The Shema is a prayer that I have struggled with, mainly because of its centrality – I've felt a sense of pressure to experience it a certain way, and also a sense that it embodies all my tension about whether or not I am Jewishly connected enough (and specifically how I am or am not connected with the type of Judaism that I grew up with). I also often feel irritated by the practice of saying the Shema with one word per breath, because it can feel like “enforced kavanah” (and also maybe kind of fake or performative kavanah) in a way that I don't necessarily want to buy into, but also can't find a way to opt out of, when it arises in the service. Finally, I've felt a sense of overwhelming energetic charge in the words because of their association with deathbed confession and martyrdom – their connection to “the last moment – what if you don't do it right?”, similar to the energy of Neilah (which also makes sense considering that Shema is one of the repeated phrases at the end of Neilah, again marking this moment of “last chance”).
After thinking and writing about this last year, I found that I came to a new place with the Shema. Once I understood the arc of shacharit liturgy leading up to the Shema, I understood that saying the Shema could serve as an act of consciously receiving the ol malchut shamayim (yoke of the sovereignty of heaven), which was helpful, since I had not previously found that the words of the Shema held particular meaning for me. After I understood this, I came to understand that accepting the ol malchut shamayim can also be a matter of “submitting to what is,” and experiencing divinity in the sense of the aspects of the world and experience that are beyond human control. Since then, I have had the practice of treating the Shema as an opportunity to come into the present moment, no matter the nature of that moment: to be with whatever my experience is in the moment that the congregation arrives at the Shema (similar in some ways to the shofar blast as a call to presence and consciousness).
Now to the new piece from today: Something that I've been thinking about a lot over the course of the past week is the question of what it means to be present in my life. I have been feeling disoriented in time and place, finding myself asking what city I'm in and what year it is. I think this is a result of how much I travel and how many discrete communities I'm involved in, and how many transitory, temporary, intense communities and cohorts I've passed through since graduating from college in 2008. I'm discovering that I seem to carry some amount of guilt about my nomadic lifestyle – I'm not really sure why ... maybe because it's so fun and stimulating, maybe because it feels selfish and resource-intensive, maybe because it breaches gendered expectations about creating and maintaining home and hearth, maybe because of a story I have about what kind of lifestyle is “spiritually healthy” (a simpler, more rooted, more solitary one). Anyway, the way that this guilt has manifested is that I go through long periods of chronic ambivalence, in which I feel guilty about whatever it is I'm doing and feel like I should be doing something else (but I never go do that other, idealized thing). And I can stay in that mode for quite a while at a time, holding on to the feeling that “Once I just get x, y, and z done, then I'll 'really' reflect and decide what to do and fix all the things.” And being in that mode also creates a self-fulfilling prophecy, in which I feel spiritually unwell and also often physically unwell, because physical self-care also gets relegated to “something I'll do after I get my work done in like a year.” And then I take the fact that I feel unwell as evidence that there is something wrong with my choices and I should indeed feel guilty and ambivalent about wherever I am and whatever I'm doing.
Every now and then, I manage by G!d's grace to come out of this paralysis and into awareness of and acceptance of the reality of my life as it is. This is often a matter of “do or do not, there is no try” in Yoda's immortal words: either making the decision to do the thing that I think I should be doing, or accepting that I am not going to do it, and therefore I can/should stop waiting for the ideal moment when I will “really deal with my life” – and that indeed, the moment to “deal with my life” is now, because this is my real life, not something that I need to get through in order to get to my real life.
I feel like in the past week, I've been fortunate to go through one of these experiences of “waking up to what is,” and when I said the Shema this morning in shacharit and engaged in my usual practice of treating it as an opportunity to come into the present moment, I became newly aware of that experience of “waking up.” This made me want to deepen this practice of presence that I associate with the Shema, and see the Shema as a resource to help maintain and nurture this kind of presence in my life.
Specifically, two practices of presencing that I have been finding helpful this week include:
-Instead of waiting until I “have time to catch up and start feeling present and oriented,” intentionally orient myself to space and time by saying to myself what city I'm in, what year it is, how old I am, what I'm doing with my life, etc. (This is also a matter of noticing and taking ownership of my choices, and cultivating awareness that I am where I am – both the wonderful parts and the hard parts – by choice and through my own actions, rather than feeling trapped/like a victim/unable to change my situation.)
-Disentangling my sense of presence from my awareness of my to-do list. I think this is perhaps the core of workaholism – the concept that presence has to wait until work is done, which, subjectively, is a kind of belief that time will stop until work is done. I think this is the main habit of thought that leaves me feeling disoriented in time. I think I usually try to address this by finishing my work – “If I can just get my work done then I'll get out of the workaholic trap.” But in fact that itself is the trap; getting out of the trap means being able to coexist with work that is unfinished without feeling like life is therefore on hold (which, not incidentally, is the point of Shabbat). I'm still figuring out what it is that makes that possible; on the deepest level, it is probably a matter of disidentifying myself from my to-do list – seeing my work as only one part of my life rather than the blueprint for my life. But I think it's maybe also a matter of seeing presence as something that is complex, multiple, incomplete, and always accessible – a matter of being with the experience of unfinishedness – rather than seeing presence as a kind of state of perfection that is attained through mysterious means.
So I would like to explore using the Shema as an opportunity to say, “Here I am” and to notice whether there is a part of me that responds, “No, I'm not ready to be here, because I'm waiting for thing X to change,” and then to reframe that for myself, “I'm here, and thing X is calling out for attention,” and to listen to find out whether the message is that I need to address thing X (and then doing that, if so); or whether I need to let go of thing X instead of imagining that I am going to magically start relating to it differently; or whether I need to live with the open question of thing X as part of what I am present to right now in my life (which is a real life that is currently underway).
In terms of a translation of Shema that helps evoke this, I guess I am understanding the actual text of the Shema in this way:
Shema yisrael, hashem elokeinu, hashem echad
Listen up, person: this grand and ineffable Thing that is, is! And it's the only reality and the only lifetime you get.
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