Rosh Hashana Foods
It’s countdown to the High Holydays and all I am thinking about is cooking. How many people are coming, who eats what, how do I keep everything warm before serving… There are at least a million jokes about Jews and eating. Is it just a gastro-obsession, or is there something else behind it?
While it is wonderful, healing, and important to break bread with others, eating is also a way of grounding spiritual teachings when done with intent. We live in physical bodies, and inhabit a physical existence. Everything that we understand about this physical existence comes through the body – what we smell, taste, hear, etc., as well as what we are pulled towards, such as sleeping, movement, comfort and … eating. By recognizing this, and using physical elements to establish rituals, patterns, and behaviors, we can better understand spiritual concepts.
For example – each Shabbat all work is ceased so that thoughts can turn from the quotidian to the God-inspired. The ceasing of work is a physical movement, and a complete change in rhythm and habit. It is a stopping. Done over time, week after week, this establishes a body-based understanding of working and self-focus broken by a pause to consider the spiritual. Work-Pause-Work-Pause-Work-Pause. Self-God-Self-God-Self-God. Keeping Shabbat lays down a rhythm, or pattern, of learning to respond to life. Rather than indulging in an unceasing self-centered world view, which is to react to life, Shabbat returns the body again and again to a higher perspective which allows us to respond to life. It is made easier because the movement of it – the spiritual teaching of stepping out of the linear and into the vertical – is grounded in the body in a physically manifest way. And of course, much of the rituals around Shabbat are centered in the food of Shabbat.
Likewise, it is critical that we ground our dreaming in the physical. It is not enough to simply dream while sleeping – to be a great dreamer we have to learn to bring the dreams out and manifest in the physical, waking experience. The way to do this is to follow the dream itself.
For example, I recently had a dream that spoke to me of a powerful balancing of masculine and feminine energies. It was a dream about choice and manifesting. One of the prominent images in the dream is a leather bracelet that keeps drawing my eyes worn by a successful woman. I keep thinking about the bracelet in this dream – black, a color of power, and on her right wrist which is the male, active side of the self. In addition, while it fit her feminine outfit, there was also something masculine about the bracelet. In total, she was balanced. When I awake I think I need to get the bracelet.
Finding the bracelet sent me on a 3 week search. The searching brought my focus and attention to areas of balance, and in need of balance, in myself. For three weeks it was a pointed spotlight that acted as a sort of moving meditation where all my interactions and all whom I met were mirrors to this introspection. Finding the bracelet, and putting it on, was a powerful “sealing the deal” of this new choice of balance.
Not every dream necessitates a purchase. Some dreams open a door to paint them, or draw the images so they can be seen in the waking day. Others may prompt you to make a decision, or have a conversation with someone, or pick up that writing project you haven’t gotten around to. Sometimes the dream is asking to make a choice physical, to change a behavior, or establish a new pattern. Other dreams may simply need to be danced.
So as we roll into the feasting of the gratitude for abundance during Rosh Hashana, and the fasting of Yom Kippur because we are so full in our relationship with God that no eating is necessary, we will be etching into our actual walking selves these great teachings. We will be bringing that dream into reality. And as you dream in the coming weeks, see what is being asked to be grounded and manifest. As in the Dr. Seuss title: Oh the Places You Will Go …
Happy Dreaming, and L’Shana Tova!
