December,2020 Megillah
RABBI'S NOTES
“Boredom is the voice of God.…” I think I made up that line a long time ago, though I may have borrowed it from someone wiser than I. I don’t get bored very often; usually I have projects and capers and work and worries and home stuff to keep me plenty busy. But lately, when it gets dark at 4:00 in the afternoon, and I haven’t been out of the house in days, and I’m not going to be out of the house for days more because of COVID, and I’ve finished what I have to do and I’ve read the news crawl a hundred times already and we’ve already had dinner and it’s only 5:00 PM, sometimes I feel that wild feeling in my chest.
I’m BORED! I want to DO SOMETHING. Something new. Something exciting. But WHAT?
I remember that feeling from childhood weekends. I don’t know what it was like for you, but when I was a kid, it wasn’t an endless cycle of music lessons and soccer practice and special tutors and volunteering at the soup kitchen. I took a year of ballet lessons when I was little, and when I was older I would sometimes go ice skating with other kids on Saturday morning. Other times I was in Girl Scouts, and still others I was in Sunday School. But there was a lot of time with nothing to do. I had things I liked to do then, just like I do now. For years I was very into making troll houses and outfits. I liked to roller skate. I liked to read. But occasionally I had run out of diversions by the middle of the afternoon. And I would feel that slightly anxious, slightly desperate feeling: what do I WANT? I would think”I’ve got art inside me, poems inside me, recipes inside me. I just can’t find them!” I took guitar lessons in seventh-grade summer school, and after that I would compose sad little middle-school songs and sing them to myself.
Then I grew up, and for many decades, up to just about the present moment, I was chronically busy, going to school, trying to make a living and a rabbinate and homes and relationships, trying to be politically active and intellectually alive and a decent friend and family member, trying to have an inner life and grow morally and spiritually by taking classes and reading books and going to conferences and taking trips and doing projects and all those purposeful things one does. But with COVID now, and with the High Holy Days well behind me, and being in heightened lockdown, I’ve had some of those wall-crawly moments when the day gets long before it’s half-over.
Yes, I could certainly do something nice for someone or clean up my office or study Torah, for heaven’s sake! But today, after reading the Sunday Times from cover to cover and doing all the puzzles, and tucking a couple of good deeds in there too, I found myself thinking that Boredom is the voice of God.
It’s the low-rent version of Mary Oliver’s famous line: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do / With your one wild and precious life?” There is something a little bit profound in that inner itch to find the task that is absolutely one’s own to do—whether for the next hour or the next decades. When boredom speaks, it says, “Don’t waste your life (or even an afternoon of it). Find your way to re-engage with life meaningfully.”
I can only imagine how much someone reading this is rolling her, or his, or their eyes while they are managing their children’s home schooling, their high-stress job, and their leaking roof. I also know that all of us sometimes get tired, which is by no means the same thing as bored, or we’ve had a full day and it’s time to kick back and watch some TV, and that is exactly what needs to be done with that interval in one’s wild and precious life. Of course, some people are in the hospital, or in jail, or otherwise prevented from doing what they want to do. In these cases, boredom is not a sweet whisper from the Beyond, but a form of sheer misery.
However, I am writing this in the month of Kislev, soon to flow into Tevet, the darkest month of the year, the month of the Winter Solstice, the hibernating month. I’m writing it when COVID has reached a renewed level of threat, and we are adjured not to do the things that many of us would usually do to fill these dark weeks and months. We’re not to travel or go to parties or even have guests at our dinner table. We’re not getting together at the shul and frying 600 latkes, and we’re not having a huge party at the Caspar Community Center with the Klezmishpoche Band. If we make a batch of soufganiyot, we’ll end up eating them all ourselves. Maybe this year we won’t even do that.
Perhaps there is some space here and there in our days and long evenings. Maybe it’s just a sweet hour to read a novel or call a friend we don’t usually have time to talk with. If you’ve already done that, and are wondering “What next?” and are thinking, “I don’t want to just wish this time away or waste it doing something I don’t even enjoy (like those headlines again…). This is, after all, my LIFE.” If you feel restless and unfulfilled and becalmed, I certainly don’t have an answer for you, or even for myself, except to say that there is something wonderful about that feeling inside us that makes us crave to engage with life, to do what is ours to do with devotion. Boredom asks us, “What is yours to do, or reflect on, or explore, or create, or just be with that you’re not pursuing? What will you do with your one wild and precious afternoon?”
The name Hanukkah comes from the word for “rededication.” The holiday was originally about restoring and repurposing the defunct sanctuary and relighting the eternal flame on the sacred altar. Allow me to wish you some boredom this Hanukkah season—a little moment here and there to sense your desire to rekindle your inner flame, and hearken to that slightly desperate, childlike yearning to DO SOMETHING that is particularly yours in life, or in Kislev and Tevet, to do. Happy Hanukkah, my dear community!
