Blog: The Embodied Soul

November 11th, 2019

11/11/2019

I had the joy and privilege of taking a short retreat at the Vedanta Retreat in Olema last week, about an hour and a half from my home in the East Bay. Each time I visit the women's retreat house, I'm overcome by gratitude for the deep silence, broken only by the wind, the rustling of leaves, and the bellowing of cattle in the nearby pasturelands. Deer grazed just beyond my window, oblivious to my presence behind glass. The unseasonably beautiful, warm, dry weather warmed my bones. And I could feel in my bones how thirsty the land is. Grasses dried brown, trees still leafed out but definitely showing signs of dehydration. My body resonates with the body of Earth, how she is changing, how dampened is the once-rich buzz of insects and bird chatter. Yes, it's autumn, heading toward winter, and yet.... This poem surfaced yesterday.

Gravity

…the force of
attraction, the irresistible
magnetism that, in
our cosmos brings
things together. Some
call it by
the name of
love, the hidden
and mysterious pull
that draws two
bodies toward one
another, holds one
in another’s orbit,
so that together,
they may circle
some larger star.
This being so,
then it’s love
that binds us,
molds us, shapes
our dreams—love
against which we
chafe and struggle,
love to which
we submit, love
that sustains, fulfills,
and sometimes empties
us. When, at
the end of the film
Gravity, the woman
astronaut who has
been stranded alone
in space, having
made it back
into Earth’s atmosphere,
splash landed in
the ocean, drags
herself onto a
beach, hugging the
wet sand as
if it were
her dearest, only
child, we know
with her, for
a certainty, that
we all are
wedded to this
Earth, and we
are her children.
We aspire and
shine only in
her orbit, in
deep and abiding
connection with her,
she is the
mother, drawing us
to her wet
and shining breast,
and she is
our spaceship, lonely
and untethered in
the black infinity
of an eternal
night, our only
lifeline, our only
hope, our cherished
garden, our only
and so temporary
home.

© Diane Elliot 2019

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The Great Pleading

10/21/2019

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[On Sunday, October 20, the last day of Sukkot, I participated in a beautiful and poignant Hoshana Rabba ritual with the Wilderness Torah community. "Hoshana Rabba" means "the great pleading," or more colloquially, "the big ask." A group of about 50 folks of all ages, from babes-in-arms to white-haired elders, gathered mid-afternoon in a sun-dappled meadow in Tilden Park, flanked by great eucalyptus trees, around an altar covered with colorful fabric, green branches, flowers, and vessels filled with water, to offer fervent prayers for rain and for the Earth. What follows is the kavannah, the intention, that I offered, at the beginning of the ritual.]

In the Talmud it is taught: “Rabbi Assi pointed out a contradiction [between verses]. One verse says: ‘And the earth brought forth grass,’ referring to the third day [of Creation], whereas another verse, when speaking of the sixth day [of Creation] says: ‘No shrub of the field was yet in the earth.’ This teaches us that the plants commenced to grow but stopped just as they were about to break through the soil, until Adam came and prayed for rain for them; and when rain fell they sprouted forth. This teaches you that the Holy One, blessed be the Name, longs for the prayers of the righteous.” *
(Talmud Chulin 60B)

All through the days of Sukkot, in the chanting of Hallel, we weave our words of praise and gratitude together with our pleas—please, please!--Hosha-na! Save us! Save our fields and trees, earth and sky, our animals and crops—please, please!

And now, at this moment of Hoshana Raba--the Great Hoshana, the Last-Chance Hoshana, it’s time to up the ante, to focus our bodies, minds, and hearts like lasers and to open the floodgates of our souls as never before, to pray with our arms and legs, bellies and throats, to let our tears of gratitude and longing, bitterness and regret, shame and longing, water the Earth that we have failed to protect.

And what are we praying for?
We’re praying for everything and everyone we know and love!
For “the Aura of life”** and “the Illumination of Light,”
for “the Majesty of Sky” and the “Variety of the plants,”
for “the Infinity of Space,” for the fish, birds, insects--
for all life on this planet and for the Earth itself!
We pray for Earth’s beauty and aliveness!
We pray that we not go extinct!
We pray to stem the tide of eco-breakdown!
We pray for the wisdom to cleanse our air, cool our waters.
We are praying for “Bears and Babies, Fawns and Families,”
for all “Instinctual and Intelligent Life.”
Hosha-na, PLEASE, we are pleading
Because we don’t know what to do!
Help us see!
Help us know!
Help us act,
so that our children
and our children’s children
have a chance at life and breath,
joy and creativity and holy service
on this, our “rising, exuberant”*** Earth.

* translation by Rabbi Yoel Glick
** All the quotes are from original Hoshanot, prayers of pleading, written in 1998 by Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi for a “subversive prayer action” organized by The Shalom Center and Elat Chayyim,
on the banks of the polluted Hudson River.
** Lewis Thomas

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Let us sleep hand in hand

1/26/2019

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I had the honor this past December of being part of the stewardship team for the second Taproot Gathering at Commonweal in Bolinas, California. Now in its second year, Taproot is a coming together of artists, activists, and changemakers who wish to enter into deeper connection with Jewish tradition and practice and with one another. In the mornings I and my rabbinic colleagues offered a variety of approaches to Torah text, including close reading and conversation, movement, and engagement with nature. In the afternoons, Taproot participants were invited to lead impromptu sessions in which they could share their interests and concerns with one another. I was fortunate to be able to spend some time in a writing khevruta, responding to poetic prompts chosen by my partner. This poem is one result of that dedicated, creative time.

“Let us sleep hand in hand…”

…the way I sometimes
reach out for your hand
in the middle of the night
or very early in the morning
not wanting to wake you,
to disturb the fragile
hard-won sleep of
your fractured nights,
yet knowing that
we are deeply
and inexorably held,
and so, in the most
essential space
everything is whole
no brokenness, no unmet
longing
and so, I reach for your
hand, and it is always
smooth and dry,
warm to the touch,
soothing to the buzz in
my 4 a.m. brain and
you, in your sleep,
clasp it and draw it
close to you and
we are touching in
the night, one asleep
one wakeful, and
this is poetry, this is
the poem, already
written, carved in
the lines of your palm,
calligraphed by a hand more ancient
and vast than any
one might imagine--
and yet also right here,
and right here, the
poetry of the rightness
of our curled togetherness
and our longing
and our astonished
delight at having
found one another
at such a late hour
in such an early
morning, in the dark,
the unquiet yet nevertheless
dark. Oh oh oh
so we are the poem
and we are the work
of God and God is our
work, our play,
our bread and
our soup, our
simplicity and
our confusion, our fear and our love.
And we move on
together, sailing
in our dreams for awhile
until you turn over
in a semi-conscious
harrumph, like a lion
or a bear
stirring in its winter cave--
or until the long
sciatic ache spindles
down my leg and
causes me to shift
and turn and
rearrange—and
then we lie, back to back
the unfinished poem
lying between us
like a cranky baby,
hungry, whimpering,
waiting until waking
fully happens and we
become lost in our day.

© Rabbi Diane Elliot 2019

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Days of Turning, Days of Awe

9/3/2018

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The Days of Awe are fast approaching. On Saturday night, you may have attended a S’likhot service, a late-night ritual introducing the prayers and melodies of the High Holy Days. Hearing the strains of the familiar niggunim—Hashiveynu, the Thirteen Attributes of Lovingkindness—the heart softens and settles, preparing for the spiritual work of clearing the dead wood from our lives, making amends, asking for and offering forgiveness, and opening up internal space to receive the vital energies of this new year.

Mystics taught that, with the advent of Rosh Hashanah, the energies of the old year whoosh upward and out through the tops of our heads, leaving our bodies feeling empty and vulnerable. When the shofar sounds on Rosh Hashanah day, the new year's energies begin to flow in through that same opening and down into our bodies. This process takes time—ten days, to be exact!—during which we remain in a vulnerable state, as shaky on our spiritual feet as a newborn calf. On Yom Kippur, the day of At-one-ment, if we’ve done the spiritual work of the season, we are able to rejoice in the purification of our beings and a sense of renewed connection with Life. And the inflow will continue through Sukkot and, some say, all the way until Hanukah!

In preparation for the days ahead, I invite you to consider the impetus for your own teshuvah—literally, your “turning” or “ returning”—this year. Is there something or someone valuable that you've left behind or forgotten? What or whom are you returning to?

Rabbi Naomi Levy, in her inspiring book Einstein and the Rabbi, Searching for the Soul, writes about the yearnings and questions that people often bring to her: What should I do with my life? Is this the right person for me? How do I find my true calling? She sees these as “soul questions.”

“We have a gnawing sense,” she writes, “that the life we are living is not the life we are meant to be living…. We experience these longings because at some point we became separated from our own souls, from a voice within that is here to guide us to the very purpose of our existence…. We fall into predictable patterns, we get through our days without reaching and stretching and listening. And then you wake up one day and you realize you have drifted far afield from your own essence. You lost yourself while trying to please others. Your work no longer resonates with you. Your relationships feel superficial. With all your obligations and pressures you’ve stopped doing the things you love. We wander in exile hoping for a way to return to our essence.”

Perhaps you resonate with some of what Rabbi Levy is speaking about. Perhaps you have some longing, some vague inner tugging, that alerts you to a space, a gap that’s opened up between your soul essence and the daily unfolding of your life. Or perhaps you recognizes subtle spaces, ruptures in relationships, that you would love to heal, or to simply release. These spaces, these gaps, these vague yearnings that draw your attention, may be points of initiation for your own teshuvah work this year.

During these next two weeks, you might want to spend some time feeling into these spaces, touching them gently, with compassion and curiosity, so that when you join in community for the chanting of Kol Nidre on the eve of Yom Kippur, in whatever sacred space you gather, you’ll be able to give voice to the nature of the longing that draws you forward this year, a sense of what you hope to release (forgive!), along with a vision of what might be birthing or strengthening for you in the months ahead.

A poem to inspire your practice:

Teach Me to Forgive

Adon Ha-S’likhot
Master of Pardonings,
teach me to forgive--
to forgive myself,
to forgive You,
to forgive those who have hurt me
in the name of ignorance, mindlessness,
certainty, rigidity,
even righteousness and justice,
even love;
to forgive the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
to forgive nature, human and otherwise,
personal and impersonal,
majestic and petty;
to forgive death,
to forgive You,
to forgive myself--
to forgive it all,
so that I may open to life,
living-and-dying as it is,
flowing through me
carrying it all along,
a great river of living-and-dying,
a mighty stream of birthing-and-dying,
a towering wave of living-and-dying.
Holy Merciful one
Ba’al Ha-Rakhamim,
teach me to forgive.
–R. Diane Elliot, 2015 / 5776

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Parshat Naso, some Torah for this week

5/24/2018

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This Torah commentary was written for the weekly Torah blog of the Academy of Jewish Religion, California, the Los Angeles seminary that ordained me in 2006. Let me know your thoughts

Parshat Naso
Torah Reading for Week of May 20-26, 2018

"Lessons of the Midbar"

We Jews have often been called “people of the book,” but perhaps a better appellation would be “people of words.” A people forged in the wilderness, the midbar—a Hebrew word whose root, l’daber, means “to speak,”—a people defined by Aseret ha-Dibrot, The Ten Speakings of an invisible and awesome Divine mouth, our Torah unfolds as a saga of the spoken word: “va-yidaber YHVH el moshe leymor…,” “and the Infinite spoke to/through Moses, saying…,” “va-yidaber moshe el b’nai yisrael…,” “and Moses spoke to the children of Israel….”

In my rare and precious times in desert wilderness—in Ein Gedi near the Dead Sea, in the high desert of New Mexico, in the Anza-Borrego desert east of San Diego, in the Panamint Valley just outside of Death Valley—what’s been palpable and deeply healing for me has been the silence. A rich, thick silence that lies upon the land like a cloak, in which any minute sound seems to echo for miles; a silence shattered at times by the wailing of wind and storm, inchoate, like wild beasts rampaging through the valleys and dry river beds.

So how, in our tradition, does midbar, this wild place of palpable silence and nature’s unpredictable blasts, become transmuted into m’daber, a mishkan built from the sayings, speakings, pronouncements of Divine Presence, channeled through the throat of Moses? And how, over the course of the Israelites’ wilderness sojourn, does this pristine space fill to overflowing with so many words of confusion, doubt, complaint, conflict, pleading, punishment, forgiveness, and threat of further punishment?

In her recent book, Moses, A Human Life, the great contemporary darshan, Dr. Avivah Zornberg, presents the voice of Moses—that great transmitter of God’s words, whose own speech was deficient, impaired in some way—as a harking back to “tehom,” “the murmuring deep,” the rumbling, inchoate flood of sound that precedes Creation, a buzzing, vibrating ocean of sound that contains all possible human vocalizations. Inarticulate, at times requiring translation by his brother Aaron, the voice of Moses, holds the full, raw range of pre-verbal feeling. And it is precisely this voice, the voice beneath words, beyond even silence, that God needs to convey Godself to this ragtag bunch of erstwhile slaves, these descendants of Jacob the trickster, of Yisrael, the angel-wrestler.

For, in the human mouth, well-formed words are often not trustworthy. Some blockage, some distortion often intervenes between the true intent and its expression, between the raw emotion, the deep intuition, and its verbal shaping. We see this in the current travesty of our public discourse. Misunderstanding blossoms, explodes into anger and hurt, and freezes into intransigent opposition.

This week’s parshah, Naso, which unfolds fairly close to the beginning of what, yet unbeknownst to them, will become the Israelites’ forty-year sojourn bamidbar, in the wilderness, includes the extremely troubling description of a “trial by water” imposed upon a wife suspected by her husband of infidelity, the sotah. The scenario described here is clearly one of broken communication, something sensed but not spoken, for, without concrete evidence, the jealousy of the husband is aroused against his mate: “…a man could have lain with her carnally, but it was hidden from the eyes of her husband, and she became secluded and could have been defiled, but there was no witness against her, and she had not been forced, and a spirit of jealousy had passed over him…” (Numbers 5:13-14, my italics).

The unlucky woman is to be brought to the Tabernacle and made to stand, her head uncovered, before the High Priest and before God. A “meal offering of jealousies” (minkhat k’na’ot) is brought by her husband, and she is made to drink from a vessel of holy water, mixed with earth from the floor of the Tabernacle and seasoned with curses, inscribed on a scroll and then scraped into the water. If, upon drinking the cursed water, her “belly distends and thigh collapses,” she is proven guilty and cursed; if not she is exonerated.

Of course, being forced to submit to this low-tech lie detector test would’ve been extremely humiliating for any woman. And though the “bitter waters” contained only a little earth and ink, the destructive power of her husband’s mistrust, or of her own guilt, if she had, in fact, slept with another, intensified by the pressure of this very public shaming, might well have caused the woman so accused to physically collapse, to become, in Torah’s words, “a curse amid her people.”

As disturbing as this description of the sotah is, can we not in some way see foreshadowed here, in microcosm, the distortions, the hiddennesses, the half-truths, untruths, and unkept promises—the repeated failures of words—that will plague the Israelite people throughout their desert sojourn, evinced both in the evolving relationship between HaShem, the Divine husband, and Israel, his reluctant, often terrified bride, and also in the people’s relationships with Moses, their leader, and with one another?

Perhaps the truth of any relationship rests not in the multitudes of words that will inevitably be shared, but in the attentive stratum of silence underlying those words, and in the tehom—the murmuring, groaning, cooing, crying, burbling resonance of shared souls—beneath the silence. Perhaps the word “midbar” points us not to a place of everyday speech, but to all that underlies and surrounds our speaking—to the great, cosmic hum that births Creation and to the matrix of silence out of which words arise. As Avivah Zornberg so eloquently puts it, “In our deepest aloneness, we listen for the elemental in each other’s voice—which, strangely, is also the particular sound of the other. He is unknown to me, it is her unknownness that I draw on, to help me be at home in the alien elements of my own world.” (Moses, A Human Life; p. 55)

As rabbis, cantors, chaplains, spiritual directors, and spiritual friends to one another, we are charged with the challenging task of conveying wisdom, comfort, remembrance, and sometimes challenge and rebuke through the tricky medium of words. How essential then that we steep ourselves in the matrix of silence and the unformed sounds of the human heart that prefigure language—that we privilege listening and the expectant space between breaths, not jumping reflexively to speech, which can so polarize, so alienate. Truth, ever elusive in our speaking, sometimes shines through most radiantly in our silences, in the simple loving act of our listening.
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Final Omer Days

5/18/2018

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As the sun sets, this Friday evening, we move into the final day of this year's Omer counting practice. Here in the Bay Area, these seven weeks have taken us from the first buddings of early spring into full-blown fecundity--blossoming fruit trees, rose bushes burgeoning, lush green hills beginning to brown. We Jews are approaching the mountain. Clustered at its foot, we gaze upward toward the revelatory heights, shrouded in smoke, cloud, mist. Like the ancient mountain, these times are raw, jagged, heart-rending, and perilous. So much is now torn. I pray that we will opened, not be torn apart, by the Word.

A new poem for this day that is passing....

Day 48, Yesod sheh’b’malkhut

Is it the
foundation of the
world that's crumbling
or merely a
façade, being chipped
away like the
once-vividly painted
Buddhist temples, sand
blasted by time
into softened shapes
of grey moss-covered
stone, overgrown with
vines and brush?
Is there a
Foundation that never
crumbles? some summer
raft bobbing far
out in the
frigid water, a
float toward which
I can swim,
braving the battering
waves, grabbing onto
its flimsy rusted
ladder, hauling myself
up onto it
gasping, to sit
and warm my
gooseflesh in the
sun, postponing that
inevitable moment when
I’ll have to
dive back in
and stroke my
way to shore?
Or is it
sun or wind
or whoever I
think I can
count on but
can’t really? Perhaps
some space between,
gravity, deep listening,
surrender, relief, joy--
the Unmoored Mooring
that with us
counts our days?

5-18-18

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Seder Plate

4/2/2018

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This season dedicated to freedom in the Jewish calendar is washing over me this year like a great, toppling wave. What is freedom, and how is it cultivated, sustained? In the ancient story, the people groan in bondage, but are too caught up in suffering to respond to freedom's call, to touch the open spaces in themselves, however minute or hidden, that can never be completely bound.

This freedom story seems to me among our core narratives as human beings. How do boundaries and flow, fences and open fields, consonants and vowels, synergize to produce meaning and the possibility of agency? How does the way we hold ourselves within connect with the ways we are held, with the ways our ancestors have been held, and with how we and our children hold and flow into the future?

Preparing for the seder, the ritual meal that marks the beginning of our yearly Jewish freedom journey, a poem emerged. It was 4 AM Monday morning, the Monday after the great day of marches, in which young people's voices surged forth from their hearts like a mighty stream, declaring their commitment to sanity, to securing a future of freedom to live and work and grow, for themselves and for future generations. The objects on the seder plate, symbolic of burgeoning life and the possibility of freedom to know, to love, to serve, began to speak to me in new and surprising voices.

May your Passover observances open a new road, a clear path, an open space that holds in each day, through each breath, the possibility of healing, of rebirth, and of joy.

Seder Plate….

Pesach’s blue plate
special, a strange
and yet familiar
gathering of ingredients,
recipe for remembrance,
symbols of celebration,
subject of cerebration,
centerpiece of our
meal of liberation….

Haroset (apples, dates, spices, and wine)
Our taste buds
are confused. Spiced
and wine-soaked,
the sweet fruit,
riches of the
earthly garden
with which we
have been entrusted,
chopped and crushed,
cements the bricks
of our forgetfulness.
Betraying nature, we
betray our own
true natures—build
Pharaoh’s palaces and
storehouses, prisons for
Earth’s bounty, monuments
to greed, mortared with
forgetfulness and ignorance.
How did we
agreed to this
betrayal? How are
we complicit in
this intolerable injustice?

Karpas, Hazeret (sweet and bitter greens)
Spring greens tantalize
with new life
yet taste bitter
when we have
forgotten how to
love, how to
nourish, how to
protect the birth
and growth given
us to nurture.
Then newness, joy
and bitterness, mingle
in one mouthful,
blessed and rueful,
chewed and seasoned
with remorseful tears.

Maror (bitter herbs)
Fiery root sears
the knowing of
how far we
have strayed from
Truth into our
very breath, like
a dry khamsin,
hot desert wind
filling nostrils, throats
with dust and
despair. How
many years, how
many incarnations before
we recognize the
thrall that binds
us all, master
and slave, in
the tight fist
of bondage? How
many millennia before
we will perceive
why we came
and what it
means to serve?

Zeroa (roasted lamb shank)
It begins in
the bones, a
glimmer of freedom,
a deep groan--
where have we
been? In what
dark cave immured?
Only when the
darkest of darks
descends do we
begin to know
our own souls’
blindness. Only then,
forced at last
to kill and
burn and gnaw
to the bone
the false gods
we have worshipped
do we begin
to taste the
savor of truth,
lost long ago--
if ever known.
Only when we
have eaten the
flesh of the
outstretched forearm, God’s
shank, does the
journey home begin.

Betzah (roasted egg)
Egg, round, white,
like the pregnant
moon of spring,
swelling full before
our delighted eyes,
pointing us toward
the possible, the
dreamed-for, prayed-
for newness, always
present, just behind
the veil, just
beneath the shell.
Is it greed
or fear or
soul’s deep grief
that compels us
to roast this
seed, to cook
the unborn, before
its growth and
birthing can occur?

Orange
Another round of
possibility, this time
not gestation, but
the fruit, juicy,
sweet and tart,
inviting all: Let
all who are
hungry come and
eat! All who
seek life’s fullness,
all who long
for the circle’s
wholeness! Together let’s
circumambulate the periphery
of this pregnant
space, upwelling with
the holiness of
“between,” Oneness arising
from the midst
of our colorful
assemblage, ever expanding
to include another
and another. We
celebrate this seventh
ingredient in our
seder soup—the
flavor that at
last completes Creation.

–Diane Elliot, Passover 5778/2018

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Creating Sanctuary, An Embodied 'Drash

3/16/2018

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I spent this past Shabbat at a sisterhood retreat with the women of Temple Beth El of Aptos, California. We met at beautiful Mt. Madonna Center, a lofty retreat on a mountaintop high above Monterey Bay that Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, may his memory be a blessing, used to call "Mount Shekhinah." Throughout the weekend, interludes of brilliant, warming sunlight alternated with rain and fog, giving rise to mystical ananei ha-kavod, clouds of glory, flaming pink sunsets, and even a waterfall of rainbow in the eastern sky just before Shabbat's end. My dear friend, Senior Rabbi Paula Marcus, had invited me to be a guest presenter at this, the congregation's first ever women's retreat, and specifically to bring an element of movement and creative engagement with prayer and text study to the women of her community. The Torah 'drash and kavannot below introduced our three readings from the double Torah portion of Vayak'hel/Pekudei in the Book of Exodus verses 35:1 - 40:38 on Shabbat morning.

We have arrived at this central moment in our Shabbat morning service, this moment where, week after week, we undress and address the teachings of our sacred Torah scroll, our ancient lineage. To undress is to reveal; to address is to confront, to come into relationship with, and ultimately, to re-clothe in a new way. The great and amazing thing about our tradition is that our sages always knew and modeled for us that the true Torah is not only the words scribed on a scroll or printed on a page, but the ever-emergent conversation between us and those words and all the spaces in between!

This is the process we call midrash--seeking, understanding, imagining. When I can realize that all that the Torah contains—the good, the bad, and the ugly—is also present within me—at least the potential for it—then grappling with these stories, engaging with them, draws me into a deeper, richer, and more honest appreciation of my own gifts and potentials and failings. Each time we encounter Torah in community, a healing can occur, a redress, as we support one another to realize that the wisdom the words draws forth already lives in us; it is not something we have to learn, but something that can be awakened, remembered, called forth from deep within our psyches and our body memories, and ultimately healed. We can dream it together, in just the ways that are needed for this moment, and for each of us.

So where are we in our Torah story today, this Shabbat? With the double portion of Vayak’hel/Pekudei we arrive at the end of the book of Exodus. From where the people began, many weeks ago—go with me there, now—crushed in body and spirit by enslavement in Egypt, cut off from one another and their own deepest selves, groaning in pain and so “kotzer ruakh, so short of breath and spirit, that they are unable for a long time to receive the Divine message of redemption flowing through Moses, we arrive now at this auspicious moment—picture it: liberated into the fearful wildness, the midbar, they are set to embark on a great building project designed to forge them into a community. They are invited to bring all that they have and all that they are to the creation of a Mishkan, a Tabernacle which will be a kind of portable Mt. Sinai, with its own fire, smoke, and cloud–a sacred dwelling space that is meant to draw the Divine Presence into the midst of their community, and deep into their hearts, to accompany them in all their travels.

I invite you to awaken the memory of this momentous passage in our own body-mind-heart….to stand and take some space, or sit, to breathe, perhaps to remember some time in your own life when you felt constricted, filled with the fear that congeals in us when we are subject to misused power, perhaps you felt trapped, unable to breathe. What did that feel like in your body? Move with that feeling for a moment. Find your way into a whole-body gesture that expresses that feeling of constriction, of having no space and no options.

Now gently release into a neutral place for a moment. Breathe. Remember a time when you felt empowered, when your gifts were wanted and fully received. Feel the sense of openness, of eagerness, the generous heart that awakens when your offerings, your creativity are valued, are honored. How does that feel in your body, in your mind, in your spirit? Can you move with that feeling? Can you shape your body into a gesture that expresses that openness, generosity, connectedness, creativity, enthusiasm, and love?

Now, for a moment, return to your first body gesture and practice several times the transition between that and your second gesture. Get to know the path between them. Move around the room with your gestures—when you see someone in a constricted place can you soothe them with a gesture of giving, of love? When you are in the constricted shape, can you feel and respond to the balm of others’ loving offerings around you? When you're ready, you may find your way back to your seat.

Can you feel how beneath all the drama, the trauma of the Exodus journey, there lies this essential human movement, embodied day by day, moment by moment, sometimes breath by breath in our own lives, from constriction to expansion to constriction again, from connection to dejection to reconnection, from absence to presence, and then emptiness again—back and forth and back and forth? What provides some constancy, some ground for you, in the midst of all this movement?

Asu li mikdash v’shakhanti b’tokham, the Divine has spoken through Moses, so many chapters ago: “Build me a holy Sanctuary and I will dwell among them, with them, within them.” Constancy. Presence. In today’s parashah, we are seeing the fruits of that Divine imperative, given so many chapters ago, the minute details of its dimensions and materials and furnishings and the priestly garb reiterated four times in the Book of Exodus alone, occupying 13 of its 40 chapters. We have come to the moment to gather our resources, to contribute the materiel for this holy building project.

Sanctuary. In Torah this structure to be erected at the center of the Israelite encampment is referred to first as “mikdash,” “holy space,” later as “ohel moed,” “tent of meeting,” and finally as “mishkan,” often translated as tabernacle, but literally meaning, “dwelling place.” A dwelling place for Shekhinah, Divine Presence on earth, a place of safety and of celebration, of guidance, of healing, a gathering place for people, a resting place for the Divine in this world. How different is this Sanctuary from the sanctuaries we seek to create, to be, today—a space, a town, a country in which the contributions, the creative energies and enthusiasm of each inhabitant are valued and sought after to build a communal structure, a community with love, compassion, awareness, Presence at the center, like a polestar, a guiding light, ever visible? In our reading today of the building of the Mishkan, a dwelling space for Divine energies in this earthly realm, we along with the ancient Israelites, are called to re-member our worth and the worth of every person in our midst, to repurpose the hidden riches of our lives, so that we may become part of a sh’khunah, a true neighborhood (same Hebrew root), in which every soul is a valued co-creator of a holy, God-filled community that honors the resources, the creativity, and the wise heart of each of its individual members. The Mishkan project is so central in Torah because it comes to heal a broken people, to remind these newly freed slaves, and each one of us, of the need for Sanctuary at the heart of our camps, at the heart of our lives.

First Aliyah: Exodus 35:4-10
Our first Aliyah begins with Moses conveying to the people God’s spiritual imperative to bring trumah for the building of the Mishkan:
קְחוּ מֵאִתְּכֶם תְּרוּמָה לַיהֹוָה כֹּל נְדִיב לִבּוֹ – “Take from your self a portion and raise it up for YHVH, every one whose heart is inspired to give.” In other words, God says, “Go back to your tent, and dig up those stashes of gold, silver, copper that you just happened to bring out of Egypt, that yarn you’ve been meaning to knit into something cozy but never seem to get to, that old piece of fabric, that dolphin skin jacket you haven’t worn for years, that old jewelry, those mirrors and bring ‘em on down!” So the invitation for this aliyah is to recognize that what you’ve got hidden away in your closet is valuable. Not only the material items in your physical closets and garages, those things you’ve been meaning to take to Good Will (especially if they no longer make your heart sing) but the riches of your life experience, the painful passages you’ve endured, the illnesses, the heartache, the tears, your personal brushes with oppression and silencing and rejection. This is the moment to bring it forward, this portion from your self, to lift it up, and to know that what you might seem like the throwaways of your life are precious: they are gold, silver, copper, and jewels. Every hidden talent is wanted and life experience is needed for creation of the Sanctuary, a space that raises up and makes holy the whole community. Ta’amdu, ta’amdu, ta’amdu…. all who wish to make an offering of your deepest selves to build the holy communal space of our world.

Second Aliyah: Exodus 35:25-29
This next section of our text reinforces what was so strikingly evident in the last aliyah–that everyone in the community who is “wise of heart,” whose heart leaps forward, is to be enlisted in this grand building project—every woman and every man. Unlike many other parts of the Torah, where only the men are counted, the Mishkan project engages both women and men, the masculine and the feminine energies together to fulfill the Divine imperative to create vibrant and beautiful sacred space. No one rejected, everyone’s skill and inspiration included, regardless of gender, class, skin color—truly, the prototypical Revolutionary Love movement.
This aliyah will be to honor the women’s special offerings to the Mishkan, and in particular the women’s offering of their spinning. We read:
וְכָל־הַנָּשִׁים אֲשֶׁר נָשָׂא לִבָּן אֹתָנָה בְּחָכְמָה טָווּ אֶת־הָעִזִּים, “every woman whose hearts inspired them with wisdom spun the wool.” These are the threads which will be woven into fabric to create the “skin” of the Mishkan, its coverings, and the elaborate garments of the high priest. You may know that the drop spindle is one of the human oldest tools, appearing somewhere the mists of pre-history, more than 7,000 years ago. With it, women spun fibers of cotton, flax, goat and sheep hairs into tough, resilient threads. Spinning was a ubiquitous activity in ancient cultures, time-consuming labor needed to produce the yarn to weave the fabrics for clothing and shelter. Everywhere women went and whatever else they were doing—walking, nursing a baby, gathering herbs, preparing food—they carried their spindles, looking like large wooden dreidls, to work bundles of raw flax and wool into yarn—perhaps the first instance of women’s multi-tasking! The Israelite women, the midrash teaches, were so eager to create the threads for fabrics of the Mishkan, that they didn’t even wait for the goats and sheep to be sheared, but miraculously spun the hairs into yarn while they were still on the animals!

This aliyah honors the countless generations of women—our mothers, and grandmothers, our great and great-great grandmothers—who spent their lives immersed in the constant, nearly invisible work, the melakhah, of spinning, sewing, weaving, knitting, embroidering, crocheting, quilting—not only yarns and fabrics, but families, communities, and cultures. We honor all the ways that we women gather and comb and smooth the raw materials of our own lives, and those of families, our friends, our students, and clients, patiently twisting and strengthening and integrating to create the strong, vibrant and beautiful fabrics that we call “home,” “workplace,” “dwelling space,” “mishkan.” Ta’amdu, ta’amdu, ta’amdu, all who honor and all who are the spinners and weavers of lives….

Third Aliyah: Exodus 40:33-38
Our final aliyah takes us to the very end of the book of Exodus, the culminating moment, when Moses has actually erected the Mishkan, according to Divine specifications, and with the contributions of all the people, and the anan, the cloud that has been guiding the people ever since they left Egypt, descends on the ohel moed, the outer part of the structure and “ כְב֣וֹד יְהֹוָ֔ה מָלֵ֖א אֶת־הַמִּשְׁכָּן ” “the Presence of Beingness (Was-Is-Will-be) fills the Mishkan, the inner precincts, the Holy of Holies. The movement of this Presence will later come to be known as Shekhinah, that aspect of Divinity that accompanies us on all our journeys, that is present in all of Creation, that is, as some mystics teach us, the material world itself. The text tells us, “When the cloud would rise up from upon the Tabernacle, then the Children of Israel would embark on all their journeyings. But if the cloud did not rise up, then they would not embark, until the day it rose up.” This aliyah is for those who wish to invite a more profound level of Divine guidance into our lives, to know in our very bones, that we are not moving alone, that the love we have poured into creating and sustaining the structures, the mishkanim of our lives, is the Divine made manifest, and that we can trust its guidance to come through our intuitions and our dreams and our everyday moments, if we will but turn our eyes and our wise hearts in its direction. Ta’amdu, ta’amdu, ta’amdu, all who seek to open to receiving Spirit’s Presence in all our journeyings….

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Foundation

10/17/2017

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Last week, as we approached the end of the Jewish holiday season, many of us here in the Bay Area, already overcome with grief at the most recent in the series of devastating disasters rolling across our land--hurricanes flattening Texas, Florida, the Gulf Coast, Puerto Rico and other Caribbean Islands, the mass shooting in Reno, the daily round of bad news--suddenly found ourselves faced with our own local crisis. Massive wild fires in the North Bay (Napa, Sonma, Mendocino Counties) had claimed scores of lives, destroyed thousands of homes and businesses, decimated vineyards and wild forest lands. In the Bay Area proper we found ourselves choking on smoke, peering at the eerie red disk of the sun through veils of wind-born pollution, our eyes stinging. "Shelter in place, keep doors and windows closed, wear N95 masks if you must go out, no strenuous exercise, outdoors or in!" Banished from our sukkot days early, hearts broken, how would be celebrate the grand finale of this two-and-a-half-month cycle of reflection and renewal that we call our High Holy Days? Should we cancel Simkhat Torah? If we weren't supposed to go outside or do any strenuous activity, how would we dance jubilantly with the Torah?

When my husband and I got to shul (Kehilla Community Synagogue in Piedmont) a few people had gathered for the maariv service. Some toddlers crawled and ran around the big open space, their tot service and puppet show having been canceled. But gradually, the room began to fill up. The band, a mixture of professional klezmer musicians and community folks who'd dusted off flutes and saxophones they hadn't played in years, filed in playing a familiar tune, spirits began to rise, and soon we were whirling and singing, holding hands and running in wild kinetic circles, our joyous, sweaty dancing (with all the doors and windows shut tight, the sanctuary became a sauna!) literally flying in the face of disaster and despair.

Of course we would dance with the Torahs! We would dance for our lives and for the lives of those who couldn't dance and for the lives and livelihoods lost! By the time we got to the sixth hakafa (cycle of dancing), the one in honor of Yesod, the Divine Emanation known as Foundation, the energy was bouncing off the walls and high-beamed ceiling, seeping through the floor, radiating out the sealed doors and windows. This was no solid, stolid foundation, nothing of brick or cement--this Foundation was of breath and movement and energy and the will to survive and thrive, a foundation of compassion and passion--what will need to carry us forward in the challenging days of recovery that face us all. The high Holy Days are not over--we must continue the word of reflection, renewal, repair, forgiveness and love!

I delivered the rap-style Yesod introduction I had written in all its juicy and erotic soul-fullness. Sometimes, when it seems that so much is lost, all we can do, all we must do, is dance!

Yesod Hakafa Kavannah 5778

Yesod, Yesod,
Yesod rhymes with Hod!
It’s surrender in action!
receiving the flow--
O extreme benefaction!--
of all the s’firot above--
the sublime intersection
of Wisdom and Love
pouring into Foundation!
Joins right leg and left
in ecstatic relation,
throwing off fear
and undue self-protection,
you stomp and you squat
in wild jubilation,
shaking off badness
renewing Creation--
igniting the Torah
of longed-for salvation.
And… Yesod can be quiet,
a glowing power Source,
a magical chalice
containing the Force
of Divine emanation,
a light in the belly,
a ray of intention
a blending of flavors
so pungent, so juicy
a seeding, a needing,
that births every future.
So come on, take a chance,
never mind perspication!
Whether wild or whispered,
get ready to dance
with Yesodic elation!

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Through the Branches

6/16/2017

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Last week, I had the blessing of co-leading a retreat on embodying the five levels of soul, as part of a wonderful adventure in embodied kabbalah called "Embodying the Great Mystery," a program conceived and created by my dancing spirit sister, Simona Aronow. "How," one of the retreatants asked, at the beginning of our week together, "are we going to embody these levels of the soul, if the soul is essentially non-material to begin with and we're moving toward more and more dissolved layers in our awareness?"

Good question, I thought. The realms it opened led us to bracing dives into the very nature of body itself, bouncing us from energetic muscularity to blissful floating among layers of consciousness expressed through solidity, fluidity, vapor, and light. Much like the photo above, taken at Point Lobos on the Monterey Peninsula, we practiced perceiving layer upon layer, "running and returning" between states of solidity and dissolution, aerating our physicality as we played in the "white spaces" of beingness.

The poem below, written as the finale in a series of 49 poems, each inspired by the dual qualities of one day of the Omer count, speaks to the mystery of Malkhut sheh'b'Malkhut, Presence within Materiality, Materiality within Presence. As Rabbi Yoel Glick writes, "The Kabbalah is not a logical system that can be mastered by the reasoning mind. It is a body of wisdom that teaches deep truths that are embedded in the fabric of creation." A body of wisdom. A wisdom of body.

This very moment
two thousand miles away
a friend receives
a stem cell transplant
seeding fresh, new blood
and hope for years more
music-making,
simple meals enjoyed
with wife and kids
and friends,
laughter, tears
more stories
stretching down the years

a miracle
so extraordinarily
ordinary--
no more or less
than the parting of
a sea, or a
mountain blazing
fire,
or a Word, unspoken,
being heard--
that these tiny sacs
of protein and water,
the body’s own,
injected into hollow
spaces at one’s core
could yet become
both throne
and crown
of living!

Thank Goodness
Thanks, Presence,
streaming down the ages
revealing living Torah
through each stick
each leaf
each stone
through the marrow
of each bone!

Malkhut sheh’b’malkhut
Sovereignty/presence within sovereignty/presence

---Diane Elliot, 2017

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Rabbi Diane Elliot resides in the hills of El Sobrante, California, an East Bay suburb of San Francisco whose name means "leftovers," but might also be translated "more than enough" or "abundance." She enjoys the peace of its softly contoured hills, the sunlight filtered through the small grove of redwoods on the hillside next to her home, and the dazzling, ever-changing beauty of the sky.

November 11th, 2019

The Great Pleading

Let us sleep hand in hand

Days of Turning, Days of Awe

Parshat Naso, some Torah for this week

Final Omer Days

Seder Plate

Creating Sanctuary, An Embodied 'Drash

Foundation

Through the Branches

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