Yom Kippur Recipes?

 At Kol Nidre services on Sunday night, Rabbi Josh riffed on Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi's notion of becoming human being like becoming a pickle. He learned about this idea through the great Rabbi Shefa Gold, and I, along with my fellow CBH congregants, learned about it through him. 

The idea of attempting to compose one's personal brine resonated with me. Of course, we cannot control all of the ingredients, but we can cultivate awareness of the environmental poisons most likely to seep into our personal jar, and we can seek out more beneficial brews. In the intensity of the 2020 discourse following the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, and later through choices I made in crafting the curriculum of study for my history PhD, I honed my ability to sense the racism and other malignancies of the hierarchical imagination that pervade our environment like bitter tea (or, to use Rabbi Sandra Lawson's analogy, acid rain). 

Lately, I've become increasingly aware of the sticky goo of despondence that burbles up through the cracks in our collective certainty. Faced with so much complexity and so much seeming indifference, glimpsing a future populated with mechanical intelligence and saturated with cheap claims on our attention, it is easy to ask what humans are good for at all. 

This weekend, with a small gathering of family and friends, we marked the milestone of my eldest child's bar mitzvah. In Jewish tradition, a child reaches this milestone in their thirteenth year, and it signifies their entry into the community of adults capable of making their own moral choices. This moment in Jewish time corresponds with the secular transition from middle to high school in the United States. As the parents of an eighth grader, we must make choices that will help shape our child's education. To whit, we have been researching and touring high schools. During a high school tour today, I was reminded of what human education ought to be about. Curiosity. Openness. Appreciation. 

Celebratory brownies baked and decorated by three generations. Now, there's a tasty mix.

Aren't those ingredients the most necessary parts of the brine? How can we begin to solve social problems without them? 

Rabbi Josh in his Yom Kippur sermon also talked about Chesed and Gevurah (kindness and discernment) as necessary elements to balance when attempting to build that proverbial pickle jar. I can't pretend to know how to best balance them, but I know that those environmental poisons of bitterness and inevitability threaten to turn my jar into the wrong kind of vessel. Thinking about the education of a child requires a willingness to engage with possible futures without catastrophizing. Eventually, our children will be wholly responsible for their brew, but for now, we can keep offering ingredients. 

May this new year be filled with enough salty, sweet, spicy, and tart flavors to keep us alert, and alive, and ready to face whatever comes next.