As the High Holidays approach, I find myself contemplating the tension between the principle and practice of tshuba.
Judaism places return, reckoning, repair and transformation at the heart of this season. These are among the principles I find most compelling in Judaism.
But what happens when your heart yearns to actually practice them—and the people with whom you most want to do that work are uninterested, unwilling, or simply unable to enter the fire with you?
What happens when tshuba requires relationship, but only one person keeps showing up?
I have circled around it, hoping, praying people will wake up, lay down their armor, walk through the searing, scorching fire of what happened, and do the work of repair.
And as the years have passed, I have found myself confronting another question: At what point does continuing to hope for repair become its own form of captivity?
That is where Bottles Everywhere begins.
The poem moves from the yearning for repair into something larger: an understanding of why people numb themselves when reality becomes too painful and too tangled to resolve. Why there are bottles everywhere. Why hazy avoidance, intoxication and distraction can become so seductive when staying fully conscious means facing what cannot—or will not—be repaired.
And then another possibility emerges—not resolution, not reconciliation, not even hope.
Presence.
Perhaps there are moments when the work is simply to remain awake in the unbearable distance between what is possible and what is real—to feel the grief without anesthetizing it, and refuse to abandon consciousness.
Perhaps, for now, that too is a form of tshuba.
Bottles Everywhere — the full poem + photos of the original handwritten journal entry + spoken-word video can be found inside KHAZZOOM Studio at KHAZZOOMstudio.com.