I've just given what I think may be my last travel talk on my adventures in South Africa this winter. It's been lovely to go here and there (to a church, a grammar school, my clergy group, a women's group as well as home to our shul…), show my pictures and tell stories about what I saw, did and learned. As I've done so, I've appreciated more and more not only the content of what I experienced but also just the fact that I took a journey.
I'm 48 years old right now. If all goes very well, I am right in the middle of my life. I'm pretty sure that at least half of it -- maybe a lot more -- is behind me. There aren't many people my age in the Jewish community here. Many of you have already survived the bumpy beginnings of middle age, or else it's still a good bit ahead of you.
A year or so before I took my trip, I was actually feeling a bit of that dreaded midlife feeling. 'Is this it?' 'Will I be right here, doing exactly this, for the rest of my life?' I suddenly found myself thinking back to my twenties a lot. Like lots of people, I had some intense years back then, stretching myself in various ways. Sometimes I've thought, only half kiddingly, that all the years since then I have just been healing up from those wild ventures of my youth. But here I was starting to crave some of that challenge again. I would hear about somebody's adventure, someone's bold endeavor, and I would find myself full of envy.
Sometimes when those cravings arose, instead of taking a cold shower and trying to talk myself out of it, I would stay with the thought for awhile. What was it I was so hungry for? What was missing in my admittedly lovely and mostly-satisfying life? I started to remember many years before when my friend Kent Hoffman had undertaken what I think he may have called an 'experimental year' and spent a couple of months apiece in several settings that were calling to him. I began to feel like I needed to go on a journey.
I believe strongly in the importance of hunger, yearning, dissatisfaction, irritation and boredom. For me these have always been the voice of God, telling me that something needs to change. I believe that within us all is a yearning for what Gandhi would have called "truth," for being in the right place, doing the task that has our name on it. When we get fidgety, it is a voice telling us to recalibrate, to reorient, to check our direction.
In fact, in this culture of ours, where we are constantly being bombarded with pitches as to what we should think we want, I think it is hard to know what we actually yearn for. At least that is true for me. I suspect that most of us really want only a very few things in life. And those deep yearnings get crowded out by manufactured wants -- until we wake up restless one day and start thrashing around.
I am, as many of you know, a devotee of Rabbeinu Bachya, who in the twelfth century wrote Duties of the Heart. Bachya says that we should want only one thing in life -- and that is to express our gratitude to our creator through a life of service. I think that this would be enough for me, if I could manage it for a minute or two -- a grateful consciousness expressed in service. But I am so easily distracted and seduced and frightened into all kinds of other preoccupations. At some point a year or two ago -- not for the first time -- I began to burn with yearning. And I knew enough to welcome even the discomfort, because it told me that, if I managed to pay attention for awhile, a journey was in store for me.
A journey doesn't necessarily start with a plane flight. It may be entirely inward. It may be with a therapist or through reading or writing or art. It may involve changes that only we can see, changes in relationship and behavior. It might happen in our dreams or in our garden.
Every journey is a one-way trip. And I don't think any of us can predict the destination. I bought a round-trip ticket to Cape Town, and I am now (gratefully!) back in my same home with my same sweetheart and community and job and cats and weeds. But I am not back where I started. For me, the trip across the globe was just the kick-start. The recalibration process is longer and more internal. I'm back at my same old desk and phone, but my thoughts and conversations feel new and alive. New issues crowd my consciousness. I find myself making commitments I wouldn't have made a year ago. I see my same old life and world differently, and I hope I will proceed from here a bit differently in response.
Sometimes summer brings us some time to stop and think and feel. The year is winding down. Sometimes a hot wind blows by, and we can feel a hint of Rosh Hashana a season away. Sometimes we can feel something calling to us and asking us to take a turn or even a jump. The new moon of Ellul, the month given over to self-reflection and preparation for the new year, rises on August 24. It's not too soon to begin reflecting not only on what might have gone wrong in this year but also what might be calling us into 5767. It's a great blessing to me to get to share my journeys with you and to witness yours as well.
© 2006 Rabbi Margaret Holub
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Updated 06/30/2006 (rge)