Rosh Hodesh Prayer

​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.