To Slow Down
Congregation B’nai B’rith, Santa Barbara CA
Friday, August 29, 2014
Up until three weeks ago, I had no idea that there is a wildflower that grows in the High Sierra called “Little Elephant Head,” whose blossoms grow on a stalk and each individual blossom does, amazingly, look like a tiny elephant’s head.
Marian and I were backpacking this month in the High Sierra and brought with us John Muir Laws’ Field Guide to the Sierra Nevada. After our first week on the trail, we decided to slow way down and to try to get to know the wildflowers. One night in the tent, I was leafing through the book, marveling at the mindboggling life-forms that exist out there. The Witch’s Butter fungus and the Giant Blazing Star and the Dog Vomit Slime Mold, and then I noticed the flower called “Little Elephant’s Head,” and leaned over to Marian and showed her. “Look at this!” I exclaimed, “Can you believe this really exists?!” Marian agreed that it was almost impossible to believe it was real.
The next day, we were walking slowly, and had identified the Sierra Gentian, and Western Monkshood, the Pussy Paws, and Cinquefoil, and Parish’s Yampa, and then one of us stopped and said “here’s one we haven’t seen yet.” We bent down low, because the flowers were so small, which was not easy with those heavy backpacks, and suddenly exclaimed “it’s it!! Little Elephant’s Head!!” That was one of the supreme highlights of our time on the trail this year.
We were hiking the same trail we hiked last year. Some of it was just as we remembered it. Other stretches had last year been shrouded in smoke from forest fires, and this year they rose up in front of us with a shocking, vivid clarity. Some of it we completely forgot about until the trail brought us back to them and the memories came rushing back. But perhaps most significant was the difference between last year’s fast hiking pace, and the hours this year when we walked slowly, and stopped to learn the flowers.
It is one thing to walk alongside a mountainside surrounded by trees and flowers and something entirely different to walk among Lodgepole Pines, Western Junipers and Jeffrey Pines and to greet individually every single Showy Penstemmon, each clump of Granite Gillia, to admire each Alpine Shooting Star, and the Columbine with its fairy wings, and the lavender Sierra Daisies, and to look longingly at the prickly red gooseberries and to confidently pick and taste the red wax currants.
Last year we were foreigners, walking quickly through a strange and threatening landscape, and this year we slowed down and walked among our friends.
One important decision in preparing for the hike was what to bring to read. We knew from last year that we would likely be falling asleep exhausted by 7:30 or 8:00pm, and then waking up in the middle of the night, ready to read. Marian brought her Kindle, on which she had loaded several novels for reading in those long dark hours. But I brought a single slender book, one of my all-time favorites, The Way of Man, according to the Teaching of Hasidism, by Martin Buber. I knew that I might read through the entire thing in one evening, but I also knew that I could read a single page and then spend two hours thinking about what I had just read.
Buber begins with the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and the strange and powerful moment after the first humans have disobeyed and eaten from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and God calls to them saying Ayeka? Where are you? Clearly, it cannot be that God actually does not know where they are….but Buber explains: this question is a Voice within each one of us, asking us where we are, calling us to come out of hiding, and awakening in us an impulse to return to God.
As I lay there in the dark, ten thousand feet above sea level, surrounded by towering mountains and the wind and the pines and wildflowers, I asked myself: Where are you? And What would it mean to return to God?
It is the classic question of this season leading up to Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the season of Teshuvah, of return. The notion of Teshuvah is perhaps the crucial, unique and distinctive teaching of Judaism. The teaching that each one of us is capable of making a change and of turning our selves toward God. Judaism calls us to choose, to take responsibility for our life, and to respond to the question: Where are you?
Laying there in our tent, I opened myself to the question: How can I turn toward God?
A few answers arose within me, some of which are too private to share. But one answer that came to me was: Slow down. Bring myself more fully to each moment. Stop rushing ahead. When I am eating, eat. When I am walking, walk. When I am praying, pray. When I am with someone, listen. Slow down.
Now that may sound obvious to you. But when a simple truth comes to you in the middle of the night, it acquires deeper power. And when it is in the middle of the night at 10,000 feet above sea level, it sounds like the voice of God at Mount Sinai.
I had a similar revelation earlier this year while attending a concert by the cellist Yo Yo Ma. Sitting in the Granada Theater, it came to me that every single note he played was filled with meaning and intention. I imagined him in his home, practicing his instrument, and thought to myself: “He brings his entire self to the cello every time he plays.” I know he is Yo Yo Ma, and I am not. But how can I bring myself more fully to prayer, to listening, to eating, to living?
The Hebrew word for this is kavanat halev, which is translated “directing the heart,” or “focus” or “intention.” Our sages were realistic about human nature, and they admitted freely that it is impossible to have kavanah all the time. But they also taught that the commandments require kavanah. And that prayer without kavanah is like a body without a soul. I am entering the High Holy Days this year with the new old truth that in my life, turning toward God will require slowing down, and living less distractedly, more whole-heartedly.
A few days later, I encountered the same teaching in a different setting.
We came off the trail at Florence Lake and had arranged for a van to drive us to Fresno, where Ari came to meet us and drive us home. The road from Florence Lake is 3 hours long and winding, with many blind turns and our driver was anxious to cover the long miles. But when he saw a car pulled over on the side, he stopped and asked the driver “need any help?” It took just a split second, but it registered in my consciousness that even though he was driving us, paying customers, and still had hours to go, he was prepared to stop and help those strangers, who may have been in difficulty, out there in the wilderness. Our driver knew the old wisdom of how to slow down.
I have a favorite old Israeli song called Yemei Binyamina, written by Ehud Manor, in which the singer remembers his little town of Binyamina, outside of Haifa. He sings: Ani zocher hakol zaram l’at, hashemesh lo miher. Anashim amru shalom, chaver hayah chaver. I remember how everything flowed slowly. The sun did not hurry. People said “shalom.” A friend was a friend. There must have been moments of worry and rushing in Binyamina, but these words of this song have for years spoken to me of the deep power of slowing down.
Remembering his own little town, in a different place and a different time, Elie Wiesel reflected on how a traditional Shabbat encompasses the Jewish teaching of sacred slowing down. He wrote: “I shall never forget Shabbat in my town….the atmosphere of holiday, of serenity pervading even the poorest houses: the white tablecloth, the candles, the meticulously combed little girls, the men on their way to synagogue. The jealousies and grudges, the petty rancors between neighbors could wait. As could the debts and worries, the dangers. Everything could wait. As it enveloped the universe, the Shabbat conferred on it a dimension of peace, an aura of love.”
As Marian and I walked through the mountains, we slowed down and met some new friends…all those wildflowers… and learned their names. This is our people’s old wisdom, contained in the ancient commandment to rest on Shabbat.
Tonight God is calling us, urging us to slow down, asking us Where are you? As we enter this season of turning, may we find the quiet to hear that voice, and the strength to turn toward God and to respond: Hineni. Here I am.