What Scars Are You Still Carrying? (Shabbat Shuvah / Parashat Ha’azinu 5787)

We are in the middle of the Aseret Yemei Teshuvah — the Ten Days of Return between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, when the whole Jewish calendar leans toward one question: having gone out into the year, how do we find our way back? This week JCHS took our students away for a Shabbaton Early Edition to prepare for this important Shabbat and Yom Kippur, and the timing is the point. Teshuvah needs what a retreat provides: time away, together.

This Shabbat — Shabbat Shuvah, the Shabbat of Return — we read Ha’azinu, Moshe’s very last lesson. Surprisingly, he opens that lesson talking about the weather: “May my teaching drop like rain, may my words distill like dew” (Deut. 32:2). Nobody has ever watched dew fall — and yet every morning the whole world wakes up covered in it. That is how we all grow: drop by drop, often in moments too small to notice. 

But this close to Yom Kippur, I wanted to talk with our students about what can block all that quiet growth. So I told them about a social psychology experiment. I am indebted to Michelle Matz, JCHS Dean of Students for telling me about this experiment

In 1980, researchers at Dartmouth ran a study (Kleck & Strenta, “Perceptions of the Impact…” J. of Personality and Social Psychology 39:861–873). The study paired one group of students with a group of strangers. Researchers took one group of students and another group of strangers. To the face of each student a makeup artist applied a realistic scar  — a vivid one, running down their cheek. Each student looked in a mirror and saw it. Then, just before sending them off to a conversation with a stranger, the makeup artist offered one last touch-up – secretly wiping the scar completely away.

The students walked into those conversations with nothing on their faces. And afterward, they reported it in detail: the stranger kept staring at my scar. The stranger was uncomfortable with my appearance. The stranger treated me differently because of how I look.

There was no scar. The wound existed in one place only — on the inside of their heads, not the outside. But from the inside, it shaped everything they saw.

Teshuvah of Perception

Here is what I believe Yom Kippur knows about us. Every one of us walked into this year wearing something from last year: a disappointment. An embarrassment we replay in our heads over and over. A friendship that broke. And we are certain — certain — that everyone can see it on our face.

Rav Kook (the first chief rabbi of pre-state Israel) uncovers a deep dimension of Teshuvah. “The primary teshuvah,” he writes, “is for a person to return to [themself], to the root of [their] soul” (Orot HaTeshuvah 15:10) — and only then, he continues, does one return to God, the Soul of all souls. In other words: before anything else, teshuvah means returning to your own true face. 

So the question Yom Kippur asks is not only what did you do? It is also: what are you still carrying?

Think about that makeup artist one more time. The scar was removed before the conversation ever began — the student just didn’t know it. What if Yom Kippur is God playing the makeup artist? The Torah promises that the day itself cleanses us (see Leviticus 16:30). What if the scar we are so certain we are wearing into the new year has already been wiped away — and our only remaining work is to stop “seeing” it in the mirror?

Take Words With You

The prophet whose cry literally gives this Shabbat – the Shabbat of Return – its name tells us where that work begins. Hosea doesn’t just shout “Return!” He says: K’chu imachem devarim — “Take words with you, and return” (Hosea 14:3). So the charge I gave our students had three parts, one for each thing we carry: an honest apology, delivered to a friend. A true sentence, spoken to yourself. And the text of reconciliation you have been putting off sending. Words are how we let go of what we carry — small, quiet, absorbed drop by drop, like dew.

May our learning fall like dew. May we take words with us. And when we stand before the mirror after Yom Kippur, may we be blessed to see what has been true all along — a clean face, ready for a new year.

G’mar chatimah tovah — may we all be sealed for a good year.

Looking Back 25 Years: In Memory & Hope (Rosh Hashanah 5762/2001)

 

September 11, 2001 fell just six days before Rosh Hashanah 5762. Like every rabbi and educator in America that week, I was rewriting sermons and lessons, searching for words that could hold what none of us yet understood. 

At the Ohio congregation I served, we opened every service that Rosh Hashanah the same way: a lit shivah candle stood on a table at the front of the sanctuary, and before any of the davening began, the congregation rose for a moment of silent reflection. When the quiet had settled, this poem was read.

In Memory and Hope

For the Victims of September 11

With hearts that are covered by dust and debris

With cheeks that are stained by tears and blood

We search through the rubble and ashes for Your light, O God.

With eyes that burn with images of destruction

With ears that are filled with stories of the missing

We search for Your comfort, we crave Your warm embrace.

Standing at the edge of a void left by the victims — both missing and dead

Standing at the threshold of a new year whose sweetness has been embittered

We take comfort from the support of standing together.

Taking inspiration from the divine imperative that we repair this broken world

Taking strength from our ability to bring healing and comfort

We dedicate ourselves to nurturing delicate seeds of hope into a blossoming peace

A peace that will, with Your help, fill our hearts, our souls, and our world.

— Howard Jacoby Ruben, Rosh Hashanah 5762 / September 2001

Turning Toward Each Other: Accounting for the Soul in Relationships (Elul 5786 · Erev Rosh Hashanah 5787)

Shalom Bayit: Ensuring everyone's
right to healthy, non-violent relationships

Adapted from this week’s Hakhel at JCHS, our weekly all-school gathering — the last of the year 5786. Inspired by Shalom Bayit's annual semon campaign and resources

This Friday evening Rosh Hashanah arrives and a new year begins. So at our final Hakhel of 5786, I shared one of the ways my own kids, Sarah and Daniel, taught me — back when they were in high school — about getting ready for a new Jewish year.

The Hebrew month we are in is called Elul, spelled aleph, lamed, vav, lamed. For centuries the rabbis have read those four letters as an acronym for a line from Song of Songs (6:3):

אֲנִי לְדוֹדִי וְדוֹדִי לִי

Ani l’dodi v’dodi li — “I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine.”

Song of Songs is a relationship poem. To some it expresses the relationship between two intimates. For others, it expresses the relationship between the people Israel and God. Why would the tradition name the month of preparing for a new year after a relationship poem? Because it is the tradition’s way of teaching that preparing for a new year is not about your statistical record — our grades, our followers count, or our streak on any app. It is about our relationships.

A Relationship Audit

Elul’s classic practice is called cheshbon hanefesh — literally, an accounting of the soul. How is that practice transformed by knowing we do it during Elul, the month of relationships? The month is time for an accounting of our relationships. A relationship audit.

My kids taught me how to do that with two questions. Question one: bring to mind one relationship that is a source of light in your life — a friend, a sibling, a parent, a teammate, a teacher. Now ask yourself: what makes that relationship feel that way?

When others in the Bay Area Jewish community — people of all ages — were asked that question, here's what they said: support, trust, kindness, real listening, respect, laughter, feeling safe, room to grow.

Notice anything unique about that list? None of those items are about statistics or numbers of friends, or counting anything. The list items are not about luck or chance. Every items on that list represents a relationship muscle — something a person does, on purpose, over and over. Pirkei Avot (6:6) teaches that many of these same qualities are among the ways Torah itself is acquired. The way we treat each other in relationships is a Torah curriculum for life.

Question two, the harder one, just for the inside of your own head: was there a moment this year when your own words or actions didn’t match that list we just discussed? The message fired off in the group chat. The joke that landed as a cut. The person frozen out. We all have examples. But those examples need not be. source for shame. They could be a source of learning, toward improving. That is the homework of this Jewish season.

The Repair That Belongs to Us

Here is what the Mishnah teaches about the days we are about to enter (Yoma 8:9):

עֲבֵרוֹת שֶׁבֵּין אָדָם לַמָּקוֹם, יוֹם הַכִּפּוּרִים מְכַפֵּר. עֲבֵרוֹת שֶׁבֵּין אָדָם לַחֲבֵרוֹ, אֵין יוֹם הַכִּפּוּרִים מְכַפֵּר עַד שֶׁיְּרַצֶּה אֶת חֲבֵרוֹ

“For transgressions between a person and God, Yom Kippur atones. For transgressions between a person and another person, Yom Kippur does not atone until one has made things right with the other.”

Yom Kippur squares away what is between us and God. But for what is between us and each other, Yom Kippur does not atone until we make it right with the person. God does not accept an apology on someone else’s behalf. That repair belongs to us.

When the Accounting Shows Something Harder

I said one more thing to our students, because it matters and I wanted them to hear it from me. Sometimes an accounting of the soul shows us something harder — a friendship or a relationship, online or in person, that makes us feel afraid, or controlled, or smaller than we are.

That is not what friendship or love looks like. But if it does feel that way, it is not our fault. Rather, every one of us deserves relationships in which we are safe and where we get to be fully ourselves. I asked any student for whom a relationship doesn’t feel that way to bring it to a trusted adult — an advisor, a dean, our counselor. Our doors and our hearts are always open, and not just for the Laffy Taffy jar in my office.

Our wider Jewish community has an organization, Shalom Bayit, devoted to exactly this — helping people in relationships that have become unsafe — because our tradition holds that shalom, peace and wholeness, is supposed to live in every home and every relationship.

One Repair, One Gratitude

So here was the assignment before Friday night, and I offer it to every reader. It has two parts. First, deliver one real apology — doing it in person beats texting. Second, speak one real thank-you to someone on your light list who has never heard it out loud. One repair, one gratitude. That is cheshbon hanefesh in action.

At JCHS, every Hakhel during Elul ends with the sound of the shofar. This was our last Elul blast before the great blasts of Rosh Hashanah itself. As a student sounded the shofar at school, I invited our students to hear the shofar blasts as one question, the Elul question: whom do I need to turn toward?

Ani l’dodi v’dodi li. When the shofar sounds on Rosh Hashanah, may it find every one of us already turned toward each other.

Shanah tovah u’metukah — a good and sweet new year.