Day 22
Min ha-metzar karati Yah, Anani vamerchav Yah
From the narrow place, I called out to God, who answered me with the Divine expanse.
The Narrow Place of Unbelonging
The Five of Earth (Pentacles) notices and names the places in which you feel like an outsider, an exile, like someone who does not belong.
At this point in the year, or at this point in the process of teshuvah, you may feel utterly alone. You may have exhausted your spiritual and emotional resources to the point that it is impacting you physically. Even after taking a break, pausing to reflect on your accomplishments, you may have a sense of overwhelm.
Especially for those of us who are prone to self-criticism, the work of looking to our flaws, our missteps, our errors of judgment, our life's misalignment with our values, can feel brutal.
You may feel like you are the only one experiencing this suffering. You may feel you are the only one to have made these particular mistakes. You may feel like these character flaws make you worthy of exile, that you don't belong in a holy community because of them.
Do you feel alone, "out in the cold," or unique in your particular flaws?
Has turning to face these places of misalignment in your life made you feel gross, like you are broken or undeserving of community?
Are you secluding yourself so that no one will see where you're broken?
Are you holding this all on your own shoulders and in your own hands?
The Divine Expanse of Community
This sense of loneliness and victimhood the Five of Earth points to has real information for us. It is a wake-up call reminding us that as Jews, as humans, we are not in fact alone. We may feel alone, separate, outside. But we are not.
Each of us is part of something greater; without the rest of creation, there would BE no you or me. This season is designed to remind us of those interconnections, to bring us together and reveal them in a very literal way, precisely when we may most feel a sense of separation.
Connection and community can be the Divine Expanse that answers us and calls us out of our narrow places. It can be the love and belonging that heals our loneliness.
When we gather together in community (in physical or virtual form), we recognize our common humanity. We realize that these flaws and failings we experience in ourselves are part of the human condition.
In this last week before the High Holidays, Ashkenazi Jews begin to prepare by saying daily slichot. Sephardic Jews begin saying them on the first of Elul. Literally, slichot means "sorries." These are prayers of apology, acknowledgement of mistakes and failures. But here's the thing:
These prayers, like all of the confessions of Yom Kippur, are recited in the first person plural. The prayers don't admit that "I screwed up," they acknowledge that "WE screwed up." Our failings are always in the context of our context. They, like the rest of our lives, are interconnected with all of creation.
Your mistakes are the mistakes of your community. If you have been angry and bitter and crass and doubtful, WE have been. Because YOU are part of WE, and because in our shared humanity, many of us have individually made these same errors. You are not alone, but you are held in this Divine Expanse.
Each person who errs does so in the context of community and increases the guilt of the community as a whole. Of the group, of the family, of the congregation, of humanity.
We must hold the errors of others as partly our responsibility, and we must allow that our own failings do not fall solely on our own shoulders. And so we must turn, do teshuvah, not only individually but also as a group. The responsibility for repair belongs to all of us together.
The nice thing is, the very act of coming together is the beginning of this communal repair. When we take the time to join with others, we've already opened our hearts to the fine interconnections that bind us together.
We realize that if our failings belong collectively to us all, then so do our joys, so do ourlives. We are not alone, we belong.
In recognition of that belonging, our hearts open a little wider, and we become a bit more compassionate and kind to one another and ourselves. When we do so, we recreate the world as a little more compassionate, a little more kind as well.
In our ritual recognition of our shared humanity, we heal our hearts and repair the world.
Toward a Belonging that heals
Who do you belong to?
Whose failings are partly your responsibility to bear?
Who bears some responsibility for your mistakes?
Can you find a way this week to join with others in acknowledging the common nature of your failings, to begin the healing work together?
You might find a place in person or online to gather and say Slichot, to acknowledge "WE have failed, WE have slipped up, WE are responsible together, WE belong to each other."
Or maybe this process looks like a simple dinner table ritual with your family, or a small gathering of your friends, where one person speaks their failing out loud and the rest of the community repeats it together, changing "I" to "we".