In Deep Water Beauty is Forged

Dear Friends,

On our long morning drive to school Rumi and I were talking about her name. I told her Lila means to play, the feeling when you are doing things you love to do, playing music, raking leaves (she’s into this now), creating something magical. And Rumi, I said, was a great poet from Iran where some of your ancestors are from. And he has lots of books, she said, yes lots of books, a big one called the Mathnawi. He started a new religion and all the people would whirl round and round for hours with big white dresses on, one hand open to heaven, the other down to earth, like the shape of the letter aleph. You used to twirl like that when you were little, on the sand beside the ocean. We recorded one of the songs they twirled to, do you want to hear it? Yes.

The next morning. Can you play that song again Baba. Which one I don’t remember. Your song.  Who played the flute, it’s so beautiful? My teacher Bassam. But how did he do that if he is dead, she asks? We were all there, it was before he died, ten of us sitting in a circle, Megan, me, Bassam, Sam was sitting in the corner painting. Laughter. 

Sometimes the seams of life continue imperceptibly, the days running into weeks and months and years, changes subtle or pronounced but too minuscule in the measure of time to be given consideration. Other changes, death, change of place, the loss of a first tooth so conspicuous the parchment of life feels torn, the story discontinued. This Shabbat concludes the long festival of the new year. We read the end of the book, Moses gazing over the land from the mountaintop, dying at the kiss of God, and then we roll the scroll back, and read the beginning anew. And God said let there be water. Let there be earth. Let there be spirit, wind and light.

I track the changes of my life in the recorded sounds of the Oud, the sounds of the early years like a munchkin wobbling through the world on fresh upright legs, the self discovery of teenage years, power growing, the appreciation for deepening subtlety in sound, fingers, echoes, shadows.

We arrived at a marvelous hypothesis this year. What if God created, that is, what if we created our lives with – let there be water. Of her many qualities, the life giving element is marked by her capacity for depth. In deep water beauty is forged, says Gaston Bachelard. Our consciousness has been guided by the element of light for the three thousand year reign of patriarchy – beauty, surfaces, what the light touches, soul – these have been the ultimate truths. But the aeon before us is an aeon of water. Can we grow wise in the ways of water, it’s yearning for the descent to the deep, spilling down mountain tops toward the hidden reservoirs of the belly of the earth? After so many years of light we are afraid of our own depths, the path of descent. But that work and that place, that inverted temple is the site of the future we are making. I love you not for your face, but for everything that it is hiding, the pangs of your soul that pour through your translucent eyes when you let them. Let’s make a world together from a substance drawn from the deep.

Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Zach Fredman