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The Lilith Blog
October 21, 2010 by Liz Lawler
One Step Forward, Two Steps Back: A Two-Act Conversion Story
So where did we leave off? Was I up to my waist in the mikvah? Yes. But let me back-track to the conversion process itself.
I chose the “easy” way in, so to speak. Faced with the multiple schools of Judaism, I panicked and went with the one that seemed the least dogmatic. I chose a Reform rabbi to initiate me. But while it was non-threatening in many ways, it also left me with the anguish of choice and agency. It gave me the responsibility of co-creating my own sense of Jewishness. My rabbi never claimed to have any definitive answers, refused to impose too many rules. There was a decent amount of structure: I got the usual crash course in Jewish literacy, took a class called Judaism 101. And, at the rabbi’s insistence, this started out as a joint-process. My then fiancé had to attend the classes, and private sessions with the rabbi. We also went to services semi-faithfully. Ostensibly, this was so that we would be on the same religious page, as a family. But really, I felt like it was only fair, that he should have to sit through these interminable services with me. He could barely disguise his boredom. As for me, it was overwhelming, all of this Hebrew, the up and down, the repetition and the singing. So there we were: side by side, both of us terribly awkward about the whole thing, but for different reasons. (more…)
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October 18, 2010 by Amanda Walgrove
At the Theater: Abraham's Daughters
Abraham’s Daughters, written by Elissa Lerner and directed by Niccolo Aeed, premiered at the New York International Fringe Festival this year along with over 200 other talent-filled plays. Lerner, currently a graduate student at NYU, penned the script as a thesis for her double major in Religion and Theater Studies at Duke University. After reading a great deal of text about Abraham’s Biblical sons, the playwright pondered, “Even to provoke half of a thought: What if? How would things be different? How would women tell the story of their religious experiences?” Lerner, as the female pseudo-Abraham, scribed the lives of the Jewish Sarah (Rebecca LaChance), her Muslim roommate Ranya (Dea Julien), and their Christian friend Kate (Keely Flaherty). Additionally, Lerner cleverly throws Will (Aryeh Lappin) into the mix, representing a belief that is becoming increasingly contagious throughout American youth. He is an atheist who repeatedly insists on being called a rationalist. In a contemporary and relatable context, these four friends come to understand that religious values can be as fragile as budding friendships. (more…)
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October 13, 2010 by Liz Lawler
A Wildly (Maybe Not) Un-Feminist Choice
I chose my mid 20s to make a wildly un-feminist choice. I converted to Judaism. For a man.
I got a good liberal arts education, and took all of the appropriate feminist theory courses. Luce Irigaray could do no wrong, as far as I was concerned. So you can imagine what went through my head when I found myself, 8 months pregnant, wading into a mikvah like a dirigible. The woman running the show pretty much had to hold me under with a paddle, the bubble of my enormous body kept trying to surface. The idea of submersion took on a bit of a double meaning, if you catch my drift.
I’d like to pretend that I “always felt Jewish” or that discovering Judaism felt like coming home. But no such luck. (more…)
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October 6, 2010 by Bonnie Beth Chernin
Stepping Toward Minyan
If you had asked me, growing up, if the Conservative synagogue my family attended on Friday nights also offered a daily minyan, I would have answered, somewhat vaguely, that I thought a few old men got together for services on Mondays and Thursdays, and was that what you meant?
Because neither my mother, who would not have counted as one of the necessary ten in that non-egalitarian time, nor my father, spoke about or chose to go to minyan. Not even for Kaddish. When my paternal grandfather died, and then my paternal and maternal grandmothers, my father and mother faithfully attended Shabbat evening services each week for twelve months and rose each time for the mourner’s prayer. I understood that to be the way to observe a family member’s death in the Jewish tradition.
That is, until I met my husband and shared my family’s practice several months after our wedding. (more…)
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September 7, 2010 by Maya Bernstein
Return
It is a time of returning. Rosh HaShanah, the Jewish New Year, is upon us. We are in the midst of the Hebrew month of Elul, which, in preparation for the Days of Awe, is a period of Teshuva, often translated as repentance, but which literally means to go back, to return. PJ Library sent us a book called Engineer Ari and the Rosh HaShanah Ride, about a man who turns his train around and returns to his friends. Jews around the world are involved in spiritual preparation, returning to God, returning to the selves they wish to be. So, I feel, it is an especially fitting time for me to return.
Except that I’m returning to work.
In preparation for the auspicious day, I’ve been maniacally going through drawers and scrubbing under sinks. We had to rearrange our house to make room for the new baby, and I’ve been uncovering every crevice in an attempt to find more space. Unlike the mother hummingbird, who spent less and less time on her nest before her babies flew off, I have become obsessed, spending hours going through bookshelves and re-arranging the angles of chairs before I fly off. I am trying to leave my mark, so that when I’m no longer home when the baby cries, turning his head from side to side in his crib, searching for me, he will know that I love him, because he has a dresser now, and a cubby at the bottom of the crowded closet, and a quilt hanging on the wall. Maybe I’ve been trying to make the new seem old, and comfortable, before the old routine returns, belying its name, and bringing more change.
It’s a strange business, this “returning” to one’s self. Pregnancy and childbirth are especially powerful physical metaphors for the reality that we are always in flux. My grandfather used to say that change is the only constant. In the past months, I have watched my body wax and wane like the moon. I have cut dozens of white crescent fingernails, surprised at how quickly they grow. I have built sandcastles by the side of a lake, and thought of nothing else but how much more water we need for the moats, and how sweet it is that children of a certain age don’t walk, but run, no matter how small the distance. And my ears are full of the sweet sighs and grunts of a new life. I have been present in my motherhood, having nothing else tugging at my attention. I return now to a life conflicted. I will have to go through my internal drawers and closets and create more space. Perhaps I will uncover a moonlit stream of space for spirit and self and soul. For God to leak in and help me to be present. And remind me to leave some drawers unoccupied, some walls blank, some space between my ribs to breathe.
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July 30, 2010 by Bonnie Beth Chernin
Bema Comfort
I attended religious school, called Hebrew School back then, at a time when girls didn’t see much bema action.
Yes, I had a Friday night bat mitzvah and chanted a haftorah. And I had the privilege of being the first girl in my synagogue to say Kiddush during her bat mitzvah service. My sister had celebrated her bat mitzvah seven years earlier and chanted the Kiddush during her bat mitzvah when we lived in Youngstown, Ohio, and my parents, who wanted no less for me, took months to persuade our rabbi in Trenton, New Jersey to allow my chance.
But come Shabbat mornings, the mechanics of the Torah service eluded me, as I wasn’t taught to chant from the Torah or to dress it after the reader finished chanting from the scroll. Yet somehow I was taught the prayers for an aliyah, to sing along with my whole Hebrew School class.
So flashforward forty-some years when I find myself a member of an egalitarian congregation with ushers who one Shabbat morning offer me the sixth aliyah. (more…)
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July 29, 2010 by admin
Nothing New Under the Sun: Chelsea Converts Lately?
Chelsea Clinton’s looming nuptial festivities have the gossip blogs in a tizzy: what’ll she wear to walk down the aisle? Can mixed-faith marriages work? Who’ll she invite to the ceremony? And, is she really going to convert? Angela Himsel has a few insights into what that might be like, from her frank Lilith article 10 years ago on “What Converts Talk About (When Jews Aren’t Around).” Can’t wait to hear what Chelsea has to say!
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July 21, 2010 by Maya Bernstein
A Room of One’s Own, In Time
There was a great cartoon in the New Yorker magazine a couple of weeks ago; it pictures a mother driving with her three kids in the back seat. The kids were hollering, fighting, and, one could safely assume, had very sticky fingers. The mother’s eyes were narrow slits in the rear-view mirror. The bumper sticker or the back of the car reads: I’d rather be working.
Over the past six weeks, during which I have been home with my newborn and two young children, one of whom is being toilet trained, I admit to hatching numerous plans to escape to my quiet office and its spacious rooms, far from the unquenchable, insatiable mouths of babes. But now, as the midpoint of my maternity leave is incomprehensibly already behind me, I contemplate returning to work with apprehension. Is it possible that this period of time is almost over? That to these days which fold over each other and melt together, clouded in the haze of interrupted sleep, will be added the extra responsibility of functioning in the work world? (more…)
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July 21, 2010 by admin
Letter from Jerusalem: Listening on the next generation of Conservative women rabbis
“Get yourself a teacher, acquire for yourself a friend.” – Pirkei Avot 1:6
Blessed are You, God, who clothes the naked. My mother’s closet is full of clothing from various eras of her life. Suits hang in every jewel-tone from decades of shul-going. She has even saved her Bat Mitzvah dress, yellowed lace with patches of pastel. When I was younger, I used to love playing dress-up in her closet, awaiting the day I would grow into her clothes.
Among the diverse discussion topics when a group of women rabbinical students gathered in Jerusalem living rooms this past year was the contents of our own closets: how we see ourselves and how we are seen; the ways we choose to cover and uncover; the garments we have inherited and those we have taken upon ourselves. My hevruta (study partner), Kerrith Solomon, and I convened this group of women from the Jewish Theological Seminary and the Ziegler school so we could talk with our peers about things we have not yet had safe space to explore within our schooling, reclaiming and exploring our identities as women on our paths toward the rabbinate in the Conservative Movement. (more…)
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July 19, 2010 by Bonnie Beth Chernin
Hope for Deliverance
“I don’t like to think about the future. It freaks me out,” my nine-year-old daughter Rachel announces from the back of the car. She stopped using a booster seat a month ago, her height finally sufficient to require a simple seat belt.
Her announcement is in response to a Scholastic News article. Her third-grade class had read that morning about water found on the moon and the possibility of people making their homes there one day.
I ask Rachel if she would like that and receive her vehement reply. I am driving us home after her after-school program and my trying day at work. The day has also brought the news my mother’s blood pressure had shot up, and multiple phone calls with the insurance company about a biopsy I needed a month ago. Thankfully it turned out benign but left me with a claim mix-up I could use Columbo to unravel.
I brake for a red light. “Are you concerned about growing up or the future of the world?” (more…)
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