January, 2022 Megillah
RABBI'S NOTES
The Winter Solstice (and my birthday!) have now passed, and supposedly the days start getting longer. But oh, baby, we all know that the longest and darkest days are really in late January, on into February, when we haven’t seen the sun in months. And this year we slog into 2022 with Omicron doing whatever it’s doing, and who even knows what letter of the Greek alphabet comes after Omicron?
In that spirit let me tell you a little story: One fall day a couple years ago I was shopping at Corners and, when I came out, I saw two women I hardly knew leaning against one of their cars chatting. One of them must have waved, because I walked across the street to say hello. On the car was a sticker that read, “Ask me about rowing.”
So I did and then I joined this group of women, none of whom I knew well at all, in a weekly row in the Helen Dee, a wooden whale boat, on the Noyo River. I loved the rowing and the (moderate) level of seriousness that the crew brought to the endeavor.
Occasionally a holiday or a birthday would come up, and a message would go around that everyone should wear Day of the Dead costumes or blue for the waves or whatever. I’m not the costume-iest person, but I would go along, and we would laugh and take pictures even while we worked on our strokes. One day, when unfortunately I couldn’t row, the crew all dressed as RBG.
When my birthday came along in December it fell on our rowing day, and I was asked in advance what special garb I would like for the day. I was tempted to say, “regular clothes,” but I figured I didn’t need to be such a curmudgeon. So I said, “Leopard print.”
The day of the row came, and those women came dressed head to toe in animal regalia—all for me! I had only known them a couple months, and I was really touched at how silly they were willing to look in my honor.
For the first and only time I can remember, there was debris on the river that day and it was decided that it wasn’t safe to row. So what should a bunch of women in leopard print do at noon? I suggested we head over to the Golden West bar, which we did. We laid out the voluminous cookies, chips and other snacks we had brought for the row, got some margaritas, played some shuffleboard and turned on the jukebox.
A while later, to my endless delight, we were dancing to the Monkees and laughing our heads off.
Skip ahead to COVID. It wasn’t safe to row, sitting next to each other, breathing hard. Later in the year our boat became unavailable, and our rowing life was over, at least for the foreseeable future. But one of the rowers loves to plunge into icy water, and for her birthday that year she invited the crew to join her. I missed the birthday plunge, but somehow it was set that we would meet weekly and plunge in Big River. I did it now and then. Along the way a “Happy Birthday” banner got created and was unreeled when appropriate. Add to that snacks, costumes, a super-sweet chocolate liqueur called Mozart. Sometimes we would meet and use kayaks. On one birthday we paddled up to a sand bar in the river; when the banner was unfurled, it became “Jennifer Island.”
Another time the crew slipped into someone’s yard early in the morning and decorated her fence with birthday cards and signs.
By a statistical fluke, three of the ten or so of us have birthdays in the same week of December. So plans began to be made some weeks ago for a celebration. We decided to meet at the Mac House tent for a drink. Sounded simple and low-key. On the appointed date I arrived to find the birthday banner strung up across the back of the tent, decorations on tables, a rack of earrings made from Christmas ornaments for each of us to take, hats and crowns, stacks of presents (mostly lovingly selected at thrift stores) a nd cards, cupcakes with sparklers, an inflatable picture frame that sometimes shows up at events. My heart just burst open and I realized how necessary and nourishing and deeply holy all this silliness really is.
Blessedly, there are lots of different ways to show support and love to other people, and we’ve all been called on to employ many of them these past two years. We can call and check in, send notes of concern, offer food and rides, pray, and visit (when safe). We can support community endeavors and work to bring justice closer to reality. But fun and play have seemed to attenuate a bit in the seriousness of the times we’re in. Maybe it seems a little insensitive to be goofing off during such times. Or maybe it’s hard to get in the spirit of costumes and banners when life feels generally pretty heavy.
I’ve written and taught in the past about the annual cycle of Jewish holidays: how taken together, or sequentially really, over the course of a year they provide a kind of balanced diet of feelings and ideas. We might even think of the year of holidays as a menu or prescription for the necessary ingredients for a full emotional and spiritual life. For example, the holidays of deep winter are Tu B’Shevat and Purim. Tu B’Shevat is the most sensual of our holy days, when we touch and smell and savor many different fruits, then bite into them slowly, move them around our mouths and let the sheaf (divine abundance) seeded in each fruit begin to open up as we taste and chew and swallow. Then comes Purim—costumes, noise, jokes, bawdiness, intoxication of one sort or another…lightly managed bad behavior—when we cheer for our heroes and drown out the names of our enemies.
Wise ancestors! We need an extra dose or two or three of pleasure and fun during these cold days. In the spirit of the inventors of Tu B’Shevat and Purim. I hope to escalate my devotion to pleasure and merriment. In keeping with the wise lessons of my rowing sisters, I would like to be clever in how I do so, cooking up any necessary workarounds to the obstacles that would block fun and delight.
Which leads me to a little sabbatical note. Despite my aforementioned love of shenanigans, I have intentionally been very quiet and rather solitary: reading, contemplating, resting. It’s been wonderful, and I am so thankful for this time. However, I can’t begin to tell you how much I miss you all! How grateful I am to all of you who keep up the spirit of community and connection and celebration while I’m away. During the Hanukkah party, Mickey was zooming upstairs. I could hear some of the laughter and murmur of voices and song, though I wasn’t really listening. Suddenly I was surprised by a phone in my face as Mick said, “Someone wants to say hello…” or something like that.
I looked quickly at the squares I could see on the phone, and my heart took a leap—there you all were! I felt such a burst of joy. I am so glad to be in life with all of you, even from the distance of my sabbatical.
Wishing you cozy times—and some sensual delight and ribaldry—during these chilly dark days. May we all be well in body and spirit until we come back together for the serious matters of spring time!
