ELDERS AND INITIATIONS PART 2

I lived on a hippie commune after college.  I was a tremendously successful philosophy student, but I knew that studying and writing philosophy in academia wasn’t going to take me where I wanted to go. So off I went to something different, the American equivalent structurally of the Kibbutz where I had spent a gap year between High School and College. 

I absolutely fell in love with the land of the commune.  It totally felt like home, a place I could breathe after four years in the hothouse of urban academia (I went to the University of Chicago). I rapidly became the head of the dairy, based on both my experience with cows on Kibbutz and my general leadership qualities (and the fact that the head didn’t want the job).  I read like crazy, I hit upon the idea of a spreadsheet to try and figure out how much grain to feed them, I learned how to make cheese so our milk wouldn’t go to waste and came up with the idea of using fresh and warm milk to make cheese, cutting off 25% of the cheese making labor.  I worked with the folks who were in charge of the fields, grazing off the alfalfa when it was being attacked by weevils, grazing wheat once in early spring before our fescue based pastures really started to grow. I certainly wasn’t perfect—if I knew then what I know now, I would have converted us to a grass based dairy and I would have grazed our pastures earlier in a daily rotational manner, for instance, but I made a profound difference in the diet of my fellow communards.  We went from rationing dairy products to signs all over the dining room saying “Eat Cheese”

I also was reading agrarian philosophers like crazy.  Somehow I discovered Wendell Berry and that led to Masanobu Fukuoka (or maybe the other way around?), Russell Smith, Wes Jackson, Aldo Leopold, HH King, Sir Albert Howard.  Mother Earth News was my preferred outhouse reading.

I was young.  I was 23, 24 years old and I had no idea how to make sense of everything I was reading in conjunction with my abilities and inclinations.  How was all this supposed to manifest in my life?  If I had been part of a well functioning society, that’s exactly where elders would have come into play. There was an older guy (older might have been 40, LOL) who had successfully homesteaded out west and I used to routinely attempt to engage him in what led him to choose that life and then walk away from it—but he basically refused to engage.  He refused to be any kind of mentor. And there was nobody else who had any vision of what an agrarian life might mean, no one who could even have a glimmer of understanding of what I was badly articulating, what I was trying to ask. 

I wound up leaving the commune, heading back to the security of graduate school in religious studies, as I sought to make sense of how I was supposed to live, who I was supposed to be.  I was trying to discover my path in life, and oh boy, I had no guidance and no one to see me.

As I think about this, I’m asking myself what might have happened if I had been able to find an elder.  Or maybe I can frame this as what would 65 year old Jared have said to 23 year old Jared? 

Elder Jared would work with younger Jared to make sure that he understood that farming wasn’t a vocational choice, but a spiritual path and he should pursue it in that context. That younger Jared needed to view milking cows and gardening as a spiritual practice. Further, he needed to find a way to express that love and connection with the land in a Jewish way that would be rooted in pre Rabbinic Judaism, including Hebrew versions of the Goddess.  And oh, boy, there were no models at all for that (still aren’t).

Secondly, elder Jared would have engaged with younger Jared about the whole question of parnassah, making a living. Making a living from farming is really, really hard and there’s no question that there are a series of mechanical skills that I don’t much have or am really interested in.  I would not have wanted to spend time fixing up an old tractor, although I might have done better to farm with horses because I am good with animals.  I’m not sure that attempting to make a living farming would been the right choice at all.  Wendell Berry lives a life close to the land, but he makes his living by writing and not needing nearly as much money as if he lived the kind of consumer lifestyle that most of us live. That would have been the right model.  But I would have needed to find a more collective context in which to do that.  Berry is embodied in Henry County Kentucky where he was raised and his family lived.  I had nothing like that.

When I lived on the commune, I worked about half time in the commune’s industries of making sandals and rope hammocks.  ½ time work to make a living was fine with younger Jared. But what should I have done?  I don’t know.  I discovered later in life (though the signs were already there), that I’m good at running organizations, so maybe something connected to that ability.

Thirdly, I could have really used help on the question of where to plant myself.  Younger Jared knew he needed to be planted on a particular piece of land, but being from suburban New York City, that provided no guidance at all.  Without any kind of clarity about a spiritual path or a way to make a living, I had  no way to answer this question.  In hindsight, the answer would have been someplace rural that had like minded Jews.  I don’t know if such a place existed in the early 1980’s.  And even if it had, I was so far from asking this kind of question that I didn’t get anywhere near there.

An elder would have directed me to live these crucial questions for the direction of my life, and my life would have turned out really differently—or not, there’s no real way to know. But what I can say for sure is that younger Jared had no one with whom to even begin to ask these kinds of questions.

I want to add a note about the commune I lived on.  I felt at the time, and still do, that most of us were there because we were hiding from what we called “the outside” that is what Plokin calls our consumer, conformist culture. Now, I thought then and think now that our culture really sucks on every level except material, and our material success isn’t long term sustainable. But the psychology of hiding is a debilitating psychology that doesn’t allow for the growth that all of us need.  The commune simply wasn’t a place to grow; it was more like a place to retreat to and then leave—which is what almost everybody did.   

I wrote in my parsha commentary “Initiations that fail are not just individual failures; they are communal failures.  The community does not receive the benefit of the vision and spiritual maturation of the young person that is the fruit of a successful initiation.”  My failure to find an elder to help guide me was hurt me personally and hurt my community because it robbed them of the contribution I could have made had I found a way to express my unique purpose ono the planet starting in my 20’s and through my adult life.