September 2010

It is kind of unbelievable to me how the call of the Shofar resonated for me this year. The season began on Labor Day weekend with Sarah's bat mitzvah. I learned at that Shabbat service that the Hebrew root for the word labor is the same as the word for prayer. I watched in awe as Sarah "performed" her mitzvah with such grace, dignity, poise, and insight. In some ways, the service demonstrated all that we would want for our students: after a year of intense study and practice, the chance to enact the practice in a ceremony, which, through its studied structure, enables the subject to create and experience the authentic truth of the study -- and in so doing, impart that truth to the community. Through our work, we pray. In the work, there is prayer.

It is a season of beginnings. I am about to begin the year (or have begun, but feel that I just beginning now) of clinical practice as a teacher. I brought in a bag of apples from the bat mitzvah to the CWE and as I looked at them on the table, so many images converged: of course the apple for the teacher, the harvests, the tree of knowledge, the apple computer -- all of it. I was glad to be able to provide those apples.

And then, last night, as Yom Kippur services were about to end, together we read a poem from the High Holidays Siddur (probably what I should have had Uncle Jeffrey read at the bat mitzvah. I feel that I have been searching for this poems for months).

Coming Up on September

Marge Piercy

White butterflies, with single

black fingerpaint eyes on their wing,

dart and settle, eddy and mate

over the green tangle of vines

in Labor Day morning steam.

The year grinds into ripeness

and rot, grapes darkening,

pears yellowing, the first

Virginia creeper twining crimson,

the grasses, dry straw to burn.

The New Year rises, beckoning—

across the umbrellas on the sand.

I begin to reconsider my life.

What is the fruit of my resolve?

I turn from my frantic white dance

over the jungle of productivity

and slowly a niggun slides,

cold water down my throat.

I rest on a leaf spotted red.

Now is the time to let the mind

search backwards like a raven loosed

to see what can feed us. Now,

the time to cast the mind forward

to chart an aerial map of the months.

The New Year is a great door

that stands across the evening and Yom

Kippur is the second door. Between

them are song and silence, stone and

clay pot to be filled from within myself.

I will find there both ripeness and rot,

what I have done and undone,

what I must let go with the waning days

and what I must take in. With the last

tomatoes, we harvest the fruit of our lives.