. . . . deep down we all feel unprepared. If we look at our lives honestly, the events that really shape us, that really make us who we are, are the events we didn't prepare for, or we couldn't prepare for, like a serious illness, the loss of a loved one, the failure of a relationship, or God forbid the loss of a child. Or suddenly a child appears surprisingly, or we fall in love. These are the things that really shape our lives.

We spend most of our lives preparing like crazy--we prepare for our professional lives, we prepare for our health by doing exercise, we do self-improvement, we always anticipate tomorrow, but the mounting evidence is that what we anticipate almost never occurs tomorrow. . . . .

All of this is at the heart of the High Holiday journey, this journey of the soul that we go through every year at this time. It's built into the liturgy: the service that we do on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur is taken almost word for word from the prayer service that went along with the public fast. Public fast was something practiced during Rabbinic times, the time of the Talmud, for public emergencies, the kind of things you couldn't prepare for--drought, a ship lost at sea, a city under siege. It's a liturgy for a spiritual emergency, for an urgent desperate matter you can't prepare for. The shofar is like the ancient alarm--it was something that we blew at a really desperate, urgent time.

. . . . The inevitable result of becoming more aware is that we realize we're not really prepared for our lives. The things that are significant in our lives are not the things we spend all of our energy defending against and trying to manipulate. That's only half of the journey. The other half is that once we realize that our preparations and our attempts to manipulate life don't work, we also realize we can let them go, that we don't need them. That is a great relief and a great healing.

This journey starts at Tisha B'Av, the day we remember the destruction of the Temple. It's a logical start on the journey to reconciliation, toward wholeness. Tisha B'Av is the day that we acknowledge our estrangement--from God, from each other, from ourselves. That's how you being a journey of reconciliation--by acknowledging your estrangement. It's exactly seven weeks before Rosh Hashanah. Seven weeks in our tradition is always the time it takes to prepare for a significant spiritual event--like the time between Pesach and Shavuot. Here we are at Tisha B'Av, sitting on the floor mourning this broken house (the Temple was called the

Months later, at the end of the journey, we're sitting in another broken house, the sukkah. Only now, we're rejoicing. We're singing and dancing. At first we saw the fact that the house was broken was a great catastrophe. And now we see we don't need it. We can sit outside with the stars in our hair and the wind in our face, and we're perfectly fine. And that's the real journey. It has two major parts--the first coming to the realization that we are completely unprepared, that we are in a state of urgent and desperate emergency. And then second realizing that it's alright.

UPDATE: Marjorie Ingall - the punk Erma Bombeck - gets to the same place through the uncertain and impermanent experience of parenting, and shares some drashes that have inspired her:

Jonah builds the sukkah after delivering God’s fire-and-brimstone warning to the people of Nineveh, who promptly repent and earn God’s forgiveness — which annoys the crap out of Jonah, who thinks he now looks like a moron. So he goes to the edge of the city and builds a booth to sulk in. Rabbi Matthew Berkowitz wrote a drash a few years ago about it, in which he noted: “Although a sukkah is typically associated with peace, shelter and God’s beneficence, Jonah turns the true image of the sukkah on its head…. Dissatisfied and even angry with the mercy God has shown to the Ninevites, Jonah waits patiently in an attempt to prove he is right — that his pessimism will prevail and God will destroy the Ninevites. Jonah’s behavior is unbefitting an Israelite prophet. One who should be rejoicing in God’s mercy becomes embittered.” Ugh. Don’t be that guy.

We read this story on Yom Kippur, and we’re encouraged to build a sukkah right after Yom Kippur, right after hearing about this leader exhibiting total sullen-teen behavior. The takeaway: “The sukkah that we build is one that negates Jonah’s pessimism in human nature,” Berkowitz writes. “It is a sukkah that stands for peace, faith, shelter and ultimately in the eternal Jewish optimism of human behavior.” Our liturgy shares this image, with the phrase in the Sabbath-evening service: “Praised are You, Lord, who spreads a shelter (sukkah) of peace over us.” Our sukkah should reflect the one provided by the ultimate Parent. It should be, as Berkowitz puts it, “an expression of hope in our future.”

. . . . Rabbi Irwin Kula writes beautifully about letting go of our control-freak tendencies and knee-jerk judgmentalness. He calls the midbar, the Hebrew name for the wilderness our people wandered and built sukkot in, an “in-between space, a wild unpredictable place where we can encounter parts of us that we don’t yet know or haven’t allowed to emerge.” Midbar, he writes, is our inner landscape. Roaming around in there, examining our true feelings and defenses, is an opportunity for growth. And I’d argue that being a good parent means accepting the necessity of entering that sometimes-scary place. Kula points out that the word midbar literally means “word place.” And the words we use, the stories we tell — about ourselves as a people, why we choose to squat in a temporary booth, why our children aren’t perfect and why we aren’t perfect — can be scary and compelling and beautiful.