This has been a time of much loss on many levels: personal losses as beloved ones become ill and pass away, as our work and roles shift unpredictably in response to the pandemic and changing conditions; communal loss, as members of our communities with black and brown skin continue to be singled out, hunted down, suppressed, and our most cherished stories about who we are as people and nations shatter over and over; and global loss, as the oceans warm, the ice caps melt, rainforests turn to ash as skies darken with the smoke of out-of-control fires, whole species disappear, and masses of people, seeking food and water and basic safety make arduous journeys across impossible terrain, only to be turned away at human-made borders. How to be with our heart-brokenness, even as we direct our energies toward what we can still do to repair, renew, comfort, and hold? To continue to love as we grieve? This poem speaks to the potency of remembering, of fully receiving the legacies of our personal and human histories, the pain and the strength, if we're to keep our hearts open and available in the face of this Great Undoing.

​The Last Glass
 
I loved that last glass,
the only one remaining 
from its set.
Thick, dependable, sturdy,
just the right height
for catching the pressed juice 
of carrots and apples, 
incised on its underside:
“made in Russia,”
 
like my grandfather,
Sam, Sam Asher,
the silent one
who grinned his
broken-toothed smile,
who rarely spoke,
and called all of his grandchildren
“Bobby,” even us girls.
 
Perhaps he meant to say
“Baby,” but “Bobby” was how
it sounded, in his sparse Russian-Yiddish
flavored English. There were other
Ashers in Chicago, cousins,
an older sister—Tante Sarah Levin--
but by the time I was born
most were gone--
 
disappeared, the family broken,
the many we never knew. 
Had they been sturdy, dependable,
strong? How had they disappeared--
one by one, or all at once,
from their shtetl outside Vitebsk, 
where they’d been living 
in uneasy peace in the first decade
of the twentieth century, 
at the time when young Sam 
ran away, boarded a ship,
made it to Baltimore, then headed west?
 
Was he the last remaining one,
all the others, siblings, parents, in-laws
broken or disappeared
long, long before his
heart cracked one day in a hospital bed,
long, long before that last glass
slipped from my hand
and shattered in the sink?
 
                    --Diane Elliot, July 15 2021
 

Last month I had the honor of being invited to help confer smikhah (rabbinic ordination) on my dear friend and colleague, the amazing Rabbi Irwin Keller. Irwin had spent several years studying in the ALEPH rabbinic program and many, many years before that serving as the spiritual leader of Congregation Ner Shalom in Cotati, California. ​

​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,