
This pre-Rosh Hashana afternoon, as I watch a dive-bombing hummingbird and a dozen others just trying to get a drink from our feeder, my mind is on community. How we can make and keep community. What community is at its best, and how it enacts love as a verb. Why breaking bread, breaking through barriers, and breaking new ground together matters, especially in a time of rough-edged divides, political name-calling, and one-size-fits-all labels that diminish us all.
I’m also thinking of awe: that sense of wonder at the shining edges and in-depth centers of the life force. From the vantage point of the porch I get to witness this regularly in the parade of clouds behind the translucent lines of spider webs where unfortunate moths meet their maker (and the spider). The good dog, realizing I’m not getting up to let him in, lies down gingerly, then collapses to sleep on his side. A hummingbird suspends itself in buzz on the other side of the screen, and the air is brilliantly bright and cool.
At sundown, I’ll be at the Lawrence Jewish Community Congregation, singing, davening (bowing back and forth in prayer), and even dancing at our Rosh Hashana service before the annual cookie orgy that follows, all of which opens the Day of Awe — the 10 days between the new year celebration and Yom Kippur, the day of fasting, prayer and atonement. During this time, we are called to fix anything we screwed up (particularly with other human) this year, based on the premise that while prayer can right us with God, only action can right us with each other. Of course this also entails looking at how we’ve messed things up with ourselves: times we may have acted not from our values and deepest goodness but from our anxieties and fearful badness.
Which gets me back to community and awe: we can’t sustain positive change in our lives without the help of one another. By opening our eyes to the wonder of how we can show up for each other and ourselves, we may just find the right steps, words, breathes, and stillnesses to arrive right where we are, in the promised land of this beautiful life even while trudging through the desert of brokenness, injustice, heartbreak, and grief. Whether you’re Jewish or not, a new year is here for the taking (and I believe in jumping onboard for every new start that rolls on through). Let us walk together, and to all, L’Shanah Tovah (have a good and sweet year).
Here is a poem I wrote about this time:
Entering the Days of Awe
Let us walk unfettered into these days
unfurling in the sun, wide fields of old grasses
bracketed by sunflowers and pebbles.
Let us step into the lapis sky that fastens itself
to the driveway, the sidewalk, the worn leaves
of dying summer under new leaf fall.
Let us give up the wasteful thinking,
the 2 a.m. anxieties over what cannot be changed,
the waking with a gasp. Let us stand in the morning,
the new chill of the air clearing the disgards of time,
fear, reaching too hard or not enough.
Let the wrongs be made right. Let forgiveness
overtake the words we hear and pray, the stories
we’ve made and tilted. Let us remember this dreaming song
from all our beloveds long gone or just over the bend,
each note engraved with lost lands, singing
of how good it is when we dwell together.
Let the peripheral vision in the days of awe show us
the world, the first seeing of the heart, the last pulse
of those we love who travel with us. Let the wind shake
the trees, the tattered leaves shine, the last butterflies
flash their orange, the first dark blue of night
open into a panorama of past and present light
on its way to us all.
Let the next breath we take inscribe us in the book of life.
Let the next breath you give welcome us home.
~ Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg
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