Yesterday Mickey and I bought our tickets to Cape Town -- an exciting and oddly wistful moment. We take off together January 10. He returns alone February 4. I join him, and all of you, March 25. Mickey is accompanying me at the beginning and then sending me off on my own for the remainder. We've never been apart for anything like two months before. It feels like a great adventure in more ways than one.
Mickey is escorting me off into the unknown, and all of you are freeing me for this venture, as an act of faith. Several years ago I began to feel a restlessness. My mind and heart, which had been pretty locally-focused for a long time, began to be occupied with world matters. One day it was almost as if I saw the word "Africa" in lights. I began to fantasize about spending time there. Africa is a big continent. I imagined volunteering as a relief worker in Sudan. I met our Ugandan friends, JJ and Rachel, and kvelled as Thanksgiving Coffee invested in Peace Kawomera coffee from their Jewish/Christian/Moslem cooperative. Maybe there was something for me to do there? I corresponded with a woman who used to be a Jewish community executive on the East Coast until she dropped out to run an AIDS clinic in Namibia. Did she need a volunteer? I began surfing the websites of Doctors Without Borders and Amnesty International and the American Jewish World Service. I read books about volunteering and kept folding over the pages of the Africa programs. Something was materializing, but I couldn't quite describe it.
One day I had this fanciful idea to write a letter to Archbishop Tutu in South Africa, and just thinking about his amazing work and legacy lit up a more central place within me than had any of these other investigations. Now, many e- mails and phone calls later, with tremendous, gracious help from the Archbishop's office and many others, I am off to the Desmond Tutu Peace Trust and the Desmond Tutu TB Project.
It feels incredibly right, directly on-target. And at the same time I can't begin to explain why. Something awaits me, some change, some growth. Maybe I have something to offer. I certainly have plenty to learn. I am full of questions that I will undoubtedly get some perspective on.
But at the heart of it is a bit of a mystery. It's been my experience with all the big junctures of my life -- choosing a college, applying to rabbinical school, going to work on Skid Row, coming to the Coast to be your rabbi -- that it was like feeling my way down a dark hallway until my hand was on a door handle. Once my hand was on the knob, there was only one door to walk through. Now that I have written that sentence, I realize it's true with some smaller but cherished adventures as well. I think of jumping on the Green Tortoise to go to Seattle for the anti-globalization uprising in Seattle in 2000 or going to Israel with Rabbis for Human Rights. I'm groping along for awhile, looking for a door. And then it's there, and I can open it. In fact, I just about have to open it. If I don't, I'll implode.
Some of that is my double-Sagittarius, firstborn-son nature -- decisive, impulsive, a little grandiose. But some of it, I have come to think, is something like "calling," perhaps in the way that we talked about Jonah's calling at Yom Kippur. A door appears, and it seems to have my name on it. We all come to these doors now and then, and life is probably more satisfying if we open them and walk through.
Years ago I heard a teaching from the wonderful Rabbi Yosef Liebowitz on teshuvah. I remember that he drew an arrow on the blackboard. At the tail end he wrote "you." At the point he wrote "tov," "good." Then he drew various squiggles representing the ways that we deviate from the line between ourselves and the good. Teshuvah, he said, was the process of getting back on the straight path.
I shot up my hand with a feeling of urgency. "Is that path the same for every person, or do we each have our own pathway to the good?" I asked. After some consideration, he said that the path is the same for every person -- a life of good deeds, study, mitzvah observance, seeking God.
I understand that sense of path -- not that I can do it all the time, but the idea makes sense. Torah, avodah, gemilut hasidim -- wisdom, transcendence, goodness. The possibilities for tov and lo tov -- on the path and off -- exist in every moment. Right now, right here, I can choose the wise and the kind step, or I can choose the stupid and selfish one. It doesn't matter in any essential way whether I am in Africa or here in Albion at my computer gazing out the window and writing my Rabbi's Notes. I certainly know and admire people who live lives replete with goodness and wisdom without traveling to exotic locales. And I also know people full of self-importance and drama doing big deeds without any evident kindness, wisdom or perspective.
But I also know that place where you are feeling your way in the dark along a long hallway, and one day your hand is on a door knob. At that moment the question is not just, "What is good here?" but, "Should I turn that thing I'm grasping?"
Months before even getting on the plane, I am learning important things as I feel my way along here. One is that it is a great act of love and trust to support your beloved in walking through a door that seems to have her name on it, rather than trying to hold her back. So I want to thank all of you for making it possible for me to go to South Africa in response to this mysterious beckoning, for arranging to hold down the fort while I am away, for trusting me to do something useful and meaningful with this gift of time. And I particularly want to honor Mickey, who is supporting me in the truest and most loving way by walking me through that door and then waving as I tiptoe onward. I look forward to returning to all of you before Passover, with tales to tell and who knows what riches of experience?
© 2005 Rabbi Margaret Holub
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Updated 11/02/2005 (rge)