she returns

long time no see

Rosh Hashanah always comes around in the Fall and I always have an excuse about why I cannot do as much self inventory as I’d like.  It’s the new school year, the beginning of a new move, a new program. Acclimation doesn’t really lend itself to the cheshbon hanefesh, literally accounting of the soul, that is required for these holy dates, and I always come up short of where I’d like to be.

I had the last two weeks of August off of work, a true treasure and delight in the working world. During an intense summer working at camp, I looked toward the promise of those vacation days with longing and excitement, hoping that my two weeks of traveling and reconnecting with loved ones would fill my soul, the kind of soul filling that just doesn’t happen at five thousand miles away on FaceTime.

Hours after returning from camp— an experience more all encompassing, all consuming, and all absorbing than I could have imagined— I told my roommates I was leaving again. I didn’t really know them yet, thus needing to explain my seeming restlessness, inability to settle in to my new home. I texted them en route to the train.

I’m off to DC for the weekend (college friends reunion) but I’ll be back Sunday night for three days :) anyway Shabbat shalom!!!!! …Time to see the peeps I haven’t seen for 14 months lol

(reader: notice the exclamation points. This is indeed how I text, an admission that is perhaps the most embarrassing thing I have yet to put on the internet?)

My roommate’s response took me by surprise: They’re gonna love the new you :))

New me?! In all my excitement and anticipation of the reunions ahead, I hadn’t even had a chance to account for all the ways I had changed over the year. I had built new community, lived in a whole other country, studied Jewish text seriously for the first time. All of that was certainly New. But perhaps even deeper, in my core, I don’t really think of myself as a person who undergoes dramatic or transformational change— the kind of person who goes to Jerusalem, finds God, and comes back with a religious practice that no one recognizes.

But, of course— comically, hilariously, ironically— that is me. Maybe it wasn’t dramatic or sudden or unexpected, but I had gone through a year of intense experiences. For the first time in my life, I thought about my own relationship with the Divine, the ways I had suppressed my own curiosity and longing for spiritual comfort with internalized feelings of superficiality or imposter syndrome or, more generally, a worldview in which God is monopolized by right wing ideology. And I had taken on many mitzvot while abroad, the tefillin packed away in my suitcase as the most visual example.

But even more frightening then my own change was the prospect of my friends’ changes. My change, my journey was mine— controlled, not too extreme, and intimately studied. Theirs was unknown, unfamiliar. I was reminded of an unpublished essay about the death of friendship I wrote, excerpted below:

People change, this is part of the ever-exciting remodeling of the human experience. Nothing can be assured except that it will all change: the language will change, the landscape will change, the gadgets will change. We will change, forever in some kind of symbiosis with the social world around us. And when you love someone you have to make a choice: are you going to commit to changing together? To loving and embracing those changes as part of this dynamic, ever evolving life? Are you going to work, hard, to fit your existing relationships into your latest self, a self that may have different values, dreams, and realities than when those relationships began?

I say a choice but anyone who has ever loved anyone for a long period of time knows that this is really an oversimplification: it is never just one. It is a series of micro-choices often spread out so that if you are not paying attention you might not realize you are making them until it is Too Late. The intimacy you once had, the back and forth, the best-friendness, has vanished.

Would that be us? I worried for the first time. I had been so busy with transitions, newness I had not even been able to think about the unthinkable. Of course my friends had changed, but, for the first time, I had not had a front row seat. The costs of falling off the face of the earth can be great.

The unsaid is mostly better said, this is a lesson I’ve learned this year, but it is one I struggle to live up to. I am inspired by my people of radical and whole-hearted honesty, the people who can name the feelings in the room in a way that is comforting and justifying. As I sat on the train, confronted with the reality of time and distance, I felt urged to name the change, to anticipate it, to celebrate it.

I texted my friends my friends and asked them to think of their answers to three questions:

1. What’s something new about yourself from the past year? (could be a new hobby, a new discovery, new likes, new personality traits)

2. What was something hard about the last year?

3. Looking at the last year, what is something you are proud of?

These questions anchored us throughout the weekend as we giggled, ate, explored, and remembered. We never ran out of things to talk about, nostalgic and academic as ever. I was surrounded friends that had changed, sure, but into versions of themselves that I celebrated and loved. I was proud of them. And I was proud of myself, too.

As frequently pointed out, tshuvah (the hebrew word for repentance— what we are supposed to be doing a lot of these holy days), comes from the root shuv, to return. We are told we must leave our unholy, ungodly ways and return to the ways of the Divine. We have lied. We have cheated. We have deceived.

The irony, perhaps, is we often think of growth and self-improvement as a kind of newness and innovation, the opposite of a backwards return. Turning back seems contrary to growth. Or maybe, when we change and grow, we are becoming more in the divine Image, a return to our original Creator— ever dynamic and flux.

We have learned. We have hurt. We have lost. We have loved.

May 5784 be one of friendships accompanied by growth and change. May it be a year of returning to our most holy and full selves.

(Brooklyn!)