More than halfway

Submitted my last final! Year 3 done and dusted.

I’m also conscious that I’ve been keeping track in my head of my progress from year to year but haven’t been keeping any kind of written record of milestones, and I want to make sure I don’t take for granted how far I’ve come. So:

May 2018 – Accepted to Rabbinical Schools: I had been taking Hebrew classes at Brandeis and studying Talmud, but I couldn’t have told you what reference text to pull off the shelf to look up unknown words. I could lead Friday night services but not weekday services. Looking forward to the summer JTS intensive and a year in Israel at the Conservative Yeshiva in Israel!

May 2019 – End of Shana Aleph: I knew which reference text to pull off the shelf, but had to look up almost every word. Way more comfortable with Talmud, especially after Rabbi Jim Michaels put me through my paces. Cautiously comfortable with Rashi script and able to slog through biblical Hebrew, thanks to the amazing Bex Stern Rosenblatt. Could easily roll a Torah scroll to the right place. Led weekday afternoon services every chance I got, but still scared of morning and evening services. Tentatively beginning to articulate how fiction writing and chaplaincy might inform each other. Looking forward to CPE at Hebrew Senior Life and my first year on campus at Hebrew College!

May 2020 – End of Shana Bet: Beginning of quarantine and zoom learning. Learned the difference between helping and accompanying in CPE, as well as how to be in relationship with God while being honest about my anger towards God. Co-led High Holiday services with my dad! Only looking up 2/3-1/2 the words in most texts. Managed to pass Aramaic and tentatively able to break down the logical flow of a passage of Talmud. Better able to write a sermon, bringing in sources besides the main biblical text. Have realized that I don’t know how to write a lesson plan or source sheet for anything other than creative writing, but looking forward to teaching at Temple Israel.

May 2021 – End of Shana Gimmel: A whole year of zoom learning! Have finally gotten a systematic understanding of Torah cantillation and how to teach it to others. Can not only lead the Pesukei and Hallel parts of morning prayers, but can do so on zero advance notice when needed. Regularly leading Kabbalat Shabbat. Led a Seder solo! Able to be in relationship with God without being angry. Making lesson plans and source sheets for Jewish learning for people of all ages has become second nature. Can look at a (more straightforward) rabbinic commentary and translate it for myself because I don’t like the liberties taken by another translator. Only looking up 1/4 of the words in most texts, and able to understand and appreciate wordplay in Talmudic texts. Have led a class on reading and writing midrash! Doing prewriting for a midrashic novel. Looking forward to a second unit of CPE at MGH, teaching at TI again, and a rabbinic internship at B’nai Tikvah in Canton!

History in the making

It’s fascinating to me that I always assumed the big event I lived through that I’d be asked to recount for younger generations would be 9/11, or the Challenger explosion. I had no idea of the paradigm shift that would mean the experiences I most need to revisit are Anita Hill’s testimony, Rodney King’s beating, OJ’s trial, the savaging of Monica Lewinsky. I certainly didn’t imagine that Columbine would mark a sea change to school shootings as a daily fact of life, making that particular event unremarkable. It makes me wonder whether the events people lived through in centuries past had similar mismatches between what they thought was significant and what future generations focused on.

Remembering Mike Resnick

I studied under Mike Resnick at Clarion in 1999. Every night, he’d invite whichever of the students wanted to come down to the local Denny’s to pick his brain, and most nights only two of us accepted, me and Tobias Buckell. He very much took Tobias under his wing, and for whatever reason (possibly gender, possibly my lack of interpersonal skills at that age), I wasn’t his cup of tea, but he never made me feel unwelcome, and I learned a lot from those late-night conversations and from him in general:

1. The first night, he teased me for not having a pen and paper with me to write down a recommendation of his. “And you want to be a writer? What happens when you get an idea and you’re in the middle of nowhere?” (My private answer was that I need time to develop ideas before I write them down, and if I can’t hold on to them, they’re not worth writing, but 21 years later, I still carry a pen and notepad everywhere I go.)

2. He taught us that as writers, we are the ones who get paid, not the ones who pay, not for editing or publishing, and not for a working meal, and thus generously paid for whatever we wanted to eat or drink, night after night.

3. The reason he went to Denny’s was that they were cheap and open at ridiculous hours, ideal for his writing schedule because late hours means no phone calls or other interruptions. He taught us to be protective of our writing time.

4. He explained both book/magazine contracts and the Hollywood option and screenwriting process to us in such a way that we would feel comfortable taking ownership of our careers. In my MFA program, this meant more than one of my classmates turned to me when they sold their stories because I knew what a reasonable contract should look like and what it was okay to push back on.

5. He taught us to break down the mechanics of any book or plot to understand it better, and apologized that we’d never be able to just enjoy watching a movie again. He made up for it by showing us Casablanca, which he argued was the perfect cyberpunk movie if you swap out the letters of transit for any tech MacGuffin/plot device.

He’s an indelible part of my formation as a writer, and while I may have wished for more, I’m glad for what I learned from him.

2020 Vision

I see a lot of people posting what’s changed and what’s stayed the same in the last decade. In 2010 I was midway through a graduate program in creative writing (which I chose in part because I thought you couldn’t be a rabbi unless you wanted it more than anything else—turns out you can have more than one calling!) and in 2000 I was finishing up my BA in medieval studies (because it was the closest I could get to majoring in fantasy world building, and I was sure I’d break in as an SFF writer within the next five years).

Ten years later, twenty years later, I’m back in school, working on another degree, another path to what I think will be a meaningful, happy, successful life. And you know what? Both times, I was right about the meaning and happiness. Both times, just going to the school took a leap of faith that paid off in unexpected ways. Both times, I made friends who are still a huge part of my life. Both times, I learned things that helped me grow and that continue to delight me. And both times, I was totally wrong about where I’d be in ten years, where my path was leading me, because the things that are most meaningful to me now are things I didn’t know I wanted (let alone, things I could accomplish) until I’d done more growing. So I fully expect my 2030 self to be nothing like I imagine. I can’t wait to meet her.

Long overdue

There’s so much I want to say right now, and all of it is creating a logjam so none of it has gotten posted in a timely fashion. While I was in Israel, it made sense to post updates about my life to a photo album on Facebook so family and friends could see everything in one coherent package, but it was exhausting to cross-post to my blog, so I was mostly silent here. That was compounded by my chaplaincy training this summer, which was both intense and tied up in issues of confidentiality. Over the next month, I aim to bring the Israel posts over here (possibly using Flikr to host the photos), write some posts on my summer chaplaincy experience, and make this site do what it’s supposed to do: offer a picture of my life, my writing, and my journey to become a rabbi.

For now, two brief updates on what’s been going on lately:

Having done my first year of rabbinical school in Israel at the Conservative Yeshiva, I’m settling into the new semester at Hebrew College as a second-year student who is also a newbie. The classes are great, the students and teachers are extraordinary, and the morning prayers are deeply meaningful–I keep feeling affirmed that I made the right choice in coming here. But I’m still acclimating to the workload–it doesn’t help that an extra course got crowbar-ed into my already-packed schedule (two of my classes meet at the same time, timeturner required). Hopefully next semester will be easier.

I’ve had the extraordinary experience of co-leading Rosh Hashanah services with my dad this year, and will co-lead Yom Kippur with him as well. He suggested it (with his typical overwhelming generosity) as a way for me to get used to leading and to the High Holiday liturgy without having to do the whole thing my first time out, and he was right about how helpful that was. But the real gift was the “backstage pass” of seeing how to put together a meaningful service beforehand and how to change it on the fly depending on whether you’re running late, what the congregation’s mood is like, etc. Invaluable.

So much more to say, but that feels like plenty for now.

Moving to new heights

For some reason, I have spent a not-insignificant portion of my life living in one attic or another. I’m spending the summer living in the attic of one of my professors, and if it works out, we’ll continue it into the school year. The space is gorgeous, windows all around, a view of the neighborhood, sheltered by enough treetops to give me privacy while allowing me to admire sunrise, sunsets, and the occasional lightning storm. It’s also way too much space for me at present, because until the arrangement is permanent, it makes sense to leave the contents of my storage locker where they are, so I’m living out of the same two suitcases that got me through the year in Israel. I’ve closed the door to the giant living room for now so I don’t feel like a bean rattling around in a jar.

However, my friend David has very generously offered to give me the books that got him through rabbinical school, so I now have an epic collection of Judaica filling one bookshelf. Some are classic reference works I’ll use in all my classes, but others just seemed like fascinating reads that I wanted for my own pleasure and growth, which says to me that I’m in the right field.

I also have been dipping into the storage unit every time I go visit my folks, and have been taking out a box at a time, mostly books, some clothes. It’s been clarifying to sort through things I lived without for a year and make decisions that yes, I really can live without this thing, or no, my heart soars when I’m reunited with it and I’ll never let it go. This winnowing process was going fine until today, when  I moved what I thought was a randomly placed stepladder that turned out to be the only thing bracing my mattress and keeping it from sliding down and eating me alive in a space too narrow to turn around. I made it home with four boxes of books, all of which I had sorely missed. And hopefully, shelving them in the living room will tempt me into finally using all of my space and making my new apartment into more of a home.

 

Lost in translation

In transit. It was hellish getting to the airport, and when I got there, I discovered my smaller bag was twice the allowed weight, despite my careful packing, and my larger bag was also a bit too heavy. I had to make split-second decisions about what was really important to me and what I was throwing in the trash, after already having pared down my belongings to the absolute minimum.

I’ve now been awake for almost 40 hours straight at this point and still literally have miles to go on this trek from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv to Zurich to Toronto to Boston to Northampton. My tired brain keeps wanting to improve the situation the way I’ve done for the past year, by trying to speak to people in Hebrew when I need something, and I have to keep reminding myself that in Zurich and Toronto, that’s not particularly helpful.

R Cake

There’s a Hebrew College tradition that each year of rabbinical school, your class shares a cake that eventually spells out “Rabbi.” It’s been bittersweet for me, seeing on social media as members of my class back in Boston, most of whom I haven’t even met yet, took part in this tradition together, without those of us in Israel. But my classmate Max called us all together and gave us cakes he had baked himself, using melted white chocolate to spell out the letters appropriate for each of our years. I’m so grateful to him for making  sure we don’t miss out even though we’re far from home!

One last time

Last Shabbes in Jerusalem. Susan and Yosef very generously invited me to ask whomever I wanted over for dinner, with them handling all the hosting details for however big a crowd. It was such a love-fest, and my friends said such beautiful things about why they liked me, which was incredibly moving. We stayed up long past midnight singing everything from “Hashkiveinu” to “Seasons of Love” and having deep conversations. We are going to be dear friends for life. This has been the best of years.

Next year in Jerusalem

Because I’m not staying in my home for Passover, I had to pack for a week away. And because Passover falls so close to the end of the school year this year, it made sense to use the opportunity as a dry run for packing to leave the country: would everything fit in my bag? What would I have to ship? All this has meant that, more than a month before my actual end date, I’ve been forced to contemplate what this year has meant for me and what I hope to accomplish in the time I have left.

There are areas where I can see real progress. When I first visited Hebrew College a year ago, I didn’t know when to reach for a Jastrow or a BDB, or how to figure out the roots of words so I could actually look them up in either of those reference books. Now, I can make my way through a page of Talmud at a good pace, figure out where sentences begin and end, and notice different argument structures as they come into play. My Hebrew has a long way to go, but it’s much better than it was. I’ve led a few services and hope to get comfortable leading more before the year’s up.

There are also things I didn’t anticipate, experiences and choices I wouldn’t have predicted. Helping create a new Jewish holiday around social justice. Writing new prayers for experiences the traditional liturgy doesn’t encompass. Forging what I hope are lifelong friendships with people whose lives and Judaisms are very different from my own. I could never have imagined that praying at the Kotel, with my class at Robinson’s Arch and with Women of the Wall in the women’s section, would be the source of both my core religious nourishment and my deepest pain and anger of the year.

But despite all I’ve seen and done and learned, I’ve come to call this time Ne’ila, the closing of the gates, in recognition of all the things I’m still trying to get in under the wire before I go. I want to get comfortable leading Shaharit. I want to visit Petra and Tsfat and Masada. I want to find a particular out-of-print book which I’ve scoured a dozen bookstores for without success. I want to read an entire novel in Hebrew. And I’m having to come to terms with the fact that not all of these things are going to happen. I can do some of them, but some are going to have to wait until further along in my rabbinic education, or a later trip to Israel.

Growing up post-founding the State of Israel, it’s always felt weird for me to say L’shana haba’a b’Yerushalayim, “next year in Jerusalem.” What exactly, as a diaspora Jew, am I wishing for? To live in Israel, when that’s not a choice I’ve actually made for my life? To visit again? To build a messianic-era Jerusalem that bears little resemblance to the city where I’ve lived this past year? Instead, I’m trying to have a kavannah that any experience of Jerusalem, of Israel, is going to be incomplete and imperfect. There is always going to be too much for one visit, one lifetime. There are always going to be things left undone, missed connections and opportunities, room for repair. The common phrase can be a recognition that there’s always something better we can reach for, whether next year is physically in Jerusalem or somewhere else entirely.

ETA: I revised this piece into an article for JWA!