Dear Wild Women

Rabbi's Notes - August 2000

by Rabbi Margaret Holub

"No story ever really ends..." That's what I concluded back when my parents remarried each other -- after a decade-plus of separation. You think something is over, and then it keeps percolating onwards in ways you never quite expect. Well, in a funny way I'm back to that line of thought now as I write. I'm in the afterglow of the tenth annual "Rosh Hodesh/ Mid-Hodesh/Wild Woodlands Women's" retreat, home once again with mosquito bites all over, amazed and confused and happy in ways I never quite expected I would be.

When I first came up here to the Coast I was hot to get a Rosh Hodesh group together. Rosh Hodesh is, as you probably know well by now, the new moon -- on the Jewish calendar actually the first visible sliver of new moon. In the midrash the celebration of Rosh Hodesh was given to women -- and there it more or less languished for two millennia. In the (nineteen-) seventies and eighties there was a huge flowering of Jewish women's energy -- along with women's energy all over the world. And one small part of that huge emergence was a new interest in Rosh Hodesh as a women's holiday. I was part of various Rosh Hodesh gatherings in Los Angeles, and, when I came up here, I really wanted something similar here.

We started meeting monthly and developed our own ritual to greet the new moon. Somewhere in there, we had the idea to have a new moon retreat. The concept was to get together with other rural Jewish women in the various shtetlach around the north. And to our great surprise and delight, women from Eureka, Garberville, Willits, Ukiah, Santa Rosa and Guerneville responded to our invitation. That first year about thirty-five brave women schlepped out to the Mendocino Woodlands, having no idea what or whom they would find when they got there. A good and inspiring time was had, and a tradition, it seems, got born.

A lot of things happened with that retreat each year, including the numbers swelling until, in desperation, we capped things at seventy women. It also got a day longer somewhere in there. Friendships formed, between various individuals and also between the various communities from which we all sprang. Women started bringing Rosh Hodesh practices back to their own communities and began bringing practices from their communities to the retreat each year. We had all kinds of wild -- sometimes inspired, sometimes maybe less so -- services, workshops, rituals and conversations. Some things, like the annual ice water mikveh and the bad jokes on Saturday nights, began to seem like they came from Mount Sinai. Other projects and processes came and went.

In my own subjective experience, what had at first been like a potluck dinner grew into a big catered banquet. In the first years whoever came brought whatever they knew, and we bumbled along together. Some things were fabulous, and some were, well, less so. As things grew larger, we stopped schlepping our own bagels. And we began to have themes, guest teachers and all-around higher production values. As you might imagine, there were both gains and losses. Personally it started sometimes feeling like we were putting on a show -- especially in years when we were packed to the gills with women we didn't even know very well, many from far beyond the little "pale of settlement" of rural northern California. I started sometimes getting downright cranky about the retreat (shocking, I know...). On the homefront, our own Rosh Hodesh group began to change and dwindle. We were going the way of lots of women's groups. It just didn't seem as urgent as it had eight or ten years earlier, and after a decade of meeting every single month, we went to a "now and then" schedule.

Out in the big Jewish world lots of things were happening as well. When we had the first retreat in 1990, it was pretty much the only opportunity we knew of for Jewish women -- or men, for that matter -- to get together to study, pray and explore in the open and playful way we had put together. In the decade that followed Chochmat Ha-lev opened its doors in Berkeley, with a full complement of teachers, workshops, weekend and ongoing experiences. There began to be Jewish meditation conferences and retreats all over the Bay Area. The Aleph (Jewish renewal) Kallah came westward last year. In the east, Elat Chayim became like a Jewish Esalen Institute, with notable teachers and workshops throughout the year drawing people from all over the country. Sonoma County started holding their own Jewish women's retreats. We started hearing some of our "regulars" say, well, I can't come this year because I'm already going to three other Jewish retreats this summer...

And then this year, for the first time in many years, we didn't reach our cap of seventy women. Not even close. And in the days and weeks before the retreat, the planners started whispering to each other that maybe this thing had gone as far as it was going to go. The world had changed. We had changed. We decided to make a big deal of it being our tenth year. Our theme, we decided, would be the number "ten." You know, the Ten Commandments, the ten sefirot, the ten people required for a minyan, Bachya's ten gates, the Ten Sayings with which the world was created... And our tenth anniversary, and all of us being ten years older than we were, well, ten years ago. We didn't make any decisions about the future of the retreat, but there was definitely a retrospective, conclusive feeling to things.

So there we were Shabbat morning in this redwood circle, the sefer Torah from Garberville unrolled on a cloth in the duff, the reader for the second-to-last aliyah kneeling on the ground finding her place in the scroll. In our sweet tradition of group aliyot, I asked everyone who had every experienced a Jewish "first" at the retreat to come forward to the Torah. And shoot if every single woman there didn't come forward! I asked people to mention what their "first" had been. Lots of women had read from the Torah for the first time at the retreat. A surprising number touched a Torah for the first time there. Others wore a tallit for the first time, experienced their first mikveh, laid tefillin for the first time (I was in that group.) One woman said she lit Shabbat candles for the first time at the retreat. Someone else said she loved being Jewish for the first time. (Yes, it's true, one women volunteered that it was the first time she'd ever seen a rabbi do a striptease...)

I have to say, I had NO IDEA. I had no idea that this little once a year gathering had been such an important vessel for so many people. I had no idea that people came to the Woodlands to stretch themselves in such challenging ways. And I began to realize that people went home from this little get-together and read Torah again, made tallitot for themselves and their beloveds, continued celebrating Shabbat, studied more, brought other people together to enjoy what that had experienced first at the retreat.

And I realized something else this past weekend, because of that retrospective feeling we had engineered so carefully. I began to see that, in some magical and amorphous way, this group of people who saw each other only once a year -- sometimes only once or twice in their lives -- had become a community. I saw that over that decade we had gotten interested in each other's lives. We had watched each other change. As a group we had developed habits and customs together. We had learned to witness each other's intentions at the mikveh and to move into groups to discuss things and then to end our conversations and come back to the circle. We were even learning how to tell our life stories in one sentence or whatever other weird structures were imposed by various facilitators. We were learning a lot about getting along with each other's various eccentricities and needinesses (is that a word? It should be..)

Somehow with that backwards look I could see that this little "thing" had really grown into something. It was an accretion of experiences shared over time -- and an endless hunger in all of us to deepen each year -- that grew us into a little community. So now we have our own retreat stories and memories and traditions. And we have some kind of impulse towards the future together.

This column isn't an announcement or a verdict or a decision or even a plea. It's really about the past and present -- the future will have to take care of itself in the future. I came home from the retreat on Sunday, sat down on the couch and woke up sixteen hours later! Now it's a day or two later -- I haven't even gotten all the colored pens and xeroxed things and maraccas and tamourines out of the car yet. And I'm just shaking my head in amazement at this thing that grew -- almost in spite of my intentions. Because it was "just" ten years -- really just ten weekends -- it allowed all of us to see the birth and growth of a community in a telescoped way that we don't usually see in the bigger, more complicated communities of our lives.

I was in various conversations where the word "grace" popped up -- grace being good that comes your way not because you planned it, not because you made it happen, but maybe because you were available to experience it, maybe even laid the groundwork. The emergence of a community, like the birth of a baby, always has an element of grace in it, along with all the schlepping and e-mailing and xeroxing and decision-making. We created something, or/and were created by it. Happy tenth, dear wild women!

Copyright 2000 Rabbi Margaret Holub

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