Minyan Replay with Rabbi Lizzi — Selichot Edition

At our Virtual Morning Minyan on September 7th, Rabbi Lizzi  prepared us for the High Holidays by teaching us about Selichot.

Every weekday at 8:00 am, Mishkan Chicago holds a virtual Morning Minyan. Our Thursday sessions are hosted by Mishkan's Founding Rabbi, Lizzi Heydemann. You can join in yourself, or listen to all the prayer, music, and inspiration right here on Contact Chai.

https://www.mishkanchicago.org/series/morning-minyan-summer-fall-2023/

Mishkan Chicago's High Holiday tickets are now on sale to the general public! For scheduling, pricing, venue information, and tickets, follow this link:

https://www.mishkanchicago.org/high-holy-days/

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For upcoming Shabbat services and programs, check our event calendar, and see our Accessibility & Inclusion page for information about our venues. Follow us on Instagram and like us on Facebook for more updates.

Produced by Mishkan Chicago. Music composed, produced, and performed by Kalman Strauss.

Transcript

Transcript

Because this Saturday night is sleepy Haute I wanted to kick us off with a tune called a dough nastily hurt, which means master of forgiveness.

Which is

as you're gonna you could hear if you're if you're listening to the, like alphabet Gimel dalla to the to the alphabet as it goes through but essentially it's an acrostic and it's as much of Hebrew poetry is and sort of like ASHRAE is an acrostic of you know ways of praising and sham new by God new guys our new is like an acrostic of sins you know it's we get very creative with our classics. This one is an acrostic of ways of talking about God nearly like names for God that have to do with the High Holidays and so I'll put on the song and then I'll give you the translation in the chat

and you'll you'll really hear that

oh

hello and welcome to this half hour dose of weekly Jewish spirituality brought to you by Michigan's Thursday morning minion Jews have a tradition of praying three times a day and at Mishkan we have a daily mini at 8am Central to get your day started. folks join us from across the country and world as we begin each day with words and songs of gratitude, inspiration and Torah. If you miss us in the morning join us here every week for the replay of our Thursday minion hosted by me Rabbi Lizzi Hayden without further ado I invite you to breathe a little deeper connect a little more with yourself with God with Torah with this community and with the world around you wherever you are whatever your timezone.

Whoa show me mid day oh

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I'm gonna sing it again and you can join me if you want but what I love about this and you can see so there's a chorus and it says Caetano live Vanessa Molina. We have seen before you have mercy on us Hi Tanya live on NASA

emmalin

and I bring this up because it's you know, we're getting into sleep coats and the idea with sleep hoods is the you know if if you have not been already sort of doing a daily accounting of her like what's going right what's going wrong um, so then like the Saturday night before the holidays let's get it going. And this is part of the liturgy of sleep Haute but what I love about this is where as so much of I don't know I feel I feel like thinking about things we haven't gotten right can feel like it belongs in a minor key you know, like it's sad and hard and has no light in it you know, it's just like kind of dark and this like the chorus let's see if I NASA,

right Ah, hey,

Am I late? No,

it's in a major key that

man Manny? No.

And then it goes into a minor key as it talks about you know, sort of like relationship with God and then you can see all these different names master of forgiveness. examiner of hearts revealer of the depths speaker of righteousness we can see going down on the left side here all of the you know the sort of alphabetical, the alphabetical thing. Glorious in wonders eternal in constellations who remembers the covenant of our forefathers of our ancestors reader of all our hidden parts. That's one way to to this is one way to translate this like, like searcher of our innards. Hatano Lafonda Horeca Molina perfect my laser fields etc I really like full of full of things that shine no rattle he loads awesome and praises who forgives wrongdoings Oh near that sorrow out. answers us in times of trouble. Okay, so here we go

ah, Dawn Hi, sweetheart. Bow. Hey, Liv about go there. Coat dough.com for NASA

NASA family Manny. doaba neath it Vanessa. So every W four time my lane all tied on evanesce. Lane. Ma lazes. He no know. II though. So they found Oh, no. Oh, never a

day, my lane? No, ha, no, they're fine NASA lane.

You know, part of why I love this is that we often think the way to handle the things that we have screwed up is to hide them. No, like, Let's just not talk about them. Let's hide them. And maybe if we don't talk about them, and we and we hide them, and we think nobody's going to notice, then they will disappear. You know that like float away like a cloud. But in fact, what we know is that when we ignore something that's like eating away at us a little it just festers and grows and you know sort of pops out in other ways. It doesn't disappear. It you know, it surprises you. When you suddenly like yell at somebody you weren't expecting to yell at who wasn't expecting to be yelled at by you. But you know what you have this other thing on your mind that you didn't even know was on your mind. It's just been in there knocking around and now suddenly sort of knocking into other things. And and that's basically that's what happens until we deal with our stuff. And so what I love about that piece is it's just like unabashedly sort of calling out and being honest, about we've screwed it up

QA time, no, they're fine. Now ha.

This past Shabbat morning, we studied the liturgy of Rosh Hashanah, in our in the Shabbat morning tour in the park. And we were looking at just the words of, you know, the words of ONET Dinotopia F, which is the prayer in Moussaieff, you have to stay you have to stay all the way to Moose off in order to get to in a ton of toecap. But it's the it's the iconic prayer inside of Rashanna that says, who by fire, who by water, you know, on Rashanna, it is written and on Yom Kippur it is sealed, who will who will live the fullness of their life and who will not live the fullness of their life, but to tshuva and to feel a and sadaqa can change the severity of the decree. And we talked about what does that mean? And somebody in the end just somebody learning with us said, you know, in a 12 step recovery, part of 12 step recovery is taking a fearless and searching moral inventory. You know, and and then that way, it's not like God catches us doing something in the act. You know, this idea that God is sort of like searching our innards and finding out what's going on and that we're going to be surprised by what God discovers know if we're doing our own searching and fearless moral inventory and then making amends talking to people you know dealing with the stuff that's knocking around in there knocking into other things. We actually we liberate ourselves from the worry of like oh what's going to be done to me? Because of what I have done no like, then it'll just be whatever it is, but we'll know that we have come clean

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and with that we will go into

go into our morning davening Wait,

I don't think this is the right screen is it? Yes it is. Okay. All right. I'm going to take us into 112 in here before we go into Barstow.

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a really good book for thinking about these issues of harm, you know, like when we have caused it, when we've been on the receiving end of it, what we owe to other people when we have caused harm. So a really good book for this is Daniel Ruttenberg on repentance and repair. Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, and one of the things that she talks about in there is how American culture I probably inspired deeply by Christianity is kind of obsessed with forgiveness, you know, it's like, if somebody screws something up, even publicly, you know, it's sort of like, alright, well, what they owe isn't, is, you know, an apology, but mostly it's on the, it's on the person who was hurt, to forgive, you know, let go and you'll feel better and then then then you'll repair the breach, you know, if we can just forgive, and she talks about, she talks about the stages of forgiveness in my mind, it eases my mind at ease that like Hillfolk Juva, the laws of making amends and that forgiveness is actually a completely different sort of category than the repentance and repair piece. chuva is over here and forgiveness is over here. And they can they can meet in the middle when chuva really has has happened. But the person who has been hurt does not necessarily owe the person who has caused hurt, forgiveness. And that that's actually something really kind of counterintuitive and countercultural that the Jewish tradition comes to suggest which is when we have done something, the first thing is Confession. Confession and I mentioned this before sleep coat because like the next week is really all about kind of digging deep and figuring out like where can We actually bring things to light and say things out loud. Step one is saying out loud confession. Step two, start to change, like, start to figure out, what do you need to do to not repeat that behavior? Whatever that thing? was? Was that just a one time thing? Or was that actually a pattern? And if it was a pattern? Like, what what are the what are the guardrails to put in place in your life? What are the who are the people you need to talk to what is the therapy, you know, have like some old hurt or trauma that is causing you to kind of go through and repeat this again, and again, thinking like, maybe it'll be different this time, but it never is, in any case, two is begin to change. Three is beginning to make amends, like reaching out to the people, you've heard to say, I have already begun the process of trying to do something differently. And I am sorry, right? I'm sorry for what I did. I'm sorry for how I hurt you. Not, I'm sorry. But you know, what you did do this part like this, you made me know, after you after you own your stuff. At that point, they may say, you know, I wasn't the best either. Ah, okay, great, now we can have a conversation about it. Four is an actual, like actually apologizing, like getting to the place where you're making an apology with the hopes that this person will say, I forgive you. And then finally, five is, you know, choosing differently in the future. And, and she applies this rubric to, you know, harm on a personal level, but also harm that's done on you know, in the, in the public square online, you know, in a in a boardroom meeting, and one of the hard things is like if you've publicly screwed up actually publicly, acknowledging it and going through this process publicly. And so in any case, I just I wanted to, I wanted to put this, this book and this rubric out there for all of us, because it can be kind of daunting to go into this season, and hear about you know, hear all of this stuff about chuva and to feel it and sadaqa that that changes the trajectory of our lives, or you know, what God's going to do for us. But really, so much of it is in our hands. It's so much of it's in our hands. For the people wondering about the book again, the book and the author is on repentance and repair by Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, who is who's actually who's local here in Chicago, and she's also the scholar in residence for the National Council of Jewish Women. Anyway, good book and you will learn something about the about the Jewish like the distinctive in particular Jewish approach to repentance and repair. All right. I am standing and going in tomorrow

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hatha yoga or over a shadow say Shalom over a charcoal I made around it that you may have heard me move to by Mahadesh at boho young to meet my savory sheet or her dad shots even even his cat hold on him here our little row by row Hurtado, Nygaard ser hammy oh shoot I have Rabbi I have time. I don't know how I'm gonna deliver Terra Mata LA. No. No Well, Keanu

was one of these places where we see all these different names for God that we that so many people only only encounter at the High Holidays of vino volcano, you know, I guarantee you at some point during the holidays or at some point in the lead up to the holidays you're gonna hear me or Rabbi Steven say something about God language and how God you know a vino Mulkey new our father, our King of King language, it's so archaic and people don't like it, and people don't relate to it. And you know, but in fact, it's not the only way we relate to God. This is just sort of a high holiday. You know, it's a high holiday theme. God is King. However, we have so many different metaphors for God that appear all year. And so the king metaphor on the High Holidays is not exclusive, as you just saw there all of these beautiful ways of referring to the Divine that have to do with just the capacious pneus for love and for forgiveness. but also the king metaphor is appear during the rest of the year too and so here we are in this you know prayer about God's profound and deep love for us a look of you know volcano snuck in there and that's not a bad thing or a scary thing it's a loving thing

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the Haftar ah i don't know i know HESA Hold on, hold on their DACA their high you had very inhaler, a share. I know he mitzvah ha ha ha yo malaba. The sheen and Tom live in a heavy bar to bomb the shift to have a veto. Over left the covered era shopUSA of comesa Orkestra tablet auto Alia data, the ulit of default been a NASA orca data armas, ozone bag ta movie Shara. All right.

And as we

all right, I want to have the opportunity to read a little something from our holiday Bible. This is real and you're completely unprepared. Um, so before we do that, I'll pull the screen off. And I think that was a good time for shofar. And so I want to invite all of us to stand and hang out. Are you going to stand with me? All right. Ricky last time? Well, yeah, Ricky, well, will you will you show for us? Maybe air Eric, will you do the calls for Ricky?

Um, we've talked about this, what are the calls? Ah,

here we go. I'll write them in the chat. I figure you know, we all sort of do I know the words. I just don't know what order to save. I think as discussed last time, it's whatever you feel like saying. Okay, well, I'd like Ricky bye bad. Like the Cabal has a suggested order. But as it turns out, it's the minhag the you know, custom of of whatever community and so I think you could Ricky Stoker, cool. I'll

just do what I usually do. All right.

Are you ready? Okay. Sure.

All right. Duck you're

barking Ducky, y'all know wall?

Why don't we hear the shofar?

You want to tell me? Is it? What's it for waking up? She's tapping my heart. It's for waking up parts. All right, beautiful. Yasha. co working. I told you silently. Thank you. I had intended to ask us to put into the chat people were praying for because it feels like the shofar, like the power of it. Also, you know, like sending out from the narrow place to the expansive place is also a prayer for healing. That said, since I forgot to do that, let's do that now. And we'll do that as as we go into me Hello, ha All

right, I'm going to begin to I'm going to begin to sing better. Yeah please, for anybody who needs to go from that narrow place to that expansive place either physically or mentally emotionally just drop their names in the chat

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Bailey muddle me come back Kodesh no ra te o se FAL and or to he loved Oh safe air there she here she sheep who get lonely Leshy name Hi spa Taya. Yeah five Lambo do VM the fool van I don't naive. Ay, ay ay ay ay, ay. Ay ay ay. Ay to throw away Komaba as Rocky slow as well for days you know Massa you die of a stroke go Lane

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speedy recovery of body and mind and you're betting on all of your lists. I mean, I mean, I mean Okay. I want to make sure we go into Cadiz Shia tome. And so we will do mourners Kaddish and then yeah, and then I just have a little, a little section from the book from our holiday Bible. If it folks on it stick around. I know we're remembering your mom. Glen. Anyone else who you're remembering this morning?

Yeah, I found out a colleague passed away last June. Mary done. Very wonderful person.

An old, very good friend of ours. Just got the news that she died. And we'd been trying to find a way to see her. So it's a little little extra bittersweet because we weren't able to reach any family to be able to visit her before she died. She was 93 though, so it's only a little sad in terms that. Yeah. Jean Laveau and my mother Florence ADA Feldman.

Minion mamas. All right.

Is there anybody who would like to lead Kaddish this morning?

I can leave but you got to make it bigger.

All right, well. My command all right. Yeah.

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Amen. I mean

we're working on doing the tune that I played us out last time with from Joey Weissenberg so I'll do that here. Let's say

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Okay, so this book I feel like, every year if we're not doing a class on it, we're also we're reading from it. So this book begins at Tisha Ave, and goes through the end of Sukkot. And it is kind of like an emotional to work, you know, like a map, you know, like, sort of, like going through the terrain of the High Holidays, the emotional terrain, the spiritual terrain, and the author, Rabbi Allen Lu, may his memory be a blessing spent many years being a Zen Buddhist monk, actually, before he became a conservative rabbi, and the perspective and depth that he brings to, you know, what are kind of the, the themes of the High Holidays are not superficial, but there is a kind of superficial way of talking about them, where it's, you know, like, oh, the, you know, like, birthday of the world of repentance and repair, and, you know, children, whatever it it's like, but yeah, but, but what does that look like? And how does that feel? And how do we do that? So anyway, the book is full of personal examples and examples from from history. And I just, I highly recommend this book, you could, you could pick, pick any few pages and find the meaning in them. So I just, I open to the sleek Haute section here. And he talks about how he and his wife who got married a little bit later in life, you know, had all these big dreams for the birth of their first child, they wanted to have a home birth, they wanted it to be super spiritual, they were going to meditate while she was in labor. And just one after one thing after the next did not go the way that they planned. And so they ended up having to go to the hospital. And not only were they in the hospital, but it turns out that she wasn't progressing fast enough. And so they had to, you know, give her Pitocin and then it was very painful. And then it was just a very intense and they you know, and she was in a lot of pain, and she's yelling at him and, and, you know, everything that he had envisioned for this moment, was not happening, you know, and not only wasn't happening, the opposite was happening, you know, like, instead of this experience, bringing them closer together was driving them further apart. All right. Love you, sweetheart. Have a great day. Bye. I love you. All right. So they wheeled Cheryl into the delivery room. She was grimacing horribly and focusing on her breathing with everything she had I followed behind, crestfallen and deeply anxious. My heart full of terror and utterly broken eye And it was at that precise moment that God put in an appearance in the delivery room. It was Friday at sundown. And the last thing I saw through the window in the hallway before I went into the delivery room, was the son of Shabbat, going down behind Mount St. Helena, there was a huge round lamp at the center of the delivery room ceiling, and it gave the room a kind of spiraled spirituality or radiance. When the birth itself occurred. The room was full of every kind of bodily fluid imaginable, the most intense breathing I have ever witnessed. The skilled movements of the doctors, the nurses, the mother and the presence of God, the presence of God was so thick, so real, so absolutely connected to the pain and the anxiety of the and the biological trauma of birth. That the fantasy of birth that I had first envisioned now seemed downright stupid. And maybe that's how you feel right now. If you think you have been preparing for this event for months, but walk in here to find the reality of Rosh Hashanah is making a mockery of these preparations. exposing them for the thin and inadequate week reads they are, you feel devastated, you feel stupid, all those hours of practice. And now your name has been called and you're standing on the stage choking. You can't remember one thing you resolve to do you try to recall your idea of what this should feel like. But it all seems so small and thin. Next to this immense and pulsing reality. next to your name being called and the pages rustling in a book that might mean death or might mean life. Sidebar, he he does kind of a whole pageant description of the you know the the book of life or the book of death and your name being called and you don't know which book your name is going to be called out of. And here's the bad news I have come to deliver. This is a true story. And it's not about me, or my mother or a desperate man trying to blow the shofar. It's about you. And it's really happening. And you are seriously unprepared. And it is real whether or not you believe in God. Perhaps God made it real and perhaps God did not perhaps God created this pageant of judgment and choice of transformation of life and death. Perhaps God created the book of life and the book of death chuva and the blowing of the shofar, or perhaps they're all just inventions of human culture, it makes no difference. It is equally real. In any case, the weeks and the months and the years are also inventions of human culture, time and biology are inventions of human culture, language and stories. Love and tragedy are inventions of human culture, but they are all matters of life and death. All real, all in escapable. Even though we invented the idea of weeks, we die when our allotted number of weeks has gone by. So if this event is merely the product of human culture, it is the product of an exceedingly rich culture, one that has been accumulating focus and force for 3000 years.

There's so much more good stuff in here you guys. Should I keep reading? No, I should just stop the last

line of that chapter is powerful.

The last line of this chapter of sleep wrote the chapter on sleep. Yeah.

Yeah, I think so. I was just turning to it.

Huh? All right.

Maybe not. I just found it.

I'll bring people to it. I'll bring people to it because it won't totally make sense without the a lot of this a lot of this chapter is is about heartbreak. You know about the the ways in which our temple came down, you know, the walls of our temple came down the ways in which things we relied on found stability and comfort and predictability in cease to be reliable sources of comfort and predictability. You know, neither skills we once had, you know, maybe a profession that we thought we'd spend the rest of our lives in and then couldn't. And so I'll just read from here. This is what we call heartbreak. This is why I always feel that the High Holidays start at Tisha of the day we mourn the fall of the temple. The day precisely seven weeks before Rosh HaShana, we begin our preparations for reconciliation with God by acknowledging our estrangement from God. This is the day the walls come tumbling down and we begin to acknowledge the futility of our present course of action. And biannual magazine, as we say in a vino volcano that we have no deeds to redeem us and we begin to acknowledge the fact that we are utterly unprepared for what we have to face in life. And this is when the walls of our psyche begin to break down, and then comes a little. And with these walls already down, we try to see our real circumstances, we try to see who we really are, and what we really have. And we try to acknowledge the emptiness of what we have been doing. And then Rosh Hashanah itself arrives, and perhaps this is the beginning of the process for you. Or maybe it's the culmination, or maybe somewhere in between. But wherever you are, in this this much is sure. And Manu might assume you have no good deeds, you are utterly unprepared, nothing you have done can or has, or will have any efficacy at all. It's a little, it's a little intense. But I guess his point is, is we just don't know, we just don't know what will. And so what do we do at a moment like this, when we have become so painfully aware that there's nothing we can do at all. So the Midrash from Tana debate Eliyahu Zuta, we begin, which with which we began is quite explicit, we do three things. And the good news is, after all, this very bad news, that we already know how to do these three things. We do them every year at high holidays, the first thing we do is come together, we stand before God as a single unit. This comes out of a very deep instinct. Just stand on the street in front of a synagogue and try to stop people from coming into excuse me, try to stop people from coming into our services. And you will see the great force of this incredible instinct Jews have to be together with other Jews at this moment. They don't have tickets they never called, but just try to stop them. And you will feel the force of this instinct. We need each other now we need each other deeply. And so we stand in that stream. And the first thing we do is stand together. The second thing hit Vudu, we make confession, we open our hearts. We acknowledge the futility of our actions, we try and see and come to what we see our attempts to be cute with this life to manipulate it for the thin reads that they are and resolve to give them up. We're able to find that courage precisely because we are gathered about agwu data and had in one spiritual unit. Precisely because now we realize the enterprise doesn't depend on our single puny, thin, pale stratagems. But on our belonging to something much, much deeper and thicker than that. And finally, we perform this service this ancient ritual of judgment and transformation of forgiveness of life and death. The Tradition tells us that we inherited this from God that God came out of the midst in the mystery donned a Talita and passed before the ark. God dressed God's self in the implements of human culture and revealed the service to us through the evolution of our own people. So on the first night of Rosh Hashanah, there we are back with that a cat in one unit, pressed together in a large room, helping each other acknowledge our actual condition and reciting this ancient service given to us by the Divine physician as a medicine for that condition. And that condition is this. This is very real. This is absolutely inescapable. And we are utterly unprepared and we have nothing to offer but each other and our broken hearts. And that will be enough. You've been listening to Kontakt five miscounts podcast. If you enjoy the podcast, please leave us a rating on Apple podcasts and help us rise in the Jewish charts. And if you appreciate what we do, I invite you to join as a builder or make a donation on our website Mishcon Chicago dot board. Shabbat shalom.