Ella Dobkin Russell, daughter of Rose and Julius, Leyva bat Rusza v' Ittl, was a proud daughter of the Bronx. Her idea for a float for the Fourth of July parade in Mendocino was a flatbed truck with a Bronx living room on the back. She was the younger sister of David Dobkin, who is three and a half years older. Looking at photos of Ella as a young girl and young woman, we see that she had her unworldly good looks from the beginning to the end -- her beautiful cheekbones, her gap teeth and strawberry curls and the sweet grin that brought delight until her very last days.
Ella went to Bennington, studied Spanish, moved to Europe, met Tony Russell and married, lived in several European countries with her artist husband who once in an act of impulsive grandeur dangled her upside-down off an upstairs balcony. I remember these tales if not their exact order. She met Linny Chase, who has been her lifelong friend. Her beloved father, Julius, died on the first day of Passover. Tony and Ella moved to California, lived on the Rainbow commune. She and her family were woven into the Elk community. Ella gave birth to Jesse, Tatanka, Rio and Gulliver. They moved to the Druid Hall in Elk. They posed for that great, archetypal photo by Nick Wilson, which now hangs in Ella's living room. Gulliver was diagnosed with autism. The house was famous for drama, for a stairway that started six feet in the air, for Tony's murals on the walls, floors full of pillows.
But all was not soft there, and some years later Ella took flight with her children. I remember her telling me that Ellen Saxe brought Hanukkah gifts to the shelter where they stayed. I met Ella around this time. I remember ecstatic prayers, Shabbat candles, children, friends and poverty. Ella became a mighty advocate for Gully. As soft and as silly and as unprepossessing as she could be among her friends, she was fierce in school meetings and hearings, consultations with specialists, networking with experts and parents of children with autism. She pursued different strategies to help Gully live fully, becoming in recent years a powerful advocate for facilitated communication. Their house had no bedrooms, and Ella slept right near Gully for eighteen years, waking often each night. I thought about that detail now and then over these last weeks and months, when others of us had the opportunity to wake in the night to come to Ella's assistance. Her boys grew up walking Greenwood Creek, fishing, combing the ridges and watersheds of this area, and now Jesse, Tonk and Rio all make their livings in the trees and streams of our community.
Ella was a fabulous cook, as we all know. But if you dropped by her house and walked into the kitchen there was probably brown rice on the stove, some simple greens or a salad. Her challah, rugelach, latkes, blintzes and hamantaschen are matters of legend. She made the best chicken soup and matzah balls for our seder every year but really didn't eat chicken. She was a glorious baker who hardly ate pastries. She ate raw food for a long stretch, did regular juice fasts. Her cooking was a gift for her friends and family. And it was a spiritual practice, woven into her celebration of holidays and seasons. It was, in the truest sense, an offering, a devotion.
Ella had many paths, many lives that she live all at the same time. And so many of us know Ella as a strong companion in the various worlds that we shared with her. The path that I walked with Ella had a lot to do with Judaism. And she lived this path so fully, so deeply, that I have to remind myself that those of you who know Ella through the worlds of Elk community or Trager bodywork or the community of autism or of poetry and literature or the Laodihan or herbal healing or aerobics and Fandassana and walking must also think that her real, full commitment and attention lay there. For just one example, I never really knew that Ella was even in a women's group. But actually she was in two. And obviously she was a devoted member of both, because this devotion was returned to her so generously by those sisters this past year.
Ella raised her four children under very challenging circumstances. She trained in and became expert in Trager bodywork, which brought healing and pleasure to many of us and also brought Ella a livelihood. This part of Ella's life, the part in which she methodically gained financial independence, a class here, a small loan there, always repaid as promised, and grew in her gifts and range of healing practices at the same time, feels heroic to me. She gave free treatments generously and always made it feel, at least to me, like the most important thing in the world was for our needing bodies to receive healing touch.
I think that many of us know that Ella wished very much to have a life partner, and this never came to be in the way that she hoped for so ardently. I mention this not on its own merits but in order to tell you about how she became our Mikveh Lady. Many years ago now she had a brief infatuation that was never to come to be what she wanted, and it left her heartbroken. And somehow the idea came up for her to go to the Navarro River and to immerse as a kind of healing gesture, using the traditional Jewish format of immersion in the mikveh. There were several of us there with her, if I recall. And I think that two ideas got articulated that day which got more important as the years went on. One was that, while the traditional use of mikveh had to do with purification, one could also see it as a ritual to help a person move into a better state. So it was not only about leaving behind some unclean past; it was also about moving towards hope.
The other crucial idea from that day was about witnessing. I remember us sitting at the river's edge that day and asking Ella, "What do you hope to move towards as a result of this experience? What is your intention that emerges from this?" And, probably in part because the water was freezing cold, we sort of got the idea that the job of witnesses was not just (as it is in a traditional mikveh) to make sure that the person immersing gets all her hair under water. It has to do with holding her intention, her kavvanah, so that she can let it all go in the experience of being submersed in living water.
It was a powerful experience, and from that day Ella became the Mikveh Lady (which is what orthodox Jewish women call the attendant who helps them in their ritual immersions.) For many years now there have been two large group immersions each year, one at our annual Jewish women's retreat and one the morning before Rosh Hashana. And people have also sought Ella out individually for mikveh rituals of healing, for marriages and divorces and times of mourning and life transitions and for more internal kinds of growth and change.
She thought a lot about these immersions: how could she center the experience with a teaching, with a tweak in the format and so on, appropriate to the context. And even more, she became the person who held our intentions. So many of us over the years have had the experience of whispering our kavvanah into Ella's ear as we stood naked at the river's edge, or stood holding her hand and speaking it aloud to our circle of witnessing sisters. Ella had a remarkable gift for holding these intentions, and the emotions and stories that came with them, while other people entered the "womb and the grave" of the water, to use a phrase she loved. I think now about Ella standing calf-deep in water, reaching a hand out to steady a trembling woman, directing her to voice her kavvanah, leading her into the water, under the water, and welcoming her out with an embrace and a towel, giving her a completely secure, knowing, exuberant, faith-filled smile as she emerged. This is a very important teaching to me.
There is much more I could say about Ella in these ways. She was a center pole in the beautiful tent of our hevra kadisha, our group in the Jewish community that attends to the bodies of people who have died. She visited and cared for people who were ill with great tenderness. She was a lively, off-key singer of prayers. She prostrated herself to the floor on Yom Kippur while most people sat in their seats.
I feel a personal need to mention that Ella was my "Ellul partner" for many years now, which means that a month before the High Holy Days began in the fall, Ella and I would meet for a walk and discuss with each other the kinds of intimate personal repair of relationships and habits that is the work of that season. In this more extensive way I was privileged to speak my intentions into her ear and receive not only a beautiful smile but strong advice and supportive follow-up throughout the month. And I also was blessed to have this particular window into Ella's self-reflection year to year.
Ella worked very hard to have clear, clean relationships with people in her life, past and present. She was remarkably un-grudging, but she also courageously willed herself to face times of personal pain and tried to make peace with her memories, cutting cords that bound her to old sources of hurt. She endeavored in so many particular ways to support her children, feeling their struggles and thinking thinking thinking: "What can I do to help here?" To the very end of her life, their situations and difficulties were so important to her. She not only spoke words of love regularly and openly; she also really worked to love them in all ways that mattered.
It may be that I just didn't know this part of her life as well in earlier years, but I noticed her relationships with her extended family growing more prominent in recent years, more sweet visits and contacts with aunts and cousins, more time with her brother. When that wonderful furniture from her aunts arrived at her house in Elk a few years ago, the very sideboard and hutch that I'm sure she pictured on the flatbed in the July Fourth parade, it seemed to close a circle in some way. And I should also mention that Ella devotedly visited and cared for Donna Dobkin, her brother David's wife, when she became ill and ultimately died of cancer.
Ella also had a gift for phoning and starting a long conversation at exactly the minute I was running out the door, for obsessing to maddening length on men who probably didn't deserve her passions, for being suckered again and again, to my cold eye, by some expensive new healing trip. She could be impractical until you wanted to pull your hair out. She wasn't much interested in news and politics. She had a hard time with things like cars and firewood. For all the myriad ways that she was so strong, she was also a little helpless.
And she grew and she grew and she grew over all these many years. And in this last year of her illness she was beautifully balanced between struggle and surrender, between taking care of business and letting us all take care of her. For all the ways that this past year was very difficult it was also, dare I say, easy. Ella was clear and decisive when she needed to be. All those circles of friendship and care were intact and ready to move into action. We were able to know what Ella valued. While she had times of fear, she was remarkably un-anguished. Many of us remarked on how she received help in such a gracious way, without embarrassment, clearly appreciative but without being obsequious. Many people did mind-bendingly hard work for Ella, but it felt so warranted, so right, so genuinely helpful, that I think there was a lot of pleasure in that work.
And I know that all of us who spent time with Ella this past year would agree that, even as her language ended, and her mobility and her ability to sit at the table and everything else, her essential spirit never changed, never diminished. If anything, maybe it even got a little more concentrated when all the other stuff dropped away. You could feel her particular warmth and wisdom and humor, and her faith, as clearly yesterday as at any time in the past. And this will continue.
Ella was my rabbi and my teacher. I feel like it has been one of the blessings of my life that I got to live in company and in conversation with Ella as deeply as I did. I am grateful that she was so acknowledged and honored for being the person that she was, that we all had time to think so much about her, to ask her what we wanted to know, to learn so fully from her wisdom. I am grateful that she breathed that whole remarkable wheel of service into being this past year, which united and deepened us all. Lots of times this past year she said, with her big smile, "Everybody lovess me!" And, while she was clearly happy about this, I don't think she was surprised.
In Jewish tradition when we mention someone who had died, we usually say zichronah livrachah, "may her memory be a blessing." But in a few extraordinary cases of rebbes and heroes and miracle workers, we say zecher tzaddik livrachah, "may the memory of this righteous one, this saint, be a blessing." There are many lovely people in our community and world, but only some of them affect the rest of us, so that we are fundamentally changed by knowing them. Without ever giving a class or writing a book, Ella taught us so much about how to be the people and the community that we all want to be. And more recently she has taught us how to die as well. Ella wasn't perfect, but she was righteous and holy and, as she liked to say, "totally enlightened." She really was a bit of a saint. Zecher tzaddik livrachah. May the memory of this holy soul continue to bring blessing to us all.
Copyright 2008 Margaret Holub