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One of the many things I did this summer was begin the process of downsizing. I helped friends who – after living in their houses for 34 years, raising 3 kids, and collecting a lot of stuff – move to a much smaller place. That’s the stage of life my friends and I are now at! Watching how difficult it was for them, emotionally and time consuming, I decided to start the process myself. I went through and threw out a lot of the files, boxes, and stuff in our own house as I rearranged rooms and got rid of clutter. Each piece of paper brought back memories and required a decision: do I need this car maintenance receipt from 1996? No. Do I want to save the picture book story my son made when he was 3 ½? Yes. What about the letter a student wrote me in 2001 or 1978? Yes!
The downsizing process is an interesting one. Because it’s an opportunity to revisit who I’ve been, what I’ve done, what was and is no longer important to me, what was and still is important to me. What I choose to keep and what I throw out becomes a tangible record of who I am and what I value. And I’ve become aware that whatever I save now, when I’m dead and gone, my children will have to go through. Some of what they find will surprise them, some of it will remind them, some of it they wonder why did I ever save that, some of it they will be so pleased to find, or find again. But it will be a record of what was important to their mama.
A 50 year old friend told me the other day about the piano in her living room. She’d had it since she was a child and had taken piano lessons every week when she was growing up. But shortly after her mother died last year, my friend sold the piano. Because she realized that it represented her mother’s wishes for who she was, not her own.
This time period, the 10 days between the Jewish Holy days of Rosh Ha Shanah and Yom Kippur, is sort of like the spiritual equivalent to ‘downsizing.’ It’s an opportunity to go through your psychological and spiritual house, and evaluate: What’s the unnecessary clutter? What do I need to get rid of? What do I want to keep? What do I want to change? Who am I? What do I really value? What is the legacy of a life I want to leave?
In fact, there are some very explicit rituals associated with both Rosh Ha Shanah and Yom Kippur that express this as metaphor. On the afternoon of the first day of Rosh HaShanah, yesterday, people performed Tashlich. They went to a body of water and threw in crumbs of bread they put in their pocket, representing one’s sins. It’s a way to clear out the psychic, spiritual, emotional ‘schmutz’ (Schmutz is a wonderful Yiddish word meaning, according to the Urban dictionary, “Random, icky stuff that ends up on you or something else.” And that’s what this ritual encourages us to get rid of – the random, icky stuff that ends up on us or someone else because of us.
During these days between R & Y we have to do a self-evaluation and approach those we have harmed to ask for forgiveness. There’s something very important about this work. As a fellow Jew, Jesus, recognized, there is a strong connection between the power of forgiveness and the power of healing. So we need to examine ourselves and see where we’ve messed up. And then we need to do something about it. In Judaism, you can’t ask G-d or a rabbi to forgive you for something you’ve done to another person. You have to speak directly to the person you’ve harmed. Unless you own up, responsibly, and deal with that directly, you will remain spiritually crippled.
The day of Yom Kippur is in every way a symbolic day of death. People wear white, the colour Jews are buried in, they refrain from all earthly pleasures, and they face G-d with the hope that their name will be inscribed in the book of life. People who face death, either because of an illness or old age, often find that what is important to them changes. Given the opportunities, they often let go of the pursuits and resentments they have lived with, and seek something else. In his book, Healing Into Life and Death, about helping those who are dying to come to terms with their lives, Buddhist Stephen Levine tells the story of Hazel, a bitter nasty "bitch-on-wheels" who makes everyone's life -- in the hospital and in her family -- miserable. But at the end, when she connected to the pain of others she was transformed into a loving, forgiving woman.
A teaching colleague told the faculty on opening days of an informal study that was done on what people’s goals were and that they changed dramatically over time. High school students defined success as meaning ‘good’ schools, ‘good’ jobs, lots of money. Older people, those who were near the end of their careers and recognized they were going to die one day, wanted lives of significance. As he said: “Their definitions included phrases like…having a meaningful impact in my field, earning the respect of my employees and family, building something that matters in the world, and leaving a legacy that will last after I'm gone. Essentially, the word "success" had been replaced with the word "significance" as they grew older. So, shouldn't we focus less on being "successful" and more on how to lead lives of significance?”
Wouldn’t it be great if we could recognize the importance of that, make the kind of change Hazel and these older people did, long before we face the end? That’s what Yom Kippur does! It helps people – hopefully – see the value of lives of significance being lives of success.
I’m going to leave you now with one of the MANY pieces of paper that I came across in my files that I shall not only keep, but pass on to you. It is something that my dear stepmother gave me many years ago. It was written in 1904 by a school teacher, Mary Stewart in Colorado, and it goes like this:
The Collect
Keep us, o god, from pettiness. Let us be large in thought, in word, in deed.
Let us be done with fault finding and leave off self-seeking
May we put away all pretense and meet each other face to face – without self pity and without prejudice.
May we never be hasty in judgement and always generous.
Let us take time for all things; make us to grow calm, serene, gentle.
Teach us to put into action our better impulses, straightforward and unafraid.
Grant that we may realize it is the little things that create differences, that in the big things of life we are at one.
And may we strive to touch and to know the great, common human heart of us all and, Oh Lord God, let us not forget to be kind!
Mary Stewart
1904, Colorado
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