Elul Day 27

Dear Elul Writers,

My old friend, Helen Rubinstein, is a writer, a teacher and a writing coach. She has a forthcoming book of essays called, Feels Like Trouble: Provocations on Writing, Teaching & Power. I had the pleasure of reading it over the past month, and, despite her entreaties in the book to avoid judging writing as ‘good’ or ‘bad’, I found it to be fabulous.

In an essay that explores what it means to be a writing coach, she points out a paradox about writing that I had never quite been able to articulate.

Everybody writes alone. Even in a generative workshop, when fifteen people sit shoulder-to-shoulder scribbling in notebooks by hand, each of us is writing alone: with our own sheet of paper, our own stream of words, our own pen.
Nobody writes alone. Even when we’re sitting “alone” at our desks—as I am right now, on a voraciously windy October night—even when, like me, you’ve carved out silence and absolute solitude, are fully offline, your phone shut outside your apartment door—we are not alone. We’re in conversation. We’re talking to the reader we imagine, or to the readers we dare not imagine. We’re talking to ourselves yesterday and to our future selves. We’re talking to each other. I’m talking to you, whoever you are. Hi.

That writing is an act that is done in isolation and, at the same time, is so inherently connected to others, reminds me of our spiritual task during Elul. Each of us faces inward in this season, and yet we do so as a community; we undertake this work in conversation with each other, with past and future selves, with the Holy One. 

Every year, I hear from you, and every year, I do my best to introduce you to one another. Our community is intergenerational, including people born in the ‘90s and people well into their 90s. I have heard from people in New Zealand and New Hampshire, Haifa and Halifax, Miami, San Diego, London and New Rochelle (to name a few). There are Jews of all varieties– folks who have found a home in communities that are Reform, Conservative and Orthodox and plenty who don’t fit so neatly into any box. We are accompanied by our siblings of other faith traditions– we are glad to have you along! The group includes artists and singers, community organizers and home organizers, health care workers (nurses, physical therapists, physicians, herbalists) and baristas (they should probably be included in the healthcare workers). We have amongst us people who wear the title ‘creative’ comfortably and others who still chafe against it. We are journalers, ruminators and discussers– each of us seeking to enter the new year with a sense of purpose and renewal. I think of you as I write; both those of you I know well, and those I don’t yet know. Please, feel free to say hi.

Prompt

Cheshbon hanefesh, our seasonal soul searching, is deeply personal, but we also find ourselves connecting through the process. Today, I encourage you to consider who you find yourself in conversation with as you prepare for the new year. If you are journaling, feel free to write, “I am in conversation with…” and then journal for a while. If you want to, you can write it again and again and again. Many of us are in conversation not with one person, but with a constellation– with ancestors and maple trees and cousins and sacred spaces and teachers and with the Divine.

Bivracha,

Jordan