Turn, Turn, Turn
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If we hadn’t learned it already from reading the Ecclesiastes section of the Hebrew Bible (what Christians call the Old Testament), many of us absorbed this piece of scripture through a musical rendition by Pete Seeger or The Byrds.
For everything there is a season and a time for every purpose under heaven—a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to pluck up what is planted, a time to break down and a time to build up, a time to weep and a time to dance, a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing, a time to seek and a time to lose, a time to tear and a time to sew, a time to keep silence and a time to speak, a time to love and a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace.
And in between all of these “times for” was the chorus—turn, turn, turn.
It occurs to me that in this familiar and powerful list of meaningful activities of our lives—year in and year out, over the centuries—there is at least one significant “time-for” that is missing.
A time to atone. To repent, to ask forgiveness. To literally change one’s mind.
Atonement was on my mind and in my heart because I was about to embark on an annual time of turning called teshuvah. You see, I am a Jewish Unitarian Universalist by birth and by choice. I observe the Jewish High Holy Days—first the Birthday of the World on Rosh Hashanah, then the 10 Days of Awe, and finally Yom Kippur; the Day of Atonement—which is as natural to me as observing and celebrating Christmas and Easter in this liberal and living faith tradition.
Rabbi Michael Lerner, one of the leaders of the Jewish Renewal movement (an effort to increase the meaning and feeling of Jewish religious practice), describes this period of teshuvah, of turning, as a time to assess how close we have come to actualizing our potential to be partners with God. It is a time to look at ways we miss the mark, and how we need to realign ourselves so that we return to our highest spiritual mission. It is a time to examine how we have individually gone astray and how we have gone astray as a society.
More than 200 years ago our Universalist forebear Hosea Ballou wrote his Treatise on Atonement, which turned the Calvinist idea of the relationship between people and God on its head. It is not an angry God that needs to be appeased or reconciled to human beings, Ballou argued, but human beings who must be reconciled to God—a God who saves all regardless of their errors. Ballou was convinced that once people realized this, they would take pleasure in living a moral life and doing good works.
I sense that the Jewish notions of sin and atonement and Ballou’s early Universalist ideas are not strictly parallel. Ballou believed that we need to just accept that human beings are sinful and that God loves them anyway. In Judaism, human beings are believed to be capable always of choosing to do good, to do mitzvot (right things, pleasing to God) or not. Once a year during the High Holy Days, when the Book of Life is open for introspection and correction, we can make amends both to the people we have offended and to God. At the end of the period of atonement, the Book of Life is closed again and it is God’s turn to judge whether we have fallen short and in which ways.
This comes out of the religious conviction that we are not passive participants in our life on Earth or in our relationship with God. The Hebrew prayer that captures this is unetaneh tokef—we change the future by changing ourselves. If we can look at ourselves clearly and take an accounting, we can once again be in right relationship with ourselves, with each other, with the world and all living things. Why do we review the records of our deeds from this past year? Why do we evaluate the quality of our existence? Because we cannot blame our conduct on forces beyond our control.
So we must turn around first, and look backwards.
Seven years ago, just before the High Holy Days and after finishing a Sunday service at my congregation in the North Georgia mountains, I was driving to the out-in-the-country home of a parishioner who was dying of a series of afflictions—breast cancer, kidney failure, heart disease—but who was looking forward to our visit and the bag of McDonald’s hamburgers I was bringing for her dog. It was a lovely Indian summer day. I felt good about my sermon, the way things had gone. I was playing something on the radio and singing along. I was reliving some of the better moments of the morning.
And I wasn’t exactly sure where I was and if I had missed a turn.
I remember suddenly thinking I was not going the right way. I remember what I thought was a four-way stop sign, and then starting out into the intersection and seeing a car coming on my right, and not being able to brake in time. And then spinning and turning, turning, turning. When I came to a stop, I had spun out and landed to the left of where I had been going. My passenger side was completely smashed in. In the intersection there was a car with a young couple and a baby in a car seat. The driver told me that he had only had one accident before. He kept saying that. And in the back of his car, the baby was wailing.
According to those who witnessed, I had indeed made a full stop, but then I moved out into the intersection when a car was coming through. My car was totaled, as was theirs. If there had been anyone in my front passenger seat, he or she would have been killed.
I was sore for weeks and would not drive. They filed a claim and said that the baby had some injuries where the seat belt had dug in, and the mother had neck pains. I was cited for failure to yield. They call these “accidents,” but they rarely are. I knew, and I know, what happened: I was not paying attention, I was distracted, I was careless. I was spun around, turned around in that intersection and other people were hurt because of this.
It was my fault. And I felt terrible, a huge sense of remorse for what I had caused, what I had done.
In the process of teshuvah, of turning around, the second stage is restitution, making amends. It would have been healthier for me spiritually to have been able to write a letter to the family in the other car or to call them and apologize for my part in the car wreck. But in this litigious world of insurance claims, that is not allowed. I know this from my own earlier experience of being flattened by a car hurtling through an intersection and striking me on a sidewalk when I was just 20. It broke my hip in eight places, causing internal injuries and several other fractures, and still the elderly man who caused this could not and did not ever contact me. He can’t, my lawyer told me, and he didn’t.
So since I could not, did not, approach those I injured directly, the process of atonement, of turning, was much, much harder. I prayed about it, and dreamt about it, and wrote about it, and still speak about it, but in some ways I have never reconciled myself to it.
First, we turn back to see what we have done. Second, we turn things right by taking responsibility and saying we are sorry. For me, it was for the sins of distraction and carelessness and being more interested in savoring personal success than driving cautiously, attentively, and safely. I have tried to be a fully alert and conscientious driver, but cannot say I’ve never lapsed into the kind of distracted behavior that caused the damages. But I try.
For others of us, and for me at other times, our sorrow and attempts at repair may be for the sins of being judgmental or withholding love and support. For the sin of cooperating with the self-destructive behavior of others or ourselves. For the sin of not supporting each other when we attempt to change. For the sin of saying we are spiritual and not political as a way of hiding from painful realities—and not speaking out against injustice and tyranny. For the sin of not recognizing and celebrating the beauty and the grandeur of the universe around us; for the sin of not seeing the spirit of God in others; for the sin of not recognizing and nurturing the spirit of God within ourselves. And for the sin of focusing only on our sins and not on our strengths and beauties.
Turning back, we look to see how we have done, for what we are accountable. Turning—as in changing, changing our minds, making restitution. And then turning toward God. To turn, turn, turn.
Rabbi Zalman Scachter-Shalomi tells us that we are theotropic creatures. Just as a sunflower turns towards the sun and we call it heliotropic, we grow naturally toward God. He urges each one of us to find our own name for God. For some, God has a face that we long for in our deepest moments. Is it a friend we need or a comforter? A rock to lean on when we are the most besieged? A recipient of our joy and gratitude?
For others of us, for me, the rabbi invites us to move away from a noun and find other ways of describing God. We might try on words like godding, a process that the universe is doing, has been doing, and will continue to do forever—moving towards healing, harmony, and wholeness.
That is why every Jewish prayer service ends with praise and a request for blessing, such as:
On this day, give us strength. On this day, bless us. On this day, help us grow. On this day, be mindful of us. On this day, inscribe us for a good life. On this day, support us with your just strength. On this day bring us closer to your service so that we may be well and so that we may be spiritually alive all of our days as we are on this day. May righteousness, blessing, mercy, life, and peace be ever granted to us.
For everything there is a season, turn, turn, turn, and a time for every purpose under heaven.
She is also a published poet with chapbooks: Prickly Pear (Farm House Press, 2009) and South/West (Shakespeare's Sisters Press, 2013). She is the co-editor, with Leah Hart-Landsberg, of Jewish Voices in Unitarian Universalism (Skinner House, 2014). She is also an author and editor of Faith of UU Jews, part of the welcoming pamphlet library of the Unitarian Universalist Association.
In 2014, she was selected to be a poet in residence as part of the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the National Wilderness Act. She joined visual artists, photographers, sculptors, and musicians in a program where participants spent time in urban wild spaces in preparation for producing creative works. She was assigned to three preserves in Southwest Atlanta.
- Observations at Southwest Atlanta Nature Preserves - September 1, 2017
- Turn, Turn, Turn - September 1, 2012
