"Self Awareness "

2008 Rosh Hashanah sermon by Jodi Kornfeld, Spiritual Leader

The Torah portion from Genesis 3 is no doubt familiar to many, if not most of you.  The general story if not the particulars has made its way into Western culture and art.  There are of course four characters, Adam, Eve, God and the serpent, set in the Garden of Eden, with that archetype of temptation often depicted as an apple but described in the text only as “the fruit,” eaten by Eve.  But the central message is not about theological notions of sin, or evil or obedience to the instruction of the biblical god.  Instead the moral is often overlooked and comes from, of all characters, the serpent.  He tells the woman, “you are not going to die, but God knows that as soon as you eat of [the tree] your eyes will be opened and you will be like divine beings who know good and bad.”  That tree was a source of wisdom, often referred to as the tree of knowledge.  How is it that wisdom or knowledge was to be avoided lest severe penalties follow?  Isn’t that precisely what we need to strive for?  And isn’t it the commodity that seems too often to be in short supply?  Wisdom and knowledge should not be off-limits even if what we learn is difficult or unpleasant. More often though, it is just the contrary; wisdom is the hallmark of insight and understanding.  It is the product of experience and perception.  Yet, wisdom, although it is there for the taking, hanging from a tree in all of its splendor, requires action.  For we must in fact interact in order to obtain it. There is no passive acquisition of wisdom; it cannot exist in a vacuum. The key point of the story then is one of self-awareness as the serpent reminds us that by the intake of such fruit, our eyes are opened.  We must hone the keen skill of attentively and deliberately seeing:  seeing ourselves as fully developed if imperfect human beings, possessing both good and bad traits; seeing if our relationships are imbued with honesty and integrity; and seeing whether our place in the world is as active and engaged participants.  To do anything less means we have passed on the fruit from the tree of wisdom, leaving us malnourished and hungering for more.  Indeed we must have our recommended daily allowance of such fruit in order to maintain a level of mindfulness and consciousness in our lives.  Otherwise, it is as if our eyes are not opened and we are choosing to be blinded to the possibilities, opportunities and connections that so enrich our very beings.

An active self-awareness seems to require three things that the tree of knowledge can bear:  namely, consciousness, memory and uncertainty.  None of these things is easy to obtain or maintain, and they may be difficult to live with and accept; nevertheless they are each essential in their own way to developing wisdom and ultimately meaning in our lives.  First, there is consciousness, consciousness of who we are, what we value and how we behave. And just as critical, a conscious effort to have these act as an integrated whole.  It entails self-appraisal, not praise of self.  It necessitates an ethical compass to guide us proactively, not a reactive, retrofitted rearrangement of our actions. It means that we pay attention and not settle for so-called blissful ignorance.  We simply cannot be self-aware without consciousness.

Secondly, there is memory because we come to each moment built on the moments and days and indeed lives that have come before us. In his brilliant first book Everything is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer writes that Jews have six senses –“Touch, taste, sight, smell,hearing. . . . memory.  While [others]
experience and process the world through the traditional senses,and use memory only as a second-order means of interpreting events, for Jews memory is no less primary than the prick of a pin, or its silver glimmer, or the taste of the blood it pulls from the finger.  The Jew is pricked by a pin and remembers other pins.  It is only by tracing the pinprick back to other pinpricks ---when his mother tried to fix his sleeve while his arm was still in it, when his grandfather’s fingers fell asleep from stroking his great-grandfather’s damp forehead, when Abraham tested the knife point to be sure Isaac would feel no pain --- that the Jew is able to know why it hurts.  When a Jew encounters a pin, he asks: What does it remember like?

Implicit in this passage are two essential points. Memory in general, and Jewish memory in particular, is a sensory mechanism by which to absorb and process experience and information; and secondly it operates across generations to provide context to that experience and information.  Even though he is describing the Jewish condition, Safran Foer could well be describing the active humanist condition, one of connection, identification, empathy and association with what preceded us. None of us operates in isolation from each other. Through memory we encounter history, both personal and communal, and translate it into meaning. Through memory, we maintain our contact with the joys and the sorrows of those who preceded us, and inform our own understanding.  In other words, the meaning of events in one’s life is shaped by their comparison and similarity to the shared remembered events of the past or their place in our collective memory.  Thus memory is the second essential element of self-awareness.

Finally self-awareness requires the ability to live with uncertainty; and this may be the hardest item of all.  The world is a random place, which does not set each of us at its center.  Indeed if we are conscious and mindful, we are also profoundly affected by the knowledge that life holds no guarantees; no promise of length of days; no immunization from the pain of loss.  Yet it is precisely because of this that we cannot afford to waste a moment; we ought not to be careless in our words or actions. We must enthusiastically relish each quiet joy that comes our way.  We need not fear uncertainty but rather we can embrace what has been termed “the blessing of uncertainty,” that which makes a meaningful life possible.  In the realm of quantum physics, admittedly a field well beyond my understanding, Fred Wolf in Taking the Quantum Leap, has written that uncertainty is that which enables life itself to continue, "[T]he alternatives to this uncertain world is a certain world. In such a world, particles would follow well-determined paths with exact locations at each and every point.  But this alternative is known to be unworkable. The tiny electron inside of every atom would have to radiate each and every instant in such a determined world.  It would lose all of its energy and quickly fall into the nucleus.  All atoms would disappear.  All electromagnetic energy would vanish.  All nervous systems would cease their activity. All Life would stop.   For life as we know it can only exist through the blessing of uncertainty...”  (Wolf, p. 250).  We need to learn this, and accept it because uncertainty is what enables change.  It works against a static existence, an unacceptable status quo, a superficial state of being.  It is for this very reason that the fruit from the tree of knowledge bearing self-awareness is so tantalizing, and nourishing.  With it, we are humanized, an ironic twist to a text that suggests it is only a divine delicacy.

There is a fitting image of the intervening days from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur.  It relates to the so-called Book of Life, the Sefer Ha-Chayim.  Our tradition suggests that on Rosh Hashanah we are inscribed in the book of life, and the book is sealed, along with our fate, on Yom Kippur.  But we know that this is not done to us, or for us, or on our behalf.  Instead we are the authors of these pages.  We must approach the assignment as if we are critical editors of our own books.  We control our narrative to a large degree by our conduct and the outcomes we direct.  Our deliberate embrace of consciousness, memory and uncertainty help dictate that narrative.  Our values are recited in between the covers of the books of our lives.  And collectively we create an impressive library, as no two editions are the same.  Nor is the volume closed ten days hence.  Pages continue to be added, written, redrafted, illustrated and annotated.  Our eyes, however, must be opened in order to do an effective and inspired job.  Our eyes must also be opened to the very real fact that ultimately there is a finite number of pages in the book we write.  This awareness makes each word, each phrase, each paragraph that much more significant and precious. The Spanish-Jewish poet of the eleventh century, Bachya ben Joseph ibn Pakuda wrote: “Days are scrolls; write on them what you want to be remembered''.  So the question each of us must ask is what is it we want to inscribe not in the book of life, but in the book of our life.  In part of her poem, “The Summer Day” Mary Oliver wrote:
            I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
            I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
            Into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass
            How to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields
            Which is what I have been doing all day.
            Tell me, what else should I have done?
            Doesn’t everything die at last and too soon?
            Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your
            One wild and precious life?

The need for awareness of the life we lead is ultimately the meaning of the Garden of Eden story, and likewise I think behind the notion of the Book of Life being sealed.  We do not have endless second chances; and we certainly cannot waste them by blindly, rotely or robotically engaging.  Rosh Hashanah annually reasserts this message:  it is written and it is sealed.  With the not so subtle sound of the shofar, it shouts to us – keep writing the pages of your life.  Self-awareness and self-responsibility are unsettling at times; they are  difficult and painful.  But they are also lovely, engendering a sense of purpose and meaning of our own making.  A purpose annually renewed at Rosh Hashanah.  Let us enter this new year with resolve, with acumen and with graciousness.  Partake of the fruit; try it in new recipes; savor every bite.  And then see what new pages you will add to the book of your life.