Seasons of Our Joy
Waskow, Arthur I.
SEASONS OF OUR JOY ARTHUR I. WASKOW Thirty young men and women, with a scattering of children, left a rambling old mansion on Massachusetts Avenue near the embassies in Washington, D.C. Blinking...
...But keep what is eccentric, lively, me...
...People looked around at each other...
...They're so ingrained...
...so that our mothers carry the living ocean in their bellies...
...Muscles, tensed from scrambling down the hillside, loosened...
...But a famine not for food, And a thirst not just for water, But for hearing the words of the Lord...
...There was a long silence...
...Not by standing apart from the storm, but immersing ourselves in it...
...What she cast away was his deadliness, his death trip—so that he could turn toward life...
...This article is part of his work-in-progress on the round of the Jewish year, Seasons of Our Joy...
...And we ourselves, experiencing the solemn joy of Rosh Hashanah, cannot believe that these two "castings"— one so central to the morning and one to the afternoon of that day— are unconnected...
...But the water comes in different guises—a well, a river, a stohny ocean, a jug for pouring water, rain...
...Their laughter hushed, and gradually the chuckles and whispers of the water grew easier to hear...
...The song ebbed, followed by echoes of laughter, and a woman began to read from the Book of Micah—at first softly, then with more intensity...
...She demands that Abraham send Ishmael and Hagar away...
...For the tradition also says, "The greater the person, the greater the yetzer hara...
...Sarah, the primary wife, becomes convinced that Ishmael is profoundly mocking the identity of her own son, Isaac...
...Somehow we have to cast away their deadliness but draw new liveliness out of them...
...It is only when Hagar casts Ishmael under the bush that their lives can be saved...
...At the end of the period of "turning," we are taught this lesson again...
...And as if to remind us, to sum it all up, to echo at the end what we have heard at the beginning, the symbol of water returns to us in an utterly different guise—the stormy seas of the Book of Jonah...
...I don't feel that dryness anymore...
...God sends a storm to rage around Jonah's ship...
...Water, the world's table on which sits all the food of all our crops...
...Then the sea calms down—but Jonah cries out to God: "You cast me into the depths, into the heart of the sea...
...Hagar fills the bottle Abraham had given her, gives her son the water, and saves his life...
...Water, which can keep us alive for weeks even if we have no food...
...His deadliness is threatening her with death, but she wants the lively part of him to live...
...The ceremony is Tashlich, or "Casting...
...That God intends to cast our sins into the depths of the sea...
...The others grinned back, and turned to climb back up the trail into the city—just a hundred yards away...
...Others picked it up, the guitar joined in, and the humming resolved into words: Behold, the days are coming—soon at hand— When I shall send a famine on the earth...
...Right," says one...
...We do and don't want to get rid of our sins, at the same moment...
...Cold and lifeless...
...Instead we are trying to turn it from garbage and poison into something fertile and life-giving...
...So the Fabrangeners begin to turn the reading around, to draw meaning from the story of Hagar to deepen our understanding of how "Tashlich" is used to deal with our sins...
...But you do call them sins," says somebody else...
...There's something about them you dislike, distrust, want to get rid of...
...Water, the cleansing, cooling liquid that by washing away our dust and sweat helps us to feel our own selves again...
...The study group was a dozen people sitting in a circle, reading together the Bible texts and prayer book passages and trying to experience the ceremonies that are specially set aside for the holy days...
...But as water mirrors the human face, the sea becomes a mirror of his troubled stormy soul...
...To get rid of them I would have to dig so deep, kill so much of my self, so much of what I like about myself...
...Water, where the Torah tell us the universe began...
...But the more we try to hold ourselves aloof, the more we try to shield ourselves from danger, the nearer we come to dying...
...Water, the life-giver...
...So we read it on Yom Kippur to remind us that if we turn our lives around, God will respond...
...His behavior had dragged her into danger...
...I don't really want to get rid of my sins...
...Plunge our sins into the sea," he is saying— "the sea from which they can emerge reborn—no longer sins, but energies toward good...
...Water, the purifier...
...But the story, if we read the water-symbolism closely, teaches us how to turn our lives around...
...But they use it up, and Hagar "cast the child under one of the shrubs," saying, "Let me not see the death of the child...
...That doesn't seem right...
...Without them, without what led to them, I might be an empty stereotype...
...Realizing we can start over, the year is new, there's hope of change...
...And joyfully you shall draw water from the springs of salvation...
...The band of walkers spread out, each person coming closer to the water...
...It's true that Ishmael is at this moment a heavy burden to her...
...It has been a kind of doomed dryness that came from reading the stories of how the temples in Jerusalem were destroyed and how the Nazis did the Holocaust...
...The water themes began to feel connected when a Fabrangen-spon-sored study group came together to examine the cycle of the festivals...
...Superstitious," muttered the rabbis...
...They had read together the special Bible passage for the day—a passage about thirst and water...
...We might also dare to say that God is as deeply connected to Jonah as Hagar is to Ishmael, that just as Ishmael's actions threatened Hagar's life, Jonah's actions threatened God's Presence in the world, that Jonah was God's burden to be cast away—but not wholly rejected, because Jonah's death would have meant the death of Nineveh and thus the death of God's plan for redemption of the world...
...On Rosh Hashanah morning when we listen to the chanting of these stories from the Torah and on Rosh Hashanah afternoon when we listen to the whisperings of the river, Rosh Hashanah is about a search for water...
...The group pauses to chew this over...
...The storm that threatens to sink and drown us when we try to stand above it-becomes the water of our birth if we cast ourselves into it...
...But perhaps the teaching even means that in order to eliminate the sinful direction of these energies entirely, it would be necessary to eliminate the good directions as well...
...The sailors hesitated to heave Jonah overboard—as we hesitate to cast away our sins, these outgrowths of our lives...
...So may we come throughout the year to the ancient river of our tradition, to drink renewal from it...
...Eyes turned to see the shadow-patterns, ears turned to hear the water...
...When we cast our garbage into the river, we are not just trying to get rid of it...
...For the whole month that begins with Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish liturgy puts us in touch with water...
...But wait a minute," says somebody else...
...So then, we ask ourselves, what does it mean to hear a parallel between Hagar's "casting" of Ishmael under the bush, God's "casting" of our sins into the depths of the sea, and our "casting" of the symbols of our sin into the nearest river on Rosh Hashanah...
...Blinking in the end-of-summer sunlight, trailing after a man with a guitar, chanting ancient Hebrew songs, they made their way across busy city streets to a corner of Rock Creek Park...
...The people who walked down the hill to Rock Creek were from the community-congregation called Fabrangen...
...That morning, the Fabrangeners had chanted the special triumphant melodies of Rosh Hashanah and bent their heads to hear the eerie blast of the ram's horn...
...Water water water water—hey, water, joyfully...
...It is only when the sailors throw Jonah into the sea that the lives of Jonah and the sailors can be saved...
...As Jewish tradition teaches, "Not a house would be built in Israel if it were not for the impulse toward evil—the yetzer hara...
...Water, the mirror...
...So what is Micah telling us...
...Hagar is "casting" Ishmael not in order to get rid of him but in order that she should not see him die...
...but it is these same energies that lead to forming families and building homes...
...And the tradition underscores the point by requiring us, Yom Kippur afternoon, to read that passage from Micah as soon as we have finished reading the Jonah story...
...The last is Micah—a brief reading of the passage about Tashlich...
...The band of celebrants reached into their pockets, took out bread crumbs, lint, dust, threw it over the stream bank to fall into the water...
...Yes...
...I want to get rid of what's deadly about them, what endangers me, what suffocates or burns or poisons me...
...Maybe we can learn from it how to change specific actions in our own lives, while our lives as a whole keep going strong...
...The energy must be and can be turned toward good...
...And You shall cast all their sins into the depths of the sea...
...About Abraham himself, in conflict with his neighbors over wells and water—until he could arrive at the Jewish people's first peace agreement with a foreign nation, and could take title to his own well of water...
...not to destroy them, but to turn their energy to good...
...I've felt a kind of thirstiness for seven weeks now, since the Ninth of Av...
...The tradition draws new meaning from the text by treating the use of the same key word in different contexts as deliberate, intended to suggest that there is a profound connecton or similarity between them...
...Slowly a couple of others nod...
...Now for the first time I feel my thirst relieved...
...On the afternoon of Yom Kippur we read the Book of Jonah...
...When Micah tells God, "You will cast all their sins into the depths of the sea," he is remembering that the sea gives birth to life...
...The day is Rosh Hashanah, the day of the Jewish New Year...
...His words echo those of Micah, the words we recite when we do Tashlich: "You shall cast all their sins into the depths of the sea...
...That's how we really feel about our sins!—We give them life, and we feel our lives connected to them...
...It is the next-to-last of the Biblical passages we address that day...
...Let's be clear about the double-ness of it," says one Fabrangener...
...Guises so different that only after several years of experiencing these holy days together did some Fabrangeners start working out a sense of their connections...
...Fabrangen is a little like a shtiebel, as the Jews of Eastern Europe called a kind of storefront synagogue without a hired rabbi or an imposing edifice...
...But at this particular Tashlich, there were no rabbis...
...And indeed her act of despair is what brings him water, allows him to live...
...I can see how Hagar is hoping that somehow Ishmael's deadliness will die, but not Ishmael...
...The word for "cast" is "Tashlaych," from the same root as "Tashlich"—the ceremony of casting "sins" into the water, the ceremony that takes its name from the verse in Micah in which we say that God will "cast" our sins into the depths of the sea...
...They're so much part of me...
...Or rather—I do and I don't...
...That is: the intense energies of sexuality and ownership frequently burst out in the evils of sexual conquest and the piling up of property...
...Jonah goes to sea rather than obey God's command that he cry out Nineveh's evil...
...Both those teachings lead not toward trying to eliminate sin, but toward trying to transform it in the service of life...
...Jonah invites the other sailors to appease God's wrath by heaving him overboard...
...They found a steep path between the trees, stumbled their way in semi-dark down a series of steps cut into the hillside, and stopped at several large rocks to look directly down on turbulent Rock Creek...
...Jewish tradition does not hear such parallels as accidental...
...Probing, feeling, discussing these passages as was impossible to do while we were actually reciting them on the festival itself...
...Someone started humming a tune...
...Rosh Hashanah is only a beginning of the ten days of turning that end on Yom Kippur...
...Let us join the study group in listening more closely to the first of the water passages: Ishmael is Abraham's older son, born of his second and subordinate wife Hagar...
...It is a havurah, a fellowship that shares the task of reaching toward a holistic Jewish life-process that will both be authentically Jewish and will work under the conditions of the modern world...
...How do we achieve this...
...That would simply pollute our neighbors downstream...
...Reaching toward—never quite achieving...
...They hold back out of pity for him—but finally the other sailors do heave him into the sea...
...The two together thus complete the process we began on Rosh Hashanah morning with the Ishmael story...
...It wasn't just the kind of thirstiness I felt because we fasted all night and day, no food or water, and it was so hot...
...If we do, the parallel would be saying that Hagar feels Ishmael is a kind of sin she wants to be rid of...
...and in this case, neither do we...
...Shall we draw meaning from the prophecy of Micah and the Tashlich ceremony in order to understand the Ishmael story...
...During all of that time, we are trying to do a real Tashlich...
...It's so hard...
...We read Jonah as the climax of the Days of Turning because it is the story of Jonah's turnabout from his refusal to heed God, Nineveh's turnabout from its violence and exploitation, and God's turnabout from intending to destroy Nineveh...
...It is a ceremony that ordinary Jews have preserved for centuries in the face of criticism from their rabbis...
...And indeed, from the belly of the great fish Jonah is reborn...
...Water, which pours forth from every mother when her birthing begins—and according to the scientists, pours forth in the same mild saltiness the oceans bore when the first amphibians crawled out of them...
...Tashlaych" here means that she "casts" him to bring about a transformation, a reversal, a turn-about in his fate...
...Not by denying our despair, but entering it...
...I did give life to them, they grow out of the way I am...
...Water, the flow of possibility and freedom and change that gushes forth unexpected from the rock of certainty—the flow that will not stay inside predicted boundaries but washes them away...
...It is after Hagar "casts" her son under the bush that God hears his weeping, promises that the boy will become the forebear of a great nation, and reveals a well of water...
...As we watch this water flow, may we learn to let our lives flow and change and be more fluid...
...Water, where the scientists tell us life began...
...I'm not very happy seeing it that way," one of us says...
...She has given life to this burden, and if he dies she will die with him...
...The singing trailed off...
...One by one they spoke up: "As the river carries away this dust and garbage from our lives, so may the river of time in this new year carry away the garbage from our lives...
...Are these parallel uses of "Tashlich" just an accident...
...And this is the deepest spiritual goal of the period of renewal in the early Fall: not that we simply rid ourselves of our sins, send them out to die—but that we reverse them, transform them...
...Water, the flow...
...This river remains the same river even while every atom of the water in it is changing...
...The rabbis have been afraid that the people would believe that all they needed to do in order to get rid of their sins was to throw those breadcrumbs in the river...
...What's more, we both should and shouldn't get rid of them...
...Just looking at this water, listening to it trickle coolly—that relieves my thirst...
...He gives them a bottle of water...
...After a few minutes the guitarist began to play, and slowly others joined: U-shavtem mayim b'sasson, mima-yenai ha-yeshua...
...Somebody grinned and walked back to the foot of the hill...
...God cast Jonah into the sea as Hagar cast Ishmael under the bush—not to get rid of him, but to get rid of his deadliness...
...To kill their deadliness so as to give our lives new life...
...He hesitates, but then God tells him to do what Sarah asks, and Abraham sends them out into the wilderness...
...Copyright © 1979 by the author...
...But the people persisted—they loved to seek out brooks and creeks and rivers— so, reluctantly, the rabbis joined the process...
...Water, which if it is deep enough lets us see and reflect upon ourselves...
...not to kill him, but to give him new birth, new life...
...About Ishmael and Hagar, sent by their husband and father Abraham into the desert, dying of thirst in the desert at Beersheva—until God heard their outcry and let a well appear to them...
...We come to this river seeking renewal, but the river itself is ancient...
...Arthur Waskow is the author of Godwrestling (published by Schocken) and the editor of Yiddishkeit, a monthly newsletter of Jewish renewal...
...But he is a special kind of burden—a burden she is deeply bound up with...
...also at Beersheva...
Vol. 4 • September 1979 • No. 8
