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I have tried many times to reject Judaism, but I have always been pulled back in.
The first time was when I was in 10th or 11th grade, at Temple Sinai in Marblehead, Massachusetts – a seacoast town about 20 miles north of Boston. It’s a conservative synagogue – a right wing conservative synagogue. I went to Hebrew school three times a week and I actually learned something there; I went to junior congregation every week, where I wasn’t allowed to do anything. (Well, I participated, but my brothers led, and I couldn’t do that because I was a girl). I declined having a Bat Mitzvah – this was 1973 – because they wouldn’t let me do anything meaningful, so I said, “I’m not doing this.” I traveled to Boston for Hebrew High School. I belonged to USY.
I had the whole conservative upbringing, except that in my house we didn’t observe much. My father had grown up Conservative, my mother was a Yiddishist/socialist (maybe Communist) who was a bit uncomfortable with home rituals. We didn’t like candles on Friday night; we didn’t do kiddush. We didn’t do Shabbat except for going to junior congregation, but we did do Pesach with a ton of singing.
Anyway, I was sitting at Temple Sinai on the high holidays, thinking about things, and I became outraged at the fact that God had ordered the children of Israel to wipe out the tribes of Canaan and conquer the land. I thought, “What kind of religion is this? We’re supposed to be getting moral instruction from this religion? Forget about it. I’m rejecting it.” So I told my parents I was rejecting Judaism, and my mother got very upset. I think my mother didn’t really like any form of rebellion, and she was very upset about this. She said we had to call my brothers back from college. They talked and talked and talked to me and finally wore me down. “You’re not going to go to services?? You’re not going to do Passover at all??” “Okay, fine. I’ll do those things. But I’ll do them as an outsider.” I belonged to the Latin Club at that time – I was a nerdy child and that has continued throughout my life. “I’ll do it like we do Latin Club things. I’m an outsider, but I’ll do it.”
So I continued on. As I was starting college, my main view of religion was that it was a force of division, hatred, and war. But I had the opportunity to go on a tour of England with my college chorus and different communities hosted us. When we came to a small town, it was the church that brought people together to host us –the most amazing hospitality. I had a feeling that it was the church, it was actually religion, that motivated this act of community and kindness. And it flipped me around.
When I returned to college, I thought, “I’m going to major in religion” and I did. My program had us visit different religious ceremonies and write papers on them; I really enjoyed it. I’d never been to a Catholic mass, and the drama and the incense and the music – everything – was so impressive to me. I loved the Easter morning sunrise service at a monastery. It was gorgeous, the transition from darkness to light and joy. I thought, “We don’t quite have this. We have Yom Kippur, where it’s all dark, dark, dark – and then we eat! Anyway, on my own – this wasn’t part of the program – I went with my Catholic friends on Yom Kippur to see the Pope on Boston Common and I ate ice cream. I was doing my own thing.
I was very attracted to Buddhism, both academically and practically, because Buddhism made sense to me, and it continues to make sense to me, especially the way it’s come over to the West. You’ll hear a bit more about that, but the basic concept is that there’s impermanence in life, there’s flux in life and what gets us into trouble and suffering and pain is that we keep acting as though life is solid, as though people are going to be around, and we’re going to be alive and everything’s going to be good. It’s the clinging to that view that brings us suffering. Buddhism also gives you a technology for helping to reduce the suffering. I thought Buddhism was a really sensible religion, but I never learned to meditate at that time. I bought a book, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, that said to just start. So I sat on my bed, I tried, but I didn’t know what I was doing and gave up. Meditation had to wait.
Another thing that happened in college was that I wanted to study ancient Near Eastern religion, like what the Canaanites practiced. I had read The Source by James Michener, which I loved. I told my department what I wanted to do, and they said, “You have to study Bible.” And I said, ” Bible? I’m getting away from Judaism!” And they said, “That’s the main source.” So I studied Bible and Biblical Hebrew – and I loved the text study, the close reading, the language. But I still wasn’t connecting much to Judaism. I think I went to Hillel between zero and one time in my college years!
One more venture outside of Judaism was in my early 20s after I’d graduated from college. I had moved to Baltimore and had a therapist at the time who was very boundary crossing. He had encouraged some of his patients who were merely a bit maladjusted to get involved in something called Siddha Yoga. Siddha Yoga is not like you might imagine – a yoga studio with yoga mats. It’s full-blown Hinduism. I got quite involved. I went to practice sessions on Sunday night and traveled to retreats. There was a guru and statues and leis and colors and a lot of incense and chanting and meditation. I learned to meditate in that mode, but I didn’t have – or didn’t absorb – a more mature spiritual instruction. I had an overweening spiritual ambition. I wanted to be good at spirituality. I wanted to have that mystical union, I wanted the guru to recognize me the way she recognized my friend and gave her a little gift. People were reporting visions they had while meditating. I wanted that – and I wasn’t getting any of it. What finally drew me away was chanting in Sanskrit. I realized, “I have a sacred language, and this is not it.”
I was incredibly fortunate to connect with a group in Baltimore I had come to know slightly, the East Bank Havurah. It was an amazing group for a lot of reasons, but especially for me, because several members had been involved in an Eastern tradition and come back to Judaism. They had a certain vibe or spirituality that was helpful for me, and they actually did Jewish – we had services, I learned to layn Torah and to lead parts of the service. We met alternately on Saturday mornings and Friday nights – it was the real thing. And I realized that what I was doing there was much more important to me than my work – which I believed in – but this was where my heart really was. They encouraged me to go to the Havurah Institute, a summer retreat, which I did. I had a teacher named Rabbi Sami Barth, who led a series that exposed me to Rabbinic texts – Mishna and Talmud. Oh my God, I loved it! Sami and others encouraged me at that point to go to Pardes to study in Jerusalem and to consider rabbinical school. I did both. I considered rabbinical school seriously four or five times during my life, and maybe made a mistake in not going. And I went to Pardes, where the first thing that happened was that I met Avi. He was in Israel for his rabbinical program and he decided to extend his stay – he thought it was because he wanted to do more text study, but maybe it was to meet me. Our relationship developed quickly.
Maybe I have rose colored glasses, but I feel like studying at Pardes was the best learning experience of my life. First of all, I just love text study and it was all about that. It was learning in partnership, hevrutah study (and I’m still close to one of my hevrutah partners). The teachers loved teaching us; they loved it when we got excited about the material. They brought us into their homes – and they taught us music! I have associations of specific melodies with each teacher, which is just lovely. We also had a Shabbat community. I had never done Seudah Shelishit at the end of Shabbat – singing while the light is dimming. It was wonderful.
When I came back to the United States, Avi was finishing with rabbinical school and I thought, “How am I going to continue this?” At that point I wanted to learn more so I could provide educational resources to groups like my Havurah. I talked to a couple of Avi’s mentors. One of them said, “You’re going to need a credential in the Jewish community – either rabbi or a Ph.D.” The other one said, “Avi’s almost done with rabbinical school and two rabbi families are hard, so maybe you should take another approach if you think you can.” So I started a Ph.D. program and did all the course work. Again, I loved the text study. It was at that point that I started to develop a more mature understanding of rabbinic text. I love its diversity – how different opinions sit right next to each other on the same page. They are not flattened, and we’re not trying to resolve them – and the Bible is bumpy and unresolved as well. I just love that about rabbinic texts. Any time that I have an opportunity to share them with you, I will. Anyway, I did not end up finishing graduate school. I wasn’t all that motivated to get a Ph.D. and have an academic career and things got difficult when our son was born.
The next phase of my life involved being Avi’s wife and being our son Rafi’s mother. Many of you know that we have a son with profound disabilities and challenges, and it’s been a really hard road. I lost my ability to pray during the first dire period of his life. And at that time, I still was maintaining a little bit of a magic feeling. Everybody on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where we lived, had him on their misheberah list and Tibetan Buddhists were praying for him. There was some part of me that believed that between the prayers and craniosacral therapy and homeopathy and whatever else we were doing, something would turn around for him. Ultimately, it certainly did not. So prayer became very hard for me; I fell away from it. That was many years ago, when Rafi was three or four, and now he’s 31. I think what I’m left with, which I actually do appeciate, is a kind of a yearning that I express in prayer and song. I’ve tried to think about this yearning. It’s undirected. I don’t actually direct my yearning to a god or seek out a relationship with a god or explicitly seek an answer from a god, but I will “pray,” or most often sing, about it. Like the song Chazzan Jessi taught at the High Holidays, rahamanah d’ani le’aniyei, “Compassionate one, who answers those who are impoverished and those who have broken hearted, answer us.” I say this with real feeling, but it’s undirected. That’s where my spirituality is now. The other aspect of my spirituality was finally becoming involved with Buddhism and learning to meditate, which was has been very, very helpful for coming to terms with my life. I have to say I’m not doing any of that now. Part of it is that I got busy, and part of it is our son now requires so much skilled and specialized care that it’s hard for me to get away.
As for being the rabbi’s wife: the good parts are being involved with text study and music and community – that’s been a pleasure. And Avi is my greatest booster. The communities he served have been so warm and interesting: first Shirei Shalom in Monroe, CT; then a much larger synagogue, West End Synagogue in New York; and we came here in 2001. But I was so nervous about being the wife of a rabbi because I’m very socially anxious and, contrary to what Fran says, I have no domestic skills. (I can cook three things, but Fran likes them all.) It’s been a pleasure for me in these congregations to develop my capacity as a teacher and to be able to share the things I’m learning in a way that’s very enjoyable for me and I think for others as well.
A highlight of our time here has the community’s embrace of our son, Rafi. In the early days, he was mobile. He was able to come to synagogue. He would wander around on the bima, up and down the steps and across. The community provided help so that I could participate in the Torah service. Somebody would watch Rafi in Avi’s office and do puzzles or read books with him. It was a community for our whole family, for Rafi too.
When he turned 13, we developed a ceremony that was not a bar mitzvah, because that was not going to be appropriate for him. We called it a bar kehillah ceremony because we wanted to recognize his relationship with the community and how the community had embraced him. It was just so lovely. We did a very, very simple ritual and Cantor Neil Schnitzer and Betsy Alexander led some music and dancing afterwards. The board, with Cantor Neil’s help, made a CD of Rafi’s favorite songs, which they gave to us along with an amazing certificate. It was decorated by our friend Fran Gallen, artist extraordinaire, and it says, “The board of directors, congregation, staff, and faculty of Society Hill Synagogue wishes mazel tov and happy birthday to Rafi Winokur on this day…as Rafi becomes bar kehillah, “son of the community” at Society Hill Synagogue. His love of music, song, and prayer touches our hearts and enriches our lives.” Even later, when his condition had declined but I was able to bring him from time to time, his favorite song was ilu finu, and Chazan Jessi would bring it back again, even if the time for the prayer had passed. Society Hill has been a wonderful community for us as a family.
I would like to say, I’m up here with somebody who actually has given so much to the community, as have all of my predecessors in this role. I wish I could have done more, and I would like to do more, and someday, maybe soon, I’m going to retire from my job and I will do more. Thank you so much.
