It's midway through the Days of Awe as I write -- "the Awful Days of Awe," as I recently heard them called. And they are anything but awful for me (so far) this year: quiet, sunny, with a bit of heightened seriousness. Even romping around with my best friends I can't seem to find it in myself to be quite as loud and silly as I usually am. There's a reflective quality in the air, or inside me anyhow. More "awe-full," which may be what the person I heard describe them meant as well.
It's induced in me, I know, by the change in light and in the texture of the air, and a very specific, even piercing set of memories that are associated with just this season. This is the twentieth consecutive season of Awe that I have spent breathing this particular soft, sweet fall air with all of you. I was twenty-six years old the first Days that I spent up here with you, in the fall of 1984. Ronald Reagan was president. I had just completed my year off from rabbinical school, immersing myself further in the passions of skid row in Los Angeles. I got on a red-eye from here after those first holidays and landed in New York to start my last two years of school. I remember that flight well. I was totally ensconced in LA and hated to leave there. But when the plane flew low across the whole Manhattan skyline at dawn, on its way to the runway in Newark, I thought that only a fool would fuss about the opportunity to spend two years in that most glorious city.
Now Noah, my youngest stepson, is twenty-six. People keep mistaking me these days for my gorgeous neighbor Sandy Berrigan who -- unlike me! -- has a monumental head of grey hair. The babies we blessed that first Rosh Hashana can vote now (and oh, I hope they do) In those first few visits up here I met Charlie Steinbuck and Edie Miller and Max Hill and Rob Curl and Linda Barnett, all now of most blessed memory. And I was having great trouble sorting out who was who that first visit or two -- I remember that one of those darling guys from Elk picked me up in Santa Rosa, and I didn't know for almost the whole ride if it was George Montag or Ronnie Karish (it was George.) Now you fill my heart and my days, and I know who many of you are far beyond your names -- and you, me.
Forgive my nostalgic tone, please, but I love my own round-numbered occasions. They are like personal holidays for me. And so, even though there had already been High Holy Days services here for close to a decade by the time I came on the scene, this personal twentieth anniversary occasions a bit of looking back for me. Rosh Hashana is Yom Ha-zikaron -- the Day of Remembrance. On Yom Kippur we observe Yizkor, the service of remembrance. We are supposed to be completing our heshbon ha-nefesh, the accounting of our souls, right about now. And so memories may be in the air for all of us.
I have a set of more interior markers that I look back on as well this season. I was in the full, all-knowing ardor of my twenties when I first came here, and I was overcome by my encounters with poverty and homelessness in Los Angeles. My sense of the holy was deep but pretty edgy. I used to sit on the roof of Zedaka House, the converted skid row hotel of the Catholic Worker community (named, yes, after our beloved word tzedaka, sustaining justice,) watching the sun set red through the hellish heat and smog of an LA summer day, and say to myself, "This is as holy as Jerusalem." An act of kindness in the soup line, an expression of honest grief in response to the endemic violence there -- this is where I saw the face of the divine.
When I began coming up here, and my world began to expand to include not only the redwood trees and the coastline but also the loveliness of all of you, I didn't know how to factor such beauty into my spiritual life. I was consumed with the dissonance between these two landscapes.
Then I fell in love with someone up here, and then he was killed in a car crash. And, among many other things, I realized that there are edges and dissonances everywhere and that life's mysteries are larger and less binary than perhaps I had considered before. I date my own sense of awe-full-ness to that set of experiences. I found myself in awe of the brevity, and the impact, of life in this universe. Any life, anyplace -- all so precious, irreproducible, and so transient.
I became quieter and a bit more contemplative. I turned thirty. Jack Azevedo ran for County Supervisor, and one unintended byproduct of his holocaust denial and his hate list was that you all courageously decided to take a higher profile in the community. And you invited me to come up here and be your rabbi. I got that call late in 1988, from Donna Montag. At that time I was sitting in my rocking chair in Los Angeles day after day, wondering what to make of all these changes within, wondering what I would do next. And that invitation came, from the Universe via you. I didn't hesitate for a minute.
Now I've been up here as your resident rabbi for more than fifteen years! Much, much has happened, within and without -- probably most notably the year after I got here a funny little guy from down in Gualala won a pie I entered in the Hanukkah raffle. A month or so later he called me "to discuss the pie." And then, a few years down the road, hundreds of you turned out to dance at our wedding. And if I have learned any more about the Divine, it is in the steady, solid, still-funny, highly-energized, dependably kind, romantic, enthusiastic, always-growing love of Mickey Chalfin in my lucky and blessed life. And equally so in the great grace of having a community which will come so close, to celebrate, to mourn, and for points in between.
Edges and dissonances, yes, yes -- but long stretches of plain sweetness too, which is probably more of a mystery to me than the bumpy stuff. This past year in the Megillah you've all seen me twisting and turning in another edgy phase, as I find myself deep in midlife. And that may well continue for awhile, so please bear with me. But Sukkot is coming. It's time to bring the harvest in, to celebrate what's been and to give thanks to the One at the heart of it all. And so, on this twentieth harvest since I first came up here to be with the Jews of the Mendocino Coast for the High Holy Days, I am deeply, madly, truly grateful to all of you and to You.
© 2004 Rabbi Margaret Holub
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Updated 09/23/2004 (rge)