 | We approach the peak light of Shavuot and Mount Sinai, and also the peak light of the solar zenith in the Northern Hemisphere sky. This confluence of two peak lights has me thinking about what peak experiences are, why we need them and why we sometimes push them away, and how we can open ourselves anew to inviting them as this summer season of light approaches. |
By Rabbi David Evan Markus
Happy June, Shir Ami! June brings two nearly simultaneous peaks: in Jewish time, the Shavuot celebration of receiving Torah at Sinai’s “peak” light (June 11-12); and in secular time, the sun’s Northern Hemisphere peak light that will launch summer (June 20-21).
Click here to read more about this year’s Shavuot offerings.
Click here for a Dvar Torah on how we “receive” Torah anew.
In these days leading into Shavuot and the summer solstice, I’m thinking about life’s “peak lights” – peak experiences that transform us. Psychologist Abraham Maslow (a nice Jewish boy) called them “rare, exciting, oceanic, deeply moving, exhilarating, elevating experiences that generate an advanced form of perceiving reality, and are even mystic and magical in their effect.”
Some peak experiences are planned and socially in vogue: romance, moments of commitment (say, a wedding), parental joy (holding one’s baby for the first time). Even a moment of ultimate loss (witnessing a death, burying a loved one) can outlive its time and stand out as a peak impact moment in life.
Other peak experiences are unplanned, spontaneous and surprising: they might come even despite ourselves. They're our sudden "Eureka!" moments that shift our thinking, the sunsets whose beauty takes our breath away and suddenly we're not just ourselves, the exquisite beauty of a prayer moment that changes everything.
By their nature, peak experiences bend time, memory and our very selves. They feel outside of time – whether because time stops or stretches (a moment that lasts forever), or because they pivotally shape us far beyond when they occur (a memory that feels like now). In real ways, they make us who we are.
Yet by definition, peak experiences are the opposite of routine, normal, safe, staid, familiar life. It’s a paradox: how can we be both our ordinary selves and our extraordinary peak moments that lift us beyond ourselves? Why do ordinary life and peak moments wrestle for dominance and even push each other away?
In a sense, it’s the paradox of spirituality itself. In Biblical language, we humans are ordinary creatures but just a bit less than divinity itself (Psalms 8:6), in the divine image (Genesis 1:26). Yet we humans also tend to deny, resist or rationalize peak experiences away precisely because they lift us away from our routine selves. Alternatively, some so gravitate to peak experiences that “normal” life becomes all but impossible.
This push-pull of the ordinary and extraordinary is the tidal ebb and flow of our own lives, and the ebb and flow of Jewish spiritual life. We honor both by making times for each. Much as sun and moon have peaks of light and dark, proximity and distance, so do Jewish and spiritual life. In a synagogue service, the Amidah is a peak. In the Jewish year, Shavuot is a peak.
Peaks are intended to change us – but only if we truly let ourselves be changed. (How many does it take to change a light bulb? One, but the light bulb needs to want to change.) Of the Amidah, it is said אל תעש תפילתך קבע / “Do not make your prayer fixed” (Pirkei Avot 2:13), an apparent paradox because the Amidah’s words are fixed – but not our prayer, not ourselves. An autopilot Amidah can’t be a peak experience: we’re not fully there. Similarly of Shavuot it is said that to receive Torah anew, we must first make ourselves hefker – ownerless, unfenced, inwardly untamed – like the wilderness of Sinai itself. Unmoored to anything, peak experience can transform.
It is said that peak experience usually is an “accident” – an act of surrender and grace – and therefore the purpose of spiritual life is to become “accident prone.” That’s my heightened intention in these days leading into peak light, and I look forward to sharing the journey with you. See you at Sinai!
Happy June, Shir Ami! June brings two nearly simultaneous peaks: in Jewish time, the Shavuot celebration of receiving Torah at Sinai’s “peak” light (June 11-12); and in secular time, the sun’s Northern Hemisphere peak light that will launch summer (June 20-21).
Click here to read more about this year’s Shavuot offerings.
Click here for a Dvar Torah on how we “receive” Torah anew.
In these days leading into Shavuot and the summer solstice, I’m thinking about life’s “peak lights” – peak experiences that transform us. Psychologist Abraham Maslow (a nice Jewish boy) called them “rare, exciting, oceanic, deeply moving, exhilarating, elevating experiences that generate an advanced form of perceiving reality, and are even mystic and magical in their effect.”
Some peak experiences are planned and socially in vogue: romance, moments of commitment (say, a wedding), parental joy (holding one’s baby for the first time). Even a moment of ultimate loss (witnessing a death, burying a loved one) can outlive its time and stand out as a peak impact moment in life.
Other peak experiences are unplanned, spontaneous and surprising: they might come even despite ourselves. They're our sudden "Eureka!" moments that shift our thinking, the sunsets whose beauty takes our breath away and suddenly we're not just ourselves, the exquisite beauty of a prayer moment that changes everything.
By their nature, peak experiences bend time, memory and our very selves. They feel outside of time – whether because time stops or stretches (a moment that lasts forever), or because they pivotally shape us far beyond when they occur (a memory that feels like now). In real ways, they make us who we are.
Yet by definition, peak experiences are the opposite of routine, normal, safe, staid, familiar life. It’s a paradox: how can we be both our ordinary selves and our extraordinary peak moments that lift us beyond ourselves? Why do ordinary life and peak moments wrestle for dominance and even push each other away?
In a sense, it’s the paradox of spirituality itself. In Biblical language, we humans are ordinary creatures but just a bit less than divinity itself (Psalms 8:6), in the divine image (Genesis 1:26). Yet we humans also tend to deny, resist or rationalize peak experiences away precisely because they lift us away from our routine selves. Alternatively, some so gravitate to peak experiences that “normal” life becomes all but impossible.
This push-pull of the ordinary and extraordinary is the tidal ebb and flow of our own lives, and the ebb and flow of Jewish spiritual life. We honor both by making times for each. Much as sun and moon have peaks of light and dark, proximity and distance, so do Jewish and spiritual life. In a synagogue service, the Amidah is a peak. In the Jewish year, Shavuot is a peak.
Peaks are intended to change us – but only if we truly let ourselves be changed. (How many does it take to change a light bulb? One, but the light bulb needs to want to change.) Of the Amidah, it is said אל תעש תפילתך קבע / “Do not make your prayer fixed” (Pirkei Avot 2:13), an apparent paradox because the Amidah’s words are fixed – but not our prayer, not ourselves. An autopilot Amidah can’t be a peak experience: we’re not fully there. Similarly of Shavuot it is said that to receive Torah anew, we must first make ourselves hefker – ownerless, unfenced, inwardly untamed – like the wilderness of Sinai itself. Unmoored to anything, peak experience can transform.
It is said that peak experience usually is an “accident” – an act of surrender and grace – and therefore the purpose of spiritual life is to become “accident prone.” That’s my heightened intention in these days leading into peak light, and I look forward to sharing the journey with you. See you at Sinai!
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