Spiritual Pilgrimages

By AVIYA KUSHNER

THIS IS REAL AND YOU ARE COMPLETELY UNPREPARED
The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation
By Rabbi Alan Lew
288 pages. Little, Brown. $23.95.

THE LOWERCASE JEW
By Rodger Kamenetz
96 pages. Northwestern University Press. $12.95.

For anyone who has spent hours in a synagogue during the High Holy Days, trying to figure out the point of all those prayers, This is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared will be a revelation. This lyrical, personal book by a poet and the author of One God Clapping: The Spiritual Path of a Zen Rabbi, is a beautiful account of how the ten days of repentance—which begin at Rosh Hashanah and end with the Yom Kippur fast—acknowledge the essential questions and crises of human life.

We spend most of our lives, Rabbi Alan Lew writes, "in this strange dance—pushing forward to get back home." Just as much of great literature is about voyage, from Homer onward, so the Days of Awe are about an inner voyage, a trip to the true home and the real self.

This one-soul-to-another book feels like it absolutely had to be written, and there are many sentences that, taken alone, are moving contributions to Jewish thought. For readers who have experienced doubt, non-interest in Jewish tradition, or simply bafflement at what is really going on, Lew is an ideal companion.

Lew readily admits his defeats and limitations as both a rabbi and a human being, and this makes his writing on repentance palatable and intimate. Here is a rabbi who repeatedly says that he is not perfect in his faith or his life. He did not begin life as a religious believer, but has lived as a seeker who can report back on his voyage to greater understanding.

For Lew, the great annual voyage of the Days of Awe begins early. Instead of starting his chronicle of the arc of repentance with Rosh Hashanah, Lew begins with Tisha B’Av, the fast day and date of the destruction of both Temples. Slowly, with many asides into personal stories, Hebrew texts, poems, cultural and political references, and comments of other rabbis from various eras, Lew probes how late summer and early fall in Jewish tradition are a time of questioning, but also a time of acceptance of the cycles of the world.

For starters, Lew presents two ways of looking at the Ninth of Av—as a "cursed time" and as a time when we are reminded that catastrophes will recur until we get things right.

This is true in our personal lives, as well, the commentator Rashba notes, since we find ourselves in the same situations over and over. Lew moves that observation further, asking, "why do our relationships always fail in precisely the same way?" He then pushes, writing "what is the recurring disaster of my life? What is it that I persistently refuse to see?"

Lew’s big strength is his ability to tie Jewish tradition to individual concerns. Kol Nidrei, which is the prayer in which we renounce all our vows at the start of Yom Kippur, in Lew’s view, "begins at the moment of heartbreak." As Lew writes, "the tragic pain of the soul—the pain we hear in those first grieving notes of Kol Nidre—is the pain of loss, the pain of impermanence."

Our evanescence, Lew thinks, is often our greatest problem. We use it as an excuse to remain all potential. "Many of us are afraid to be who we really are, precisely because we sense this," Lew writes. "We sense that once we have risen up, we will begin to fall away."

In haunting moments like this, Lew’s book becomes hopeful and encouraging. In detailing the voyage of the soul that Jewish tradition acknowledges, he offers the reader the hope of understanding, and finally, a truer life: which is exactly what the Days of Awe have always been about, from ancient times through the present days of uncertainty.

* * *

For a second take on the voyage to the true inner self, Rodger Kamenetz’s new book of poems provides fresh views on Tisha B’Av, the Psalms, and the violent anti-Semitism pervasive in European literature and history. Kamenetz, the author of the well-known book The Jew in the Lotus, about the Jewish encounter with Buddhism, has mined the subjects of survival and forgiveness before, but this time, he considers the repentance angle as well.

Like Lew, Kamenetz flags Tisha B’Av as a key moment in the annual spiritual pilgrimage. In a poem titled "Altneuschul, Prague, Tisha B’Av," set in a centuries-old synagogue in Prague, Kamenetz describes Eicha, the book of Lamentations, as a word that sounds like "ache" but means "how."  He notes that Eicha ends with a call to repentance. In Kamenetz’s version of that call, the request becomes an invitation to be turned over. "Turn us to You / O Master of every wave, / turn us to you / and we will be turned."

But Kamenetz himself doesn’t arrive so easily. In one of the collection’s strongest poems, Kamenetz imagines Allen Ginsberg’s encounter with Ezra Pound, the poet and infamous anti-Semite. He wonders how or why Ginsberg forgave Pound, offering another riff on repentance and forgiveness. "Were you able to hold not only forgiveness / but the knowledge of all that needed forgiving?" Kamenetz asks, moving his meditation from the idea that Ginsberg decides to forgive anti-Semitism to the notion that he simply decided to forgive all the weaknesses of human beings.

Finally, in the collection’s closing poem, Kamenetz presents the rewards of a man who has completed the inner journey—happiness. In a jaunty riff off the first psalm, Kamenetz offers three pages on what a happy person is. "Happy is the short-order cook / who forgets time and space / with a spatula and an apron" and later, "Happy the bug that eats the fruit, the fly that lurches on the flower. Happy the radiation flying from the petal / invisible to the eye of man."

In writing that relies heavily on classic Jewish texts, Lew and Kamenetz probe the visible and the invisible challenges of Jewish life. Both poets and spiritual seekers honestly point out the tough spots on the seeker’s path, and both meditate on key moments of repentance built into Jewish tradition. Interestingly, both writers promise happiness and greater calm as the rewards of strenuous spiritual labor.