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Of course this particular Elul has an extra measure of poignancy in it for me, because this will be my first entry into a New Year without my beloved ‘Elul partner,’ Ella, with me on the material plane. Last year she was already quite ill by the time Elul rolled around, and we couldn’t have our customary conversations. But there’s a big difference between quite ill and dead, as I learn each day she’s still gone. Still, as many of her family and friends have said in these past eight months since her death, she is still here among us in many ways. So what I’d like to do here, both in Ella’s honor and in my own need, is to commune with my Elul partner a bit and to gather some of her wisdom for this month ahead.
Every year at about this time the phone would ring, and Ella would say, “We have to schedule our Elul walk…” We’d take a long walk as close to the beginning of the month as we could manage, usually on the Big River haul road, but at least once, years ago, in the prickly brambles surrounding the Elk cemetery where she is now buried. Walking out one direction I would spill out my heart and receive her wise direction. Walking the other direction she would reflect on her year, and I would listen as best I could to her concerns and intentions.
Thinking back this year on those years of plotting out our Elul work together, several themes come back strongly to me now. The most important to me is really a kind of paradox: Ella could hear me go on at length about ways I had hurt and damaged myself and other people. She could completely know and believe that I had behaved in these ways, not minimize them in any way, and she could firmly counsel me to clean up my act. And at the same time she loved me without condition. It’s like she could witness my weaknesses in all their gory detail and not hold them against me at all in any way. She could know me as I really am – but somehow none of this alienated Ella from me at all.
Now that she’s gone I ask myself: who else holds me in such an unconditionally sweet light? And who else do I love without any kind of resentment or alienation? There are others – I am a lucky and blessed person in that way. But it is quite a gift to be able to see someone clearly as they are, with frailties and struggles and issues galore, and not to love them any less. How do you do that – see someone’s weaknesses as well as their strengths, and not close your heart to any of it? I could do with more of that…
I also find myself thinking about Ella’s faith that important relationships in life can be mended and healed, even if it takes years and years. I don’t want to say more about Ella’s work in this light, but I can say that I learned from her that it is worth asking forgiveness even years after having wronged someone, even if you can’t imagine that they will ever let go of what went wrong. It is worth trying to right things in one way and then another and then yet another. It is worth doing so even if you have no real hope that they will ever forgive. Even if someone has died, it is worth asking their forgiveness.
Awhile ago I had the experience of someone coming up to me and saying that they had felt bad for a long time about something they had said to me. I didn’t even remember the incident, and so it was easy for me to say, “Hey, no problem – of course I forgive you. Don’t worry about it.” But as I thought about it afterwards, I realized that, even though I didn’t remember the particular words said, I had carried with me a little tinge of uneasy feeling about that person, and I kept a little bit of inner distance from them. And once they reached out to me, that alienation completely melted from my heart, and my fondness and trust is greater than it ever was before. I’m glad that this person approached me even years after the fact, even long after I had ceased thinking I cared about whatever it was. It’s always worth trying to repair damaged relationships.
And finally I find myself thinking about water. Ella was, after all, the mikveh lady of our community. And she taught all of us about offering up our kavvanot – our intentions, our commitments – and then giving them over to the water for safekeeping. She used to quote Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan of blessed memory, who said that going into the water of the mikveh was like going into the womb and the grave. Rabbi Kaplan didn’t even know about the icy cold water of the Navarro River in the fall – how it literally takes your breath away when you duck under. So I might have all the ferocious intention in the world to be a better person in all my specific ways, with all my plans and my two-colored highlightered Elul timesheet and everything else. And then I walk out into the water, slip below the surface, and it vanishes from my grasp! I’m just a cold, chattering, naked soul in the water of life and death. I always think of water as the closest physical thing I know to God: absolutely necessary and absolutely deadly, continuously shaping the world, always changing forms but never essence. Immersing in the mikveh is like dipping into God-ness.
The moment of stepping out of the river is like few others. There is an exuberance, a newness to it all. It feels so good. Whatever I walked in there with has been stripped away. I hope that my intention will come true – if I can even remember what it was! And that simple, pure hope is a precious thing.
Ella used to talk about praying for “real help.” Her devotional life was deep, though she was never a regular davvener or meditator or anything as far as I know. She prayed for help, and she believed that help – real help – was out there. It wasn’t just a matter of her, or my, own fierce intentionality. It was entirely possible that the universe itself would shift – that someone else’s heart would soften, that circumstances would change, that new insights would emerge, and healing would become possible where it had not been before.
Love without condition, tenacious commitment to healing relationships, faith in the universe’s willingness to shift as we do in the direction of forgiveness and renewal. May the memory of our friend and teacher be a blessing for us all (whether or not you knew her in her lifetime) as we move towards a new year of life. L’shana tovah, my dear community.
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Updated 08/30/2009 (rge)