Call of the Heavens

Dear Friends,

First day of school was a bust. The one friend she knew was unwelcoming. Day two was a score, she made a new friend, her best friend now, and playdates are in the works, though she doesn’t know her name. It starts with an R. The heat wave to open school was not entirely unwelcome. We made some final summer trips to the water, and the immersions felt like pilgrimage to the mikvah, to wash away the unwanted debris of season's transition, to remind ourselves that we are waterlike, ichorous, our form capable of becoming supple, to reanimate for the year ahead. But by the end of the heat I was wrecked, I was nauseous last night, exhausted and couldn’t understand what was coming over me.

I left the holiday preparations to themselves, figured I’d shower and get to bed early, rest more productive than work. Right as I was about to get in the shower, the sounds of wind and rain surrounded the house, lightning cracked, and I let out an impromptu “thank god,” that came from my bones, and I realized immediately how bound up I was with the world. I wanted to feel the storm, to listen to its discourse, and let it work directly on my skin. Completely naked I went out to the back of the house, but the wind blowing through the willow was terrifying, its giant limbs like a flailing sea creature, I was sure it was going to fall on me or the house, and I ran to Zivar like a child. The storm at the front of the house was tolerable. I stood on the porch and inched forward beneath the two mighty catalpas, bride and groom whose love and strength is unwavering, and watched the curtain of sky pulled open beneath their branches. Lightning like a strobe, delicate cool rain, thunder as if at the end of a long paragraph, slow and deep, the distance between me and the storm.

I let it think me. I passed over the reigns of my chariot, your turn to drive. I think we understand intelligence all wrong. It is not isolated, containable, every being is a thinking feeling thing in its own way, and we are all moved, touched, shaped, affected, by the beings with which we share life. The storm spoke to me about the state of the skies, about the state of my own skies, and the beings of my home whose skies I share. The storm gave me my next assignments, as if it were my first day of school, tasks lofty and seemingly inconsequential, use this song in the shofar service, ask Zivar about the dreams that kept her up last night, schedule a Shvitz Club meet before the holiday. Where is wisdom to be found?  In me, no. It is coming out of nothing, emerging from the space between beings, from between myself naked, and the material imagination of the sky. 

Last days of the year, light of the moon dripping out, shofar calls resounding in the distance. Days of becoming mutable, like the creature of the cocoon that is no longer caterpillar, but not yet butterfly, organs, blood, bones, all reconstituting. There are messengers about who are privy to the secrets of our future. They are not the beings we ordinarily endow with intelligence. The dirt and the leaves, groundhogs with great swagger in their behinds, crickets singing their swansongs, candle light and an empty page. I am listening. Where is wisdom to be found?

Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Zach Fredman