#342: Mishpucha

NEW lead-in from Alex Tulloch:

Whenever someone asks about ReShawn or Sedric or Floyd or Cedric or Calvin, I always introduce them the same way: as my brothers. And every time I say that, the response I usually get is "Well, not your brother brother." That's always confused me, because while we're not biologically related, we're certainly connected in a way that I could primarily describe as brotherly. So Irwin's piece helped me add another word to describe the connection that we share; a sensation that I've grown to feel amongst our CFC, a family family (whatever that means).

- Alex

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