolded – it’s grounding, but there is no image attached to it. I can feel it and know that it’s real, but it is impossible to articulate. I can’t grab it, I can’t hold it, I can’t stop it from changing, nor can I make it change against its will. It just exists, and I walk blindly into it and blindly through it, only knowing for certain that I will end up where I started (I would say excuse my morbidity, but I think Judaism would tell me to embrace it).

We are told – warned, even – at this time of year that our names may or may not be inscribed in the Book of Life. Maybe in biblical times, before modern science, the Book of Life was a sufficient explainer of why people would fall ill or drop dead or have a bad harvest, or even be forsaken by their political leader. God would literally decide who was worthy of living and who was not, and those fates were sealed in a book at this time every year, calling for the most grueling ritual worship in our tradition. Now, the Book of Life serves as a symbol of teshuva itself, as a choice between turning towards life and turning towards spiritual, emotional, moral death. Death as not an event, but a state of being. A state of wanting, of discontent, of nihilism.

During the Selichot service leading up to Rosh Hashanah, we recite the Vidui, a confession of our sins. Reform synagogues tend to take liberties with the English translation – an often poignant way to find new meaning in old prayers. As I read aloud with the congregation, I was struck so profoundly by one line that I stood silently for the remainder of the prayer, unable to think of anything but this line. Al chet sh’chatanu l’fanecha, We have sinned against you by indulging in despair.

A few weeks ago I was on the phone with my therapist, kvetching about how as soon as one thing falls into place, another falls out. My professional life feels rewarding for the first time ever, but suddenly my social life feels lacking and depressing.

“It just feels like it’s always one step forward and two steps back,” I told her.

“Well, that’s life,” she said, unflinching. The conversation ended there, and we moved on to something else.

We finished our session, and I thanked her, and I recalled that interaction and I thought, was she mad at me? It wasn’t her usual style, such an abrupt, abrasive little quip like that. She’s much more of a prodder – always asking questions to get to the root of things, to get me to dig deeper. After thinking about it for days, and then weeks, I realized that there was no more digging to do, no more questions to be asked. We were at the core – that’s life.

Teshuva this year has felt like digging that deep. I look far enough inwards and eventually realize that, while there are still problems, there are no more answers. The only thing to do is to face that core – and it looks absolutely, unequivocally, wretchedly flawed – and say, in the words of my wonderful therapist, “Well that’s life.” To accept the thorns scraping your legs and the branches tangling your hair and wishing you’d listened when they told you to wear long pants and a hat for this activity, but to keep walking anyways.

Teshuva is looking inwards – doing the journaling and the meditating and the therapy and the work-life balance and realizing it’s still so hard, every day is challenging and there is no self-care regimen for the essential, difficult nature of life – and one day hitting the core, and realizing there is nowhere else to go. Twenty four years ago, there was birth, and one day there will be death. In between those two promises, you walk blindfolded through absolute uncertainty using only context clues and sometimes tripping and sometimes basking in the glow of joy sometimes stepping in shit but doing your best not to indulge in despair or judgment or anger or greed, and sometimes taking a step backwards, but always moving forward again.

L’shana tova.