On Preparation

Welcome to the OMFG podcast, Jewish wisdom for unprecedented times. My name is Rabbi Jodi Gordon, and together with my friend and co-conspirator Rabbi Jen Gubitz, we're glad you're with us.

OMFG is not just a podcast, it's a philosophy, a worldview, a way of keeping it Jewish while keeping it real. Sometimes, especially if those times are any time in the last few years, the world just gives you opportunity after opportunity to say, "OMFG." The world is the world, but Jewish tradition inspires us to call out to each other, sometimes to God, and to figure out what it all means. And so this podcast is our way of inviting you into the conversation.

In true OMFG fashion, we hope you're wearing some comfy pants and sipping an iced coffee or seltzer. Welcome to OMFG.

So, Jodi, it's been a while. I know our listeners are thinking, you don't write, you don't call, where have we been? For starters, the last time Jodi and I had a chance to hang out in real life was at Tanglewood in the pouring rain at a Bonnie Raitt concert all the way back in June. However, her partner Josh had the brilliant wherewithal to bring a Snuggie. No, is it the Comfy? It's called the Comfy, I think.

Yeah.

Which didn't help with being wet, but it did help with being warm. But also, your family had a pretty difficult summer.

Yeah, which I'm totally happy to talk about. But I also just want to say that that Bonnie Raitt concert, I've talked about it at least 3 times in the past week. To just say that it was 55 and raining sideways. And we were so intrepid. I still feel proud of us. But, you know, it's just— it's definitely been an odd time. So my family and I got back from Israel at the end of May. Summer in the Berkshires is like my favorite time of year anywhere ever in the history of the world. And we were off to a really good start after sending my older daughter off to Eisner for a full month of sleepaway. And then things did in fact take a turn. So we wound up with an emergency trip back to Israel and we did say goodbye to my mother-in-law, Roz, who died at the beginning of July. But the thing I want to say about that is I feel like I learned a lot about grief and mourning. You know, I work with families all the time and individuals dealing with death and grief. And still, when it's your family, suddenly you feel like a total novice. And so I did learn some important things. In fact, I have a new what I call dinner at week 3 rule, right? So, you know, the death happens, you're in shiva, lots of people are around and what can I do for you? And I'm going to drop something off. And then about 3 weeks after she died, friends of ours texted us, shout out Rabbi Ethan Brosnett, we love you, and Ariel Traub, to say, oh, we're going to send dinner tonight. And I almost texted back to say like, oh no, we're good. We're fine. Because yes, technically at that moment, like I could have made a pot of pasta. And I just said, "Thank you, that's so nice." And all of this wonderful Indian food showed up at our house. And it was just this amazing moment to be like, "Oh, 3 weeks since a major loss is like no time at all." And to be cared for still is amazing. And now that's going to be my new move. Anytime anyone in my life has something happen, I'm going to wait till week 3 when, you know, the rest of the bagels have already hit the freezer to send a meal. But since Shiva ended, we have just sort of been moving kind of slowly through the summer, feeling a little bit less foggy day by day, trying to soak up all of that summer joy where we can. And, you know, now it's August, which means the high holidays feel like tomorrow. Religious school is opening soon. I'm going to be the high holiday cantorial soloist here this year. And let's just say that Barbra Streisand does make it look a little too easy. So that's like— that's what's been going on here. But Jen, it's not like your summer has been a totally normal walk in the park. What's been going on with you?

Totally true. In May, I had abdominal surgery to try to increase some fertility outcomes. And what's funny about that is that the doctor's specialty is known as minimally invasive, but I think they are in fact comparing it to the 17th century. It was quite invasive and it took a really long time to heal, much longer than I understood, and my energy was drained. I did watch a lot of Netflix. One thing I watched, I binge-watched, was the Anna Delvey Netflix series, but I got drawn too far into the main character's emotionally unhealthy ways while on pain medicine, and I don't recommend that cocktail. But then suddenly on June 1st, like literally to the day, my energy returned, which was great because I was officiating multiple weddings in Nantucket, the Berkshires, Denver. I was running a couples retreat in Tampa as part of my Jewish learning project, Modern Jewish Couples. And while I was in Tampa, you guessed it, I got us COVID. We are okay, but it was a bad scene and I don't recommend it. Um, and then we did have a beautiful vacation in Vermont. I went to Denver with my sister. Um, so that was positive, sort of in the non-COVID positive sort of way.

And here we are. And now we are so pumped to be back in the swing of things with OMFG. We are ready and excited for season 3.

The design of each episode will be refreshed from our past 2 years, but don't worry, friends, it's still us, your snarky, witty, and wise rabbis with the initials J and G, who will be the first to alert you to how Jewish wisdom can sustain us through the highs and lows of being human. As well as how sad we are that Ben Platt is doing a show on Yom Kippur in Atlanta, mostly because we're jealous to miss such a mystical experience.

So here we go. Season 3, Episode 1, On Preparation.

This is where I make the Preparation H joke, i.e., the pandemic is a hemorrhoid. I finally was like, oh, that's why it's called Preparation H, for hemorrhoid. I just realized that. I know. Anyways, Adam Sandler put it best when he said, "Back to school, back to school." Although Target still hasn't used that very dated pop culture reference for its back-to-school campaign, we can feel that shift in the air. The days are— sad face— already getting shorter. I find myself wanting to stay outside at night as long as I can, wistful at summer's end.

Now we do have a few weeks of summer left here on the East Coast, although I feel very sad watching all of our friends in the South and the Midwest already posting their first day back at school photos. But here, even if we're not paying attention, at the very least Target and the schools, or maybe Hebrew schools, are reminding us that it's time to prepare with all of their back-to-school lists and sales. And the thing about those lists that is so simultaneously exciting and enraging, because as a side note, I do love buying school supplies— is that it makes you feel like if you just get everything on the list, you'll have a great year with a guarantee. I think honestly, when I was, you know, circa 5th grade, I felt like as long as I had a new Trapper Keeper and a fresh pack of Crayola markers, there was no way I could fail.

That sort of list never really worked for me to prepare for camp or for school, although I think that had more to do with like undiagnosed ADHD. But to be honest, I've had a similar adult version of these lists. After going through 2 IVF cycles, you are given this huge list of meds that get sent to your home in a box, um, and you suddenly have this in-home pharmacy. And you get a little bit of training, like a back-to-school on how to take the meds, and a few videos. And you can Google your— till your heart's desire, and then you actually start the cycle. And that list of meds and those trainings and even those videos, they don't, they don't really feel like adequate preparation for the emotional journey that is also intensified by extreme hormonal shifts and only relieved by a cookie diet, which needs no explanation.

So I feel like I'm going to pause here to just say, like, the experience of IVF warriors is like unbelievable to me. And I wish I could provide you with your Strictly Cookie diet every day as you go through these cycles. But you're gluten-free, which makes it less fun. But the thing with lists is that those physical items, all those things we can buy, they can only take you so far. Even with a list like that, the thing I'm thinking about is not whether or not my kids have new backpacks and colored pencils, but more this moment of, oh my God, they're going into first and third grade, which means I must be a year older. So it begs the question, if lists assume that once you check something off the list, you're ready, and we both seem to agree here that somehow these lists don't quite emotionally prepare us, then how are we supposed to prepare for things like, say, the High Holy Days? How do we know when to start? What could that preparation look like? And perhaps most curious, what if it doesn't work?

What if the H in Preparation H stood for Preparation High Holy Days?

Okay, back to it. No, swag opportunity. We are going to— we are going to print out, uh, Preparation Age High Holy Day tickets. It's going to be great.

Okay, I'll add that to my to-do list. Um, so first, it might not work, Jodi, but I still think trying to do some preparation is wiser than really realizing the day before that the new year has arrived. So here's a brief primer about the High Holy Days. Rosh Hashanah arrives technically later this year than last year, but as rabbis tend to joke to a very small crowd who thinks it's funny, it's always on time because it's always on the first of Tishrei. In the secular year of 2022, if you're listening this year, it begins on Sunday night, September 25th, at sundown. And trust me, I checked heebkal.com 5,773 times to make sure.

So depending on when you're listening, you've got about a month or so to go, and that month happens to be called Elul in the Hebrew calendar. You know, last year we talked about preparing for the High Holidays in a beautiful, if I do say so myself, conversation on butterflies and golden threads and transformation. And so this year we want to focus on this month of Elul as the means to preparation. Perhaps you are familiar with Elul, and perhaps not.

And I honestly don't recall knowing what Elul was until rabbinical school. So if it's new to you, welcome. It happens to be one of my favorite months, and I love it even more now that I can help my friends write and edit their sermons rather than stressing about my own. Although I do miss the internal transformation I'd experience as the cheese grater washed over my soul searching for words of meaning to share and sermons. I used to sense the month of Elul quite deeply, especially because the cycles of the moon shift really told me how soon Rosh Hashanah was coming and passing, and because of that sense of terror of the work year ratcheting back up. An Elul full moon meant the 2-week countdown was on. One year I even went to Utah with 2 weeks to go, and that was a beautiful risk.

I do think it's worth just maybe like putting in the parking lot for later, the cheese grater over your soul.

For those, right?

No, Rabbi Jen Gubitz is, is truly the master of metaphor, and I'm gonna really hold on to that. Like the Parmesan of my sermon.

I don't know, but it's also— those are— we use cheese graters a lot at home and they're so hard to clean, especially with the Scrub Daddy, because then you have like grated Scrub Daddy. Anyways, that's for That's another time. Another episode, to be sure.

But I want to go back to the other beautiful turn of phrase that you just offered us, right? This idea of a beautiful risk. And I think that's actually a great way of framing Elul. It's a beautiful risk, and here's why. So in Elul, we get a preparation list for our souls. It's literally meant to be this month-long wake-up call, as the great rabbi Maimonides reminds us from across the centuries, saying, Wake up, you slumberers, from your slumbering. He nudges us out from our beds. In the month of Elul, we blow a shofar ram's horn daily, and if that's not a reminder to focus on your preparation list, I don't know what is. But really, we're supposed to turn our souls inside and out, looking backward, looking forward, figuring out who we have become, how that happened, and frankly, if we like it and ourselves much.

We may discover that we're contented with where we find ourselves and we may find that we're quite discontented and that we have some work to do.

I think your last point is the point. For me, the whole point of Elul is to do some of that picking apart that helps me figure out where there's work to do. And so here's where I want to pause and name something about what it means when we say, quote, "There's much work to do," right, about ourselves. I think when I was younger, the idea of admitting that I had some work to do felt like an admission of failure. And as I progress deeper into what I lovingly call, and pardon the language, friends, my fuck it 40s, beep, I feel more excited about having work to do on myself. Because it feels like a chance to stop doing the same darn thing over and over again, and then feeling frustrated with the less than amazing results. So the idea of self-work feels freeing, to be honest.

He's a scholar, Alan Marinus talks about how we dip ourselves in the same soup twice.

Mm-hmm.

Um, and I feel like our goal, our goal is perhaps to only dip yourself once or to choose a better soup, right? Maybe you just need to change the soup. Um, but I think that perfectionism is this common barrier for a lot of people on this type of preparation. Like if I admit that there's work to do, I have to admit that I'm not getting it all quote right. And I already work so hard and admitting that feels devastating. I think there's actually a lot of different kinds of barriers to the kind of preparation that Elul asks of us. If the high holy day is going to mark a new year of a loved one not being present, still being single, still not being pregnant, being recently divorced, still being unemployed, not being where you want in life, why would you want to prepare for that?

Yeah, you know, I think that maybe this is where there's more nuance to the idea of being prepared. You know, like getting all of the stuff on the back-to-school list, if that's the metaphor, might make you ready, but it doesn't make you prepared. You know, this distinction is fascinating because in Hebrew there is some overlap with the word mukhanah and mechinah. We have this same root word that gives us both a sense of readiness and preparation. I think part of the spiritual preparation of Elul is about openness and about getting down into our roots. Letting our guards down, admitting where some things just aren't working and could use some fine-tuning.

So maybe ultimately preparation is actually some kind of split between readiness and openness. Because at the end of the day, those back-to-school lists are about collecting all of the necessary tools. But when we move beyond the metaphor and look at our actual lives as adults, I think we all have the tools. And the tough part of being human is that life sometimes makes it hard to remember how to use them, or we forget what we knew about using them and have to relearn it. I think the preparation of Elul is about remembering how to use those ancient tools for transformation— prayer, self-reflection, repentance— and being open to how they might actually change you and your life.

It reminds me of one of my favorite poems that I always think of as a High Holy Day poem, which perhaps is a nice way for us to close close out this welcome back episode, the first episode of season 3, and it's a poem by the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai. Open, closed, open. Before we are born, everything is open in the universe without us. For as long as we live, everything is closed within us, and when we die, everything is open again.

Open, Closed, open. That's all we are. This episode of the OMFG podcast was brought to you by the letter H for hemorrhoids and High Holy Days and Hellmann's mayonnaise, right? Of course, of course. If you are thinking about ways to prepare yourself for the High Holy Days, we encourage you to check out the book This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared by Alan Lu. To explore the spiritual writing prompts by author and poet Meryl Feld, to get outside in nature, and to check out 10Q, which is 10 questions to reflect on who and how you want to be in the world in the year to come. If you have other ideas that have worked for you on how to really get yourself ready to become the finest version of yourself? Let us know on Instagram @omfgjewish.

Have a great year!