A Spiritual Life: Exploring the Heart and Jewish Tradition, Revised Edition

11.Brigadoon, A Place for Dreams to Grow

11 h Brigadoon, A Place for Dreams to Grow 282 A SPIRITUAL LIFE 283 BRIGADOON, A PLACE FOR DREAMS TO GROW This is a story that began as a solitary story, the story of a person coming of age, growing into maturity, seeking meaning , seeking connection. The spiritual journey begins with the self: I need to articulate who I am, as precisely as I am able to see that. I need to know, in my cells, in my pores, what I am feeling. If I acknowledge that, if I honor that, I am more readily at peace with myself. But the burden of oneness, of solitude, is unbearable. Again and again we reach out for connection. Having located an intact self, I want to rub up against others, to hear their stories, to laugh, to nourish, to comfort one another, to be explorers together entering new worlds, ever deepening meaning, pleasure. All of my life I have sought connection—in the home of my childhood; in the late night walks through Brooklyn streets with college friends on our way home from Shabbat gatherings; in the formation of minyanim, prayer communities where men and women sit together, are counted equally and share each other’s energy in an attempt toward religious meaning; in Rosh Hodesh groups where women meet monthly to explore their relationship to the traditions they’ve inherited and to strive also to be active creators of new traditions; in dialogue groups where Palestinians and Jews can express honestly sources of pain, of hatred, of mistrust , and where they can lay the groundwork for new ways of living together in a space even smaller than the apartment of my childhood; in cities and towns across the former Soviet Union where women and men are finding Jewish roots again and creating a vital Jewish future; in individual friendships with women and with men where we have celebrated and struggled sometimes for decades to hear each other, to accept each other, to care for each other, to bless each other; and most of all, in the ever-changing yet solid center of my life, my adult home, where I have given love bounteously and received love abundantly and where we have made room to welcome travellers embarked on spiritual pilgrimage for the momentary refreshment offered by Shabbat, by seder, by festival celebration. And then there’s Brigadoon. Brigadoon, a place for dreams to grow, Brigadoon, which I’ve saved for last. Brigadoon 284 A SPIRITUAL LIFE was one of those wonderful Broadway musicals (later made into a movie) about a mythic Scottish village which appears from the mist once every hundred years and which has but a day for its magic to work and its stories to unfold before it once again recedes into the mist. This is one of the playful ways the women of Bnot Esh have come to refer to themselves. Bnot Esh (literally, Daughters of Fire) is a Jewish feminist community established in 1981. Consisting of 30 members, we gather once a year for a five day retreat over the Memorial Day weekend and together explore issues of spirituality, social change, and the feminist transformation of Judaism. Why do I want to end the multifaceted story of this spiritual journey with Brigadoon? Because it is there and with those sisters that I have radically dared to explore the unknown, especially the unknown in me. It is there and with those sisters that I have again and again been reborn, allowed the many secret selves which hide within to step into daylight. It is there and with those sisters I learned to dance without a net. h h h I first came to Bnot Esh in May 1984. I was 36 years old, the mother of five-year-old Lisa, and almost two-year-old Uri. Although I had already written my first play, it sat in a drawer— I knew enough to know it lacked sufficient merit to be “sent out” and in any case I had not the vaguest notion of where I might have sent it. Nonetheless, I was hard at work on a second play and had a recurring fantasy that the finished product would be so incredible that Joe Papp himself would drive down to Princeton to meet me: on a bright sunny day, he’d ring the doorbell, I’d open my front door and he would embrace me...