Generosity & Loneliness
Homework -- Read Lewis Hyde’s The Gift with me
New Epichorus Video -- Yedid Nefesh
Dear Friends,
I made a peach pie to close out the summer. Bathed it in cinnamon and brown sugar. Any other year the pie would be an offering to the gods of summer in gratitude for the sun and bounty they bestowed, just as we turn into the alternate rhythms of school, September, the new year. But our rhythms have been radically altered. And I’m certain, more than ever, we’re in need of a High Holiday season in order to process and speak language over the too-muchness we’ve all been through.
Over the holidays this year we’re going to meditate on GENEROSITY & LONELINESS. I chose these themes out of the intuition that the isolation which the pandemic commanded necessitated a posture to balance the scales. Our bodies were forced to distance from one another -- walking the streets of the city as if any person might be a carrier of plague. And by natural magnetism, our spirits followed into that isolation. Generosity is going to be our doorway back to each other.
I’m really excited about something new I’ve cooked up -- a MONTHLY SPIRITUAL CHECK-UP. Wouldn’t it be great to check in with a friend or spiritual mentor regularly? I believe this modality will deepen our health as individuals, in families, and in community. I want real change, healing permeating through all of our circles. To do that, we have to open up to each other about what is and isn’t working. Read the page at the link, and then call me!
If you’re looking for some spiritual homework please join me in reading Lewis Hyde’s The Gift. It’s a marvelous meditation on generosity, gift-economies, the rituals that create community, and the nature of art and spirituality. Next week, I’ll offer some more meditations and exercises for deepening into the new year season.
The month leading to the new year, Elul, is a season of spiritual intimacy and ease, a time to really focus on the practices that center and ground us. In the language of the tradition, God has left the gilded palace of the heavens to play and be with the workers of the field. That is, God is eager to be amongst us. If we open our hearts to her, as wide as the eye of a needle, she will open to us.
Wishing you a Shabbat of love and peace and joy,
Rabbi Zach Fredman