There was a new moon last night. In my sky it was bright white, a sliver of its fullness, floating against a black sky. It was warm with promise. It spoke of what is yet to come. It came at a good time, reminding me of what is real and what is not. It was the Elul moon of preparation.

Yesterday we spent the day packing. Or to be more accurate, yesterday we spent the day unpacking and repacking. The guidelines for the trip are “duffel bag, no more than 24 inches, no frame, small wheels”. We will be gone for a good portion of September so what to take, what to leave behind; what to carry forward, what to assign to the unnecessary pile. But unnecessary is such a grey word. What if it is colder than we anticipate; what if it rains; what if the mosquitoes are out in full force (unlikely this time of year)?

Prepare for every eventuality? Not in 24 inches. (I know people who are really good at this, I admire their decisiveness.) Or is it trust? What we call in Hebrew – bitachon. Trust that they can weather almost any eventuality. Trust that they are prepared.

There’s that word again. Prepare; fortify yourself that you are ready. Ready for a new moment, a new year, a new experience, a different way, a new path. Switch gears. Engage the clutch. Gradually let it out and find that sweet spot where when you press the gas, you move forward slowly, smoothly, gliding through the unknown, like last night’s moon.

I promised myself that today I was zipping them up. It is hard to carry when it’s open.
Things just keep falling out. Gotta make that leap of faith. Done. Done. Done.
But you know, I know, it’s never done, just finished for now. Thank God we can begin again. That’s the season you know; that’s the blessing of last night’s moon.

It is almost a week since the slaughter of 49 people in a nightclub in Orlando. If the media is any indication of what is true, our nation is sad, angry, confused and shaken. At the very least those are good descriptors of where I am.

Sad, intensely, that 49 lives have been taken. They were mercilessly killed by a man wielding guns who in my humble opinion had no right obtaining or owning. Somewhere on line I read that it is easier to buy an assault rifle than Sudafed. (Probably an exaggeration but you get the point. We choose what we regulate and guns seem to be too sacred for the Feds to touch.)

We are angry at each other and we are angry at our elected officials who refuse to do anything about this plague of violence. I think J.J. Goldberg’s editorial in The Forward is right on target. He asks, “Why the Orlando Massacre has America so angry at itself”. We are so angry we can’t hear each other talk; we are so angry we can’t even agree on the causes of the attack. Is it the easy access to assault weapons? Is it Radical Islam and the actual or emotional ties that the killer had to ISIS? Is it homophobia or even self-loathing? Is it mental instability? Is it one of the above, some of the above or all of the above.

I don’t mean to be cute or make light of the tragedy. My answer is it is all of the above. It is too easy to get assault weapons in this country and if someone is on the no fly list and they are too dangerous to be sitting on a plane next to me it feels too obvious that they are too dangerous to have a semi-automatic rifle. And that is on Congress. And that is on our public representatives who are supposed to insure that “government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.” Well who cares for “the people” in Washington? Not those who think guns are more sacred than human lives, or the gun lobby is too powerful to go up against.

I can feel my anger rising as I write.  I am not afraid to say the words “radical Islam”. I am also not afraid to say the words “Jewish extremists and Christian crusaders”. My point being that every religion and culture has those who pervert their fundamental message and use them for their own political purposes. I feel for my gay friends. This hit their community extra hard. All the pride and progress of the last few years diminished. It is a terrible reminder that we have a long way to go for GLBT equality and acceptance. And how young? But I guess that’s no criteria – they were younger still at Sandy Hook.

No, I don’t care what you say: It is not about ISIS; it is not about Homophobia: It is not about mental instability; it is about guns. It is about easy access. Someone will always find a cause worth killing for. It is about the cowardice of congress. It is about the failure of our representatives to protect us. It is about their interest, not ours. It is disgusting.

I have set my computer screen saver to change pictures every five minutes and randomly select them from the photos I have loaded either from my camera, my phone, slides I have had digitalized, images shared. I readily admit that I have no idea how to control the choices that fade in and out and I notice that some pictures rotate more often than others. I fantasize that the computer is laughing at me and playing hide and seek with my pictures.

Each picture is a memory and a slice of my life. Maya and I are feeding a dolphin in one; the illusive, mysterious moss hanging on twisted trees in the squares of Savannah; aqua green water peppered by red and white buoys floating in the Bay of Nhatrang, Vietnam; the beige sand of a Moroccan flea market punctuated with the saffron and purple head coverings of the women hiding their faces and shopping for bargains; stages of life reflected in my different body shapes, hair styles, clothing choices, each one a sacred moment, each one an opportunity to mentally move along the arc of my life.

Sometimes the computer program zooms in and only part of the picture shows up on the screen. This morning I had a close up of my smile and my teeth – my dentist would have been proud – I laughed when I saw it but I think I could use some whitener. Sometimes I have to challenge myself to figure out where we are. Invariably the process touches me in places deep and inside even when I can’t remember the name of that site, city or setting.   It is often tinged with sadness and loss; but more often than not, if I let myself linger in the memory, I feel a profound gratitude for that which I have been given. Each moment is a different letter in a blessing formula.

But my challenge to myself is to extend that thankfulness to all of life, even that which is not apparently striking. I tend to take pictures of the beautiful and surprising but that is not the complete picture of life. There are photos I did not take with a camera but are still imbedded in my internal album: my mother curled up in her bedroom deep in depression; the steps I tripped up when I was given the honor of opening the door of my grandfather’s synagogue where the hearse stopped so that the Cantor could ask God to bind his soul in the bond of eternal life.; the dreams that astonish me in content and vividness in the middle of the night – the ones that wake me up and sometimes serialize themselves after I fall back to sleep. And I could go on.

All of these teach; all of these make me who I am; the good, the beautiful, the embarrassing, the disappointments, the successes, the endeavors I wish I had finished and the relationships I wish I had done differently. All of these are opportunities for introspection and growth. Even those out of focus.

Enough, it may be cloudy right now but there is still a golf ball wanting to be hit.

The bus collected us at Victoria Coach Station for our excursion to Stonehenge. It was Eileen, our grandson, Corey, who is studying London for a term and me. Don’t get me wrong, there were 48 other people as well, but there was WIFI on the bus so you could stay in your personal space, except for Eileen who knew an awful lot about her seatmate, Dr. Dave before we hit the M3.

As we left the highway and the tour guide got back on the mike, it was still early morning: “You should be able to see Stonehenge in that field on the right but the fog and mist is hiding it. Hopefully it will begin to lift before we take the shuttle bus from the visitor center to the site.” I sort of thought, this is how you should see Stonehenge, a little bit of mist and a little bit of mystery, although, I did want some good pictures.

And then she was right and then it was there. Across the fields, the sheep were barely moving, little non-discriminate mounds in the grass, everything shades of grey. Stonehenge slowly emerged: a statement to a civilization and culture that knew how to keep its secrets, from how they got the stones here to what their purpose. Yes, there are theories and I am sure some day one of us humans will figure it all out, but right now they range from the magical to the ritual, the astronomical to the sacred, a place of healing and magic or a place of sacrifice and death. I like some of this unknowing. I believe in mystery. I am attracted to the mystical. It makes me appreciate the hole of knowing at the center of life.

So it was ok with me that the sun wasn’t shining. The ancient stones were resting on a bed strong enough to keep them erect and resilient enough to keep them mysterious. It was ok with me that I wasn’t certain if the stones may have been a place where the sun and the moon found alignment or the stones may have been a place where people were sacrificed to some unknown but demanding deity. What isn’t ok is that centuries and millennia later we are still finding reasons to believe that the gods want us to kill and to maim, to blow up suitcases and people and the smoke that rises from the explosion is a sweet smell of obedience to a cruel and uncaring universe. What isn’t ok is to believe that these acts of terror are courageous or even part of a holy war one civilization wages on another.

What’s sad is that we have lost the meaning of the word mysterious that for me implies knowing that you don’t know. I believe built into the word sacred is the word doubt. I believe in a healthy dose of skepticism in my approach to faith and it is a wonder to me that independent of the physicality of my brain, I am conscious of life I live. There is a wonderful Jewish teaching that the black handwritten Hebrew letters on every Torah scroll are only half the story. The creamy white spaces between each letter tell the other half. So maybe it isn’t the stones at Stonehenge – maybe it’s the galaxies in between and their placement in this field of fog, mist and haze.

In my worldview that which is sacred is the humility to be in awe of how much we do not know.  No one has a lock on truth.

It is at least seven weeks since a metal box containing files with 6 x 8 blue note cards was found in a storage room at the Temple. The blue cards were all filed neatly with rubber bands around each pile, rubber bands that if you touch, now break from age and dryness, even in this Florida humidity. Most of them are typed and they have dates and occasions, rarely titles. It has taken me till this morning to look into this file box. I’m not sure what I was afraid I would find.

They are sermons from the 1970’s. (I know some of you reading this weren’t even born.) I don’t know what is keeping me from going through them. I think it is an adequacy issues – are they good enough. It reminds me when I first began Spiritual Direction. My “director” was a Roman Catholic Dominican Sister who works at a retreat center nearby. When I started she encouraged me to write and journal. I chose to record my sense of the sacred and what being spiritual meant to me at that moment through poetry. The first time I shared a poem with her, she responded with silence. There was lots of silence in those spiritual direction sessions. But I was new and the absence of words felt strange. I jumped right in: Is it good, I asked.

Is it good? There it is. Are they good – those words typed in dark black ink on light blue cards? What has 40 plus years done to them? What have they done to the 40 years? Forty is a special number in both the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures. It rained for forty days and nights as Noah’s ark floated back and forth across the waters. The Israelites wandered for forty years in the wilderness till they were ready to cross the Jordan. Jesus was tempted for 40 days and nights till he passed the test. And that is just for starters. Some say forty is associated with humility; some say transition/change.

I am going to read what’s in that box – there is no doubt in my mind, but not just yet. I don’t know why but it definitely is an adequacy issue. Or maybe it goes back to the symbolic number of the biblical forty. Am I humble enough to be willing to see that I have changed/grown/developed over the years and life is all about transition? Am I strong enough to recognize that maybe I didn’t? The days and the years grow you; the trials and the tests refine you; the blessings, challenges, opportunities and failures hone and polish. Am I willing to accept that some of them may just not meet my over perceived and probably falsely filled standards and some of them may just be plain dated or lousy or saturated with unrealized potential?

This has been helpful; thanks for hanging in with me. I think reading them would be a good exercise in humility. I think it will “grow” me. Stay tuned.

It’s been a hell of a year. Are they all like this or was this one just so intense and filled with so many shocking moments that we were reeling from what was happening both during and after. What did it all mean for our children, for our society, our future and us? We struggle with how to respond. We always do. Genesis tells us the story of Jacob wrestling with an unknown man ultimately forcing a blessing and a new name out of his protagonist. Jacob becomes Israel – the one who struggles with God and what it means to believe, to affirm goodness in a dark and fractured world, to stay true to our core values.

Different religious traditions describe this struggle differently. One of the words in the Muslim tradition for this process is Jihad. Yes, it can refer to a holy war against non-believers, but at its essence it speaks to the internal battle that wages within us between doing what is right living to our highest standards and doing what is expedient and giving in to our base fears. You can position this process in many different frames. Some scaffold it within a religious setting, speaking about the need to submit to the will of God or Allah or Jesus or HaShem (all basically synonyms for the Unknowable). Some frame it within a spiritual and ethical self-improvement venue articulating the need for balance and living in sync with the laws of nature and society. No matter where you are positioned, all of us struggle.

In Judaism we call it the tension between the “Yetzer Hatov and the Yetzer HaRa” – the Good and the Bad Inclination. (Don’t read too much into those words “good” and “bad”, it is way too complicated for 500 words.) Just know we are always weighing our options. No matter what the situation, we choose where to live internally. Shall I live with the fear of terrorism; shall I dwell in the resentment of my freedom of movement being curtailed; shall I sit with the frustration of knowing that Big Brother is listening and George Orwell’s “1984” is closer to prophecy than science fiction. And whom shall I blame and how shall I direct my anger?

As a nation we are in that moment right now. There are those who feed our fears and tell us that the solution is to label those who follow Islam our enemies. There is a tendency to want to find that scapegoat with talk of walls and religious identity cards.

All of that tells me that we need to acknowledge that as real as the problem is outside of us that there are people with guns and bombs who want to destroy our way of living, there is also a challenge inside as well. We need smart and effective ways of dealing with the external threat and we need a conscious awareness that there is a struggle going on a gut level between our fears and darker instincts to close down and circle the wagons and our higher aspirations to be welcoming and open to people in need and ideas that challenge. Islam as a spiritual tradition has much to teach. The word Jihad reflects that struggle. It is an internal process of choosing hope rather than fear, faith rather than despair, acceptance and understanding rather than rejecting and stereotyping those who call God by a different name. We need to be willing to learn from all our traditions and we need to live in that struggle. Out of it comes blessing.