So here I am.

What does that mean?

Remember when I was 15 (maybe you don’t, but I do) and I first had that crazy thought that maybe I wanted to go to rabbinical school? Remember how the second I began to show an interest in Judaism, people started to assume, without my saying anything, that I was headed for rabbinical school? Remember how I came to a realization then that this was precisely what was creating the oft-lamented gap between the laity and the rabbinate, that as soon as a young person shows interest they are pushed towards the rabbinate? Remember how much it pissed me off, and how as a result I became adamant that I would not go to rabbinical school, that I would start a counter-trend and remain part of the laity? Remember how that idea failed?

So here I am. In rabbinical school. Failure. Loser. Clergy (to be).

Part of the problem.

Well, I figured out where the other people like me are. Those people around my age who decided that they wanted active and authentic Jewish lives, were ideologically pretty much in line with the Conservative Movement, but frustrated with the lack of like-mindedness of the Jews In The Pews. The ones that succeeded in not going to rabbinical school.

They’re post-denominational. Gosh darn it.

What frustrates me so immensely about post-denominationalism is that this demographic of people, this group of engaged active Jews interested in practice and prayer, these are exactly the people most needed by the Conservative Movement. What is their reason for not wanting to be a part of the Conservative Movement? Not wanting to go to Conservative shuls? They don’t want to be there because the other people like them aren’t there. Where are they? At the post-denominational minyan. Why? Because that’s where they all are.

They seem to see no need to put in the work to revitalize the Movement that fosters the institutions that sustain them. They see the old guard, the leftovers of the suburban age of Conservative Judaism (which I think/hope is ending) and they jump ship thinking that even if they could change something, it’s not their responsibility to do so.

It’s mine. And sometimes I feel very very alone.

There’s a lot to write about but for now I’ll stick with what I was talking about before, which is davenning. Jeremiah asked some really good questions about what kind of work I believe davenning takes and what exactly it is that I mean by davenning in the first place.

We’re actually studying davenning in school… That is to say that we’re learning masechet berachot in Talmud and hilchot tefillah (Mishneh Torah) in Halacha. The question of what actually constitutes davenning has been the focus of much class discussion, especially, it seems, over the past couple of days. The bottom line is that, when you come down to it, as far as Torah obligation is concerned, any praise, supplication, thanks combination communication with God constitutes the fulfillment of the obligation to pray. And, according to the strictest minimal Torah obligation, as long as you do this at least once a day, you’ve done what God commands as far as prayer is concerned. In that sense, it is never appropriate to say that a person does not know how to daven

That said, we as Jews do not live by the Torah. We live by the Rabbis. Unless you are a Karaite, if you are a Jew with any sort of practice tradition, you are a Rabbinic Jew. Our Judaism is entirely based upon how the Rabbis established their interpretations of scripture, and what they established that Jews ought to do practically in order to stay in line with what they understood to be God’s will for us. If it weren’t for these rabbis and sages, there would be no Judaism.

All this is by way of saying that we have forms and structures of davenning, and these forms, one can be good at or need practice with. I’ve met many who are quick to blame these structures for their problems with communal or organized davenning, or to blame the leadership of a particular synagogue or minyan for their boredom or lack of engagement. I’ve also known several who have felt this way initially, before they actually took the time to study and unpack the davenning structure as it exists in rabbinic law, as it is practiced by Jews throughout the world. There is a flow to it, a poetry, a rationale. The structure of our prayer service is carefully crafted to make communication with God easy and meaningful. We’d all like to think that we are artistic and poetic souls, that this need for structure doesn’t apply to us. But until you sit down and learn why the rabbis set the process of prayer as they did, until you take a minute to learn something of the elegance and poetry of the language of the service, and until you make an effort to actually use the structure, and do so uncynically, with a mind open to the possibilty that structure can be a help and not a hinderance, it is little more than hubris to think that you are above the use of the siddur.

There is, of course, more to this than just laziness and hubris. My words above are largely about principles rather than people. When it comes to people, I’m sympathetic. The prayer book is hard. Learning enough Hebrew to really appreciate it is hard. It takes time and work and I know very well the feeling that it is just too much. There is a very real fear and even shame about not knowing how to do what everyone around you seems to be doing effortlessly. That is why, when my rabbinical school class, during orientation, met in the synagogue to talk about prayer, I decided to make it known to the group that I still read a lot of the siddur in English. Everytime I daven I read through a section in Hebrew that I don’t yet have down, and sometimes that means I fall behind the congregation and don’t get to sing all of the out loud parts with everyone else. And sometimes it means that I have to skip over certain psalms or piyyutim. That is ok. Though it may not seem like it, everyone knows that there is a learning curve and no one will begrudge you the time which that learning process takes. And if they do, they’ve got their own problems.

Back to the singing. Singing, as I’ve said, has always been a very importand part of my life and a very significant and joyful experience for me, whether I understood the words I was singing or not. There is something to that. However, I came to a whole new understanding of singing as prayer when I came to a point where I did understand what it was that I was singing, when they were words that I could say meaningfully in prayer, quietly, by myself. At that point, taking those words and singing them out loud with a congregation became real davenning.

More to come, on this subject and others. Meantime, may we all be sealed in the book for a good life full of blessing, joy and meaning.

And for God’s sake be nice to each other!!!

(By the way, I wrote this entire thing on my iPod. How cool is that?)

While I’m restoring my iPod in an attempt to get it to be less annoying, I may as well write something.

There are some great things going on at my shul. Great people with great projects and great innovations and the like. All of the people in charge, I believe, are wonderful and well-intentioned and doing really good things that could be real positive contributions to the synagogue.

And I’m worried.

I’m worried about what I’m hearing from other congregants. I’m worried about certain attitudes I feel brewing around these innovations, approvals and disapprovals and divisions and personality cults etc.

So I’m going to discuss principles rather than people, because I’ve not yet had conversations with the people involved, and I’m trying not to engage in Lashon HaRa here.

I love to sing. I mean I really, really love to sing. There is very little else in this world that makes me happier. Singing is up there with Really Good Learning and sex on my enjoyment meter. So I can easily see why people call the experience of singing “spiritual.” And indeed, I do find that singing and harmonizing and clapping and dancing can enhance my davenning experience.

But there is a difference between a singing experience and a davenning experience. I might feel the same visceral thrill singing Eddie From Ohio or Great Big Sea songs with my friends as I do singing Havu L’Adonai at Kabbalat Shabbat. The difference is in the content. The difference is the singing as the experience itself, versus the singing as an extra set of wings to elevate the davenning.

Getting the content, folks, takes work. I’m really sorry, but there’s no getting around that.

Now, the problem arises when you’ve got two minyanim, one which is, shall we say, “traditional” in the sense that it follows more or less a certain established pattern, shaliach tzibbur, a standard nusach, a sanctuary of a certain size with immobile pews, etc. The second is, shall we say, “neo-Chassidische” in the sense that it intentionally utilizes a smaller, less formal-appearing space, leadership is shared (people stand around the sha”tz and kind of co-sha”tz together), upbeat catchy niggunim are used to encourage harmonizing, hand-clapping and the like, etc.

It is not the existence of these two minyanim that is the problem. On the contrary, I think it is wonderful. When I was living in Jerusalem over the past two years I loved the fact that I had the option to go to a relatively standard traditional Conservative service, a Chassidische Carlebach service, a quasi-egal Carlebach-y service, a standard Orthodox service, a young hip non-denominational egal niggun-heavy service, etc. you get the idea. Options are good. Having the ability, the resources, to switch things up is good. Exposing yourself to different davenning experiences is good. Being able to pray effectively in different communal models is good.

Competition, however, is very very bad.

I wish to reiterate, it seems to me that it is not the leaders who are fostering the competitive attitude I am sensing. It is those who make presumptive statements about one service or the other’s lack of “authenticity” or “neshama” or “kavannah.” It seems to always boil down to something political, something that becomes personal, something that is insulting or imposing or lacking…

Personally, I think there needs to be some re-education going on here. We need to start talking about what it means to daven in a community, as part of a community. Perhaps we need to back it up further and teach people what it means to daven, period.

Davenning is less about you and your experience than you think it is. I think someone needs to be brave enough to say that out loud to our population of middle class American Conservative Jews.

Holy updates Batman! An… um… update?

My life is made of midrash. This is how I usually look at things, midrash is kind of my obsession. What this means, basically, is that I seem to very intuitively see connections, echoes, reflections, patterns in my life that make the whole look cohesive and somewhat understandable… manageable… drashable. This may have been why, when I was a little girl, I wanted to be a writer and a poet. Now it is how I approach my rabbinical education and career.

Yeah that’s right. I’m in rabbinical school. I’m actually, finally, really, in rabbinical school.

And right now, the echoes in my midrash are pretty darn deafening.

I’m a student at JTS, the Jewish Theological Seminary. I went to Hebrew school here through junior high and high school. I live in the dorms and when I look out the window in the morning I see the courtyard where I used to toss a frisbee with my sister and friends on sunny sunday afternoons during bagel break. I’m in the place where my Judaism originated… my mother studied here for her conversion. I live in a room 4 floors below the office of my first Rabbi, who was at my naming. It is a new year. I am moving forward with new beginnings… very new things happening and a bright clean shiny future all laid out in front of me.

And what it is is my past. Nothing here is actually new. It is my whole life come together, polished, rearranged, and set before me as it was gearing up to do this whole time.

This is why my life is Midrash. Everything leads to everything else. It makes it a story. And it makes it beautiful.

This is inspired by something Jen wrote about celebrating chanukkah (the post itself is friendslocked, but she’s worth reading in general cause she’s made of awesome).

It’s wonderful being in Israel during Chanukkah and seeing the chanukkiot in the windows and outside the doors here. It’s wonderful to see people lighting big chanukkiot with oil (instead of candles) which doesn’t go out after only half an hour. It’s wonderful to come to shul in the morning and to sing hallel, and on Sunday morning to see the shul’s chanukkiah (which uses big candles) still burning from before havdalah the night before. And it’s wonderful that there’s no gaudy Christmas stuff to compete, so the holiday is its own thing. No one gives presents here. Chanukkah gets to be precisely what it is, a festival of lights, a festival of the Jewish people, something that belongs to us, that we had first, that doesn’t look like a cheap knockoff of the other guy’s birthday party.

The following are things that have occurred to me in the past couple of years:

Sukkah decorating should be for us what Christmas tree decorating is for them. We’ve got that activity in our tradition… and our “Christmas tree” thing is cooler than a Christmas tree because not only is it lovely and fragrant (depending on what you use for schach) but you get to frikkin LIVE in it! Do they get to live in their Christmas tree? I think not! And no, I’m not saying that we should copy the Christians with decorating the sukkah like how they decorate Christmas trees… dwelling in a sukkah is a mitzvah, a commandment. Decorating the sukkah is hiddur mitzvah, beautifying the mitzvah. This is BUILT IN to OUR religion. I’m saying we should OWN it, and realize how much we are NOT lacking.

For Chanukkah, here is no reason we shouldn’t have lights. It’s a festival of lights. Banu Choshech LeGaresh for Pete’s sake! There’s nothing about having lights that is inherently Christmas, and if anyone asks, well, we had the frikkin idea first, ya know? Well, not first, but at least before THEY did. Not that it’s a competition… as Jen put it, it’s “about the primal winter scream (help, where is the sun going?! we are hungry! come back, sun!! argh!!!)” and almost every culture has that. See, we’ve always known about Seasonal Affective Disorder. We banish the darkness with little oil lights or candles, because it fits with the story, and because that’s what used to be available for making light. A chanukkiah used to be a significant increase in how much light there was in the house. I see no reason why, in this day and age, we shouldn’t also have twinkly lights to ward off the SAD, without losing our “Jewish Cred” as Jen puts it.

As for the Maccabee cultural isolationism thingy… I’m genuinely torn about that one. This is a holiday of mixed messages and multiple lessons. (The short version: under Greco-Syrian Hellenistic rule, the Israelites began to assimilate, sometimes by force, sometimes under cultural pressure, sometimes by choice. The Maccabees/Chashmonaim [Hasmoneans] who were descended from priestly line fought a war against the Greco-Syrians AND the assimilationist Israelites, regained national sovereignty, kicked out the pagans, and cleansed and rededicated the Temple so that our religious worship could resume.) On the one hand, what did the Chashmonaim do as soon as they won their war against Hellenism and assimilation? They did the most Greek thing they could do and declared a holiday! That’s not something Jews did… we observed the festivals assigned us by God. Greeks declared holidays for military victories. And the Rabbis were extremely disturbed by this so they came up with the oil story. Which brings it into the primal scream realm very nicely and all works out well in the end. But more to the point, we would a) not be here, and b) not be celebrating this holiday or c) doing a lot of the stuff that we do as Jews (including Talmud) were is not for Hellenistic influence.

On the other hand, nor would we be here if we allowed the assimilationist tendency to overrun us, if we allowed ourselves to stop circumcising and gave in to the pressure to worship other gods/adopt other religious practices, even just for show. Which brings us to the Christmas tree/Chanukkah bush thing. The tree may not be so Christian, but neither is it Jewish. It is true that over the course of our history we have assimilated many pagan elements into our religion as have the Christians, but the tree is not one of them. I understand having positive cultural associations with the tree that one might feel like they want to bring into their celebration of Chanukkah… I have those associations too, from Christmas at my Catholic grandparents’ home… but it was always clear to us as children that, while the tree is lovely, it is not ours. I think that it is important to make that distinction. I think that it’s good to consider what will bring us closer to the holistic spirit of what we are celebrating at Chanukkah (I see it as primordial scream, with a healthy dose of maintaining and celebrating our other-ness) which means not shying away from neutral light-bearing sort of stuff, but davka NOT adopting the stuff that has nothing to do with us, that is just jealously copying the neighbors.

Sura Choshech Halah Shchor. Sura Mipnei HaOr.

I’ve heard it said before that Yom Kippur should be joyous.

Rosh Hashannah is Yom HaDin, the Day of Judgment, not Yom Kippur. The month of Tishrei which leads up to Rosh Hashannah we focus on Cheshbon Nefesh, an accounting of our souls, and we do teshuvah, repentance and atonement, between ourselves and our fellows, ourselves and God, and ourselves and… ourselves. The 10 days between Rosh Hashannah and Yom Kippur, the cheshbon nefesh gets kicked into high gear, because on Rosh Hashannah, it is said, it is written, and on Yom Kippur it is sealed who will merit what for the coming year. By the time we reach Yom Kippur, we have done all of the work. On Yom Kippur we fast, but not mournfully. We dress in white and we spend the whole day praying as though we had nothing better to do. On Yom Kippur we don’t bathe or eat or drink or take care of our personal needs. On the one hand, the command is to afflict our souls. We fast in contrition. On the other hand, on this day we stand before God like angels. And we know that we will be forgiven, because God has given us this day for repentance, for atonement, and for forgiveness. Year after year we stand before God and are forgiven, pardoned, and absolved.

As my teacher Shaiya is fond of saying, Ashkenazi Jews, that is, Jews from Eastern Europe, on Yom Kippur weep and wail and cry “We have sinned! We have sinned!” Sephardi Jews, descended from the Jews of medieval Spain, on Yom Kippur sing and dance because “Hey, isn’t this the same judge who let us off last year?”

The month of Tirshrei, Rosh Hashannah and Yom Kippur have never been easy for me. The past ten years have been especially difficult for me at this time of year. For personal reasons, the work of cheshbon nefesh and all the talk of forgiveness has weighed on me horribly, and I’ve never been able to feel good about Yom Kippur. Besides which, I’ve never been in a space on Yom Kippur where I felt I had a chevre, a group of like-minded individuals who take all of this as seriously as I do.

This year, a lot happened in Elul. I had a lot thrown at me, I’d been hurt emotionally, and as a result a lot of stuff got hashed out and thrashed out and worked out. And on Yom Kippur I davenned at The Leader Minyan. I’d never been before, but my good friend David was going there, and Shaiya was as well, and I felt the need to try something new.

I walked over with my new friend Josh, who lives up the street from me. I met him at his apartment at 7:15, we waited for a couple of other people, picked some people up along the way, and found our way to the Zionist Youth Farm where they were holding services. At some point I asked Josh what time they start. He laughed and said “about an hour and a half ago.” We got there in time for Borchu, around 7:50.

The first time the congregation broke into singing and dancing, I was conflicted. I had spoken to David the night before about toying with the idea of having a joyful Yom Kippur this year. Elul had been so hard. David suggested that I had to. I had to have a joyful Yom Kippur. I told him I wasn’t sure if I could. And when I saw the women begin to dance, I hesitated. I wanted so badly to join them, but something held me back.

The day continued. The singing became more spirited and more intense. As we started to feel the fast, little containers of eucalyptus oil and powder were passed around for smelling. At some point a piyyut, a liturgical poem, was sung that people started clapping to. It got me clapping. Clapping and swaying. I looked up and saw dancing again. I saw that David was dancing over on the men’s side. A circle formed on the women’s side. And I remembered something that David had said to me the night before as we were finishing up dinner alone at his place before we headed out to Kol Nidrei. He said “Gella, you will be inscribed for a good year. There is no way that you could not be. If you’re not inscribed for a good year, then I don’t want any part of this.”

For the first time in my life, I stood before The Lord on Yom Kippur, and was not alone.

I tied my tallit around my neck so that it wouldn’t fall from my shoulders. I climbed over chairs. I grabbed the hands of two women, and I danced. I closed my eyes and I danced and I sang.

Someone had my back. Someone argued for me. I had support. I had solidarity. I had someone standing behind me saying “if she goes, I go.”

And I knew, then I knew, I was being forgiven. Released. How can you not dance?

There was no break between mussaf and mincha. I’d been nervous about that, but now I was glad of it. I didn’t want to stop praying. Even at the end, when we’d davenned neila, the last service of the day, the locking of the gates of heaven, and we’d already gone a half hour over the end of the fast, I still didn’t want it to end. In that last amidah I’s held my hands out to God in thanks and praise and love and marveled that every year, every year, we get to stand before our God and every year God forgives us our iniquities and gives us the chance to do better next time. God was suddenly a father. A good and loving father who cares and cradles and looks upon us with kindness. I, in turn, loved everyone and everything. After ma’ariv we broke the fast with water juice and cake. I just had a little water, and immediately went to find my friends and hug them, because that is what nourishes me.

This past Tuesday morning at Moreshet Yisrael Nancy gave a dvar torah about v’ahavta, the first paragraph of the shema, and about loving God. I was suddenly reminded of the last time I had heard Parshat V’etchanan in which v’ahavta appears. On Shabbat Nachamu last year I took weekend trip to Tzfat with some friends from the Yeshiva. We ate, slept and davened at Ascent, a Chabad hostel. After I outed myself to one of the staff as a Conservative Yeshiva student and hopeful future rabbinical student, he asked if I would give a d’var torah during lunch. I’d not given a d’var torah since my bat mitzvah. I didn’t have any of my books or the internet, I didn’t even have a chumash with me. I was scared – no, I was terrified. But I saw that I was being challenged as a Conservative Jew by a Chabad rabbi, and I couldn’t back down from that.

Lying in bed that night at 2 am, I tried to think… parsha parsha parsha… what can I say about the parsha? Shabbat Nachamu, ok… 10 commandments, always nice… Shema… Ah! Yes, I thought! Shema! I know the Shema! Well, yes, I mean one should hope, right? I mean I say it at least twice a day. Last summer we studied Shema pretty closely in a few of our classes. I remembered feeling troubled in Rabbi Goldfarb’s tefillah class, when I was studying in chevruta, about the talk of love in the shema. Take the Shema completely out of context. Forget the brachot before and after, forget everything else you know about Judaism. The love described in v’ahavtah, the first paragraph of the Shema, seems very one-sided. You are to love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your might. Why? Because the second paragraph says that if you don’t… you get “schmeised,” as Reb Mordechai likes to say. Love God, obey the commandments, otherwise, no rain, grain wine or oil, and you disappear. The brachot before and after talk extensively about God’s love for us, but if anything it seemed to me at the time that this was an attempt to compensate for the lack of reciprocal love in the Shema proper, our paradigmatic statement of faith. How can we love God if we can’t see God’s love for us? How can you even conceive of calling such a thing love?

What else happens in the Shema, I asked myself. Mention of Yitziyat Mitzraim, and Tzitzits. There are many different ways to tie tzitzits, but the way my father’s family does it, the way I learned at Camp Ramah, is to tie them in 4 segments with 7 loops in the first segment, 8 in the second, 11 in the third and 13 in the fourth. I started thinking about numbers, playing a gematrya game in my mind. What is God? Well, God is One. The Shema tells us this. But God is also 26, 10 for yod, 5 for hey, 6 for vav and 5 for hey, adds up to 26. So do 7, 8, and 11, the numbers of the loops in the first three segments of the tzitzits. Love, Ahava, it just so happens is 13. 1 for aleph, 5 for hey, 2 for bet and 5 for hey add up to 13, the number of loops on the last segment of the tzitzit. Why do we wear Tzitzits? The shema says to look upon them and to be reminded of all of the commandments. So if God, 26, plus love, 13, makes up the tzitzits, which we can understand to be a representation of the commandments, since we look at them to be reminded of the mitzvot, what can I take from this? God, plus love, equals Commandments. The mitzvot are the expression of God’s love for us.

Ok, a numbers game. That’s very nice and very cute. But does it mean anything to say that God shows God’s love for us by giving us commandments? This summer when I went back home to New York for a couple of weeks, I was bombarded with questions from my friends and family and shul community about what I’ve learned during my year in Israel and how my observance and my outlook on Judaism have changed. I found that these conversations tended to break down when they came to the concept of commandedness, specifically the idea of Jews being bound, obligated, by the commandments. “Ah, see, there’s the problem,” one friend told me as she tried to wrap her head around my newfound religious fanaticism. “I hear obligation and I immediately think ‘that’s a bad thing!’” Another friend agreed, insisting that obligation by definition carries negative connotations. According to these views, the notion that God shows love for us by giving us commandments seems, if not preposterous, at least childish. When we think of commandment, of laws, many of us think of restriction, of narrowing. Many modern enlightened adults view this kind of restriction as infantalizing… as a vision of a sort of cosmic mommy and daddy who restrict our behavior because they know better than we do. Do we really need this? After all, we thank God every day for granting us intelligence, for making us free… how then can we see being bound to a restrictive prescriptive system by which to live, even to think, as a good thing, as a manifestation of God’s love? Aren’t we supposed to be able to think for ourselves?

Ok, so we’ve covered tzitzits. Yitziyat Mitzrayim is the other main element of the Shema. God gave us commandments, the Torah, after taking us out of Egypt. When we think of commandment as restriction, narrowness, are we to learn from this that God brought us out of the narrowness of bondage in Mitzrayim, to bring us into another narrowness called mitzvot? Psalm 118 says that Min Hametzar Karati Ya, from my troubles, literally from the narrowness, I called to God, Anani Vamerchav Ya, God answered me by setting me free, literally by widening the way. Perhaps God does not take us from narrows to narrows but rather from narrows to widening. It is true that living a halachically bound life is, on the surface of it, restrictive. There is no way of getting around that. But perhaps what we can learn from the psalm is that there is a way to look deeper at the commandments. I tend to believe that each mitzvah, if you look at it closely enough, points to something else, some principle, something for us to be aware of. There is a lot of marking, distinguishing, sanctifying, categorizing in Jewish practice. If we can accept as a basic premise that God’s commandments, our law, is meant to teach us how to live with maximum awareness, to maximize our potential as human beings, then each mitzvah has the potential to widen our perspective and broaden our understanding of the world in which we live. The world may be a very narrow bridge, but God gives us a derech, a path, a way to live which can expand our consciousness if we let it. This is how I can believe that God loves us by commanding us. Viewed in this way, the mitzvot are a gift, an addition to the gift of our lives to allow us to get the best that we can out of that life, if we are open to receiving it.

If God loves us by giving us mitzvot, then the shema is not devoid of God’s love, it is filled with it. And it seems to me that the best way of loving God back is to use this gift of God’s love to its fullest, to use each mitzvah to its full potential. To do the mitzvot is only the first step. To really fulfill the Mitzvah to love your God is to do more than that. It is said that the Torah has 70 faces, that everything is in it. To take each mitzvah and to turn it over and over and to learn all you can from it is, in my opinion, the way the way to love God back.

Sometime before I came to Israel, I took on the custom of covering my head at, pretty much, all times. Sometimes I wear a kippah, sometimes a scarf wrapped in such a way that I hope it is obvious that what I am covering is the top of my head and not my hair. I have been doing this for about two years now.

The wearing of a kippah is a custom, not a law. It has been elevated in Orthodox communities to the status of law, but this is a relatively recent phenomenon. In the Talmud it says that Rabbi Huna, son of Rabbi Yehoshua, never walked more than 4 cubits without covering his head. There is also a story of Rav Nachman Bar Isaac whose mother was told by a stargazer that he was destined to become a thief, so she instructed him to always cover his head so that the fear of heaven should be instilled in him… and indeed one time the scarf that covered his head fell off, and he was seized by the urge to steal, and stole some dates from the tree under which he was sitting.

The custom of piety took on the status of law for some simply because it became ubiquitous among Jews at certain times, and ubiquitous customs in Judaism have this tendency to become laws. But there is nothing in the Torah or in the Talmud which suggests that everyone, all men, or even really anyone is legally bound by this custom.

So why do I do it?

There are a few reasons. Just as custom has a habit of becoming law in Judaism, there is a strong injunction in Jewish custom that one is to follow the custom of one’s father. In my father’s family, the custom is that one will cover his or her head when he or she is in a religious institution, saying or responding to a bracha, or studying classical Jewish texts. So I began covering my head at all times so that when I engaged in any of these activities, which were becoming much more frequent, I would be ready and not have to go fishing for a head covering. Also, putting on a headcovering when you begin to study and taking it off again when you finish, I feel, is more conspicuous than simply having the covering on by default, and not wishing to draw more attention to myself than is necessary is one motivation. That was my rationale.

Here’s a story.

One day I was on the subway on the way to work. This was a few years ago when I was still working in retail. I had a hat that I had bought at The Falcon Ridge Folk Festival. It was a green brimless cloth hat, one might call it a skullcap or a beanie. I used it at times as a kippah, when I was in shul or when I was studying, and when I bought it I thought “this would make a good kippah.” But when I wore it, I didn’t always think of it as a kippah. It was a hat. There was nothing particularly Jewish about it, it was sold to me by a non-Jew who almost certainly didn’t think of it as a kippah, and a lot of people who were at the festival that year bought similar hats and wore them without making any sort of religious statement. That day, I was wearing this hat because it was cool out. I was going to take it off when I got to work.

So there I am on the subway minding my own business, not really looking at anything or anyone in particular. Suddenly I hear a loud, not so friendly voice:

“Look! A woman rabbi!”

I look up and there is an Orthodox man with a black hat staring down at me. I regard him in bewilderment, saying nothing. He turns to the man next to him, also a black-hat Orthodox man and begins speaking, to him, but clearly for my benefit, about how ridiculous these Reform Jews are who think that women can be rabbis. “There’s no such thing as a woman rabbi!” He declares loudly as though his companion needed convincing. He continues on about Reform Jews pervert Judaism, serve lobster at bar mitzvahs, don’t know anything about anything, “and look… they think that women can be rabbis!” He continues this tirade for the entire 40 minute train ride, and I say nothing until he disappears the stop before mine.

At this point I take a deep breath and let it out.

I get off at the next stop, Union Square, and exit the train station. As I emerge from the stairwell to the street, I see the man. I had thought he’d gotten off the train at the previous stop and I have no idea how he is there. He spots me and points directly at me. “YOU!” He yells at me, “you’re a woman rabbi!” It sounds so much like a declaration, a proclamation. I’m not entirely certain what his purpose is… is he asking? Is he asserting?

Regardless, he needs to be set straight. I walk calmly up to him.

“I’m not a rabbi,” I say to him softly. “But I will be. Because of people like you.” And I walk off toward my store.

Were I put in the same situation again now, I don’t know that I would have given the same answer. Because the truth is I am not doing this for him or for people like him. I’m not doing this to rebel, to be anti-anything, to make a statement.

On the other hand, wearing a kippah is a statement, regardless of my intention. It is a statement because it is out of the ordinary for a woman to do so. For me to wear a kippah is to go against the grain which necessarily calls attention to me and necessarily makes a statement to those who take notice. The same is true for wearing tzitzit. And this is at least part of why when I am not in the Yeshiva, I tuck my tzitzit in and I wear something on my head which is not immediately recognizable as a kippah.

This is a constant struggle for me. Part of me dislikes the idea of making a statement at all. It feels as though my practice loses something the minute it becomes about making a statement. Like with hagbah… the second it stops being about the congregation and becomes about me, it becomes meaningless. At the same time, since I have no control over how people read the symbol, the only way that I can prevent it from being read as a statement is to be in hiding about it, which is problematic for a number of reasons. It is beneficial for me and for women like me for such symbols being visible on women to become more mainstream, and hiding the symbols prevents that from happening. It also does little to encourage other women to explore ideological full egalitarianism, and perpetuates the status quo sense of isolation and loneliness.

My general rule is that I wear the “potentially gender problematic” symbols visibly in contexts where there is hope of the people who see them receiving the potential challenge to their world view in a productive and useful way. That means that I will wear tzitzit out and sometimes a kippah-style kippah at The Yeshiva, at Masorti/Conservative and progressive congregations, in the English tutoring program I do with 4th 5th and 6th graders at the Reform shul, and at my choir. On the street or in an Orthodox congregation, I keep myself closeted until I have reason to out myself.

Not too long ago I accompanied my friend Rachel, an Israeli woman from my choir, to a shabbaton called “Shabbat Shetach,” a Jews in the Woods sort of event, though decidedly less crunchy, and consisting almost entirely of nominally Orthodox young Jews. After some internal debate, I made a decision to cover my head with a kippah rather than with a scarf, and to wear my tzitzit out. This was supposed to be a friendly environment where people get to know each other and bonds form between people. If I was going to be myself anywhere, it was here. My garb elicited many questions, about myself, about Conservative Judaism, about my Yeshiva… all productive, all constructive. The determining factor is how likely it is in any given context that I will be dismissed out of hand versus how likely it is that someone will come to me, genuinely curious, ask me “why,” and then care enough to hear the answer.

Every Thursday during the school year, Reb Shmuel our Rosh Yeshiva has a sicha. Sicha means conversation. He starts with some thoughts of his own on some point of relevance to religious life… truthfulness, faith, tefilah, humor, study, it can be anything really. He shares with is his thoughts, looks at his watch, and says “your turn.” And we have a conversation.

This past Thursday was the last day of Yeshiva for the year. Reb Shmuel in his sicha talked about the sichot we have had over the course of the past year. Usually I remember what Reb Shmuel says in his sichot. Reb Shmuel is a very smart and a very wise man. This sicha I actually don’t remember very much of. What I remember is the reactions to it, some of which I found disappointing. Someone asked if Reb Shmuel had a vision for a structured way of implementing the values he attempts to communicate in his sichot into the Yeshiva throughout the year. I found this disappointing because the sorts of values that he talks about in his sichot are largely personal values that one must implement personally, not through a program prescribed by an institution. I felt that this person, along with others who expressed similar sentiments about the lack of structured implementation, missed the entire point of the sichot over the course of the year, and probably largely missed the point of Yeshiva as well.

Someone else asked “Where is God in all of this?”

Reb Shmuel said a bit about how he doesn’t like so much to talk about God in God terms because it often feels as though when people start to talk about God, they are talking about something that doesn’t mean anything, using a language that doesn’t mean anything. He said that nevertheless, bli neder, he would try to come up with a sicha about God perhaps for the coming year, since people seemed to want to talk about it.

I raised my hand.

Reb Shmuel talks about God all the time. All of his sichot are about God. See, I take his sichot very seriously. I listen and I try to assimilate and incorporate the things that he talks about into my daily life, and into my outlook. Some of his sichot are very concrete, very tachlis, like this is how you daven properly, this is how you build a kosher sukkah, this is how you hold a lulav. Some of them are more conceptual, more abstract, like about the nature of truth and truthfulness, or faith and faithfulness. They are all about how we live our lives, and they are all about God.

I remember a few months ago I was having a conversation with someone here at the Yeshiva. It was a conversation about personal conduct, about doing right by other people. And God came up in the conversation. We talked about God, matter of factly, comfortably, unselfconsciously. And I remember, after the fact, realizing that that was the first time I had ever been able to talk about God in that way… to talk about God without making disclaimers, without defining terms, without specifying what kind of God we are talking about here… God was just there in the conversation, perfectly at home.

Another time, I was having a conversation with another Yeshiva friend, one of those deep intense conversations that I tend to have with people, and he asked me the question “Do you ever just… talk to God?” The question seemed a little odd to me, but I couldn’t quite pinpoint why. I thought about it and gave him an answer about the times in my prayers when I explicitly include personal thoughts, supplication, etc. like tachanun and the end of the Amidah, but it didn’t seem like the right answer. I remember thinking about it the next day and trying to write about it… and I realized why the question had seemed so odd… it was because I don’t need to think in terms of “talking to God.” I have come to a point in my life where God is a constant presence.

In Shaiya’s medieval philosophy class we talked a little bit the other day about first order and second order theologies. Basically, second-order theology involves the questions of what we mean when we talk about God, what kind of God we do or don’t, can or cannot believe in, what it does and doesn’t mean to worship, etc. Academic discourse about God belongs in this category. First order theology is the realm of faith, worship and practice. My whole life, since the age of 7 or so, has been about second-order theology. This is where The Conservative Movement especially puts a great deal of emphasis. This year, as I mentioned way back last July, I made a decision to take a step back from second-order analysis of my Judaism and my theology and just work on practice. Now theology and philosophy and halachic theory have all slowly been reasserting themselves into my consciousness over the course of the year, and that is fine. But what I’ve been amazed to discover is that through the living of this life, thorough choosing to open myself to what text and practice has to teach me, I have, somewhere along the way, developed a first-order theology. God is in my life now in a way that I would not have thought possible for an overly-analytical type like myself. God is there when I wake up and thank God for returning my soul to me after sleep. God is there when I pray three times a day. God is there when I study. God is there as I work hard to live according to the standards of ethical personal conduct that our tradition mandates. God is there when, in my imperfection, I do things wrong and seek the rachamim that enables me to pick myself up and try again, to always strive to do better next time. And God is in the community that we create here with communal prayer and study, sharing shabbatot and holidays. God is there in the family that we become.

These are the things that Reb Shmuel’s sichot are about. How we live and think and practice Jewishly. And these are the things that bring God into our lives.

After the sicha ended, after I had expressed these thoughts, Reb Shmuel called me over and told me that he has never felt so appreciated in all of his life. And it made us both smile.

A couple of years ago I made a decision to work on watching my tongue. I decided to take on lashon hara as my project for the year and I became very aware of what I said and I also became very aware of what others said and what conversations I did and did not participate in. Over the course of that year or so I felt like I did a pretty darn good job. Not good enough, because of course it is never “good enough” (which doesn’t have to be a bad thing) but I felt like I made a lot of personal progress.

This year I feel that I have not done so well.

I have noticed this year an unwillingness on my part to say anything about L”H when I hear it, or even to refuse to take part. This is a big problem. It is a problem for me personally and it is a problem in the Jewish world. This is not one of those areas in which one can say “oh that’s just not so-an-so’s strong point.” Shmirat HaLashon is essential in Jewish life and especially essential for our professional body. I’m sincerely disturbed by the lack of care i have observed given to this area.

So I’m laying out a proposal. I am making a deal with myself. I want to be a rabbi. Not so that I can have the job-title “Rabbi” but because I want to achieve a certain level of mastery in Jewish learning so that I may contribute to the Jewish world and the Jewish people by helping others to live fulfilling Jewish lives, have their lives enriched by Jewish learning, and so that I may live properly as a Jew myself. Becoming a rabbi entails more than just learning though. You can get a master’s or a doctorate just learning. Being a rabbi is being a master in our tradition which is not just a learning tradition but a legal and ethical tradition as well. Study is in our tradition is optimistically considered more highly than performing mitzvot for the simple reason that study leads to mitzvot. If you study with no intention of putting into practice what you learn, then you have merited something certainly… and you might gain a title out of it… but how can it be anything but empty until you implement it in your own life?

I’m making Shmirat HaLashon my project again. And not just for a year, but for good. I was reading lessons from the Chafetz Chaim that year, and I think I might do so again… but what I might want to do, rather than reading summaries written up in English flooding my inbox, I might make it a project to read the original. Maybe set a weekly goal. I will make it my business to watch what I listen to, what conversations I participate in, and to try to steer conversations away from lashon hara when I see it rearing its ugly head. I have already incorporated a reminder into my daily tefillah. Now I am making it public.

We’ll see how this goes. Wish me strength and success.