Jewish tradition invites us to rewrite our lives
LOOKING BACK TO MOVE FORWARD
It is the season for Jewish communities around the world to recite Selichot, the beautiful penitential prayers that lead us into the Jewish High Holidays of Rosh Hashanah, beginning at sundown Wednesday, and Yom Kippur, Sept. 29, and into the reflective process of teshuvah, repentance.
Part of the Selichot liturgy is the familiar phrase from Lamentations 5:21, which we also sing when returning the Torah to the ark every Shabbat morning:
Turn us, o God, to you, so that we may return, renew our days as
in the days of old ...
When I really listen to this prayer two ancient stories of turning come to mind.
The first is the legendary Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Orpheus, skilled player of the lyre, falls in love with Eurydice, a woman of exceptional beauty. When Eurydice is fatally bitten by a snake, Orpheus manages to strike a deal with Hades for her return from the Underworld. The one condition is that Orpheus must not look back at Eurydice until they have both resurfaced in the land of the living. However, when Orpheus is about to emerge from the Underworld with Eurydice following close behind, he cannot help but look back, and she is immediately whisked away from him forever.
The Torah offers us a similar tale of turning.
In the book of Genesis, two angels urge Lot to round up his relatives and flee impending disaster in their city of Sodom. When Lot delays, the angels take charge and lead him and his family out, warning them not to look behind, lest they perish.
Here too, Lot’s wife (who unfortunately remains nameless), disregards the angels, looks back and is turned into a pillar of salt.
Two cautionary tales of turning.
Different in many ways, but both resulting in the perilous fate that can befall us when we human beings decide to look back.
For hundreds of years, rabbinic commentators like Rashi, the 11th century French Torah scholar, have vilified Lot’s wife as disobedient and deserving of her misfortune.
More recently, the band Arcade Fire, in its song “It’s Never Over (Orpheus)” sings to Orpheus from Eurydice’s point of view, “Hey Orpheus! I’m behind you. Don’t turn around, I can find you. Just wait until it’s over, wait until it’s through.”
It’s easy to place blame on Orpheus and on Lot’s wife for turning back. Scholars and cultural icons alike have long cultivated this accusatory thinking. So why, if turning can lead to our demise, do the Jewish people ask God every year, every week, sometimes every day, to turn us?
Well, if we reconsider these two stories of turning, it is no wonder that our characters defy their simple instructions. How could they resist gazing back at all that they knew and loved and were afraid to leave behind? Turning and looking back is the human way of recognizing, learning from and moving on from our past. In fact, the word teshuvah, repentance, comes from the Hebrew root meaning to turn.
In her book “Looking Back to See Ahead,” Helen Harris Perlman, a pioneering figure in social work, writes:
“If looking back represents a reluctance to leave the known for the unknown, if it expresses a fear of present prospects, if it is a temptation to escape the here-and-now reality and thus becomes a deterrent to looking ahead with courage, it is to be deplored.
“If, however, it is a way of gaining perspective ... if, in short, we look to the past as a way of seeing more clearly and penetratingly its meanings and uses for our immediate present and near-future, then it may serve us well ... I look back in order to see ahead.”
And so we find ourselves in the season of Selichot, at the crossroads of a classical Greek myth and an ancient biblical story. During this critical time of teshuvah, of turning and looking back, how fitting it is that we call the upcoming Shabbat, or the Jewish Sabbath, Shabbat Shuvah, the Shabbat of Return (from the same root as teshuvah). Occurring between the holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, this Shabbat is named for its special haftarah reading in Hosea that begins, “Return, O Israel, to Adonai your God, for you have stumbled in your iniquity.”
In other words, the prophet Hosea urges us to turn toward God so that we may reflect on our imperfect past and move toward a better future.
This year, whether we are examining ourselves, our communities, our fractured nation or our ailing world, teshuvah reminds us that brokenness can be repaired; that change is truly possible, that though we may feel powerless, there is so much we are truly capable of, if only we would turn and learn from what is behind us. This is an invaluable teaching, yet one that we continue to need reminding of year after year, generation after generation.
As we enter into these High Holy Days, let us forgive Orpheus and Lot’s wife for being human; let us go a step further and praise them for having the courage to confront their past; and let them give us permission to turn around and take a healthy look back at our own lives — to trust that what’s behind us is sometimes the only way to propel us forward, to truly do teshuvah. Though their endings cannot be rewritten, each year Jewish tradition invites us to rewrite ours.
In the words of the poet Jack Riemer: God, help us to turn — From callousness to sensitivity, From hostility to love, From pettiness to purpose, From envy to contentment, From carelessness to discipline, From fear to faith. Turn us around, O God, so that we may return.
Revive our lives, as at the beginning. Rabbi Samantha Safran is Assistant Director of the Bobbi & Vic Samuels Center for Jewish Living and Learning at the Evelyn Rubenstein Jewish Community Center. More information can be found at erjcchouston.org.