Mishkan Ha'am The Westchester-Riverdale Reconstructionist Group

Dear Mishkan Ha'am,

 I'm writing this note from 30,000 feet in the air as Elise and I fly towards our honeymoon in the Pacific Northwest.  It's definitely been a summer of transformation for us, and we remain touched by the send-off that you all gave us at the aufruf in June.  I hope your summers have also been full of rewarding experiences.

This is the first of a new series of notes that I will be sending out over the course of the year, to coincide, roughly, with Rosh Chodesh, the celebration of the new Hebrew month.  These twelve new-month days (well, eleven, actually, if you don't count Rosh Hashanah) are each treated by our tradition as minor festivals, marked liturgically with the recitation of Hallel--a special selection of Psalms of praise and tha nksgiving.  

If you don't want to get into the nitty-gritty of Jewish liturgy (and I know some of you don't, and are probably already growing vaguely concerned, what with all of the Hebrew terms I jammed into the last paragraph, that I've sold us out to Chabad) you can just think of Rosh Chodesh as a lesserRosh Hashanah.  Just as Rosh Hashanah offers us the opportunity to greet the gift of a new year with renewed consciousness, so does Rosh Chodesh invite us to accept a new month with awareness and intention.  And when the month to follow happens to contain special Jewish days--like Purim or Passover--Rosh Chodesh  serves as a kind of foretaste of what we are anticipating.

(My new Chabad overlords wanted to make sure you know that Chodesh means 'month', just as Shanah means 'year'.  Hashanah is 'the year'.  AndRosh, literally 'head', in this case just means the 'first' or the 'beginning'.)

The month we will be greeting this Thursday, Elul, has a unique and particular significance, as it is the last month of the Jewish year, leading up to the High Holidays.  In fact, the period of tshuva--'repentance', or 'returning'--which achieves its height on Yom Kippur, is actually said to begin onRosh Chodesh Elul.  From the beginning of this month, those who live in relationship to traditional Jewish prayer begin to add special words to the daily recitation, to get them in the spirit of what's coming.  It is also traditional to blow the shofar at the end of the weekday morning prayers throughout the month.  (I had the responsibility of doing this once, when I was working at a family summer camp.  It was very moving, especially when a young child turned to his father and asked, "Daddy, why are they strangling a duck?"  There's a reason we keep David Saphra on the payroll.)

But, again, even if we don't mark the period with traditional prayer and the sound of the shofar, its essence is still open to us.  We live at a time of transformations, some joyous and some daunting, and the High Holidays offer us a space for the difficult task of setting our hearts right with our circumstances; of going to difficult places and emerging with renewed, or changed, vision and purpose.  Our tradition identified the need to work our way into this process, and gave us Elul as a warm-up.  It is a time to take stock of yourself, whether through daily journalling or moments of contemplation, through conversations with loved ones or estranged friends.  It is a time to begin hearing the questions you are asking yourself.  It is a time to relearn how to say what needs to be said.  

The time is ours to use as we are able, and any use, no matter how large or small, will enable us to be that much more present to the task when we gather under the tent in late September.

There's a lot more I could say about the great programming in the works for Mishkan Ha'am over the next year.  But, c'mon, I'm on my honeymoon!