CBH Blog

By Rabbi Joshua Lesser

Spiritual practices can give us handles, places to grasp when life is hard or unpredictable. My High Holy Day practice has been a thorough cheshbon hanefesh: taking stock of our year, examining our lives, noticing growth and unhealthy patterns, identifying which relationships need patching and which traits need shoring up. To serve me well, I must sort through my strengths, wrestle with my character and reveal the more tender and embarrassing parts for my reflection.

This process reminds me of when as a kid we lived in Charleston, in a small house with threadbare carpeting, even a few areas with large holes. My clever mother strategically hid these unsightly places by putting potted plants over them. This included an unwieldy 5-foot cactus that guarded the largest hole. Surely no one would lift such a heavy and prickly plant, and so it remained well protected. However, since the spots in the carpet (and in our lives, too) are rarely in convenient places, we often painfully bumped into the cactus. A good High Holy Day preparation is like moving the cactus we have placed on the parts of our lives we avoid and checking on the areas that are more vulnerable, hidden and requiring attention.
And if our troubled spots, the places of conflict, remain largely the same -- and for many of us they do -- there is a repetitive nature to it. Those who are wiser, namely, folks like my therapist, say there is slow cyclical growth in the repetition. Maybe it is a labyrinth, circles that move you inward, then outward and back within again, but this year I was frustrated with the same reexamination. I felt stuck.
As the High Holy Day season tumbled around again, I realized that my carpet felt more threadbare this year and there were not enough potted plants to cover it up. Last year brought us a most unsettling, destabilizing presidency: a new administration bent on ignoring civil rights, dismantling human rights, engaging in warring brinksmanship and disrupting our environmental protections and global treaties. It is as if we had elected Pandora’s box and Greed, Narcissism, Deceit and Contempt had escaped from their confines and were now at the helm.

No wonder exploring productive and unhelpful traits felt less relevant. Throw in natural disasters and terror attacks with their deep existential questions and it’s a wonder that any of us would even have an inclination to assess our own lives. And in parallel process, my father spent the whole year successfully dying; the nerve of him. Thus, my High Holy Day preparation has felt different this year -- you likely can relate. There is so much going on in our country (not to mention the world) that calls for an outward moral response that our ability to focus our attention inward on ourselves feels challenging.

Many of us are overwhelmed, saddened or disposed to avoid introspection during chaotic times. And, of course, we are. Who has the time that contemplation requires when it feels as if we are constantly called to act? And where does one start when there is so much to do? Why look inward when one can blame outward? And yet, we must.

My first step was to name honestly where I was; I felt fragmented. There was more. Under the cactus, the most unsightly spot was despair. Not just intangible despair, but the type of despair that packs 10 pounds on you because along with engaging all the other protests, you have given up the fight against processed flour and refined sugars no matter how hard you push yourself at Orange Theory. All year I have tried to be a dispenser of hope, but was I making any difference? People told me that some days my words have gotten them out of bed. But when I needed to project my own self out of bed, my words dried up where uncertainty and powerlessness took root.

It was unpleasant to accept this was where I was, yet it beat needing to pretend. One of the worst betrayals of self is to become the purveyor of our own fake news. So my preparation for these holidays began with a different set of questions: “What do I need? Where is there wholeness?” One of the best ways to discern what to do is to ask questions: to God, to my meditation, to my inner wisdom, to loved ones and strangers. And then to listen as if my life depended on it.

I began to pay attention. When gathering books for my summer High Holy Day prep, the last one I grabbed was Anne Lamott’s Hallelujah Anyway. I was familiar with the title, but I hadn’t paid attention to the subtitle: Rediscovering Mercy. Surrounded by gold dots, the word “mercy” blinked at me like a neon sign.

Rediscovering mercy? “Mercy sounds so Christian,” I thought. Why do they get all the good words? And yet, it’s ours, too. Isn’t the High Holy Day liturgy replete with mercy, I pondered? If teshuvah, repentance, is a process, then mercy is the quality required. Mercy as a spiritual practice is precisely what’s needed. Obvious, but elusive to me. What did I need? Mercy. Mercy for myself and for others. We could all use a bit more mercy.

Dropping the book in the bin, I opened my Hebrew Bible to search the text I knew by heart with the word mercy. The air felt electric as I sensed the handle I was seeking was within my grasp. Micah 6:8 -- “God has told you, Mortal, what is good and what Adonai seeks from you: Only to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with your God. Ahavat chesed, love mercy.” When we live in a time that demands us to do justice, what does it mean to love mercy?

This felt like the right question to prepare for these High Holy Days. Micah, too, lived in turbulent times. He served under kings Yotam and his son Ahaz. Ahaz was especially morally bankrupt, violent and weak. Micah condemned his regime with its excessive social inequities and exploitation of the poor and vulnerable. With much of the government and priesthood systematically perverting justice and seeking its own gain, the people lost their way. Many either idolized and blindly followed the unscrupulous regime or succumbed to despair, abandoning hope and their religious practices. The echoes of our times are clear. No wonder Lamott calls Micah’s words “the North Star that guides me through the darkness.” Justice, Mercy, Humility burn brightly.

Micah’s words began to wake up the people. Confused, overwhelmed and despairing, they asked Micah for an easy formula to alleviate their suffering: exactly what type of sacrifice do these times require? Should we offer a brand new calf? 1000 rams? “No, it has been told to you, ‘What is needed from you is to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with your God.’” And so we, too, have been told. Let’s peer into this ancient mirror to reflect on what is required of us in this New Year.

Let’s begin with ourselves. Those of us who have let fear overwhelm us and anxiety prevent us from acting, these days invite us to ask for mercy. For all of us who may have been self-centered, unaware or privileged, we, too, deserve mercy. Even those of us who are judgmental, temperamental or overly sentimental, we need the embrace of our own mercy. Mercy is the thread that reconnects us to our lives and binds the world. How do we expect to forgive others or ask for forgiveness if we do not extend it to ourselves? And if we are unwilling to explore mercy, can we be effective “doers of justice” or do we become dogmatic at the expense of our humanity? Micah’s words inspire the casting out we do at tashlich; we do so to make room for mercy.

I assume if you’ve chosen to be here for the High Holy Days, then likely the “do justice” part is a given. The word Micah used for justice comes from the root ‘to judge.’ While these times call for moral discernment, we must remember this practice is to act, not to condemn from our couches or Facebook pages. Pastor Oswald Chambers taught that we receive divine discernment not to criticize but to intercede. Indeed, it is precisely why the central fulcrum point of Micah’s phrase is to love mercy. We must balance our actions of equity with relationships founded on mercy. Our ability to forgive, to express compassion, is what saves us from the mire of contempt politics. Justice is a pursuit, not a science, and if it is not tempered with mercy, it, too, can be another form of oppression.

This is why people like renowned criminal justice reform activist Bryan Stevenson rarely speak about justice without speaking about mercy. He says, “Much of injustice emerges from our own brokenness.” When he addressed progressive Jews at Bend The Arc, he said, “There is a strength, a power even, in understanding brokenness, because embracing our brokenness creates the need … for mercy … and for a corresponding need to show mercy. When you experience mercy, you learn things that are hard to learn otherwise. You recognize the humanity that resides in each of us.”

Because we are Jews and like to debate, a thought like this inevitably provokes us to ask hard questions such as “Do white supremacists deserve mercy?” Lovers of mercy would likely say yes. But hold on, so few of us actually are lovers of mercy. We may barely like mercy, or don’t know it well, perhaps even rightly believe it must have its limits. Mercy is not without justice or repercussions. Mercy is a practice that requires an attitudinal shift that everyone is a part of humanity and no one is beyond redemption. Heschel taught that we do justice and love mercy because God loves people. “God’s concern for justice grows out of compassion for [humanity]. The prophets do not speak of a divine relationship to an absolute principle … called justice. An act of injustice is condemned, not because the law is broken, but because a person has been hurt.”

Practicing mercy starts as an intention of how you treat people, particularly those with whom you have conflict. So, if we are to engage in a spiritual practice like extending mercy to self and other, let’s not start at the deepest end of the pool. Put neo-Nazis on the shelf and get comfortable with mercy first. Start with someone like a coworker, or your brother; from there you can decide how far you extend.

Practicing mercy with a dying loved one was a blessing that emerged from my father’s cancer diagnosis. Over many months, we said what we needed to say and I let go of the things (often more than once) that were unresolved. But the unexpected mercy practice came by asking me to officiate his memorial service. The funeral was largely for loved ones, but the memorial was for his patients, people who had symbolically been difficult for me. They represented why my father was absent at many important moments. While I reframed this years ago with appreciation for his sense of duty, to serve them on his behest felt hard. Most of them are white Southern Conservative Christians, in other words, adversaries. Then it came to me. What better opportunity to address them en masse while lifting up the progressive values that guided my father and underpinned his attentive and loving care for them. I would deliver a sermon, not a eulogy. This was justice! My delight in delivering these truths as his son, a gay social justice oriented rabbi, meant mercy had fled the building.

I imagined the scene in my head with zeal.  Friends expressed concern for my chutzpah, but to no avail. When the day came, I had some trepidation. The benefit of a well-lived practice is it sneaks up on you when you least expect. I had already begun to extend mercy to myself and those around me. So, when I began to deliver my sermon on welcoming the stranger, mercy emerged for these people who had shared with me how my father held their hands in pain or kissed their foreheads, despite how they treated him. When they were scared, he did not think about how they voted, he treated their humanity. Though my words remained unchanged, my heart cracked open at the extent of mercy my father had for these people, many of whom were conflicted about his future salvation, afraid of immigrants, gay people and Muslims, but at some time had been sick, lonely, scared and on their deathbed. My father healed them with medication and mercy; for that, I was brought into their circle and they into mine. So my words of reminding them to refrain from oppressing and to love the stranger spoke to me, too. They were offered as balm, not as shame. It was the most merciful gift I could offer, because my father lived in these true and unsettling words, and they wove us together. When the voice of an elderly white man cried out “Amen!” at its conclusion, it was as if he was Micah himself praising the mercy that strangers share when they see another’s humanity, another’s hurt. Briefly, we were all lovers of mercy, deeply human, opening perspectives and lifting despair. I was ready to face a New Year. How about you?