6, God is a verb.
As I draft this article, a soothing flashback sets in:
Comfortably perched. My peripheral furnished with books shelved meticulously complimenting that distinct cozy Golders Green cottage decor. I am the latest recruit here, immersed in a parkour of dialogue with a former colleague and his SOAS cohort; about seven or eight of us. Our mutual friend’s beautiful home hosts the eclectic exchange.
After jousting through a garrison of topics the tempo simmered and a voice among us gently leapt over. Perfect elocution peppered with a distinct upper class Catalan flare coaxing the discourse to a new wellspring, “ — please join us, we’d love your opinion on…” (paraphrasing here, this memory has weathered about five years now). Our host’s mum replied with grace as she approaches to join us; we orient ourselves for new discourse. The room almost folding in as if the walls and ceiling eagerly hunched over to receive her words. Gracefully, she sets in, communing and enriching the dialogue from her perspective as a rabbi. “God is a verb…,” the rest of her wisdom revolved around this phrase. Still my own memory of that evening, like the folding walls and ceiling, huddles around those affirming words.
An intuition that was budding in me over the years that I had not yet fixed language to; here she succinctly articulated, “God is a verb.”
