Glimpses of Jewish Cuba
by Nancy Rosenbaum, producer
Last week I visited one of Cuba’s few operating synagogues. It was founded in 1939 by Sephardic Turkish Jews who immigrated to the eastern Cuban city of Santiago de Cuba in the first decades of the 20th century. Later, they were joined by Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe fleeing Nazi persecution.
The synagogue’s doors were shuttered from 1980-1995. I was told that an Argentine rabbi came in the 1990s and helped to revive Jewish life here. Today, roughly two dozen members attend services. Over the years, the Jewish community in Santiago de Cuba has dwindled. People have opted to leave Cuba to make a new life in Israel. Still, according to congregant Emma Levy (pictured below in the flowered dress), as long as there’s one member, the doors of the Santiago de Cuba’s historic synagogue will remain open and Shabbat candles will illuminate the temple’s sanctuary each Friday.
(All photos by Nancy Rosenbaum)
An Easter Sunday. A Sacred Echo. Solidarity in a Small Hell of Our Own
by Pádraig Ó Tuama, guest contributor
A sign hangs on the wall of a Taizé community in Burgundy, France. (photo: forteller/Flickr, cc by-nc-sa 2.0)
It is Easter week. This week, we remember the events from Thursday’s meal to Friday’s torture to Saturday’s silence and Sunday’s mystery.
Years ago, 13 years ago in fact, I fell apart. I was 22 and I had already been sick for a year. It had started with a bad flu that had never gone away. After 12 months, I was bewildered and dizzy and achy, confused with a fatigue and an illness that would take a further five years to diagnose and a total of nine years to recover from.
Up until that point, I hadn’t spent much time contemplating chronic illness. However, after a year of being ill, hearing doctors’ opinions, berating myself with my own opinions, I was firmly contemplating chronic illness. When you are chronically ill, there are some things to learn — you must learn to relate to your sickness, and you must learn to relate to your feelings about being sick. In the face of these two lessons, I was gutted with a raw fear in the face of the unknown.
For Lent that year, I read a chapter of Job every day. It was less a religious exercise and more an exercise of survival. I needed some kind of echo of the bewilderment, loneliness, and confusion. Job became a friend. I heard his grief, and I heard his sadness.
Taizé community celebrate the ascension of Jesus Christ on Easter Sunday. (photo: Damien Mathieu/Flickr, cc by-nc-nd 2.0)
And, for the last two weeks of Easter in 1998, I went to a monastery in eastern France for two weeks of silence. Looking back on it, it might seem unwise — responding to a hollowness inside me by going to a place of silence. I don’t know what prompted me to go, but I went. I was welcomed by a gentle monk who showed me to my small room and told me that it might not be a good idea to read all the time.
“Il faut écouter, avec les oreilles de tendresse, à ton propre silence,” he said. “You must listen, with ears of tenderness, to your own silence.”
Ha! I was petrified of that silence. I read The Lord of the Rings in five days flat.
It took 11 days before I began to relax. By that time, it was Holy Thursday, and the time when the Last Supper is remembered. That morning, the brother spoke to the pilgrims gathered for a few minutes after breakfast to set a tone of inspiration for the day. He noted how Jesus said in the Gospel of Luke, “I have earnestly desired this meal.”
He didn’t paint a picture of a Nazarene who ran to the arms of Roman torture willingly, but he depicted a character who believed enough in a way of life to take that way of life to the death. The monk spoke about how Jesus lived the last days of his life in a way that was faithful to the life he’d always lived — calling enemies and dispossessed ones “friends,” having concern for his mother, accepting help from a Cyrenian stranger, looking for moments of life while life itself was draining away.
I don’t know what happened, but somehow, I began to breathe. I remember I was sitting in a chapel, listening to a German nun tune an eclectic zoo of musicians into some kind of harmony. Nothing cataclysmic occurred — it was just that I began to fear my own darkness a little less. I began to feel where I had only known numb and lonely survival. I began to feel that if I am here, then perhaps I am here with a companion. There were few words of prayer; there was a deep sense of accompaniment. I began to recognise that I didn’t need the words to describe the chronic illness that was indescribable.
That Easter Sunday I cried. Not because of some miraculous resurrection. I had eight long years to wait before my health began to improve. I cried because, in the words of an old monk, I heard an echo of an understanding that went beyond words, and, in that echo there was companionship.
Tree at Taizé community in France. (photo: etch indelibly in the mind/Flickr, cc by-nc-sa 2.0)
Years later, when studying theology, I came across Hans Urs Von Balthasar. Von Balthasar is noted for many things, one of which is his poetic retelling of Christ’s descent into hell. He said, “Jesus descended into hell. He is dead with us, and disturbs our loneliness. … God, in the weakness of love enters into solidarity with us who find ourselves damning ourselves, in the form of the crucified brother abandoned by God…and in such a way that is clear to the sinner that God-the-Forsaken is so for my sake.”
Each year on Easter Sunday I find myself moved. Not because there is a happy ever after ending to all of our stories. It is quite clear that there is not. I am moved because of a sacred echo of a hope that there is solidarity for those who feel like we inhabit a small hell of our own experience. The hope of Easter doesn’t damn this hell with a bleaching light. Rather this hope enters and squats with us. The celebrations of Holy Week for me are not about cataclysmic resurrections, but about being moved to follow in the life of the Nazarene, bravely entering into loneliness with a small spring of consoling company.
Pádraig Ó Tuama, a native of Cork, works in Belfast, Northern Ireland as a faith & peace worker of the Irish Peace Centres. His poetry and writing can be found at Hold Your Self Together.
We welcome your original reflections, essays, videos, or news items for possible publication on the Being Blog. Submit your entry through our First Person Outreach page.
The Hard Work of Staying Still
by Teresa Jordan, guest contributor
One day last fall, just after 3 a.m, I found myself on a country road in the high Ogden Valley near Huntsville, Utah. It was the first morning of a three-day retreat at the Abbey of Our Lady of the Holy Trinity, a Trappist-Cistercian monastery, and I was walking the half mile from the guest house to the church for Vigils, the first of seven times each day that the monks gather to chant and pray.
I am not Catholic. As a child, I did not attend church of any kind and my adult observance can best be described as “Cafeterian,” drawing nourishment from many spiritual traditions. But the abbey offers retreat to anyone who seeks renewal, and for three days I had an apartment in the guest house to myself and an invitation to use my time for contemplation in whatever form I chose.
On a moonless night, the earth was inky black and the sky a field of diamonds. I did not, however, find myself in a world of ethereal quiet. I might have expected the chirp of night birds, the strange wooden cooing of Sandhill cranes, the bark of town dogs a few miles away, or even a truck groaning up a distant grade. All of these were present but only as bass tones to a more pervasive racket, an eerie, high-pitched call and response back and forth across the valley from high up in the hills. I didn’t recognize the sound: certainly not coyotes and too high-pitched for donkeys — unlike any bird call I could imagine. The sound wrapped me in its mystery and I had a thought that often occurs when I stop to really listen, even in midday: a world exists outside my knowing because I am asleep.
Later, Father Charles, who coordinates the retreats for women, told me I had arrived at the height of elk mating season. Of course. I should have known. I had heard bugling once or twice in my childhood, but I remembered it as much lower in pitch, and in fact elk make many different sounds. On subsequent mornings, I heard a range of calls as well as other signs that the animals were near: the sound of hooves running in the field beside the road, the stick-on-stick clatter of antlers as two bulls sparred. All this in the pitch dark. By day, the elk were nowhere to be seen, but I took comfort in knowing they were about, taking refuge, as was I, at the abbey.
The Abbey of our Lady of the Holy Trinity was founded in 1947 with 34 monks from Gethsemani monastery in Kentucky and is one of twelve Cistercian-Trappist monasteries in the United States. (There are also five convents.) The monks observe seven periods of Scripture, prayer, and song throughout the day known as the Liturgy of the Hours: Vigils, Lauds, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers, and Compline. The ancient chants — historically in Latin but now in English — are sung in unison. In addition, the monks devote their lives to private prayer and manual labor.
Monks who enter a Trappist monastery live out their lives in community. Today, 15 monks live at the Huntsville Abbey and their average age is 80; there have been four funerals in the past year. There are more stones in the graveyard than plates on the table. They have no novices. “We are praying for that to change,” Father Charles told me.
The Abbey is self-supporting on 1800 acres of crop and range ground. Traditionally, the monks did all the ranch work themselves. Now, in deference to their ages, they lease out the land but still do the maintenance and housekeeping themselves as well as process creamed honey and run a book store and gift shop. One monk, a fine woodworker, builds grandfather clocks.
I had been under the impression that Trappist monks observe a vow of silence, but that has never been the case. They follow rules of silence that were stricter in the past than now, but they have always believed, as they explain on their website, that silence ”is a form of charity to others, but it is not absolute. Charity may sometimes oblige persons, including monks, to speak at the right time and in the right way.” The words have stayed with me. Often I am so distracted, so “busy,” that I feel far removed from a world in which I know how to speak — or do anything else, for that matter — “at the right time and in the right way.”
Recently, a friend reminded me of a quote from advertising: “I know half my advertising dollars are completely wasted; the problem is I don’t know which half.” And then commented that she felt that way about her busy-ness. “It’s usually only in retrospect that I can see things that really didn’t need to be done,” she wrote, “or at least not done in the frenzy with which I approached them, or indeed would have been much better left undone.”
She identifies a quandary that many of us feel. We are dancing so fast that we hardly hear the music. We fall in bed each night too exhausted to imagine that the ceaseless tasks that engage us might be a form of what the Tibetan Buddhist master Sogyal Rinpoche calls “active laziness.”
“Eastern laziness,” he writes in The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying,“ is like the one practiced to perfection in India. It consists of hanging out all day in the sun, doing nothing, avoiding any kind of work or useful activity, drinking cups of tea, listening to Hindi film music blaring on the radio, and gossiping with friends. Western laziness is quite different. It consists of cramming our lives with compulsive activity, so that there is no time at all to confront the real issues.”
Many of us want to confront the real issues: how to live responsibly on this Earth, practice love for one other, and live in gratitude for the miracle of our existence — but we have forgotten how. It is one reason I went to Huntsville: to grow quiet enough to remember. It was not a complete retreat. I was “too busy” not to bring a writing deadline with me and I spent a few hours each day in the Huntsville library. But for a little sliver of time, my days were not so very different from those of the monks, in form if not in depth: I attended many, though not all, of the hours; I spent time in private meditation; I worked quietly with little outside distraction.
The Trappists are not teachers in the active sense. They do no ministry outside the monastery. In their words, they devote their lives “to live the gospel in our particular way for the sake of our brothers and sisters throughout the world.” They pray for us, and they provide a model of commitment and reverent industry through the quiet order of their day.
The monks live the strength of their vows to a degree that few of us can imagine. But as they observe the hours, they remind us that we all make vows with time, something which David Whyte eloquently explores in his book Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity:
“When we make a good marriage with time, … whatever sanity, patience, generosity and creative genius we are able to achieve in life is not solely within our own remit. It comes from a real conversation with something other than ourselves…The closer we are to the productions of time — that is, to the eternal — the more easily we understand the particular currents we must navigate on any given day…
To say yes …to [something] that we know we cannot do with any sanity given all our present commitments … would be the equivalent of promiscuity, of faithlessness and betrayal. Stress means we have committed adultery with regard to our marriage with time. If we want to understand the particulars of our reality, we must understand the way we conduct our daily relationship with the hours.”
I did not come home from Huntsville having entirely healed my marriage with time, and I know myself well enough to doubt I can completely resist the seduction of unnecessary busy-ness. But the retreat reminded me of the power of contemplation to create a spaciousness where our larger commitments can come into view. This seems a simple truth and in fact the Greek word for truth, aletheia, means a clearing. No matter how full the hours, I need to make time to hear the elk bugling in the hills, the monks chanting in the chapel, and the still small voice within.
Teresa Jordan is the author or editor of seven books on the American West, including a study of women who work on the land and in the rodeo, Cowgirls: Women of the American West, and the rural memoir, Riding the White Horse Home. She blogs at The Year of Living Virtuously (Weekends Off).
We welcome your original reflections, essays, videos, or news items for possible publication on the Being Blog. Submit your entry through our First Person Outreach page.
Fasting on Facebook with My Beloved Baha’i Community
by Candace Hill, guest contributor
Screen capture of the Baha’i Faith Facebook page.
Day two of fasting this year, and the egg salad on the sesame bagel was especially delicious this morning. This is the dichotomy of the Nineteen Day Fast — that while we don’t eat or drink from sunrise to sunset, the early morning meals feel more special and dinners more festive.
The Baha’i Faith has its own calendar of 19 months made up of 19 days. As in Islam, one of these months is set aside for fasting, just during the daylight hours. And much like the Islamic month of Ramadan, when it comes time for the sun to set, the evening meal feels like a party, a celebration, a time for truly giving thanks for our nourishment, be it a feast or bread and water.
This is all fine and well if you live in a community, neighborhood, or family where everyone is fasting. Although certainly not the children, the elderly, the sick, the traveler, or the pregnant or nursing mother, fasting is for the healthy, mature adults in the community, if you have a community.
In America, the Baha’i Faith is small in numbers. It is more likely that a college student will be the only one in her dorm who is fasting. The editor at his desk will kindly refuse offers of lunch outings. A coffee break with friends seems strange if you are the only one who is not drinking coffee.
But then there’s Facebook. If you are a Baha’i on Facebook, then you have the bounty of an in-gathering of friends from around the world. Baha’is tend to love conferences, summer schools, study circles, and potlucks. It’s not difficult to amass a list of Facebook friends of all ages and ethnicities, living in an exciting number of time zones.
On Facebook you can worship together, with friends posting excerpts from beloved prayers and meditations. On Facebook you can learn together, with friends posting photographs from Baha’i history. On Facebook you can laugh together, with inside jokes and stories that don’t have to be explained. On Facebook you can sing along, to songs from breaking artists like Andy Grammar to beloved standards by Seals and Crofts. On Facebook you can cook together, sharing recipes and shopping tips. On Facebook you can fast together, encouraging each other to make it through the 3 p.m. nap at the desk, and by cheerfully counting down the days.
Facebook allows the beloved community to chat with each other while working, on a mobile phone riding the bus to work, when the baby is napping, and even late at night when we should have all been in bed hours ago.
Fasting is a religious experience where we practice patience and restraint. It is also a community experience where we support and encourage each other. As enlightenment dawns through prayer and meditation, we reflect that light upon each other. It is lovely to be able to do that face to face. But, I also enjoy that same process on Facebook. The reaching out and sharing feels the same across the miles, now that we have the immediacy of the Internet.
Now, what to make for dinner tonight? My Facebook friends will have some ideas.
Candace Moore Hill lives in Evanston, Illinois and has recently published a photographic history of the Baha’i House of Worship in Wilmette. She is currently a volunteer community ambassador with One Chicago One Nation, affiliated with Interfaith Youth Core and blogs at Baha’i History in Postcards.
We welcome your original reflections, essays, videos, or news items for possible publication on the Being Blog. Submit your entry through our First Person Outreach page.
