For me, becoming a rabbi was a calling. I can still remember a moment that I unequivocally felt the call. I was a college senior, out for a meal with my cousin who was a college junior, and she asked me that most obvious question that is asked of all soon-to-be-graduates: what are you gonna do next? I still remember it at the time: my entire being said, “Rabbi. Rabbi. Rabbi.” I felt called.
And so what happened next?
There I was, about five years later, in a warehouse in Silicon Valley taking the California bar exam, on my way to work at a large corporate law firm.
So, what happened?
Judaism knows a thing or two about experiencing a call, and avoiding it. In fact, it’s the central premise of one of the texts we read on Yom Kippur, the story of Yonah, Jonah.
“The word of GOD came to Jonah son of Amitai,” the Book begins. “Go at once to Nineveh,” the word of God says. Nineveh, a city in northern Mesopotamia, due east of Jonah’s home in northern Israel. “Go at once to Nineveh, that great city,” the word of God says,
וּקְרָ֣א עָלֶ֑יהָ
U’kra aleihah
“and call upon it;”
call upon its residents to change their ways “for their unkindness has come before Me.”
“Jonah rose up to flee unto… Tarshish from the presence of God,”
Tarshish, commonly understood to be the ancient colony of Tartessos in southern Spain. Due west of Israel. The opposite direction of his call.
So, I say again, what happened? What is it about our people, and about human beings, that on the one hand we are able to discern a call, to have a sense that we have something we are called upon to do in this world — in a lifetime, or in a given moment — and on the other hand can find ourselves so far afield from fulfilling it? What is that, and how might we address it?
Let’s take the first part first: discerning the call. In some respects, the experience of being called is central to the experience of being Jewish, and being human.
The first man, Adam, experiences a call.
In the Garden of Eden, after he and Eve have eaten of the forbidden fruit and experienced what it is to feel shame, for the first time, the new chapter of their lives begins with a call.
וַיִּקְרָ֛א יְהֹוָ֥ה אֱלֹהִ֖ים
Vayikra Adonai Elohim
The ETERNAL God
וַיִּקְרָ֛א
Vayikra
called to the human being, and said to him,
?אַיֶּֽכָּה
Ayekah?
“Where are you?”
Sometimes calls begin with a question, calling upon us to take stock of our lives. Where are you? Where are you in this journey of your life? Where do you find yourself? What forces, within your control and outside of it, have led you to where you are? Where are you physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually? Where are you? Sometimes the call begins with a call to ground ourselves in our current experience, to be mindful of it before we can go any further.
Other calls may call upon us to discover something about ourselves — to let go of what we know, to explore something new, to venture forth. The formative call of our people, beginning with one human being, was one such call.
וַיֹּ֤אמֶר יְהֹוָה֙ אֶל־אַבְרָ֔ם
Vayomer Adonai el-Avram
GOD said to Abram,
לֶךְ־לְךָ֛.
Lekh-Lekha
Traditionally translated as go forth, it literally means something like, “Go forth to yourself.”
Lekh-lekha me’artzekha u’mimoladetkha u’mibeit avikha el ha’aretz asher arekha
“Go forth from your native land and from your father’s house to the land that I will show you.”
You’ve got a lot to learn, this voice said. You need to go forth to yourself. Sometimes a calling can include a destination, and a also point of departure. In order to fulfill a calling, we sometimes have to let go of what we know, let go of the path of least resistance, in order to arrive at what is authentic and true. Sometimes we have to lekh lekha — go forth in order to encounter ourselves.
The call may begin with a call to return to our true selves, but it inevitably flows into a call of service.
וּמֹשֶׁה הָיָה רֹעֶה אֶת־צֹאן יִתְרוֹ
U’Mosheh hayah ro’eh et-tzon Yitro.
“Moses was tending the flock of his father-in-law Jethro,” and he drove the flock into the wilderness, and came to Horeb, the mountain of God.
An angel of GOD appeared to him…
בְּלַבַּת־אֵשׁ מִתּוֹךְ הַסְּנֶה
B’labat-esh mitokh hasneh.
in a blazing fire out of a bush.
Moses gazed, and there was a bush all aflame, yet the bush was not consumed. Moses said, ‘I must turn aside to look at this marvelous sight; why doesn’t the bush burn up?’
When GOD saw that Moses had turned aside to look,
וַיִּקְרָא אֵלָיו
Vayikra elav
called to him out of the bush: ‘Moses! Moses!’ God called. And Moses answered,
הִנֵּנִי
Hineni
‘Here I am.’
The nature of the call then begins to reveal itself. “Now the cry of the Israelites has reached Me;” God said. “I have seen how the Egyptians oppress them. Come, therefore, I will send you to Pharaoh, and you shall free My people, the Israelites, from Egypt.’”
A call to notice the hardship experienced by one’s fellow and to commit one’s life in service to them.
Our tradition teaches that life brings with it moments in which we feel “called” — moments where a call pierces through the silence, pierces through the static, which says we each have a purpose in this moment, or in this lifetime, or in this lifetime made up of moment after moment.
In fact, lest we think sacred calls of this nature are reserved for a select few individuals — the great prophets; tzadikei hador, the righteous in each generation — that’s not what Judaism teaches.
I often reference a midrash, a rabbinic teaching, about the creation of the world. We know from Bereshit, from Genesis, that in the first step of the act of creation, God said
יְהִ֣י א֑וֹר
Yehi or
Let there be light
וַֽיְהִי־אֽוֹר
Vayehi or
and there was light.
What is a lesser known part of the story, according to rabbinic tradition, is that God encased this light into vessels, casks. God sent forth these vessels “like a fleet of ships, each carrying its cargo of light.” And when these vessels arrived at their destination, the space of creation… they shattered. And creation resulted through the ensuing combination of ingredients, shard of vessel, spark of light, shard of vessel, spark of light. Sparks of light were scattered throughout the newly created universe, “like sand, like seeds, like stars,” covered by shards of vessels. This is the universe we now know today — sparks of light hidden in broken shards.
As the teaching goes, this is why humanity was created. We are called upon to gather the sparks no matter where they are hidden.
What Judaism goes on to teach is that there are particular sparks sewn into the universe belonging to each person — that there are certain sparks out that only one individual — Nathan Kamesar; Jessi Roemer; Lisa Eizen can reveal. There are certain sparks in the universe that are exclusively in our purview to reveal and to reunite with their source. We are all called, Judaism says, over the course of our lives, and in particular moments, to respond, in order to reveal sparks of light in the world.
As we see from these different calls over different chapters of the Jewish experience, there may be different calls over the different chapters of our lives. As a young person, like Adam or Abraham, we might be called upon to discover who we are, separate from our family of origin. Like the people of Israel at Mount Sinai, we might be called upon to discover our system of values, the causes, the covenantal relationships to which we will be devoted. What matters most to us? Who matters most to us? What will be our north star as we navigate our way through the world?
As we grow further, we may be called upon to deepen relationships, to experience further intimacy, with friends and with loved ones, supporting them as they support us; making ourselves vulnerable to them as they make themselves vulnerable to us. Adam, upon encountering Eve, serves as the basis for a verse of Torah which says a man leaves his father and mother
וְדָבַק בְּאִשְׁתּוֹ
V’davak b’ishto
and cleaves to his wife.
A call can be a call to deepen relationships, to recognize that life is not only about what we want; what we need; but how our lives can touch the lives of others.
As life goes on, we may be further called to create a family and to transmit the values we’ve learned and discerned, the traditions we’ve honed, to our children, to the next generation; or perhaps to deepen our engagement with the world around us — to pursue work that facilitates meaning and creativity; to make contributions to the larger world around us, leaving it better than when we found it; to pound the pavement to ensure we elect leaders who are aligned with our values, with the character to match; to steward the earth for the next generation.
At a later stage of life, we may be called simply to make peace with the life we’ve lived; to understand the contributions we’ve made, and to harvest the fruits of those experiences. To recognize where we fit into the vastness of the universe, where we are in our course of the cycle of life. To put our regrets to rest; to allow ourselves to experience a sense of wholeness, completeness, shalom.
So that’s part of the question: how are we called in this moment, in each moment, when you are asked ayekah, where are you? When you hear the call lekh-lekha, go forth; when you hear ashleha, I am sending you. On what path are you being sent? How are you called?
How do we discern that call? To discover how we are called in each moment, in each lifetime, in each lifetime made up of each moment; we turn to another call, this perhaps the central call in all of Jewish life:
Sh’ma — listen. That’s what the sh’ma is; it’s not a prayer, it’s a call. It’s a call that, originally, Moses, channeling the spirit of God, proclaimed to all of Israel, and it’s now a call we proclaim to ourselves, to our communities, to one another, morning and night: a call which says, sh’ma, Listen. Sh’ma Yisrael, the ones who wrestle with El, the divine, with the source of life. Sh’ma Yisrael adonai eloheinu, Listen Israel, Adonai, YHVH, from the word “to be,” the source of all being, is Eloheinu, is our God. Adonai, the source of all being, all of it, is one.
Sh’ma. Listen. Listen for the call. Listen like you’ve never listened before.
My spiritual director, Barbara Breitman, teaches that “the Sh’ma declares that the quintessentially sacred act for Jews is listening.” “Indeed,” she writes, “the Sh’ma announces that listening is the spiritual discipline through which the Oneness of God can be known.”
“Paradoxically,” she continues, “the name for God used in the Sh’ma” YHVH, which we pronounce as Adonai, but whose true pronunciation is lost to us through time, “Paradoxically, the name for God used in the Sh’ma is precisely the one name that cannot be spoken, that is ineffable — that we can’t articulate — exhorting Jews to listen precisely to that which cannot be spoken, to hear in the living silence that which unites us all.”
The Sh’ma signals to us that this sort of listening isn’t listening to the audible, the voice from the mountaintop — it’s to the inaudible, the unpronounceable, the ineffable. The call ringing out from the source of life, through our souls, into the world.
“What kind of listening is this?” she asks. “It is the listening that requires us to quiet the noise in our minds, listening that involves both the outer and the inner ear — the ear of the heart.”
She could be channeling another teacher of mine — if only my teacher in writing — Abraham Joshua Heschel, who writes, “Is not listening to the pulse of wonder worth silence and abstinence from self-assertion;” absence from the confident and forceful expression or promotion of oneself, one’s views, one’s desires?
Listening. Silence.
This is increasingly hard in a world where, through muscle memory alone, we’ve begun to reach for our phones when we have even seconds alone with our thoughts. Where notifications ping on our screen or buzz in our pocket when a train of thought has just begun to leave the station. It takes more intentionality than ever to have extended moments of quiet listening in our lives.
Jewish tradition calls for prayer three times a day. Many of us struggle, either from a literacy perspective or a theological perspective with the traditional liturgy, and so, how about we take this cue from the Sh’ma, and just twice each day, once in the morning, once in the evening, just listen — to listen for the Source of Being unfolding in us and in the universe, to hear how it calls out to us, what it asks, nay, what it demands, of us.
For Heschel — and for Barbara Breitman — silence isn’t just silence. It’s setting apart time for devotion to God by surrendering to stillness.
As I talked about on Erev Rosh Hashanah, surrender is an important part of this practice. We surrender to stillness, as Heschel says, “opening our thoughts to God. We cannot make God visible to us,” he says, “but we can make ourselves visible to God. So we open our thoughts to God — feeble our tongues [— we don’t necessarily have anything impressive to say] but sensitive our hearts.”
We open up our thoughts to God, surrendering any preconceived notions for how we believe we ought to be called; rather, listening, opening ourselves up to whatever call comes.
Note that when Judaism speaks of calls, we should say, it doesn’t only speak of career paths, grand gestures, sweeping, dramatic turns.
It speaks of the kol d’mamah dakah; the still, small voice of God, the prophet Elijah discovered, was not to be found in the great and mighty wind, not to be found in the fire, and not to be found in the earthquake, but in the kol d’mamah dakah, the still small voice.
The call can be present in thinking about how we go about our day-to-day lives. About how we interacted with a neighbor, a co-worker. Do they need a kind word, an apology? It can be about how we bring ourselves to a meeting or the family dinner table. Are we fully present in the ways we need to be? About different familial relationships: who needs a listening ear, a tender heart? Calls can show up in all the corners of our lives, waiting for us to respond. In each of these places, discernment can be practiced, seeking to separate signal from noise, divine hum from static. Spark from shard. In what ways are we called throughout the moments of our lives?
Okay, so let’s say we’ve figured this out. Let’s say we’ve done the incredibly challenging work of discerning the call, of tuning out the noise, of generating clarity on a particular question that confronts us. We have clarity on how we think we’re called.
But what about step two, responding to the call? Why are there books like Jonah that lift up both the experience of feeling called, of hearing that call loud and clear, and of shrinking from it, of running the other way? Why, if I was so sure that I wanted to be rabbi, did it take me not one, not two, but ten years to go from that level of clarity to actually following through?
I’ll give you three quick reasons, which do not comprise an exhaustive list, but perhaps may illustrate some of the reasons we may shy away from a call, the big calls that speak to the arc of our lives, and the little calls; those moments that make up those arcs of time.
Number 1: Being more concerned with others’ perceptions of you than staying true to a call.
A midrash teaches that Jonah ran away from God’s call because of the events of a previous mission on which Jonah had been sent. Once, God had sent Jonah to destroy Jerusalem, the midrash teaches, because of the sins of its people. However, its people repented, so the Holy One Blessed be He acted in accordance with His mercy and repented of His fatal intention, and did not destroy it. Thus, the people called Jonah a navi sheker (“a false prophet”) for foretelling their doom, a prophecy which did not turn out to come to pass. Stung by this rebuke, he vowed never again to respond to God’s call.
While my own experience was not nearly this dramatic, there were hints of this as I steered away from rabbinical school. I allowed concerns of others’ perceptions of me to eclipse, to drown out, the call. When I was 21 years old and graduating college, few, if any, of my peers were Jewish. Few of my peers would appreciate what it meant to be a rabbi; they simply didn’t understand it. And I was someone yearning to impress other people, to get credit from society for my success. In my world at the time, “rabbi” did not give me that, but I thought getting into a good law school might. So I did that instead. Letting others’ perceptions dictate our choices — reason number one for running from our calls.
Reason number 2: Sometimes we’re not sure we believe in ourselves to have the capacity to carry out our call to fruition. Put differently, we’re afraid.
Both Moses and Jeremiah, when called by God, said in effect, who am I? Who am I to do this? “Ah, my Sovereign GOD!” Jeremiah says, when called forth to his mission. “I don’t know how to speak, for I am still a boy.” For Moses it is, “Who am I I that I should go to Pharaoh and free the Israelites from Egypt?”
Our own uncertainty, our own fears about our personal capabilities, can cause us to shy away from taking the plunge. When I was initially contemplating rabbinical school, it had been years since I’d had a formal Jewish education. What did I know about being a rabbi? Would I have the Talmudic chops; would my Jewish practice hold up in the eyes of the admissions committee? Who was I to have the chutzpah to assume Jewish communal leadership in this way? We doubt ourselves. Reason number two.
Reason number 3: Conflict avoidance.
Few of us like conflict. The prophets of old were no different. When Moses discerns his call, he begins to imagine how it will unfold, all the conflict it may bring to his life. “What if the Israelites do not believe me?” Moses says. “What if they do not listen to me, but say: God did not appear to you?” What about all the negotiation, the disappointment, the fear of abandonment and alienation that will result from our responding to a call that does not align with the understandings and visions of others.
This, too, featured in my initial decision not to pursue rabbinical school. At the time, I was living a life marked by a very strict approach to halakhah, to Jewish law, and no one around me, including my family, shared this approach. Everything was a negotiation: how early could we start the seder; what plates could we use; could we as a household order takeout on Shabbat? While you may have different sorts of examples of what bringing your voice to the table might mean, sometimes we rightly anticipate that following through on our instincts, our calls, will lead to disagreement and conflict with people who see the issue very differently. It may feel like it’s easier to turn the volume down on what is inside us rather than to experience the friction that would result from sharing it, the fears we imagine might come to fruition as a result of that friction. Conflict avoidance — reason number 3 for running from our call.
We throw up all sorts of obstacles in response to the calls we discern, sometimes burying the calls, submerging them deep within us. But as Jonah will tell you, that doesn’t mean they go away. They seem to pursue us, even if we don’t pursue them, keeping us awake at night.
So how do we face up to our fears, how do we heed the voice of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, when he says kol ha’olam kulo, gesher tzar m’eod — the whole world is a narrow bridge, but the point is not to succumb to our fear. As my teacher, Kenwyn Smith taught; that’s the paradox of courage: it’s impossible to be courageous if there is no fear in the first place.
One of the most frequently-cited quotations at graduations all around the world, when students are seeking to discern their call and to muster the courage to follow through, is the following, often misattributed to Nelson Mandela, actually written by the Jewish author and erstwhile presidential candidate, Marianne Williamson, with whom I have plenty of disagreements, but who once said that had she received the Jewish education her daughter had, that she would have been a rabbi. In her famous words, she wrote: “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.”
In fact, it’s this latter point that may be the key. Our responding to a call is not about us. From the Jewish perspective, it’s about doing our part to lift the sparks that are needed to bring about a redemption for the collective whole.
Now, just because we feel called in a particular way doesn’t mean we can expect the world to bend over backwards to our vision. Nor should we imagine that there won’t be voices in response to our own self-assertion that we need to take account of. There will be. In fact, it may be that our contributing our voice in the way we are called will elicit the response of someone else, and that the two voices, responding to one another, will yield a new pathway, a new calling, neither had imagined before.
Our response to our call may not lead us where we imagined it would. I’ll close with a story I know from a Jewish context, which has now made its way into popular literature:
One night, a man named Isaac had a dream. In his dream, a voice told him to go to the capital city and look for a treasure under the bridge by the Royal Palace. It is only a dream, he thought when he woke up, and paid no attention to it. The dream came back a second time. Still he ignored it. When the dream came back a third time, he said, “Maybe it’s real,” and so he set out on his journey. When he reached the capital city and came to the bridge by the Royal Palace, he found that it was guarded day and night. He dared not search for the treasure, but he returned to the bridge every morning and wandered around it until dark. One day, the captain of the guards asked him, “Why are you here?” Isaac told him the dream. The captain laughed. “You poor fellow, he said, what a pity you wore your shoes out for a dream! Listen, if I believed a dream I once had, I would go right now to the city you came from, and I’d look for a treasure under the stove in the house of a fellow named Isaac.” And he laughed again. Isaac bowed to the captain and started on his long way home. When he got there, he dug under his stove, and there he found the treasure.
Sometimes our call, after venturing forth, leads us to treasure what is right here at home. G’mar Hatimah Tovah, may you be sealed, for good, in the Book of Life.
