April, 2021 Megillah
RABBI'S NOTES
God. HASHEM. The Unnameable. The Blessed Holy One. Ha-Kadosh Baruch Hu. Shechinah. Breath of Life. Life. Source of the Universe. Love. Mystery.
I forget sometimes. In the helter-skelter of daily life—even a daily life that includes some prayer and mitzvot—I forget the amazing, mysterious Universe in which I and all of us reside. Right now I am jamming away getting ready for Pesach. I’m putting together a menu for our tiny Seder and the details of various Zoom gatherings we will share over the week. I’m planning to clean at least some of the crumbs out of the house—at least to swab out the cabinet that is dusted with flour from a year of sourdough obsession. Oh, and the sourdough itself. I’m deciding whether to make “real” boiled gefilte fish, since my oven blew up and I have only a stovetop this week. I’m “doing the do,” as I often say, mostly happily, with pleasure and anticipation. And I forget God.
At least I would if it weren’t for the occasional sighting of a trillium. I am the last person to wax lyrical about spring flowers, but I can’t help noticing that winter has ended. All those things that happen— sprouts, buds, birdsong, weeds, wind, asparagus, pollen—signal irrepressible change. And a blessed consistency.
I spend a lot of time ruing the damage to our world, the damage I do as a consumer, a driver, a white citizen of a developed nation, all that. In my urgency not to be heedlessly happy about life, I sometimes forget that I am alive and that life is a blessing. Not just because I am not dead, but for the opportunity to breathe, eat, move, smell the flowers, love. Even as I write this I am pounding myself from inside: what about those people who live with dreadful air pollution and can barely breathe? What about the many people who have too little to eat? Those who are confined in jails and can’t move about? Plants and animals brought to extinction? And my part in creating and perpetuating all of it??
But I rue the negation of life because life matters, all of it. Failing, forgetting, not always showing up―that too. I yearn for justice because I want every person to be able to experience this universe with all its grandeur, mystery, and possibility. I yearn for the well-being of our natural world for the same reason, because I want every living thing to have its blessed existence.
I tend to use words like God and life sort of interchangeably. Earlier today, after I had written the above paragraphs, I had to run to town for a bit. I was driving down Albion Ridge thinking about God and life. The air around me was interesting, sunny but blustery, with a little bit of fog mixed in. I had this feeling of life blowing and billowing around me, of the air being filled with life. I felt this not in a technical way, not in a way of bugs and seeds and living stuff blowing around, but more like the intensely living quality of just being on the road in my car on the way to town and thinking about God. Feeling life pressing in all around me. Feeling God, or something Goddish.
The kabbalists teach that, through attention and devotion, we can draw God down into the world. This is part of our human capacity. (I don’t doubt for a moment that plants and animals and landscapes also draw God down into the world, all of us creatures in our own ways.) I can’t explain what it means to draw God down into the world, even though I know we can all do it. “Down,” “God” and “world” are all slippery terms. But we can feel their meanings even if we can’t quite pin them down.
Our mystic predecessors taught practices that help us to engage this capacity. Counting the omer can be one such practice. Beginning the second night of Pesach, and for the next 49 days, we “count the omer,” marking off seven weeks of seven days. On the fiftieth day, we celebrate Shavuot. This counting is commanded twice in Torah (Deuteronomy 16:9-12 and Leviticus 23:10-16) without a lot of explanation. The kabbalists took hold of this commandment and devised a tool, as it were, to draw God’s essence down to earth via the counting. Each week of the omer is associated with a Divine attribute. Each day within the week is also connected with an attribute. By contemplating these pairs of Divine attributes we can—I don’t know exactly how to put it―channel, inhale and exhale, and be in the presence of God.
There are many omer calendars, including the little one I devise every year for our community. Each one helps us connect with the attributes of each day of the omer. I’ve learned so much from our beautiful friend Yael Raff Peskin, who holds this practice close to her heart and shares it in such delightful and interesting ways each year.
For myself, I love counting the omer. (Truth: I love it on the days when I remember to do it!) I love that there is such a beautiful and mysterious ladder between the most elevated aspects of the Universe and the workaday one I usually occupy. I love feeling my own capacity to draw God down to earth through these contemplations. I love being with other people who also explore and engage that capacity.
And it reminds me of much simpler things: remembering God when I’m driving down the road, feeling Godness in the air, feeling the mystery of being in life, of life being in me as well.
Right now the wind is crazy outside. It’s rattling the window and sending a freezing draft through the room. Wind and rattling windows are natural phenomena, but a wind that shakes the room is also exciting and inspiring. It wakes me up to the late-afternoon sunlight, to the cobwebs, to my delicious glass of water. Yes, yes, I so wish that everyone had a house with windows to rattle, and delicious clean water to drink. And that we’d had enough rain this past year that I wouldn’t have to worry about our own well. That place of wishing and ruing is so easy for me to visit. But right now, since I’m thinking about God, a moment of awe drops down upon me. Wind and water are life. And they are a little, inexactly but evocatively, like God.
