Juliet I. Spitzer

“What do you need this year from your holiday experience?” 

What an unusual question to consider for myself! For the past 40 years I’ve been asking what needs to be done for the chag. Now, for the first time, I’m packing up my partner, my four adult children and their children, and going on retreat. With special activities and music and meaningful prayer for all of us, farm-to-table meals and snacks provided throughout, hikes and ziplines and nature walks and rest periods. I don’t have to prepare anything. 

But all of this without my youngest daughter and her family who live in Jerusalem. Two sets of children and their children with us, and yet we are a family incomplete. And now the tears begin. Here is our tribe, longing for our Yosef. How whole can we be when our caboose is in harm’s way, so far away? My baby, with her baby and her bashert,  is in the line of fire. The country is shrinking, the borders are closing in, and the image of sitting ducks comes to mind. 

I don’t want to hear one more geopolitical, self-important analysis. I want prayer and potent mindful worldwide heart-directed energy pouring forth toward that epicenter of destruction and despair and devastation and terror and trauma and disease and madness and fury and bitterness and mute grief. 

Help us! Pull us out of this sinkhole where we are mired in heavy, gritty, filthy, vengeful habits of hatred and fear! Please G!D! Gently pluck the grenades and missiles and drones and rifles and tanks and bombs and all demonic devices from all their midst, to start over. 

Begin again, with all hands clasped behind their backs, vulnerable and open. Soon, release one hand in order that it may caress the curls on the heads of the others’ children. Then release the other, so that those children can be gathered into their arms.  And from this place, all can begin to look up into the faces of the mothers.  And then, only then, to tentatively glance at the fathers, and in soft voices, begin anew: 

 Shalom aleichem, As-salamu alaikum.

Evidently, this is what I need from my holiday experience.

And now I ask you, what do you need from your holiday experience?

Juliet Spitzer is a Spiritual Companion counting the days until this war is over.

Learn more at julietspitzer.com