Wow, it's time to write my column for the February, 1999 Megillah! I've been looking forward to this one for awhile now, because it's an anniversary for me. I moved up here on February 2, 1989 (in the middle of the biggest snowstorm to hit the coast in a hundred years --I'd have been here on the first, but the roads were closed!) So I've been up here, been your rabbi, and all of you mine, for a decade now.
So what! What's to say, really? Ten years is a totally random number. But it's an invitation for me to stop and think, and give thanks, and rue a very few things as well, I suppose... Per a conversation with Paul Katzeff, I sat down the other night with my folder of old Megillahs and read a few years' worth of my early columns. I enjoyed seeing the old typefaces. There were the invitations to Mimosa's and Oona's and Jonah's and Laura's and Elijah's bar/bat mitzvahs -- such happy memories. I saw the invitation to form a hevra kadisha to care for the dead, and the notes from our many early meetings. I saw myself year after year saying, "Well, my main goal for this next year is to get a bikkur holim (group to visit the sick) together. THIS is the year..." I saw myself chatting about holding a Tu B'shevat seder at Headwaters Forest years before we actually did it. I saw a little note at the bottom of one of my columns which said acerbically, "Speaking of life, Mickey Chalfin and I have decided to spend our lives together. We'll be married next May..." I saw the beginnings -- but stopped reading before the demise -- of Alephnet, our brilliant but ill-timed hi-tech idea, just months ahead of the internet being easily available to everyone here on the Coast.
I'll leave it to all of you to muse, if you want to, about how the Jewish community has changed over the past ten years. That's been a collective enterprise, and I really have no greater perspective on that than do any of us. What I can see more strongly, if not clearly, is how I have changed in a decade of being your rabbi and part of our community. My retrospective mood is telling me that the way I rabbi (v, transitive, to noodge a Jewish community) is even more bound up than I would have copped to in the past with my own inner life.
I could recall, reading those old Megillahs, how much I used to struggle with every aspect of Judaism! Oy! The words, the prayers, the customs, the gender stuff, the politics, the stories, the Torah! And most especially with God. I came up here straight from Skid Row in LA, and I was deeply shaken by the enormous suffering I had witnessed in that setting. I was indignant that life could be so cruel, that our religious life could sound so complacent in the face of it all. Every month, it seemed, I was deconstructing another aspect of our tradition. Did you ever think of the Maccabean revolt as a right-wing assault on cultural freedom? If we pray for people who are ill, are we just seeking preferential treatment for our friends and family members? How can we possibly want for our kids to have a positive Jewish identity if we want them to be part of the world community as well? Why Bar and Bat Mitzvah at thirteen? Why not eighteen? How can we keep kosher, when to do so separates us from those who don't and especially from non-Jews? How can we pray "aleinu" when it says, "God has not placed us among the other peoples of the earth and has not made our destiny to be the same as theirs?" How can we pray in Hebrew when so few people here actually know Hebrew? And how can we pray in English, when to know what the prayers actually say puts one so in conflict with their meaning? How can we embrace the Torah when Torah says "___________?"
The funny thing is, I still hold most of those same beliefs, or tensions, or whatever they are. But they just don't bother me as much. Somehow I seem to be able to hold more and more contradictory ideas side-by-side than I could ten years ago. If anything, I think I may have begun to figure out that a spiritual path, at least mine, at least one as rife with difficulty and strangeness as Judaism, is a matter of love much more than of agreement to propositions. One doesn't choose to be religious in order to have things make sense. Quite the opposite! Hey, I think I said something like this recently about Torah.
And now I will say it about God. I increasingly understand that relating to God is about love, not about things making sense. I find myself thinking about that metaphor in the Zohar, of Torah being a maiden in a tower, high up, with a small window. Her lover paces below, pining to see her for even a flash. And every once in awhile, if the lover is very consistent, always there down below -- every once in awhile the maiden will pass by the window and she below will catch a glimpse. One might say the same of God -- that it is enough to catch an occasional glimpse as She passes by the window, that one never sees the entirety or knows every detail. But after a few partial sightings, one's heart is convinced and enflamed.
In this past decade, in this beloved community, I have had a few sightings (maybe many every day,) and my heart has been changed. Now, if anything, I am hoping and praying to reconnect with some of the indignation at injustice which I felt so strongly when I first arrived here. But I am hoping that I understand it differently, am moved to act differently, than I did a decade ago. A question for a new decade.
This is a more personal and introspective letter than I set out to write this morning. I had planned to reminisce, to kvell, to give thanks for ten years in your company (fifteen if you count High Holy Days.) And I am! And I do! But when I sat down to write that, I started to reflect on how I have changed within. And it is actually completely connected. I am shaped so much by each of you (whether I see you every day or just see your address on a list.) We are all placed here on this mysterious earth for some interval. And each of us has to make sense of it all, figure out how to best use our interval, try to see the connections. Many of us have placed ourselves, or have been placed by life, here on the Coast. And we have chosen to come together, to greater or lesser degrees, to converse with each other, to try experiments together, to tell each other how it looks along the way, to protect each other a bit if we can, to adjure each other, and just to enjoy each other. The Jewish part means that we have all this from our ancestors as well.
We each have to find our own way in the world. But it would be such a lonely endeavor without the company of our neighbors and the ones who came before us. What I am most truly grateful for is the loving hands with which you have shaped my life, and the opportunities I have had to affect yours as well. I give thanks to God, the Source of my life, Who has kept me alive, and sustained me through your company, and brought me to this moment.
Copyright 1999 Rabbi Margaret Holub
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Last updated 01/21/99 (rge)