The Beauty of Trauma. Thoughts on Esther's Scroll.

I am preparing for a fast of three days during which I query #Creator as to what I can learn from #QueenEsther and #QueenVashti and the religious traditions that have risen since the scroll's canonization. In looking at some of the scholarship and having read a number of #midrash and #sermons, I sigh. A rich tradition, yes, but riches are lost when a book supplants #ceremony, #prayer, #faith. I sense that during my fast, I shall refrain from reading scriptural interpretations. Until then, I have scholarly mountains, not tombs nor tomes, to read. People of the Book I am, but also people of the circle and #areyto.

Humans are curious by nature; we are also creative to our core. We are creation that emerges, flowers, withers. and returns to source. Given the climate emergency, we need a new tale, not one but many. What do we learn from the past? What do we abandon as we innovate? Not what, how? Dream into faith. This comes to me as I read biblical scholarship and sense into the wide gap between what I experience in prayer versus what I perceive during historical research.

In doing Esther's fast of three days, I seek to gain insight into how and why I'm being called to weave together prophetic traditions of Turtle Island and the Abrahamic Religions to teach business principles in light of system change and the climate emergency. I tend to prefer to make sense of this moment as one of proud fascism and climate chaos versus the the return of the sacred feminine and the rise of the new sun. How I teach is a story to be heard and drawn and taken to heart.... personalized and then applied as the listener is called by their Creator. Who's mine if we are all one but divided?

Literary criticism is not my cup of tea.

Midrash reads the text and dreams into the text and the scholarly explorations and spiritual instruction over time. Yes? But what of translation. God the Father of dominant Christian tradition is an error of translation. Spirit is feminine. Musings as I read academic literature and ye olde internet.

Such brutal text. To be disappeared, to be impaled, to be exterminated. Such things are normalized and chronicled. A party follows. #Purim. #Megillah. #Hadassah. In the Hebrew scripture, her name, Hadassah, means myrtle. Esther is closer to concealment. A revelation. Mine means sacred vision. What happens if you read yourself into this ancient text and renew it today? Or not. Some stories we must compost. You? #MeToo.

A storied people, my people of the book! And now with digital editions.... and feminist additions!

A sadness arises upon reading The Book of Esther in the #JewishTanakh AKA #ChristianOldTestament in light of this fast I plan to start. We Jews, for I am a Jew via my mother's bloodline, celebrate massacres, both those averted and those perpetuated in the name of Adonai and Israel. I gasp in reading Esther's scroll: The numbers of people murdered!

My god is true love, a sword of truth, not a gun or drone or annual masquerade. A living god, not lethal. A life where every night is one worthy of glitter. We have abandoned regeneration and loving balance for excess and poverty at their most harsh. Is this what it means to be fallen? The collective punishment, the retaliation, the repetitive atrocities in the #Megillah: I want no more.

#NeverAgain. No wonder so many people like me seek a new story, new system, new spirituality. We build on the bones and the biblical body counts.

Scriptural interpretation is a new telling of past events, divinely inspired or not. Activist spiritualities from #EngagedBuddhism to the prayerful Indigenous movements for the protection of sacred mountains like #ProtectMaunaKea to the ancient Jewish practice of #TikkunOlam are everywhere, both online and around the corner.

Our activism is divinely inspired and also totally different from biblical narrative. It is amazing to watch the writing of global wisdom, a woven tradition, in light of the climate emergency, proud fascism, and toxic masculinity. And it breaks my heart. We are here, and we have guns, drones, and delusions for company.

The spiral, the serpent, the scroll.

A regenerative medicine wheel.

Ancient wisdom reborn as we greet the new sun.

So bright, it forces awakening.

Soften, soften, soften.

Esther and Vashti, not original sin.

#Anacoana, #Malinche and every person unnamed.

#NiUnaMenos means #NeverAgain.

A sweet future unfurling.

The divine irreverence of #AndrésSerrano.

The disidentifications of #JoséEstebanMu?oz.

The sacred scroll of #Vashti, #Esther, and #SefiraCreative.

The prophetic economics of #DecolonialBiznessWorld.

How do I weave the teachings, the learning, the trauma, the beauty into one guided meditation and text?