Wake Up Sleepy Head
Dear Friends,
When I asked the keeper of the farmstand if there were any peaches left, she directed me to a four line poem she had written on a miniature chalkboard hanging from a beam to my left. The first line said the peaches are done, the second line allowed a pause for sadness, the third line I forget, and the fourth directed me to the apples. For those with children, the shifting seasons coincide with first day of school pictures, parents throwing secret festivals of ecstasy within themselves at the thought of regular childcare. And the new year, always concurrent to the taste of this cooling air, give or take some weeks, in the midst of personal hulabloos, we come together for ceremonies to mark the creation and recreation of the world, the world god is creating today, different from the days in which clear waters ran under the tree of life.
More than the Christmas new year resolutions, vows of diet or practice, the ceremonies of Rosh Hashanah create space for soul gazing. This many years into my life – Who am I? Who do I wish to become this year? What will I make? What is for me to repair, within myself, between friends and family, in community, how I live in relationship with water and earth and god?
We start to hear the shofar now, the call of awakening. What does it mean to be awake? How to know when we are sleeping, what we are asleep to? Maimonides gives it over this way …
Wake up sleepers from your sleep. Slumberers quit your slumber. Consider your ways and return in teshuvah and remember your creator. Those who forget the truth amidst the vanities of the moment and are infatuated all their years with emptiness and nothingness that’s of no use or value. Look at your souls, fix your path and your motivations! Abandon your misguided ways, and your thinking which lacks goodness. It is necessary for every person to consider themselves half good, and half guilty. And also the world, half good, half guilty. If you sin [err] then the whole world is tipped to the side of guilt, causing destruction. But one good deed, tips the whole world to virtue, brings help and protection. (Maimonides Hilchot Teshuva 3:4)
Not quite adjusted to country living, various members of the household meet bugs in the hearth with extravagant reactions. The first evening I gently shooed a moth with a broom down the stairs and out the door. The next night after Rumi and I went out to gaze at the waxing moon, the sky goddess and her stars which are foreigners to our city kid, we brought three moths in with us. I hooked up our mighty new vacuum and the moths disappeared. The first moth, tips the world to goodness, the triplets, three tugs toward destruction. At a time when the world really does feel like it’s hanging in the breach by a thread, every moth might really be the one to save us.
We are gathering kindling for the first ceremony, all the dried bramble, the branches of the year with no life in them anymore. These will be the fuel of the offering. Bring what you can, old wood and new shoots, wisdom and heart, beauty, exhaustion, kindness, friendship, broken in yearning, truth, poetry, bubbles and smores. See you at the altar.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Zach Fredman