Ashes and Pockets of Light; Left, Right, & in Circles (Eikev)

Last week, I hiked up a mountain with twenty other people for a burial.

It was not the first time assisting this one particular family—for the same beloved person who died back at the end of February.

(Remember? Angel or A-Hole? This was him. Steven.)

Steven had family and friends that loved him so much, they gathered together, not once, but three times—from the far reaches of the globe—to honor and rermember him.

The first time was for a memorial service; he’d requested cremation, and that was honored.

The second time was to place some of his ashes in a plot at the family cemetery where he would remain connected to his ancestors.

That very week, I’d written about ashes in relation to Passover and a seder I had led at a senior center that week. In my blog, I’d connected Passover with the Torah reading of that week, which talked about the sacrificial system. While the Torah says the ashes from the animal sacrifices were to be placed next to the alter in a pile, Rabbi Tali Adler had quoted the ancient rabbis, saying that, into the ashes went all the hopes and dreams and prayers of the Israelites. And isn’t Passover all about our hopes and prayers and dreams for liberation?

And it was that same Friday, interestingly, that I met the family on Staten Island on a rainy, cold, nasty day, the day before Passover, to bury Steven’s ashes.

The third time of gathering for Steven was last week, when we brought the second half of his ashes to a mountaintop in Upstate New York. There, they were scattered among ferns in a forest. This was his truest wish—to be free, liberated from the confines of the world, but connected to the earth that he loved so dearly.

I suggested that everyone bring a stone or pick one up along the way. The stones were not (this time) for placing on a tombstone, the traditional way when visiting a Jewish cemetery. But what was traditional about this burial anyway? And where was the foundation laid for how to carry out such a ritual in a Jewish way?

So, instead of leaving the stones at the “grave,” people were to take them home.

But before doing that, we had to get to the top of the mountain, which proved not as easy as expected. First, we got lost on the road, taking a right turn instead of a left. We were following two different GPS’s (have you ever done that?), and had to make a guess as to which one was correct. There were various sign-posts for the mountain we were headed to, but none of them was the correct one. We lost our signal, and ended up returning to the truck stop where we’d originally met the others, and started all over again, finally connecting by phone to let the others know we were lost.

Once on the trail, distances were farther and the hike steeper than we’d thought. We passed turn-offs and had to retrace our steps. Much of the time, it felt like we were going in circles. Not having been there before, each step we took changed our expectations of what this day was supposed to look like.

Like the Israelites wandering through the desert for forty years as recalled by Moses in this week’s Torah portion, to some of us on this venture, it felt like we were wandering.

But we found wonderful surprises along the way, too, and it was so much more beautiful than I could have imagined. The bad air quality that had been plaguing us on the East Coast cleared that day, the humidity lifted, we had relief from the extreme heat, the summer bugs in the forests were nowhere to be found, and the sun came out, creating pockets of light through the trees.

At our ultimate destination, we stood in a circle in a sweet little wooded area near a lean-to, and everyone took out their stones. As they held them in their palms, I asked them to place their memories, and also lessons learned from Steven about how to live, and maybe how to die. They were to take these stones home with them, a sign of permanence in an impermanent world, from a place where Steven would only be found in spirit.

Stones, I explained, can be reminders of the bricks laid in a foundation for building a new kind of future. If anyone cared about building a future for a better world, Steven was that person.

He loved the wilderness and hiking, yes. The present state of the natural world troubled him deeply, as it does many of us. He was also deeply troubled by the present political and social state of the world. And he worked tirelessly, to make things different, to make things better and, to the annoyance of some who loved him, ranted and raved while he was at it. What he wanted was for people and governments to be kinder and more caring, to recognize the humanity in each person, and to treat them as such, even those you might deem your enemies. This was how Steven expressed his Jewishness, even if he was not aware of it and didn’t identify deeply with it in other ways.

So, just as in this week’s Torah portion, when Moses reminds the Israelites of their long, twisted journey in the desert, of all their missteps along the way and repeated lack of faith, we too were on a journey.

As a people, and as a world, we continue to be on a journey, one much longer and more challenging than we might have expected or certainly hoped for. We seem to continue to get lost along the way, turning right instead of left, with a very flawed GPS to guide us along the way—and often GPS’s with conflicting directions on how to proceed.

We hope that we will be surprised by the outcome, and that we encounter a beauty we can barely imagine, but that we know, somewhere in our discouraged hearts, is possible, if only we have the faith to continue working tirelessly to make it happen.

In the meantime, we need to continue to find and create pockets of light in the world, in the small and beautiful ways people bring goodness into the world, and place our hopes and dreams and prayers into the ashes of destruction caused by wildfires and wars, working towards creating a better future.

And please say amen.