I return from a 6-week leave of absence with questions – raised by an unfortunate meeting of home and car, about my own mind’s sudden leave of absence.
And I return with the desire to honor the beautiful drashing and spiritual leadership brought forward in my absence by Shoshana Fershtman, D’vorah Grenn, Leiah Bowden, Neshamah Faraone, Rinat Abastado, Sally Churgel, Judith Goleman, Basha Hirschfeld, and Shari Brenner, and the Torah poems of Rita Losch.
Welcome home, me!
It was a good 6 weeks. I worked hard. I studied and wrote. And no, I didn’t finish everything. I’ll still be doing this school work on the side and I think they’ll graduate me anyway because they’ve had enough of me.
The time was busy and full and it was nice to have an energetic shift – a change in rhythm. I was free to shift my attention because so many gifted leaders – Shoshana and D’vorah and Leiah and Neshamah and Rinat and Sally and Judith and Basha and Shari stepped up to lead this congregation so creatively and skillfully and gifted us with so much wisdom and vision! And I was free to shift my attention because the Board and committees didn’t so much need me, and because Shari took over creating and editing our Ner Shalom eBlasts and editing the Ner Shalom website and ticket sites, which I should’ve given up years ago but I’m possessive and prideful and it took this leave of absence to finally let go of it, and it’s going to stay let gone of.
This time off was also an opportunity to notice how this farkakte year has landed in me – bewildering me and exhausting me. Living in this strange mix of normal and not normal. Noticing how out of it I can be. I leave the house, faithfully wearing a mask, with my glasses steaming up and my brain struggling to remember all the important details of distance and movement, until all movement feels unnatural and all communication feels strained.
Last Sunday I had a get-together outdoors at a seminary in San Anselmo where I am enrolled in a chaplaincy program on Zoom. It was a meeting of my classmates. I’ve grown to know these people well but have never met any of them in the flesh. We gathered, and it was odd. Because we were masked, then we were unmasked and distanced, and of course we couldn’t touch or hug. So it was unsatisfying and maybe disorienting in its own way. I couldn’t decide if it felt like I’d actually met them or not. It wasn’t until we were back on Zoom this week that they all looked properly like themselves.
When we ended our hour together, I had to run an errand – swing by a friend’s home in San Anselmo drop off some mail for him that had come to our house.
I pulled into his driveway and opened the car door. I was still listening to something on NPR while I was gathering up his mail. There were people down the block and I was wondering if I needed to put my mask back on for form’s sake, even though I was far from them. I decided I didn’t need to. So I sprang out of the car and trotted to the mailbox. As I opened it I saw movement out of the corner of my eye. There was my car, the door open, continuing to proceed up the driveway. Without me. As if in slow motion. As if in a dream. I watched as the car slowly rolled over a Japanese maple sapling and came to rest against the house.
I ran after the car, not because I could catch it but because what else could I do? When it stopped, I dove in, threw it in reverse and backed away from the house. Now at last I put the car properly in park and got out to inspect. The bumper of the car had housepaint on it. The downspout on the house was bent out of shape. The Japanese maple was unaffected except for now having a story to tell its grand-seedlings about its youthful pliability and resilience.
Out of all four of us – car, house, tree, and me – I took it the hardest. I was shaken, embarrassed, frightened. How could I have done something like this? So stupid and absent-minded? Where was my mind? Where was I? I’ve put so much energy into being present – or at least engaged – during these long months of pandemic and lockdown and uprising and election. Maybe my mind or some part of me finally said, “Enough.”
Last week in this room, Reb Neshama said that it is in moments of being fully awake, fully present, that she realizes how much of the time she is not fully present. For me it was this moment of extreme absence that made me worry about how much of the time I am not quite there.
I guess on some level I’m ashamed of the part of me that needs time off. Somewhere inside I feel that when I’m not doing, not producing, my value drops. If I were to root around, I’d be forced to theorize that this is a lifelong displacement of childhood gay shame. I think that maybe as a kid I believed that if I was productive enough – with lots of clever words and music and exciting outcomes – no one would notice that other part of me that I was ashamed of.
So the busy in me has always been relentless, cruel even. A few Shabboses ago Reb Dvorah asked, “How would our lives have been different if we had been celebrated for our true nature?” After asking this, she went on to assert: “We are, each of us, enough.”
We are – each of us – enough.
Just saying those words makes me breathe differently. On another recent Shabbat, Reb Judith also asked us to honor what is in us. She asked us to imagine what it would take to go to our true selves, “the part . . . that shines with God’s light.”
Well I see Reb Judith and raise her one. What would it take for us to see God’s light in all the parts of ourselves? Including the parts we are so quick to judge and dismiss? Would it be, as Reb Shoshana described one night, like rolling a stone off a well and feeling Shechinah, feeling Divine love, flow! Bucket after bucket of it. A bottomless well of blessing!
That’s how I think it would feel if we could see the Divine in all the parts of ourselves.
I know it’s not so easy to do. We have trained ourselves to love some parts and not love others. The habit is so engrained. But as Reb Basha said one Shabbos, “Leave what is familiar.” And she identified the risk and reward of doing so. She said, “To leave what is familiar and step into the unknown requires trust, faith...”
And indeed! Honoring all the parts of ourselves! Departing from our old patterns that way? It does require faith! And trust! That if we really look at all the parts of us, we will see that they are all worthy of love. That it all comes from the same Source. It’s not like God created the noble-seeming parts of us and the rest got outsourced somewhere. All of it is holy and worthy of love.
This is not only a kind of faith and trust. It is a kind of self-forgiveness. Which is hard for some of us to do, but maybe doesn’t need to be. As Reb Sally said one recent Shabbat:
The act of forgiveness
Is simply the act of continuing to live
Without malice or regret
Just spin your filaments of desires
Allow them to attach where they can
Go about the business of your life
Forgiving ourselves, forgiving the parts of us that we are habituated not to approve of. Seeing the holiness in all of this. I think that would roll the stone right off the well. It would let the light in – and out! – more fully. As Reb Leiah reminded us one recent Shabbos, “The world needs your Light.”
So why not let our light shine fully? Not just for our own sakes. But for others! As Reb Shari reminded us a few weeks ago, “We never know the repercussion of our actions . . . but we know that when we are thinking of and acting on behalf of others, it is a blessing.”
Seeing the Divine in all the parts of ourselves, letting loose all that light, is not a selfish act. It is for the good of our families and our communities and our future. We need all of us to access all that is in us. Reb Leiah encouraged us in this, saying, “Modesty has no place in the healing of the world.” And Reb Rinat added, two weeks ago, “We live in times that call on . . . our inner strength. . . . [W]e are the ones we have been waiting for.”
At the end of the day, we are human beings, living in a physical world, separate from each other, with all sorts of limitations. Each of us contains conflicting ideas, longings, instincts, strategies, pride, shame, fear and hope. As Reb Rita Losch said in her poem last Shabbat, “Inside each of us struggles a pair of mismatched twins.”
Or triplets. Or quintuplets. Or a whole brood.
We don’t need all the parts of us to agree with each other. We just need them to forgive. As we read in Torah tomorrow, Jacob and Esau, the mismatched twins, at last kiss and weep. They don’t move back in together, but they have reconciled nonetheless.
So for me, I need to make peace with the part of me that needs to rest and breathe. And forgive the part of me that thinks I should be doing all the time. And the part that is muddled. And the part that is tired. And the part of me that got out of a car while it is still in gear. And love and see the Divine in all those complicated, kooky, beloved pieces. And in doing so, I will trust. I will trust.