[HANASHIR:3189] Re: HANASHIR digest 567

[Julie Newman <jnewman...>]

In response to the question regarding the authenticity of community at Hava
Nashira:
While a good distinction is made that we at Hava Nashira, for the most part, do 
not
share in each others' day to day lives and lifecycle events, I would make the 
case
that at Hava Nashira (at least in my opinion from this, my first experience) 
true
community is formed. I challenge the unstated assumption that we are only part 
of
one community. If  some of the criteria for community are: communal 
responsibility
for each other's spirituality; interdependence; sharing of history, love, and
miracles (I hesitate to add death, but it has a nasty way of showing up over 
time);
then I think that the Hava Nashira community embodies those criteria. These 
things
are available for the first-timer----but as a newcomer (with all that "still on 
the
honeymoon" implies). I felt that others took communal responsibility for 
providing
a safe place for me to try new things and to experience the divine in ways that 
are
not easily achieved in my regular congregation. I thank you all and am grateful.
But I think for those that continue to go (and I plan to be one), real history 
is
achieved, and real responsibility felt----at the workshop itself towards those
sharing it----but also in what is added to the larger community of Jewish music.

Through music, we share common experience in a way that makes us part of a
community  before we ever get to Hava Nashira. Just like Danny Maseng taught in
Torah study, when we come in contact with something that is true we recognize 
it.
As the midrash teaches, the angels taught it to our neshamah in the womb. So 
when
we reach Hava Nashira and we say to ourselves , "Now this also is my 
community!",
the truth of that recognition hits like a wave of sound.

So this is long winded enough for me. Did the rest of you experience the first 
day
home adrenalin rush and then the "low battery" warning for the next two days? 
I'm
just starting to even out. Our greyhound is eyeing me hopefully, warily, "Which 
Mom
is this?". My family is just glad I'm back.

Just about time to say Shabbat Shalom! (Hey Ellen, "We say Shabbat.----we say
Shalom"----.

Shabbat shalom,

Julie Newman
Pittsburgh, PA


>
>
> So here is what is troubling me.  The Israelites had been slaves
> together, faced death at the sea and starvation in the desert together,
> had experienced countless miracles together. Only after all of this were
> they given communal responsibility for each other's spirituality.  It is
> within a deeply intertwined and interdependent community
> that shares experience, history, love, death, miracles and deep communal
> responsibility that, I think, the Jewish tradition teaches us that we
> truly experience God.
>
> Hava Nashira (and other short events like it) is not such a community.  It
> is a group of wonderful people with some deeply shared interests. Judaism,
> teaching, music. But it is not a community of true and lasting mutual
> responsibility. Nor is any group that gets together for but a week once a
> year.  How could it be? We see how tenuous the communal bonds are when we
> see that some people do not experience the spiritual wonder because of the
> lack of dance. Dance is just an expression, surely the lack of dance
> cannot impede the spiritual experience. As I said above, I don't think it
> was the lack of dance, per se.  The lack of dance made those people feel
> somewhat outside the community because the community was based on music. A
> deeper Jewish community can only be formed among people who live in
> community and share their lives together. And it is in this context that
> one can reach the highest levels of spiritual experience according to
> Tradition (in my view).
>