Friday Dispatch: Find Out What Is Awaiting You

Feeling the fear and doing it anyway

Friday greetings,

Forty-eight hours from now, I’ll be at Logan airport boarding an El-Al flight to Israel. I just completed my online check-in and also registered my trip with the U.S. State Department.

My next Friday Dispatch will be on July 26. It’s possible I’ll share while I’m traveling, but I want to be as fully present to my time there as possible so I’m giving myself permission to leave that wide open and not commit to anything. I wasn’t nervous until I was, and now, well, the only thing to do is to start packing and proceed with this plan I began making back in February when I learned about the Shalom Hartman Institute.

I originally planned to attend the Community Leadership Program, but when I reached out to the Institute with some questions, the program’s director suggested I consider attending the Rabbinic Torah Seminar instead. To say I was surprised would be an understatement. But I recognized almost immediately the cosmic continuity of this opportunity and said yes, despite any self-doubt or fear that would certainly have kept me from accepting such an unexpected invitation.

(Who am I to… / Who am I not to…)

*

A memory.

Twenty-three years ago, when I was the Hillel director at the University of Vermont, I had the opportunity to study, all expenses paid, for a month at the Pardes Institute for Jewish Studies in Jerusalem. I was 27. As much as I yearned for such an experience, I could not bring myself to go. I canceled, opting instead for an unpaid month off from work.

Not long after, on a stunningly beautiful September morning, I went to pick up my outfit for Rosh Hashanah services on campus, which I was responsible for planning. The news blared from a small TV in the corner of the dry cleaners on Cherry Street. Something about a plane crash?

I hurried to my car, where I turned on the radio, then into my house, where with growing urgency I told my then-husband to turn on the TV. We watched as the second plane hit. We watched as the towers crumbled. Lower Manhattan, so known and intimate-feeling, I was convinced surely we’d know half of the people who’d been there. An epicenter of connection, particularly Jewish connection. The shock, as everyone who was old enough to remember, was beyond description.

I convened a gathering for any students who wanted to be together that night, for the comfort of each other’s presence. I participated and co-led High Holiday services, despite the fact that many of the students knew far more about Jewish holidays and rituals than I did.

This was how I learned – by being with, by doing, by osmosis and intention – even as I hadn’t yet been able to bring myself to go to Israel. I’m not sure if it was terrorism I was afraid of or opening to a part of me I wasn’t yet ready to encounter more fully. Likely a combination of the two.  

In any case, it would be another 18 years before I visited Israel for the first time, in 2019 with my parents and daughter. We had an Israeli guide for much of the time, who drove us here and there – from the northern border to the Galilee to the Negev desert and the Dead Sea. I peppered him with questions about the West Bank, visible as it was from the roadside, questions filled with idealism and naïveté. Just as I knew so little about Jewish practice as a Hillel director and learned “on the job,” here I was in Israel, perhaps only just beginning to realize how little I knew.

I did know feelings. I knew my soul-level experience of belonging from the moment we arrived. I knew this was the place I’d spent decades dreaming about, quite literally, as if it had been mapped on the insides of my being before my birth. I knew it was “complicated.” I knew I could not suspend my beliefs as a liberal American committed to democratic values and human rights when it came to the Occupation, even as I had barely studied how the Occupation came to be, or why it persisted. I also knew that Israel was the only democracy in the Middle East, that millions of Israelis were working for a better and more just reality and future for all, and that many surrounding nations had been hellbent on its eradication since its creation.

*

In recent years, I have cringed at the right-wing Israeli government and its supporters justifying an expansionist agenda rather than working towards secure and sustainable ways of co-existing. And, particularly since October 7, I have also cringed at the blanket opposition to Israel and Zionism on the American left, often belying a shocking lack of empathy for Israelis and leaving little if any room for multiplicity, nuance, and the legitimacy of Israel’s very existence.

I have spent much of this year in a state of agony – at times defensive and self-protective, at times undone by grief at the magnitude of human suffering on both sides, at times beside myself with frustration and anger, at times afraid of the chasm between ideals and realities, and at times simply too overwhelmed by all of it to know what I think or feel at all. I have been in conversation with so many people who feel similarly, while also seeing some of my friendships strain and even sever as a result of fundamentally different ways of seeing and understanding, as if we are truly living on different planets.

Spoiler alert and “duh” of the century: None of it is easy or simple.

*

And what my place is in any of this, I honestly cannot tell you, only that there is a call that keeps calling. How best to heed this call may be one of the clearest, and most challenging, throughlines of my life.

I heard it in college when I dove into researching and spending time in Soviet Jewish refugee communities, in part as a way to begin understanding my own identity as a Jew with no Jewish education. I heard it in my dorm room in 1995, when it first dawned on me to become a rabbi. (I wasn’t ready.) I heard it when I accepted a job as a Hillel director, despite a wild lack of experience, and even when I turned down that chance to study at Pardes. (I wasn’t ready.) I heard it when I gathered and held space for the shock, grief, and fear of those Jewish students on 9/11, many of whom had strong ties to NYC. I heard it throughout two blessed pregnancies and, surrounded by community, when our children received their Hebrew names.

This call led me to study to become bat mitzah in my mid-40s, a commitment that deepened my commitment to participating in Jewish communal and ritual life. I heard it when I began writing and sharing liturgical poetry, and when I agreed to serve as the Poet Laureate of our synagogue during the disorientation and isolation of the Covid lockdown. This call practically sang through me when I applied to the Creative Facilitation Fellow training with the Jewish Studio Project. And it placed an easy "yes” on my lips last fall when I was invited to join the board of our synagogue.

Now, as my nervousness kicks in – and it is kicking in – this call is saying:

Don’t cancel. Go. Find out what is awaiting you.

Is this utter foolishness? An act of faith? Thoughtful and grounded? Maybe. Maybe, even, all of the above, which of course would be the most Jewish answer.

*

Two years ago, Rabbi Sharon Brous gave a Yom Kippur sermon called The Angels Among Us. I am currently listening to her new book, The Amen Effect, where this sermon is now a chapter. (Incidentally, R’ Brous will be at the seminar I’m attending in Jerusalem and I am greatly looking forward to hearing her speak in person!)

I want to share a couple of passages from this sermon/chapter:

“I know you’ve encountered angels. The quiet whisper, the mysterious presence. The person who gave you a loan when you were desperate, and then wouldn’t let you repay it. The one who calls you every Friday for three years just to check in, after your son tragically died on a Friday. The one who sat with you in the darkness, not to cheer you up, just to be beside you. The one who said your loved one’s name at kaddish when you couldn’t make it to minyan that morning. The one who told you her husband also had Parkinson’s, and she could help. The one who saw your beauty and your promise, when you could not.

Yes, there are angels here too.

And here’s the second thing I’m asking you to consider: you may be one of them.”

She goes on:

Andrew Solomon, Psychology Professor at Columbia University, wrote about the treacherous “gap between public triumph and private despair… with the outer shell obscuring the real person even to those with whom [we have] professed intimacy.” We know that this gap can be not only painful, but deadly.

In Jewish parlance, Imposter Syndrome is the problem of Zusya: Zusya, it is said, though he was a great rabbi, was afraid to die because he was ashamed to stand before God in judgment, having failed to live as deeply and faithfully as Abraham or Moses. His rebbe tells him that he’s got it wrong: God won’t ask why you were not Abraham or Moses. God will only ask: were you Zusya. Becoming ourselves seems to be a spiritual imperative of the highest order—for our own sakes and for the sake of the world.

…Because our tradition insists that every person is unique. That of the billions of humans alive on this planet, there has never been, nor will there ever be, another just like you. And that, in the language of Rabbi Shlomi Wolbe (Volbay), the great 20th century master of mussar, Jewish spiritual development,6 I, with my unique combination of capabilities, born in this particular time and place, [am called to what is] undoubtedly a unique task before me. And all creation is waiting for me… because I can’t trade my work (avodah) with anyone else in the world!

This is an incredibly daring theology—the idea that not only every angel, but every person is brought into this world with some higher purpose, in the language of the Slonimer Rebbe: a shlihut elyona. Something only we can do. Yes, just like the angels. Each one, on its own unique mission. Each one, a messenger of the Holy One.

I only wish we could hear this. We inflict so much pain on ourselves: we don’t believe that our voice will matter. We think someone else is better qualified. We’re afraid. Distracted. Busy!

I do not want to live in the shadow of self-doubt or the gloom of fear. Both are and would be easy to succumb to.

I know what it is to not be ready and to honor that not-readiness. I also know what it is to not be ready and to do it anyway, whatever the “it” may be. There is a time for both; one is not more worthy than the other.

It is taking a lot for me to choose the “doing it anyway” path right now. And yet the call is clear. There is something here about being qualified enough, ready enough, and having reason and purpose enough.

I don’t fully understand why this is my call, to be honest, but also accept that the mystery may be part and parcel of the task before me, which is to get on a plane on Sunday and step, once again, into this land that won’t seem to let me go.

To everyone who has expressed support, encouragement, and warmth, and to everyone who contributed to my GoFundMe for this trip, thank you. Your being-with-ness means more to me than I can say.

One of my biggest prayers is that becoming more and more fully ourselves only strengthens the connections we hold dearest and more cherished.

May it be so.

Shabbat Shalom and love,

Jena

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