seek always g-d’s face

November 20, 2012 By Leave a Comment

בקשו פניו תמיד collage; photo by salem pearce (via instagram)

Last week the “Year of Shacharit” tefila group looked at the section of the prayerbook between baruch sheamar and ashrei (up next). As the group’s faculty advisor noted as he began leading us through the davenning, there are just “so many words” here. (Included in the section are a passage from II Chronicles as well as Psalms 100, 19, 34, 90, 91, 135, 136, 33, 92, and 93).) And it’s a mostly overlooked part of the liturgy.

The ideas in this section that most struck me while we prayed were seeking, wandering, and joy.

One of the first phrases that he brought to our attention was backshu fanav tamid, “seek always G-d’s face,” a quote from Psalm 105. Hebrew College Rabbinical School founder Art Green uses the idea in the title for one of his books on Jewish spirituality, Seek My Face. As he notes in his introduction, “Personal journeys seldom have a clear beginning, and they rarely have a definite end. If there is an end to our journey, surely it is one that leads to some measure of wisdom, and thence back to its own beginning. But somewhere along the way, we come to realize that we must know where we have been going, why we have been going. Most of all, we come to understand as best we can the One who sends us on our way.”

From here, the liturgy recounts G-d’s covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and our wandering in the desert — making explicit Art’s move above: seeking implies wandering. A journey.

The psalms that follow urge praise and bask in the comfort of the surety of G-d. One of my favorite phrases is one that we end up singing a fair amount during the morning service at school: ivdu et Adonai b’simcha, bo’u l’fanav birnana, “worship the Lord in joy; come before the Lord with flowery singing.” It’s not every far into this section of the prayerbook, but I think it’s a great finale to the actions thus far: Wander and seek — and then rejoice.

During our davenning our facilitator asked us to reflect: In what ways does G-d protect me as I wander?

G-d protects me by giving me the strength to handle whatever I encounter.

G-d protects me by reminding me of G-d’s previous promises to my ancestors.

G-d protects me by giving me support in form of family and friends.

G-d protects me by guiding me to resources.

G-d protects me by giving me health and wealth.

Seek G-d and G-d’s strength; seek always G-d’s face.

Worship the Lord in joy; come before the Lord in flowery singing

______________________________________________________

This post is part of a series about my year-long tefila (“prayer”) group. Read other posts about the group here. View my artwork inspired by the group here.

Filed Under: tefila group Tagged With: , , ,

RAPE

November 15, 2012 By 2 Comments

Trigger warning: This post is about my struggle over the past few months with being triggered by various events, as result of my many years of volunteering at the rape crisis center in D.C. It doesn’t contain details of any sexual assault, but it nevertheless may be upsetting for survivors.

This is a hard post to write for many reasons — and not just because it’s highly personal. But I process by writing, and this issue has become part of my rabbinical school experience. And it will likely come up again.

I realized two weeks ago that I’ve been re-traumatized — and have been in that process for a few months — by a confluence of events. When it finally occurred to me, I felt enormous relief. Being able to put a name and a reason to what I’d been feeling was incredibly comforting. Then I felt stupid: How could I have not realized what was happening, and how could I not have realized how long it had been going on? I’d been feeling overly emotional, on edge, scared, out of control, hurt by things that were not personal, unable to hear anything about sexual assault without intense pain. And on and on. Basically, I felt crazy, and I didn’t know why. And I’ve felt this way before, and I’ve had this realization before. I just had to get there. AGAIN.

mlk quote on store window; photo by salem pearce (via instagram)

It started during the pre-semester seminar at school, in which we looked at the Torah and Haftarah readings for the high holidays. One day in class we started talking about trauma. I don’t remember how we got there, and I don’t remember how we got out of there. I just remember sitting in chair, my brain screaming, “No! No! NO! No-stop-talking-stop-talking-please.” I wanted the ground to open and swallow me up. The presentation I wrote for the end of the seminar was,in retrospect, a clue that things were getting difficult.

I underestimated how triggering rabbinical school would be. By which I mean that I didn’t think about it at all. This, too, seems foolish in retrospect. There is no shortage of abusive texts in the Jewish tradition, and I think I’ve only touched a handful so far. From stories of sexual assault in the Tanakh to an explanation in the Talmud that women die in childbirth for not observing halakha, the fear and disgust of women is  . . . everywhere. When we read and discussed the story of the gang rape and dismemberment of an unnamed woman in Judges, I wanted to weep.

Compounding the experiences of reading these texts is being a Hebrew College student — a wonderful experience, but also one that has left me feeling more vulnerable than usual. This is a very earnest community, and I am asked to share of myself often — or at least more than I was in my everyday life in D.C. I thus feel more emotionally “raw” than I have in the past.

And then there was a sexual assault on the campus of Andover Newton Theological Seminary (ANTS), which shares the hill with Hebrew College. The president of ANTS came to an all-school meeting to . . . I don’t know: Give us more information about it? I couldn’t stay in the room to hear it. I was terrified. I had no idea what kind of training the president had, so I didn’t trust that she wouldn’t saying anything triggering. Was she going to tell us what happened? What ANTS was doing? Whether the rapist was a member of the community or a stranger? To what end? I don’t even think that “sharing information” serves any purpose, since the only way to stop rape is for rapists to stop raping. There’s simply nothing a potential victim can do to ensure his/her safety.

And then there was the election. With all of the rape. I am glad that dominant narrative was that these old men need to just stop talking — and I rejoiced when they all, to a one, lost their elections — but I still stand in shock that our nation’s leaders, to say nothing of their constituents, think it’s acceptable to make such callous statements about sexual assault survivors.

And then a friend of mine was raped.

Hence the title of my post. It has been as though in every direction I turned there was in front of me a giant neon sign. It hasn’t been this bad in many years. Most of the time, I can say “ouch,” and then move on. But not this time. This time, I felt buried under the avalanche.

I feel better now, better than I have in a while. It’s an unbelievably empowering action to be able to name what is going on. I am also doing more self-care, recognizing that some of my self-destructive behavior was a result of being triggered.

I know I’m going to feel “normal” again soon. I also know that I’m not going to make it through another five-and-a-half years if I don’t. I’m beginning to think about how to deal with what Phyllis Trible calls “texts of terror.” I hope that I’ll be able to try on a variety of options for engaging with these texts and with my tradition. There are women at Hebrew College who have done a lot of work in this area. I’ve thought about doing some writing, to perhaps give [my] voice to the voiceless.

For now, I am grateful just to feel more like myself. Which is challenging enough without the experience of trauma.

Filed Under: school Tagged With: , , ,

why have kids?

October 20, 2012 By 2 Comments

First: I don’t know whether I want children. I’ve never felt a strong desire for children. I have felt pressure from my mom and from (what I perceive is, more on that below) Jewish tradition. I’m mostly undecided, and I think I could be okay not having kids. I do wonder though, if it were socially acceptable, whether I would just decide not to. Which is strange to me, since I am not usually ruled by others’ expectations. I think part of it is the fact that relatively few people choose not to have kids, so I wonder if I’m missing something. I also wonder how to know that I won’t regret that decision. Deciding to become a rabbi has only intensified my anxiety about this issue: I don’t know any rabbis without children.

Over the holidays I read (on my Kindle app on my iPhone) Jessica Valenti’s Why Have Kids? A New Mom Explores the Truth About Parenting and Happiness. It’s a short and quick read, and it in no way answers its own question. I was left with the overwhelming feeling that there is no rational reason to have kids. People do it because they want to, because they are expected to, because they were faced with an unintended pregnancy — all valid reasons. But it’s not necessarily going to make you a happier or more fulfilled person (at least not for a long while).

The book is divided into two parts: LIES and TRUTH. The first category includes “Children Make You Happy,” “Breast is Best,” “‘The Hardest Job in the World’”; the former, of “‘Bad’ Mothers Go to Jail,” “Smart Women Don’t Have Children,” and “Women Should Work.” Obviously, some of these are provocative, but Valenti does manage in some way to take on some of the sacred cows of motherhood. Much of the book draws from first-mother accounts, and the stories, quite frankly, are horrifying — and played into my worst fears. The standout in the book is her (unfortunately ill-formed) argument for the need in our country to move from individual to community parenting — thus requiring us to advocate for “government and workplace policies that honor parenting for everyone.” That’s a world into which I would want to bring children. Valenti just doesn’t really offer a way to get there.

Interestingly, related issues were raised last Shabbat in a Jewish context; at Temple Beth Zion, a congregant, the aunt of one of my classmates, gave a d’var Torah about the Biblical imperative to procreate, from the weekly parshah, Bereshit. In the first account of the creation of humans — the only humans at the time — in Genesis 1:28, G-d tells them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it.” The talk was intensely personal, and it deeply resonated with me.

At my request, she sent me a copy of her d’var. Speaking from her perspective as “a Jewish woman who chose not to give birth or be the primary raiser of children,” she talked about her struggle with that decision and her exploration for its validation in Jewish tradition. She grew up in a different time, when women were told that being a mother was part of having a full life. (I’m actually not sure that things have changed that much, though perhaps the messages are less explicit.) She began to speak with women older than she and discovered that this might not be the case. After much agonizing, she related, “I felt at the end of the day that primary parenting is a huge responsibility and a lot of work that, while potentially quite wonderful, was not one of the major life works that I wanted to take on.”

She explained that she made that decision with the belief that it was in opposition to Jewish law and practice. At the time, she identified as a secular Jew, so whether there was support for her choice in Jewish tradition was not of import. When she became more religious mid-life (when having children was no longer an option), she began to explore what Jewish texts actually have to say on the issue. There are in the Tanakh examples of women who do not have children — most notably Dvora – which is to say nothing of the men and women who cannot have children. She also cited the story of Jacob’s reaction to Rachel in her despair over not having children; a 15th century rabbi interprets it as anger at her forgetting her basic worth as a human being.

Wrapping up, she asked, “What does it mean to be a mensch (human) in regards to procreation and the domination of the planet by human beings in the 21st century? What is our holy work and what is our holy work today as we explore our connection back to the very first mitzvah — of procreation?” Citing the writing of Rav Kook (the first chief rabbi of British Mandate Palestine) on the issue — his view is that procreation is not mere instinct but pursuit of divine goodness, to be found everywhere — she concluded,

From my point of view this means that procreation originally set the precedent for human holy activity that now includes all activity that nurtures the human race.

Oh my God! I forgot to have children!Thus, her work as a mentor and advocate for Jewish women is her holy work — born of the Biblical mandate to “be fruitful and multiply.”

This decision weighs on me, and it’s something I’ll continue to wrestle with as my window for having children continues to close because of my age. The d’var giver joked that she didn’t want to have the realization of a woman in a t-shirt she saw: “Oh my God! I can’t believe I forgot to have to have children!” Like her, I want “to make an active, intelligent decision about whether or not I [am] going to give birth and raise children.”

Filed Under: books, synagogue Tagged With: , , , ,

feminist teshuva

September 21, 2012 By 1 Comment

I wrote this two weeks ago as a final assignment for the fall seminar for first-year students, which looked at the Torah and Haftarah portions – and critical analysis of both – for Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur. We were asked to reflect on something we found interesting or significant from the readings and to present that reflection to the class. I’ve edited it slightly to make it more accessible to readers not in that class.

Thus for me, teshuva between women and G-d implies not just G-d holding me responsible for the ways I have failed as a human being, but also me holding G-d responsible for failing me as a Jewish woman by giving me a world and a people and a text that continue to betray women, often making it difficult for us to uphold our side of the covenant.

I almost fell off of my bed after I read this passage from Tamara Cohen’s essay, “Returning to Sarah,” in Beginning Anew. To say that it resonated with me would be a vast understatement. I don’t think a piece of text has so perfectly spoken to me in 10 years, since I read Anita Diamant’s Choosing a Jewish Life – the main impetus for the Jewish journey that eventually led me here.

The passage gave me permission to be mad at G-d. The tradition I grew up in did not allow that, and my inchoate theology tends towards a G-d that is not directly responsible for the state of things. Our mischegas is our own.

A world and a people and a text that continue to betray women.

[B]etray women.

This is my experience, from growing up in a tradition of strict gender roles, to working at an all girls’ boarding school in North Carolina, to volunteering at the rape crisis center in D.C.

I am grateful to now be a part of a community whose commitment to egalitarianism seems to be firm, but I know this to be an aberration. (And I know that there will be failures on that front; we live in a world of male privilege, after all.)

My life thus far has been a daily, run-into-a-wall encounter between the way that I experience life and a privileged experience of life. And that’s my experience as an upper-middle-class, straight white woman – to say nothing of the experience of people of color, or queer folks.

I feel that betrayal acutely, in ways large and small.

I feel it when last summer’s debt crisis – which almost led to a default and did lead to a downgrade in U.S. credit by world debtors – ended only when the president agreed to a bill rider that prohibited the District of Columbia from directing its own tax revenues to subsidize abortions for District residents.

I feel it in the lack of basic labor protections – standard for most workers in this country – for domestic employees, the women that care for our children, houses, and elders.

I feel it when our secretary of state – our nation’s top diplomat – is asked which fashion designers she prefers.

I feel it when sports teams at my alma mater are referred to as “the Longhorns” . . . and “the Lady Longhorns.”

I feel it when I get mail, as I did yesterday, addressed to “Mr. & Mrs. Joseph Grossberg.”

Last Wednesday at hesbon hanefesh (“account of the soul”) a teacher asked us to reflect on the issue of anger, and he used a text from Rav Natan as a prompt: “Help me break my tendency towards anger. Help me practice patience in all aspects of my life and overcome my anger. I don’t want to be angry or respond harshly to anything . . . I just want to be able to serve you honestly and simply, and to have total trust in you.”

This is not my prayer to G-d. For me there is a distinction between the feeling of anger and acting angrily. I don’t want to do the latter. But I also don’t want to not be angry, when I generally feel that if you’re not angry about the world, you’re not paying attention. (Patience, on the other hand, that I pray for daily.) My anger, my outrage at injustice, is often what motivates me. It’s one of the reasons I’m here.

And if I’m being honest, I have to say that in the drama of the traditional Yom Kippur “scapegoat” sacrifice in the texts that we read, I feel less like the onlookers or even the high priest – and more like the goat. I feel the weighed down by the burden of our society’s sins against women. Like the goat, I am either abandoned in the wilderness – or thrown over a cliff.

So, how can I do the hard work of teshuva (“repentence”) when a great deal of my reflection has left me angry at G-d? Trust after betrayal is incredibly hard, especially when the betrayal “continue[s],” as Cohen notes.

Cohen’s answer is, at least in part, is for us to complete the stories about and to strain to hear the voices of the women of the Torah. We must write our own midrashim and live our own fully integrated lives. So, I’ll definitely try to get that done in the next 19 days.

Hebrew College founder Art Green, in his introduction to S.Y. Agnon’s seminal text on the High Holidays, Yamim Noraim, suggests another, or an additional, model: He notes that Yom Kippur commemorates the giving of the second of the Ten Commandment tablets. (Moses destroyed the first in his anger at the Israelites’ creation of the golden calf.) Green says, “This time the tablets were to be a joint divine-human project. Moses does the carving, G-d does the writing. Every Jew receives or fashions these second tablets on or around Yom Kippur. This is the season when each of us renegotiates our covenant with G-d.”

If I can frame it like that, I’m able see G-d as a partner in the beginning of my teshuva. But it’s also a good thing that I have next year, too.

Filed Under: holidays, school Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

so it begins

September 3, 2012 By 1 Comment

I just completed my first week of school (well, sort of). Sunday and Monday were orientation, and Tuesday through Friday were the first four days of a pre-semester seminar. My classes will start in earnest next week.

It’s hard to relate all of the feelings I’ve had in the past week. Frankly, it’s been overwhelming, but in the best way possible. I’ve loved meeting my new classmates, the returning students, and the faculty, as well as beginning to learn as a class and to pray as a community.

I’ve also spent a fair amount of the week in a kind of emotional suspended animation: I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop. “It can’t really be that for once in my life I am in the right place.” “I can’t actually be doing what I supposed to be doing.” I know that not everything about this school and my experience as a student is or will be perfect. But I have never known peace like this.

First things first! The best thing about rabbinical school so far: I get to sing every day, and no one cares if (that?) I sing out of tune. I get to sing during morning prayers, and most communal time starts with a niggun (wordless melody). Even my class does! (Indeed, the fact that my admissions interview ended with a niggun solidified for me that Hebrew College was the right place for me.)

hebrew college’s selichot leader; photo by dena trugman (via instagram)

One of my favorite parts of the last week has been selichot, which unfortunately won’t be a regular occurrence throughout the year. Selichot are poems and prayers said during the Jewish month of Elul, which precedes the High Holidays. They explore themes of penitence and G-d’s mercy — not, perhaps, the most cheerful of topics — and at Hebrew College start at 7:00 a.m., before the morning service — giving an idea of how moving they must be to draw a crowd. (I have a limited music vocabulary, so I can only try to explain why.) In fact, more than one returning student told me that, despite the early hour, they were not to missed. Many of the tunes have strong beats and feature repeating lines, facilitating participation. And the Hebrew College tradition in many of the songs is that anyone can take a verse, while we all take the chorus together; I’ve loved hearing the variety of experience, accuracy, and ability that results. In this setting, not everyone sings well, but anyone can sing. I’ve never had an experience like selichot before, and I find that the songs stay with me all day.

Orientation was great mix of practical and spiritual. We met administrators, did icebreakers, told and heard personal journey stories, and started learning about core elements of the Hebrew College curriculum: personal and spiritual growth, tefila (prayer), beit midrash (literally, “house of interpretation”) and hevruta (study partners), and (good, old-fashioned) learning. I was particularly struck by something the director of admissions said as he welcomed us to orientation. He noted that school begins at an odd moment in the Jewish calendar, during the month Elul, a time of preparation for the High Holidays in which we reflect on teshuvah (literally, “return”). We atone for our sins by trying to make right our relationships with our fellow human beings and with G-d. Taking the first step in a new journey may feel out of sync with the prevalent theme of repentance, but, he said, “I know that for many us this beginning may represent a return in a very real way.”

This combination (which doesn’t even include the practical side of rabbinic education, which is to come in the curriculum), exemplified in the orientation schedule and in the introduction to the core elements of the school’s curriculum, is the essence of what I was looking for in a graduate program. I know I would not have been happy in a purely academic setting (as for example a Ph.D. program). I ultimately want to use my knowledge of Judaism in the service of others, and I am so excited to be an institution that recognizes the importance of spiritual and personal growth.

hannah, whose story is read on the first day of Rosh Hashanah

The seminar for first-year students is about the passages from the Tanakh that we read in synagogue on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. We’re looking at the primary texts in the Hebrew Bible as well as a variety of commentary on them: sections of Talmud and other rabbinic sources, modern and contemporary perspectives, and Israeli poetry. The rabbi who teaches the course is our class advisor (and will be teaching one of our fall semester courses); he assigned a text, Beginning Anew: A Woman’s Companion to the High Holy Days, as part of his commitment to looking at the primary texts through a feminist lens. I am thrilled that this perspective is given such importance, especially since so many of the High Holidays’ stories feature women.

This week marked for me the beginning of the hevruta study experience, as mentioned, a hallmark of the Hebrew College curriculum. Every morning after selichot, shacharit (morning prayer), and our facilitated Elul reflection, the first-year students split up into pairs to work, in the beit midrash, on the assignments for class that day. We switch partners every day (although we will eventually choose permanent study partners for the year). I was nervous about this part of the learning process. I’ve had a few experiences with hevruta learning, but nothing this consistent or systematic, and I have always thrived well in a very traditional, individual learning setting (lecture by professor and supplementary reading). I wasn’t sure I was going to like working in hevruta. To be sure, I chose Hebrew College in part because of its emphasis on hevruta learning, but I did so with trepidation, anticipating that it would be a challenge, pushing me out of my safety zone.

On Tuesday my first partner, who spent last year in Israel studying in hevruta, told me that it would ruin me for me classroom learning. I’m not sure I’m ready to go quite that far, but I have absolutely loved this week, completely confounding my expectations. It helps that I’ve jibed well with the four classmates that I’ve worked with so far: I’ve really appreciated their different strengths, and partnered learning has helped me to realize my own strengths (to wit, and unsurprisingly, grammar and translation of the Hebrew texts).

My final thought from this first week takes me back to the first day of orientation, Sunday — and my birthday. When I first found out the week’s schedule, I had the fleeting thought that it would be an odd way to spend my birthday (not least because I’d be among a fair number of strangers), but the more I considered, the more I thought that it might actually be perfect. The director of admissions in particular made a big deal of it, leading the group in “Happy Birthday” singing not once but twice, and when I thanked everyone after blowing out my candles, I said, “There is no place or group of people I would rather be on my birthday.”

And it really was true: I am incredibly privileged to be able to pursue this dream. What better gift could I ask for on my birthday than to be taking the first step on that journey?

Filed Under: holidays, school Tagged With: , , , , , ,

bat mitzvah

July 27, 2012 By 2 Comments

after the ceremony, with the sefer torah; photo by gay lee pearce

My bat mitzvah ceremony was almost two months ago, and with all that has happened since then, it seems even further in the past. But yesterday in Hebrew class our book included a text about the ritual of Orthodox boys’ first haircuts — traditionally at the age of three, on Lag B’Omer, at the tomb of Rabbi Simeon bar Yohai in the Galilean town of Meron, in case you’re interested — and one of the book’s exercises asked us to reflect on one of our own meaningful Jewish rituals. Since I have to do it in Hebrew, I may as well attempt it in English first . . .

I completed the adult b’nai mitzvah class in June, after seven months of study. The group of 15 — all young adults in the D.C. area — met for two hours each week; the class was held at Sixth & I and was the first of its kind for the synagogue. Sixth & I hired an outside rabbi to teach the class, a woman I had first met — and loved! — when she taught one of the sessions of the Jeremiah Fellowship I completed a year ago. As I noted at the end of our ceremony dress rehearsal, I am likely one of the few who can say that her bat mitzvah prepared her for rabbinical school. I don’t know what this first step in my journey to the rabbinate would have been like without all that I gained from the class, the rabbi, and my classmates.

We read about prayer and the liturgy, talked about the holidays, learned how to put on a tallit and lay tefillin. We wrote d’vrei torah and practiced leining our parts of the parshah. Even after all these years of my adult Jewish education, it continues to thrill me that there is always more to learn.

The class was an interesting mix of Jewish backgrounds. A few people had had b’nai mitzvah as teenagers but had not found the experience particularly meaningful and hadn’t been involved in the Jewish community since then. Like me, others had never had one, despite having been raised as Jews, and some of us weren’t raised Jewish. I in particular was in a different place in my Jewish journey than everyone else, as I began visiting and applying to rabbinical schools shortly after the class started. But we all shared a desire to deepen our commitment to Judaism.

In addition to the opportunities for spiritual and intellectual development and liturgical proficiency, the class also gave me a glimpse into the future. A curious thing happens when you say that you are planning to become a rabbi, probably not unlike what happens when you say that you are studying to become a rabbi, or that you are a rabbi: in the class and elsewhere, people began jokingly referring to me as “rabbi,” asking me questions about Judaism, and deferring to my leadership. More than one person whom I do not know well at all wanted to talk about G-d in the course of otherwise fairly pedestrian conversations. In all of those moments I felt acutely inadequate.

I am going to rabbinical school because I don’t have answers, in more than one sense. I need and want to know more to be able to serve the Jewish community, and I am well suited for the rabbinate in part because I don’t require certainty.

The class was my first experience of being a part of a Jewish community with the “rabbi lens.” As rabbinical school became a reality, what I wanted to get out of the class changed. I watched the rabbi teach and observed how she handled the class and its questions. I listened to what others said about why the class was meaningful to them. I led one of the rehearsals when the rabbi couldn’t make it to class. I began to feel less a part of the class and more an aide to the class. Of course, this position came with risks. After a tense second-to-last service rehearsal, in which we were all nervous and on edge, I snapped at one of my classmates. She was understandably upset with me, and righting that wrong and repairing that relationship (which I am happy to report did happen) took on a different import. I felt a power imbalance and a new responsibility — and the crushing guilt that must always come with being a “bad representative” of a group’s leadership. I knew it behooved me to make amends, no matter the extenuating circumstances. I asked myself for the first, but presumably not the last, time, “Can I be a good rabbi if I . . .?”

part of the amazing card my friends gave me, with pictures from their own b’nai mitzvah

The service itself was wonderful. For some reason I’ve always been cavalier about milestones, ceremonies, and celebrations. I don’t remember attaching much import to high school or college graduations, and I was fairly blasé even about my wedding (noting again for my reader(s?) that this was not my attitude towards my marriage). And it took me a while to warm to the idea of this one: My cousin found out about it a few months prior and said to me, “Hello!? You have to tell us about these things!” But the excitement came. I practiced every day, I invited friends and family, I got my hair done, and I bought new clothes (a true sign of how meaningful I held the occasion, since I loathe shopping; the best present I’ve ever gotten was when my mom bought me a wedding dress and sent it to me).

At the Saturday morning service on June 4, 2012, I gave my d’var torah, I led the amidah and the second half of the Torah service, and I had two aliyot. Almost of this involved carrying a tune, and the truly hilarious part of the day was finding my family in the social hall downstairs after the ceremony and hearing each of them exclaim as they hugged me, “I didn’t know you could sing!” I didn’t either, and I am happy to now have the confidence that I can lead services and not embarrass myself.

I remember Sixth & I’s rabbi, acting as gabbai while we read Torah, giving me a hug after I finished my aliyah, and saying, “Nice job, rabbi.” I remember that so many of my friends came to support me. I remember my mom’s thrill at meeting the rabbis who helped us lead the service, women who were both holding at least one of their small children after the ceremony. It’s not clear to me what my mom’s conception of being a rabbi is, but she turned to me as we were leaving the synagogue and said, “See? You can be a rabbi *and* have kids!”

I almost started crying when I saw my father-in-law after the service. He has known more than his fair share of tragedy and thus is understandably staid, with a deadpan sense of humor. He drove 12 hours from his home in Louisville, Ky., to attend the service, a generous gesture from a fairly cynical atheist and generally non-practicing Jew. His face lit up when he saw me after the ceremony, and with a huge smile that I’ve never seen, he told me what a great job I did. In my mind I can still see his expression, and I think it would have been enough just to have that memory.

Filed Under: D.C., memories, synagogue Tagged With: , , , , , ,

death of a mensch

July 12, 2012 By 3 Comments

On Monday I woke up thinking about him, a man I never knew — and didn’t even consider the existence of until last week.

On Sunday I attended the funeral of the father-in-law of the rabbi who taught the b’nai mitzvah class I completed in D.C. last month. Her in-laws are local, and since I consider the rabbi one of my mentors and one of the reasons I decided to go to rabbinical school, I — along with a classmate who also knew her in her past job — made the drive to a small town outside of Boston to be a part of the mitzvah of k’vod hameyt, honoring the dead.

His death on July 4 was a random accident, one so terrible that the rabbi, one of the most articulate and thoughtful people I know, just shook her head when I saw her: “There’s nothing to say.”

There certainly isn’t much to say about his death, although the rabbi who presided over the ceremony did a yeoman’s job. He took to task the chief of police who had declared the accident “an act of G-d.” “Oh, really?” he rejoined scathingly. “That is not G-d.” And then he cautioned the large crowd that allowed only standing room in the sanctuary by the time the service started, “Before you ask, ‘Why?’, I ask you to consider whether there is any answer to that question that you would find satisfactory.”

There was certainly, though, very much to say about his life. From his obituary: “Loved nature, music, writing short stories, studying Torah, discussing politics, dancing with [his wife], and the Red Sox. His goodness and love will be missed.”

The service started with the synagogue’s cantor, who had known him and his wife since she began her job at the congregation. (They were involved in selecting the rabbi as well.) Next was his sister, then his son (my rabbi’s husband), then his daughter. And then his wife.

His son talked about how his father had taught him how to be a father. The rabbi and her husband have two children, and he recalled how much joy his father had gotten out of being a grandfather. And he sounded like the best kind of father and grandfather. The son recalled, “Dad could do anything. Wrote down the wrong gate and missed your flight? Let dad know: he’ll fix it. Don’t understand how student loans work? Ask dad: he’ll explain them. Get lost on the way to an important meeting? Call dad: he”ll get you there.”

A heartbreakingly young woman, his daughter talked about all of her many childhood activities that her dad never missed: Practices, performances, meets, competitions. In school he stayed up late with her the night before a paper was due in case she needed help breaking through writer’s block. She ended up in technology, the same field as his, and she spoke fondly their attending a recent conference together. There he introduced her to a colleague as his daughter; later, the man found her again and said, “When your father introduced you, I didn’t realize that you are actually his daughter. I thought he was saying that you were like a daughter, that he was your mentor.” She recalled at the service, “The colleague wasn’t wrong. He was my father, but he was also my mentor.”

Last was his wife, who was unbelievable. And by that I mean that I almost couldn’t pay attention to what she was saying because she was so unexpectedly poised at a moment when everyone around her, including people who hadn’t even known him, were sobbing. She shared how they had met, in college: two atheist, anti-Jewish Jews. They bonded over activism and late night philosophical talks, but, although she wasn’t all that interested in marriage, she didn’t want to move in with him if they were unmarried. “I told him that I didn’t understand that. If two people wanted to commit to one another, they should just do it, go all the way.” And five months after they met, he asked her to marry him on bended knee and with a toy ring with a green stone (which she promptly dropped, losing the stone, as soon as he handed it to her). So at ages 18 and 19, they were married, in a Jewish ceremony to satisfy their parents — and one entirely in Hebrew “so that we couldn’t understand all the stuff about G-d.”

I wish there had been time to hear more about their journey together from kids to having grandkids, from rebels to pillars of the community, from G-d denying to G-d embracing. But what followed next was well worth that omission.

His wife explained that she had asked people from various points in his life to speak about him because what she had known about him was not all there was to know about him. We then heard from a childhood friend and one from his young adult years, then from a member of the synagogue’s men’s group that he founded, and from a colleague. We heard about his mischievousness, his reflections on Torah, and a vacation dinner in a nice restaurant that ended with his young son covered in spaghetti and chocolate ice cream. A woman from a job or two ago said that after several people had left the company, they committed to getting together for dinner every few months to stay in touch. She had been in charge of scheduling those dinners, and he was always the hardest one to nail down. But, she added, after hearing that day what others had to say about him and his commitment to his family, friends, and community, she understood why he was always so busy.

I loved his wife’s tribute, her acknowledgement that she doesn’t own the memories of him, that all of the community carries pieces of him — then and now. This is how remembrance stays alive, and I am blessed to now be a bearer of his life and death as well.

And then she began to talk about the night he died. They had attended a James Taylor concert, just one of the activities that had begun to form the shape of their (soon-to-be) retired life. They sat on the lawn and talked about their ballroom dancing lessons and their financial future. The last song of the concert, she informed us, was Taylor’s “How Sweet It Is To Be Loved By You.” And the cantor joined her at the podium, and they invited everyone to sing. And when we weren’t spirited enough, his wife admonished us to sing louder and to clap harder. It was hard to do through my tears. But she just laughed and clapped and sang.

In the end, she concluded by thanking him for their 43 years together, declaring, “I regret nothing.”

“I regret nothing.” How many of us can say that about our relationships? About our lives? About anything? How many of us can say that, whether we actually don’t experience regret, or whether we have made peace with our mistakes?

I just want to stop. And thank you, baby.

How sweet it is to be loved by you.

Filed Under: Boston, D.C., memories Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

d’var torah

June 7, 2012 By 2 Comments

part of parshah naso in the sefer torah; photo by kera bartlett

On Saturday, I read the following reflection at the ceremony for my adult b’nai mitzvah class at Sixth & I Historic Synagogue (more on the ceremony in a later post). The speech is called a d’var Torah (literally, “word of Torah”), a close study on one aspect of the weekly portion of the Torah that is read that week in synagogue. It’s traditional for a bar or bat mitzvah to write and give such a speech at his/her ceremony. The parshah last week was Naso, Numbers 4:21–7:89.

Naso et rosh.

Thus begins our parshah, with a directive generally translated as “Take a census.” But it literally means, “Lift up the head.” It’s G-d’s command to Moses to number the groups of Levites entrusted with the care of the Tabernacle. And at its essence, a census is a just a list.

In his book The List: The Uses and Pleasures of Cataloguing, my friend Bob Belknap grapples with the ancient literary tradition of lists in the authors of the American Renaissance: Emerson, Whitman, Melville, Thoreau. He’s puzzled by his graduate school roommate’s dismissive attitude towards such sections of text, “I just skip over all that stuff.” Indeed, Bob’s love of lists may be unique: Most of us, when confronted with a lengthy enumeration – say, of the descendents of a patriarch in the Torah – at best skim. Almost all of us desperately search for the beginning of the next paragraph: Why on earth should we care about the names of each man who get us from Seth to Noah?

What has been described as our parshah’s overall theme, order and structure, is evidenced in its abundance of lists: G-d tells Moses to take a census; G-d spells out who is to be counted; G-d enumerates the specific parts of the Tabernacle that the Levites are responsible for; G-d lays out procedures for the physically impure, for betrayal, for a wife accused of adultery; G-d explains the laws of the nazarite. And via one of the more challenging examples of a list, repetition, G-d tells us about the dedication offerings from the twelve chieftains of Israel, each of whom brings the exact same gifts. And those gifts take a paragraph each time to describe. So the parshah ends with a list of 12 identical lists.

I wonder how these sections struck Moses at the revelation at Mount Sinai (if it’s the case that, as some postulate, Moses received then the entire Torah and not just the Decalogue). I assume he took a moment to read what G-d had given him before he went down to the Israelites and proclaimed it a sacred text. I like to imagine Moses as editor, sitting atop the mountain with a red pen, trying to reason with G-d. “There may be an opportunity here to cut this part down a bit. No one’s going to read all this 12 times in a row.”

But as my friend argues in his book, “The value of lists is that they ask us to make them meaningful.” If we are engaged in the text – and as Jews we are asked to engage with Torah – we have to consider these challenging sections.

Lists catalogue and lists omit; they highlight differences and they emphasize similarities; they create patterns of possibility and they make assessments of importance. They honor the fallen, the lost, the loved.

Naso et rosh.

Through the years, commentators have expounded on the various meanings of this verb. Rashi sees naso as a play on words: He connects its meaning of “to lift or raise” with the function of the Levites who are engaged in carrying parts of the Tabernacle.

Another rabbi understands its connotation of pride: When one shows or feels pride, one lifts up one’s head and stands tall; the Torah wants to tell us that the Levites were proud of their responsibility.

Yet another rabbi interprets the verb as a metaphor for lifting up one’s spiritual station: The Levites were given an incredibly important task that helped them reach an elevated ability of patience and coping with adversity.

I can think of another meaning. As any student knows, engaging with a text often finds us hunched over, staring into the pages of a book. But as any teacher knows, in a classroom deeper meaning takes root when students are actively listening instead of reading the bullet points of a lecture on a handout. With naso et rosh, G-d is reminding to consider that deeper meaning, to ponder that larger picture. “I’m giving you these lists, instead of narrative, to make you stop. Lift up your head and behold me.” The stories in the Torah – of creation, of the flood, of Abraham and Isaac, of Sodom and Gomorrah, of Jacob and his sons, of the Exodus out of Egypt – don’t make us stop. These are great stories, and we want to keep our heads down and find out what happens.

But we’re also called to be like Moses at the end of the parshah, which concludes with him standing by himself (and I imagine, with his head raised), listening to G-d speaking to him from above the cover of the ark.

In these moments, we can reflect, dwell, exult in detail, even rejoice in minutiae. As my friend so beautifully puts it in his book, lists challenge us to stop: “The rhythm of the repetition interrupts the forward drive of the text, and for a moment we are invited to dance.”

Filed Under: D.C., synagogue Tagged With: , , , , , ,

praying with my feet

May 1, 2012 By Leave a Comment

JOIN national summit program; photo by salem pearce (via instagram)

I spent last Sunday and Monday in New York, at the HUC-JIR campus, attending the Jewish Organizing Institute and Network for Justice (JOIN for Justice) first National Summit, the organization’s first. I heard about it through Jews United for Justice, one of my favorite D.C. organizations. As a rabbi, I want to do organizing, so it was a good opportunity to network with other Jews doing social justice work. Indeed, those two days I walked around thinking, “Yes. These are my people.”

Simply put, the conference was awesome, for little and big reasons. I am dork, so I really liked that everything ran on time and stuck to the schedule. (Not everyone showed up on time to sessions (myself included on one occasion!) but that’s a different kettle of fish.) Every session I attended had a written agenda of what was to be covered, and in good organizing fashion, the agenda was reviewed and affirmed before each session. What can I say? I like knowing that presenters know what they’re doing.

The conference also got me super excited about moving to Boston. Bostonophiles had told me what a great city it is for social justice, but seeing is believing. I heard about so much good work going on and/or based there (where JOIN itself is located!), through Moishe Kavod House, Jewish Association for Law & Social Action, Massachusetts Senior Action Council, Boston Workman’s Circle, Keshet, Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Boston, and more. I’m thrilled about the potential opportunities I’m going to have in rabbinical school.

And I heard some downright inspiring speakers: In the opening assembly, Simon Greer of Nathan Cummings talked about the Jewish legacy and future of social justice: “At the March on Washington, Jews blended in; at Occupy Wall Street, Jews stood out.” Ai-jen Poo of the National Domestic Workers Alliance spoke about community/labor coalition building: “All progressive movements, worker-related or not, bank on the utilization of the labor movement. We have to lift it up.” Marshall Ganz of the Kennedy School highlighted the necessity of a moral aspect to social justice work: “One cannot long last as a light to the world and a darkness at home” (in reference to the occupation of Palestinian lands). Gordon Whitman of PICO emphasized the importance of religious Judaism: “We can’t have just a secular Jewish social justice movement.” Nancy Kaufman of the National Council of Jewish Women: “Social justice comes from Jewish values — but has universal goals.”

One of my favorite sessions was “Mindfulness and Organizing Work,” led by Rabbis David Adelson and Lisa Goldstein. I really identified with Rabbi Goldstein’s section on text study as a mindfulness practice. As she noted, looking at a piece of text is the default Jewish spiritual practice in organizing — but doing so often puts participants into an intellectual space that can be anxiety-producing and can lead to tearing others down. “How can I demonstrate that I know more about Judaism than others? What if I don’t understand what someone else says? How can I show my independence of thought by disagreeing with the author?” Instead, Rabbi Goldstein suggested looking at text from mindful perspective: “What it wise, beautiful, true, or helpful about this text? What does this text teach me about myself and about where I am in the world?”

the prophet isaiah (i love the prophet art at huc!); photo by salem pearce (via instagram)

Personally (as opposed to professionally), my favorite part of the conference was seeing my old friend David Segal (now Rabbi David Segal). We hadn’t seen each other since high school, when I was his yearbook editor. We’d friended each other on Facebook within the past couple of years, so we had some idea of what the other was doing. But because of the time built into the schedule for relational meetings (thanks, JOIN!), we were able to make that deeper connection as adults and as organizers. I got to hear about his path to the rabbinate and to Aspen, and I got to tell him about my path to Judaism and to the rabbinate. When we parted, headed to different sessions, he told me a story that gave me chills.

A friend of his, also a convert and a rabbi, shared with him a midrash (or perhaps a midrash on a midrash?): Between creation and when the Israelites went out of Egypt, G-d is said to have visited and offered Torah to all of the nations of the earth, who ultimately rejected it; only the Israelite nation, at Mount Sinai, accepted it — becoming the “chosen” people. David’s friend noted that in each of the rejecting nations, though, a few people in the back of the crowd raised their hands and said, “Wait! I want it.” That is him, he said.

That is me, too.

Filed Under: social justice Tagged With: , , , , , ,

decision

April 29, 2012 By 6 Comments

This is perhaps more than a little anti-climactic now, since it says so in more than one place on this blog, but . . . I’ve decided to go to Hebrew College, the transdenominational rabbinical school in Boston (or, more accurately, Newton Centre).

It was in some ways a very simple choice. When I visited the first time in November, there was a moment — that scared me, that I didn’t talk about with anyone at the time — when I just knew: This is right. This is where I want to be. I didn’t want to say it aloud because I knew I wasn’t going to make a decision based just on a feeling. I was also not ready to put that intention out into the universe.

Besides, one of the most important things I took away from my tour of rabbinical schools is how great all of them are. It was amazing to see how each institution is so seriously engaged in thinking about how best to train rabbis to serve the Jewish people. I loved meeting the deans of admissions, faculty, and students at each school: They are all amazing people. I honestly believe I would have been happy at any of the four I applied to. In addition to other factors, it came down to which I thought would be the best fit. (More about that below.)

The decision was also simple in another, more surprising, way. In mid-March, after I’d received my acceptances, I narrowed the choice down to two schools in two cities: Hebrew College, and Reconstructionist Rabbinical School (RRC) in Philadelphia. I’d gotten the idea that my husband was leaning more towards the latter, and since I really wanted the decision to be transparent and mutually agreed upon and beneficial, I began to prepare for a lengthy conversation. I taped a piece of butcher paper on the door into the living room; it was divided into two sections, one for each city. We began to write down the pros and cons of each city and school. (Some of the more amusing cons were “Pats fans” and then “Eagles and Phillies fans.” In retrospect, we clearly should have added “Bruins fans” to that list.)

Shortly afterwards, I was looking at the paper and my husband came up to me and said, “Do we need to do this? I want to go to Boston.” And that was that.

On my conviction that Hebrew College is the best fit for me: During my interview, both Rabbi Art Green (a professor and one of the founders) and Rabbi Sharon Cohen Anisfeld (the dean) helped me to clarify my thinking on the issue. As Rabbi Green noted, the emphasis at RRC is on history, as reflected in its curriculum; Reconstructionism views Judaism as an evolving religious civilization, so each year is spent immersed in an historical period (biblical, rabbinic, medieval, modern and contemporary). Rabbi Green knows from what he speaks: He was the dean of RRC for six years.

At Hebrew College, the emphasis is on text, as reflected in its curriculum, in which each year is spent immersed in a book of Torah. Let’s face it: I was a Classics major for a reason. I spent my undergraduate years learning Latin and Greek — and then reading texts in the original. (There was a little culture and history thrown in, but not much.) And then I went on to learn German and Russian for the same reason. More than most things, I love reading and translating text. Grammar, syntax, vocabulary, sentence structure, nuances of meaning — they all thrill me. Simply put, I am a text dork.

yeminite beit midrash by geula twersky

But “best fit” also means something else to me. As I realized in my Hebrew College interview, RRC would have been, in some ways, the “safer” choice. The school, its students, and its alums are know for their political engagement (among other things). In that sense, I would fit right in. In contrast, Hebrew College, as a transdenominational school, doesn’t have the same political homogeneity. I anticipate that I will find it quite challenging at times to go to school with people who have different opinions than I do in this area. For one, I don’t have much experience; I tend to surround myself with like-minded people (as do most of us). Relatedly, I don’t have much patience with non-progressives/radicals.

The other aspect of a Hebrew College education that I expect to find challenging is its required beit midrash hours. Beit midrash literally means “house of study” and refers to the places of Torah study that the early rabbis used. In rabbinical schools, the beit midrash is a library that encourages talking, because studying there is done b’chevrutah (with a partner). Part of a transdenominational education is learning from others who may have different (in this case religious) viewpoints. But in general, the school values partnered learning, which means I’ll be required to spend several hours each week studying with someone else. As an introvert who prefers to work alone rather than in a group, I’ll thus have to work hard to make sure I am getting enough recharging time.

I’ve framed these last two factors in a negative way; indeed, it’s the challenge of them that appeals to me. I need to push myself out of my comfort zone. Doing so, I will be a better rabbinical student, and a thus a better rabbi.

Finally — and I can’t emphasize enough how awesome this was — my interview at Hebrew College ended with the room singing a niggun (wordless melody). What’s not to love?

Filed Under: application process Tagged With: , , , , , ,
« Older Posts
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 1,615 other followers