My Eruv is My Temple
by Molly
I've been feeling a bit estranged from my spiritual center lately, thanks in no small part to the fact that I'm living a nomadic, my-home-is-where-my-car-is-parked life. Without a regular neighborhood yogi (I have no neighborhood), shelf of talismen (I have no shelf) or consistent place to get introspective (the only constant these days seems to be the amount of money I'm spending on gas), it's been hard to find the space and the time to connect with the universe.
Or so I reasoned until I came across this article about Orthodox Jews in Venice Beach.
Apparently, members of a synagogue there are lobbying to mark off a part of the beach with fishing line as an eruv, or holy area, so they can celebrate the Sabbath on the sand. The boundary is symbolic, marking the area inside the string as “home” (and therefore a place where people can carry food and push strollers).
As far as Jews go, I’m as reform as reform gets (my Dad used to say we celebrated Christmas because it’s a national holiday), so I’ve never heard of an eruv before. But the idea got me thinking. If you can deem the boardwalk between Santa Monica and Marina del Rey as holy just by stringing up some rope, could you do the same with other areas traditionally out of the bounds of the Sabbath? Say, Trader Joe’s? Spaceland? Jumbo’s Clown Room?
I’m kidding, of course. But my irreverent mental wandering did lead me to an important point about holy places – that they’re sacred because we decide they are. A church is special because we build it with that purpose. Same goes for a yoga studio, a meditation room or an altar in the corner of a dorm room.
Which means I can create sacred space wherever I am – in a bachelor pad in Long Beach, on the futon in my best friend’s living room in Highland Park, and even, if necessary, in my toaster-shaped Scion.
And so my next project is to assemble my eruv-on-the-go, a box of accoutrements for Instant Introspection. I plan to use a mosaic box I made with my family last weekend, and to fill it with a candle, an eye pillow or scented sachet, and, most importantly, some kind of ribbon or string to mark out my own personal eruv.
I can only hope my personal version will cause less controversy than the proposed Venice eruv seems to be creating. (Stay tuned…I’ll report back with results.)
| 10/28/06
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Religion
