shlepping to shul

August 19, 2013 by 2 Comments

Note: This is part of series of posts about my participation in an interfaith program in England, and as such, it was briefly deleted from this site and then reposted, edited to remove references to the specific program and to the university that runs it. See here for further explanation. Click here to read all the posts in the series.

Continuing the story of my visit to Birmingham, on Saturday morning we went to shul. We could go to Birmingham Hebrew Congregation, an orthodox synagogue, or Birmingham Progressive Synagogue, a Liberal congregation. Though I knew that I would probably appreciate the davenning more at the orthodox shul, I chose BPS because I was curious about egalitarian Judaism in the UK. To be a little snide, this service out-Reformed a Reform synagogue in the U.S.: To some extent, what happened was almost unrecognizable to me.

After a 20-minute walk, we arrived at the synagogue before services started at 11:00 a.m. — which seemed quite late. Also, I’m not sure I’ve ever been in synagogue before services started; because the ones I attend on Shabbat morning tend to be about three hours, I (like many people) drift in 30 or 45 minutes late. So we actually sat for a little while, and the very nice member of the congregation who welcomed us explained that because of the summer holidays, attendance would be sparse, and asked those of us who were Jewish to please sing out during the service. Indeed, there were perhaps 25 congregants, and almost no young people. The rabbi (who is a woman) was away, and in her place a congregant (also a woman) led the service.

The service was quite abbreviated, with none of the prayers — including the Amidah — said (or even printed) in full. Many were replaced by responsive readings in English. I knew almost none of the melodies, and I think (though I’m not an expert) that the ones used were difficult to sing, and not that spirited. Honestly, I felt like I was in church, which is not bad per se, but not what I would want in a synagogue.

The Torah service was in the same vein. The procession of the scroll happened only after the reading, and there was only one aliyah, meaning that only a very small part of the parshah was read. And the tallit of young girl who had the aliyah was longer than her overall shorts. (I realize that makes me sound crotchety.) The Torah reader gave a short d’var and then did just that: read the Torah. He didn’t chant it; he just read it from the scroll. He then offered his own translation. I’ve never seen this tradition before, though I was told it is standard practice in these congregations in England. The reader did gain my affection by talking about the points of grammar he considered when making his translation; he even used the words “infinitive absolute”!

After kiddush, we went back upstairs so that the non-Jews could look at the Torah scroll close up. The congregation has four scrolls, which is quite a lot for a 300-member shul. (Most synagogues do have more than one, to avoid constant scroll rolling, since a holiday might make it necessary to read from different parts of the scroll.) The building, too, was quite modern and expensive, which seemed out of sync with its anemic congregation. As it turns out, the synagogue moved just a few years ago: Its original building was bought by a developer planning to build a skyscraper on the property. So the congregation had to pay only about 10% of the cost of the building.

After lunch, we split up into groups to go to different parts of the city to try to get a sense of the multicultural and multifaith character of the city. I’ll just note that I found this exercise a little problematic, for reasons that I don’t want to go into here. But one of the things that I noticed were the near ubiquitous signs reading, “This area monitored by CCTV cameras.” My association with these cameras in the U.S. is the over-policing of low-income areas and neighborhoods of people of color, particularly under the pretext of the drug war — so I found the situation horrifying. But two native Brits confirmed that this level of surveillance is standard (or at least has become so in the post-9/11 and post-2005-Underground-bombings world). None of the natives I spoke to gave a thought to the cameras, and one even characterized Americans as “uptight” for opposing them.

Finally, we finished up the day at dinner with more guests, interfaith community organizers from Sparkbrook. We heard about The Feast, which brings together Christian and Muslim youth, and then from Rev. Richard Sudworth of Christ Church Centre (the first stop in Birmingham, where we heard from awesomely named Mohammed Ali), as well as from Javed Khan, who works in the community around Christ Church, which is majority Muslim. Rev. Sudworth talked about his church’s role in a community that is not reflective of its membership: A new experience, they’ve stepped back and concentrated on supporting the work that is already being done by groups in the area. It really resonated with me, as I think it’s a good model for the kind of work I want to do in a Jewish organization with other groups.

Next up . . . we attend church!

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columns of consonants

July 28, 2013 by 3 Comments
these color-coded torah portion sheets have been my constant companions; photo by salem pearce via instagram

these color-coded torah portion sheets have been my constant companions; photo by salem pearce (via instagram)

Practice reading Torah. Read Torah. Practice reading Torah. Read Torah. Repeat. Repeat again. Repeat again.

This is how I’ve been spending a good deal of my time this summer, as I mentioned in a previous post. We’ve held a once-a-week summer minyan at Hebrew College on Thursday mornings, one of the weekdays on which Torah is read. And I’ve leyned (read Torah) every week there since the end of May. I’ve also read four times on Shabbat at Nehar Shalom, the community synagogue in our new neighborhood.

I’ve loved reading Torah ever since I first did so at my bat mitzvah a little more than a year ago. I was part of an adult b’nai mitzvah class, and we each read three or four verses. One of my classmates dropped out towards the end, so I read her part as well — a whopping seven verses! And I worked on those seven verses for about four months.

A few weeks ago I read for the fourth time this summer at Nehar, and I was the only reader — for a total of 30 verses. (Nehar follows a triennial cycle of Torah reading, meaning that, like many other congregations, only a third of the weekly parshah is read each week.) I learned those in under a week. Same thing yesterday: The weekday portion for parshah Eikev is unusually long — 25 verses — and I learned those in about a week, too.

I’m proud of this progress — most of which has been achieved in the past two months by just forcing myself to volunteer. Both the minyans I’ve been reading at this summer use a Google doc for sign-ups, and it’s amazing how indelible it feels to type your name in a shared, editable web document, in a field marked “aliyah 1.”

Indeed, it has been one of my goals this summer to improve my Torah reading skills. This past year I took an entire class on Cantillation, the art of the ritual chanting of Torah, and it’s a bit of a complicated process. The class focused mainly on learning the melodies associated with each trope mark, as well as the technical skills needed to be able to learn a section of Torah for ritual reading.

A printed book of the Torah in the original Hebrew — one used for studying — has vowels, as well as other symbols (called trope marks) above and below the letters that aid in pronunciation and indicate the proscribed melody. But a Torah scroll, what is used in services for the ritual reading, has none of those; it’s column after column of Hebrew consonants, sometimes without spaces between words. Oftentimes a single letter will be elongated in order to make the columns both left- and right-justified. And some of the letters also have adornments, tiny crowns that seem to sprout from their tops. It’s fair to say that all of this presents something of a challenge for the novice Torah reader.

When learning a part of Torah for ritual reading, I use Trope Trainer, which I can’t recommend enough. Depending on how the program is used, it can practically do the work for you, or be just a helpful tool. It gives the dates of each parshah, and you can open just the reading for a particular day, customized by whether you’re in Israel or the Diaspora and whether you follow the triennial or the yearly cycle. Then you can choose melody, voice, and accent. An electronic voice will sing the whole thing for you — or just a word, a phrase, or a verse. (I now only use this feature to double-check the melody of an unusual trope combination.) It identifies each trope mark, transliterates each word, and indicates the syllabic accent. It provides translation and sheet music. It indicates all k’rey, or words that are read differently than how they are spelled in the scroll. What I like most is the export feature, which creates a PDF of the reading, with or without vowels and trope marks.

statges of learning torah reading; photo by salem pearce (via instagram)

stages of learning torah reading; photo by salem pearce (via instagram)

So: I start by printing the reading with vowels and trope marks; then I highlight the text with various colors that correspond to the different trope mark families (so that the same melodies are the same color). I read the text to fluency and make sure I understand what it means. Then I practice singing, using the highlighted text. I usually practice about 20-30 minutes at a time, until I start making a bunch of mistakes, and then I stop and take a break. A little while later, I practice again.

More than any other skill I’ve worked to master, chanting Torah is a marathon. You just can’t cram. The words and the melody have to have a chance to make “tracks” in your brain, as one teacher explained to me. So I practice, take a break, practice, take a break.

Finally, at least a day before I am scheduled to leyn, I begin practicing from the plain, Torah-scroll-like text. I see what I remember, and I check the highlighted version if I’m not sure. I create mnemonic devices to help me remember the vowels of unusual words and the order of melodies. I practice, take a break, practice, take a break.

On the days I’ve read at school, I’ve been able to come in early and take out the Torah scroll and practice a time or two again from the scroll itself. After a few times stumbling through a reading that I thought I knew cold, I realized that the lettering of the scroll was tripping me up (a phenomenon that I hope will lessen over time, with more practice). Looking at the actual text — being able to see which letters and words in the scroll look different from the typeset — has helped enormously.

I’m particularly proud of my skill at finding my place in the scroll: I used to think that I’d never be able to find the beginning of the parshah in the sea of Hebrew letters, but I’ve actually gotten pretty good at it. This rabbi thing just might work out.

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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.”

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bat mitzvah

July 27, 2012 by 4 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 Tagged With: , , , , , ,

lift up your head

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.”

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these are a few of my favorite things

May 16, 2012 by 7 Comments

Leaving D.C. wouldn’t be complete without waxing nostalgic, so following is a list of my favorite memories from my almost seven years in the District. It was hard to rank them, so don’t read too much into the order.

7. Riding in Bike DC. I just participated in this event last weekend, and it was especially meaningful because of my upcoming departure. On that beautiful Sunday, I traversed the 25-mile route with the constant mental refrain of “I love this city so much.” We got to ride almost the whole time without competing with cars, and I especially enjoyed Rock Creek Parkway, K Street, and the George Washington Parkway — the latter of which was a unique, and not to-be-duplicated, experience. It was amazing to head up the Potomac along that scenic road.

home page of The Washington Post on September 19, 2009

6. Shouting at Elena Kagan. In July 2010, I went for a run on Capitol Hill in the middle of the day. As I passed the Supreme Court (just east of the Capitol building), I recognized the diminutive woman walking along the opposite side of the street, whose image had dominated the news in the months leading up to her Senate confirmation. It took a few moments for this to register in my brain — and of course I was still running as I was thinking, “That’s Elena Kagan!” — so by the time I decided to “say” something, I had to yell.

cars on o st nw, just south of logan circle; photo by salem pearce

“Congratulations on your nomination to the court!” I shouted back at her. She turned around, smiled, waved, and shouted back, “Thanks!”

5. Surviving Snowpocalypse. I’m including this one in part because of where I’m headed next: soon several feet of snow will be a regular occurrence. On December 20, 2009, a historic storm dumped almost two feet of snow onto the greater-D.C. area. Everyone panicked: store shelves were emptied of milk (for some reason snow requires an increase in lactose consumption), and the entire city shut down. The storm made local blog Capital Weather Gang the must-read it’s become. This Texas girl had never seen so much snow at once, and my personal record held until the advent of Snowmageddon two months later.

with dan gordon at the new nationals park; photo by dara oliphant

4. Attending opening day at Nationals Park. For the past five years, I’ve shared Nationals season tickets with a group of friends, so we managed to get three tickets to the first regular season game, on March 30, 2008, at the new ballpark along the Anacostia. It was so cold that evening that I had to buy a red Nationals hoodie to stay warm. Then-President Bush threw out the first pitch — and was booed, much to my pleasure — I ate a hot dog from the kosher cart near our seats, and, best of all, Ryan Zimmerman hit a walk-off homer to lift his team over the Braves, 3-2.

chuppah at sixth & i; photo by matt goldenberg

3. Getting married at Sixth & I Synagogue. (I should note that I am here talking about my wedding — as opposed to my much more important marriage and relationship with my husband, lest my readers get the wrong idea.) The building is beautiful, and as I’ve documented well on this blog, Sixth & I has been the center of my Jewish life in D.C. On October 25, 2009, we stood under the chuppah, under the lofty dome, and made a commitment to each other. Sometimes I still can’t believe that we were able to have our wedding in such a meaningful place.

2. Having my photograph in the Washington Post — twice. Oddly enough, both were because of Sixth & I. The first time was September 18, 2009, right after my conversion. I had volunteered at an Erica Brown Rosh Hashanah event at the synagogue a few days earlier, and there I fell into a conversation with a Post religion reporter, who called me the next day to ask if a staff photographer could take my picture for the story. The photographer and I met at Sixth & I — and the resulting photo (above) was taken in its balcony. It appeared on the Post homepage as well as on the front page of the print edition.

enjoying the first fruits of sixth & i’s kosher food truck

The next time was May 22, 2011, the day after Sixth & I’s kosher food truck, Sixth & Rye, debuted. I dragged my then-intern along with me to wait in the hour-long line, and it was worth every second. Again, I just struck up a conversation with the Post photographer who was covering the event. The resulting photo (left) appeared inside the A-section of the print edition; my hands also appeared on the front page of the website and on the iPhone app.

1. Meeting Michelle Obama. On January 21, 2009, the day after the president’s inauguration, my husband and I got to go to the White House; I had entered and won the lottery that the administration held for 200 District residents to meet their newest neighbors. After a bit of a wait, in a line that snaked around the public rooms of the presidential residence, we made it into the room where the first lady stood. (Apparently we missed the president by just minutes!) First of all, Mrs. Obama is tall (and she was wearing flats on this occasion). Second of all, she has that quality that is the hallmark of all great politicians: the ability to make you feel like you are the only person in the room. I shook her hand and told her it was an honor to meet her. Third of all, she is a funny and charming lady. The man in front of us told her he was a Tuskegee airman and then shared a short anecdote. She punched him lightly on the shoulder and said, “Get out of here!”

And that is when I fell in love with Michelle Obama, way before all the rest of y’all.

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beit din

March 22, 2012 by 1 Comment

Yesterday, I got an email at 7:30 a.m. from the rabbi who married me and for whom I do clerical work once a week (she has a private practice). She needed a third for a beit din and a witness for the concomitant mikveh. I had a meeting that ended when the event was supposed to begin, but I agreed to duck out early, grab a cab, and race north to Adas Israel, the location of the community mikveh in D.C. It wasn’t what I was planning to do yesterday morning, but I am so happy that I did, for many reasons.

The event was a conversion for a 13-year-old boy who was marking his bar mitzvah in Israel in two weeks. Neither of his biological parents were Jewish. His father died when he was very young, and his Jewish step-father adopted him at a very young age (the boy even had the stepfather’s last name). His mother is still not Jewish, but she and her husband have raised the boy so.

A beit din (literally “house of judgment”) for conversion consists of three individuals — generally rabbis, but two can be educated Jews as long as one is an ordained rabbi who is an expert in the rules of conversion. I served along with two rabbis.

adas israel mikveh

I was really impressed with the young man. He was articulate about his desire to affirm his Judaism — and he was honest (saying, for example, that he didn’t like his Hebrew school — hee!). The beit din was mostly just a conversation among everyone. We then headed to the mikveh. The male rabbi and his father actually witnessed the three immersions, but the door to the mikveh was slightly ajar so that we could all hear him say the blessings, including the Shehecheyanu, one of my favorite blessings. We threw candy at him when he emerged from the room. Unfortunately, the rabbi had brought (kosher!) taffy, which he couldn’t have because he had just gotten braces; I was able to scrounge up a piece of hard candy in my purse for him. At the end of the ceremony, the father asked if he could make a donation to a charity I cared about to thank me for my participation, and I asked for a gift to the D.C. Rape Crisis Center, where I serve on the board.

This experience was so amazing — very special to me and incredibly holy. I was thrilled that I made the effort to be there. Plus, the rabbi on the beit din who I didn’t know has already been super helpful. He was very encouraging about my rabbinical school decision, and we’re already having a discussion about a possible fundraising job during school!

I got to sign the conversion certificate, the same template that I received two-and-a-half years ago. (Also, it turns out that I have as much trouble writing in cursive in Hebrew as I do in English. Must practice!) Before the family departed, the father thanked me for participating, noting that “you always remember these moments and those who were there.” I smiled and flashed back to my own beit din, knowing it was true.

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a new spring

March 18, 2012 by Leave a Comment

(probably not) cherry blossoms in scott circle; photo by salem pearce

Yesterday, Saturday, was a gorgeous day here in the nation’s capital. It was sunny and 70 degrees, and Shabbat was made sweeter by the fact that I had found out the day before that I was accepted at the third rabbinical school to which I applied. After morning services, I sat in Dupont Circle with my husband and felt like I could relax for the first time in at least six months. I read (Patti Smith’s Just Kids) and took a few photographs (right and below).

Yesterday felt like a new beginning in another way, as well: I led part of the Shabbat morning service for the first time! Sixth & I hosted a Learner’s Minyan in the morning, led by Rabbi Shira Stutman. The rabbi who is teaching my adult b’nai mitzvah class, Lauren Holtzblatt, arranged for the class to lead the parts of the service that we’re planning to in June during the official ceremony. I’ve volunteered for the second half of the Torah service (putting the scroll away) and for the mourner’s kaddish.

st. patrick’s day green grass at dupont circle; photo by salem pearce

Unfortunately, the past month of travel hasn’t left me any time to practice, so I had to beg off of the Torah service part. I decided to go ahead with the mourner’s kaddish, which I realized while I was leading is actually a little unnerving. The only people who are standing and reciting most of the prayer with the leader are the few in mourning or observing a yahrzeit (although I did ask those whose custom it is to stand to do so). Even so, I could only hear myself in the large sanctuary that was hardly filled, and saying the mourner’s kaddish by (what feels like just) myself is quite different than saying the hatzi kaddish with the whole congregation, when it doesn’t matter if I stumble over a word or two. I’ve got some practicing to do.

Despite my nerves, though, I was able to say to the congregation yesterday that I was leading and saying the mourner’s kaddish for the family of Trayvon Martin. This clear abrogation of justice has troubled me all week: I am proud and privileged to be an American, but I sometimes loathe my country’s institutions.

But the long road is coming to an end: I’ve gotten into (in alphabetical order) Hebrew College (in Boston), HUC-JIR (in New York), and Reconstructionist Rabbinical College (in Philadelphia). I am tentatively leaning towards one school, and I am pretty sure it will be a choice between two of them. But I’m not ready to make that intention more explicit at this point.

I now move on to the decision-making part of the process, which I hope to wrap up in the next few weeks. Stay tuned!

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marriage

March 9, 2012 by 9 Comments

Today began and ended with my reflecting on marriage. It also began with sad tears and ended with happy ones.

I am sorry to say that this morning I had to go to D.C. police (MPD) headquarters. My husband had his wallet and phone stolen from a gym locker last month, and the police report on the incident was the last document I needed to complete our renter’s insurance claim. The insurance company had requested the report from MPD but naturally had not yet received it three weeks later. The complainant (or the complainant’s spouse) can request the report for free — but only in person! — so I headed to Judiciary Square after breakfast. I expected the process to be at least somewhat trying — as is almost all interaction with District bureaucracy.

It started with the metal detector. “You have cuticle clippers in your purse,” the guy running the x-ray machine tells me. “Where are you going?” When I tell him I need a copy of a police report, he non sequiturs, “Please take the clippers out of the building.” (I have no idea why he asked me what I was doing in the building, because it sure didn’t seem to make a difference to him.)

“I have to leave them outside?” I ask, confused. “I didn’t say that,” he responds. “You have to take them out of the building.”

Sighing, I take the offending object outside and place it on a concrete window ledge. I come back inside and repeat the security drill. This time (but why wasn’t it last time as well?) it’s a pair of tweezers. “Take them outside the building,” he repeats.

Lather, rinse, repeat. This time, it’s my coin purse. He tells me to just hold on to it as I walk through the metal detector, which of course goes off. I point out the coin purse in my hand to the other security person, who wands me anyway. The wand beeps near my jacket pocket: my office keys, which haven’t caused the metal detector to go off during the previous three times I’ve already been through it. “Why did you leave those in your pocket?” she demands. Flustered, I stammer that I must have forgotten about them. She motions me back again. I put the keys in the purse and try again. This time she wants to know why I’m holding my coin purse. “Because he told me to,” I almost scream in frustration.

All of this would merely be Kafkaesque, but I’m retelling it to underline the fact that I was in no mood for bullshit when I got to the Public Documents Unit. The trouble begins when the woman returns with copy of the report she’s retrieved. “I need to see your ID, because your name isn’t on the report.” I explain that I wasn’t involved in the incident and hand her my driver’s license. She hands it back to me: “I need to see something with your married name.”

Feeling the heat rising, I force myself to say calmly, “I don’t have a ‘married name.’ I didn’t change my name when I got married. I am telling you he’s my husband; the address on my license is the same as his on the report, and I am wearing a wedding ring.”

“Well, I’m wearing a wedding ring, and my husband’s dead.” (Yes. She actually said that.) She continues, “I can’t believe you don’t have something with his name.” We go back and forth in this vein until she finally thrusts the report at me and peevishly informs me, “You just got a free report.”

“Yes,” I reply. “The free report that I’m entitled to as the complainant’s spouse!” I’m so angry at this point I am shaking. “So you say,” she ends.

I’m crying before I’ve gotten on the elevator, kicking myself for letting her get to me and for not anticipating something like this. The thought did flash through my brain as I was looking online for how to get a police report: It’s free for a spouse . . . I wonder how that is verified? (There is absolutely nothing on that page about needing proof of marriage or what that would entail.) As far as I can tell, the Public Documents Unit at MPD is “verifying” marriage through last names.

Not only is this “policy” hopelessly old-fashioned (I can’t believe I’m the first spouse with a different last name to request a copy of a police report), it’s only going to become more problematic as same-sex married couples (who choose to take each other’s names even less than straight people do) become victims of crime. So MPD is either going to have to come up with a way to easily verify marriage, or they’re just going to have to take our word for it. The kicker to all of this is that the fee for police report for a third party is $3. The woman who works in this office gave me a hard time over three dollars.

I was surprised this hurt so much, and I don’t cry easily. In retrospect I know it bothered me because I have issues with one-size-fits-all corporate or bureaucratic policy. (And I choose these words in particular because my therapist has said exactly this to me: “Salem, you have issues with one-size-fits-all corporate or bureaucratic policy.”) And this is a one-size-fits-all bureaucratic policy par excellence. Usually I just get annoyed or frustrated with this type of stupid inflexibility, not hurt. But this felt like an attack on my personal choices — and on my commitment to my marriage. It devastated me that someone would doubt that I was married solely because my spouse and I don’t share a last name.

The day ended better than it began, though. From one of my least favorite D.C. institutions to one of my favorite: Sixth & I Historic Synagogue. I went to the 6th & the City Friday night services because my friend Julia would be there on her last night in D.C. before moving to L.A., and my friend Annie was celebrating her aufruf.

Kabbalat Shabbat services always make me feel better, and sitting in the pew — listening to Rabbi Shira bless Annie and Marc, singing siman tov and mazel tov, watching everyone dance around the sanctuary, and throwing candy — I was so grateful to be a part of tradition that celebrates marriage. There was no one in that crowded room who thought any less of my marriage because my husband and I have different last names (least of all the rabbi, who also does not share a name with her husband). My heart was full, and I was happy to be affirmed, happy for Annie and Marc, happy to be Jewish, back in the space where I got married. Hare ata mekudeshet li betaba’ at zo k’dat Moshe v’ Yisrael . . .

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torah portion

February 3, 2012 by Leave a Comment

parshat naso; art by siona benjamin

Since October, I’ve been taking an weekly young adult b’nai mitzvah class at Sixth & I, where I got married.

Isn’t that how the life cycle goes? Marriage, bat mitzvah two years later, followed shortly by rabbinical school? No?

My participation in the class is a little strange, since I am in a more than slightly different place than most of my classmates. (As far as I know, no one else is applying to rabbinical school.) And the experience of my classmates is pretty varied: Some are products of mixed marriages, so didn’t grow up Jewish, but are now connecting with their Judaism; others had a bar or bat mitzvah as a kid but didn’t feel like they got much out of it and want to learn more now. And still others grew up nominally Jewish and just didn’t have b’nai mitzvah. There is at least one other convert.

I’m in the class to learn the order of services, the prayers, and trope, and to have the experience of leading services and chanting Torah. To be sure, I’m getting that, even if the class occasionally veers a little too much into the “Introduction to Judaism” realm. Plus, I love the instructor, the beyond awesome Rabbi Lauren Holtzblatt of Adas Israel.

The ceremony will be this summer at Sixth & I, and our parshah is Naso, from the book of Numbers (the longest of the weekly Torah portions). The parshah addresses priestly duties, purifying the camp, the wife accused of unfaithfulness (sotah), the nazirite, the priestly blessing, and consecrating the Tabernacle. The four or so lines that I will be chanting (Numbers 4:28-5:2) are the end of census instructions and the beginning of those for camp cleaning.

We talked about the full parshah last week and began to work on our d’vrei Torah. Most of our discussion in class focused on the ritual of the sotah, because it’s just wacky. There’s really no other word for it, at least at first glance. It’s like a scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. We began discussing it more seriously than an initial reading would suggest it merits, but I don’t know that I’ve gained much insight into the passage yet.

And so, I leave you with this: “What also floats in water?” “Bread! Apples! Very small rocks!”

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