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This week’s state-wide stay-at-home order in the face of the spread of Covid-19 (novel corona virus) prescribes a self-imposed isolation of individuals and families. The dangers of isolation and loneliness, compounded, I am reminded of the themes raised at the onset of this [Jewish] year: loneliness, solitude, and togetherness.

What follows are excerpts from the sermon I shared at CBE on Rosh Hashanah evening, six months ago, on September 29. 2019. My hope is that they invite us to reframe this challenge as an opportunity – using this time to cultivate even deeper and more powerful connections to come.

Rabbi Jamie Arnold

Learning to Be Alone Together

Shanah Tovah. This past year, people have been speaking out, uniting behind causes and candidates all around the world. I have a cause too. It’s loneliness. I’m for it!

 Here’s why. It’s not going away. Intoxicated by the beauty on a mountaintop or incarcerated in a locked cell, astounded with good fortune in a job you love, or blindsided and bewildered because you lost your job or your love, at a holiday meal surrounded by family, in a sanctuary crowded with people, alone on a bus or train or in a shelter – loneliness goes everywhere we go, like a shadow. Apparently, it has been around since the beginning of time and ever since, ironically, a constant companion, when we lie down and when we rise up – no matter how many friends or likes or shares on your social media site.

Which begs the question: If loneliness is nothing new, why, in a world equipped with the technology to offer unprecedented opportunities for social connection, are we witnessing an epidemic of isolation and alienation, of depression and suicide? My wife Marti calls it the Great Depression of the 21st century. Raise your hand if your family has NOT been directly impacted recently by depression or suicide. In Colorado teen suicide is up 58%. Almost double the national average which is already alarming and tragic. Make no mistake …we’ve entered a great depression.

So here’s a new deal to run by you. Loneliness. It is both the problem and the solution. I know what you’re thinking. A few months on sabbatical and the rabbi has lost his mind. Maybe. Hear me out. I’ve been setting aside some sabbatical time with myself, my family, and a makeshift study group made up of a Ruth and Three Davids. Studying David’s psalms, reading books by David Brooks, and David Whyte, and J Ruth Gendler. These four folks are about as different as four people can be. Still, they seem to agree on one thing -- the need for solitude. In world dominated by extroverts, we have forgotten how and why to be alone. We have inadvertently unfriended and lost touch with the subtle sounds and truths of silence that can only be heard when we are courageous enough to be alone.

Parker Palmer taught: “If you can’t get out of it, get into it!”

David Whyte agrees. “Loneliness … when fully lived can undergo its own reversal, becoming its consummation, the far horizon that answers back.” He continues, “In the grand scale of things, loneliness is a privilege. Human beings may have the ability to feel aloneness as no other creature can; with a power magnified by intelligence and imagination.” These sentiments, the value of solitude and the uniqueness of humankind, are echoed and amplified by Torah. And I suspect that our avoidance of silence and solitude is a significant factor contributing to our most worrisome national and global woes. And I am not sure our reading of the Torah has served us well either of these fronts. The scientific narratives may also need some reframing.

Let’s begin with science.

From Galileo, Copernicus, and Darwin, we hear the same underlying, and challenging message. The earth not the center of the universe, not unique. And earthlings, we humans, also not so unique as we thought, as we hoped. We are not the only species who use fire, or language, or tools, who have sex for non-procreative purposes. We are not the only ones who build caring communities, nor are we the only species on earth to that conduct strategic and violent wars. We humans do not hold a monopoly on love or hate, intelligence or language. And, it turns out we really, really want to feel special, different, unique, holy.

Which creates quite a conundrum for us, especially for ego. My ego-based identity defines and sustains its ‘sense of self,’ its existence, on the qualities that make ME unique. That’s what ego does, constructs power and meaning through difference and distinction – status, chosen-ness, uniqueness. To the ME-mask of ego, the scientific narratives that challenge our sense of uniqueness present an existential threat. So the science is ignored or, worse.

Thankfully I am more than my ego. As are you! There is a deeper substratum to human consciousness. For lack of a better name, we’ll call it soul, neshamah, or heart-and-soul, if you prefer. While the ego constructs identity and meaning through difference, soul draws its meaning and power, not through difference but through shared purpose. As David Brooks puts it, “beneath the masks of status and identity is soul, the “capacity to care for another.”

The discovery of soul requires an inward journey, it requires solitude, silence, aloneness. So why then is it written, “it’s not good to be alone?”

It’s true, in the second chapter of Genesis, the first hiccup in the beautiful, orderly ‘good’ and ‘very good’ workings of Creation is loneliness. God herself observes, “lo tov heyot adam levado, it’s not good for Adam, the earthling, to be alone.” God seems to think that this solitary earthling needs an ezer knegdo, a helper opposite him, a polar pair, so to speak. (Polar pairs, an endangered species. Just doing my part.)

Here’s the thing. I’m not sure the solution to the first ‘not good’ worked out so good. Matchmaking is not an easy thing. Just watch the Israeli TV show, Shtisel. Finding a match is no picnic. More like a zoo. God began by bringing each type of animals to adam. Adam gives them all names, like pets. Pets, yes, but a partner, no. So Adam undergoes the first general anesthesia, there’s a sort of c-section things, and poof – Eve arrives (from Maryland!) to run the show, and its happily ever after, right? Well, other than the whole, forbidden fruit, curses, banishment from paradise, fratricide, great floods wiping out most of the planet, yea it worked out great. Don’t get me wrong, our Eve is great, really great! And she, and I, are here to remind you, remind us, that it’s a group effort, braving the loneliness and discover the neshamah within us all.

So here’s the thing. Either, God got it wrong, or we misread the verse.

“Lo tov heyot adam levado. Is it good or not for the human to be alone?” A little comma changes everything. Let’s try it this way! “No,” says God, “It IS good for humans to have some alone time, to learn how and why to be alone. For me to encounter myself in the mirror. I AM. And ‘I am’ an ezer k’negdo.” In which case, the key to an ideal polar pairing is to create partnerships that enable one another to be alone, to be vulnerable, naked, and, lo yitboshashu, not ashamed. In his poem, On Marriage, Khalil Gibran writes,

…Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be ALONE.

Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music,

…and stand together but not too near together:

For the pillars of the Temple stand apart,

And the oak and the cypress grow not in each others’ shadow.

And, the first human, made in the image and likeness of God, is male and female, solitary and whole. I AM, and I am my own ezer knegdo. My image in the mirror is the image of God. The one sitting beside you, that lonely shadow of yours, the loneliness you feel wherever you go, she is your messiah, the one to lead us all out of exile, back to the garden of Eden.

So how do we access her, befriend her. David Whyte again.

“…The first step in spending time alone is to admit how afraid of it we are.

And for good reason. “The first portal of aloneness is often experienced as alienation, grief, and abandonment.“ No one wants to enter that portal. Indeed, the ego will fight tooth and nail to keep us out, the flaming sword at the garden gate.

That, I think, is why we’re here tonight. To practice being alone together, to come together to encourage one another to go there, brave those lonely waters, to confront our existential fears – for 10 days (or more). These Days of Awe, ten days of teshuvah, are the portals, going back through the doors of alienation, grief and abandonment to the very origins of life, to where we all began. On this yom hazikaron, we remember our that we are single, solitary beings. “a singularity that can kiss, create a conversation, make a vow or forge a shared life…” I, You, like all life on earth – began as single-celled organism. Before the first mitosis, the splitting of self into self-and-other. In the origin of species, in the beginning, there is singularity, a single, solitary, potent point that contains everything. One cell, One human. And before that. A God that knows loneliness.

Did you feel that? Can you feel that sense of wonder, of awe, revealed in the unmasking that gets to an essential self, a soul? “Aloneness” Whyte writes, “begins in puzzlement at our own reflection…and culminates…in a beautiful unlooked for surprise, … now exposed to air and light. …the radical step is to let ourselves alone.”

That sense of radical amazement in the face of existence, that’s what we’ve forgotten, to feel, to teach, and to guide us. The science can remind us. The Torah, the shofar, the candles, they can remind us. And most of all, we can remind one another, as polar pairs, when we gather (virtually), to practice and celebrate being alone together.

Alone – not with a book or a movie but with the silence, with our loneliness, with I AM, to discover therein a depth beneath me and myself, to discover a deep wellspring that is not just connected, bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh, but by its very nature is connection. And through that sense of connection re-discover our shared purposes – l’avdah ul’shomrah, to serve and to steward, to grow our “capacity to care for another.”

Again David Whyte.

“Loneliness is the substrate and foundation of belonging, the gravitational field that draws us home …the hand reaching out for togetherness. …The doorway is closer than we think. I am alone; therefore I belong.”

Im ain ani li. If Me and my self don’t befriend I AM, who else will?

Shanah tovah

ALONE

To be alone for any length of time is to shed an outer skin.

OTHER QUOTES FROM DAVID WHYTE:

…Alone we live in our bodies as a question rather than a statement.

The permeability of being alone asks us to re-imagine ourselves, …to tire of the same old story and then slowly hour by hour, to start to tell the story in a different way as other parallel ears, ones we were previously unaware of, begin to listen to us more carefully in the silence. For a solitary life to flourish, even if it is only for a few precious hours, aloneness asks us to make a friend of silence, and just as importantly, to find our very own way into our own particular and even virtuoso was of being alone.

…let ourselves alone, to live something that feels like choice again, to find ourselves alone as a looked for achievement, not a state to which we have been condemned.”

LONELINESS

Loneliness is …the body constellation, attempting to become proximate with other bodies, through physical touch, through conversation…the place from which we pay real attention to voices other than our own; being alone allows us to find the healing power in the other. …human beings are made to belong. Loneliness is a single malt taste of the very essentiality that makes conscious belonging possible.

FROM: Orchot Tzaddiqim, Pathways of Moral Leadership (Gate of Truth)

“One can only experience divine truth through solitude. As such, all who strive to embody loving-kindness should set aside time and space for seclusion and solitude, and only congregate with friends when necessary.”