In just a few days, we’ll be back to saying tachanun. 

I hear myself groan. 

What is it about tachanun that we all try to get out of saying it?

We drag in new grooms so we can get out of it.*

We hope there’s a bris in shul so we can skip it.* 

Why? 

What’s going on here? 

What can we do with our avoidance?

Tachanun for sure deserves a bit of respect. 

The Rambam (Hilchot Tefilla 5:11-13) tells us that following the recitation of the Amida, we are to kneel and then prostrate on the ground as we offer personal prayers to God. 

The Tur (Orach Chaim 131) fills in some of the ‘why’ to this: by standing, bowing, kneeling, and falling to the ground we mimic all of the poses used by Moses in his dialogue with God. 

Of course, nowadays we do none of this.

Due to secondary concerns, nowadays we ‘make do’ with leaning on our left arm. 

These personal prayers have evolved into the standardized text which varies from community to community. 

So sure, tachanun deserves some respect. 

But why is it so hard for us?

Obviously, a lot has to do with the fact that most of us are very much in a ‘just let’s get it over with’ mindset. 

We have jobs to get to, errands to run, and a to-do list up the wazoo. 

All good. 

Our default position then is that anything that shaves off a minute here is welcome. 

So bring in the groom and have the bris. 

But to me, it’s not just about the extra minute of saying tachanun that weighs on us. 

Maybe it’s those heavy declarations which weigh heavily. 

I’m nusach Ashkenaz and my tachanun begins with ‘And David said to Gad; I am suffering greatly’.

My nusach Sefard friends start their tachanun with, ‘please Hashem, I have sinned’.

Neither nusach brings a positive, feel-good vibe. 

Who wants to get wrapped up in such negativity?

So off we go. 

Totally understandable. 

Personally though I cannot make peace with that attitude. 

If I’m going to have something as sacred as tachanun in my siddur then I expect myself to not just say it but to say it with the respect it deserves. 

This is how I lean into tachanun:

Yes; tachanun is hard. 

It really is a speed bump on the way to the rest of the day. 

But I need a speed bump. 

Maybe in my running off to some errand or ‘whatever’ important task I’ve got going on, I’m gonna forget something vital to my success. 

Tachanun reminds me that I can succeed and enjoy my life by letting Hashem be the Boss. 

Yes; I am suffering. 

Yes; I am full of doubts. 

Yes; I am full of misconceptions and hopes and dreams and in all honesty I have no real idea if what I want and what I think is worth my energies. 

When I fall to the ground-well, now I just fall on my arm-I‘m surrendering to Hashem and His wisdom. 

In the humility of kneeling before Him, He becomes not just my Boss but my collaborator and guide. 

And that’s when the magic begins. 

Let’s start with the unadulterated truth: I’m a big fat liar

And at this rate, I’ll probably go to my grave a liar. 

But the good news is that I’m a little less of a liar today than I was yesterday. 

From the looks of it, I’m on the other side of the flu that’s been going around. I’m no longer feeling wasted and feverish. My energy is returning. I’m no longer yearning to go back to my default setting: napping on the living room couch. 

Which brings me to reflecting on the oddest dimension of being sick for two weeks: I got really depressed. 

As in: I got suicidal and dark. 

Just to be sure, it’s not like my baseline state is happy-go-lucky; I battle the noon-day demons of dysphoria and depression on a near constant basis. 

But suicidality? 

Not that level of darkness!

I mean what was up with that?

Now I’m sure there’s a whole body of literature on the affect of the flu on mood. I’m sure that some of the over the counter meds that I took may have played some role in screwing with my mood and and my mind. Who knows? Maybe I was a bit dehydrated and had a bit of a fever induced delirium. 

All of that may be true but I prefer to consider a different possibility: I was in a state of spiritual listlessness and that freaked me out. 

You see, I’m a student of Victor Frankl, the psychoanalyst and holocaust survivor who wrote, Man’s Search For Meaning. For me, Frankl’s most important thesis is that Man is in a constant state of searching for the purpose of his existence. Once that purpose is found, Man will invest his or her energies into the service of that purpose. He or she will go through thick and thin in their devotion to it. 

As per the book, I designed and engineered a life around the purpose that I determined was worth the investment of my life’s energies: living in accord to my understanding of what is asked of me as a Jew: to go to shul, to pray, to work, to study Torah, to be a kind and devoted husband and father. 

My brief foray into the land of seasonal flu destroyed a lot of that. There was no way that I was going to shul. Prayer was absentminded mumblings which I hoped to get over with before exhaustion dragged me back under. Study? Who are we kidding? 

Of course I don’t feel guilty about any of that. I’m mostly ‘done’ with the sado-masochistic god of my youth.  My Higher Power is fun and compassionate. He engages with me and I know Him well enough to know that the flu is a good enough reason to let a few missed trips to synagogue and missed days of Talmud study slide. 

This depression, this darkness, this collapse, though, felt much more like something in me. So I sat with it and this is what I came up with: 

in my pursuit for meaning I had lost the value of meaninglessness. 

Let me put it this way: my investment in meaningful life has been in some small measure a way of beating back the lurking shadow of ‘what’s the point?’ Yes; the life I’ve chosen makes sense to me in a logical kind of way. But it also is a kind of distraction from some of the never to be resolved existential questions such as what is the purpose of life, what is death, and when will I die. Like the rest of us religious folk, I’m so busy going to shul and doing mitzvahs I don’t have time to think about the dark side of the story. 

So all this doing and chasing has created a chasm of dread and alienation between me and purposelessness, especially the kind of purposelessness that comes with the flu. There’s nothing like feeling like ess-aych (it’s a thing; I just don’t like writing the word, ‘shit’) to flood me with all of insecurities both both big and small. 

Now my spiritual faith teaches me two things: the first ‘thing’ is that holiness and wholeness are the same thing. If I want to feel holy, which I definitely do, then I must be willing to embrace the whole of me. And that includes the dark, insecure parts of myself. That includes the parts of myself and of existence that frighten me, to brings me to my knees, that wreck me. The blessing of my trip down the flu was to meet that part of myself that in all of my hyperness of mitzvas I was running from. 

The second ‘thing’ that my spiritual faith taught me is that my ego was hiding in all of that religious fervor. 

Let me put it this way: my mother obm had a Toyota Prius Hybrid. For the uninitiated, the car could run off a regular gas engine or off a battery. Now imagine two kinds of energy sources as metaphor for the hybrid human self. Instead of engines though we have a soul and we have an ego. We can be driven by our ego or led by our soul. 

Without going into the whole story of ego and soul, the central idea is that while the soul is seeking the sublime beyond, the ego is seeking to fit into the crowd, to get a leg up, and most importantly, to not die. The soul, as long as it can plumb the endless possibilities of the here and now, is always ready to have a good time. Or to chill. The ego needs an audience and measurable objectives to make it feel at home. 

Now I can be a sweet, devoted fellow and you would almost never know whether the inner propulsion system was my ego or my soul. From your human perspective, Josh goes to shul, Josh studies the Talmud, Josh gives charity and you have no idea what his motivation is. In fact, I’m Josh and I didn’t even know what the source of my motivation was! 

The only way then for me to know my motivation was to deny me the ability to ‘perform’ my religious devotions in the public arena, to put me in a place where no one could see me. Not only could no one clap for me but I couldn’t even clap for myself. 

So in the flu, God, revealed me to me. He showed me that what I thought was pure was anything but pure. He showed me that my devotion was as ego-driven as if I was running for President of the United States. And the good news, heck!, the great news, is that I can still make a course correction. 

And now I’m a little less of a liar. 

And that made the flu totally worth it.

You’ve probably noticed that I have a distinctive way of saying Yehay Shemay Rabba. 

Some people have told me that I yell it. 

Others have told me that it’s bothersome to them. 

So the question is why do I say it the way that I do. 

What do I hope to accomplish by saying it as I do? 

Is it worth bothering people?

The story goes back to an early experience that I had with someone (he’ll remain nameless here) widely considered to be a paragon of devotion, simplicity, and sincerity. 

He was a teacher at the yeshiva high school I attended in my junior year of high school. 

Despite the dismal experience that I had there, he, this teacher, remains to this day one of the bright spots. 

And he yelled yehay shemay. 

He YELLED it! 

The words erupted out of him. 

I wasn’t so much impressed as I was stunned. 

Stunned out of my shyness.

Stunned out of my numbness. 

Here was a man, a fearless courageous man, willing to debase whatever social capital he had, to praise God. 

He set the bar for me. `

In my journey for authenticity his yehay shemay remains a reference point to aspire to. 

So in salute and solidarity I do the same. 

To this very day. 

While that’s the majority of the story, there’s more to it. 

I’m not going to spill all of my secrets here but let me touch on a couple that are relevant to this question. 

The first is that I’m wired to handle the muddied conflicts of life poorly. 

I supose that there are those who are not bothered by the injustice and suffering of the World. 

I suppose that there are those who have made an internal arrangement that allows them to keep the sadness and confusion at arm’s length. 

I just cannot. 

I go about my very middle class life, earning my keep, thank God, raising my family, living within the lines of normative society as though everything is fine. 

But it’s all an act. 

It’s all a costume. 

Inside? 

Inside I’m going crazy. 

Inside I’m boiling over with longing and agony. 

To paraphrase Cat Stevens, I just can’t keep it in. 

My outlet is yehay shemay rabba. 

That’s my release valve. 

That’s my space where I can reveal myself to my self and remind my self that my heart still beats and that my blood remains red. 

That I am still part of humanity and not some numbed out drone who ‘lives’ the schizoid life of modernity. 

The second reason goes to my long term depression and anxiety. 

God has cursed me and blessed me with depression and with anxiety. 

Cursed me for the obvious reasons: it takes me three times as long to do anything that a non-depressed, non-anxious person can do in a snap. 

I have loose, wobbly, disorganized neurotransmitters and it takes me a long time to get them in order so they can do things like get out of bed in the morning, get up and go to the store, or write a blog post. 

But He’s blessed me with chronic depression and anxiety because these experiences have brought me into contact with so much of Life unnoticed by the happy and the naturally serene. 

He’s also given me a way to explore depression and anxiety in such a way that I can discover things that help others who also suffer from depression and anxiety. 

Like the blessing of pattern interrupt. 

Without going into the whole backstory, pattern interrupt is a behavioral technique to disrupt habits, patterns of behavior, and moods. 

Instead of trying to hit a grand slam homerun to rid myself of depression and anxiety ONCE AND FOR ALL, I’ve developed a whole list of interruptions that compel me to be my best, my most joyous, my most un-weighted down self FOR ONE MOMENT. 

Yehay Shemay at full tilt is one of those pattern interrupts. 

Whether you call it singing or yelling or screeching or saying it loudly with verve and joy, yehay shemay is a moment when I am out of depression and anxiety. 

It’s a moment of blessed release from the heaviness of mood and doom. 

Before I get to the problem of other people and bothering other people, there is one other ‘part’ of the backstory: 

Jewish History, especially the Shoa and terrorism..

There is not much that I can do to right the wrongs of those who have been murdered. 

I am not Superman or God. 

I am not a solider or an analyst who can locate a monster planning an abomination on my beloved People. 

What I can do is to hold these hold Jews in my consciousness and in my heart. 

What I do is to give them voice and represent them in the way that I live. 

Yehay shemay is not so much a battle cry but the last word in the dialogue between Jew and monster. 

And who doesn’t want the last word?

The monster may touch the body of the Jew but the Spirit, that growing, gathering, eternal Dynamo of the Jew, only gets stronger. 

And it finds expression through my voice. 

Now about those other people:

First of all, I’m not stupid and I’m not cruel. 

If I’m a shul or place (like a shiva minyan) where the decorum and vibe is somber then I keep my voice in check. 

(But then I try to make a point of davening in places more hospitable to my deranged, chassidic, fiery way of prayer.)

But if it’s a shul where I’m comfortable enough to be myself then I let it roar. 

Shuls are not supposed to be libraries. 

Or funeral parlors. 

They are spaces for spiritual renewal. 

They are like gyms. 

If you go to a gym, you expect to sweat, to get sore, to maybe even get high. 

That’s what shul is. 

At least to me. 

If you go to gym and you don’t sweat then most likely your workout wasn’t worth too much. 

(And I could ask what the point of going is; but I won’t because it’s better to go to the gym even if you don’t break a sweat and it’s better to go to shul to mumble and grumble through the words than not to)

I go to shul to get high. 

To get closer to God. 

To reach for the Heavens. 

And if people are bothered by that then I wish them well and I invite them to contact me for a professional consultation. 

Or better yet: join me!