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Passages from Alan Lew’s This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared that hit different in 5780/2020

#we are not pressed together in a big room 😔#but we def have nothing to offer but our broken hearts!!!!#jumblr #alan lew #rosh hashanah

The rabbis of the Talmud used to go to great lengths to make themselves available to grant forgiveness to the people who had wronged them. They felt they couldn't offer forgiveness until it was requested, because they were afraid to short-circuit the inner process of Teshuvah. They understood that in order for forgiveness to be complete, the person who had wronged them needed to arrive at the point of a sincere apology by his or her own inner process, and they didn't want to interfere with this process. So if someone owed them an apology, they would hover around him constantly, both to remind him of what he had done and to be on hand to grant forgiveness the moment the person apologized. The rabbis recognized that forgiveness was a deep spiritual need for both parties. The wrongdoer needed to be cleansed of his wrongdoing and his guilt for it, and his victim needed to let go of the hot coal of anger he was holding on to. So the rabbis hovered around the people who had wronged them, so that both these needs could be met at the earliest possible moment.

Alan Lew, This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation

shoutout to the most magnificently passive-aggressive power move ever recommended as spiritual practice

#tired: being a ghost who haunts the ones who wronged you #wired: being alive and haunting them anyway #alan lew #forgiveness #teshuvah #judaism #j

"This is real and you're completely unprepared " by Alan Lew

#high holy days #Alan lew

Alan Lew, This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2003): 260-262.

#jumblr #alan lew #this is real and you are completely unprepared #neilah #yom kippur #judaism #j #give us another year or else

"We sit flush with the world, in a ‘house’ that calls attention to the fact that it gives us no shelter. It is not really a house. It is the interrupted idea of a house, a parody of a house…

And it exposes the idea of a house as an illusion. The idea of a house is that it gives us security, shelter, haven from the storm. But no house can really offer us this. No building of wood and stone can ever afford us protection from the disorder that is always lurking all around us. No shell we put between us and the world can ever really keep us secure from it. And we know this. We never really believed this illusion. That’s why we never felt truly secure in it [...]

In the sukkah, a house that is open to the world, a house that freely acknowledges that it cannot be the basis of our security, we let go of this need. The illusion of protection falls away, and suddenly we are flush with our life, feeling our life, following our life, doing its dance, one step after another.

And when we speak of joy here, we are not speaking of fun. Joy is a deep release of the soul, and it includes death and pain. Joy is any feeling fully felt, any experience we give our whole being to. We are conditioned to choose pleasure and to reject pain, but the truth is, any moment of our life fully inhabited, any feeling fully felt, any immersion in the full depth of life, can be the source of deep joy."

– Rabbi Alan Lew, This is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared

#Alan Lew #Sukkot #October #tishrei #autumn

#teshuva #alan lew

Book #142 of 2025:

This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation by Rabbi Alan Lew

The Jewish High Holy Days are approaching, which means my library’s circulation figures for this self-help title are seeing their usual annual bump. This year I remembered to place my hold early enough to finally check it out for myself, although the experience was not quite as moving / insightful as I had expected it to be.

I’m not sure whether the divergence rests more in author Alan Lew and me representing different branches of our common faith tradition or in our diverse backgrounds more generally. He’s a Conservative rabbi who came around to the community after a secular upbringing and initial exploration of Buddhism, while I’ve always belonged to one Reform congregation or another. But he was also a 60-year-old member of the Silent Generation writing in 2003, whereas I’m a Millennial in my late 30s reading his words a couple decades later. Some parts of his approach feel timeless, but others grate on me: the subtle assumption of a straight male audience, an assertion that ritual is meaningless without a divine presence on the other end of it, overconfident claims about specific hypotheses or interpretations, a certain cavalierness towards sensitive topics like rape and miscarriage, and so on.

At its strongest, this book encourages mindful meditation and open acknowledgement of one’s shortcomings, and it frames the time around Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur as a period expressly accommodating of such mental and spiritual check-ins. I’m especially struck by the writer’s parallel between these holidays and what we know of deathbed reflections, drawing on his own history with hospice patients sharing their regrets and what matters most to them in the end. These are, he suggests, the exact conversations we should be having with ourselves, our loved ones, and the Lord our G-d on a regular basis, with the Days of Awe functioning as a handy recurring reminder to prompt us in the right direction. That’s the message I’ll be taking into my own engagement with the old familiar practices, while doing my best to let go of the ways that this particular volume let me down.

★★★☆☆

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