The following is a reflection given on Rosh HaShanah by Hinenu member Karen Taylor, on the theme of makom.
On August 16, Rabbi Ariana wrote in her Shabbat message that “It is easy to forget who you are, a loving, compassionate person, when self protection tries to demand your hard shell.”
I had a hard shell, literally. It looked like a corset but was made of rigid plastic and foam. Metal rods extended up and encircled my neck, a chin rest screwed into them. It was covered, I covered it, with stickers, (mainly Victorian designs). I wore this hard shell 23 hours a day, starting a few months before my eighth birthday and ending, I think, sometime around my ninth.
A little more than a year was spent actually in this shell, this exoskeleton, this brace built to protect me from breaking a then extra-vulnerable spine. A lot more time has been spent discovering how it shaped me, realizing ways I still wear it, trying to take it off, finding it back on again. A lot more time has been spent trying to reach the body underneath, the one that I stopped fully feeling without realizing it, the place in which I live but have not always felt alive. Turtles and snails are said to carry their home around with them, but my body, in and out of its shell, has at times been more like housing. At times, it has not been shelter at all.
As we are asked this year to contemplate the concept of makom, a sacred place, I find myself thinking about consecration, desecration, and reconsecration, about what moves someplace out of the realm of holiness and then back in. If, as JD Salinger wrote, “all we do our whole lives is go from one little piece of Holy Ground to the next,” is every place cycling between sacred or desecrated, the latter calling out for reclamation once more into a state of reverence? What about our bodies, the place within all the places we live in or visit; what does reconsecration mean when we are talking about ourselves?
For myself, I have made and must still make effort to come home and live in myself with embodied presence. I have and must still make effort to put down the armoring as much as possible, to join and let in rather than hold apart. I do this, I realize, because I would like to be in my shell less and trust my spine more. And while keeping equal space for irreverence, because, you know, balance, I do this because I would like to wake up each day with reverence and awe, mah norah ha-makom hazeh —how Awesome is this Place—spilling off my tongue. I would like to wake up in general, out of the trance, the wariness, the locked in conditioning from another time. And as I try to remember who I am, so I hope that we may all remember who we are. May those memories be for a blessing, for reconsecration of ourselves and each other. May we know ourselves to be our Holy Ground, our sacred place. May we, may the entire world, know peace.