Blog: The Embodied Soul

Standing Prayer

6/15/2020

It has been a wild two weeks of despair and hope in the world--the spiral upward of covid deaths, the murder of George Floyd in the wake of so many other murders and lynchings of black Americans, the intensity of protests and uprisings against this ongoing racial violence all over the world, the meeting of peaceful protesters with tear gas, rubber bullets, police in riot gear clubbing and arresting those marching in the streets for human rights and respect and decency. And there has been dancing, heart-wrenching expressions of pain, and singing and wailing and mourning, and then more organizing. This past Shabbat I participated in a morning service with the Aquarian Minyan, in honor of the 80th birthday of one of the Minyan's longtime leaders, Shoshana Dembitz. Invited to give a kavannah, an intention for the Amidah, the time of silent communion with the deep self and with the Divine, which precedes the reading of Torah in the traditional order of the prayer service, I offered these words...

We are about to enter the Amidah prayer, the central and deepest time of prayer, the heart of our service. “Amidah” means standing. For these moments of spiritual intimacy, we stand in body if we are able; we rise to a different level in our minds and our hearts.

About this essential moment of prayer, the Shulkhan Arukh, that great compendium of halakhahassembled by the mystic and scholar, Yosef Caro, says,
”המתפלל צריך שיכוין בלבו פירוש המלות שמוציא בשפתיו ויחשוב כאלו שכינה כנגדו"
"The one who is praying the Amidah should direct through their heart the meaning of the words that issue from their lips, and imagine that the Shekhinah is before them.”

When we rise to pray the Amidah, whether in body or in spirit, we become present to our deepest truth, to that particular aspect of truth that each of us has been given to safeguard and to bring forward into the world. As it says of Moses in the traditional Shabbat Amidah prayer,
“ישמח משה במתנת חלקו, כי עבד נאמן קראת לו” “Moses rejoiced in the gift of his portion, for You, God, called him ‘faithful servant.’ ” So are we, too, to identify and to rejoice in the particular aspect of holy service to which we are called.

And when we rise in prayer, we rise not only before God, but also filled with God. The somatic pioneer Emilie Conrad z”l, the creator of Continuum Movement, in her book Life on Land, wrote, “God lives in us as a liquid presence…. The message of God can be felt in the movement of water. The fluids in our cells are the liquid presence of our spiritual birthright…. The feeling is of a divine sensuality in which every cell is illumined, wet, in an embrace where there is no fear, no death, only the merging of an encompassing unbounded embrace in which human emotion becomes something else. God is not elsewhere but is moving through our cells and in every part of us with its pulsating message.” (Breathe & feel this)

What words does God-inside-you, the Presence that fills and enlivens every cell of you, need to say--want to say—at this moment to Atah, You, God-filling-the-world? What does Presence-in-you have to say to the Presence that overflows every rosebud, every hummingbird, every mangy coyote and sleek racehorse? What does God-in-you want to say to every koala and kangaroo killed by wildfire, and to the searing flames of the fire itself; to the rising seas and the inundated lands? What does God-in-you need to say to the people sick with virus and to the virus that is sickening them; to the man lying lifeless on the pavement and to the man whose knee is on his neck?

What truth is rising within us now? What truth can we stand within? How much truth can we stand? Maybe your Amidah this morning is an Amidah of questions only, or of stunned silence, or of tears, or of breath.

Before we, along with Moses, can beg for healing, as he will do in our Torah reading today—"El na refa na lah, God, please heal her, heal us, now!"—we must steep ourselves in the truth of this moment, our truth, God’s truth. Adonai s’fati tiftakh ufi yagid t’hilatekha, Beingness, open up my lips! Let my mouth vibrate with the fullness of Your Presence!

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A Poem for L'ag b'Omer

5/12/2020

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Dear Friends,
We've turned the corner in our Omer counting journey for 5780––away, we pray, from the sorrows and oppressions of enslavement, and toward the gift of revelation, the space of spiritual intimacy that, in our ancient Torah tradition, is known, simply, as "Sinai." Last week, as I contemplated what I might present duringe ALEPH's L'ag b'Omer women-led extravaganza, organized and stewarded last night by Rabbi Geela Rayzel Raphael and her stellar team [available for viewing here], this poem emerged. May the energies of this season conduct us toward a time of less fear and urgency, more ease and peace and just distribution of the riches of our world--a deep integration of Torah wisdom.
Khag sameyakh,
Diane

The Thirty-Third Day
[L’ag B’Omer is the thirty-third day of the Omer, the seven-week period between the holidays of Passover and Shavu’ot. In ancient times, this was a period devoted to offering the first fruits of the winter barley crop (an omer measure of grain), while the priest counted the days and offered prayers to ensure the abundance of the summer wheat crop. The Sages identified the weeks of the Omer with the journey of the Israelite people from slavery in Egypt to the foot of Mt. Sinai, where they received Divine revelation. In later times, mystics devoted themselves to spiritual refinement during the time of counting the Omer, using the qualities of the seven lower sefirot or Divine emanations of the kabbalistic Tree of Life to prepare for the receiving Torah anew each year. The Talmud teaches that the first thirty-two days of this seven-week period are a time of mourning, in remembrance of the 24,000 students of Rabbi Akiva who died then. The qualities of Divine emanation associated with the thirty-third day are hod sheh’b’hod, the humility within splendor, the splendor that unfolds only through surrender.]

They died in droves
twelve thousand pairs of them,
so they say--
died of contagious disrespect,
pernicious contention,
these zealous students,
Rabbi Akiva’s boys.
Study buddies run amok,
they sank into backbiting
mud-slinging, one upsmanship;
arguing not for the sake of heaven
but on their own behalf.
Twenty-four thousand politicians of the soul,
ruthless competitors in
the marketplace of spirit,
forgot the untold grace
of paradox, the beauty of
elu v’elu, that these and also these
are the Living words.

It brought a plague upon their heads,
or so the pundits said--
a plague that fell upon them
like poisoned rain,
killing thousands
(and whom have I lately dissed,
ignored, abandoned,
labeled “lesser than,”
in my mad rush up the mountain?),
until the thirty-third day
when the dying stopped, abruptly,
so they say,
on the same date that,
some years later,
the great bar Yokhai,
khai, khai, bar Yokhai
Rabban Shimon bar Yokhai,
Akiva’s brilliant student,
who came to him after the plague,
departed this world, prophet-like,
in a fiery chariot, luminous,
ecstatic as a bridegroom.
On this day of hod sheh’b’hod
this day of splendrous surrender,
mass dying stopped,
and the true death,
the mystical merging,
was revealed,
as it is taught:
“Your term of exile is completed,”
yomar Kadosh.

Exhale! Go get a shave!
Go home and marry
your high school sweetheart!
She who has tended your garden,
go sit in her shade
like the spreading shadow
of a lush fig tree,
and count your blessings.

And what do we know
of those sweethearts,
those women--
the mothers, sisters, solitary brides,
waiting, patiently (or not),
for these twenty-four thousand
who would never return,
sitting in courtyards
or before humble hovels,
crushing grain into flour
on their grinding stones,
baking bread in clay ovens,
spinning flax threads and wool threads
day by day, making their own
silent offerings,
doing the unsung work,
waiting eagerly (or not)
to greet their young men—
each son, each brother,
each husband--
not knowing they
have died in the wars of
othering, of besting,
of putting down--
not knowing they
did not live
to fight another day?

Hod sheh’b’hod,
surrender to the splendor!
Light a bonfire
on the hillside of your heart,
in the forest of your mind!
Burn through the fakery,
the stubbornness
that passes for
endurance, the
ephemeral victories
that call themselves “eternal.”
Soften stiff hips, aching knees,
as you sink into the deepest bow,
allying hips and legs
with heart and belly.
Groan with the earth,
sigh with the tides,
wave with the sheaves,
let pride and greed evaporate
and rise to cloud,
then fall as rain,
purified, gentle—
a healing rain
of humble blessing.

––Rabbi Diane Elliot

* with thanks to poet Susan Windle for the phrase, “the splendor of surrender”

©Diane Elliot 2020
www.whollypresent.org

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Rosh Hodesh Prayer

3/27/2020

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We enter this new Hebrew month of Nisan––the month of spring, the month in which Jews the world over recall our liberation from the constriction of the "narrow spaces" of enslavement––in a state that, for many of us, seems to be mightily constricted. Some of us are quarantined at home. Some of us are sick; some very sick. Others of us are constrained to move into the public sphere, to risk our own well-being as we perform jobs deemed essential to the continued functioning of society and to the well-being of the rest of us: farm workers and those involved in food production, grocery store workers, bus operators, communications workers, and most crucially, health care workers. How can a time of such restriction, fear, grief, and constraint be perceived and known in any way as a liberatory passage? as a birthing, hedged all around by the possibility--and the reality--of dying? At Passover seders, as we retell the ancient story of slavery and liberation, we often ask, who are the Pharaoh's of our time? How does Pharaoh live within each of us? What are the plagues of our time? How do we perpetuate or participate in them? What transformation is called for, and how do we open to receive its energies and help manifest new structures in the world?

I'll also be asking these are other questions this year, as I head into my strangely curtailed preparations for Passover: what unrecognized tools for healing are already in our hands? How are neighbors banding together to help one another? How might peoples and nations connect with and honor the wisdom of heretofore silent, invisible, oppressed peoples of the world, tribal peoples, disabled people, who have long dealt with fear, deprivation, and imminent death? (Thank you Aurora Levins Morales for framing this possibility.) How can I best serve the current reality?

What questions are you holding? With what fears are you grappling? What values are guiding your actions in the face of this corona virus pandemic, this unprecedented challenge to our daily routines, to almost every assumption on which many of us in this country have based our lives?

I'm part of an intergenerational Jewish community of practice called Taproot. During our Moonthly (new moon) zoom call yesterday, Reb Irwin Keller offered this prompt, "God, Angels, Guardians, give your blessing right now that…”, and invited each of us on the call to type our response into the chat box. The prayer below is what we all, collectively, came up with. This kind of shared consciousness, this new kind of mishkan or holy gathering place in which the sacredness of all becomes manifest, seems to be arising as at least part of the "answer" to the questions of this season. Vayikra. We have been called into the place of holy service, the Mishkan, the Tabernacle erected to serve as a sacred meeting place, a touchstone, in the midst of a vast, barren, and forbidding wilderness. We will dare to enter?

Wishing you a blessed Shabbat as we flow into the Passover season of miraculous freedom. May your prayers and meditations be deep, expansive, and effective.

Taproot’s Collective Rosh Hodesh Prayer
March 26, 2020
New Moon of Nisan, 5780

God, Angels, Guardians,
give your blessing right now that people I love will be safe
and that the grief will be holdable
and there will be support for that grief,
that we find and share all the medicine we need,
that we see the power of healing each other,
that the cherry blossoms keep blooming,
that the stillness for deep listening can be cultivated,
that You are here with us now,
that we learn to listen,
that we be drenched in a rain of healing,
that every fairy be unfrozen,
that the clouds move in powerful motion,
that the sick be healed and pass on with many hands and voices with them,
that this is transformation,
that through our sharing and our love and our work
we may participate in the redeeming of this moment, this time, this world,
that we may hold one another with such gentleness and care,
that we open our ears and care for all,
Amen,
Amen.

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"Lifting Our Heads" in a Time of Turmoil

3/13/2020

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[This piece was part of a communication written today for my Embodying Spirit alumni]

My friends, we find ourselves time of grave peril and of hidden opportunities. The peril is most evident and becoming more so daily, as more is learned about the novo coronavirus. Many of us are in the so-called “high risk” group for developing complications. And…. we are among the privileged—people with safe, comfortable homes, networks of supportive friends and community members, health care teams in place, perhaps some savings to tide us over through a time of financial uncertainty. Millions of people in this country and across the world are not so fortunate. Our hearts know this, and our prayers for the collective take on extra force and urgency, as we face the magnitude of what is before us.

But what of the opportunities? How can we imagine them, uncover them, and begin to take action, even when we’re not gathering face to face? I had the blessing to be on a zoom call today with some amazing leaders in the Jewish community, deep thinkers and dreamers, convened by the Nathan Cummings Foundation, which supports some of the most innovative programs and forward thinking in the Jewish world today. We shared our perceptions and began to look at how growth and even positive change might come out of this crisis.

Among many insightful words that were spoken, several folks (including me, as you might imagine) spoke to the fact that the pandemic is waking us up to the importance of living more fully in our bodies, the need to listen more deeply to the body’s needs. And not just our personal bodies, but the bodies of our neighbors, of our communities, the bodies of animals and plants, the great body of the Earth.

This requires slowing down—slowing down the electric speed of our brains to listen more deeply to the quieter voices of wisdom flowing toward us from every created thing, including from deep within our own physicality. Staying home, cultivating more local fields of concern—attending to ourselves, our family members, our neighbors, our pets, our gardens—as best we can, brings us more into the here-and-now, into this moment, this breath, this piece of ground—the only time-space in which we can truly act.

This week’s Torah portion, Ki Tisa, chronicles the disastrous effects of the newly freed Israelites' panic when their leader, Moses, is gone too long, receiving instruction from The Divine Oneness atop Mt. Sinai. Their fear leads them to act in ways that are ultimately against their own interests—to place their faith in a false god, a golden statue. Of course, there’s much to be learned there, but even before that, the parshah begins with the words, “Vay’daber YHVH el-Moshe leymor: ‘ki-tisa et-rosh b’nei Yisrael….’ “The Divine spoke through Moses saying, ‘When you take a census of the people of Israel….’ ” In Hebrew, the phrase that translates “take a census” literally means, “lift up the head” of each Israelite. To count the people is to “lift up their heads,” to make them feel counted, to make them count.

How significant is it that we, here in the U.S., are in the midst of census-taking right now? How ironic is it that our national leaders have done everything they could to suppress the true census count, putting obstacles in the way of people’s even feeling safe to be counted, tricking them into filling out fake census forms? And how much in this current crisis will we see—are we seeing—the dire effects of dis-counting people? Of leaving so many people behind, uncounted, uncared for? The poor, refugees, immigrants, tribal people?

Perhaps part of the opportunity embedded in this time of grave trouble is the opportunity to see and know, more clearly than ever, how inter-connected we truly are, to come to truly understand how much we depend on everyone’s presence, every people's wisdom, every community’s resources and resourcefulness? Perhaps, if we can stay present and loving in the face of fear and real danger, together, we will begin to dream systems and ways of being that will include everyone, lift up every head. Perhaps we can begin to learn from those who live close to the earth, that only in truly caring for one another and the earth, can we begin to birth the ways of being that will allow us to survive and humbly steward our earthly home.

During the zoom call today, it was suggested that we reframe “social isolation” as “physical distancing,” an opportunity to be with ourselves, to look inward and catch up with our lives, and to begin to imagine and implement ways to stay lovingly connected and socially active, even when we can’t be in the same room together. I bless you with all my blessing power to keep an open heart, to stay well and safe, and to be in touch when you can.

Shabbat shalom and much love,
Diane

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The Ikar of Purim: Going Beyond Either/Or

3/1/2020

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Here in northern California, winter has chewed us up a bit, wetted us down slightly, and spit us out its other side, into the beginnings of a prematurely green and flowering spring. In the Jewish world, we've entered the Hebrew month of Adar, z'man simkhateynu, a period of weeks meant to be entirely given over to joy. How, you may ask, can we release ourselves into raucous and bawdy celebration, when so much is topsy turvy in the world? Read on to get a sense of how the spiritual technology of joking, joy, and upsidedownness might be just what the doctor ordered, building the spiritual muscle needed to survive and thrive in these hair-raising times.

The Ikar* of Purim: Going Beyond Either/Or
Notes for a Teaching on Purim
5780 ~ 2020
*ikar means “the essence” or “the main point”

“This realization of Oneness is the ultimate experience of love.”
––R. David Aaron, Inviting God In, p. 174

Guiding Questions:
What ties the mitzvot of Purim together?
Why is Purim the only holy day that the Sages declared would still be observed in
y’mot ha-mashiakh, the time of a healed world?

Five days ago, we entered the month of Adar on the Jewish calendar. The is last month of the year, since the most significant of the Jewish calendar’s four new years begins in the spring, on the 1st of Nisan (next month), the month in which the celebration of Passover and the Exodus from Egypt take place. The Talmud teaches: “Joy is increased in the month of Adar.” Kabbalistically its energy is said to be “the joy of Oneness,” and the whole month is called z’man simkhateynu, the season of our joy. The holy day of the month is Purim, celebrated on the 14th of the month, and in some places on the 15th.

So what do you know about Purim? What associations do you have with the holiday? What are your curiosities?

The story of Purim, told in Megillat Esther (the Scroll of Esther), takes place at an unspecified time in the city of Shushan, a great city in ancient Persia. The word “purim” means “lots” and refers to the lots cast by Haman to determine the day on which he planned to have his men attack and destroy all the Jews of Persia.

Yom Kippur, on the other side of the Jewish calendar, is sometimes called Yom HaKippurim, the Day of Atonements or Coverings, which can be parsed “Yom Haki-Purim,” “a day like Purim,” because on it, lots were also drawn—by the High Priest in the Jerusalem Temple to determine which of two goats would be sacrificed to atone for the entire people and which would be the proverbial scapegoat, sent into the wilderness, symbolically bearing the sins of the people on its head.
Of course, the spiritual technologies of these two days are very different. Yom Kippur is a solemn, awesome day of fasting and prayer; a day on which people wear white garments reminiscent of the kittel, the white linen garment in which they’ll be buried; a day when we aspire to be wiped clean of past errors and reborn, freed from constricting and wrongheaded ideas and behaviors. Purim, on the other hand is a bawdy holiday of raucous play, dressing up in costume, feasting, getting drunk, joking and satirizing one’s enemies and the direst of situations. What could possibly be the relationship between these two very different holy days?

In her excellent booklet on the kabbalistic roots of the Tu BiShvat Seder (you can order it at https://astillsmallvoice.org/product/ssv-tu-b-shvat-hagada-2/), which is the holiday we celebrated last month, on the full moon of Shvat, Sarah Yehudit Schneider writes this:

If life is a spiritual path, our primary task is not the accumulation of facts, but the integration of truth so deeply into our flesh, that our instinctive and reflexive response to the world shifts accordingly. This is the Jewish definition of enlightenment. (p. 33, my emphasis)

So we might ask, how do our khagim, our holidays, contribute to this great spiritual project? For one thing, every Jewish khag has its origins, either in an earth-based ritual, a historical event, or both, and involves mitzvot or minhagim—specific physical actions and symbols designed to help us inscribe the message of the holy day in our body-minds. And on the mystical level, every khagbrings a particular flavor of tikkun (repair). Here’s what Schneider says about tikkunim in general:

Every tikkun has two parts. First, is that it always includes some actualization of potential, meaning that some undeveloped capacity of soul becomes visible to the world. Second, is to gradually refine the consciousness one brings to that effort. (p. 28)

The mitzvot and customs of Purim include the reading or hearing of the Megillat Esther, Esther’s Scroll; creating satirical and raucous plays that reenact or embroider upon the story; dressing in outrageous costumes; making music and dancing; giving tzedakah and caring for the poor; delivering sh’lakh manot (gifts of at least two different kinds of food to at least one neighbor; many people make up little goody bags they distribute at Purim parties); and feasting and becoming so intoxicated that you can’t tell the difference between the phrases “arur Haman” and “borukh Mordecai,” “cursed Haman” and “blessed Mordecai.” This last teaching actually appears in the Talmud (Megillah 7b): “khayav inish liv’sumei b’Puraya ad d’lo yada ben arur Haman l’borukh Mordekhai, a person is required to become intoxicated on Purim, to the point that they can’t distinguish between ‘cursed is Haman’ and ‘blessed is Mordecai.’

What, then, is the particular tikkun or fixing effected by the mitzvot of Purim and how do they reveal our soul capacities and refine our consciousness? If as the Kabbalists teach, the healing of this month is through joy and laughter, what is being revealed and repaired? What do you imagine these observances have to do with one another and why did the Sages teach that Purim would be the only remaining holiday and Megillat Esther the only text still read, along with the Five Books of Moses, in y’mei ha-mashiakh, the world that is coming, that time of universal radical sacred hospitality? (to learn more about “sacred hospitality,” read Adam Horowitz’s recent wonderful blog on the subject at medium.com: https://medium.com/@adamhorowitz/toward-an-infrastructure-of-sacred-hospitality-5657611e79df)

“Megillat Esther” literally means “the revelation (gilui) of hiddenness (hastair).” It’s taught that, on the deepest level, the Hiddenness revealed through Purim is the encompassing Oneness that takes us beyond either/or, good/evil, friend/enemy—beyond dualistic thinking. The phrases arur Haman and borukh Mordecai have the same numerical value in Hebrew, 502, which in itself adds up to 7 (5 + 0 + 2), the number symbolic of Creation. On this day, through joy and revelry, we’re encouraged to elevate our consciousness to a level beyond the everyday, to take a magical mystery tour back to the Garden of Eden, which had the undivided Tree of Life at its center (the Tree that later splits into the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil). We dress in costume, making fun of our limited identities, shattering set ways of thinking with laughter, bearing witness to the fact that this whole, crazy world, as the Baal Shem Tov taught, is actually God in drag, the Divine Oneness cloaked in variety and multiplicity. “This realization of Oneness is the ultimate experience of love.” (Aaron, Inviting God In, p. 174)

And the agent of this revelation, in the Purim story, is none other than the Divine Feminine, the Shekhinah herself in disguise—Esther. The story itself couches its potent political message in humorous stereotypes and satire, mocking and defying the powers that be. Mordecai refuses to kowtow to Haman, the hubristic minister; Esther turns the tables on a dunderhead king, Achashverosh, who has banished his previous queen, Vashti, when she refused to dance naked before his drunken party guests.

In the Passover story, God must intercede directly, performing miracles that controvert nature—the plagues, the splitting of the sea, the drowning of the Egyptian armies. The God of Nisan, of the Exodus, acts violently to extract the Israelites from Egypt and set them free to serve the Divine. But in the Purim story, nothing supernatural happens—the miracles are hidden, God’s name is never mentioned, and the Divine plan is implemented solely through the courageous choices of human beings who speak truth to power.

Of course, there’s a dark side to this story—the death of Haman and his sons, the mandate for the Jews to take revenge upon Haman’s gangs. Even if we accept the tale as a kind of canonical superhero comic book, a revenge fantasy on the order of Quentin Tarantino’s 2009 film, Inglourious Bastards, it’s still challenging to cut through the carnage to the ikar (essence) of the khag—the deep knowing that we can never fall out of God, that love is woven into every occurrence and challenge of life. The mitzvoth of caring for the poor, gifting of food to friends, feasting and rejoicing, are all intended to liberate that love energy, to remind us that beneath all our differences, we are each a unique expression of the One. It’s for this reason that the Sages asserted that Purim would be the only holiday celebrated in mashiakhvelt, a holy day that elevates us even beyond Yom Kippur’s wiping away of sin—into a state of consciousness, of wholeness of being, in which Oneness is universally perceived and, in the absence of the good/evil dichotomy, joyful celebration is eternally possible.
How might you celebrate Purim this year?

© Rabbi Diane Elliot 2020

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November 11th, 2019

11/11/2019

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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 lands 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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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.

Standing Prayer

A Poem for L'ag b'Omer

Rosh Hodesh Prayer

"Lifting Our Heads" in a Time of Turmoil

The Ikar of Purim: Going Beyond Either/Or

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

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