Wild and Precious

Rosh Hashanah 5778 / September 21, 2017

At the end of the summer, I had the privilege of joining the Solar Eclipse Shabbat retreat at Camp Ramah Darom in Clayton, Georgia. The camp lay squarely within the eclipse’s path of totality, and several hundred people — including my parents and one of my sisters — spent Shabbat together before viewing the total eclipse on Monday afternoon.

On eclipse day the softball field, where we gathered for the big event, had a festival atmosphere: barbecue, a band, families sitting on blankets in the shade or playing frisbee on the grass. There was a murmur of excitement when the eclipse began and people started to look up through their special glasses. The mood became quieter as the light dimmed and the eclipse approached totality. The eclipse itself was almost indescribable: the sun went black, the quality of the light around us changed to something I have never seen before, and the moment took on an otherworldly stillness. It’s a memory that will stay with me forever.

Being a Jewish retreat, we recited blessings over the eclipse: עוֹשֶׂה מַעֲשֵׂה בְרֵאשִׁית, the blessing for natural wonders, before; and שֶׁהֶחֱיָֽנוּ, the blessing for special occasions, afterward. In the moment, however, it struck me that we should have recited a third blessing as well — not a blessing for rare or unusual events, but one that is meant to be recited daily, multiple times a day, and even appears in our Mahzor:

בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה ה’ אֱ־לֹהֵֽינוּ מֶֽלֶךְ הָעוֹלָם, אֲשֶׁר יָצַר אֶת הָאָדָם בְּחָכְמָה, וּבָרָא בוֹ נְקָבִים נְקָבִים, חֲלוּלִים חֲלוּלִים. גָּלוּי וְיָדֽוּעַ לִפְנֵי כִסֵּא כְבוֹדֶֽךָ, שֶׁאִם יִפָּתֵֽחַ אֶחָד מֵהֶם, אוֹ יִסָּתֵם אֶחָד מֵהֶם, אִי אֶפְשַׁר לְהִתְקַיֵּם וְלַעֲמוֹד לְפָנֶֽיךָ. בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה ה’, רוֹפֵא כָל בָּשָׂר וּמַפְלִיא לַעֲשׂוֹת.

Blessed are You, Adonai our God, Ruler of the world, who formed humans with wisdom and created a system of ducts and conduits in them. It is well-known before Your throne of glory that if one of these should burst or one of these get blocked, it would be impossible to survive and stand before You. Blessed are You, Adonai, who heals all creatures, doing wonders.^[1] 

אֲשֶׁר יָצַר is among the first ברכות recited each morning, 365 days a year. It is also recited as our Sages originally intended, each time a person finishes using the restroom.^[2] If my five-year-old son Azzi were here, he would be giggling uncontrollably at this moment. To be honest, of all our daily activities this one does seem an unlikely candidate for a blessing. What were they thinking?

Without getting too graphic, it’s safe to say that the Rabbis wanted to make a point about recognizing the wonders inherent in an ordinary, healthy body. We inhabit bodies full of “ducts and conduits,” and we’ve all experienced what it’s like when something doesn’t open or close the way it should. Some of you know that I had sinus surgery at the beginning of this year — my third surgery, along with countless lesser procedures and different medications, trying to deal with a particularly bad case of sinusitis. The past nine months have been the longest stretch in seven years that I have been able to breathe easily, and I can tell you that once I healed from the surgery and could smell again after such a long time, I was filled with gratitude for sinuses that were once again open as they should be, for a body that was back to healthy functioning.

After my surgery, I didn’t need a blessing to recognize the inherent wonder of my body. I couldn’t help but feel grateful for my senses, my limbs and organs. But to be completely honest, it didn’t last. After a few days of marveling at each smell, even truly unpleasant smells like trash or diesel exhaust, I found myself voicing the usual complaints about offensive odors. אֲשֶׁר יָצַר, the “bathroom blessing,” offers us a counterweight, helping us maintain daily appreciation for bodily functions we so easily take for granted.

Take a slow, deep breath, and hold it. Let it out. The Midrash compares the human body to a leather wine-skin: if the leather was pierced by even a pinhole, the air inside would escape; but the human body, despite its many openings and orifices, holds the breath inside.^[3] The average adult at rest breathes twelve to twenty times each minute — up to 30,000 breaths in a day, each one governed by our bodies’ delicately balanced systems — and nearly all of them pass in and out unnoticed.

As memorable as the total eclipse was, the memory that resonates most strongly happened not in the sky but on the ground. As I lay on the outfield grass, Yonah on my chest and Azzi between me and my own parents, I couldn’t shake the feeling that all of this — not just the eclipse but our planet, human beings, my being alive and having brought these children into the world — all of this, life itself, is just so improbable. None of this had to be, and yet there we were. That thought brought to mind אֲשֶׁר יָצַר, the blessing for our improbable, wondrous bodies, the daily miracle of life.

The solar eclipse was a true natural wonder, possible only because of a perfect alignment of sizes and distances. But I look around this room today, on what our tradition tells us is the very day of Creation, and I can’t help asking, was any of this more certain? Who guaranteed that any of us would be here today? When we will sing, in just a little while, כַּמָּה יַעַבְרוּן, וְכַמָּה יִבָּרֵאוּן, “How many will pass on, and how many will be born,” מִי יִחְיֶה, וּמִי יָמוּת, “Who will live and who will die,” for some of us it’s painfully real, because the empty seat next to us was filled at this time last year; others feel joy at the cries and laughter of baby that, just a year ago, was not yet. And for so many of us, most of us I think, it’s both, and we live in the tension between these emotional poles. So let’s take a moment to notice: we are here, now, and this didn’t have to be, and it is.

Remember your breath? Or did you lose track of it again? Take a moment, find it. In, out. Each breath a forgotten miracle, a remarkable wonder that goes unremarked. Then, Rosh HaShanah, and we’re asked to remember, again. To return, again, to the very beginning. To the breath, נִשְׁמַת חַיִּים,^[4] the breath of life that animated the first human and animates each of us right now, the breath that connects us to all creation, binds us together with our Creator, on this day when the world was born.

Rosh HaShanah brings us a complex emotional brew, wonder at the mystery of creation and trepidation in the face of life’s largest questions. The poet Mary Oliver, known for her sensitivity to the rhythms of nature and the human condition, beautifully captures these emotions in her poem, “The Summer Day:”

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?^[5] 

“Who made the world?” she asks, just as we ask. How did we get here? Where are we going? And for how long? These questions may prove unanswerable, and yet we can’t help asking, can’t help but feel the complex swirl of emotion today. We wear joy and sadness, loss and love, like a second skin; and yet so often they become like our breath: present, flowing, alive and unnoticed.

“I don’t know exactly what a prayer is,” Mary Oliver writes, “I do know how to pay attention.” How to pay attention. The commentaries all assume that אֲשֶׁר יָצַר appears at the beginning of the siddur because it deals with an inevitable step in getting ready for the day. But anyone in the habit of reciting this blessing would recite it after taking care of their needs in the morning even if it wasn’t in the siddur. Instead, I’d like to suggest that prayerbooks begin with אֲשֶׁר יָצַר, a blessing over those parts of life that pass unnoticed, because we can’t pray until we pay attention. I don’t mean concentrating on the words or melodies — we all know we can sing along without fully focusing, and that an intellectual understanding of a prayer’s content doesn’t always help us find its meaning. But even if we accept that we won’t know exactly what a prayer is, the key to gaining some spiritual insight, some ability to pray from the heart, lies in paying attention. Noticing. Find your breath again. We’re not supposed to pronounce God’s four-letter name, י-ה-ו-ה, but if you tried you would notice that all of the letters are breath letters. Paying attention to our breath, we find God’s holy name within us, a dozen times each minute, thousands of times a day, every day. And each time we find it again, it drifts away.

How differently would I live if I could hold on, today, every day, to the overwhelming gratitude I felt this summer? In that moment I, too, knew “how to be idle and blessed.” But I can’t live forever on my back in the sun, on lush, soft grass, with my parents and children around me. We’re not meant to. The practical truth is that if I really did pay attention to each breath, I would never get anything done. The emotional truth is that the full awareness of the fragility of our lives — “Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?” — is much too painful to hold for very long. Our attention, like our breath, needs to flow in and out. On this day of prayer, in this house of prayer, even if we don’t know exactly what a prayer is, we, too, know how to pay attention.

And then what? Mary Oliver leaves us with the most difficult question, perhaps the only question that matters: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?” Wild and precious, because none of this was a sure thing. We weren’t guaranteed to be here, but since we are, it’s up to us to decide what it will mean. “Tell me, what is it you plan to do?”

I can’t give you an answer to that question; I imagine it will take the course of my life to answer for myself. Still, none of us can turn away, not today of all days. Every page of our Mahzor, every prayer and commentary, brings us back to this one devastatingly inspiring question: “what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?” Rosh HaShanah invites us to notice, to pay attention, to pray; to embrace אֲשֶׁר יָצַר, to marvel at life’s delicate balance; to live, for a little while, “idle and blessed.” Breathe in, out. Look around. None of this had to be, but it is. Now, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?”

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