thanksgiving mash up
I live in America. I say that just to orient everyone to the topic of this blog.
The weekend before Halloween I promised to take my five-year-old friend and her mom to see Hotel Transylvania. Unfortunately, it was only playing at The Grove – a giant outdoor shopping “experience” that is jammed-packed with people, events, stores, and more things to buy than should probably be available anywhere on earth, with plenty of people hawking to focus your attention to it. As we were swimming upstream from the many-level parking lot outlet into the main courtyard my little friend began yanking on my hand which she was holding and started screaming: “Rudolph, Rudolph, Rudolph!!!” I followed her finger high into the sky and saw that, in the middle of the grand courtyard of consumer-central, spanning the fountain, were wires strung to trolley Rudolph back and forth over the heads of the throng… and over the top of the multi-storied Christmas tree that was already up. A reminder – this was October 27th.
One of my favorite aspects of Judaism is the adherence to distinction. Prayers are made over separate moments within one meal, and there are different prayers for each of the food items in the meal, even down to discerning differences between types of fruits, vegetables, whether they are accompanied by bread or meat, and so forth. In a guide to blessings one can even find that there is a different prayer for onion rings with light coating than onion rings with heavy coating. There are no generalities. Why would this be so?
Many of the great religions advise us to live in the present. And yet, humans struggle with this on an almost minute-by-minute basis. We rush to our to-do list, thinking about how we’re going to fit it all in, we pay attention to feelings of hunger and start to imagine lunch in an hour’s time, we dwell on the past and things we enjoyed or things we wished we had said. Rarely are we Here, Now. As such, there’s a lot of life that we miss. Requiring distinction is one antidote to this struggle.
By requiring separate prayers for different foods one must pause before a meal, look at the food, be present with it. What is it? What am I eating? How do I feel about it? And then in choosing and saying the prayer it is an acknowledgement of each separate food, of the food itself (how many meals have you rushed through and never even tasted?). It is a training of your focus to what is right in front of you. It is bringing back the mind to being present to our experiencing. In other words, it puts you at the table, Here, Now.
Following distinction – becoming present to our experiencing – catapults life into a vibrant and technicolor experience. Each thing in its time becomes something to be celebrated, savored. It is to fully live each moment.
The week after Halloween two local radio stations changed their line-up to 24/7, round-the-clock, Christmas music. I’ve lived in LA over 20 years and they used to change their line-up to Christmas the day after Thanksgiving. Now, it’s three weeks before.
Why are we rushing? To WHERE are we rushing?
I asked my five-year-old friend if looking at Rudolph took her attention away from the Halloween movie we were about to see. This was not a fair question, because now we were fully submerged in fake snowflakes, snow-dusting, and all the sparkly-shiny things that hang from trees and glitter in windows and really are fun to look at, especially if you are five. So I settled on telling her this:
“In my tradition it is forbidden to celebrate two events on the same day – for example, if you and your friend both had a birthday a couple of days apart so to make it easy we made one party on a date in the middle. How would that make you feel?” She understood that she wouldn’t get to be the sole princess blowing out the candles in that case, and the lesson started to sink in. I suggested she get a fun scare at the movie, go trick or treating in a few days and focus on that. Besides, she had a pretty Dorothy costume just waiting in her closet – did she want to trade those ruby red slippers for a Christmas ornament? That would mean choosing – one or the other. If not, if she waited and lived each thing fully, then she didn’t have to choose but could have both. She decided it would be more fun to have BOTH – ruby slippers on Halloween and the Christmas ornament a few weeks later.
This Thanksgiving, maybe ask yourself: Where am I? If you’re thinking about what already was, it’s over. If you’re thinking ahead, it doesn’t even exist yet. Both are a fantasy. Either we’re here or we’re not – experience (life!) can’t be multi-tasked. The only thing real is right now. So why rush it? There really is no where else to be.
