Yom Kippur (belated) and Endings in General

Yom Kippur has been very challenging for me in the past, and this year I came to understand why, and to begin to move into a new stage. I think that it is challenging for me because it emphasizes endings, and because it emphasizes the impossibility of finding closure. I used to hate it because I interpreted the liturgy and ritual structure as actually intending for people to feel at some point that they have expiated, via perfection in repentance and intense self-beration. As someone who tends to be obsessive and a little self-hating anyway, this was a recipe for disaster. I ultimately walked out of a Yom Kippur meditation service a few years ago because I was feeling so paralyzed by the process.

I've also had similar trouble with appreciating nature, as disconnected the two themes seem to be. Three things that I really loved at one point were autumn leaves, snow, and waterfalls. And I live in an area where those three things are all plentiful. But I have tended to go in and out of periods in which I find myself staring at beautiful landscapes and thinking "Why can't I appreciate this the way I once did? Why doesn't it 'click'?" And the longer I stay there, and the harder I try, the worse it gets. And, of course, Yom Kippur is in the fall, so I tended to have this double dose of "I'm somehow unable to be appropriately affected by my experience." (Even Rosh Hashana has some of the same feeling, because I felt like, "This is the New Year, I am supposed to feel like I am transitioning, like I am ready for the new and able to leave the old behind, but I just can't get there. " I guess there's a reason that religious ceremonies and compulsions are both called "rituals.")

  So, I spent several months dealing with both the landscape thing and the ritual thing by just "not trying." When I started feeling that urge to "get this one right," I would say to myself, "Make your peace with it. Make your peace." Which was somehow an effective mantra for getting myself unstuck, leaving the trigger behind, staying in the present as time ticked forward. I wasn't back at a place yet where I could feel moved by landscapes, but I felt like I was getting closer just by beginning to strip away my association between nature and the dreaded mindgames.

So that practice kind of set the scene for this Yom Kippur. I had a different experience of Yom Kippur this year, partly thanks to some of the changes that I've gone through in the past year, and partly thanks to my High Holiday read, which was This is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation, by Alan Lew. During the Day itself, the title of the book kept flashing through my mind. As I thought about it, I arrived at a new interpretation of the ritual and liturgy. I stopped thinking that you are supposed to feel cleansed by "getting your repentance/guilt right." But I also don't think the point is to believe that we are perfect and never do anything that is harmful to others. So I started thinking that the point is actually to become progressively aware of how impossible it is to feel cleansed, how culpability is something that is unfixable. The reality is that life is about getting things wrong--the only way not to engage in wrong actions is to take no action, which is another kind of wrong action. (The liturgy itself mentions both sins of commission and sins of omission.) I now interpret the sin-part of Yom Kippur as a ritual that is designed to really bring home the permanent wrongness of human existence. Alan Lew also talks about Yom Kippur as a rehearsal for one's own death. Yom Kippur definitely emphasizes finality. Once the book is sealed, that's it. You ran out of time. It is impossible, though, to finish one's repentance in a finite amount of time--so the ritual is geared to make you experience the insufficiency of time, and the reality of the impossibility of closure. Death, and all endings, I think, are the same way. You run out of time, and no matter how much time you had, there is no way that you can be ready.

I actually think that this is a reason for my connection between Yom Kippur and landscapes, and why fall in particular has been a very hard time for me for a while. The leaves are beautiful, and they are transient. I can never fully appreciate them before they are gone.

But what I think now is that the art is not in doing the impossible, and "finishing in time." I think the art is in digesting the impossibility of finishing, the impossibility of perfection. The reality that unpreparedness is the rule, not the exception--in fact, it's constant. That's what living in the present is--accepting the reality that we are constantly unprepared for everything that we face. And the temptation in Yom Kippur to try to "get it right" this time, the high drama of Ne'ilah, the last service of the evening, our last chance...the dawning, terrifying knowledge that we won't be done, we won't be ready--that fear does not reflect an error, a failure to perform the ritual the "right way." Rather, that's the whole point of the ritual, because it's in that moment of crushing defeat that we are forced to accept a reality that we otherwise might pay lip service to but not fully internalize. There. Is. Not. Enough. Time. Not on Yom Kippur, not in the autumn, not in the year that just ended nor the year that's about to start, not in life. There is not enough time, and if we keep looking backwards at what we wanted to get done instead of rising to the occasion at hand, we really will blink and miss it all. There's also an incredible humility in that recognition. We couldn't get it right if we tried. So clearly, getting it wrong isn't about not having tried hard enough. And then we can't possibly get caught up in the ego that wants to believe "But I was well-intentioned, how can you claim that I hurt someone?" and we start actually taking responsibility for the messes we do make.

Thinking in this way has actually started helping me with the landscape thing too. Because now when I feel that feeling of "I didn't do it right," I am able to interpret that as my body's foible-y way of finding something beautiful. Instead of the "oh that's beautiful" circuit getting triggered, the "oh, I'm running out of time and that feels out of control and if I try harder I can feel in control" circuit gets triggered. And when I realize that that's what's happening inside me, I can stop myself and say, "No, no matter how hard I try, I can't control the sensation of impermanence, and if I let that sensation in, it will actually be a good guide for me in life." In fact, maybe that's what the sensation of beauty is, in the first place--a sense of fragility, impermanence--and why it's inspiring--because that sense that can encourage us to live in the present and experience our lives rather than avoiding them or trying to control them.