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Posting #1: As Rosh HaShannah approaches, I'm struggling to break through an inner silence, a listening for guidance and sense of knowing little or nothing that will be of consequence in the face of what might be possible to hear leaning over the fence of fear that arose within since 911. People keep asking why so long between postings? Listening, sometimes with equanimity often with yearning, that is "why." We've been busy in fascinating ways. Lifted and drifted like leaves in a warm breeze of Indian Summer, various e-mails have come inviting us to visit folks or communities around the world, to hang out, to teach. So much so that we gave up our apartment facing the World Trade Center site in order to be fully free to respond and freer of the pervasiveness of the event's impact in the region. I have little residual sense of what we've taught along the way, hopefully what was needed came through for others. It is the listening that stands out and what can be heard continually feeds my spirit. For twelve days we served as rabbinic-couple in residence on the senior adult side of the lake of Emanuel Camp in the Berkshires. While leading an intergenerational bibliodrama on Sarah and Hagar with elder women (ages 75-98 or so) and young girls (ages 9-12), they became radically animated at discovering a precious level of Torah study so little taught in Hebrew schools, metaphor. This way of drinking from the deep well of text never ceases to amaze, I experienced their joy at entering the Flow. Like a nursing mother, the milk comes and it is not one's own to give. My sense is of being a vessel refilling and serving as a synapse through which the spark must travel with as much need as a sperm has to reach the egg. One vignette among many, regarding the angel that draws Hagar's attention to the nearby well. [How did Hagar forget? She's in the wilderness of Be'er Sheva, "Seven Wells," surely a local would know where some of the Seven Wells are?] "G*d is the angel, the Listener," one elder explained, to which she pours her heart out like water when the pain of being alive is too great. When her pouch is empty, the lament exhausted, she is ready to lift her head, then what friends have been yearning to offer from their wells she is able to receive to refill her pouch. Their love is part of how G*d refills her. A young girl, who never had spoken once in the two hours hesitantly reaches for the microphone. The group is so connected now that a hush falls as they wait for her. "I am Sarah," she says. "I slipped out of the camp to go to Hagar. I had no idea the huge hole that would appear in our lives when I pushed her and Ishmael out. I brought her water. We talked. She decided not to return, that her son needed not to grow up in the shadow of his brother. I had set in motion a process I was powerless to stop. Was I an angel to bring her water? No. Just a person doing teshuvah. Or, perhaps one becomes an angel through the act of teshuvah." Have you ever been white water rafting? The river guides learn to follow "the tongue of the river." Rocks may fall and alter its course, sand may move and mass and shape the flow, yet the heart of the flow continues, even when stones and breadth tickle it to trickling, the tongue of the river re -groups its momentum and goes on. Water themes permeate this year for Barry and I by choice. After senior camp we moved one hour over to Elat Chayyim to teach a week of Jewish Meditation Walks in Nature. After years of studies in the barns and yurts there, we resolved last year to create courses that would take us and our students off campus into the vast, exquisite nature of the Catskill region. This year we decided to immerse in the study and contemplative theme of "water" in Judaism. Beside streams and rivers, under waterfalls and in water holes we frolicked and studied, gazed, and wondered and glimpsed the image of "The King" in the mirror of such glory. We're invited back to lead a Jewish nature walk weekend there this November; we've named our class "As Autumn Leaves." Tears have been flowing freely, mostly in joy. My oldest son Adam started college this year, Vassar. In a new trend we're speaking every day, delightful to hear his progress in a new place. He tells me the orientation included important facts like the campus is "clothing optional" and that so long as sex is consensual, it can be held anywhere without fear of intervention. My sixteen year old Mark is learning how to rally forces against administrative tyranny in his public high school. That's my boy! And my step-children and our grandchildren through them are multiplying and thriving, thank G*d. I take a limited number of private life cycle event assignments, and one in preparation is a very deep, poetic young man whose parents are maximally involved in the process. Such a joy for me as his family to joins him around the table of study and reflection. Studying with a male orthodox rabbi, he decided to add a woman rabbi to the mix of his experience. Imagine taking the idea from a Torah portion of "nedivat lev" [generousity of heart] and transforming it into an aliyah at the Torah for those who have signed their organ donor cards or wish the spiritual support to do so. So he has chosen to do. I feel a great urgency to continue working on a B-mitzvah [r]evolution, very current studies now show a direct correlation between alienation from Judaism and HAVING a bar/bat mitzvah. My hope is to help infeminate a shift from memorization and stuffing in of knowledge, to having this b-mitzvah season be a source of enduring meaning and maturation for youth and families. Have been blessed with congregations in Philadelphia, Parsippany and Boston areas to beta test the effort. Now we're out west for a few months, our first stop was time with Barry's brother Jeff, wife Sheila and delightful extended family. They offered the height of South African hospitality and I felt my new year instantly sweetened by coming to know another facet of Barry's huge world-wide family. A very sensuous environment, California. The Huntingdon Library Gardens range some 200 acres, with more South African species than we saw in any one place in South Africa itself. The patterns in the cacti and pre-historic plantings in opulence were entrancing, the docents rich in detail we would have overlooked. Then at the Getty Museum for a second time in several years, the newly planted gardens were stunning in different, geometric, state of the art architectural ways that we hadn't caught on to before. The richly spirited P'nai Or community in Long Beach California invited us to teach a four hour workshop on Teshuvah. What an experience! My hubbatzin Barry - psychotherapist/chaplain/intellect and me - rebbe/intuitive/stickler for knowing the tradition - studied and then wrestled for months about how to create this experience for their group. Out of this, of course, came our own opportunities for teshuvah. We became clear that our beloved friend/mentor/teacher, Dr. Gene Gendlin, who created the form of listening within known as Focusing, has found the missing nugget of teshuvah, which might be termed as the skill to gently, supportively allow the soft voice of G*d to be heard out from under a plethora inner voices built up on the path of life. Hearing this voice - whether as a feeling, a symbol, a voice, etc. - and listening to it, dialoguing with it, yields a turning within which ultimately allows us to turn a new face to the world. We fou nd examples within Judaism of a similar sense and the combination with a dash of dance, a solid measure of chant, and a twist of Yiddish Teshuvah folk music, baked into what one participant sweetly termed "one hallah of an afternoon." Yesterday was a perfect day. With one of our gracious, vivacious local hosts, Steve Braveman, we wandered from picture perfect Monterey to Esalen to prepare for leading Rosh HaShannah services and retreat there. At the River Inn in the mountains of Big Sur we paused to take in a river with chairs built into it, a huge resident pet goose, and splendiferous reflections. Moving on to Esalen, we found this season to look so different than Spring - everything is in such richness of blooming and we've been given what's called The Big House, a program room overlooking the cliffs and Pacific coast. Mmmmmmmmm. To our surprise yesterday was a big day at Esalen, they completed and opened at 5 pm their new natural hot spring baths down by the ocean. A breathtaking cliff-side perch and of awesome architectural concept, these very hot tubs crafted of stone and ever-flowing spring water must be the most beautiful anywhere. We did a blessing ritual and of course invited the spirit of Fritz Perls and Timothy Leary to be in attendance! Our "vacation" in Monterey has had two focal points, precious mentoring time with Rabbi Leah Novick, and long walks in nature with Steve and Michaela. Steve is a national expert on the treatment of male sex offenders and has a second specialty in preparing people who wish to change their gender through drugs and/or surgery. We learned many mind-expanding psychotherapy concepts, tons about sex therapy also lots about some of their tikkun olam interests - homelessness and sea-otters. Did you know that sea otters make love free-floating on the water, the male bites onto the female's snout so he won't fall off. Beats being a praying mantis. The jelly fish exhibit here at the aquarium in Monterey exceeds those we've seen around the world. Even my love of science fiction hasn't wrought anything this magnificent, from the microscopic to the giant phosphorescence of their flowing glory. For me, Rosh HaShannah is about rebirthing optimism through witnessing how everything is constantly changing, evolving, innovating in order to thrive in changing circumstances. The grand vision of Yud Hey Vav Hey, the Jewish conception of G*d as "becoming what it is becoming" is what we are - beings becoming. This is an easy part of the world to fall in love with, one of the big decisions facing us in the coming year is where to live when we grow up, where to be of service and how. Daunting, exciting, confusing! A nice thing launched is a new web site family and non-profit I'm working on with a talented team of innovators and supporters, ReclaimingJudaism.org and Barry has a site coming out soon too, relating to his teachings in physician wellness, medicine and healing. His work is starting to be recognized by the AMA and medical educators I'm very proud of his principled persistence and profound concepts. Pacific Grove is the Monarch [ha melekh?] Butterfly capital of the continent. It takes four generations for them to complete a cycle of migration from Canada to South America. Each generation gives its all on its segment of the journey. Some Jewish mystics say this is not the first time the world was created and that it has gone through several cycles of creation and destruction on the way to becoming what it is. One blessing for the New Year might be for each of us trust the rightness of our place and phase in the cycle of Being. Another blessing might come from a version of a parable as is said to have been told by the Rebbe of Tzanz: "Two people are separately lost in a forest. One of them had been lost for many days and had no sense of the right way to get out. Suddenly the other person appeared traveling nearby. A great joy arose in the first person, finally, there would be someone to show the correct way out. When they came to each other, the first asked, "Traveler, tell me. What is the best way to go? I have been lost in the forest for many days." The second answered, "I cannot tell you what is the proper way. I am also lost. However, one thing I can tell you. The way I have been going you should not go. It is NOT the correct way. come let us together choose out a new way." It is said the rebbe would finish telling this story with tears in his eyes. He said: "I am not able to tell you anything except this, the way in which we have been going until now we should not follow any more. This way is an error. Let us try for ourselves a new way." Otzar HaChaim Others are writing with diverse and eloquent opinions on the times we live. Just for today the Tanzer speaks to my existential condition and perhaps yours, may we all be blessed to find a new way. We're enroute after Esalen to Napa, then Yom Kippur in Portland, Oregon, family time in Seattle and teaching for the AMA in Canada. B'ezrat haShem, perhaps another posting will be possible along the way. |
