 |
  |
 |
|
|
BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: On our calendar this week, Rosh Hashanah, Friday -- the Jewish New Year that begins the annual High Holidays. We talked with Rabbi Alan Lew of Congregation Beth Shalom in San Francisco, who has written about the High Holidays in his new book, THIS IS REAL AND YOU ARE COMPLETELY UNPREPARED.
Before he became a rabbi, Lew practiced Zen Buddhism for 10 years. Now, he blends Jewish and Buddhist traditions in his practice. Rabbi Lew says the High Holiday spiritual transformation process for Jews actually began on Tisha b'Av, last month, mourning the destruction of the Jewish temples in Jerusalem.
Rabbi ALAN LEW (Congregation Beth Shalom, San Francisco): The point of the High Holidays is atonement, reconciliation, a restitution to wholeness. So it makes sense that a journey that ends that way should begin with an acknowledgment of alienation and estrangement, and that is the theme of Tisha b'Av.
Tisha b'Av is the time when the temple was destroyed, and the temple was the place where one felt the palpable presence of God.
After acknowledging that we are in fact estranged from ourselves, from others, from God -- for the next 30 days there's a very rigorous period of introspection. The essential gesture of this entire period is to become more mindful, to become more aware both of our own situations psychologically and spiritually, or those things that we've been doing that aren't so productive.
So the closer we are to being in the present moment, the more mindful we are, the closer we are to God. God is here; if we are elsewhere, we are estranged from God.
So the blowing of the shofar is connected to this mindfulness, this process of becoming mindful, it calls us to it. It wakes us up literally -- it's an alarm clock.
Before he became a rabbi, Lew practiced Zen Buddhism for 10 years. Now, he blends Jewish and Buddhist traditions in his practice. Rabbi Lew says the High Holiday spiritual transformation process for Jews actually began on Tisha b'Av, last month, mourning the destruction of the Jewish temples in Jerusalem.
Rabbi ALAN LEW (Congregation Beth Shalom, San Francisco): The point of the High Holidays is atonement, reconciliation, a restitution to wholeness. So it makes sense that a journey that ends that way should begin with an acknowledgment of alienation and estrangement, and that is the theme of Tisha b'Av.Tisha b'Av is the time when the temple was destroyed, and the temple was the place where one felt the palpable presence of God.
After acknowledging that we are in fact estranged from ourselves, from others, from God -- for the next 30 days there's a very rigorous period of introspection. The essential gesture of this entire period is to become more mindful, to become more aware both of our own situations psychologically and spiritually, or those things that we've been doing that aren't so productive. So the closer we are to being in the present moment, the more mindful we are, the closer we are to God. God is here; if we are elsewhere, we are estranged from God.
So the blowing of the shofar is connected to this mindfulness, this process of becoming mindful, it calls us to it. It wakes us up literally -- it's an alarm clock.
Yom Kippur, the very end of this process, is a time when we literally rehearse our own death, and we intone this endless liturgy of who will live and who will die, and we abstain from all activities that living people engage in, like eating and sexual activity. 
