December, 2021 Megillah
RABBI'S NOTES
I’ve kvetched now and then (maybe more than now and then) about the synagogue of my childhood. Not that I was a regular attender by any means, but when I had to be there I found it dreary and alienating. I constantly complained about the women at High Holy Day—excuse me, “High Holiday”—services in their minks (when it was 100 degrees out, no less!), the mean girls in Sunday school, and the screechy voice of the cantorial soloist. I fussed about how the prayers didn’t mean anything to me, how we would be told to draw the Tree of Life in Religious School, but nobody told us what the Tree of Life is.
And of course the rabbi: don’t get me started! I was not the kid in that setting you would have bet on to grow up to love Jewish learning and practice, much less to become a rabbi herself.
I just read a magnificent book that is burrowing and rippling in my consciousness, lighting up places I had never before thought to look. One of the places is my own inauspicious Jewish beginnings. The title of the book is a mouthful: The Mystical Exodus in Jungian Perspective: Transforming Trauma and the Wellsprings of Renewal. It is by the brilliant friend of our Jewish Women’s Retreat, Shoshana Fershtman. She is a Jungian analyst, a deep student of Torah, Jewish mysticism and Kabbalah, a feminist, an environmental activist, and a beautiful writer and thinker. Her book brings together many, many streams of thought. I can’t begin to do it justice here, but I’d like to discuss one line of thought that it has awakened in me.
One stream that flows through the book is stories of people who, like me, were alienated from Judaism as children but found their ways toward Jewish life as adults. Each person’s particular beginnings are described. Some had very traumatic childhoods; others had profoundly depressed parents or grandparents. A number asked questions of the adults around them and found them unwilling or unable to respond meaningfully; still others were offended by the materialism and conformity of their families and communities.
Those generations were broken in their capacity for faith, much less joy, by the trauma of their historical moment. Of course, historical trauma extends back even farther: the wounds were passed from generation to generation, often in ways that are unexamined and unspoken.
Individuals and generations each have their traumas, and they may not be unconnected.
I am embarrassed to say that, until I read Shoshana’s book, I had never really thought about WHY my suburban synagogue in the early 1960’s seemed so empty and vain, why the rabbis and teachers seemed so spiritually deadened, why I couldn’t find clues about faith or joy or meaning. I hadn’t really thought about why a woman in that time and place might wear her fanciest clothing to the High Holiday service, why everything I heard there sounded so defensive and conformist to my young ears. At seven or ten or thirteen years old I could already see that I wasn’t going to get any meaning or solace THERE. So, like the people whose stories Shoshana tells, I turned away. She describes this turning away, in personal and collective terms, as “exile.”
According to Shoshana, in order to continue to nourish our souls and provide a pathway to the Divine, Judaism itself has to heal and transform from the injuries and diminishments of historical trauma, and especially the wounds that the tradition itself sustained from the holocaust. She writes with gratitude and love about Jewish Renewal—both the movement by that name and Jewish renewal as it has been progressing in many settings—and especially the legacy of Rabbi Zalman Shachter-Shalomi of blessed memory and his many innovations to renew Judaism in our time. In reflecting on this path of renewal, she makes a connection that surprised and moved me very much.
As I was beginning to search for meaning and connection and community in my own young life, people kept appearing at key moments to draw me back towards Judaism: Yudit Greenberg, Rabbi Laura Geller, Barbara Myerhoff of blessed memory, Rabbi Maggie Wenig, Savina Teubal of blessed memory, Rabbi Jane Litman. So many women….
It turns out that my experience was not so unusual. We are blessed to live in a time of Jewish restoration, especially the restoration of women’s voices. Shoshana writes about the long history and myth of Judaism, early on in which the feminine was suppressed and overtaken by patriarchy and hierarchy, but continues to peek out at key moments. She tells of Miriam’s well running underground, springing up to slake the thirst of the Israelites in the desert.
In case you’re a little rusty on Miriam’s well, in Numbers 20:1, the death of the prophet Miriam is announced and it is noted that the Israelites then ran out of water.
The close association of the two events led the sages of the Talmud to build a legend about the abundant well of fresh water that followed Miriam for as long as she lived as she wandered with her people through the desert.
In my own life, particular women—my college teacher, the rabbi at the Hillel House, and others—appeared at key moments to guide me toward the wellsprings of Judaism and, ultimately, of the Divine. Men too, and people I would later understand to be non-binary. The appearance of these to lead me, and to lead us all, out of exile ARE the Shekhina.
The suppression of women and of the feminine aspect of the Divine is a millennia-long injury to Judaism and to all the cultures that are affected by Judaism. And the renewal of the feminine is a transformational healing in our own time.
We are called to do our parts in generational healing. Shoshana encourages us to reflect back on the generations before us, our direct forebears, and our own younger selves, to ask them, dream them, and look upon their injuries and sufferings with more understanding and more generosity.
There is something in here related to Hanukkah, I’m sure—that dark little holiday of war and displacement and our ancestors’ fraught efforts to survive. I will look forward to contemplating these narratives this month and will very much miss sharing those days with all of you. I wish you all a very sweet and renewing Hanukkah and the winter days beyond!
