Dear Congregation Beth Israel members and friends,

The choir is rehearsing high holiday melodies. My teen has begun attending his final summer camp of the season. The roads are lined with blue chicory blooms and frothy Queen Anne’s Lace. I’m about to start eating corn and tomatoes at every meal I can, because there’s nothing like sweet corn in season or a tomato ripe off the vine. And now that we’ve made it through Tisha b’Av, we’re on the spiritual upswing toward Rosh Hashanah! Happy August.

In the Zoom class I’m co-teaching this month and next (during the seven week on-ramp to the high holidays), “Seven Habits of Highly Effective Evolved People,” we’ll be focusing each week on a different core Jewish teaching about how to live ethically and in accordance with Torah. We’ll examine our words, our deeds, where we stumble and how we pick ourselves up again, our relationship with community, and our capacity to cultivate and express care for one another.

This is a brand-new curriculum that my friend Rabbi David Markus and I have been co-creating this summer, which means I’ve been marinating in these ideas and texts and teachings since we started brainstorming about this class back at Pesach. My teacher Reb. Zalman of blessed memory used to say that the mind is like tofu: it takes on the flavor of whatever marinade we steep it in. What are the ideas and themes and obsessions in which your mind is steeping?

Whether or not you’re taking our class, this is a great time of year to sit with that question. Our repeated thought patterns carve grooves on our minds and hearts. Which of our thought patterns and habits support us in being the people we intend to be, and which maybe… don’t? Do we make thoughtful choices about what we say, how we speak about each other, when we look the other way (and shouldn’t) – or are all of those reflexes we don’t act to control?

At the rabbinic retreat I attended last month, we talked a lot about the spiritual practice of noticing. We get distracted, and then we notice the distraction and make a tiny act of teshuvah (repentance / return) and pull ourselves back to focus again. We get overwhelmed, and then we notice and calm ourselves and return to equilibrium. We lose sight of who we wanted to be, and then we notice and realign ourselves and do our best to aim high again. This is spiritual life.

Spiritual life is always a balancing act. We’re called to be in the now, even as we’re also called to recognize what’s on the spiritual horizon as the season continues to turn. We get to savor this month of summer while also looking ahead to the teshuvah work that arises for us every fall. Maybe we’ll each ponder our teshuvah journey as we drive to Lenox for the synagogue’s end-of-summer Tanglewood picnic (RSVP on our website and buy your own lawn ticket in advance).

Whatever your August holds, may it be sunny and sweet.

Blessings to all,

— Rabbi Rachel