Rosh Hashanah and Great Meadows
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Rosh Hashanah services keep getting shorter and shorter as I get older and older. They were interminable when I was in about 9th grade, and long when I was in college. Part of the reason must be that I understand the structure of the services and know what the prayers are by now. We got there this morning just in time for the last part of the Torah reading. By now it's familiar enough that I just had to hear two verses in Hebrew to know that it was the last section. Our synagogue has three services (not counting youth services) going on at the same time. The one we attend used to be called the fully traditional service and was run entirely by members of the congregation who knew what they were doing. After a few years, and through the year before last, it was run by Moshe Waldoks. Moshe got his real ordination a couple of years ago and is a full-time rabbi now in the next town over, so we lost him.
Moshe's biggest strength may have been his interest in other spiritual traditions. Many rabbis will tell you about "A light unto the nations", but we also have to let other nations be a light unto us. It shouldn't be that strange. An ancient rabbi, Ben Azzai, used to say, "Who is wise? One who learns from everybody." Moshe is willing to do that, incorporating breathing exercises into the service and preaching about meeting with the Dalai Lama as well as being familiar with traditional Jewish texts.
OK, so I said Great Meadows. It's a national wildlife refuge out in Concord, a couple of miles down the Concord River from where on the rude bridge that spanned the flood, their flag to April's breeze unfurled, the embattled farmers fired the shot heard round the world. The water has been low this year to try to control some weeds, and there weren't a lot of ducks yet. We saw a couple of green-winged teal besides mallards and Canada geese and a few great blue herons. There was a big hawk in the woods that we got several glimpses of but couldn't identify. Arlene thought she saw a white rump on it, so maybe it was a harrier, but it sure wasn't harrier habitat. I want to think it was a goshawk. Or then again, maybe it was a great horned owl. How can I not know the difference? When I just see something big and gray flying away, "big raptor in the woods" is about all I'm sure of.
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