Introduction to Discovering Your Earth Based Jewish Purpose

This program of earth based Jewish adult psychospiritual initiation  overlays Bill Plotkin’s general theory of becoming a spiritual adult with Jewish cultural context, including Jewish ancestors, prayers, myths and practices.  It is organized by the rhythm of the three pilgrimage holidays of Sukkot, Pesach and Shavuot.  These holidays are the defining rhythm of our earth based Jewish calendar.

We do not have any clear or obvious Jewish maps from any of our ancestral sources, but I think we have pieces that we can apply to create a possible path to walk.  

Here is a visual representation of the Jewish journey to discovering and embodying your true purpose in the world.  

  This rhythm is one of first leaving home.  Leaving home positions you to go through an intense and transformational liminal period in which you learn how to let go of your old adolescent self and acquire the gifts that will characterize your adult life. Then you have to navigate a return to a community in order to share those gifts in a world that has great need but little interest in psychospiritual adults.  Here's some more detail about the journey. 

Sukkot to Pesach.  First we need to leave home and launch ourselves on a journey of self discovery.  But do we have the tools to go deep and discover who we truly are, or will we stay stuck at the surface as is characteristic of the journeys of chronological adolescents and young adults in our society?  Thus this first half of our year focused on psychospiritual preparation and recognition that we are living in exile, in the narrow place that is Mitzrayim (the Hebrew for Egypt which literally means “narrow place.”)

Pesach to Shavuot.  The beginning of liberation from our narrow places at Pesach and our journey into the desert to seek the vision of who we truly who, why we were born at this time and in this place. We left home before at Sukkot and wandered from Canaan to the fleshpots but ultimately slavery of Egypt.  But after Pesach, we need to go even deeper, away from our temporary home into the emptiness of the wilderness.  We have to empty ourselves so that the divine can fill us. 

Shavuot to Sukkot.  Great, we have had this wonderful revelation, but now we have what is an even harder task—figuring out how to share the gift we received at Sinai and with whom. In traditional face to face societies, initiates would return with visions which would be interpreted with the help of elders who had been through the process themselves.  Not only do we not have such elders, but we have this incredible plethora of possible communities and geographic locations. What exactly is my gift? Where do I live?  Who is my community? How does all this go along with my survival dance?  These are complicated questions with an apparent incredible range of alternatives. 

People can and do get stuck at any of these different phases; I’ve been working on metamorphosis since the mid 90’s for instance.  So I can’t promise that you will emerge in one year as a psychospiritual earth based Jewish adult. What I can promise is that you will have some hugely important building blocks and concepts you can access that could make a profound difference in your life.