Blog Posts

Sukkah Grace

9/29/2015

Rabbi Alan Lew writes: "Form is an inevitable part of our spiritual landscape. We can't live apart from it. But once a year, after several months of reconnecting with the emptiness at the core of form, we leave the formal world behind. We sit in a house that is only the idea of a house, a house that calls attention to the illusory nature of all houses. And there is a joy in this, a joy born of the realization that nothing can protect us...." This "house that is only an idea of a house" is call a sukkah. In Jewish tradition, the sukkah calls to mind the tenuous existence of the Israelite people during their long desert sojourn after leaving the slave houses of Egypt. But more likely, the original sukkot were huts erected in the fields to provide temporary shade and shelter during the harvest season, after the Israelite peoples had settled into agricultural rhythms in the land of Canaan. Today, the rickety walls and hole-y roof (s'khakh) of sukkot--set up in backyards, on urban rooftops, and in synagogue parking lots, and in which people eat, pray, study, and even sleep for eight days--invite us to reap the bounty of gladness and abundance following the solemn self-examination and fervent prayers of the ten Days of Awe. My first attempt ever, last year, to build a sukkah on my patio put me in touch, in a way I'd never experienced, with Sukkot's particular flavor of joy--a joy tinged with urgency and frustration, a joy born of the whimsical power of serendipity--call it grace, call it God--and made more poignant by the pain of inevitable loss.

Sukkah Grace

God's grace bubbled up
in my desire for a sukkah.
Grace flowed over us in Ross's offer
of an old, dirt-encrusted PVC sukkah frame,
stored unused in his garage
for 15 years,
and God's kindness stuttered through
the spark plug, which caused my car's engine
to pull alarmingly as I drove back
from the Yom Kippur retreat
at Mt. Madonna.
God's mercy spawned Ross's offer
to deliver the frame, which meant
that he was here to unload it
and spend a good hour-and-a-half
on the evening after Yom Kippur
trying to help me set it up
(which, if my car hadn't broken
down, he would not have been).
God's wisdom spurred the realization
that some pieces were too long
for our little patio, and therefore
God sent Ross's PVC cutter,
though I had to drive over
the next day--in Burt's car, which I
had to borrow since mine
was in the shop--to Ross
and Hannah's house to
pick it up, along with the
five palm fronds
that Hannah set aside for me
as s'khakh.
God flexed God's muscle
in the joints of the
frame that never fit together
properly. God danced on the bias
in the patterned water-resistant
fabric I bought from the
Chinese couple in the fabric
store at the foot of
Appian Way, which flapped
loose or stayed put,
depending upon how hard
God's gracious wind blew up
the hillside and over our fence.
God held faithfully firm
in the duck tape that
secured the fabric to the
PVC pipes of the frame,
even when the
frame fell apart,
which it did repeatedly,
spilling the sharp,
rustly palm fronds onto
the bricks below.
God's light nevertheless
danced in the candle
flames that we lit on
the first evening of
Sukkot, well after dark,
and shone in the face
of my beloved Burt,
so surprised to be
sitting out in the evening
wind, eating tasty
marinated chicken thighs,
rice and salad, khallah bread
and sweet wine,
in the graceful shelter of
the sukkah.

--Diane Elliot, Sukkot 2014

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Teach me to forgive

9/17/2015

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As we progress through these ten days of teshuvah, of re-turning to the Wholeness that we are , I offer this prayer-poem for your contemplation. It burst through this morning during my prayer and meditation time. Perhaps it will resonate with you and support your own work of return in this awesome season.

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, Aseret Y’mei Hat’shuvah, 5776

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Bowing to What Is

7/25/2015

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Two weeks ago at Ruach HaAretz, I led a class titled "The Faith-full Body," in which we explored several embodied practices found in multiple faith traditions--breathing, bowing, binding, and walking. Now I'm at the Body-Mind Centering Association conference in Portland Oregon, the annual gathering of my somatic community. Over the course of four days folks from all over the world who have studied Body-Mind Centering® (BMC) and related modalities share their passions and curiosities through classes, performances pieces, and embodied conversation.

Yesterday Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, originator of the BMC work taught us about the vestibular system --those tiny bones of the inner ear that register gravity, spatial orientation, and timing. To release these tiny bones within their matrix in the skull and then allow the whole body to follow is to feel Earth-connected and cosmically expanded at the same time. Hearing sharpens, judgment softens. The more than one hundred people in the room swayed, bowed, and toned together, then shared some of the stories, thoughts, and images that welled up in us during this simple, profound experience. The poem below emerged for me.

Today Tisha B'Av, the 9th of the Hebrew month of Av, marks the date on which, Jewish tradition teaches, the First and Second Jerusalem Temples were destroyed--the First by the Babylonians in 586 BCE and the second by the Romans in 70 CE. The rabbinic sages teach that we lost the First Temple through blatant sinning -- turning away from Oneness, sexual impropriety, murder. But the Second Temple was lost through much subtler transgressions: people hated one another in their hearts, failed to respect the humanness of the other, and so lost the touchstone of community.

If only we could hear our humanness, our Divinity, not despite, but through our differences, our juicy individuality. That Eden, that Third Temple, is what I taste in my teacher's presence, and in the loving glow of this community--a community of embodied spirits. May this wisdom grow and spread speedily and soon and in our days....

Bowing to What Is
A vestibular map

Tiny passageways
lined with membrane
filled with fluid
teach us to be
astronauts of spirit

navigating stardust
kneeling in humility
and gratitude
upon a planet
built of awareness

wave upon wave--
surfaces summoned into existence
by whispers of desire
loved into materiality
exhaled without regret
thank you thank you thank you

brain uncoiled lays down
miles of track
among hills and valleys
of dark matter

all stories unfold
are told
side by side,
sacred siblings

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The Leonard Cycle

7/2/2015

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Here it is, just a few days after Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi's first Hebrew yahrzeit and the day before his Gregorian yahrzeit, July 3. I remember well where I was that day a year ago, when I got the news of his passing--visiting my brother and sister-in-law in Rochester, New York, about to leave for Ruach Ha-Aretz in Portland the next day (just as, this year, I'm about to leave for Ruach Ha'Aretz in Philadelphia tomorrow!) . Reb Zalman told me and Burt that he had once spent a year in Rochester, trying to get a Chabad yeshivah going. He used to go over to Brith Kodesh, he said, the large Reform congregation of which my brother, Joel, is now executive director, to play their imposing pipe organ. Brith Kodesh is in a different building now, much larger, grander, but they moved the massive pipe organ with them. So the organ Reb Zalman once played still graces their bima.

For some reason today is the day I happened to stumble upon a manila folder marked "To Be Transcribed," which contained a bunch of handwritten stuff dating back years that I meant to transfer to my computer. Among the papers in it were five pome written in the weeks after my father died, in February, 2010. On the eve of leaving for Philadelphia for ALEPH's "Getting it Together" weekend, celebrating 25 years since a delegation of rabbis made a pilgrimage to Dharamsala, India to meet with the Dalai Lama, and Ruach Ha'Aretz next week, I want to dedicate this one of those poems, "Love sees the whole," to the memories of the fathers - my father, Leonard; Reb Zalman, the tata and zayde of the Jewish Renewal movement; to Marilyn's father Joe, Shulamit's father Bill, Elizheva's father Rico, Merra's father Gershon, the fathers who died in Charleston--all the fathers, who have left us to leap and stumble, sob and brim over with joy in this world, without them.

Love

sees the whole

in the part,

the wholeness

in the broken vessel;

hears the innate

harmony

of seeming random

voices;

activates the bonds

of life

even in the midst

of dying.

Love is the open space

before and behind the

closed door,

the stepping stones

awash in coursing waters,

the flood itself,

surging, awesome,

unstoppable.

Love is the ladder,

propped upon sky;

and love is the

climber, trusting,

rung by rung;

and love is the one

who steadies its feet,

planted in earth.

—Diane Elliot 3/16/10 Rosh Hodesh Nisan, z’man kheruteynu
(first of the Hebrew month of Nisan, "season of our freedom")

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Wild Turkey

6/8/2015

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On my way to a friend's birthday party, driving on the two-lane highway alongside San Pablo Reservoir, loving the still-lush greenery of the late spring coastal hills, a heart-stopping moment caused me to consider risks I've taken and the possible effects on those around me, loved ones and strangers alike. How connected is the ever stretching, reaching, breathing, flexing web of existence; how unexpected are our teachers, how fresh each day's lessons.

Wild Turkey

Have you ever seen
a wild turkey fly?
I watched one this morning,
great wings flapping,
neck straining forward
with the effort to propel
its thick body, like an
iridescent feathered
grenade, across the road,
rising from my left,
streaking like a sudden scream
on a diagonal trajectory
just past my astonished
windshield.

How many times,
wild bird that I am,
have I barely cleared
life’s oncoming traffic,
causing bystanders--
an anxious mother,
an irate father, a heretofore
indifferent sibling, a clueless cousin,
a chafing husband, a concerned friend,
or even a complete stranger,
to cry out—as I did--
“Oh God!”,

while I, single-minded,
sweating with the strain,
flap on and up,
oblivious of the
closeness of my call,
aiming like a weighted bullet
at my target,
dropping finally, breathless,
into the seeming safety of
the shady brush
on a warm
June green
hillside?

--Diane Elliot
June 7, 2015

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Faith, Trust, and Liberation: Shabbat & the Passover Journey

3/19/2015

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In my Monday evening Deep Living practice group this spring, as Passover approaches, we've been thinking about the relationships between slavery and freedom, liberation and redemption, Passover and Shabbat. In the Exodus story the people are suddenly sprung into freedom in body, but even the most awesome miracles can’t immediately liberate their consciousnesses. Redemption, from the verb “redeem,” (late Middle English: “to buy back”) implies a revaluing, a fundamental rearranging of consciousness on a DNA level. Over and over again, G~d and Moses try to “lift” the people from their slave states of being, but the cellular imprint of “slavery,” the pervasive hopelessness of not having any choices, of having one’s strings always pulled by others, as one class member described it, is too great for them.

Soon after the miraculous splitting of the Sea of Reeds, when fear and resistance have already grabbed at the peoples hearts, comes another, perhaps less spectacular miracle--the miracle of manna, the gift of daily sustenance that descends like dew upon the ground (see Exodus, Chapter 16). And along with the manna, even they stand at Sinai, the people receive the mandate to rest on the seventh day. What you gather on the sixth day, G~d assures them, will be enough for two days; you'll be provided for, even when you stay in your place, not reaching out for sustenance.

Manna—this reminder of a benevolent cosmos that hears human pain, nurtures, and assuages fear—comes with dependable regularity to reassure frightened minds and traumatized bodies. It is not a one-time Cecil B. deMille-worthy miracle, but a reliable, daily gift that, slowly, over time, works to soften fisted hearts and soothe shattered nerves. And in this context, Shabbat, the day for which a double portion is received, when one is exhorted to stay home and to be fed without having to “gather,” can be seen as Torah’s spiritual curriculum for undoing the inner bonds of slavery—a G~d-given day of spiritual retreat, a day for each person to remember being “b’tzelem elohim,” divine in nature, and a member of a community that together honors its G~d-likeness through acts of justice, sanctity, and beauty.

Each week we, too, have this “day,” this possibility of dedicated time to experience freedom through every sense gate—to taste, smell, touch, sing, and dance freedom. Each week Jewish tradition mandates a day of retreat, a day of sensuous mindfulness in which to cultivate faith and trust, to set aside the urgency of self-importance and the fear of not-enoughness, and to rest in the great sea of Being. Each week I have a chance to allow the container of Shabbat to move me from a superficial appreciation of my own freedoms to the expansive connectedness of a truly liberated consciousness that, eventually, might permeate every day, every breath.

Here's my poetic musing on freedom, written following an embodied exercise in which we focused on our breathing and dropped into the "empty" space, the stillness between each full exhale and the receiving of the next in-breath Of course, I'm aware of how many political and physical freedoms I have, as contrasted with my fellow beings in many parts of the world, including right here in my own country, my own town. Yet, how much my consciousness is still enslaved by the toxic cultural "brine" in which I soak (see Kevin Anderson's piece "How to Soak in Divine Brine" in the March/April issue of Spirituality and Health)! How essential to steep regularly in an atmosphere of faith and trust that reconnect me to the holiness of life.

Freedom is...
unrushed
softness
opening up
spaces
between
what seems
so important
necessary, urgent
freedom
emerges
from the spaces
inside
me
not bestowed
from without
nor wrested
from anyone
or anything--
it is
God-given truly
a divine ordinance
to be accessed
anyplace, anytime
freedom
“over me”
spreading
like a quilt of
comfort
the yearning
of the soul
to attain its
unity with
the All--
this is freedom

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Connecting Inner to Outer Practice: An Interfaith Day Meditation and Social Justice

1/26/2015

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On Sunday, January 25, 2015, I was honored to be one of four teachers participating in a day devoted to "Meditation and Social Justice: Contemplative Practices from 4 Faith Traditions" at the East Bay Meditation Center in Oakland, CA. It was a day focused on practice, rather than intellectual learning. Each teacher was invited to teach for 50 minutes, followed by Q&A. We began the day with a panel, each teacher offering brief remarks about the significance of meditative and contemplative practices in his or her living faith, how they are informed by social justice concerns, and how they connect to social justice issues and actions. In preparing for this day of teaching, I needed to look deeply at my own meditative practices--those I have learned and those I am creating--and how historical practices, along with those that current practitioners are reclaiming and adapting from Jewish lineages and other faith traditions, connect with Judaism's ages old social justice mandates (from the Torah Prophets through rabbinic texts, Kabbalah, and Hasidut). Although there wasn't time for me to share all of the words below, this writing helped me to collect and organize my thinking, so far. My fellow teachers brought teachings from their traditions: Buddhist, Sufi, and Raja Yoga. I was the only white-skinned member of the faculty. This feels, for me, like a bare beginning of grappling with these issues.

I am honored and humbled to be in this company, and I teach here today only by the grace and permission of my teachers and colleagues, and most particularly in memory of my teacher, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi z”l, who passed away in July.

There’s so much to say—it’s hard to know where to begin. But I can say this: meditation practice saved my spiritual life and set me on the path to my current work as a rabbi and teacher of embodied spirituality. I have lived the life of a dance artist and a healer. Judaism as a faith and a culture has an ages-old mandate to care for the stranger, the widow, the poor, the orphaned—the weakest members of society, to love one’s neighbor, to care for the land, to conduct business equitably, to pursue justice, to become a rodef shalom, a pursuer of peace. In our country in the past century, Jews have been strong activists and advocates in many social justice movements—workers’ rights, civil rights, women’s rights, the environmental crisis, fighting hunger and poverty. But although as a young person I had a strong grounding in certain aspects of Jewish practice and culture, for many years I was unable to stand up for what I believed, to serve as a public activist for justice, or even to stand up and be seen as a Jew in the world.

For much of my life, I have needed a great deal of my life force energy for a journey of inner repair—what we call in Hebrew tikkun ha-nefesh, repair of the self. I was born soon after World War II, to Jewish parents—to a father traumatized by his military service, both as a human being and as a Jew, and to a first generation American mother, not consciously in touch with her immigrant parents’ painful loss of family, culture, heritage, and religion, which also shaped her life. I—as we all have been—was raised in the shadow of the awful genocides of the 20th century. Though I became a performing artist, I was actually shy and very sensitive, and for sensitive people, this world can be a difficult place to navigate.

It took me many years to even begin to deal with the layers of numbness, disconnection, and denial held in my body. From a young age, I danced and made dances and expressed through my body. As a young professional dancer, the pain and injuries I soon experienced catapulted me into a decades-long exploration of my body’s inner contents and workings. I studied and taught many somatic modalities, most notably Body-Mind Centering®. As I became part of a somatic community of support, my tissues began to unfreeze, and I started to feel the emotional and physical pain that they’d been holding in suspension for lifetimes.

Even though my skin is white and I’ve had many, many economic and educational advantages, for which I’m deeply grateful, inside I was always shaking, terrified of annihilation. Both as Jew and as a woman, I had been taught in subtle and not-so-subtle ways to deny who I was, to hide out, to make myself small. In mid-life (my late 30’s), desperate for spiritual nourishment and, like so many of my generation, unable to gain access to the mystical wisdom of my own faith tradition, I stumbled into Buddhist mindfulness practice and finally begin to enter deeply into the heart of my life.

Ultimately, through my deepening practice with dedicated, inspiring teachers and the many, many hours of holding my seat through layers of pain precipitating out of my body-mind, I began to find my way back into Judaism. Mindfulness practice taught me to befriend my pain and to open to the pain of other people—of my people—instead of squeezing tight or moving away from it. At the same time, it awakened the longing and urgency to discover the dignity and majesty and healing potential of my heritage, the ancient Jewish path of connection to life, to the world, and to what I have always experienced as the Mystery, the Oneness that sources and lives in each one of us.

Unlike Buddhism, Judaism has no unbroken lineage of meditative or contemplative practice, handed down in clear form from teacher to student for millennia. Rather, the rivulets and streams of Jewish mysticism, known collectively as Kabbalah--literally “That Which Is Received”—were seen to be so powerful and potentially dangerous that for many generations they were kept hidden and practiced only by small groups well-grounded in study, prayer, and mitzvot–Judaism’s detailed daily life practices designed to connect one constantly with the Divine. It’s my sense that in each generation, an elite cadré of learned and often saintly people—men, as far as we know—performed powerful meditative and theurgic practices that at times verged on magic or shamanism, trying to bring about the perfection and ultimate liberation of the world—what we call mashiachvelt, the time of the messiah. Perhaps women were also doing such practices—but mostly we can only guess at or try to channel through ourselves the women’s practices.

Later this morning I’ll share with you some of the meditative movement practices that I’ve been evolving over the past 15 years, integrating my movement background, healing, body awareness, and mindfulness background with some of the deep truths of Jewish tradition and practices hinted at in some of the ancient and not-so-ancient texts. Until recently, I’ve always been a “quiet activist,” working to heal individuals, doing healing work within my own community, contributing financially to causes I believe in, joining progressive communities whose values I share, and trying to live in alignment with those values. What I have found is that in fortifying me to live into the truth of my own life, the meditative practices I’ve learned and am adapting have gradually purified my fear and are giving me strength to stand for what I know to be true, not with anger or self-righteousness, and not without inner quaking, but with love and a growing sense of support, of Guiding Presence. There’s a well-known Jewish teaching that if you save one person’s life, you save a whole world, olam in Hebrew—all the richness that might come forth from that person, their creativity, their loving, their offspring. Saving my own life—the repair of my own nefesh, my self, through meditative practice—has prepared me to join with my fellow humans of all faiths to address the great tasks of tikkun olam, repair of the world, facing us now in our time. It has eased my own suffering, opened me to the suffering of others, given me powerful tools to help, and girded me for action.

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Simkhat Torah: Between the End and the Beginning

10/21/2014

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Last week, on the holiday of Simkhat Torah, coming at the very end of the harvest festival of Sukkot, I found myself at Kehilla Community Synagogue in Piedmont, California, between two Torah scrolls laid out on the lectern. The scroll to my right was rolled to the very end of the Torah, the one to my left to the very beginning. I leaned forward in between them, surrounded by the powerful energy of these ancient words, hand-calligraphed onto parchment, and spoke about endings and beginnings. It was my honor to call people up for the reading of the very end of the scroll, performed every year in our community by Cantor Linda Hirschhorn. In a liturgical tour de force, she chants each verse with a different trope, the melodies used traditionally to chant sacred Jewish scriptures. When she comes to the very end, she takes a very deep breath and chants the last verse of Deuteronomy and the first verse of Genesis on one long exhale. Below is my drash (Torah exposition) and call to the community to "rise up" to the Torah. I was blessed to have input from my friend and colleague Latifa Kropf, who shared with me R. David Ingber's recorded commentary on the death of Moses.

“V’zot ha-brakhah, and this is the blessing…” We are about to lose Moses, Moshe, the quintessential figure who has guided us through so much of our Torah-year. Reluctant leader, radiant communer with the Divine, narrator and central figure of so much of our Torah story, Moses ascends to the heights, is held deep in the heart of G~d, touched by the Divine voice, the Divine hand, then shuttles back to earth to care for and contain and cajole an errant, fearful, often confused people, sprung unripe into freedom, struggling to understand their place in the world and to shoulder the responsibilities and unfurl the joys of serving the Holy.

That people is us; we surely are that people, as much as the Israelites ever were, needing guidance, needing wisdom, needing at times to have our hands held or some sense shaken into us. We’ve moved through the Days of Awe, stood before the seat of judgment, hoping to exchange it for the seat of mercy. We’ve prayed to peel back the husks, to reveal a clearer, more congruent version of our lives. We’ve sought to unknot the fisted places in our hearts, and we’ve sat in our rickety, impermanent sukkah shelters, leafy boughs above our heads, pinpoints of stars above the boughs, the sweet smell of autumn harvest--pri etz hadar, beautiful, fragrant fruits—in our nostrils, feeling a bit more at peace with our humanness, our frailty, our less than perfect world.

And now here we are, dancing with the Torah, Moshe’s chef-d’oeuvre, whirling in joy, suffused with a love we can hardly contain or name—knowing, all the while, that we’re about to lose Moshe himself.

Doesn’t it seem strange, sad, oddly unsatisfying that at the end of his Torah, Moshe just disappears, like a magician in a puff of smoke? Vanishes between Shabbats, when no one is looking, when we’re all caught up in joyful dancing and release, with no special Shabbat dedicated to the mourning his passing? Maybe it’s just too much in this z’man simkhateynu, the harvest season of our joy, to face the loss of the greatest wisdom figure within our sacred mythology, this humble companion and fierce guide who walks us through so many parshiot. Or maybe it’s hard, so soon after Yom Kippur, to be reminded of the end we humans all must face, cut off at what must always seem midstream, just short of our promised lands.

But perhaps there’s a deeper wisdom here, a profound wisdom about the cyclic nature of life on earth and our humanity, the circlings, the hakafot that connect beginnings to endings and ends to beginnings. Moshe has lived 120, twice 60 years, double samekh. Samekh, the Hebrew letter that has a value of 60, is a symbol of wholeness, of completion—a simple round circle, closed, complete, empty, the end present in the beginning, the beginning implicate in the end. One circle of Moshe’s life is lived in unconscious privilege, in palatial insulation in Mitzrayim, Egypt. A second circle—his mid-life career transition, you might say—is spurred by a sudden awakening to the plight of his enslaved people, and thrusts him into harsh truths of wilderness and human nature, as he struggles through wars, disbelief, cynicism, hunger, and fear to guide an unknowing multitude into the Unknown—protected, guided only by the Invisible Nameless…. two distinct yet interdependent samekh’s, two cycles of fullness, emptiness, completion

Maybe this is what all our dancing is about—not to deny loss and death, but to joyfully embrace the whole cycle of living and dying, the beginnings in the endings, the endings in beginnings. Rabbi David Ingber has taught that the Torah’s beginning with a Bet, the second letter of the Hebrew aleph-bet, points to a missing, mysterious Aleph, of which we can know nothing. This silent Aleph precedes the Bet of B’reishit and is the ground of Creation, and it is into this Aleph that Moses, kissed by G~d, sinks, disappears—not into nothingness, but into the deep, high, wide, mysterious, unknowable Aleph from which the whole story, the whole cosmos springs. There in the Garden, the snake, the first human beings, the Tree, the Flood, the lives of the patriarchs and matriarchs, this whole world of Ever-Arising Beingness, is Moshe Rabbeynu, Moses our Teacher, whispering, shouting, laughing, crying, teaching—anticipating his own re-birth.

In the beginning, writes the poet and spiritual teacher Mark Nepo,

where I was touched by G~d,

before my tongue had word,

before my mind had thought,

there, in the fire I still carry,

the mind and heart are one.

This aliyah is for those who wish to learn, along with Moshe and with Linda, to embrace every trope of Torah in the Great Yeshiva of living and dying. It’s for those willing to enter the unknown and unknowable, to join heart and mind within the Great Aleph that births Creation, and fueled with the faith and humility of Moses, to traverse endings and beginnings with hope, with trust, and with a deep love for all that humans aspire to. Yamdu, yamdu, yamdu….rise up, rise up, rise up!

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Prayer in a Time of Drought

10/6/2014

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We've moved through the Days of Awe, the days of returning, the weeks of self-examination, and now, G~d willing, we turn outward, to see our world with truer, clear eyes, to understand how deeply we are a part of it All, how deeply we are embedded in the matrix of all life, how it fills us. I experienced the Yom Kippur fast this year on retreat at Mt. Madonna Center in Watsonville, CA, in the midst of the most intense drought the state of California has known since weather began to be recorded. Temperatures on the mountain above Monterey Bay soared to 100 degrees; fasting without food or water, our small community of retreatants sang, moved, prayed, chanted Torah, drummed, meditated, and sweated together, melting down to an essential place of truth. This year I was inspired to translate the traditional prayer for a time of drought in the land of Israel and to bring that into our prayers of At-Onement. Feeling the dryness of the land in our bodies, could we begin to understand how responsible we are to and for this Earth, our sacred home, even as She nurtures, cares for, and loves us? I offer my translation/adaptation of the traditional prayer here as a plea for consciousness and a siren call to action. As we move into the season of rains, both is Israel and California, may we indeed be blessed with streams of living water and showers of snow, and may this water strengthen us this year and in all the years to come, to partner with the Life Force of the Cosmos to tip the balance in Earth's favor, and in our own . Sukkot samey'akh, a joyful Harvest Festival to all.

PRAYER IN A TIME OF DROUGHT

We implore the Generative Force

of this Cosmos

to grace humankind with

compassion, with mercy,

and with the wisdom

to see and to steward

the splendid beauty

of this gorgeous and

fragile world

with which we have

been gifted.

Hear our prayer--

teach us to hear

our own prayers!--

bring dew and rain

to our parched land!

Shower our world

with Your goodness;

let our hands overflow

with blessings,

gift us with abundance.

Protect this year

from every badness

and violence;

fill it with hope

and with wholeness.

Be gracious, have compassion

upon us, our crops, our fruit.

Bless us with streams

of blessing.

May we meet Your gifts

with wise actions,

good decisions,

so that we may join You

in co-creating

life and satisfaction and peace,

as in the best of years.

Spare humankind

from plague and war and famine,

from vicious beasts, evil intentions,

from harshness and deprivation.

School us to see with Your eyes of compassion

so that our actions in the world

are steeped in goodness.

Hear, accept, and help us manifest

this prayer.

(adapted from the traditional prayer in a time of drought by R. Diane Elliot, Yom Kippur, 2014/5775)

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Selikhot

9/21/2014

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I offered this teaching during Kehilla Community Synagogue's service of Selikhot, or forgiveness, which begins the High Holy Day cycle. During the month that precedes the High Holy Days, the month of Elul, our liturgical tradition enwraps us in the comforting words of Isaiah II and III, reassurances that we've paid our dues, that the time of suffering, of exile from our true selves, our land, our G~d, is ended. We are "con-souled," empowered by love to do the hard work of confession, repair, and return asked of us during the upcoming Days of Awe.

The words below aim to help the spiritual practitioner find a way to enter the traditional liturgy and to own and soften around old patterns that cause suffering, often for others, certainly for ourselves.

L'shanah tovah tikatevu, may each and every one be inscribed for blessing in the flow of life.

[Tisha B'Av, artwork by Carola de Vries Robles]

We are about to recite for the first time this High Holy Day season the short viddui, the ashamnu, a symbolic litany of sins from A to Z, which we’ll be repeating many times over the course of these Days of Awe.

This alphabetical list is clearly symbolic of the many ways we human beings can fall away from the truth of our beings, our essences. But what can be the purpose of such a numbing repetition of sins—errors, missteps, malicious acts—most of which, we’ve never committed--have we?

The double Torah portion, Nitzavim/Va-yelekh, that was read this morning, on this Shabbat preceding Rosh HaShanah, in synagogues all over the world, begins with these words: “Atem nitzavim ha-yom kulkhem lifnei Yud-Hay-Vav-Hay Elohekhem…. You (plural) are standing right now, this very moment, all of you, before Yud-Hay-Vav-Hay, your Power….”

What a kavannah—what a clear, strong intention—to take us into these Holy Days! My dear teacher, Reb Mimi Feigelson, in her Torah drash for this past week, asks this question: “How are you planning on showing up before G~d this year?” Because in just a few days, we’re about to stand before a holy altar, before a Torah of truth, before our community of friends and loved ones, before the vastness of the universe and the soft murmur of our own hearts on this Rosh HaShanah, at the very head of this new year….kulkhem, the Torah verse says: “all of you.”

Reb Mimi asks us to read this two ways: stand “all of you together,” as an agudat akhat, as a community united in mind and heart, and stand with “all parts of yourself, with everything that’s within each of you.”

The Ashamnu is a confession, an acknowledgment of our all-ness as human beings, individually and together. We don’t say “ashamti, I have sinned, I have fallen away from connection, from wholeness, from self-love and love for my fellow beings,” but “ashamnu, we have sinned, we human beings have caused harm.”

For just a moment, breathe into your belly. Bring your whole body and mind as present ha-yom, in this moment, as you can. Ask yourself, “Have I never felt murderous rage? Have I never thought, ‘if I run into this person right now, or ever again, I could rip their heart out?’ ” If you’ve ever glimpsed even a whiff of this potential in yourself, breathe into it.

Have you never hesitated to respond to another’s need or request with kindness, harboring the barely conscious thought, "This person doesn’t interest me, I’m better, smarter, richer, more together, than they are?” If you’ve ever had a scornful or arrogant thought, breathe into it.

Have you never abandoned yourself, rushing to give yourself away when what is really called for is to nurture and conserve your energy? Have you never taken something that wasn’t yours to take? Breathe into your all-ness, feeling at the same time, if you can, the ever-expanding love that is your root and flowering.

The powerful poem we’re about to read by the Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh is about opening the mind and the heart to all of who we are. It suggests that when we look deeply, we can’t help but notice that each one of us is implicated in every flavor of human experience—the beautiful and the ugly, the sublime and the horrifying. And this awareness—that everything human beings are capable of exists in potential in each one of us—can deepen the compassion that spurs our teshuvah, our at-one-ment, our return.

Call Me By My True Names

Do not say that I‘ll depart tomorrow

because even today I still arrive.


Look deeply: I arrive in every second

                        to be a bud on a spring branch,

                        to be a tiny bird, with wings still fragile,

                        learning to sing in my new nest,

                        to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower

                        to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone.


I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry,

                        in order to fear and to hope.

                        The rhythm of my heart is the birth and

                        death of all that are alive.


I am the mayfly metamorphosing on the surface of the river,

                        and I am the bird which, when spring comes, arrives in time

                        to eat the mayfly.

I am the frog swimming happily in the clear pond,

                        and I am also the grass-snake who, approaching in silence,

                        feeds itself on the frog.

I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,

                        my legs as thin as bamboo sticks

                        and I am the arms merchant, selling deadly weapons to

                        Uganda.

I am the twelve-year-old girl, refugee on a small boat,

                        who throws herself into the ocean after being raped by a sea

                        pirate,

                        and I am the pirate, my heart not yet capable of seeing and

                        loving.

I am a member of the politburo, with plenty of power in my

                        hands,

                        and I am the man who has to pay his debt of blood to my

                        people,

                        dying slowly in a forced labor camp.

My joy is like spring, so warm it makes flowers bloom in all

                        walks of life,

                        My pain is like a river of tears, so full it fills the four oceans.

Please call me by my true names,

                        so I can hear all my cries and laughs at once,

                        so I can see that my joy and pain are one.

                        Please call me by my true names,

                        so I can wake up,

                        and so the door of my heart can be left open,

                        the door of compassion

                                                —Thich Nhat Hanh

As we rise now to declare “Ashamnu,” to claim responsibility, even for deeds we have not done, let’s do so in the spirit of opening and inviting all that each one of us is and can be, and to all that we are and can be together. Rather than beating our chests in anguish and self-punishment, try with each declaration gently massaging your heart and solar plexus open. Throughout these Days of Awe, let us dedicate ourselves, in some mysterious way and on behalf of the whole community, to healing the splits in consciousness that create all separations, all that which we deem “evil.” Ashamnu, we have sinned. Acknowledging our culpability, our humanness, we open the door to forgiveness. Ashamnu, we have missed the mark. Loving ourselves into wholeness, we each do our small part to be the peace and goodness we want to create.

(said standing before the open Ark)

Ah-yai-yai-yai-yai, Ah-yai-yai-yai-yai, Ah-yai-yai-yai-yai-yai

Who are we? We're dust and spirit,
Children of Heaven, made in Your image,
Ashamnu - yet we 've been wrong, Bagadnu - we've betrayed,
Gazalnu - we have stolen, Dibarnu dofi - yes, we' ve misspoken.

Who are we? We're sparks of Fire
Our souls filled with light and infinite wisdom,
Heh'evinu - yet we have injured, V'hir'shanu - we've been malicious,
Zad'nu - we've transgressed, Chamasnu - yes we've been violent.

Who are we? We're one with You
But we have forgotten, we have forgotten!
Tafal'nu sheh'ker - we have slandered, Ya'atz'nu rah - we have misled,
Ki-zavnu - we have lied, Latznu - yes, we have jeered.

Search your heart, see it through
turn it over, make us new. Ah-yai-yai...

Who are we? We're dust and spirit,
Children of Heaven, made in Your image,
Maradnu - we've been rejecting, Ni'atznu - we've insulted,
Sararnu - we've turned away, Avinu - we have offended.

Who are we? We're sparks of Fire
Our souls filled with light and infinite wisdorn,
Pashanu - yet we have violated, Tzararnu - we have confused,
Ki'shinu oref - we've been stubbom, Rashanu - yes, we've served evil.

Who are we? We're one with You,
but we have forgotten, we have forgotten!
Shichat'nu - we've been wastefirl, Ti'avnu - we have hated,
Ta'inu - we've been in error, Titanu - yes, we have cheated.

Clear them out, let them go,
Sweep them out, and let your life flow. Ah-yai-yai...

(from Kehilla Community Synagogue's High Holy Day liturgy, traditional Hebrew, English by R. Burt Jacobson & R. David Cooper)

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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.

Sukkah Grace

Teach me to forgive

Bowing to What Is

The Leonard Cycle

Wild Turkey

Faith, Trust, and Liberation: Shabbat & the Passover Journey

Connecting Inner to Outer Practice: An Interfaith Day Meditation and Social Justice

Simkhat Torah: Between the End and the Beginning

Prayer in a Time of Drought

Selikhot

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