#326: Mishpucha

This is a special note that Irwin had written back in November shortly after he woke up feeling unwell the day of a community gathering (called Space Jammers) and could no longer attend. To give a bit more background on this, Pip had heard the Yiddish phrase "mishpucha" at Betty's daughter's bat mitzvah and was planning to have Irwin share with us all his experience and/or connection to a mishpucha and what it means to him personally. Despite being sick, Irwin took some time to reflect on this word, and I am sharing below the wonderful rumination that came from his heart when he paused to do so. 

- Amanda

Mishpucha

Dear Space Jammers:

I woke up this morning with a fever and a sore throat and the first thing I thought was not that I have Covid - I don’t- nor even how bad I felt. It was that I would not be able to be at our gathering today. I have literally been counting the days to physically see people I feel so much respect for and feel so connected to.

At some point today,  Pip was going to have me riff on a Yiddish word he heard for the first time a week or so ago.  

The word is “mish-puh-chah”…..(emphasis on that guttural “ch”!)

What was unsurprisingly synchronistic - given it was Pip- is that I have been wrestling for a good few months with how to define this group of people who come together under the Coburn sacred canopy. 

And mishpucha is the perfect description!!!

The word mishpucha literally means family but is used to describe people who are in a web of connection who have unexpected feelings of intimacy but who are not kin and immediate family!

A mishpucha isn’t a sangha as we don’t share one teacher’s teachings or set of practices. Rather, in a mishpucha we are all at different moments teachers sharing our lives.  

A mishpucha isn’t a community as these days community has been emptied of content and because we so yearn for community it is easily exploited and so anything that connects anyone in any way winds up being called community. 

A mishpucha is less thick than a sangha, less bounded than kinship but more deeply connective and purposeful than the way community is used in our culture. 

A mishpucha is who WE are: people who share an ever deepening connection and intimacy without needing to agree about stuff, a group who gathers whose commitment to each other as people trumps any particular idea, view, or policy… and in fact sharing and wrestling about ideas, policies, and views is actually part of what it means to have a mishpucha! 

In the mishpucha there aren’t boundaries between the personal and the public or between the head and the heart or between business and life.  

In the mishpucha we are not afraid to bring all of who we are to the table…and when we don’t show up we are missed…and when we don’t show up we miss the people who miss us. 

And while there is always hierarchy in a mishpucha, as there is in any group of people, the hierarchy is fluid depending on what’s going on and it is always “earned” rather than taken. 

In the mishpucha we have this feeling of chosen obligation…our wanting to be together is so much stronger than our needing to be together….and so the web that binds a mishpucha extends between people in unpredictable ways beyond the time and space of our gatherings. 

I finally know who WE are. We are a mishpucha! 

I am so blessed to be in this mishpucha!

I know that during this day, together, every single person present will laugh, think, eat well, shed a tear, ponder, wonder when Pip will call on them, will grow, learn, teach, and inevitably will be surprised by the sheer joy and soul- satisfaction of being together…in the mishpucha.

Love,

Irwin