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Embodying Spirit....A Time to Praise

11/8/2016

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My dear friend Latifa Kropf took this stunning photo on a recent trip to Utah. Swirling waves of water solidified into rock shape a channel through which air and light filter. This confluence of elements, of worlds, captures for me the essence of the Four Worlds of Prayer through which a small band of spirit seekers journeyed during this past week's Embodying Spirit retreat. Drawn by the desire to enter, body, mind, and soul, into the deep structure of Jewish prayer, ten of us, a minyan, converged at Four Springs Retreat Center in the hills above Napa Valley, California. We came from across the country, from the midwest, northwest, southwest, from north and south. We arrived in Lake County, the site of devastating fires over the past two summers, to find a steady rain soaking into the soil, birthing tender greenery. Luminescent clouds revealing patches of blue sky floated above the vineyards, and as I drove up into the hills, not one, but two double rainbows appeared, evanescent, benevolent, promising a magical week ahead. 

In this blog I share the words with which I introduced the Embodying Spirit program to the newly gathered retreatants, along with a short psalm of praise that emerged one sunny morning later in the week, when we each spent time outside in a personal "hallelujah spot," drinking in, moving with, opening to the intimate majesty of a greening world.


What is this Embodying Spirit training about?
 
Parashat B’reishit, which we just read this past Shabbat, helps us align with the process of beginning. It says:
 
“In-a-beginning (once upon a time…)
created Elohim,
along with the heavens and the earth.
The earth was astonishingly empty and desolate
and darkness was upon the face of the Deep.
And the Spirit/Wind of Elohim hovered over the surface of the waters.”
 
We are at such a beginning here. This Hebrew month of Kheshvan just beginning is  a “hovering time.” After the burst of creativity of the High Holy Days (a filling), the purification of Yom Kippur (an emptying), the fullness of Sukkot (the harvest of last year’s plantings), we find ourselves again at the beginning of a cycle of creativity….and so it is with this program.
 
This program is about allowing our spirits, as much as possible, to enter into a hovering state, hovering over the waters of our beings and of this newly forming group, where we can each in our own way tap into the raw energy of Creation emanating from the Great Mystery. 
 
Coming into this space with one another’s support can put us in touch with the Source of our own creativity, allow us to see our abilities and talents more clearly, to confront our fears, and to move into who and what we are becoming.
 
As we come to honor all abilities in ourselves and in others, we forge a pathway of shalom, of peace and wholeness, to grow and sustain us in our lives beyond the retreat.
 
As we touch and gently challenge the limitations we’ve created for ourselves in our own minds, we may uncover new abilities, reach toward goals we didn’t even know we had, and gain the strength to address fears that might be hampering us on our path of spirit.
 
As we delve into the treasures of our Jewish heritage, we may discover shining jewels that have been lying right under our noses for lifetimes, just waiting to be picked up, turned to catch the light, and cherished.
 
Welcome to Embodying Spirit!


How.....

How green is your green!
How blue is your blue!
How calming and magnificent
      are your wispy swirling
      white puffs of
      water vapor
How sweet and refreshing
      your dew
How quietly flows the sap in your
      tall stately
      standers
How secret and deep
      are your hidden
      running waters
How fully You are you
 
                        —Diane Elliot, Embodying Prayer, November 2, 2016


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Homecoming

4/28/2016

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We have a lot of work to do to heal and care for this amazing planet on which we humans, along with plants and animals of all kinds, are privileged to live. And that includes caring, in tangible and systematic ways, for our fellow humans, along with the plants, animals, air, land, water. This will require changing the ways and the scale in which we think and feel. Yet sometimes it's enough to simply open our senses, to take in the gift we've been given. In doing so, we remind ourselves that with the freedom to be human, to live, to nourish ourselves, comes a sacred trust and responsibility, which each of us must fulfill in the best way that  we can.



Homecoming
 
Turning to face
coming
home
standing
just standing
 
not yearning, reaching
trying, straining
pulling away, regretting
yearning, reaching
simply standing
 
seeing myself seeing
the gray green hummingbird
as she delicately suckles
sugar water from
the garden feeder
hanging just outside
the kitchen window
 
seeing myself seeing
the green worm
laying its aphid eggs
on an almost-bursting
fuchsia rosebud,
the front door
the sidewalk
the parked cars
and beyond them
green hills
tree clumps
 
seeing myself being seen
by your blue green eyes
shining joking loving,
hearing myself hearing
the storm wind’s
wild scream up the hills
compressed to a whistle
shuddering the clay
welcome plaque
against the wooden siding
whipping up the faint
salt freshness of the bay
and the earthy smell
of wet redwood bark
 
 
vision telescoping
out and out
I see myself
floating
facing this
blue green planet
shimmering like
an eye in space
this member of a family--
moon and sun
sister and brother planets
countless galaxies
swirling dust
of great and dying
stars beyond imagining
 
standing
simply standing
simply facing
nothing to grasp
to conquer
to achieve--
just basking
in the vastness
of being
home.
 
            —Diane Elliot, Erev Pesach 5776, Earth Day 2016
               

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Sukkah Grace

9/29/2015

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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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Picture
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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    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. 

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