The High Holy Days are over. Now what?
After all the reflecting and remembering, resolving and returning we’ve just done, another year is in front of us. Given that many of the personal shortcomings and challenges we own up to are the same ones each year, there must be something else needed for this year to be better than the past year.
There’s a strange and enigmatic Torah story that offers a clue. Have you ever heard of “the sticks of Jacob”? After 20 years of service, it’s time to compensate Jacob as he and Lavan are about to part company. Jacob asks only for the speckled, striped and mottled goats and dark-spotted sheep — the less prized ones.
Then, he proceeds to devise an ingenious method for producing just what he has asked for. He peels stripes in the bark of tree branches and sets them up in front of the water troughs where the animals gather to drink and mate. Lo and behold, the offspring are speckled, striped and mottled!
Our commentaries offer various explanations. A miracle, some say. Something chemical in the water, perhaps amino acids or fungi from the branches. Jacob was expert in genetics and heredity.
Perhaps. And …
There is a larger lesson here, one that may be helpful to us at this moment in our history. It’s the power and necessity of vision. The goats and sheep saw these striped sticks, an impression was made in their neural system, perhaps becoming a thought or an imagination, and then you have a different kind of “vision.” And this vision gets imprinted, internalized so deeply that it becomes manifest, part of the warp and weft of your life, your being. “Dyed in the wool,” so to speak.
A “vision,” then, for ourselves and our community, is the secret sauce, the magic ingredient for our psycho-social-spiritual growth. And every considered thought, word or deed is infused and informed by this vision.
In leadership coach Robert Gass’s terminology, behaviors, structures and hearts/minds are aligned. Then, we are able to bring forth what we imagine, aspire to and long for. It is well known that our physical surroundings, what we actually see and witness, have an impact on who and what we are, all the more so with our values and intentions. What we see — in our hearts and minds, too — is what we get.
Interestingly, Jacob gets this idea in a dream, from an angel of God. This suggests that our vision ought to be in alignment with what we might call “God’s vision,” or Godliness, holiness, connection to Source. That is the ultimate source, and byproduct. of our personal and collective vision.
One of my teachers, the very smart scholar of contemporary American Jewry Rabbi Sid Schwarz, has articulated four core elements of a vision for us. It is a vision of a “community of meaning and purpose,” a society informed by overlapping wisdom, justice, community and creativity. Moreover, these four intersecting engagements are all the constituent parts of Holiness. The community I want to be a part of concerns itself with social justice, economic sustainability, learning groups, spiritual practices, artistic and cultural expression, acts of chesed.
And what might you envision for yourself? Well, my wish for each of us would be a commitment in the coming year to one — just one — element of your ideal life and the better parts of yourself. Perhaps something that inspires you from the experience of the chaggei Tishrei (or the whole season from Tisha B’av to Simchat Torah). One area of personal growth (between you and you), or an aspect of your relations with others, or an aspect of your work life, or your spiritual life.
One thing you will not have to encounter, yet again, this time next year. Perhaps there’s something you’d like to study and learn? Something you’d like to invite into your life more and explore? Or that “lesson” that keeps appearing in your life that you haven’t quite learned yet, once and for all.
When Jacob and Lavan agree to terms, the two make a pact, they “cut a brit,” they swear an oath. My hope is that we come to know the blessings that come from a shared vision and an oath-bound commitment to seeing it through and making it manifest.
Rabbi Geoff Basik is spiritual leader of the Kol HaLev Synagogue Community in North Baltimore.
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