Happy Ritual Change of Year

“I’m looking forward to 2014...I’m so ready to move on.” (Anonymous) 

Yes, me too.  2013 has been a strange year, in some ways painful and in some ways freeing, definitely filled with unexpected transitions.  

But isn’t a calendar change arbitrary?  If we are so ready to move on, can’t we do it without the new year’s arrival?  Shouldn’t a new day be enough?

Sure!  Every day is a new beginning.  “Every day Creation is renewed.”  

One of the reasons I think the New Year holiday is so profound - even if our resolutions don’t last - is that it is so highly ritualized.  We prepare for (at least) a week: Facebook friends, organizations, newscasters and more count down what they see as important music, movies, events, and so forth from the past year.  We are encouraged thus to reflect on our own year, on its ups and downs, on our own successes and “failures,” and ultimately on what we would like to change in the coming year.  And then we all come together - in person or via technology - to count down the last minutes and seconds to the new year.  (But even as I write this it is already 2014 in parts of the world; I understood this early, growing up on the west coast, when the clock struck midnight in the “heart” of our country (Times Square) at 9pm.  See how arbitrary it is?)

Ritual is powerful.  Ritual awakens us - “wake up and see”! - urges us into awareness.  

We don’t have to wait for a new year.  We can ritualize our mornings.  We can wake up to a practice of prayer, reflection, renewal.  If we don’t already do something like this, we can resolve right now that in the new year we will.  Take note - it’s not just tonight as the clock strikes midnight, but:

Every day Creation is renewed: wake up and see

In the spreading light of dawn

The world and all it contains

Coming into being new and fresh,

Filled with divine goodness and love.

Every day, Creation is renewed: wake up and see.   

Rabbi Sheila Peltz Weinberg

(Kol Haneshamah: Shabbat VeHagim)

So my resolution for 2014 is, when I feel like I am ready to move on, to leave something behind, I’m not going to look for an upcoming transition - a year or even a day.  As the saying goes, “never put off until tomorrow what can wait until the next day.”  Oh, wait - that’s the procrastinator in me.  “Never put off until tomorrow what can be done right now.”  This breath, this moment - now is the time!

Wishing you and yours many blessings in the year to come, moment by moment and day by day.  Happy New Year!

Encountering the Divine

Last night I watched an old episode of 7th Heaven, a 90s tv show focused on the family of Reverend Camden, a suburban minister, in which the middle school leadership is concerned that the custodian is crazy and needs to be forced into retirement.  Why?  Because he hears the voice of God.  God tells him to go speak to Reverend Camden, who becomes his advocate, announcing to the school board, "I speak to God every day, [don't you?]....  Do you not even expect an answer?"

How do we listen for answers or connection from the Divine?  The biblical prophets experienced visions, dreams, even the voice of God directly or through Mal'achim - angels (literally messengers).  Were the prophets crazy?

This week the Torah reading cycle enters the Moses story and his first encounters with the Divine.   Song and lore tells us that "none has yet risen in Israel like Moses," no other prophet has, to jump ahead in the story, seen God face-to-face (Exod. 33:11) and lived to tell about it.

When God recruits Moses for the work of bringing the people to freedom, Moses asks a valuable question, "What shall I tell them is Your name?"  God's cryptic answer, Ehyeh asher ehyeh - I will be that which I will be (some translate present tense, "I'm am what I am").

The openness of the answer is brilliant - each encounter may be different.  Not only is each individual's relationship to the Divine unique, but one individual may experience God in myriads of ways.

Admittedly, when someone says they hear God speaking to them I get nervous.  This is not necessarily a bad response.  I think of such God-voices as those described in Under the Banner of Heaven, contemporary prophecy that leads one to take the life of another.

So how do I describe my own encounters with the Divine?  I have said that I believe in the God of coincidences - that there are times that I should have been one place or done one thing and instead have chosen another, and as a result I am saved some horrific experience.  An example?  When I was sixteen I was supposed to meet a girlfriend after school to bring her something of hers.  Instead, I went home, and that is where my mother, who was supposed to be at work but came home because she thought she had left the oven on, answered the phone call with the news that my friend had shot herself.  I cannot be sure what I might have done had I gone to meet my friend as planned and found her lying there with the still-loaded gun - but through what might seem like chance I had my mother's support.

No, I didn't hear a voice telling me to go home instead of meeting my friend - not in the conventional sense of spoken words anyway.  Call it more gut instinct.  And it's not that the outcome of such moments is joyful, as I sometimes imagine all Divine encounter ought to be.  Sometimes it's downright miserable - involving things like losing a friend to suicide.

But this is the marvelous thing about Ehyeh - God can be the connector in the moment when one needs support from family, friends, colleagues; but God can be other things in other moments, like the indescribable moment when the world simply seems beautiful, right, amazing, awesome, or the flame that doesn't consume but catches our attention, or the invisible but tangible outstretched arm guiding us away from narrow places and into freedom.  And maybe sometimes it is the still, small voice - a voice from within and beyond, that calls us by name and tells us:

"Ehyeh asher ehyeh - I will be that which I will be." (Exodus 3:14)

Ehyeh - I will be
I will be with you
I will be what you need
Don't look
   I am not what you think you need
Don't expect me
   I am already here
I will breathe you
I will carry you
I will dance you
I will sing you
I will hold you
I will nudge you
I will guide you
I will support you
Ehyeh - I am