One Thing

Saturday night begins the final week of preparation for the Days of Awe: Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur, the Day of Judgment and the Day of Atonement. We pray for forgiveness and strength and courage of spirit using the words of Psalm 27, which begins “The Eternal is my light and my help; whom should I fear?”

A few lines down, the psalmist declares, “One thing I ask of the Eternal; this one thing I seek: that I might live in the house of the Eternal all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Eternal and to visit his Temple.”

Just this one thing, the psalmist says, and then lists what appear to be three requests, all of them magnificent in scale: to dwell with God, to see God’s beauty, to visit God’s abode.

Just this one thing.

I seem to have innumerable requests of God this coming year: health for loved ones, a smooth acclimation to rabbinical school for me and my classmates, the humility and confidence to enter this profession, and other, sometimes petty, sometimes weighty concerns that often come with a new year. Help me keep up the weight loss. Help me balance school, work, and home. Don’t let me make a complete fool of myself in front of my fifth-graders. Help us continue to strengthen our marriage. Don’t let me lose touch with my sisters, my in-laws, my cousins, and my friends as the year gets busy.

Resolutions and reflections are common even at the secular new year, but the Jewish Rosh HaShana takes place in the context of the Days of Awe—days of terrible and awesome power and import, days in which, it is said, God decides the fate of all living things for the coming year. Even the angels tremble, according to the central prayer of Rosh HaShana, before the judgment of God. We are called to make a heshbon nefesh, a spiritual accounting, a detailed balance sheet of our lives and deeds over the past year. It is a daunting and certainly a humbling task.

And in the course of all this self-searching, as we make amends face-to-face with the people we have wronged over the past year, knowing that the forgiveness God can grant on Yom Kippur will not erase our duties toward other human beings, we pray Selichot, pleading prayers for forgiveness and for the ability to repent, to turn to God, to start the new year with sincerity.

And we make requests.

“One thing I ask of the Eternal; this one thing I seek: that I might live in the house of the Eternal all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Eternal and to visit his Temple.”

What would your one thing be? What deep desire lies at the heart of your turning to God and to good this year?

I’ve already joked that I can’t cut it down to just one thing, but I wonder if the psalmist was on to something, declaring his “one” request and then listing what seem to be three. Perhaps living in God’s house, gazing upon God’s beauty, and visiting God’s Temple are, indeed, all one thing. Perhaps it’s about how we look at the world, how we perceive the limited reality that surrounds us, and in some cases (I know in my own and, during this economic crisis, in many others’ lives it does) burdens us.

If the one thing I seek is to live with God all the days of my life—and I am most certainly not talking about afterlife—where might I gaze upon God’s beauty and visit his Temple? I’m not generally a literal reader of the Tanakh, and so I can imagine many situations in which we do gaze upon God’s beauty and visit God’s Temple: live with God in the days of our own lives. I think about the amazing experiences of the past year: sharing Shabbat during the joyful holiday of Sukkot with family in Tzfat, standing under the huppah and singing the Sheva Brachot (the seven wedding blessings) for my friends, hugging and kissing Rachel in the airport upon my return from Jerusalem, hearing an amazing sermon about our duties to ourselves and each another from Dean Idelson of HUC, sharing a Shabbat meal with old friends and new around our table in Brooklyn. In small ways, we can get a taste of what it’s like to live in the house of the Eternal, but we have to be open to feeling those moments.

Sometimes the one thing we ask for is a huge thing. We can’t put it into words or separate out its components. It seems un-grantable. It seems too big and too far for us to grasp. But it might be around us, in little pieces. We have to look at them, to turn them in the light. But they are there. They are little pieces of that one thing we seek.

“Hear, Eternal, when I cry out; have mercy on me, answer me […] Do not hide Your face.”