Women's Wisdom by Elissa Blaser
G-d has bestowed extra gifts on women: an uncanny “woman’s intuition”, an extra measure of compassion, and an innate desire for modesty.
This spiritual nature builds the other people around into stronger people.
An early example of this was in our experience, as a people, during the crisis of the golden calf in the desert. The men, perceiving a desperate situation, collapsed into a previous weakened state. The women, understanding the temporary nature of the crisis and holding hope for a real future, did not fall alongside. The women held back and did not participate. The crisis passed.
The wisdom of women was enhanced as a result.
We see this paradigm of life played out again and again in subsequent generations. “The wisdom of women builds the home”. Women navigate every day through choppy waters. Delicate, invisible, steadfast work builds families, communities, and institutions.
Rosh Chodesh Women’s Circle tries to show this to women.
What we are saying is: Look around, listen to other women’s life tales, and be amazed! The stories will teach, will show lives well lived, tremendous accomplishments, generations born and gone, values transmitted through decades and centuries of time.
It’s us. It’s the women who are driving forces.
We guide our own lives as well as the lives of those around us. We build ourselves and others, day by day, year by year, until, at the end of life, women can see so much that has been built around them.
We need to celebrate each other.
We need to hear about the life journey with its dramatic challenges and its triumphs. We need to understand that women play a major part. Like the wind and rain and sun, women provide the essential elements that allow the world to grow.
How is this done?
By doing the small things every day, again and again. By understanding and applying grace to the ordinary tasks of living. By knowing that the day is long and full of demand, and that the years fly by. Each day is important. Each day is worthy of a full heart and a dedicated mind. The days add up.
Another “world” is created.
Let us tell each other, let us laugh and cry together. Let us remind each other how events spin around our circle. Let us congratulate the women who can sit back and remember. Let us help each other go on.
Come join us.
Telling Our Story by Elissa Blaser
By telling our story, we begin to unfold the mystery of our lives.
Why is one person drawn to music and one person able to understand physics just by reading it?
Why can one person captivate an audience with a speech, while another cannot walk up to a stage to speak?
Why do these abilities seem to be shared along familial lines?
Inside each and every one of us is a “sim card”, our soul, breathed into us directly and only by the Master of the universe.
There is a profound architecture in this world and every minute detail operates in its synchronicity.
We cannot hear its tick-tock; we cannot see its threads.
However, when we sit back from everyday tasks and examine our lives and the lives of others, we can hear the hint of all that happens underneath the story: what happened, why, and what does this mean?
While we can never approach answers to these questions, the search can change our lives.
The narrative of each individual life is haunting – why… what if… what wisdom led to the major decisions… where was the wisdom learned … where do we go for advice?
Are the stories of the families in the Bible a guide?
The map of collected individual stories forms a community tale.
We build ourselves.
We build others in the same process.
Our individual choices colour the community.
However, the bonds of our lives must be strengthened so that they may endure through our lifetimes and beyond.
We must learn how to live the noble life G-d intends for us.
We must learn how to live in accordance with that blessing, and how to help others continue to stay in the embrace of that blessing.
The story is one road to that destination.
We tell the family story in honour and admiration of those before us. We hope to imbibe some of the courage, the strength, the belief, and the positive note of their lives lived well through many different circumstances.
The story can be written down and videotaped.
The questions that hang in the air after the story is told, the many questions that lead to other questions, that point to our destinies, individual and shared, can only lead to further questions, further study, to the attraction to good deeds, and to prayer, as we continue to search for the visible and invisible connections of our lives.