84 Spirituality Studies 10-2 Fall 2024 therapist. My values were Jewish, even if I did not know upon which they were based. I saw the injustices in the world, especially the ones that I had experienced at home; I identified with those who had been victimized, as I too had felt victimized. My work has always been about changing the world, perhaps a Jewish value that I took on without thinking of where it came from. I became a social worker, a professor, a writer on social justice, a political activist, and a practitioner of restorative justice, rarely connecting my Jewish upbringing with why I was doing this. 3 How the Transformation Began After retiring as a dean in California I was looking for community. There was a little progressive Jewish synagogue not far from my home and a friend invited me to attend. I remember the first high holiday when I saw the rabbi in a skirt; Kol Nidre was sung with a guitar. I was shocked since this seemed far from that which I had experienced as a child. One of the women there was talking about angels and I thought this was a strange, weird group of people. But I stayed because I liked the music and the rabbi had been a drag queen in another iteration. I thought these might be my kind of people. Because I often take on leadership positions, I was invited to join the board, which I grudgingly did, to be of service. The years went by and COVID hit, so we were not going to the building. We were on zoom and the music still gripped me; the rabbi’s drashes were meaningful and profound. I stuck around, slowly moving from the back row to the middle, as I became more imbedded in the community. Then in 2022 I was called to the ark during Kol Nidre where, as a board member I was handed the Torah to hold for part of the service. I had never in my life held one and I wept! It was a transformative moment for me, realizing how I had not been allowed access to the wisdom and teachings that influenced my life without knowing it. That night I wrote to the Rabbi, telling him how meaningful that moment had been for me. He suggested that I could now wear the Tallit (prayer shawl that Jewish men wore as they prayed). I said I could not; I had not done the work of reading Torah to be allowed to wear it, by my own judgment. I often felt distressed when I saw people who knew nothing about being Jewish putting it on to pray. So dear Irwin (the Rabbi) suggested that perhaps the time was now right for me to do the work, to read from the Torah. I demurred. I did not want to learn Hebrew; it had been difficult as a child, and I did not want to struggle with a new language at the age of seventy-eight. But I said that if I could do it in Yiddish I would like to try. What an offer I made! He took me up on the idea and the die was cast. I had signed on to have a Bas Mitzvah two years hence. I decided to call it a Bas Mitzvah because that is what it is called using the Ashkenazi Hebrew, rather than the contemporary Hebrew, which is Sephardic based on current Israelis language. 4 The Process Indeed, I did not realize what I had taken on! It was hard work. Even if I was going to read from the Torah in Yiddish, I had to learn the prayers and songs in Hebrew. It was a language that I still did not understand and was impossible for me to really get. I could read the letters, but the words were foreign to me. Yiddish was comprehensible, I could read the letters and if it was transliterated, I understood it completely. Irwin found me a Yiddish translation of the Parsha I would read, and I mastered that very quickly. It was clear I needed a teacher to help me with the Hebrew. Thus, I began to study with a member of the synagogue who taught young B’Mitzvah students how to read and sing in Hebrew. This man, Gesher Calmenson, became my guru. Not only did he teach me to read the Hebrew, but he also gave me access to the esoterica of Jewish thought. I began to see, while studying with him, just how deep and meaningful Jewish study could be. No longer was this study just about the letters and putting the words together. It was not about what I once considered “Bubbe Miesses” – grandmother’s tales about the Bible. Now it was about the numerology, the Kabbalah, the meanings of the stories we were reading. It was about the metaphors, the meaning behind the simple stories, the symbolism, and lessons for life they were conveying. I realized there was something there worth knowing. I remembered my father reading the Zohar when I was a kid; he told me that one had to be at least forty years old to access this information. Well, I was now seventy-eight and felt it was time to find out. There were times when I was studying with Gesher that tears came to my eyes because I was getting actual knowledge, access to the depth, the substance of Jewish ideas. I was given entry to the mysticism, the beauty of the thousands of years of thought that had gone into the creation of
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