A Loving PresenceThis month I?m shuffling off, not to Buffalo but to Philadelphia*, where I?ll get my ?Didn?t Die? degree, actually an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree on the occasion of it being twenty-five years since I was ordained. It?s a traditional thing, this twenty-five year marker for rabbis. I vaguely remember those old guys (yes, all guys) at my ordination getting their DD?s -- I could hardly imagine being twenty-five years older, much less rabbi-ing all that time. But, as they say, it flew right by... And here I am, grey hair, grandkids and all.
[*I?m heading to Philadelphia, to the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, not to Hebrew Union College in New York, where I was ordained. It?s a bit of a story why, and I?m restraining myself from telling it here...]
So of course I am reminiscing a bit. 1986, the year I was ordained, was the first year that the Conservative movement ordained a woman -- the wonderful Amy Eilberg. As I recall, it was touch-and-go for Amy until just about the last minute over there; ordaining women was still hotly contested in their seminary. Down at Hebrew Union College, where I was going to school, there were women, but there weren?t yet openly gay or lesbian rabbinical students. One noted professor in particular refused to sign the ordination certificate of any student he thought was gay. Gay students I knew were minimally-closeted; but they couldn?t be public about their partners -- until the day after ordination, at which time several came blazingly and beautifully out.
I sound old writing all this, and I am. Last year I was at a Hevra Kadisha conference, and at one point I realized that I was chatting away about funerals with three transgender rabbis. Baruch Hashem! At my ordination I was still in the first one-hundred women rabbis in the history of the world. Now how many kids growing up these days even know that there used to be male rabbis?
When I was ordained I was pretty hazy about what my own rabbinate was going to look like, though some nameless pull had kept me slogging through five years of school, and a whole lot of loan money, to get there. As many of you know, while in school I had been quite involved with advocacy among homeless people in LA, and after I was ordained I went right back to work as a paralegal at Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles. When people would ask me, ?Why aren?t you working as a rabbi?? I would say (indignantly, of course) ?I AM working as a rabbi.?
Now there are a lot of rabbis who have jobs as advocates -- both in Jewish organizations and outside them, as I was. Rabbis work as labor organizers, on economic justice campaigns, on Israel/Palestine matters and more. Today there is a professional chaplaincy, which there barely was Back Then -- putting many rabbis in hospitals, jails and prisons, nursing homes, in the military and more. And there are rabbis who work as teachers of chant, meditation, kabbalah and such, making their livings not with one congregation or organization but traveling from one to the next. There are also five or six non-orthodox rabbinical seminaries, and then there are rabbis who will teach private students and ordain them. So the whole profession is a lot more diverse and interesting than it was in 1986, as, I think, is the Jewish community today.
But I didn?t end up going any of those routes. To my amazed joy I ended up being invited by this very interesting little Jewish community on the Mendocino Coast to come up and lead High Holy Day services for a number of years, and then -- just as I had reached my absolute emotional end with Skid Row -- to actually move up and be their rabbi. And I never left!
So as I get to my 25-year mark in the rabbinate, I find myself ruminating that this wasn?t the career trajectory that I expected when I entered Hebrew Union College in 1980. But actually, I remember my admissions interview (yikes!) This was before I knew from Skid Row, before I interned at Beth Chayim Chadashim, the gay and lesbian shul in LA, which I dearly loved, long before I knew any of you. I was 22 years old, and I didn?t know which end of the Torah was the top. I remember this panel of rabbis asking me what kind of rabbinate I aspired to. I responded nervously that I had no idea, but I figured I would like to do something somewhere on the margins. I remember using that word, not even knowing what I meant.
Recently, after not thinking about it for decades, that conversation came back to me, and I see that a through-line for me has been a kind of joy and challenge with a life on the margins. MCJC looms large for me in the day-to-day, but we are a small community on the edge of the continent. What we do here doesn?t necessarily shake the power-centers of the world, but we can do them deeply and thoroughly.
I was just reading a little thing about inventors of little home-fabricators, a bit like the Vac-U-Form of my childhood, where you can make your own i-pod holder or something, rather than buying one made in a factory in China. I relate to the idea of home-fabrication. A conversation here, a little group of three or four there, a book that gets passed around, an idea that someone floats and then it doesn?t get taken up for awhile... it begins to mount up into something. Small, slow, deep...
Which takes me in thought back to my Catholic Worker roots, to the idea of ?personalism,? a French philosophy, also pretty marginal, which the Workers liked to cite. I never really understood it then, but I think I do now, a bit better. I think the idea is that change in the world actually happens person-to-person, in the context of relationships. Small, slow, deep.
A big part of my work in LA was being a ?street paralegal,? working with a team of lawyers who were suing LA County over and over to try to make them support homeless people and get them off the street. I walked Skid Row (and Venice Beach and South Central LA) all day long talking to people -- taking hand-written legal testimony, shaking the trees in the welfare office to get someone a hotel voucher for a night, trying to organize homeless people to advocate for each other. If you would have asked me at the time, I would have said that my goal was to end homelessness, at least in Los Angeles.
But in far-retrospect, my actual work there wasn?t so different than my work up here (less fragrant...) -- it was a personalist enterprise, a bunch of individual relationships. It was a meal, a place to stay for a night, a story told and heard, a bit of relief that came from friendly and caring interactions. These relationships in turn fueled the legal advocacy, which then, in its noble and inefficient way, sometimes forced the machinery of State to shift a bit. For awhile the laws got better, and then they got worse. The political landscape changed a lot, but the power of community and connection and care never did.
As I?ve slowly been fabricated into the funny little rabbi I am today, I appreciate the intensity of these ?materials? more than ever. The difference between enduring a challenge alone and unheard and facing the same challenge supported with loving presence seems inestimable to me today. I also think that the web of interaction and relationship we forge out herein the redwoods, like the relationships my coworkers and I helped to built in LA, does have some small, inefficient power to affect the larger society. For example, our little hevra kadisha has been a bit of an inspiration to the nationwide HK movement going today. Our women?s retreat has exported rituals and such to other communities. But really I think more and more that loving presence, community, connection -- they are an end, not just a means.
I agonize every day over shortfalls -- my own and others? -- in offering loving attention to people in our community, and points beyond, in times of joy and need. But I also step back regularly and take delight in the many ways we have worked out to be present for each other over years and decades of life together.
I just glanced back at what I?ve written so far, and I see that I haven?t used the word ?Jewish? once yet. But actually it?s woven throughout; Jewish sources, Jewish tradition, Jewish values and practice are the schooling we?ve chosen -- and quite a potent choice indeed, I?d say -- to cultivate the practice of offering loving presence in community. Jewish is the blueprint for the fabricator of the life we are constructing together, layer by layer.
Still and all I have to remind myself, and sometimes I have to try to believe, that loving presence is both a human offering and at the same time something both larger and subtler than whether I or any one of us remembers to make that phone call or show up for that party. Each life is wide and deep and profound. Without the sweetness of others? care, life for any of us would at times be unbearable. But even with it, there is more -- more need and also more presence. At this little breathing point in my own checkered path, I think that I am only beginning to understand a little bit of what we can and can?t be for each other. And so, with that question at the forefront, onward to the next twenty-five...
© 2011 Rabbi Margaret Holub
- ©2011 Rabbi Margaret Holub