Time to Go Outside: A Blessing for the Month of Iyyar

This is the season when renewal is so deeply bound up in the natural world that divinity itself is legible as a healing force.

Dear friend, Spring is here, and for all the hard news bombarding our screens, at least the warmer, longer days come as good and simple change.

There’s a funny balance we try to strike at RUACH, between offering a space to breathe — to step away from the world’s churn — and offering a space precisely to tune into what matters most for healing what is broken in our culture. Which begs the question:  Are we here, now, to zoom out from the world’s ills, or to zoom in?

With this new moon, we enter the Hebrew month of Iyyar, known for blossoming, light, and health. (Its name comes from the Babylonian month of Āru, “blossoming.”) This is the month when the manna appeared in the wilderness to feed the Israelites without any labor, the month when a miraculous well opened to quench their desert thirst. Like the April-May season on the Gregorian calendar, Iyyar is when it feels like nature might be finally giving us a bit of a break.

How are you going to enjoy this fleeting season of spring? Can you sneak outside between meetings? Snag an outdoor table or park bench for lunch? Stop to literally smell the flowers? The pursuit of happiness may not give us license to disengage from the public sphere — but if a bloom-heavy spring day demands our attention, who are we to ignore its call?

The very first words ascribed to God after the Israelites cross the sea are “I am God, your healer.” In a bit of classic rabbinic letter-play, this declaration is traditionally read as an acronym for Iyyar (“Ani Yah Rofecha” — it works cleanly in the Hebrew!). In other words, this season of blossoming, of more light, warmer days, and new life — this is the season when renewal is so deeply bound up in the natural world that divinity itself is legible as a healing force.

It may be a bridge too far to hope the power-crazed members of today’s world-leading cohort are going to step outside for fresh, blossom-infused air, find their hearts softened, agree to reasonable peace deals and let their peoples go free. (Though it’s nice to imagine, no?) Given the realities we’re living through, what is a realistic set of expectations for how we can channel the redemptive energy all around us this spring?

Perhaps we can try practicing the difficult work of unhooking our emotions from the rise and fall of empires — even from the disturbing images we must face to stay informed, and from the difficult actions we may ourselves be called to take to honor life — and attaching them a bit more to the rise and fall of leaves on trees. Not as an escape from the political, world-making work before us, but as a way of putting on our own oxygen masks for the long haul. The air smells about as good as ever right now, and that’s something to savor as we continue on the journey.

As spring comes into full bloom, may it bless us all with ripples of renewal. May small moments of nourishment appear without effort, and may they inspire a sense of trust that this is all headed somewhere better — somewhere more sensible, kind, and just.

Oh — and as the temperature continues to climb, may we all stay hydrated easily, too!

Hodesh tov — with blessings for a good month,

Yaakov Ginsberg-Schreck Founder & Executive Director