Alan's Musings

As we approach the a marker in the endless circle of life, of seasons, of the year, I reflect on the past to inform my thoughts of the future. We spend so much time analyzing our failures so we don’t repeat them. It’s equally important to understand our successes so we can repeat them, apply the techniques again.

It was late in the summer fifteen yeas ago. Three of us, Elaine, Marty, and I, were in the final stages of getting ready to lead High Holy Days services—our congregation’s first such communal observance, though we were a few years old. We had assembled our machzor, drawing from several sources (carefully securing permission to include the excerpts when they were copyrighted, writing some original liturgy, engaging a significant part of the community in the effort). Elaine served as editor of the machzor; I chaired the committee charged with planning and executing and realizing our goals, our vision of more than just our own High Holy Days service, but making those the kind of services we wanted, including everything for liturgy and ritual to venue, from finding people who would lead services to people who could deliver a great collection of drashes, while also realizing our value that they be freely open to the community at large.

I had been asked to lead Erev Rosh haShanah services, on a Friday evening, the very first part of the High Holy Days collection of services. As I prepared for this, learning new liturgy and new melody, I recognized that I also wanted to prepare emotionally. Thanks to some good teachers regarding such things—in particular, Lanny Bassham, an Olympic champion—I knew that if I wasn’t ready, if I didn’t review and prepare in every way possible, there was a high chance that I would not provide the kind of experience for our congregation that I wanted to provide. I wanted people to feel comfortable, to be confident in me as I led services, so they could focus on their own experience and their own spirituality, rather than wondering when the poor fools up there on the bimah would make yet another jarring mistake.

Besides being technically prepared, I also had the feeling that the situation could prove overwhelming. In sports, it’s called “match pressure,” and I knew what it was like both to handle it well and to handle it poorly, to succumb to it and to master, from my own experience, from that of my teammates, and from other competitors and teachers, such as Lanny.

I had been taught that the best way to handle match pressure was to experience it, to become accustomed to it, and to learn how to harness it. (Harness, not eliminate: match pressure can lead to additional adrenaline in the blood, which will enhance perception and kinesthetic awareness, among other things, allowing a trained competitor to perform better. Unharnessed, though, match pressure leads to nervousness, distraction, and loss of concentration and focus.) I decided to harness a tool Lanny, and others, had taught me, a tool that allowed one to experience something without actually doing it: visualization.

Odd though it seemed to me at first, I learned that vivid visualization, done well, causes the body—muscles, nerves, brain, etc.—to respond in ways similar to living the actual event. As I thought about this when I first was exposed to the concepts, a dozen and a half years before the High Holy Days preparation, I realized that it was just like dreaming. Sure, I had awakened from nightmares as a youngster covered in sweat, heart beating jackhammer-fast. A dream is just an example of vivid imagination, one so vivid that the mind cannot differentiate it from reality. It made sense that we could learn to harness this, especially as I heard elite athletes’ experiences with the techniques.

Why do we train? To improve performance: performance in the match, performance in the game, performance during the real event such as an emergency or a space flight. The goal? Make the actual event “just like drill,” or, perhaps, even better.

I decided to visualize myself leading services.

The challenge became visualizing what would really happen: leading from the bimah instead of in the round, with a congregation of 350 instead of 50, with new melodies instead of ones that were years familiar, with new liturgy instead of that which I had prayed many, many times. I had to become technically competent before I could visualize effectively. I had to learn the melodies and understand the liturgy so that I could begin to experience things accurately in my head. It turned out that these were the easy things, and the simple things. The difficult bit? Putting myself in a frame of mind as close to what I would experience that Friday evening as possible, experiencing the emotions as fully as I could.

Why the emphasis on the emotions? I knew how powerful an experience this could be. I knew how important it was to us as a community, and to me personally. I knew how much I had invested in this, how much work we had all put in. I knew that the first experience people had, that first night, could well affect whether people returned.

I knew I wanted to succeed.

I knew what my own definition of success was.

It was, indeed, not easy, nor simple. I took as many little bits of time as I could, even a few minutes, to go through what I would do in each part of the service, and then to experience it as vividly as I could while relaxing on the couch or laying in bed or sitting out in the sun. I made the time to run through the entire service, repeatedly.

I was, yes, a little nervous during the final few minutes of preparation that Friday evening. Once we started, though, the nervousness vanished. From what people told me afterwards, services went very well. From my perspective, I remember two things.

First, I really did feel like I had been at services, that I’d had a spiritual and fulfilling Erev Rosh haShanah experience, not simply that I had performed on stage. That was very much part of the goal, to be so comfortable with the technical things, with the performance aspect, that I could be fully there. I didn’t want to feel like I had to concentrate on the content or the liturgy or the songs, but that I could concentrate on the people there and connect with them, that I could concentrate on leading services and helping people have the experience they wanted.

Second, and the most vivid memory, was when I was asked how I thought it went. My answer: “Exactly as I expected.” I had, after all, done it dozens of times already in my imagination.

As I remember this, I think about harnessing that power. I think about the things I want to do, to happen, to experience, to accomplish. I think about applying these techniques to other things, to attaining other goals. I think about sharing these techniques with others. I also reflect on having good teachers, and I am grateful.

Here’s to a good new year: !לשנה טובה