Adina Roth – Head of Jewish Life

It was going to be the highlight of the first day. We had experienced a beautiful day one on the Year 10 Ayekah camp, as we wound our way into the Southern Highlands and settled in at the beautiful Tallong campsite, where yellow wattle blooms set the otherwise bare, wintry landscape ablaze in colour. The students had worked hard through the day, talking about values and starting to peel away the layers of the central Garden-of-Eden inspired question Ayekah, where are you? What are you holding in your life, where do you come from and where are you going to?

This would be the question they would return to through the week as they explored themselves in relation to Zionism, Judaism, community and each other. Our penultimate activity of the night was to create a train of students all looking down at their feet and remaining silent as they walked down a quiet road to a pitch black oval. There we would switch off our torches and invite the students, in unison, to look up and see the stars. Star-gazing is itself an ancient Jewish tradition as Avram held intimate conversations with God under a night sky and God promised that his futures would be as infinite as the galaxies above him. The students walked down to the oval in a curious, somewhat awkward silence. We arrived at the oval and formed a dramatic circle, one hundred people standing together in perfect anticipation. Then, with music in the background, we invited them to look up. Only, there was anticlimax! A misty cloudy presence had crept in. There was not a single star to be seen in the heavens. Our Year 10s gazed into the darkness.

When you have prepared a program to go a certain way and circumstances conspire against the plan, what do you do? When you have planned to ‘see’ something and then are presented with absence, what comes next? Suddenly, a potent piece of Torah occurred to me. We are on the cusp of the month of Elul, four weeks away from Rosh HaShanah, the holiest day in the Jewish New Year. The Rabbis in the Talmud, Tractate Rosh Hashanah cite a line from Tehillim (Psalms) to announce the timing of the Jewish New Year. The verse in Psalm 81 reads Tiku Bachodesh Shofar, Bakeseh Leyom Chageinu, Sound the shofar at the new moon, the hiddenness is the time of our holiday. Rosh Hashanah begins at the beginning of the lunar month of Tishrei, which we might imagine as being the first night that a baby crescent moon blinks in the sky. However, Rosh Chodesh, the new moon actually begins pre-crescent, when the waning moon of the previous month has completely disappeared and the new crescent is yet to be born. The new moon is born in utter darkness. The Jewish New Year begins in imperceptible occlusion. This is, in part, because to create our future, we need to release expectations, rigid ideas and imposed demands, we need to sit with the darkness of the potential that is yet to emerge. Free from ‘memory and desire,’ we become truly liberated to create ourselves anew.

Although there were no stars in the sky on our first night of Ayekah, the darkness of the night was the perfect opening. We could say to our students, don’t impose pre-conceptions, don’t begin with a particular end in mind. Welcome the not knowing of a question: Ayekah, where are you….and allow the answer to unfold naturally and authentically and perhaps, surprisingly.

Natasha Bedingfield sings, “I am unwritten/can’t read my mind/I’m undefined.” The absence of stars presented an empty page in the sky. It was as if the Universe was saying, “Year 10s, here is a blank canvas….now go and write your story”. In a month’s time the Jewish people will be invited to do the same!

Shabbat Shalom