Walking the Walls of Jerusalem in my Vision An Example of Self Created Ritual

I know this is out of season, but it came to me to share it when I was walking in the woods today as an example of the power of self created ritual that is authentically Jewish and deeply rooted in our tradition.

The ritual happened the day after the Hoshana Rabbah ritual that has been developed and celebrated communally by Wilderness Torah.  Hoshana Rabba, the great pleading, is an ancient ritual in which our ancestors would sing and dance and pray for rain at the end of Sukkot and in the beginning of the rainy season. 

Wilderness Torah rightly has created a full body ritual of intense music and dance to pray with our whole being for rain and thus for our very lives.  Because water is life, and without the life giving rains, which we certainly don’t deserve given how we have treated the more than human world, we would starve. Our ancestors did not have grocery stores where it is always summer, and perhaps one day we too will not.

The ritual done at Sukkot in 5784, October 2023, was an incredibly powerful ritual. The music was married to a huge theme of really begging the divine for life, because water is life. The ritual, to its great credit, didn’t try to make any kind of argument; we just danced and pleaded with our bodies. It was really intense.  The only analogy I have is one of the scenes with John the Baptist in the movie the Last Temptation of Christ with the fabulous score by Peter Gabriel.

I didn’t fall into any trance (which I’d expected to do), maybe because it was hot, maybe because I had to be in my body to not fall and break an ankle on the uneven ground, maybe because it was crowded.  But I definitely danced and let myself sink into the music and the movement.

It ended, I stood still for a few minutes and then went off to do a kitchen shift. As Jack Kornfield says, after the ecstasy, the laundry. However, I felt really unfinished and overwhelmed. That feeling persisted even through a very sweet Havdalah, the ritual that ends Shabbat and offers us a transition to the mundane world.  I retreated to my room, grateful to have been gifted the room (most everyone else was camping) and asked for some dreams to help me process.

This was an important step in my spiritual process—asking for help.  It tells whoever or whatever is listening that I would stay with my sense of being incomplete and I was looking for some wisdom from outside of my ego.  Jewish tradition has long valued dreaming.

I did dream, but nothing that I could remember or felt was applicable to that huge sense of incompletion. But I did wake up with the strangest sense that part of me was still physically in the circle (that was a disorienting experience to be both in my room and in the circle at the same time).  I knew that what there was to do was go and pray about it. I did not know if praying would ground me or offer any resolution but it seemed to me to be the thing to do, so I went over to where the altar was around which we had danced on the previous day.  I pulled up a somewhat wet chair (from dew, not rain) and did some of my normal morning prayer practice, while asking for some guidance in what to do.

Here’s what came to me and is the example of a self created ritual embedded in Jewish tradition.

I got up from the chair uncertain of what to do but thought circumambulating the altar, following the while chalk line 7 times still going counter sun wise was a place to start.  Counterclockwise was the direction we’d danced in to pull down the rain from the heavens. If I were doing this dance during Pesach, I would have danced clockwise, because our ancestors then prayed for the dryness that they needed so the grain could ripen and be harvested.  Clockwise, in this wisdom, sends things upward. 

As I was walking, slowly, slowly, I had this clear vision of walking like an old man on the walls of Jerusalem,  more like trudging, an old horse still committed to pulling the milk wagon, no longer able to do it effortlessly as the horse had done in his/her youth.

Over the time leading up to the dance, R. Zelig Golden had talked a lot about celebrating and dancing, and everyone staying up all night partying.  Sukkot was a great time of rejoicing for our ancestors.  As the famous Talmudic statement goes “The person who has not seen the rejoicing of the Water Drawing ceremony [during Sukkot] has never seen rejoicing (Sukkah 51A).  

But as I circumambulated the altar, I felt like an old pilgrim. That maybe this was the last time I’d ever come up to Jerusalem to perform this ritual. I was trudging around the altar, not dancing around it.  Every step was an effort. Maybe this was the last time I’d ever see the altar.  I moved into the center and spoke about how I felt a lot of me was left behind somehow.  I teared up and stood there swaying underneath my tallis.  I’m not sure how long I stood there.  Then I left the altar, complete enough to go on with the day, and still unresolved.

I’m still not sure.  There is a sense of saying goodbye and a sense of grief.  Maybe I am saying goodbye to being an adult and transitioning into being an elder?  I definitely had a sense of things undone that will never be done.  I am no longer young. Sure my body reminds me of the fact on a regular basis, but getting older isn’t enough to become an elder. We need to both let go of what we were once capable of, and embrace who we are now. Or maybe it was something else entirely. I will never forget that vision of me being an old man, trudging around on the walls of Jerusalem, the walls I walked as a young man.

The communal ritual and my personal ritual response to it lives within me. It was powerful and meaningful for me personally.  And maybe even ecologically as the rains started in Northern California shortly after our rain dance,  the rain in season for which we prayed.

Walls of the Old City of Jerusalem