The season of sacred pilgrimage

Rabbi Mark Wm. Gross

Iam a Southern Californian by birth and upbringing. For me, the traditional sign of the change of seasons is when the swallows come back to Capistrano. Here, in Collier County, however, the sure sign it’s spring is auto transport trailers heading north.

Most of us are such digitally driven creatures, that we live our daily lives more by the clock and the calendar than by solar azimuth angle and, as such, don’t really pay too much attention to the seasons (particularly here in South Florida, where we don’t really have seasons)! But for our long-ago forebears in the land of Israel, the turn of the seasons — and the associated cycles of sowing and reaping, pruning and harvesting — were all seen as sacred and blessed manifestations of God’s orderly management of the universe.

Not everyone takes such an exalted view of the seasons. Take this month of May, for example, which, in northern Europe, used to be seen as a stirring of the earth mother goddess. Or, as Lerner and Loew put it much more directly in their lyric for “Camelot:”

It’s May, it’s May — the month of “yes, you may;”

That lovely month when everyone goes blissfully astray …

The time for every frivolous whim, proper or “im.”

While that salaciously frisky spirit of the month delights neopagans today, real pagans in earlier eras saw May — a critical juncture between winter’s cold and summer’s heat — as a dangerous marginal time, when supernatural forces were unleashed into our dimension. Nor did the arrival of ethical monotheism in Medieval Europe do anything to dispel such long-held dark and ominous convictions. In the opening of Bram Stoker’s “Dracula,” the innkeeper’s wife warns Jonathan Harker, “This fourth of May is the eve of St. George’s Day. Do you not know that tonight, when the clock strikes midnight, all the evil things in the world will have full sway?”

All of which is perplexing to us Jews. Certainly, we have our own superstitions but none of them is that grim and ominous. Moreover, our religious convictions leave no room in our thinking for the existence of dark and inimical forces that are beyond God’s control. And while we have individual days (10th of Tevet; 17th of Tammuz; 9th of Av) and whole periods of time (the respective s’firah countdowns of seven weeks in the spring and three in the summer) when it is customary not to schedule affirmative celebrations, such self-imposed constraints are a gesture of solidarity with Jewish history, not because those times are viewed as inauspicious.

In fact, our current season represents a transition that is completely involved with an alignment with Jewish history. Because the seven-week countdown from Passover (which was April 15 this year) to Shavuot (which will be June 5) sees us in between, living in a mythic dream, where every one of those 50 days not only commemorates, but reenacts, the trek from Egypt to Sinai.

This is the real reason we don’t traditionally hold weddings during the sevenweek spring s’firah. Until we have relived the trudge through the desert sands to meet at the Mountain the One Who brought us forth from servitude, and to enter into a covenant to be “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation,” any other covenant — including a marriage contract — is a subordinate commitment that we are not yet in a position to make. Because God comes first.

May this season of sacred pilgrimage find us moving in good and affirmative directions, as looking back to Egypt last month and forward to Sinai next month aligns us to whatever lies beyond.

Rabbi Mark Wm. Gross serves at Jewish Congregation of Marco Island.