In Praise of Daffodils

I wander’d lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o’er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host of golden daffodils

…

[And] oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude;

And then my heart with pleasure fills,

And dances with the daffodils.

Thus, William Wordsworth. When I first met Will, I was a junior in English at UCLA and I fell totally in love with his poetry. My personal bucket list includes a trip to England's Lake Country, to walk where he walked and, if I'm lucky, to see the clouds of daffodils that so moved him.

Once upon a time, part of my Shabbat preparation was to stop at a local market and pick up a bunch of flowers for my table. Whatever the weather, I loved to see the flowers brighten up my dining room. The challenge each week was to choose which vase I would use: the pretty blue one my future daughter in law gave me for Hanukkah one year? The green one that had held flowers from a dear friend? A glass one I'd picked up while trolling through an antique shop on one of my vacations? Choosing just the right vase was a part of my Friday preparation that was pure delight.

I almost never bought daffodils. I seldom saw them for sale. There were astromeria, that I dearly loved, because they lasted forever. There were lilies, tulips in season, everything but daffies. But I didn't care, because I had a patch of daffies in my back yard. They bloomed riotously every spring, and what I loved about them was their absolute joy at having blossomed. "Look at us," they seemed to yell from the ground. "We're here, we're happy, and our sole purpose is to make you happy." OK that's a little egocentric, I suppose, but they never failed to make me happy. They just kept blooming, long after I'd have thought they would be dead, and you could almost sense their eagerness to keep their beautiful golden heads straight up, proud of their role in my life.

In the years since I left that house and that community, I've missed having daffodils around. And with my budget barely leaving room for food and gas, I've given up on fresh flowers every Friday. It's a shame, because how beautiful the table would look with fresh blooms, but with my income reduced and all my vases in storage, what's the point? My Friday night table looks so different anyway - no special kiddush cup (but a nice wine glass), traveling candle holders instead of my mother's candlesticks...not having flowers seems to make sense.

Then I went to Trader Joe's last week, and to my delight they were selling little bunches of daffodils. You couldn't even see the blossoms because they hadn't opened, and a bunch could be had for a mere $1.99. That I could afford.

The vase? Don't be shocked when I tell you I've saved the blue holder from the 7 day candle I lit when my Aunt Gert died a few years ago. It's been in a box, waiting for use, and I dug it out on Friday, filled it with water, and immersed the cut ends of my daffodils-in-waiting into the vase.

It's taken a few days. But as I sit here, I can take absolutely mind-expanding delight in looking at a bunch of daffodils, fully open, smiling at me and enjoying the knowledge that they are bringing me joy.

Trader Joe's probably won't have those daffies all the time. Too bad. I love looking at them. I love the sunshine they bring into my life, especially when it's pouring outside. I love their exuberance.

Will loved to walk on the hills of the Lake Country and watch the waves of daffodils bobbing in the breeze. I used to love to look out my window and watch my daffies nodding in the New Jersey sunshine. What a gift to be able to enjoy my little handful of daffies now, for as long as they can keep themselves alive.

A Torch Passed and Reluctantly Accepted

When someone dies before their time, we rage and weep and wonder at the justice of it all (or rather the perceived lack of justice). Even when someone dies in old age, we aren't ready to let go (I'm reminded of a comment to the L.A. Times coverage of the death of John Wooden last year, "I know that everyone dies, but I was hoping in his case there'd be an exception"), but when that person is young, and filled with promise, and has already made an enormous contribution to the world, and has perhaps even touched us personally, we simply aren't ready to let go.

Debbie Friedman died this morning. Some of you reading this may not know who she was, so allow me a few lines to try to explain her.

Debbie Friedman was a musician, but she was more than that. She was a God-touched musician, a singer of achingly pure voice, a composer of heart-breaking melodies (and sometimes less heartbreaking than rollicking: "I am a latke" has entered the repertoire of all Hebrew school music teachers for Hanukkah enjoyment). She changed the nature of Jewish liturgical music, from the somber cantor-centered arias to guitar-accompanied, sing-along music that raised the souls of everyone who heard her and joined in with her.

She was a presence way out of proportion to the size of her person for perhaps three decades. Jewish conferences of Jewish professionals would feature her presentation, and even if the largest room available had been booked, there was inevitably standing room only, seating in the aisles, standing in the halls outside the doors. Everyone longed to be near her, to hear her music, to be healed by her songs and touched by her words.

It is inconceivable that she has died.

The Jewish world is rocked by her loss, and we struggle to face a future filled with what she left us but without the promise of her new music to come. There will be no more new music.

But here's what I believe. I believe each of us has been put here for a purpose. Some of us figure out what that is. Others never do. Still others trip over the purpose, do what we are meant to do, and then move on, never knowing how important our act was.

Debbie was meant to lift us. She was meant to infuse our souls with strength, the spices of havdalah at the end of Shabbat that would last across the week. She was meant to show us possibility, what Jewish music, what Jewish worship could be like. She was meant to open the door just a crack and give us a view to a different place.

She did that, and having done that, she was called home.

But now comes the real challenge. Having shown us what was possible, she passed the torch to us, to expect more in our services, to invest ourselves in our services, to reach out to others and with whatever gifts God has given us make of our congregations true communities.

When I have officiated at a funeral and accompany the family home to help them light the seven day shiva candle, I often quote the Proverbs that teach that God's light is the human soul. I reflect on the candle and note that the soul of the loved one we have just buried has been extinguished, but before it was, it lit sparks in each of those who loved them, and it's up to those that person left behind to keep those sparks alive.

If that is so for a person of modest reknown, known to family and dear friends, how much the more so is it so for someone like Debbie. She lit sparks of joy and God-love in each of us. Her fire has been extinguished, but our job has just begun - to keep those sparks alive. Sing her music. Create music of our own. With words or melody, reach out to God, express the fear, the joy, or the hope that within us. It's not just about singing her songs. It's about singing our own.

Y'hi zikhra barukh - may her memory be a blessing.

Why I Love This Country

When I was in rabbinical school, the message I got over and over again was that there's morality, which can be relative, and there's law. What might be "so unfair!" to one generation might be perfectly permissible or even necessary in the eyes of another. What mattered, said my law teachers repeatedly, was the law. Can the act be justified according to the law? Specifically, said my law teacher, Rabbi Joel Roth, if you can trace the law back to Sinai, you're on solid ground. Just to announce a law is "unfair" and therefore worthy of pitching is to allow contemporary sensibilities to determine what's acceptable. And "contemporary sensibilities" change. That's why they're called "contemporary."

I have been sputtering for a while over the dust-up over gay rights, and specifically gay marriage, in California. I cheered the ruling in 2008 that gays would be allowed to marry. I watched with disbelief when the returns came in on Election Night, as those on the other side of the gender rights divide cheered as Proposition 8, banning gay marriage in California, won handily. In California, I yelled? Here? In my home state? People are saying no?? How is this possible?

In the years since that vote, I've listened to gay people express their frustration at the inability of straights around the country to understand their point of view. I've watched state after state vote down measures that would permit gay marriages to be approved. And I've felt my blood pressure rise as I listened to the justifications of those on the right for their belief that they could determine by vox populi what is acceptable in this country.

The arguments have been made. Is there a point to repeat here that if the voice of the people had been sought in 1954, separate would have continued to be perceived as equal? In 1967, the voice of the people would have overturned the ruling that determined that couples of mixed race (i.e. a black person and a white person) may marry.

Another memory I have of rabbinical school is seeing a cartoon on the dorm room of a classmate. It showed a board room with the table surrounded by men in suits, and the caption read, "The Committee on the Status of Women." Every woman rabbinical student who saw the cartoon no doubt had the same reaction I did - we'd laugh if it weren't so true. The status of a minority is always in the hands of the majority. And when "contemporary sensibilities" determine the fate of the minority, and contemporary sensibilities are moving at a snail's pace (because who in power would ever choose to give it up?), the status quo remains, barring a miracle.

Sometimes, miracles happen, but those "miracles" are in truth only the triumph of dispassionate law over the emotions of the people.

The ruling this week by Judge Vaughn Walker was the triumph of law over the hissy fit of the people. It was the statement of American law that in order for something to be changed, proof (that old bugaboo) must be brought that the change is desirable. To overturn gay marriage, proof must be brought that such an institution is indeed as frightening and evil as it has been presented to be. That never happened, and the brilliance of the judge was that he was careful to document all the "proof" that was brought (one of the "expert witnesses" was someone who presented dire consequences of gay marriage and when asked the source of his findings, proclaimed, "The Internet." There you go - we all know that only truth is found in cyberspace) - or not brought - and to go point by point in explaining why the "evidence" brought by the defense was insufficient to allow Prop. 8 to stand. We understand that the next step will be a challenge on the appellate level, and the record of evidence brought and how it was evaluated will be critical in determining whether there is cause to vacate Judge Walker's ruling. The better his documentation, the better the chances for the anti-8 folks to maintain the ruling. And Judge Walker did a bang-up job.

Once again, I listened to NPR this morning, and once again my blood pressure went up. I heard people complaining that if gays are permitted to marry, straights will cease marrying and therefore procreating, and there won't be any more babies born in this country. Compare that with a recent study showing that there is a growing disparity between higher educated women having fewer children and women who are either less educated or in fundamentalist religious communities having large families (more on this in a later blog -stay tuned). Do these pro-8 people really think that if gay marriage is permitted, fundamentalist Christians and Muslims and Orthodox Jews will stop marrying and having children? Really?

The greatest threat to heterosexual marriage is heterosexuals. The divorce rate stands at 50%, without the help of gays. Children in heterosexual marriages continue to be confused, not because they have two mommies but because one of their parents (or both) seem to think that marriage vows are merely suggestions. Or "to love and cherish" means "to beat to a pulp." Children in heterosexual marriages are exposed to a huge spectrum of experiences, from healthy and loving situations to promiscuity and abuse. There are children of straight marriages who vow never to get married "if that's what it means to be married," or never to have children because "I never learned how to be a good parent from my dysfunctional parents." Prop. 8 does nothing to protect those children. Neither does it do anything to protect the gay children growing up in families where the presumption is that everyone is straight.

To paraphrase the cartoon from my Seminary days, the "Commission on the Status of Gays" is populated by straights, not one of whom understands what it means to be gay, or, since it's hard for anyone to truly "get" what it means to be part of a different population, is even willing to listen to what it means to be gay in America. A 10 year old whose friend has two daddies will not be "influenced to 'turn gay,'" but a 10 year old who knows he's different will be discouraged, despondent, and ultimately depressed if he sees no one in his life who is respected, admired, loved, and gay.

When Barak Obama was inaugurated nearly two years ago, I shelved my lesson plan for the day and decided to have a conversation with my 5th graders about the historical import of the day. They wrote prayers for him and his family. It was very cool. But I'm thinking in particular of one girl who asked how old his daughters were. When I replied, she said, "Oh, then Malia can be my friend, and Sasha can be my sister's friend." I smiled and agreed (from her lips to God's ears, but what a statement!)

It was 2008, and a little white, Jewish kid in the San Fernando Valley was thinking that it was cool that the president had daughters her age and her sister's age. It never once occurred to her that the fact that she was white and they weren't would be any kind of a problem. It was as natural for her to think of the Obama girls as friends as she would think of any new neighbor on her block.

Please God, may the days of stomping around like Rumpelstiltskin end, may the fear and the hissy fits and the circling of the wagons and the overwhelming sense of threat end, and may it be soon that our children can come home to talk about their friends with a different family constellation and find nothing unusual about it. And may the day soon come that gay kids no longer find suicide the only option as they come to terms with who they are.

What's the Big Deal?

This will be a very short post. I just want to know what's changed.

There was so much press about the wedding - no, the Wedding - this past weekend, and in particular among my colleagues about the nature of a wedding with a Jewish participant and a rabbinic co-officiant on a Shabbat afternoon, with huppah (bridal canopy) and a ketubah (marriage contract)... Mah pit'om? What's the deal all of a sudden?

Why are we suddenly so filled with opinion about the nature of intermarriage in this country? Are Marc and Chelsea the first couple to cross the religion line? Hardly. They're frankly not even the first celebrity couple to do so.

Think Caroline Kennedy and Arthur Schlossberg. Not a hiccup. Back in the 70s, Henry Kissinger chose to marry on a Saturday afternoon, and there was indeed a response in the Jewish community about his insensitivity, even though he was marrying a non-Jewish woman. Even Sandy Koufax, American Judaism's hero for not playing on Yom Kippur, married a non-Jewish woman.

So what's the big deal about Marc Mezvinsky?

And you know - that's not a rhetorical question. I don't understand why there's such an uproar, a struggle over "is this good for the Jews." This is not the first interfaith marriage to take place, not the first to have a rabbinic presence, not the first to have a huppah - no one mentioned whether he broke a glass. (For so many families, that's the essence of a marriage where a Jew is involved - you gotta break a glass.) Is this a trumpeting of our having Arrived - look at the celebrity family he's marrying into? Certainly this can't be about the threat of intermarriage - if this couple is the first glimmer of intermarriage you're reading about, what planet did you just arrive from?

So - somebody out there - please clue me in. What's the big deal?

I want my country back

I need to stop listening to public radio. Every once in a while, I hear a piece, or an interview, or a series of call-ins that sends my blood pressure through the roof. I suppose the alternative is to listen to a bit of Vivaldi and put my head in the sand, and I suppose I have an obligation to learn what's going on in the world. If someone wise out there knows how to listen to scary stuff calmly, let me know.

Here's my fear, the real fear. People like me are becoming a minority, and with all due respect, people like me are what made this country what it is - er - what it used to be. I'm not sure I like what my country has become.

When the Founding Fathers met to craft our Constitution, they argued and debated and realized that the only way to believe the infant country would survive would be through compromise. We have lost that skill. We have lost the recognition that everyone has something of value to add to the conversation, that (in Jewish terms) only disputes that are for the greater good are worth engaging in. Disputes not for the sake of heaven (to quote the Mishna) are forbidden, because they are about vanity, about the self, not about the greater good. And all I see around me are disputes that focus on the speaker, or the speaker's constituency, or the speaker's ratings or popularity. Everyone's talking, and no one's listening. Everyone insists on learning the black and white of issues, ignoring the fact that most of life is lived in shades of gray.

Further, as I recall, the Founding Fathers stipulated that the government shall make no laws concerning the establishing of a state religion. If only those on the far right would read the Constitution they profess to love, and note that when the laws of a country are in place to serve only one population, one faith tradition, to the point of making the participating in another faith tradition difficult, we have transgressed the Constitution. Ah, those pesky amendments.

Case in point: all those who rail against abortion seem to be blissfully unaware that there is more than one approach to considering the unborn fetus than the Catholic/Christian one. The Jewish tradition understands the issue is a complicated one (warning: gray area alert). Jewish law understands the fetus to be part of the woman until the birth process begins, and if the fetus is posing a threat to the health of the mother, the mother has an obligation to terminate the pregnancy to save her life. Of course, Judaism does not see abortion as birth control and understands the fetus as having the great potential for life, but until birth, the fetus is as much a part of the mother's body as a gangrenous limb.

So, pre-Roe v. Wade, if a woman sought an abortion because she was facing a medical issue (perhaps it was her fourth or fifth child and she had heart issues), she was simply prohibited from any conclusion to her pregnancy other than the birth of the child, even it meant the loss of her own life. Catholics may respond that a Catholic mother had been baptized while the baby had not, but that works only if you are a Catholic. Religious sensibilities drove (and continue to try to drive) the access to abortion by women who are not part of those religious communities. Preventing me from obtaining a safe abortion if my physical (or mental) health were at risk is denying me my rights under the First Amendment. Does anyone care?

So now, just last week, I was astonished to hear about a move to get yet another proposition onto the California ballot in November (you gotta love California - get enough people with an opinion together with a petition and you can get anything on the ballot - worse - get enough other people together who like what the petition said, and you get new law, whether it's moral or not, whether it makes sense or not - witness Prop. 8 and gay marriage). The people behind this new initiative, Rescuemarriage.org (this is not an endorsement), want to go Prop. 8 one better - to truly save heterosexual marriage (I still don't get why it's being threatened), we need to make divorce illegal in California. Now, if you want to leave your marriage, you have to leave the state.

There are those who believe the whole proposal is a satire, like Swift's "A Modest Proposal." If you look at the organization's website, it's not funny. They're dead serious. And not only are they proposing to make life even more difficult for those in abusive situations, once again, they are ignoring centuries of Jewish law by claiming that the notion of divorce is a relatively recent construct. Jesus, they say, never talked about divorce.

Maybe not, but Moses sure did. Divorce is part of Jewish law, again, not encouraged ("when a man divorces the wife of his youth, the stones of the Altar weep") but permitted because Jewish law recognizes the humanness of the partners in a marriage.

I might also point out that gays who decide they have been living a lie and need to come out and live openly as gays (and their spouses) are also condemned to a life of unhappiness. But hey, who cares?

My kvetch? The underlying complaint I have that ties all these issues together? I've disappeared. Not only me, but everyone like me, people who are Jewish and who have a basic understanding of Jewish law, and who would expect to live according to Jewish law to the extent it does not countermand civil law. (The rabbis of the Talmud taught that the law of the land is the law, but there are limits. If a law were passed tomorrow to require everyone to eat a pound of bacon every week because the poor pig farmers are in trouble, we would argue vehemently against this law.)

"The Judeo-Christian tradition" is a fallacy. "Judeo" is put at the front of "Christian" to assuage the rest of us, but in truth we do not agree with everything our Christian neighbors believe, and yet despite our greater visibility in contemporary culture (and all the excitement over the Clinton wedding), our essential differentness is being ignored, or deemed irrelevant, and the result of that perception of irrelevance is the arrogance of presenting laws that satisfy only the Christian approach to private lives.

I don't like disappearing. I don't like feeling irrelevant. What's the point of feeling comfortable announcing I'm Jewish, or a rabbi, if that doesn't mean anything? I have more to bring to the table than just "why don't you accept Jesus?" No one asks. Because no one cares. I hate that.

What Is It About the Summer?

Tisha B'Av is right around the corner. The ninth day of the Hebrew month of Av is the day on which the entire Jewish people sits in mourning - for the destruction of the two Temples in ancient Jerusalem, and for a litany of traumas that befell our people across the centuries. The Talmud teaches that the first Temple was destroyed as punishment for the fact that we refused to give up the worship of idols, and that the second Temple was destroyed as punishment for the sin of causeless hatred of Jew against Jew.

We sit on the floor in the position of mourning. The lights are dimmed. We read from Aykha, the book of Lamentations, in a mournful key. Our shoes are off. In many synagogues the curtain - the parokhet - is removed from the ark holding the Torah scrolls, as a sign of communal mourning. We fast for 25 hours, the only other full fast in the Jewish year besides Yom Kippur. We invariably enter the sanctuary slowly, sadly, knowing we are about to observe a day that is heavy with memory, all of it bad.

In recent years, many have questioned the need to observe Tisha B'Av. How long, they wonder, do we need to mourn the destruction of a place where animals were sacrificed? It's been two full millennia. Time to get over it. And further - we cannot mourn the loss of Jerusalem, because after all, Jerusalem is ours. We can get on a plane, land in Tel Aviv, and after a short ride into the hills, we can walk the sacred streets once again. How long can we mourn?

And yet.

I remember nearly 15 years ago, members of Masorti (Conservative) communities decided it was time to challenge the power of the ruling Orthodox rabbinate in Israel. Since the reunification of the city in 1967, the Rabbanut had decreed that the plaza in front of the Western Wall (Kotel HaMa'aravit) was a synagogue, and as such would follow the rules of all synagogues in the Orthodox world - i.e., there would be a separation between men and women. For the purposes of individual prayer, this might not seem like an imposition, but on a day like Tisha B'Av, when Jews come together as community precisely in the place where the destruction took place, it was important to daven (participate in a service) in that place as a community as defined by those individuals. In other words, Conservative and Reform Jews needed to come together in a mixed group in the plaza before the Kotel. It was decided to assemble far at the back of the plaza, not near the Kotel itself, since (a) the area immediately before the Kotel had a separating wall (mehitza) enforcing the gender separation and (b) our desire to daven as a mixed community should not be seen as forcing itself onto the sensibilities of those for whom that kind of congregation is offensive. We did not seek to offend others. Others were not so kind to us.

For two years, Conservative Jews came together to daven the Tisha B'Av service. And for two years, they were harrassed by yeshiva students nearby, pelted with a variety of substances, and hassled by the police. The upshot of the confrontation was the allocation of another location near the Temple Mount, now called the Kotel HaMasortit, but found down at a lower level. Some are pleased to have a place to daven without hassle. Others find the out-of-the-way location a way of shunting us egalitarians out of sight and therefore out of mind.

But I have a clear memory of the first year the Masorti community attempted to hold a mixed service at the back of the Kotel plaza. I remember going into my synagogue sanctuary in the afternoon, opening the doors to the ark, wrapping myself in my tallit, putting on my tefilin, sitting on the floor and crying. I wept for fear, because I still believe, in a deep-down irrational place, that we were given our homeland back because it was time for us to have it back, but that, as the Torah tells us, we still have to deserve it. And we as a nation were behaving so badly that it would not be a stretch for God to say, "OK you've had your privileges long enough. Back to your rooms."

Years passed, Israel faced challenges, fought back rocket attacks, learned to be tough as only someone can who grows up in a tough neighborhood, and now it's 2010 and I'm fearful again.

I look at the state of Israel, that beautiful piece of real estate at the far end of the Mediterranean, and I want to be proud. We have developed into a center of high-tech innovation. We are a lone outpost of democracy in an area run by autocrats and fear. When a disaster happens, anywhere in the world, Israel is a first responder, sending equipment, skilled professionals, and supplies. We were in Haiti before the United States. I am so proud of Israel.

And then I watch to see how the ultra-right-wing Rabbanut seeks to dismantle all that is good about Israel and turn her into another theocracy in an area filled with theocracies. The validity of conversions by non-Orthodox rabbis (a redundancy, since Orthodox rabbis have stopped teaching for conversion) has been called into question, and women who have the temerity to wear a tallit and tefilin in public are attacked. The women who meet monthly as a women's group on the women's side of the Kotel mehitza are harrassed, have to fear having chairs thrown at them, and all because they wear tallit and dare read from a Torah scroll. A woman was assaulted while waiting for a bus because a man saw the impressions of tefilin straps on her arm and began assaulting her when she confirmed that indeed she had put on tefilin that morning. And now a woman has been arrested for carrying a Torah.

There is no halakhic (legal) basic for any of these insults, only the frantic desire on the part of the Orthodox authorities to narrow the definition of who is a Jew and how can we define normative - no, strike that - just Jewish behavior. How do we worship as a Jew, as individuals or as a community? Who may wear the Jewish prayer uniform? Authorities across the Jewish spectrum are divided, but clearly the Rabbanut is certain about their position, and their position seems to be the only one that matters.

And so the rest of the Jewish world watches as Israel is being pulled further and further to the right Jewishly, further and further away from the rest of the Jewish world. We feel more and more estranged from our home, a heartbreaking reality.

Jew is fighting Jew again. World Jewry is enraged at the passage of the conversion bill by the Knesset. Women and men everywhere are appalled at the arrest of Anat Hoffman for carrying a Torah. Rabbis are expressing concern for the safety of their communities on visits to Israel - "Will our women be assaulted for showing the imprint of tefilin straps?"

It's the summer again. Tisha B'Av is around the corner again. And the actions and decisions coming from Israel are once again threatening to divide the Jewish people. We no longer have a Temple that God can take from us. We have only our land, a blessing for the past 62 years. And once again I will go to services Monday night and Tuesday morning, and I will cry for what we lost millennia ago, and I will cry for what we are losing today.

What is it about the summer? What is it about this time of year, that the tensions between the ultra-Orthodox and the rest of Israel (and world Jewry) come to a head? Have we learned nothing after the losses of the millennia? Or will we continue to fight, Jew against Jew, no matter the price?

You Never Really Leave

I knew when I began at the synagogue that I might not be there more than a year. I knew that I'd be there only twice a month, for a weekend. Little chance to really bond with the community. I'd preach. Meet with the kids. Teach a class. Read some Torah. How much could I connect, really?

It's surprising how much you take with you when you leave, and how much you leave behind. I met older people who are struggling with loss of independence and looming health crises. I met kids who were overflowing with energy and questions. I met people who became dear friends and who are now struggling with their own health issues. I met people on life journeys and was privileged to help them to their next milestone. I was their rabbi, and now that I'm no longer there, I'm still there.

I still worry about the people with health issues or loved ones with health issues. I still want to answer all those kids' questions. I still want to know what questions my adult learners have. I want to be able to recommend books.

The time has come to leave, and yet part of me is still there, and they will always be with me. It's the challenge of the rabbi - of any pastor, really. When you leave, you don't really leave, not if you've done it right.

I have a colleague who speaks of rabbis as symbolic exemplars. I'm not perfectly clear what that is, but I think it has something to do with our representing God in people's lives. If we are accessible, God is accessible. If we are available to bring comfort, it's God (or the Jewish community) that is bringing comfort. It's a lot of pressure, but I've seen people's faces change when I walk into a room. It's not ME, it's The Rabbi. And I know that if I don't extend myself to my community, they do will not believe that God cares about them. That may sound arrogant, but in truth it's a very humble statement. Because it's not about me, it's about making God's presence being felt in a community. And when you make yourself accessible to others, they leave parts of themselves with you, and you never leave.

I still think about people in my first congregation in eastern Connecticut. My dear little shul in New Jersey. Even the people in my one-year interims in Philadelphia and Memphis. They remain part of me, populate my interior landscape with their search, their triumphs, their celebrations and their losses. And far from feeling burdened by their presence, I feel privileged to have been part of their lives and to have had them part of mine.