What is Temenos
Dear Friends,
In the days after the holiday many correspondences were exchanged with friends who have been in our circle for years and with new faces. At first reading, one letter bumped me off my track. But you should never respond before reading things twice, so I have learned. She said, I didn’t really know what I was getting into, I had an idea of what it would be, and it wasn’t that, and I still don’t really know what it is. I winced, but then I read it again. It’s rare to make a work that conveys tenderness, power and magic, and yet it remains unfinished, a sanctuary draped in beauty with rafters open to rain and thunder, an animal hunting in the midst of evolution. There is not a box for what we do yet, but there are creatures with organs to taste its novel sweetness.
We read the Torah with a baby as our pointer, the child who has ancientness in her too, gave over wisdom. The lesser deities of the ancient forest dropped in for the shofar service, blue faces, uncommon appendages, they spoke of tadpoles dreaming legs into being, children birthing grandparents, the extravagance of the color yellow. We became rocks, downloaded the soft-ware of mothers, drowned in drops of water. We reconceived the choreography of bodies, prayed for peace as birds, owls imagining the forgiveness of the future with their sparrow sisters. Bards of ten thousand generations sent us downriver on water harps and lutes strung with hair like corn and suffering. We watercolored our sins away.
When all the prayers had ended and no one was left in the sanctuary save the rabbi alone, in walked Elijah the prophet and his accompanying crooner. He wanted to be photographed beneath the church organ in his fine white dress, and to hear the final blast of the shofar. So the rabbi took the photograph and blew the shofar for Elijah and his accompanying beast, who roared back in delight. He wished all the creatures of our constituency a sweet new year, sealed in mud, fur, and lace.
New intelligences emerged, not from within us, but from thin air, from nothingness that hung quietly unseen in the rafters, nothingness in each of us like sea creatures of the deep that science has yet to discover. With all the knowledge of ceremony that has been passed to us from our teachers, from the kabbalists and sufis of Konya and Gerona, we set the portals up as infinity mirrors and opened pathways to hidden worlds that reside everywhere underneath all of the surfaces, at a breadth three fingers wide, that separates heaven and earth. The cognoscenti made their way to piedmont street at first unitarian in brooklyn heights for the holy days 5784, and I could not be more grateful to be in communion with such a wild wondrous conference of birds.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Zach Fredman
ps - Temenos, Greek not Spanish, M followed by N, is the periphery around a sanctuary that makes all the work inside possible.