More Questions than Answers

Note:  The essay below was written in conjunction with my earlier essay "Jew by Choice."  Here, as in my previous essay, I am attempting to answer, for me, just what it means to be Jewish, just how it is that we can connect to our faith, our community.  Most, I hope to find some answers to just how I can teach this to my son, pass it on so that he can find and foster that connection himself.  It is my hope that this essay will serve as a springboard for a dialog, so that we all learn from each other.  I may not have all the answers, and I'm certainly learning a lot of questions.  I am hoping you all can help shine a light for us all.  


~szr




So, on the first Sunday of the last year that I taught religious school, I challenged my seventh grade students:  "How do you have a conversation with God in the 21st century? Do you even have a conversation at all? How do you come to God when life is good? More, how do you come to God in times of anger or sadness or despair, when all you want to do is curse at God? How do you connect to Judaism?"

Being a fan of symmetry and neatly wrapped boxes, on the last Sunday of the last year that I taught religious school, I asked them: "What is it that connects you?  To Judaism, to God?  Are you connected?  What does it mean, to be a Jew?"

I don't know that I have answers any more now than I did when I started that year.  For that matter,  any more than I did when I lost God, when I was convinced that God had lost me, or any more than when I felt sheltered and carried gently in the palm of God's hand. But I know now, I think, what connects me.  I know, now, what binds me to my faith.

Hooray for me (she said, somewhat dryly) (after all, this is not about me).  But still I ask myself  "Have I done enough? Have I, have we, the community that surrounds and supports these questing, growing, questioning minds--- have we given them enough, to anchor them in their doubt and disbelief, to strengthen them in their journey to adulthood? Will they, too, become Jews by choice?"

I look at my son, who, at thirteen,  is right there: a jumble of belief and doubt and cynicism and hope, so ready to believe, so fearful of his honest disbelief.  What can I give him, that he will choose to be a Jew?  Around and around I go, on a merry-go-round of ask-and-answer.  And every so often, I'm lucky enough to stop long enough to hear enough from others who ride their own merry-go-rounds of hope and doubt and faith and love.

It lets me know, if nothing else, that I'm asking the right questions.  At least, that we are all asking a lot of the same questions.  And we're finding some... if not answers, then at least a little bit of clarity.  And so I can say: what does it take to be enough?  And I can start to hear the tin calliope merry-go-round music of an answer coming back to me:

It's about passion, I think.  My passion.  Our passion.  The passion and joy and exuberance of being Jewish: of study and community and service and prayer and family and God.  It's choosing and being engaged in the choice.  It's mindful and sometimes hard and sometimes frustrating and always, always--- it is ok to be passionate.  It's good to find the wonder and sense the awe of who we are and where we fit.  Judaism can be an intellectual pursuit.  But it is so much more; can be so much more.  If we allow it.  If we let it.  How can we not show that?  How can we not share that?

But wait-- there's more (she said with a cockeyed smile).  It's also about obligation.  We spend so much time sheltering our young, of giving and teaching and doing for them, we don't always remember to teach them their obligation to us, their community.  We don't always show them that there is as much joy, as much passion in obligation and service outwards as there is in being served.  God has taught us that lesson well: we are commanded to serve, we are bound by our obligations one to another, to our community and to God. It is that obligation that helps give us all a framework of connection that can transcend doubt or disbelief.

Passion.  Obligation.  Joy.  God.  Beginning the conversation.  Being caught in the act-- of choosing, every day, to be a Jew.  What else, what else, what else?  What am I missing?  What are we missing?  I don't know it all, not by a long shot.  But I've learned that there are those who can fill in the blanks, if I ask. There are those who can help me find the questions, if I listen.

So-- I'm listening. I'm asking.  Is it enough?  Is there joy enough, wonder enough to bridge the doubt?  What connects us?  What will bind us, one to another and to God?  What words do I give to my son, so that he can find his own way to choose, every day, to be a Jew?


And finally, I offer a small prayer of my own: that we can all listen in wonder, ask in joy, choose in faith, dance with God.  Amen.

Choreography in Holy Time

When my son was born, I cradled him against my heart, arms wrapped gently yet surely around his small and fragile body.  I would stand, holding him, our breaths mingled, our hearts beating in an elegant call and response, one beat to the next, and I would sway, a slow and gentle side-to-side rock that lasted for the eternity that exists between heartbeats.  I could feel his body relax into the motion, like oceans, like drifting, like peace.  I loved the simplicity of that rhythm, the warmth of him, the smell of his newness and his infinite possibilities.  As he drifted, as he gentled, my own body would react in kind, and I followed him.

These moments became our own Fibonacci sequence: the delicate curve of our bodies, in motion, at rest, in motion again, twined in an eternal spiral, more intimate than a lover's kiss, repeated again and again and again (world without end, Amen).

So, when I found God again---

No.  When I found the need to find a communal God---

No again.  When I found the need to be part of a community in order to engage and have a conversation with God as part of that community, I began to pray more formally.  I began, as it were, to daven.  In earnest. 

It started with Friday nights, happy, joyous celebrations that welcomed in the Sabbath Bride.  With music and prayer (and clapping, with an occasional crash of cymbal or the downbeat of a drum), we ushered in Shabbat, remembering the light of creation, the promise of wholeness and completion. I needed the community raucousness, the loud holiness of erev Shabbat to ease me into a different kind of worship.  My voice was rusty after years of disuse; there was comfort in the foot-stomping, toe-tapping, almost giddy prayer of those nights.

Saturday mornings came later for me, when I learned how to be still, when I learned that listening was as much a part of prayer as words and song.  They were all about quiet joy.  Intense, but soft and gentle.  If Friday nights were all a communal romp at play in the fields of the Lord, Saturday mornings (and, later, festival mornings) were a way to find individual sacredness in the midst of a holy community.

As I prayed, as I found my voice, something surfaced for me.  It was so familiar, a recognition that washed over me like pools of light: warm and gentle and cleansing.  As a child, I had seen my grandfather daven often enough.  In shul, he and his congregation would shuckle as they bentsched, a quick, rhythmic motion back and forth, as if they were all about to walk forward but were rooted in their places.  The more impassioned their prayer, the faster they moved.  Now, decades later, I found an odd connection to my grandfather: a choreography in holy time.  Prayer moved me, not just emotionally, but physically as well. 

There was a difference, though.  Where my grandfather rocked, forward and back, so ready to be propelled outwards, or upwards, to soar wherever it was that his prayer led him, my dance was different.  Mine was that gentle sway, the side-to-side rhythm I had found in my son's infancy.  Unlike the shuckling of my grandfather's generation, my sway seemed to be centered, to be grounded.  Don't get me wrong: one was not better than the other.  Just different.  I was not meant to be propelled, but to flow.  Like oceans or time.  Like light.

I cannot shake the feeling that there is something holy in that movement.  I can lose myself in that tidal sway, let the sacred wash over me and through me.  I can believe, in those moments, that the movement itself, that easy to-and-fro, is a prayer.

In fact, I know that it is: sacred and holy and eternal.  Like oceans or time.  Like light.

Like love.

My son is preparing to become a Bar Mitzvah.  To be fair, he is a Bar Mitzvah, having passed his thirteenth birthday just last month.  But in fine American Jewish tradition, he is preparing to lead a service, chant from Torah, teach us something about what he chants.  As I've tried to teach him, now, not only does the community have something to offer him, he now has something to offer the community.  It's a two-way street, and he has obligations to fulfill as he steps onto the path of burgeoning adulthood.

But as he prepares, I've really tried to stay out of it.  I'm his mom: I drive him to his tutor's, I remind him to practice (I remind him again to practice), I nag him a little about practicing, I'm planning the social festivities of the day itself (and thinking a lot about wardrobe.  Mine, not his.)  But I am not his teacher--- not for this.  Let others help him prepare.  I have, I hope, laid the foundation and given him guidance enough for him to follow his own path.  But there is a community upon whom he can depend, who have so much to teach and share with him.  Let him learn this lesson as well (I pray).

So I was surprised one day, when I reminded him, but had not reached the level of nagging at him, to practice, and he asked if I would chant with him.   Would I chant with him?  Would I pray with him?  Would I?

I held as still as I knew how, as if a delicate butterfly had lit upon my finger, shyly flapping its gossamer wings, so ready to take flight again.  I held my breath and nodded, hoping I appeared calm and nonchalant, while inwardly doing my little happy-dance-of-joy.  I did not want to frighten him away.

Would I pray with him?

And he came to me while I sat at the table, my not-so-tall boy, my almost man.  He came and stood and nestled his body next to mine, so that our hearts beat in time together, a gentle call and response.  And we prayed, my son and I, and we swayed, he cradled next to me, a simple back and forth, that gentle back and forth, slow and stately, a dance in holy time.  Like oceans, like time.  Like light.

Sacred and holy and eternal, like love.  Exactly like love.