Teshuvah

by Ira Rosenberg

Teshuvah We walk two paths in life -- two paths that bring us meaning. The inward path toward wisdom and the path of love that leads us to each other. And each path moves in two directions, both natural, both necessary. The wisdom path takes us into the core of ourselves where we endure self-transformation. Then it returns us to the surface of the world with a changed capacity for action. The path of love brings us close to each other, then moves us apart from each other, then brings us back together in brief and long oscillations. When we are apart, we acquire and reconstruct the essence of each other and when we are together we create something new together, in our "usness" that never was and never could be before.

Sometimes for some of us one phase or another of love or wisdom evokes terror and doubt, but for others the same phase produces delight. Some of us fear withdrawal from our daily cares, however much they irk us, and resist being swept into the depths. Some of us love the depths and love to wallow there endlessly planning to write the great American novel and we fear return -- we never come back to bestow the product of our inwardness on others.

So too in love. The movement apart of lovers, which may actually presage new intimacy, is felt by some as abandonment. But others separate with the sense of a joyful infusion of new energy, and come back bearing gifts. Those with a propensity to approach see only the delights of intimacy and scarcely notice its oppressive and even cruel possibilities. While those inclined by nature or upbringing toward separation fear engagement and avoid it. Few of us recognize the underlying truth: both approach and separation shape love. They need each other.

When we see love as an alternation of approach and separation and wisdom as an alternation of withdrawal and return we must immediately recognize the crucial importance of turning points. To move from approach to separation, or from withdrawal to return there must be reversals, and these reversals are the peripetieas, the heightened moments of our life dramas.

In Aristotelian drama the protagonist, overwhelmed by the forces unleashed by previous actions, particularly acts of overweening pride, cannot resist the peripetia; it whirls him around. It takes him, he doesn't take it. In real life, if we can avoid hubris and moderate our egos and diminish our fixation on celebrity and personality we may find that it is only in these moments of heightened drama at our turning points that we can really influence our own destinies. Here is where we choose rather than succumb to fate -- and in a world in which everything causes everything -- become a lot more of a cause and a little less of an effect.

Out on the long stretches of love and wisdom we have freedom of will, but our wills are weak relative to the causal momentum of our lives. We mistakenly preserve our sense of freedom then, and maintain a false self-esteem, by making ever smaller and less meaningful choices and deceiving ourselves about our own importance. In fact, the more we are overmastered by circumstances, the smaller and more cosmetic our choices become, a condition created and exploited by mass media marketing.

Both love and wisdom contain turning points when the play of forces is reversed -- a metanoia-- That's when the process reaches an extreme and turns round into its opposite. During this vulnerable time even a small force can make a great difference. This is known as the butterfly effect. In the peripetia, a turbulent situation arises, the unfolded order recedes and briefly chaos reigns. But the power and potentiality within the chaos itself is usually hidden from us by our fear. But this is a good fear, akin to the fear of God, so we shouldn't fear our fear but bravely accept it and endure it with gratitude.

Teshuvah is the use of conscious intention to move through these turning points of love and wisdom in the direction of tikkun olam.

We can recognize teshuvah -- because it comes in a moment but has lasting consequences -- and these are transactional moments where the perceiver and the perceived and the act of perception seem to merge -- moments of non-dual awareness.

These moments when small causes have great consequences occur in nature on every scale -- in the turbulence of fluid dynamics, in the physiology of the heartbeat, in population genetics, in weather. But they also occur in human nature and particularly around turning points in love and wisdom. In recent times chaos theory has attempted a general description of these conditions,

With training and courage we can learn to make teshuvah by being present at our turning points. The presence is a matter of sensory discrimination, especially the internal sensations of the body itself, and meditative stillness. Nonreactivity is important, because reaction to the recognition of the significance of the moment -- and the reaction to the awe and fear that it brings -- will trigger the stress response and wash it away in cascade of stress hormones and autonomic nervous system shifts. Faith, acceptance, meditative stillness all lead to stronger teshuvah.

The central drama of teshuvah is the framing of an intention -- the making of the choice is everything. The same intention to move in a new or different direction in love or wisdom that in other times has fallen barren and achieved nothing is now potentiated. That's because timing is the crucial factor. Only in the moments when we are vulnerable to change can we change through intention. These moments come in the extremes of our oscillations in love and wisdom. But we can miss these moments too.

In the turbulence of the turning point the human soul directly influences events by clearly apprehending them. Clear apprehension needs meditative stillness. Meditative stillness influences our destiny in the direction of free choice during turning points. According to our intentions, we fan out on a radial from the turning point. There is an art of framing intentions, based on bravery and stillness and understanding the potentialities of the moment in the light of the larger polar patterns of love and wisdom.

The Jewish world attempts to orchestrate teshuvah through the rituals and prayers of Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur. They peel off our egotism and time our personal turning points to larger communal, seasonal, and spiritual cycles.

Teshuvah is not so much a movement from something as a movement towards something -- but that something is in the future. It does not yet exist. Not one path, but a great variety of paths fan out from the moment of teshuvah. Where genuine teshuvah is made in a communal setting array upon array of a plenitude of paths diverge from the moment. Sometimes we even seem to feel this in each other's presence.

The paths that fan out from crucial turning point moments, much like the slats of a fan diverge from the pivot where the hand holds the fan, are our destiny paths: each represents an alternate life possibility. The use we make or fail to make of these major turning point moments determines our own influence on our personal destiny -- and through that our potency for tikkun -- to be part of the solution not part of the problem.

There are different disciplines and different courages and different integrations in love and wisdom, and different moments at which teshuvah can be made -- not all of them to be reserved for the High Holidays certainly. And different things happen during turning points in love and wisdom. In wisdom turning points, we lose and find our grasp on reality and what we come to in the turbulence is a changed model of what is real and the new model opens our senses and with our opened senses we make new recognitions and reality seems to have changed. Teshuvah in wisdom always entails self transformation.

In love, the turning point brings into the self an image of the beloved, and a kind of physiological imprinting process occurs, and by this we are changed, but changed not by the eradication of the old self but by the infusion of the beloved and from teshuvah in love is lit the desire to give or to receive or both.

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