I’m not the same

It’s been a little while. Hello friends, and Happy Tu B’shvat (15th day of the month of Sh’vat), the New Year of the Trees, when the signs of spring begin to emerge in Israel. In the cold and rain, could there be hints of regrowth and healing?

In the wake of October 7th, I struggle to find the words these days, plus, with the conclusion of radiation in December, I’ve been steadily more active in childrearing and work — so it’s a new landscape to find moments to transfer my thoughts and writing to this space. But it’s good to be back and I intend to keep on writing here.

My colleague Rabbi Debra J. Robbins shared a powerful meditation with me this morning, care of IJS. You can find the link here and the title is “Noticing the Divine in our Bodies: https://jewish-meditation-for-everyone.simplecast.com/

I love the Hasidic story told in the podcast, one I’ve heard before but this time from the perspective of a little girl. It goes like this: During daily prayers in the synagogue, a little girl wanders into the woods. She loves to sit in the forest amidst the trees. Finally, her father asks: “Where were you? Where are you going?”
“I go to the woods to pray. I go so I can feel close to the Divine.” says the girl.
“But you know God is the same everywhere, the same in the forest and the synagogue” says the father.
“I know,” says the girl, “but I’m not.”

We are not the same. We change, through space and time. As I pray in the woods of my meditative mind sitting in Stern Chapel, or walk the slick streets and pause to behold the bare branches of the Japanese maple, I am not the same as last Tu B’shvat or the one before that, etc. Particularly now in this season of middle age, I feel such steady changes in my body and in the Earth. I am more attuned to the longing for redemption and healing than I once was.

And so it is. My work is to accept the now and set my sights on helping myself and others weed out thoughts and actions that bring us further away from our most authentic selves. It is time to keep seeding ancient wisdom made new with each day.

But I wonder, isn’t movement at the very core of God’s name, Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey? Could it be that the father of the girl proposed only one understanding of God, that God moves with us and isn’t the same everywhere? The pages of Exodus seem to suggest this is so. The Israelites were under constant tyranny of work. Days blended into horrifying uniformity. There didn’t exist a sense of past, present, future until Moses and the people, and eventually even Pharoah, could acknowledge the existence of Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey, the God whose very name (root: “to be”) speaks to movement in time.

I’ll close with a poem I re-wrote from a few years ago, which I think stands evergreen in meaning as we navigate the triumphs and trials of our world, longing for collective redemption.

“Ha-meirah”: The Illumined One

You turn, pained by the scorching fire storms

The cracked plains and palms

The bloated bellies and streams.

Beloved moon, balancing on the hills at dawn,

I am drawn to your changing ways.

It is You who calls to our swollen apathy and distraction.

Awake! Awake!

And we stir

Like the night creatures

Scurrying over California fields.

Tide pools of the soul swirl and churn,

Our spiritual joints are watered again.

Could it be, Ha-Meirah,

When lanterns cross borders to ease a mother’s despair

When the bald eagle returns to Catalina Island

When a universe of breath expands in me,

that I begin to see Your hidden face,

with the rising sun of redemption?