Fall Hunter Moon
When Kate and I drove home from the kol nidre service at Beth Evergreen last night, the Hunter Moon lit up a sky covering labyrinth of white fluffy clouds. Occasionally, a few clouds would become very bright, then a hole would open, briefly, and the three quarter moon would not only backlight the cloud cover, but provide a luminous presence, too. It was a magical sky, a sort that seems particular to the onrushing fall. Aspens still blaze bright gold in some places, in others the leaves have turned brown and blown away leaving stands of naked branches as harbingers of the winter months.
The kol nidre service starts Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, and has many elements, most elements, new to me. Even so, I could tell that this service with roots in the middle ages as well as the ancient past, spoke of a people, a tribe, with a nuanced understanding of what it means to be human. We are neither angels nor devils, rather we do good one minute and bad the next. Knowing this, placing it at the heart of the most sacred day of the year, makes Judaism a powerful poem. It teases out the curious mix of pride and shame that inhabits us all, says, yes, ok, but now let’s focus on next year. Let’s seek pardon and forgiveness for where we failed and reinforcement for what was good.
I feel odd at Beth Evergreen. My physiognomy is out of place. The language of many of the prayers and songs is foreign to me. I don’t feel, and don’t expect to feel, part of the tribe. Yet, Kate feels, is, part of the tribe. Also, much of the content resonates with my own faith reimagining project.
I’m learning, at 69, that analytical thought is not the best tool for religious insight. Rather, the heart and its contradictions, its powerful pushes and pulls, can create a warm and joyous place where even the most egregious of errors can be contained without problem.
Working on homeowners insurance right now, a fraught topic in the red zone. The red zone, which I have mentioned before, is the area in Colorado most likely to experience wildfire. Jefferson County, our home county is the long, narrow county which abuts the southwest side of the Denver metro (gray blob, high center right). We are smack in the middle of Jeffco’s redzone.
Final activity for yesterday was changing the oil in the snowblower. If you have any mechanical aptitude, this is probably not worth mentioning. In my case the material world and I struggle every time we come in contact. I did get the job done, but it took much more thinking and jiggering than it might have. Example: to drain the oil the snowblower has to be tipped over on its side, but not fall over. That meant balancing the snowblowers unwieldy bulk with my legs while my arms prevented it from tipping over all the way. The result was dependence on my knees for backward stability. And that left one isn’t working so well right now. Gave me a couple of interesting moments.
Speaking of seasons, this is not the silly season; it’s the Insane Clown Posse season. When a reactionary like Mike Pence gets kudos for a stable debate performance, the world has gone seriously out of whack. This is a guy who tried to abrogate the first amendment, destroy unions, and denigrates women. The only reason he looked less than totally unappealing is the comparison to his running mate, Donald the Hair Trump. OK, Kaine wasn’t much better, but, hey, these guys were picked as Vice-Presidential candidates for a reason. Whatever it was.
Yesterday was a reading day, getting up to speed on the middot (character trait) of watchfulness. The notion of Mussar is to take character traits like watchfulness, explicate them, then practice them. Literally. Mussar encourages taking a character trait like watchfulness, then working over the period of a month to manifest it in your life or raise your observance of it to a higher level. Watchfulness entails what a Jesuit might call examen. Paying attention to your behavior, becoming conscious of it rather than letting it flow by out of habit unnoticed, that’s the first part.
Yesterday included three separate trips into Evergreen. First, I took Kate in for the morning Rosh Hashanah service at Beth Evergreen. Then, I came back to answer questions, be available for the electrician and the painter. At noon I went back to pick up Kate and eat the after service lunch with her. All these trips included waits in two spots on Brook Forest Road for culvert repair. Stop. Slow. Stop. Slow.
There were kugels in aluminum pans, bagels with lox and cream cheese or chopped egg, fresh cut vegetables, fruit. Paper plates and plastic forks. Lots of eating and greeting. Some very short skirts. Some men carried small cloth pouches containing prayer shawls and yarmulkes. Kids ran around,
My fellow traveler shoes are beginning to get a lot of mileage on them at Congregation Beth Evergreen. The Rabbi there, Jamie Arnold, is a very sweet guy, empathetic, bright, learned, good singing voice. At the Mussar midday session yesterday we looked again at the first chapter of Mesillat Yesharim. There are many important ideas in it, two stand out for me right now.
The second idea is that we can be tempted, pulled away from delight and joy, by both prosperity and adversity. Recalling this simple, but far from obvious truth about the human condition helps us see that our material advantages are not the core focus of our lives. Our material success is incidental to the spiritual journey-unless it distracts us from it.
Interesting intersection of past and present yesterday. In my Christian days, I explored many different forms of spiritual practice, including a Benedictine form called lectio divina. Turns out a Rabbi is teaching a version of lectio to other rabbis for use, in particular, with Torah study. Bonnie, a rabbi in training who attends Beth Evergreen, modified it to use in our Mussar study.