RABBIS SAGES ELDERS - what common ground do we spring from?
My dear Rabbi Charna,
Wow – I’ve never had an in-flesh Rabbi friend – all my previous rabbinical relationships have be-friended me through the pages of books. I’m grateful you are my close neighbor, but above all very much aware you are a soul sister and excited to see how our lives will intertwine and hone each other here in our community village as the years move on. Today, I’m inspired to find words to express the significance of your smicha/ordination ceremony last night. It was more than clear how monumental this passage was for you and your community. Uli and I were honored to share in a virtual experience that felt deeply meaningful as we shared in the gift of being a witness. What a surprise gift to behold!
Goodness – it was like nothing I have even been part of, yet it had so many threads of commonality. We were dropped into another culture, language, rituals, and customs that both were archaic, foreign, and also entirely familial. Other than you I knew no-one, but I felt welcomed as not just a voyeur but as a guest allowed to enter a sacred site, a virtual and very real Holy of Holies. Somehow, I became welcomed, privileged in a deeper way to know my place in the vast community of our human race who have stumbled around forever making meaning out of our complex life in a cosmic universe. We are all sojourners and travelers, clothed in the multi-colored skin of our ancestors yet breathing the same air of Spirit. Yikes, the cloak of rabbi you have earned and been given is significant in its weight of authority, and because I know you as one of authenticity, you will continue to honor the warp and weft of all the strands of complexity that entails!
It beings tears to my eyes to say it, but I physically witnessed how elders are formed in and through thousands of years of community; how rag and bone humans are offered a place in the passage of time, not only as brilliant stars in their own planetary system, but as descendants of time who offer their life back for the future generations that follow. The ordered cacophony of the laying-on-of hands blessing of the elders touched some core of my being that has longed to physically know the same kind of transmission from the real flesh, blood, in-Spirited old ones. I have felt this in the solitude of nature and yet being raised in the African bush, my wild soul has long-yearned to know communal ceremonies of all land-connected, indigenous peoples. I have often dreamed about modern forms of blessing; communal rites of passage, from elder to younger, that juicy, messy, earthy wisdom of conscious aging passed down through psychospiritual and mental DNA and wrinkly skin. Last night I witnessed a profound example that sparked the sacred fire of ancient longing in me.
All the long-standing traditions of humanity have Elders as their core examples of humans who have perfected their brokenness, who have clarified their true relationship as an Earth-being. The example of your Jewish people as tribal wanderers in the desert who forged their destiny as a people is still living through you my friend! My Christian history is built on yours, but somehow in honoring the personal, individualized human-God relationship we have mostly forgotten about earth-based, relational community. Instead, my tradition has spent too many centuries in-fighting, honing and spreading our differences through methods of power and colonization.
Today, as I wonder about the collective tragedy of leadership that we are presently drowning in, I feel the reality of our neglect to nurture the deeper soul of eldership in our very diverse and divergent communities of faith. What a different collective of people we might be if we had honorable elders to guide the way; especially ones who have been grounded in the strengths of their tradition and willing to learn together as One inside the shadowlands of that uncertainty. A deep democracy of Spirit, Psyche and Order!
What does it mean to be an Earth Elder? It demands incredible chutzpah to stand out in our unique essence and call out to those around us, to offer ourselves as doorways out of the slavery of Egypt and through the psychospiritual desert of our times to remain connected to each other and Mother Earth, our real home and community.
We are a starved people right now - desperate for those who have endured the journey of body, mind and spirit and are finding their way into a unity of inter-relationship. Ones who have learned that creative inter-weaving of inner and outer, of tradition and modern, and are willing to let go of the old so that some new co-creative emergence will eventually happen. Days ahead will not be easy for any of us and I don’t know how you are going to do it my Jewish rabbi friend, but what we hold onto and what we let go of will be a critical test of the coming years.
Curiously too, we now are connected as Sages; joined through the Spirit and original blessing of Reb Zalman who called us here to Silver Sage Co-Housing Village. Let’s re-new our world, let’s do it together as Elder Souls.
Wildly and soulfully in community,
Carol
1/11/2021
