This is all there is. And sometimes, this is sh*t. (Trigger alert: no positive pablum found here.)
Dear Friends in Fluxlandia,
I’ve been sick this past week with severe cold-like symptoms but not-COVID. My dear Rabbi, who I now work with, has been more seriously laid up. Our organization’s staff was thrilled to see her at the building for the staff photo on Wednesday. As she recovers, our rabbi is walking with a cane. When asked if she wanted to hide the cane for the photo, she said, “No. I want to show it’s okay to have a cane.”
My partner Marco and I have a saying when things don’t go as planned: This is it. When we say this to each other, what we’re really saying is: “So, this is happening.” This is it also means this is all there is. This is life, our one wild and precious life. Even the crappy parts. Even the parts we hate.
As is so often the case, I’ve been feeling a lot of both/and of late. Even as I’ve been feeling crappy, I’ve been bursting with excitement over what I’ve been helping to create where I work—which is basically: community.
The world is a painful mess. Gun violence in Minneapolis. Immigration raids. Threats of troops coming to my city, Chicago. Man-made starvation crisis in Gaza. Israeli hostages living wrenched from their family. I have cousins in IDF who (like me) hate their government and close family friends in Ramat Aviv in their 80s whose house was destroyed by an Iranian missile and cherished family friends here in town who are Palestinian American and the whole thing is one excruciating, unfathomable, there-are-no-word-for-it-I-can’t-even-think-of-a-noun-to-put-here-so-I-won’t-even-make-the-empty-attempt.
Language fails us.
In the Hebrew calendar, we are a few days into the month of Elul, the last month of the Jewish year and the final month prior to Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year. It’s a month in which to spiritually prepare for the High Holiday season of reflection and repentance. According to My Jewish Learning (and believe me, I am always learning – there is so much to learn), it’s traditionally a time of “introspection and personal stock-taking, known in Hebrew as cheshbon hanefesh — literally ‘an accounting of the soul.’”
This process is conducted in preparation for Rosh Hashanah when, Jewish tradition teaches, “all of humanity is called to account and a divine judgment is issued.”
The customs associated with Elul are all intended to help cultivate the proper mindset for this preparation.
How on earth does one “cultivate the mindset” when the world is in flames and it’s breaking our hearts and so much feels out of our control?
I don’t pretend to know. I am trying to stay open.
I snapped the photo above in the workroom at work one day when I was feeling punchy. I had a double mastectomy in 2017 and chose not to reconstruct. I am lucky that breast cancer didn’t hit me until seven years after I had nursed my twins. I still mourn the loss of my breasts, but somehow, I found a way to move on. Dark humor helps me cope.
There’s little that’s funny about the world right now. There is, however, community. I’m finding solace in being around others. We experience the pain together, and while not a solution, it is healing to be together, while we’re here.
This is it, people. This is it.
With so much love,
Deborah