Rosh HaShanah - How to Embrace the Mystery

The metered pulse of the moon has shaped Jewish spiritual consciousness, and perhaps all of human consciousness, since we began to look at right at her and her soft light on the cold ground and the high treetops. All of Jewish memory has tied itself to her, a moon to our moon, that we have fashioned with ritual and somatic ancestry and all of its mutations as we’ve dragged ourselves out of and back into the waters of human culture. Our eternal agreements with Divinity have the moon in the smack middle of them, so why does Rosh HaShanah, presumably the most vaunted and highest of holidays, occur when she is nowhere to be found?

Rosh HaShanah’s unique status as a moonless moment in the Hebrew calendar comes from Sefer Tehillim—the book of Psalms— where we read:

תִּקְעוּ בַחֹדֶשׁ שׁוֹפָר בַּכֵּסֶה לְיוֹם חַגֵּנוּ׃

Blow the horn on the new moon,

covered for our feast day.

There is such a stark contrast in the imagery of this verse. The shofar, connected to such intense mythic moments such as the giving of the Torah, coronation of Israelite royalty, and the promise of warfare, is produced here against the background of the silent and soft sky. Raw, audial power is not met with its equal—the brilliance of the sun—but with a bare shred of silver light. From this verse, the Talmud clarifies “Which is the holiday whose month, whose moon, is concealed, hidden, masked upon it? This is Rosh Hashanah.” A basic experiential orientation for body, mind, and spirit, inspired by this holiday, is to accept its beckoning invitation to act in the absence of certainty, to embrace the Mystery of the Unknown and the Unknowable.

How do I embrace the mystery? First, perhaps by recognizing that our universe and its all inhabitants, and whatever lies well beyond them, are full of secrets that cannot be grasped. The silence of the cosmos were so overpowering to the Piacezner Rebbe that he wrote to them in his journal, exclaiming, “With awesome quiet and cosmic silence, your unceasing message resounds without noise. To behold you is like beholding a great tzaddik deep in meditation. Your eternal hush grips us with awe as your total surrender to God’s existence draws us also into that rapture.” Each evening, I can walk outside, to gaze at the farthest star, to speak out my version of the Piacezner’s to my brother, Deep Space, and feel deep in my self that every tool at my disposal will never account for unity of Creation and all that it reveals and conceals. This universal awareness is not static, of course. As the Sefas Emes teaches succinctly, “We learn that the year is renewed through the individual months. Tishrei, the month in which Rosh HaShanah falls, has within it all of the lifeforce and existence of the rest of the year within it.” When we engage in the poetry of the holiday, with its passionate requests to secure life for the year, it is not solely life in physical, communal, or political terms—but for the complete reanimation of all things. Can we get quiet enough, in meditation, or prayer, walking, to feel shedding of the year past and the newness of Reality?

How do our spiritual traditions foster this embrace, as well? This year, I’m dedicating myself to encounter the Mystery through the medium of Torah. While it is traditional to pray and hope for all of the Torah one may learn in the course of the year during the holiday of Shavuot, I will be asking the Holy One to best guide me and our community toward the Torah which fosters healing, safety, discernment, and slowness. In focusing on the Unknowable in a tangible way, what should be revealed and what should be concealed? What discourse about psychedelic Judaism should be reserved for smaller and more intimate audiences? As Melila Hellner-Eshed writes in her wonderful book on the language of the Zohar, “The disclosure of secrets is viewed favorably only when the. measure of disclosure is appropriate, the one revealing is deserving, the receivers of the secret are found worthy, and above all when the cosmic time is suitable.” What Torah will you learn that cultivates that sense of yearning for the beyond? Certainly it can be found in our books of mystical knowledge, yet even the dimensions of the Hebrew letters, the stories of ancestors, the Mishnah can be portals to deeper and wider realms within our own consciousness. Seek them out!

And, of course, how we encounter the unknown through our work in psychedelic space. The shofar blasting against the new moon is an almost too perfect image to describe my own healing work in expanded consciousness—the incredible energy, the endless blast that is awakening, working at the edges of intensity, all against a background of unfolding wonder. This work, for many of us, is revitalizing our search for healing and meaning beyond anything we inherited from our families and our cultures of origin, in order to reawaken something within them that has been quieted for myriad reasons. These personal motivations can also open us up to global, perhaps even, a sense of messianic urgency about the health and wellbeing of our entire human existence, grounded in returning Mystery to our lives. Terence McKenna spoke and wrote at lengths about how the reabsorption of psychedelics, the states they reliably produce, and their ability to dissolve the disposition of ontological certainty is not only necessary for the healthy humility of an individual, but for the possibility of our species to survive at all: If we can recover the lost sense of nature as a living mystery, we can be confident of new perspectives on the cultural adventure that surely must lie ahead. We have the opportunity to move away from the gloomy historical nihilism that characterizes the reign of our deeply patriarchal, dominator culture…We of the industrial democracies can choose to explore these unfamiliar dimensions now or we can wait until the advancing destruction of the living planet makes all further exploration irrelevant. May our adventures in consciousness continue to reveal grounded and holistic solutions for the healing within our internal and planetary systems.

My blessings for us all, are embedded in the number of this year—5784, in Hebrew תשפ״ד. As an acronym, these letters can spell out two phrases which can ground our prayerful intentions for the year to come:

ת״הא ש״נת פ״ליאה ד״עת—T’heh shnat peliah da’at—May this be a year of wonderous wisdom!

ת״הא ש״נת פ״ודה ד״לים—T’heh shnat podeh dalim—May this be the year of redeeming the destitute!

May the Mystery bring us to righteous action through the emptying of our knowledge.

Shanah tovah,

Z