Elul, Day 24 - כ"ד באלול
Dear Elul Writers,
Nearly a decade ago Zadie Smith wrote an article in The New Yorker about how she came to appreciate (love!) the music of Joni Mitchell. In it, she discusses the ideas of the Roman stoic philosopher, Seneca, the poetry of William Wordsworth, the binding of Isaac and its influence on Kierkegaard, and The Talking Heads. Yet, at its essence, the essay is about how we change. She writes,
With Joni, it was all so easy. In a sense, it took no time. Instantaneous. Involving no progressive change but, instead, a leap of faith. A sudden, unexpected attunement. Or a retuning from nothing, or from a negative, into something soaring and positive and sublime. It will perhaps insult sincerely religious people that I should compare something rare and precious, the “leap of faith,” to something as banal as realizing that “Blue,” by Joni Mitchell, is a great album, but to a person like me, who has never known God (who has only read and written a lot of words about other people who have known God), the structure of the sensation, if not the content, seems to be unavoidably related.
This is certainly one paradigm for transformation. What Rav Kook calls teshuvah pitomit/instantaneous teshuvah.
On the other side of the equation, is my relationship to making knishes. Eight years ago, during a massive Boston snowstorm, I tried for the first time in my life to make potato knishes. It was a classic snow day project that involved hours of preparation and an enormous mess. My dough was prepared in the morning, my filling by mid-afternoon, by dinner they were baked and I was ready to drop.
Cut to this past year, working from home in Atlanta, when one morning my kids requested knishes for breakfast (God bless them!). I started the preparation at 8:30 and by 10:00 we had two dozen, astoundingly-flaky, perfectly-delicious, piping-hot mini knishes on the table. My transformation from being a knish-amateur to being the next incarnation of Yonah Schimmel had not happened overnight. When did it happen?! It was only when looking back over many years that I could recognize the magnitude of the change.
This type of transformation is what Rav Kook refers to as teshuvah hadragit/gradual teshuvah. It is a much slower process, yet no less miraculous.
Prompt
From one new year to the next it can feel a bit like nothing has changed (and, sometimes, like nothing ever will change). Yet, we are all aware that change is a constant. We lean on this fact. We cling to it desperately.
Today, I invite you to consider places where you know you have changed. Maybe that change was instantaneous (“I hated Joni Mitchell—and then I loved her. Her voice did nothing for me—until the day it undid me completely.”) or maybe it was gradual (from being rubbish at making potato knishes to being better than bubbe’s bubbe). How does it feel to recognize that change in yourself? How did it happen? Does it open up the possibility of more/greater transformation?
Take care,
Jordan