You probably have heard me, when making the blessing when called to the Torah, identifying myself as “Bat Avraham v’Sarah,” though you know I am not a convert.
It’s because my Jewish journey was somewhat sparse and complicated until I got married. As an infant, I was adopted by a paranoid schizophrenic mother and a father who enabled her. My mother didn’t send me to nursery school because she was convinced that they would try to kill me. I did have one year of Sunday school; my only memory of it was being told to draw a picture of Jephthah’s daughter (the one who was sacrificed because she was the first being he saw when he returned from a victory); some sixty-five years later, I can still remember wondering what to color her eye; should I make it black because it was burnt?
I was not sent to Hebrew school. “Girls don’t need it.”
“But I want to!”
“No.”
So going to services was just a lot of mumbling. I remember also being told before a funeral that women didn’t count in a minyan (although in Conservative synagogues, by that time we did). In college, because of the weird spelling of my last name, students would come up to me and demand to know why I had changed my name, why I was “ashamed” of being Jewish.
“It’s just my name,” I would say, “I don’t know why it’s spelled that way.”
When I was in medical school, I would tag along with Jewish friends on Yom Kippur; I often got bad migraines on Yom Kippur, maybe from guilt over not knowing anything.
Years later, on the same night I left an abusive relationship, my father died of a heart attack. I knew G-d had it in for me for wanting to be happy.
Years later, in my late thirties, I had my midlife crisis. Thanks to the arrival of the early Internet, I met Tom, my future husband, on a bulletin board service (the Web hadn’t come out yet). He had come from a sort of unusual family, too; his mother was the daughter of a priest defrocked for marrying. She and I got along great, and I still say Kaddish for her every Yahrzeit. It was her idea that when Tom and I decided to get married that we have a Jewish wedding.
This started my adventure!
After we got married, we enrolled in the Reconstructionist Movement’s Nuts and Bolts class, called “Jewish, Alive, and American,” held at the Gershman Y. Our teacher was then-rabbinical-student Elisheva Sacks, who was both an “Orthoprax” Jew and a lover of animals. I will always remember the classes she taught while wearing tzitzit and riding breeches! When the class was over, Tom and I joined Leyv Ha-Ir, the Reconstructionist shul that at that time met in the basement of Temple University in Center City. Rabbi Rayzel Raphael, the Rabbi at the time, helped me a lot with my relationship with the Divine.
I continued taking adult education courses at the Gershman Y. I loved it, especially the Talmud courses. Books that helped my Jewish knowledge at that time included Jewish Renewal by Michael Lerner (his first book; it was quite good, actually), Seasons of Our Joy by Arthur Waskow, and Mordecai Kaplan’s Judaism as a Civilization and Judaism Without Supernaturalism.
My dream job at Graduate Hospital had evaporated just a year after I had made partner. I had worked in New Jersey for a while, and then went to Temple in North Philly. As part of my midlife crisis, I began to see that my career in nuclear medicine and radiology (especially with Temple being stingy with the equipment I needed) was not the only thing that could keep me going.
I decided to register at Gratz College, and, taking courses at night and in the summer (one semester over one week), I worked my way to an MA in Jewish studies. I couldn’t have gotten my degree without Unheroic Conduct by Daniel Boyarin; a great book about gender roles. When it came to writing my thesis, I had become enthralled with the history of the German occupation of the Channel Islands (Guernsey, Jersey, Alderney, and Sark) during World War II. I learned about the Jewish surrealist artists/underground members/stepsisters/lovers Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, who would feature prominently. My adviser (Prof. Joe Davis, a terrific teacher and mensch) looked skeptical when I told him about it. “What if I write it as an historical novel?” (His eyes brightened; perhaps he realized there would be no footnotes to check.)
“OK, do that.”
Thus, War on the Margins was born. I self-published it on Amazon. Then, with Rabbi Avi’s encouragement (by then we had joined Society Hill Synagogue), I found a publisher. I have since self-published a few more novellas and novels.
In addition to Prof. Davis, some of my other professors at Gratz included Prof. Ruth Sandberg (Talmud), Prof. Saul Wachs (liturgy), and Prof. Jerry Kutnick (Israeli History). My Hebrew improved somewhat with a few ulpan courses, but I still have trouble with it. I remember a few Yemei Kippur ago, asking Cantor Bob Freedman (who spent a whole summer teaching me the extra Musaf), “Bob, why does the Yamin Nora’im Kaddish have ‘night, night’ in it?” (I was thinking of “laila, laila” instead of “l’eila l’eila“). He was very kind.
I loved Society Hill Synagogue from the first time I came to a Friday night service. Rabbi Avi and then-Cantor Neil had so much enthusiasm! I still wonder why I am getting this award. My alarm goes off Saturday mornings, and I come to shul. I do head the bereavement committee through God’s Unfinished Business, with loyal members whom I assign notes to write to the bereaved on Sh’loshim and the first Yahrzeit. I am on the Religion Committee, calling people to see if they want to do readings. I am on the newly-formed Israel Committee. I have learned so much from Rabbi Avi and Rabbi Nathan and Rabbi Marjorie and all our wonderful Cantors, including Hazzan Jessi. My conception of G-d has grown to include quantum physics (please have a look at the Richard Feynman lectures on YouTube [very little math, very fascinating physics] and David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity [ditto]) and the music of Gustav Mahler.
Thanks to everyone, and special thanks to Beverly Michaels for agreeing to introduce me on very short notice!