Arise my darling;
For the winter is past,
The rain is over and gone.
The flowers appear on the earth;
The time of singing has come,
And the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land;
The fig tree puts forth its green figs;
And the vines in blossom give forth their fragrance
Rejoice my darling;
Arise and come away!
-Song of Songs (excerpted from my family’s haggadah)
Every year, at the onset of fall, as part of Rosh Hashanah (New Year) and Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement), Jews all across the world engage in a ritual rehearsal of our own death. We don’t all speak of it in those terms. There are many interpretations of this ritual, many narratives that we assign it, but to me it all clicked into place when I understood the practices of atonement: of taking account of our actions, of asking forgiveness - from each other, from our selves, from our god - as a rehearsal of, if not a preparation for our own death.
This death rehearsal, as all things Jewish, contains many layers: the interpersonal (and intrapersonal) practice of making reparation for the times we did not live up to the aspirations of our best self; the spiritual reckoning with the inevitability of our own actual death; and, particularly in ancient times, the very practical preparation for the oncoming winter when the land would cease its production and it was not certain that we would make it to the next season of abundance. In each of these ways, this death rehearsal prepares us to enter the uncertainty of the winter season spiritually grounded, all debts accounted for, steady and ready for whatever it is that lies ahead.
Six moon cycles later, at the onset of spring, we engage in a ritual of rebirth: the Passover Seder. At the Seder we eat the first foods of the new growing season, we celebrate fertility, and we tell the story of our people’s liberation. In the modern world where most Jews are not farmers orienting our years around the growing seasons, our celebrations tend to highlight the symbols and metaphors of these natural life cycles moments, focusing our rituals on the meaning that can be made in our own lives through our ancient connections with the rhythms of the earth and the heavens.
Some of the questions we might ask at a rebirth ritual include, what over the course of this past winter has been dying? How does the world I am stepping into look different this year from the world I left this past fall? How have the conditions upon which I am to plant, the conditions in which I am to do my work, changed?
As someone who has always centered myself and my work in the struggle for liberation and justice for all people, I find myself walking out this spring into a landscape that is not hospitable to the crops that I am used to planting. There have been fires, there have been floods, there have been toxic spillages. There are a lot of places in the landscape that are no longer safe for me to walk in, let alone plant.
Looking around at these conditions I am called to ask, are we in an elongated season of dying? And if we are, what does that mean… for me and the people I love; for communities and institutions that I feel connected to; for ideas that I have held, that have driven me, that have shaped the ways that I see the world? In a time of dying, what are the things that are worth holding onto, that are worth standing up for, that are worth preserving? And what are the things that I can be okay saying goodbye to, that I can thank for that which they gave to me and then let go of, that I can accept the loss of through a process of grieving? In a time of great dying, what does grief ask of me? And if we are in an elongated season of dying, what can rebirth look like in the midst of that?
I do not know the answers to all of these questions, perhaps I will ask them at my Seder tonight. What I do know is that death and rebirth are not always linear and are certainly not binary. All week, as I have been preparing to write on this theme, the image that has most often come to my mind is of a patch of forest on the land upon which my summer camp was held. This particular patch of forest was in a small area of the land on the far side of the pond, a place where most campers never spent much time. The lighting felt different in this part of the forest, the ground was uneven - sometimes solid and other times swampy, and any potential paths were cut off by giant old trees that had fallen. It was these trees that made me fall in love with this part of the forest.
Some of these trees were clearly dead. Separated from their roots and starting to hollow, their rot became the fertile ground for a new ecosystem of moss, smaller plants, and the beginnings of what might one day become new trees. But of greatest interest to me was a tree where it was not entirely clear which phase of the life cycle it was in. It was lying horizontal on the forest floor, roots mostly upended but had taken an entire tract of soil into the air with it as it fell.
If the roots were intact and some of them were still entrenched in the soil, could the tree still be alive? And if it was still alive what did that mean about the new life that was already using it as the ground it would emerge from? Was this tree both dead and alive? Was it somewhere in between? Rebirth, it turns out, is not a linear process. New life does not need complete death to occur before it can emerge.
Thinking about this tree I am reminded that even in this current moment, this elongated season of dying where it seems like there is nothing to do but watch the decay continue eating away at all the things I used to know, there is new life that is dying to be born. And it is each of our work, in this moment, to find those buds of life and do all we can to nurture them, to become them, to grow with them into the beings that we most aspire to be.