October, 2021 Megillah
RABBI'S NOTES
Before Sukkot started, on the full moon of Tishrei, I had already had some Sukkot (mis)adventures. Mickey and I love building a sukkah. We always use the same highly sophisticated technology: bamboo poles and duct tape. But the structure itself comes out different every year. Sort of like tinker toys. This year, Mick leapt up last Friday morning, seemingly just minutes after we had broken the fast at the end of Yom Kippur and fallen deliriously into bed. Good morning! Time to build our sukkah! So we did. It was seven-sided, oval-ish, not our biggest ever, but pretty good-sized, kinda weirdly shaped. Very much our style.
The next day, Shabbat, there was that glorious rainfall. And, speaking of “fall,” our sukkah collapsed. I laughed when I saw it. It pancaked!
Mick was gone the next couple of days, so clearly, if we wanted a sukkah by the beginning of the festival, today was the day. He woke up talking about it: “Let’s skip it this year.” “Let’s make a really tiny one, just a teepee.” I said, Okay, sure, how about a circle of rope on the ground (our retreat sukkah invention one year, not quite kosher but surprisingly powerful). He went off to work today and while he was gone, I went out and built us another big oval, weirdly shaped, bamboo and duct tape sukkah. I just couldn’t let it be simple. So now I’m cooling off and thinking about simple.
We are in the shmita year—that beautiful, challenging every-seventh-year time when we let things just be. There is a technical shmita, which pertains to farmers in Israel and has many specifics as to how it’s carried out. Torah commands farmers to stop plowing, sowing and harvesting, to let the land rest. They are to open the gates of their field and allow both hungry people and animals to graze freely. Creditors are commanded to forgive debt.
There is also a shmita of the spirit, the time to cease cultivating and growing and building, to let oneself and the world rest from our enterprises. The shmita gave rise to the concept of sabbatical, the seventh year to rest and restore, a topic of much interest to me just now, as I am days from beginning my own sabbatical.
Our Women’s Retreat this past summer was centered around the theme of the shmita: ease, simplicity, rest, fallowness, letting things be. Ronite Gluck, Ellen Robin and I—the program planning troika—tried to keep things spacious, simple, easy. But, you know, easy is not so easy. Back to my sukkah-building enterprises: “What will people think if we don’t build a real sukkah? If we don’t even make a sukkah, no one here ever will. It will make the holiday sad, and it’s supposed to be the Season of our Joy. If we just do something really modest, we will never go back to building more elaborate and exciting structures. Does this mean we’re getting lazy? OLD?”
I had a beautiful friend, Steve Doll, who died of AIDS back in 1993. Before he died, Steve wrote a little chapbook with his “rules of life” to leave with his friends. I just took out my copy and refreshed myself with his words:
Easy is high on my list. I think I always believed that life could be easy, all the time. Now I’m trying it out. (Initial test results are positive.) So, I “take it easy.” I don’t work hard, I work easy, cause when I’m relaxed, my brain works more easily. I don’t have to think hard anymore. Or make hard decisions. Things are no longer hard to come by — they come easy. I think easy. Easy come, easy go.
Believe that though life is inevitably an effort, annoying, a struggle, challenging, complicated, confusing, demanding, distracting, dreary, full of surprises, overwhelming, MESSY, painful, resistant, stressful, tough and troubling, it doesn’t have to be HARD. And life can be less of all these things, and more fun and rewarding depending on how you play it. And the more I work at and practice “easy,” the easier things get.
Heaven knows the earth could use our easing up a little bit. So could our own health and peace of mind. I am thankful and happy about my upcoming sabbatical. I can hardly wait! I am “planning” (i.e., not planning) a true sabbatical, a true shmita, a time of release, of fallowing, of resting hand and heart, of “practicing easy.” I have no plans, no goals other than being in the time with a whole heart. I will let what pops up in the little field of my life during this time be what sustains me. Whatever that turns out to be.
I wish everyone could have a shmita, a sabbatical. I feel privileged in both the healthy and the unhealthy way: deeply grateful for what I have, and simultaneously pained that only a very lucky few receive this gift. I hope that all of you will find ways this shmita year to move toward ease a bit now and then, to throw a rope on the ground every once in a while and call it good enough.
Even as I prepare to fallow myself, I feel that scramble inside: “I should… I could… I have to… Who will if I don’t? How can I not?” Easy isn’t always easy.
During the six months of my sabbatical I will keep you posted via the Rabbi’s Notes on my practice of easy. I hope you will be practicing right along with me. I love you all. I thank you all. Be well, my dear community.
