During my third year of rabbinical school I was lucky enough to be assigned to Rabbi Michael Signer as an advisee. Michael was -- still is -- a scholar of medieval Judaism. At that time he had a windowless downstairs lair, every available surface stacked to the ceiling with scholarly books and periodicals, many in Hebrew. That exact year, 1982, I was at the peak of my own cognitive dissonance. I had spent the summer before on Skid Row with the LA Catholic Worker, trying to find jobs for homeless people. While in school I was balancing a heavy load of Bible, Talmud, Aramaic and medieval history classes with my second year as the passionate but staggeringly under-skilled rabbi at the gay and lesbian synagogue, Beth Chayim Chadashim. At the end of that year I took a year's leave to fight in the streets with homeless people against LA's cruel welfare policies and slum hotels (and, incidentally, to visit a little place called Mendocino for the first time.)
One day in class -- I think it was my bible class, in which we were laboriously parsing a verse a week with a concordance, a lexicon and a big heap of commentaries -- I hit the wall. I stomped out of the class in all my twenty-four-year-old indignation and stormed down to Michael's office. He was engrossed in a book, but looked up when I flounced in. "How can you waste your time on this pointless trivia when there's a whole world out there falling apart?" I raved. I don't remember any pithy answer. He said something to the effect that exactly because the world was so full of difficulty and challenge he was grateful to have something timeless and beautiful to retreat into. He may have said that his beloved texts were like a kind of hermitage for him. Michael was interested in the medieval Christian monastic tradition, and he may have even said that he retreated into study like a monk might retreat into his monastery. I remember being distinctly unsatisfied by his reply.
But all these years later -- in fact, tonight, looking ahead to November, 2004 -- I find myself thinking of Michael's words to me. I realize that whatever chitchat I write here tonight will find its way to your mailbox right around November 2. Personally I have never before felt such engagement -- and anxiety -- about an election! I can't stop thinking, worrying, cursing and fuming about it. And of course at this moment, whatever my own internal optimism or pessimism (the latter, actually, since you asked,) I truly have no idea what will happen. Whatever happens, there is a huge sense of weight about these times. And, since we are in a world, country and community which is intensely divided in vision, I have to assume that, whatever the outcome of the election, there will be people among us who are flung into despair on November 3. And it might be me.
Right now as I write it is just a week after Simchat Torah ended another season of High Holy Days. So I have that rich, tired, happy feeling of a soul that has prayed and sung and meditated at length of late. I heard a hundred -- and one -- blasts of the shofar. I threw my crumbs in the ocean. I fasted. I prostrated myself on the floor in honor of the High Priest in the Holy of Holies. Then I came home and, with Mickey, built a sukkah. I was guest or host in a sukkah many times over the week. I had a lulav and an etrog. I danced like a fool with our Torah, then helped to roll her from end to beginning. We prayed for rain, and the next day there was a downpour.
Now there are no holidays -- except, of course, Shabbat, the most radiant holiday of all -- until Hanukkah. But then the train picks up speed again, with Tu B'shevat and Purim and Pesach and Shavuot, and some smaller holidays tucked in between.
Holidays are many things. But one thing they are is holy days, days set apart, days when we exit our everyday reality and enter another set of experiences. Each holiday has its own textures, its own sense experiences, its own tunes and foods and visual symbols. Each has story and text and ideas of its own. You prepare for the holiday, enter it, experience it, and exit to return to regular life. Just today Mickey took down our sukkah. And it occurs to me that every holiday has a sukkah-like aspect. It's a kind of temporary structure, and hopefully a beautiful and charming one that is a pleasure to dwell in, at least for a day or two or a week.
Without meaning any insult at all to those contemplatives of other traditions who ensconce themselves permanently in cloisters, I like the idea that holidays come and go. There is something lovely about a holiday as a kind of temporary shelter in the stream of time. We are asked -- commanded -- to live a daily life of service, justice, mitzvah, to do good work, hard work, to fix what is broken. And then, each week and at intervals throughout the year, we are invited to levitate to another place, another set of experiences, for a short time -- hopefully to be delighted and inspired and filled by our time there before we return to the every-day.
I reckon that whatever happens on November 2, there will remain hard places and hard circumstances in our world to break our hearts. Plenty of work will remain to be done, and plenty of struggle too. And there will be lenty of time between holidays for just those tasks. Like now, Cheshvan, November.
I no longer have the stamina I had when I was twenty-four to be in a permanent funk. I can be outraged for a week, and then I'm glad it's Shabbat. I can be heartbroken for a month or two, and then thank heavens there comes Hanukkah with its lights. Those of us who choose, or feel compelled, to be engaged with the world's difficulties might want to consider taking shelter in those intermittent days and weeks of elevation, to take a breath, to look within and around in a slightly less-hurried way, maybe even to see our same world from a somewhat different perspective.
November 3 will come the day after November 2, no matter what, and the fourth and fifth after that. As we prepare to be either elated or distraught by the outcome of the election, we might want to think a bit about what will sustain us for the tasks of the days after. There is much more to life than beauty, and there is much more to Judaism than holidays. But sometimes when the world looks especially difficult, it's probably good to have a little something timeless and beautiful to retreat into. I think back a few weeks to the end of Yom Kippur, to all of your gorgeous faces lit by the havdalah candle in the dark shul, our beloved dead swirling around overhead, invited in at yizkor. I promised myself then that I would put the vision of that moment in my pocket for some hard day ahead when I need it. That day could come soon. Who knows? But I think that memory might just pull me through.
© 2004 Rabbi Margaret Holub
(home) (calendar) (info) (articles) (sponsors) (links) (bios) (reviews) (travel) (recipes) (projects) (photos) (art)
Updated 10/28/2004 (rge)