The original talk was given on April 25, 1993 in Santa Rosa at the First Sonoma County Jewish Women's Gathering and was called "Reclaiming Judaism and Making it Your Own."
I am just going to tell a story:
I grew up in, or really on the edge of, one of those synagogues where the big topic of conversation was what color Mrs. Goldberg's hair was this week. I won't tell you where it is -- it was in one of the big suburban areas that broke off from a major city and then just kind of drowned. I was a dreamy, religious kid with a lot of diffuse feelings about spirit, and I remember drawing the Tree of Life over and over in Sunday School, without anyone ever explaining what the Tree of Life was. Probably my first Jewish memory is of jumping out of the car at a stop sign on the way to Sunday School and running away down the street.
The emptiness made me furious, but more than that, my parents split up a few years before it was fashionable. I was the second kid on earth I had ever heard of whose parents divorced, and certainly the only Jew it had ever happened to. People still talked about "broken families" back then. The synagogue was no help, less than no help, an insult, a slap in the face, making no place for my mother once she didn't have means, and it never had any place for me anyhow, so it was no great loss.
In the suburban area where I grew up, and probably just about everyplace else in the late fifties, early sixties, you weren't supposed to look too religious. Kids were supposed to go to church or temple enough to not turn into mass murderers, but you certainly weren't supposed to take it at all seriously or personally. We had seders at home, which were usually sad little affairs with my "broken family," and we went to High Holiday services and talked about Cadillacs and Mrs. Goldberg's hair. I don't remember ever lighting Shabbat candles at home, though we might have once or twice. I had never even heard of anybody still alive who kept kosher, much less built a sukkah at home or went to a mikveh or joined a revolutionary movement on account of being Jewish. Those things just weren't done.
So of course, as soon as I was old enough to do anything about it, I became a raving Jesus freak. Because I'm kind of a fanatical personality anyhow, I really threw myself into it. I passed out religious tracts on the beach, went to church four nights a week in a tent, screaming at my mother every night before I went, listened to Jesus rock and roll. Those were wonderful times for me. I was in high school. All the sudden surfers and football players would talk to me. I had millions of Jesus freak friends. But more than that, if I was depressed and struggling, people would gather around me in a circle and put their hands on me and pray for me. We did that for each other all the time, sitting on the brick wall by the little pond at school or at prayer meeetings at this place called "the house", where a couple of older Jesus people lived and conducted Bible studies. It was a very intense, wonderful experience of community and love, and it was totally new and other than any religious experience I'd ever had before.
I stayed involved in the Jesus movement for many years, well into college. I started growing up. I didn't need to horrify my parents so much anymore. More than that, in college I began to meet another kind of Christian, people who had grown up in the tradition rather than taking it on as a teenager, who had some roots, and who had some political analysis that grew out of their faith. The Christian pastors at my college organized a fast to raise money for famine relief, and I swear I had never before in my life thought about "world hunger", especially not as a religious matter. I was blown away. I began to feel a little guilty that, while I had been in prayer meetings praying for A's on my algebra test, Christians in Latin America in particular were becoming guerillas and moving out to the hills as a consequence of their faith.
It was in this context that I was hit by two bolts out of the blue. The first came when I was taking a class in American folk music. Somehow I got the idea to write a paper about Jewish music. Now you have to understand that I never thought about being Jewish. I wasn't a Jew for Jesus or anything. Being Jewish was the easiest thing in the world for me to leave behind, because it meant almost nothing to me. But I was doing this paper, and I checked out a book from the library which was a photo essay on Hasidim in either New York or Poland, I'm not sure which. So I was sitting on my bed in my dorm and I opened the book and started looking at the photos. And suddenly I found myself crying, weeping, and I closed the book and shoved it under my bed. These images of Jews were some kind of reminder, like seeing a ghost. I wrote a very perfunctory paper, and it was the last time for several more years that I thought for even one second about being Jewish.
By the next time I had evolved somewhat. I took the world hunger stuff very seriously and began to plunge into the world of at least thinking about, if not yet doing very much, activism. I was very interested in nonviolence. It was in this context that I began to attend a study group about the holocaust at the Resource Center for Nonviolence. We were reading and discussing the books of Elie Wiesel, who survived Auschwitz as a young teenager and went on to explore in writing what it meant to be a survivor. Thinking about the holocaust pushed me, of course, into religious chaos. How could I believe in God, much less Jesus, in a world where such destruction had occurred?
I went to a conference about the holocaust put on by the National Conference of Christians and Jews. There they showed one of the many documentary films which included film footage from the death camps. One frame changed my life. It was a still photo of a bunch of Hungarian Jewish women lined up naked in front of a pit about to be shot. I remember looking with horror at the black triangles of pubic hair, the black, thick eyebrows of the women in the photo and thinking, oh my god, they look like my mother, my grandmother, my sister. I remember that I didn't realize at the time that they looked like me too. But I felt this awareness in the darkest place inside me: I'm Jewish. I'm going to have to deal with this.
It was just exactly the worst, the most desolate, the most bereft place to connect with being Jewish. There was nothing positive, about this awakening for me. I left the conference feeling like I had to do something about this grim realization, and I had no idea what. And it was at this juncture, when only in the most abstract sense did I wish to reclaim my Judaism, that three great teachers came into my life and began to give me tools for this reclamation. What I really want to do tonight is to tell you about these three teachers who brought me through a tunnel to wherever it is that I am now.
When I was in college I had kind of a guru, like many young women students do, a professor that I worshipped. He used to speak of his mystical Israeli lover, Yehudit. It turned out that Yehudit Kornberg (now Greenberg) was sitting at the same table with me when I saw the holocaust film at the conference. Yudit was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. She looked like a Yemenite princess. She was finishing her doctorate in modern Jewish theology and teaching a few courses at the college I attended. We struck up a friendship and started talking about doing various projects together. We talked a lot about arranging some kind of Jewish/Christian dialogue on campus. I didn't know which chair I would sit in! But Yudit accepted all that without any judgment that I could feel. We would sit on my porch drinking ollalieberry wine and talking about just what the theological issues were which distinguished one religion from the other. What does salvation mean? What is incarnation? What is the role of history? Where does suffering fit in? She was perfectly willing to delve into the confusions and contradictions of Jewish theology, but she did so with a kind of pleasure, a savoring of Jewish ways of looking at things. She could engage confusion, but she wasn't confused herself.
Yudit invited me up to her apartment in Half Moon Bay to celebrate Shabbat. I remember sitting at her dinner table with candles and wine and challah. I didn't know what any of those things meant as symbols. But I could feel the beauty that they had in themselves, sitting on the table. And I could feel Yudit's sense of entitlement, the shameless pleasure of ownership, as she blessed and lit and served. Shabbat was hers to share. That Shabbat dinner, those conversations on my porch, were the first clue I had that there might be something positive, something nourishing for me in the world of Judaism. With Yudit, I felt like I was looking in a window at a brightly lit home, a beautiful table, and a tribe of people that sat comfortably and innocently enjoying their feast, while I crouched outside.
When I graduated from college, I decided that I too would do a PhD in theology. So of course I went to a school where at the time there were no Jewish teachers in the religion department and only one other Jewish student. But it was there -- though not in my department! -- that I found my next two teachers.
When I went to USC I started going to the Hillel House, largely because I was desperate. It was the loneliest time of my life. Now HIllel was the place for just the kinds of Jews I couldn't stand. These kids loved Hebrew; they loved to folk dance; they had all gone to Camp Ramah and on to their junior year in Israel. There were Shabbat dinners at the Hillel house every Friday night, and I went almost Friday -- because I was so hard up. But it was also a chance to learn some basics. I was working on my doctorate in theology (which, I am happy to say, I never got!), but I didn't know how to light Shabbat candles. I had never heard of birkat hamazon, the long grace which these kids would belt out at the end of dinner. I would sit there red with shame and stammer through the transliterations, both drawn to and hating the people around me who seemed so comfortable, so entitled.
I was angry and frustrated a lot those days. I wasn't finding what I needed by reading theology. I kept circling around the Hillel House, but I was sick and tired of all this foreign ritual that I didn't know how to do. I felt like there was an impenetrable barrier that kept the goyim like me from what the real Jews knew how to do. Part of it was Hebrew. I took a Hebrew class, but I was so angry at the elitism of a system in which you had to study for years before you could open your mouth to pray that I took a kind of perverse pleasure in never really getting it. And it wasn't just Hebrew -- it was the whole business of "knowing what to do." This business about entitlement plagued me. It seemed like certain people were real Jews, and that, for better or for worse, I sure wasn't one of them.
It was in this frame of mind that I got to know Laura Geller, who was the rabbi at the Hillel House there at USC. Laura is the second woman in the world to be ordained. She was the only woman in her rabbinical school classes. Her professors used to address their classes: "Gentlemen and Laura..." She came out of school angry and motivated -- full of struggle with a tradition that spits you out as much as it drinks you in.
This was back in 1978. At that time, Laura's main issue with Judaism was the way it treats women. She talked about the Jewish life cycle: bris, bar mitzvah, huppah and funeral. What about the birth of a baby girl? What about a girl's puberty, her first menstruation? What about other partnerings than marriage? What if a woman wants to marry a woman and not a man? What about the unequal, possessive language in the ketubah, the marriage contract? What about when a woman gives birth? What about when a woman does not give birth, by choice or because she cannot? What about a woman growing older, about menopause? Why aren't the achievements of women, their scholarship, their wisdom, passed on to future generations?
And it's not just the lifecycle -- what about "baruch ata Adonai elohaynu melech ha-olam?" "Blessed are you, Lord our God, King of the universe?" Does this language have meaning for women? What about the paltry tales of the matriarchs in the Torah? Why don't we have records of women's lives, women's prayers? Laura turned a bright light on Jewish tradition and exposed these holes, these gaps, these insults and deliberate deprivations.
And she began to imagine a different way. She began to devise rituals for the birth of baby girls, for first menstruation, for women growing old. She not only performed the rituals, but she exposed her own process, the questions it raised. She began to experiment with new language for prayer. She began to celebrate new moons. She gathered a little group of women to talk about our own Jewish experiences, another group to read and critique each other's academic writing. She went on to be one of the creators of the LA Jewish Feminist Center. And this last year Laura became the first woman to be hired as the head rabbi of a large synagogue -- an honor I wouldn't want in a million years, but I'm thrilled that it was she who first broke the glass ceiling.
I admired Laura's fierce questions, but my own were much more basic. What's in the Torah anyhow? Who are the Jewish people, and what does it mean to be affiliated with them? Laura suggested that I consider picking up the thread where I had dropped it at age thirteen and study to become Bat Mitzvah. I was twenty two at the time, and I knew as much about Judaism as a well educated preschooler.
I set a date in the spring. My Torah portion was Tazria, from the book of Leviticus. The portion begins by saying that a woman who gives birth to a boy child is tam-eh for seven days. If she gives birth to a girl child, she is tam-ah for fourteen days. Now tam-ah is translated a lot of different ways. It's a sensitive word. But let's just go on to say that the rest of the portion is about leprosy and all different scabs and skin sores, which also make you tam-ah, or tam-eh if you're a man. The portion says that if the High Priest determines that you do have leprosy, you are to be taken outside of the Israelite camp into the wilderness, where you are to cry, "I am tam-ah" until you die. You are in the same state as after childbirth. Nice portion!
I was supposed to chant the first 21 lines of Tazria. To do that, I had to read each line probably a thousand times, over and over again. I had to listen to it every day in the car. It was a terrible, difficult portion. I was lucky that I didn't understand the vocabulary, that I was really just deciphering syllables and stringing them together to a tune. I'm not sure I could have stomached it with full understandng.
The morning of my Bat Mitzvah I read Tazria from the Torah scroll. The experience of reading such a painful portion should have been full of contradictions, but it was not. The words shimmered on the parchment. I felt my heart full in my chest. Sometimes while I was reading I could hardly breathe, I was so amazed to be holding the staves of the scroll. I felt like I was surrounded in concentric waves with Laura standing next to me, my family, who had come from all over to be with me, the women standing by the grave whose picture I had seen at the conference a few years earlier, the writers of the Torah itself. I was in the middle of a field, a force. It swirled around me, and there I was, in the middle, inside. It was an extraordinary passage, and one I didn't expect at all. I had come in.
The haftara to Tazria, the portion from the books of the Prophets which accompanies it, is about Naaman. Naaman was an Aramean general, a non-Jew, who contracted leprosy during the time of the prophet and healer Elisha. Now, while the biblical passage has you cast the leper out from the Israelite camp, Elisha did exactly the opposite. He told Naaman to go right into the middle of the camp, to the river Jordan, and to bathe his contaminated body in the water seven times. Naaman did seven mikvehs and was healed. So too, I said that day, I have felt like the leper, cast out from the camp, alone in the woods. But that's not the end of the story. I too have been invited in. I made seventeen mistakes reading the Torah that day, my coach was kind enough to tell me. I was halting and fragile. But, for better or for worse, I had come into the Israelite camp. And my healing began there.
The contradictions have all stayed with me. Some things about Judaism are infuriating, repulsive. What was different for me from that day on was that I began to look at these from the inside rather than the outside. It was the beginning of a path and not the end. Tazria turned out to be the perfect Torah portion for my Bat Mitzvah, exactly because it was so awful, so shocking. Struggling with that passage, claiming it in all its wrongness, forced me to go in deeper.
Two other things happened at my Bat Mitzvah, both very small in themselves, but they presaged the future for me. One had to do with my grandfather. My grandpa Ben, when he was alive, was the real Jew in the family. He wasn't orthodox, but he was deeply pious and traditional. I really wanted him to be at my Bat Mitzvah, as -- though I never would have articulated it this way at the time -- a stamp that what I was doing was real and Jewish. But he lived in Chicago, and everyone decided that it was just too expensive for him to fly out. So, at the last possible minute, on Thursday, my Grandma Sylvia said to him, "Get on the plane, " and out he flew.
It happened that my Bat Mitzvah fell on Rosh Hodesh Tevet (which was last Wednesday night, by the way). Rosh Hodesh is the new moon, the first day of the visible moon. How many of you have heard of Rosh Hodesh? In 1980 no one had heard of Rosh Hodesh. It is mentioned in the Talmud, as a kind of aside to something else, that because women did not contribute their gold earrings to build the golden calf, they should be rewarded with Rosh Hodesh as a day of rest and celebration. So, needless to say, hardly anything was ever developed. Men in shul say a blessing on the appearance of the new moon, but do women have a day of rest and celebration? No way! Laura and others began to look at Rosh Hodesh and say, here is a Jewish women's holiday, a feast day for women. But there is no service, no special prayers, no customs, no ritual objects, no special foods. So Jewish women in the last ten or fifteen years, in little groups all over the place, began to invent new rituals for the new moon.
So on Friday night I said to Laura, "Guess what! My Grandpa Ben is here for my Bat Mitzvah!" She looked a little nervous. "Okay, but this might be a little weird..." And I have this beautiful memory of my grandfather walking in a circle with the rest of us, carrying a bowl of water with a candle floating in it, doing this invented women's ritual.
That night Laura introduced me to the pleasures and contradictions of inventing ritual. It takes a lot of collective ego strength to invent tradition. There was a kind of challenge in the Rosh Hodesh service she did. She chose symbols, wrote prayers. And in doing so, she placed herself boldly in the chain of tradition. We now observe Rosh Hodesh up in Mendocino every month. We don't use a bowl of water with a candle floating in it. We have invented our own ritual. I know that there are at least two Rosh Hodesh groups here in Sonoma County also celebrating new moons. And you must have created your own ritual too. Whenever we create sacred Jewish space for women, when we take it upon ourelves to celebrate women's experience, as we have this morning, we learned to do that from Laura Geller and other pioneers who taught us that it is our tradition as well as that of our male ancestors, that if we need something that isn't there, we need to form it for ourselves, that what we form is as Jewish as anything the ancestors gave us. By the way, my grandfather thought the new moon thing was a little odd, but he loved it.
Also immediately before my Bat Mitzvah, Laura found out that I hadn't invited any of the Hillel regulars. It never crossed my mind to invite any of them. I hardly knew them. Why would they want to come to my Bat Mitzvah? "Oh, no," she said, "they are really hurt. They want to come. They are part of the community." "So, okay, invite them." The morning of my Bat Mitzvah, there were all those nerdy guys setting up chairs, and they danced and carried on with us till the bitter end. I learned from them what has come to be one of the most important things I know. Community is not just my friends, not just the people I like or even know. There are people who will come to me and surround me and accompany me through the important passages of my life, whether they know me or not, whether I want them or not, because they are Jewish. I end up spending time with people I don't always like. But I know in a deep and fundamental way that I am not alone and will not be alone, in times of great joy and in times of great suffering.
When I was at Yudit's house, I was full of admiration for the people at the table, but I was not one of them. I didn't know then about the problems around the table, because I couldn't hear the conversation. Largely through Laura's teaching, I came in and sat down. Once I was in, I learned that this family has problems like any other. There are inequities, power struggles, people around the table who take all the attention and others you never hear from.
The issues that plagued me the most didn't even have to do so much with the exclusion of women. It was the elitism I perceived in the Jewish world, echoes of the fat, cold, bourgeois Judaism of my childhood, that enraged me. I carried inside myself images of Jews as wealthy consumers who only cared about the label on your jeans. And I was able to prove it to myself everywhere I looked. Just look at the fancy synagogues, at selling tickets for High Holy Days. Look how much rabbis are paid! Look at Jewish country clubs, lists of Federation donors, plaques everywhere. I loved Laura and even learned to feel more or less at home at the Hillel house, but I could no more imagine joining what I thought was the larger Jewish community than I could imagine joining the klan.
My teacher in this department was an unexpected one, for herself as well as for me. It was my great privilege to be a student and friend of Barbara Myerhoff, who was a professor of anthropology when I was a student at USC. Barbara, like many anthropologists of her generation, studied peyote eaters in Mexico, Huichol shamans in Guatemala, people who did interesting things, real things, whose spirituality was alive and challenging. Somewhere along the line a friend said to her, "You are never going to be a Huichol shaman. But you are going to be a little old Jewish lady".
In response to this, Barbara did what became a very famous ethnography of elderly Jews in Venice LA. She spent several years at a very funky, homely little senior center right on the boardwalk, observing their Shabbat and birthday rituals, the ways the members of the center greeted and fought with each other, illness, poverty and death in the center community. She began collecting oral histories of elderly Jews there. She began to note the ways in which telling their stories to the "lady professor" seemed to enliven the group, make them take themselves more seriously.
She tells a story: a woman who had been ill for a long time came back to the center on her first day of good health. That day, she walked out the door onto the boardwalk, which is like a dragstrip, and was hit by a bicyclist and killed. The bicyclist said, "I never even saw her!" But by this time, the folks at the center were used to their lives being taken seriously. They had had it with being invisible. They organized a march along the boardwalk. At the head of the line was a coffin, followed by a couple of people with walkers, a woman in a wheelchair, a bunch more very frail marchers. One person carried a sign which said "Life not Death in Venice". Politically, they won a two block safe zone. But spiritually, they won much more.
Barbara herself began to change. She began to show Number Our Days to groups of elders, in synagogues, to Federation groups, all over the world. She became a kind of an advocate, a resource, for Jewish elders. She herself had had no truck with Judaism. But she began to find herself involved, ensconced, communally if not spiritually. It was around this time that I applied to rabbinical school. Barbara was thrilled. She said that I was doing it for her, that if she had been twenty years younger she would perhaps have done it herself. The night I got news of my acceptance, she cancelled our seminar and took the whole class out for drinks.
After Venice, Barbara took on a much bigger research project, an ethnography of the entire Fairfax area of Los Angeles, which has within it communities of all kinds of Jews, from Chabadniks to Bukharin Jews to a gay and lesbian synagogue (which I had the honor of serving a few years later as a student rabbi.) Near the beginning of the Fairfax project, Barbara learned that she had lung cancer. Some of you may know some of this story from seeing her second film, "In Her Own Time". She was a social scientist who was finding herself sort of quizzically, tentatively involved in Jewish life. And now she was in crisis. So, even as she interviewed and observed, she opened herself to the people she was studying. Before she started chemotherapy, she was fitted for a wig by an orthodox woman who sells shaidels to women who shave their heads after marriage. A rabbi conducted a service for her to change her name to fool the angel of death. Other traditional Jews helped her to compose a letter to the Lubavicher rebbe, asking him to pray for her healing. Others arranged for her to get a get, a Jewish divorce, to untangle her spirit from that of her ex-husband and aid in her healing. She was amazed by the generosity of spirit she experienced in this community of people who seemed in many ways so foreign. Her film ends with someone interviewing her two weeks before she died. These people seemed so strange at first, she said, separated from her by a veil she could not imagine piercing. But at the very end of her life, she said, yes, I could imagine piercing that veil.
I think of Barbara with so much love, with so many tears. I think of all the things I have done since 1985 that would have delighted her. I wonder how she would have pierced the veil and what her life would have been like once she had. I learned so many things from her work and her path which have affected the way I live and work now. But I asked myself as I was preparing this talk, what is the central thing Barbara taught me? I kept thinking -- the stories, something about all those stories, how beautiful they were, how much Barbara loved to hear Jewish people's stories. Barbara showed me how beautiful Jews are, how real and spiritual, how lucky I am to be part of such a varied and generous world. There is so much more there than the dry, narrow world of my childhood Judaism, so many more people, so many more experiences.
The last conversation I had with Barbara was over the phone in 1984. I had taken a year off from rabbinical school and was living and working with the Catholic Worker on Skid Row in LA as a kind of hellraiser. We were trying to organize homeless people to push the County for what now seems like more of a dream than ever -- decent General Relief that a person can live on. One thing I was doing was taking legal affidavits from hundreds of people on the streets about how they had suffered at the hands of LA County. I had a clipboard with legal forms that we had drawn lines on, and I would go into a welfare office, stand up on a chair and yell, "Who's getting screwed today?" Then I would take down their story in longhand, they'd sign it, and we'd take it to court. I would ask them, where are you from? How did you get here? What is life on the street like? What's the worst part? The stories were harrowing, amazing. And, just like Barbara saw in Venice, I began to see signs of new strength in the people whose stories I was recording. They began to organize and march and move.
I called Barbara from our trailer office one afternoon. I was so excited -- "I'm hearing these stories -- people are coming to life! What should I do? I should record them. I should form them into something. I should study them...". And she said "yes, it sounded amazing. Just keep listening. Don't stop to figure out what to do. Just keep going".
And that's how it's been for me, for the most part. I never went out and searched, not in any organized way. It's like I've been rolling down a hill. Teachers and experiences have come my way and shaped me. I feel extraordinarily blessed. Sometimes these days I feel like I've died and gone to heaven, at least for a second. Last Shabbat I did a Bar Mitzvah for a thirteen year old boy -- I guess I should call him a man. In our community, after the parents offer their blessings, we invite anyone who wants to come up and offer their blessing. So the boy's younger sister got up and read from a speech she had written: "You did a real good job. I've never said that before about anything you did, that you did a good job. There, I said it. It wasn't so bad. And, you know, I've been thinking, when I think about all the people that could have been my brother, you're not really so bad." And she looked down at the paper she was holding and winced. "I'm going to say the three hardest words -- I love you." We were all laughing and weeping at once, we all know these two kids so well and love them so much.
For a second I realized that all we had gone through all those years, getting this young man ready for his Bar Mitzvah -- helping him to learn to read Hebrew, to learn to chant his portion, putting together the service, helping him to write a dvar Torah, his grandparents flying out from Miami with suitcases full of lox, whitefish and herring, because what we might be able to get at Shensons wouldn't be good enough -- all of this elaborate superstructure was a way of enabling us to feel love, in this moment for this boy -- in another moment for someone else -- more acutely, more deeply, and to articulate it more clearly and memorably than any of us would have ever bothered to do if it weren't for the occasion.
And I guess this is where I want to end. To me, Judaism offers a set of tools for loving and connecting. It is more about love than it is about any kind of abstract truth. There are all kinds of cold truths -- that the holocaust, and every massacre, genocide and slow starvation happen without the apparent involvement of any active God; that women have been systematically excluded from much of the best of Jewish life; that there are extremes of consumption and materialism in our community as in any other; that the historical reality of the state of Israel draws Jews into an arena where certain choices seem unacceptable from one perspective and absolutely essential from another. If you look at Judaism as a set of facts, it's a mixed bag at best. But it's more than facts -- it's a mixed array of customs, teachings, ideas and experiences. Imagine that it all arrives in a box, your inheritance from the generations before. It's all wrapped up. There is a string around the box. What are you going to do?
There is a line in Pirkei Avot that I often think about: hafokh ba v'hafokh ba d-kula ba -- turn it over and turn it over, because everything is inside it. It's all there in the box for us, our inheritance, the good and the bad, the things that warm your heart and the things that make your blood run cold. Barbara Tomin asked me to please be sure to say something practical, something you can do to reclaim Judaism and make it your own. I would say, as Yudit did, take a look in the box -- there might be something you'll like -- as Laura said, just because it's in there doesn't mean you have to like it -- as Barbara Myerhoff said, just keep listening. Don't try too hard to figure everything out. Just keep going. Each one of us needs to sort it out for herself, for himself. What I've selected seems to work for me. But I don't know anyone else who puts it together quite like I do. Judaism is what it is, an ancient tradition with bits and pieces from every age, from all kinds of people. There is broken glass and there are gems. We have a box full of gifts from people who have been trying to love, connect and survive for 5,000 years. We can do whatever we want with it. It's ours. Turn it over and turn it over, because everything is in there. Just keep going. Blessings on your journey.
Copyright 1993, 1997 Margaret Holub