Cycles of Seven

Two weeks ago, I had the pleasure of teaching at Limmud Baltimore, one of 60 communities world-wide to sponsor "open-source" Jewish learning days in their home towns.

I spoke about the recurring cycles of seven in Judaism: one day in seven is Shabbat; one year in seven is a sabbatical; one sabbatical in seven is The Jubilee.

Stacking up all these cycles, or better, seeing them embedded one in the other, it seemed to me that these represent so much more than the work/rest or work/release lessons we most often glean from them.

Judaism is a religion that seeks to balance the messy, joyous, frustrating realities of life with a vision of achievement and perfection, of Eden, the World to Come, the realization of Tikkun Olam.

The question is how do we keep motivated, how do we keep hope alive, how do we keep laboring for that ultimate good in the face of so little progress, so much failure, such grand disillusionment?

Judaism's answer, or so it seems to me, is to give us periodic tastes of arrival, regular tastes of accomplishment, in the midst of our daily lives. We work six days a week and then arrive at, not just rest on, the seventh day. At sunset on Friday, we enter a different time and a different place. The world may look the same but it is temporarily transformed into an outpost, an embassy, a suite of time and place that alters who we are and how we behave.

One little known midrash plays on this vision. In 18th century Italy, Jewish women would light the Shabbat candles and say the following prayer: "God of Israel, may  it be Your will to radiate light, joy, happiness, honor, goodness, mercy, prosperity, blessing and peace upon those in heaven and those here below... and may you extend graciousness through the concealed light, the light of all life..."

The "concealed light", ha'or ha'ganuz, is, according to this midrash, the light of the first day of creation. On Day One, in Genesis, God created Light. Not the sun or the moon or the stars. Those came on Day Four.  But Day One saw the birth of Light, the primordial, generative light that feeds all life.

This light (unlike the solar light we are familiar with) was so powerful it lit up the universe from one end to the other. It was so powerful it would have incinerated material life should it remain loose in the world.

So, to create the world, God gathered this primordial light of perfection and tucked it away under the divine throne to be kept safe and sound for the End of Days and the World to Come.

It is, however, released once a week, when the Shabbat candles are lit. Those two flames are emissaries of this primordial light, and portals to the world of perfection they promise.

Judaism tells us that the six days, years, cycles we work are not separate from the goal we strive for. They are the path that will get us there. And lest we despair, and give in to frustration, or believe that what we do matters not, we are gifted each week (each seventh year, each Jubilee) with increasing levels of Arrival, of a taste of being there.

The cycles, then, are much more than work and rest. They are pursuit and destination, achievement and arrival. They are what drives our work and gives us a blessedly recurring, and reliable, taste of our dreams.

(More on the differences between Shabbat, Shemittah (the seventh year), and the Jubilee (the seventh seventh year) in posts to come.

What do we pack?

 An older woman told a pastor friend of mine recently that she was going blind. She seemed amazingly obliging about the news. Having given herself over to what would come, she was working on preparing herself for the change. "I guess I am going to have to memorize my favorite portions of the Bible," she told him.

"Packing," I told my friend. "She was packing up the things she would need for this move to a new place in her life." 

What a wise and gentle woman. Without fanfare, without fuss, she was taking stock of what this change would require her to leave behind, and what she could and should take along to manage it.

We all face these "moves" at various times in our lives, most of the time when we are alone. Some of these are more modest, like traveling by ourselves or giving a book report before 40 fifth-grade critics. Others are big, like surgery or taking a new job that takes us hundreds of miles from home. 

What we pack to help us live in the move is determined by what we have stored up over the years. These are different gifts than the coping skills we employ to help us get past a transition. These are, instead, what makes the essence of us: the teachings, the voices, the visions, the ever-constant sense of belonging that bury themselves deep inside, clinging to our innards and our spirit so that it becomes impossible to separate self from luggage.

And then, when we move, as eventually we all must, we must exercise the art of packing.

In between, in preparation, as we live the hours and days of our lives in the more secure places of here and now, we should be storing up the lessons and learnings, the moments and memories that pile upon us, as much as we can. I am, by nature, not a pack rat. Indeed, straightening closets, discarding things and making empty space brings me great joy.

But there, in my spiritual attic (which I seem to  enter more easily these days, prodded by a gentle tug of the attic door's dangling cord of scents and sights and sounds), it seems I can never get enough.

So I am trying harder, eager to hold fast to the visions around me: of a tiny white pine nestled improbably in a nook of a gnarled old dogwood; and the different shades of green of the tulip poplars in April and August; and our neighbors' glen on a summer's night flashing endlessly, silently, with battalions of lightning bugs charging up 100 foot trees. And a thousand more memories of loved ones' laughter, stories, lessons, and wisdom.

These - and others - are things I will store away in the attic, ready to be packed and taken with me when times get hard; when winter winds blow; and when the next step is mine to take alone.

Blowing Up

It was about 7:00 pm Sunday when a text came through on my phone warning me about a possible thunderstorm passing through.  (Yup. I get The Weather Channel's foul weather warnings texted to me. I love it.)

Yea, sure, I thought. There was nothing but  bright blue sky all around, the end of a lovely day that was ending a lovely weekend. So I saddled up my tennis shoes, grabbed my cell phone and headed out the door.

I wanted to go out and photograph the 3 or 4 fruit trees my husband and I had seen the day before on a Shabbat walk, sans phone. We believe we found an apple tree, a chestnut tree, some berry trees, a walnut tree and another tree which we could not even take a guess at. As always, in such situations, I try to take a photograph and send it to my friend Charlie Davis, head of the Natural History Society of Maryland, a wonderful group of naturalists and friends who devote themselves to preserving and interpreting the natural history of our state, and educating the rest of us about it.

So off I went, out the door by 7:06 - in the streaming sunshine. Although, come to think of it, when I looked really hard, it did, almost imperceptibly, seem to be a bit darker than usual for that hour of the day. So, just in case, I decided to alter my route so that it would take me on a circuit that, while allowing me to walk for miles should I wish, would also never leave me further than 10 minutes away from home.

I was not outside for 5 minutes before the bulbous, bulging leading edge of an enormous dark sky appeared atop trees on the jutting ridge that formed the hill I liked to walk. "Really?" I muttered.

I then heard the rushing, rustling, vibrant sound that I always confuse: water or leaves, friend or foe. I checked the stream. It wasn't the water. I looked up at the towering trees. They weren't moving either. Yet.

It was, I realized, the trees behind them, down the other side of the rise. The wind was coming up the valley wall, pushing the sound even before it began to push the leaves. By this time, the dark clouds looked like a monster bent on consuming the sky before it.

A man and his dog came out to investigate. Yup, we determined, it looks like it is going start blowing up soon.

It was time to head back home. The fast-moving clouds had overtake me by then; they had devoured the sun and it felt like they were coming after me. The wind had caught up too, strong enough to send showers of leaves and small branches raining down to the ground. Which is where I was - and I still needed to get through the back woods to my house, beneath a bountiful but not always sturdy canopy of poplars.

A deer and I eyed each other, both knowing that we needed to find shelter soon. If it hadn't been so exciting, and if I hadn't been so close to home, I might have been frightened. It truly felt like the world was being engulfed by a darkening, drenching monster.

I got home 7:36. The rains started in earnest 7:48 or so.

It is still dark as I write; still raining, though not the thunderous, pounding rain of monsters. Just the gentle rain of a warm summer day.

I wonder if all thunderstorms feel like this and act like this and I just never paid attention.

All I know is, it was pretty awesome.