Etrog

This is a guided visualization.
You can read it to yourself or
read it out loud to your congregation
or havurah or other group....

Please get as comfortable as you can in your seat.

Begin to notice your breathing (make a few audible, slow breaths so others present can join you)....

imagine it is a really nice day during sukkot.

You have made a plan to leave your office or place of work or study - to leave that strong office temple which houses your day's efforts and for a few minutes to go sit in a sukkah.

How might a feminal idea differ from a seminal idea?

Pass both a lulav and an etrog to tonight's guests in your sukkah. Let the person to whom it comes, if they are so inclined, reflect on the differences in the qualities of these two symbols. Allow room for humor, scent, acting, conceptualizing, and singing.

One related memory that comes to mind for me is when the women rabbinical students at the seminary where I trained (Reconstructionist Rabbinical College) were sitting together in collective sadness in a sukkah. Our sadness came from the absence of Jewish women’s history, philosophy and life-cycle rituals in both Judaism and rabbinical school.

The bus lines to get to Safed (Sefat), Israel before Shabbat were impossible. There I was a tiny (five feet one half inch) brown haired, green-eyed, non-Hebrew speaking seventeen year-old Jewish girl, waiting in line at the central bus station in Jerusalem. If you could even call it a line - it more resembled a crowd at a rugby match.

Why Safed? In my spiritual imagination it was where wild-eyed mystics roam the streets and with a glance fill your soul with endless revelation....where artists become inspired by simply viewing the ornamented Sephardic temples and gleaming hammered metal Torah scroll cases.....where domed roofs would carry my prayers higher and deeper....