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A few years ago, Rabbi Kahn spoke on the High Holidays about whether or not religion is a crutch. For over two months this summer, I thought about whether or not crutches had become my religion. So how did I end up in pain, in bed, and on crutches? What did I learn during the experience? And what does any of this have to do with Yom Kippur? Well, let me tell you a story.

The story actually begins long before this summer--all the way back to the fall of 1982, as I was beginning my senior year at Brown University. During the summer of '82, I had been working on a geological field team in Alaska. We were studying what forces had shaped the surface of the land, and how human activities were affecting the future of that surface and the life on it. For many weeks, I had the exhilarating experience of celebrating Shabbat as the sun sank slowly past midnight in Denali National Park, near the foot of Mt. McKinley. The occasional caribou or gyrfalcon would join me, the only Jew in the crew, during my prayers, and several times the call of birds or the song of wolves would flow into the melody of L'cha Dodi. On our days off, we'd often go climbing--up peaks, onto glaciers, into ice caves. So I came to Brown healthy, fit, and more than a little infected with a sort of wilderness machismo.

And in this too-self-satisfied state, I magnanimously agreed to run an errand for my environmental studies professor. He had gotten the library to order a book, entitled Risk and Culture, that he thought might prove of worth to a new course on risk analysis, and the library had just notified him that the book had arrived.

So I leapt over to the library to pick it up--only to be informed that it had already been checked out on professorial loan. Which meant that it had to be returned either when the professor felt like it, or retired, or died. Having lost all diplomatic pretense during my months with rock-climbers, I stormed out of the library, soared down the first set of stairs in a single bound, attempted to do so again for the second set, and crashed. After the Director of Admissions, who had been walking by with what now was a set of more than slightly bewildered prospective students, helped me to the doctors, I quickly found out the bad news: I had torn my anterior cruciate ligament, or ACL as those in the know, primarily us folks with bad knees and the huge health care industry our indiscretions support, call it. I spent much of that year on crutches or in physical therapy. But by the end of the year, I seemed completely better, with little to no pain, aside from a minor reinjury during a graduation party.

My knee remained stable until 1990, when I again suffered a mild reinjury during a party celebrating my class's ordination from rabbinical school. I failed to detect the pattern, however, so I went off blithely unafraid to a party Roya and some of her fellow Masters of Social Work were holding for their graduation this past May.

Indeed it was a wonderful party at an old farm outside of Gettysburg, complete with a hayride and Roya catching her first fish. To top it off, there was to be a barn dance with a local caller. About twenty of us were up for the square dancing, including many international students who had never witnessed such Americana before. As the evening wore on, Roya and I began remembering ancient gym class lessons, and we started to show off a bit to the crowd. On the last dance, during a particularly lively set of do-si-dos, I spun--and heard something pop.

The pain was intense--though, I must admit, it got considerably worse when the emergency room physician, Dr. Werner something or other, said, Does it hurt ven I do zis? Yes. Soon, the miracles of modern medical technology showed that I not only had retorn the ACL but had a bucket handle cartilage tear--which meant that as soon as my orthopedist was done attending a golf tournament, he had to get inside my knee and staple things back together.

The next few weeks are a bit of a blur. Roya says the pain medicine made me very agreeable. "Sure dear, anything you say." Those pills should carry a warning: "Do not undertake serious negotiations while on this." Then the physical torture--I mean therapy, began. My physical therapists were wonderful, caring folk, without whom I would not be walking right now. But they realize, accurately and unfortunately, that pain is not only good for the soul, but for the knee. I never realized how frightening the words "Let's see if we can stretch that just a bit more." could be. 15 hours a week of physical therapy can be pretty draining. Especially when I found myself amidst football players injured on a key tackle, or basketball players downed during a brilliant lay-up. "This? Oh, you know, one of those square dancing injuries."

And on top of all that, I was unable to bear weight on my right leg, so I had the choice of either using crutches or hopping to get anywhere at all. I quickly recalled the worst thing about crutches, besides the general exhaustion of that method of locomotion. The worst is simply that you can't both move and use your hands at the same time. Nix the garden plans. Cancel the 10^th wedding anniversary trip Roya and I were planning. Even cooking, one of my standard household chores, became a near impossibility. I couldn't drive, and taking the metro would wipe out all my energy for several days at a time. I felt totally dependent. I was often too tired to get out of bed, so I just lay there, depressed and wallowing in self-pity.

Luckily, I have a fairly short attention span, so I quickly became bored with self-pity. In fact, I became bored in general. "Roya, there's nothing to do." But even regression to adolescence became boring, so my thoughts began to turn elsewhere. And then something wonderful happened. Somehow, through my thick skull and thin cartilage, an insight managed to wend its way in.

Now, before I explore it, I want to make clear something about life-lessons. There are certain Pollyannas who preach that everything that happens to us is a cosmically ordained lesson, that all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds. I find it difficult to understand how any Jews could believe that after the Holocaust, but you don't even have to go that far. How could anyone need or deserve to be taught a lesson from cancer? Imagine for a moment what sort of parent would deliberately cause severe, permanent damage to their children as a lesson--and then ask yourself, do you really believe that God, whom we call Our Parent over and over again during these High Holidays, would treat us that much worse?

No, such tragedies are not deliberate visitations that we bring on ourselves. But nonetheless, petty misfortunes and great tragedies do befall us with alarming frequency.

So when they all too inevitably do, we have a choice. To simply suffer. Or, in the midst of our suffering, to ask, since this has already happened, is there any good that I can bring out of it, any silver lining I can uncover, any insight I can gain from an event that I still wish had never happened in the first place? Thus, for example, I would never say that Hurricane Georges was sent to teach anyone a lesson--but, it having come, and the hurricane cycle apparently on a multi-year upswing for a variety of reasons, perhaps we'll learn not to put houses in certain place. This round of physical rehab, I was fortunate enough to be able to make that choice, to receive that insight, an insight that can be summed up in a single word--blessing, or in Hebrew, bracha.

You see, as soon as I stopped whining, I realized how very blessed I was, even on my most exhausted, painful days. Thank God I had Roya in my life. I couldn't have gone through this alone. And even apart from Roya, which I hope I'll never be, I was most certainly not alone. Rabbi Kahn called to ask if the Temple could do anything. Since I'm the family cook, and was seriously out of commission, Roya had the good sense to ask if we could get some help with meals. We soon found out that while the Mitzvah Corps may be proud, they certainly aren't few. They kept us wonderfully fed--and that made such a difference.

Soon I began noticing more and more small blessings. Like the first time I could move the pedal all the way around on the exercise bike. Or the first time my leg could fully straighten. Or my National Religious Partnership for the Environment colleagues taking turns carrying my briefcase during visits to the Hill. Even our bunnies, Belle and Sammy Sosa, seemed to understand and to nuzzle me more. And the first time I could walk! Everywhere I turned, I was surrounded by blessings.

So I began to ask myself, what does our tradition teach us about the nature of blessings? How should we react to the blessings we receive? And how can we best continue to receive blessings?

Sefer Ha-Bahir, the book of lights, an early mystical work, dives deeply into the nature of blessings. And I don't use that metaphor casually. For the book begins by acknowledging an even older rabbinic tradition that the Torah starts with the letter Bet to signify that brachot, blessings, are woven into the very fabric of the universe. It then asks, what are these brachot like? The answer, it teaches, is that we should understand the word bracha, blessing, as breacha, a deep clear pool. It is as if we are God's daughters, and as a sign of love, God has hewed out for us a palace from amidst the rocks. Then, to make the palace more livable, more beautiful, God splits the rocks so that an unending pool of pure, cool water appears by our feet. No matter how much we draw from it, it will always be full, always more than sufficient for our needs. Sefer Ha-Bahir asserts that the fundamental quality of our universe is this state of malay, of being filled to overflowing. Whenever we are properly attuned, we can feel its waters still.

Rabbi Moshe of Cordovero, in his work the Palm Tree of Deborah, took this constant overflow of blessing a step further. He personified that attribute of God that serves as a source to blessing's flow as Keter, the Crown. Though itself replete with blessings, the Crown remains humble, for it realizes how far short it falls of God's overall munificence and majesty. And so the Crown looks downward in its humility, to us, and at the same time tries to reach upward by giving more and more blessings to us.

Our part in this cycle of blessings is to imitate this aspect of Keter. We do so first by humbly acknowledging that we receive gifts of blessing far beyond our worth, and second by trying ourselves to give blessings to others. We need to see all beings, even our enemies, as standing in that same flow of blessings, bathed from the same Source. Then we will try to help those who would do evil to turn, to experience blessing, to work with us in sharing blessings with all that remains broken in the world. God's blessed presence is like an upside-down tree, with its roots in that pool of blessing and its leaves granting cool shade to our souls.

Rabbi Moshe moves us from describing blessings to contemplating how we should react to those blessings--in humility and with generosity. Proverbs 11:25 teaches us that being blessed means being generous, being one who satisfies others. Blessings are to be shared, not stored away. Indeed, the same chapter of Deuteronomy that we just read from has verses that warn against just that, against blessing yourself in your heart--and not reaching out with blessings to others.

What's more, the more blessings are shared, the more we receive them. That's one of the profound lessons of the Mitzvah Corps--that helping others brings a double benefit--to those we help and to ourselves. Some have joined the Mitzvah Corps because they first received its help--and now receive this joy as well. Mitzvot and blessings don't obey the laws of conservation of matter and energy. Rather, the more they are given away, the more remains. This is the truth behind the Talmudic dictum -- schar mitzvah mitzvah. The reward of a mitzvah is a mitzvah. Not a quid pro quo, not you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours, but the doing itself is its own reward, for it recenters our soul in the midst of the stream of blessing. It's a stream we can all dive into, whether through the mitzvah corps, or joining with the congregation on Mitzvah Day, or in any of a countless number of tiny yet crucial mitzvot we each engage in during our day to day lives.

And countless is indeed the key here. For one of the most counterproductive pieces of advice ever given about blessings is "Count your blessings." Counting blessings gets us into a constricted, comparative, competitive mindset antithetical to blessings. How do you measure blessings, let alone perform arithmetic on them? No, just as they are to be shared rather than stored, they are to be savored, not summed. Think of food, as I always seem to during Yom Kippur. Instead of lots of the low-fat fake stuff, I'd rather have a little real chocolate--and savor it slowly.

That's how it should be with blessings. One of my NRPE colleagues, the Rev. Stan LeQuire of the Evangelical Environmental Network, taught me that Thoreau once said, "to one who has heard the wood thrush sing, the gates of heaven open." Well, one evening as the light was softening over the hills of Tennessee, as it approached the hour to say the evening Sh'ma, Stan heard one thrush start its heavenly song--then another, and another. He stopped and tried to count how many thrushes he heard singing, but he couldn't--it was beyond count. So he just sat a while and let their songs wash over him.

That's how we should react to blessings. But in the rush and hurry of our lives, it's so hard to stop and savor, so hard to keep our appreciation fresh. Rabbi Moses Ephraim of Sudylkov was once commenting on the verse in Psalms, "Cast us not into old age." He taught, nu, what's the alternative? Maybe the Psalmist is trying to say, may our taste of the world never become old. May we truly believe the blessing recited each morning, "God, You renew each day the work of Creation." The faithful one sees that every day is a new Creation, that all the worlds are new, that we ourselves have just been born. How then could we not want to sing the blessings of the Creator, sing with as much glory as the thrush?

Our faith has two traditions to help us in our task of renewed vision. The first is Shabbat. In the V'shamru we sing each Friday night, taken from Exodus 31, we read, And on the seventh day, God ceased work va-yee-na-fash, and was refreshed--or more literally re-ensouled. That is the possibility inherent in each Shabbat, that we too can cease work, can press a cosmic pause button, and have our souls refreshed, renewed. So that our eyes can once again see the newness in the world, our ears hear a new song; our bodies touch anew that constant stream of blessing.

But Shabbat gives us even more than rest. Shabbat, we are told, is a foretaste of paradise, an appetizer of perfection. And we acknowledge that in the very blessings we recite on Shabbat--for all the weekday petitions, all the prayers of asking, pleading, wanting, are gone from the Siddur. Instead, we are to imagine for a day, that we are indeed by the banks of the pool of blessing and all our needs are met. In that brief moment between moments, we truly experience malay, that sense of being filled and fulfilled, that Sefer Ha-Bahir speaks of.

Those blessings bring us to the second soul-renewing tradition--blessings themselves, the whole panoply of brachot that infuse Judaism. The Talmud lifts up the ideal that a person should recite 100 blessings a day. And there are plenty of candidates--not only the motzi before meals and the birkat hamazon after meals, but the whole series of birchot hanehenin, blessings of enjoyment, over seeing a mountain or a rainbow, smelling a flower or fragrant herb, hearing thunder, witnessing a comet, feeling an earthquake. There are even a whole series of blessings in Yiddish, tkhines, written by and for women from the 1500s to the 1800s, that celebrate baking bread, collecting tzedakkah, giving birth, taking children to school. Let me teach you just one traditional bracha that you can use today. It is a blessing over beauty, for when you see exceptional trees or animals or people. It goes: baruch atah adonai elohaynu melech haolam, she-cacha lo b'olamo. Blessed are you, Eternal God, Sovereign of the universe, that thus it is for you in your world.

This blessing reminds us that beauty not only comes from God but also is part of God's nature, another shining thread of blessing woven into life's tapestry. Like all traditional blessings, it also unifies polarities. God is both the intimate You and the transcendent Sovereign; past and present beauty come together in a timeless moment of acclamation. There are pages of such traditional blessings--and more are being added each year. As noted Jewish feminist theologian Judith Plaskow writes, creating new blessings becomes an expression of commitment to a tradition in the process of becoming, a tradition continually needing to be recreated even as it remembers the past. We partake in the ever-new flow of blessings by weaving blessings anew.

Such blessings attempt to combat the routinization of experience by reconnecting us to the divine power that surrounds us, reminding us, as Rabbi Kahn taught last night, that we know and work for God. But of course, like physical therapy, brachot only work when we put energy into them. As Rabbi Barry Holtz teaches, the motzi is only one sentence, and giving thanks before eating may be something we find not only reasonable but worthy, even spiritually uplifting--and yet how many of us actually say it before every meal? Now, I don't believe God is keeping a scorecard to see how many blessings we do recite, that there is some heavenly statistician tracking the latest Iron Man of Motzis--but discipline is needed to accomplish the central purpose of brachot, an attitude adjustment that amounts to a soul-revolution.

And just what is that attitude adjustment? Our Torah portion says it best: "I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day that I have set before you life AND death, blessing AND curse." Our world is filled with beauty--and with horror. Each new day brings both new joys and new tragedies. We should not blinker our vision and deny the reality of pain, of true evil, in our world. But we have a choice about what we will emphasize. We can focus on Sammy Sosa's falling short of McGwire's total at the end of the season, or savor the sixty-six homers he did hit. We can always imagine more, better, bigger--but we also can choose to see the blessing in what is, even as we strive to bring greater healing, richer blessings, into the world. We can, each and every day, celebrate the renewal of creation by choosing life.

And as for me, have the needs of my knee adjusted other attitudes? What choices am I making? Well, I know for sure that the next time I go to a graduation party, I'm wearing armor. There are still days that the knee is stiff or sore, still steps that feel just a bit tentative. But simply walking is still such a blessing that I could almost dance--almost. And even when my knee twinges, I usually can smile. For that brings to mind the actual etymology of the word bracha, blessing. Not from breacha, pool, but from berech, knee. From the knee that bends to acknowledge the Source of blessings. And when all of us, supple or stiff-kneed, knock kneed or without (k)need, turn to that source, when even berech-hanahar, the knee bend in the river, cannot constrict that flow of blessings, then indeed our world will be filled and fulfilled. May this New Year be the year that we all come to stand by God's pool and find the peace and wholeness of blessing. Shanah Tovah.

Daniel Swartz is the Assistant Rabbi at Temple Shalom in Chevy Chase, MD, and Executive Director of the Childrens' Enviromental Health Network (CEHN). He lives with his wife Roya in Takoma Park, MD.

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