Samain Bare Aspen Moon
Wednesday, adult Hebrew at 4:30 with Rabbi Jamie. Then, kabbalah at 7 p.m. Thursday. Mussar at 1 pm. Then mussar leadership group at 6:30 p.m. Result? Both nights up past my bedtime and an 8 a.m. rising this morning. Oooffdah, as we would have said back in the land of the frozen mustache.
I’m in a graduate program in Jewish studies by immersion. The learning is constant and interesting. Beth Evergreen has made me a better person, calmer and even more introspective.
Judaism is humane and that aspect of it appeals to me. A lot. Example. Rich Levine, the lawyer who did our estate documents, attended the MVP meeting last night. He had, he said, with his brother just unveiled his father’s gravestone. Is this a common custom, I asked? Yes, he said, most if not all Jews follow it. A loved one is buried, then not more than a year later, a gravestone is erected. The wait considers a journey the deceased needs to make that can last as long as a year. But, Rich said, you don’t want to make them think that you think it would take them a whole year, so usually the gravestone goes up somewhere between 10 and 11 months after burial. Much less fraught then.
This morning I had to retrieve parts of my hearing aid, (my $3,200 aid) from Rigel’s depredations. Aaarrggh. Hippety hop to the hearing aid shop in Littleton. Still under warranty, so a shot at repair first; and, if repair’s not possible, then a loss and damage claim for a new hearing aid with a $250 deductible. About a week or so.
My sweetie took me out to lunch at Okinawa Sushi to soothe me. Rigel also ate the mustache trimmer I had received and unboxed only an hour before. So, double aarrggh. We may have to consider where we deposit things. It’s possible Rigel is a neat freak advocating for a clutter free home.
Today is now officially a rest day. No working out. No writing. Just naps and replacing ruined items. Tomorrow there’s a service at Beth Evergreen focused on sexual harassment. Kate and I will be there.
CC’s work with Maslow sparked a conversation about the difference between human agency in moving up the pyramid as opposed to the necessity of God’s agency. Within my worldview this is a false dichotomy, but the conversation was fruitful. It’s a false dichotomy to me for two reasons. 1. How else would God move someone up the pyramid save through human agency? 2. Since I see energy moving up and down the tree of life, from the invisible to the visible and back through the visible to the invisible, this energy flow is the key agency involved, imh. I might call it chi, or prana, or l’chaim. Could also call it divine or vitality or consciousness. I don’t see that adding God to the conversation accomplishes much.
In the end I felt heard and honored for my understanding of the relationship between the cyclical turn of the seasons and the meaning of the tree of the life to kabbalists.
Since I have long believed that the world’s religions are philosophy and poetry accessible to all, I remain eager to learn from them. Since I know their claims cannot all be true, I choose to remain outside them, yet to walk with them as part of my journey. During college, when fellow students were turning to Asian faiths: the hare krishnas, zen, tibetan mysticism, I believed that the religious traditions of the West were most culturally attuned to the American mind. I still believe that and find Judaism and its traditions and thoughts, like Christianity, trigger a depth of understanding I don’t get from the Asian faiths.
Think I’ve figured out my kabbalah presentation. Still a bit rough around the edges but that’s going to be part of it. It’ll be a how to think with the tree of the life as a touchstone example, using the Great Wheel as an instance.
This a crucial difference between a secular, scientific world view and a mystical one. Entropy posits, as I mentioned in a post not long ago, that all things die, including death, I suppose. The Great Wheel and the tree of life challenge that grim metaphysics with an alternative.
God became fractionated during the tzimtzum, the contraction of divine energy that made the finite possible. This idea is still difficult for me, but I’m just accepting it for the purposes of this presentation. During the tzimtzum the infinite light, ohr, tried to manifest in the finite, filling the space created by the contraction, but the vessel, things, (ein sof = no-things, infinity) could not hold it and shattered. That shattering created all the elements that now make up our universe. (and other universes, too) Trapped inside all of these elements is the ohr. The ascent and descent of divine energy, from the keter to malchut and backup through the sephirot to the keter from malchut, is the way the ohr will once again join with the infinite. How? No clue.
This is a malchutian manifestation, I think, of the ascent and descent and ascent again of divine energy represented by the tree of life. Why? Well, until the divine energy passes through yesod and becomes real in malchut, it is hidden, invisible, just like the vivifying function of the soil and the air and the sun is hidden during the fallow time. Both represent the cyclical nature of things coming into existence from apparent no-thing, then returning themselves to the invisible, the hidden.
The slinkys I will hand out, tiny one-inch ones, illustrate what I mean. The Great Wheel turns through one year, one orbit around the sun, then repeats and is, in that, cyclical and not chronological. But, if you link this orbit to that one we get a spiral as our rapidly moving planet follows our solar system around the galaxy at unimaginable rates of speed. The Great Wheel then extends in space, in a spiral, this year’s revolution becoming another while the whole planet and its sun captive neighbors push further and further around the Milky Way. And, just to add complexity, as the whole galaxy moves, too.
Just noticed a quirky reminder of Coco and the song that saves Hector, Remember Me. Each time I have to login into a site, I enter a username and a password. Then, just below the blanks for those is a small square to check or not. It says, remember me? It reminds me, too, of the posts of the dead on Facebook. I can’t think of anyone else right now, though I know there are others, but I still get the occasional reminder for Kathleen Donahue who died two years ago from lung cancer. In my instance there is the now quite long trail of bytes and bits that breadcrumb my life over the last decade plus. Perhaps we could create 
During the conversation on gratitude we talked about the wonder and awe available to us always, in any given moment. I asked, “I believe the world is always wonderful and awesome if only we pay attention. So then a question is, what blocks us from seeing it. What’s the barrier?” Rabbi Jamie, in his way, came up with seven reasons, three major and four minor. I don’t recall them all, but he included over-sharing and numbing. How can we lean into gratitude, rather than self-absorption?