In early May 2022, I took the next step on my learning journey about anti-Black Racism in America. I spent four transformative days on a Bearing Witness to Racism in America retreat in Alabama with Zen Peacemakers International (ZPI). This trip to Alabama was a lifetime in the making. It started in Newark, NJ in the 1970s when I would go on the weekends with my dad, Alan Grosman, to hang out at his law office. I met his Black Jazz musician friend who operated the elevator in the office building at the corner of Broad and Market. He became my piano teacher for a season. I asked why parts of Newark that we drove through looked devastated by violence and poverty - so very different from Short Hills where we lived.  Dad helped organize Freedom Bus Rides while he was a grad student in Political Science at Yale in the 50s and as a young lawyer he helped immigrants resolve their legal issues. He kept the family law office in Newark until the 1980s. I am one of the only white girls from Short Hills, NJ I know who spent my childhood weekends hanging out in Newark asking why it was so different from the surrounding communities.  My dad died at the end of May 2022. My anti-racism work is part of his legacy.
 
Over the years I read books on racism in America and the Black experience, attended anti-racism workshops, a microaggression training at work, book groups and meetings for white people working to eliminate our own anti-Black racism, and listened to my Black friends and the Black people in my life about their experiences in a racist society. Two years ago, I recommitted to making my anti-racism learning journey a consistent focus in my life. This was my response to the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement’s ask of white people to take the initiative to learn about the Black experience in America and not wait for Black people to explain it to us. Whatever your background, I invite you to join me on this journey. There is so much to learn and unlearn.
 
I first learned of the Zen Peacemakers Bearing Witness retreats 7 years ago when I did ZPI’s social entrepreneurship training at the Greyston Bakery in Yonkers, NY. Greyston pioneered open hiring, where people who are unhoused or recently incarcerated can get work and rebuild their lives without references or background checks; they just need to show up and do the work. My 2 days working on the factory floor, as the newbie, taking direction from people whose lives had been directly impacted by racism, homelessness, incarceration and poverty, was my first ZPI “plunge.” Greyston was started by ZPI’s founder, Roshi Bernie Glassman, a Jewish rocket scientist, turned social activist, Zen master. For more than 20 years Bernie led Bearing Witness retreats to Auschwitz, and the ZPI team led “plunges” into homelessness in New York City, where they would live for three days on the streets using only the resources available to the unhoused. This immersive approach to understanding oppression and healing called to me and I knew I would someday go on a Bearing Witness retreat.
 
During the first year of the COVID pandemic, I attended a virtual Bearing Witness retreat at Auschwitz and the first ever Bearing Witness to Racism in America retreat. There I encountered the work of the  Equal Justice Initiative  (EJI) to commemorate the 4000+ lynchings that happened in America with public memorials in the communities where they occurred as a tool to facilitate communal acknowledgement and healing. We participated virtually in a ceremony in Volusia, FL to remember the life and death of an innocent man killed by a lynch mob after being handed over by the police 85 years before. Community members gathered dirt from the site of the lynching to place in 2 jars to serve as a memorial in the Volusia community and at EJI’s museum. The white sheriff spoke at the event about how this type of injustice could never happen today in Florida, which was the hardest moment of the retreat for me in light of the death of George Floyd, and countless other Black people who are harmed in police custody in our times. This opened my eyes and my heart and left me wanting to learn more and do more about anti-Black racism. 
 
This spring I was among the first to sign up for the Bearing Witness to Racism in America retreat in Alabama. I was excited and nervous when I arrived in Birmingham, the site of the 1963 Civil Rights protests, whose images in the press of dogs and firehoses being set on children pushed segregation into the national consciousness, enabling the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. As we set the container for the retreat everyone shared their name and a word or phrase about what they were feeling. My word was gratitude - the gratitude expressed In the Shehecheyanu prayer: 
 
I am grateful to be alive and to be sustained to reach this season. 
 
I am grateful for the teachings of Bernie Glassman and the Zen Peacemakers' tradition of bearing witness retreats where a group of people can gather to share a learning, heart-opening journey and draw strength and inspiration from all we encounter and from each other. And then continue to ask the question “what is my response? What is my action?” 
 
“What happened here in Alabama was a human rights issue not a civil rights issue. In this case the marginalized community was Black.” This was the key message I heard that first night at our opening gathering from Timarie, a local racial and social justice activist in Birmingham, whose great uncle was murdered by the Klan for being a union organizer. We watched a montage of the faces and names of dozens of Black folks killed by police or lynched and Timarie emphasized that they each had plans and families and lives interrupted. Her call to action for us was: “What are you going to do with this experience? What is your piece?”  As I walked the following morning among the sculptures in Birmingham’s Kelly Ingram Park, through a narrow passage with life-size bronze dogs lunging at me, I could imagine what it was like to be there on that day in 1963, watching children get beaten by the police, and feel the desperation that drove the movement. I knew my piece was to share my experience with my community and to encourage people I know to take their own next step on their learning journeys about racism in America, past and present.
 
Nothing prepared me to encounter EJI’s Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration in Montgomery, which teaches the history of Black people in America. Entering it felt like entering the US Holocaust Memorial Museum - emotionally overpowering, heartbreaking, and profoundly important. So important that I want to tell everyone I know to go there.  The Legacy Museum is an immersive experience. I entered a gallery surrounded by video walls of crashing waves and sculptural forms of people struggling, depicting the middle passage, which transported 12.5 million people from Africa to the Americas and left 2 million dead on the bottom of the sea. It tells the story of the economic impact of the slave trade on cities up and down the eastern seaboard, including Boston. There are ghost-like videos of people telling their stories or acting out a scene from the lives of the people who were held in bondage at the site of the museum. The museum tells the tale of emancipation and reconstruction, with its promises of Freedom abandoned and betrayed, the rise of the Klan, the epidemic of lynchings that drove the great migration north, the Civil Rights movement, the present day mass incarceration of Black people in the US and the structures of white supremacy that perpetuate our unjust system. It challenges us to fight for justice for Black Americans and all Americans. 
 
So much of what I learned in Birmingham at Kelly Ingram Park and in Montgomery at The Legacy Museum gave 3-D solidity to things I knew as headlines. I had heard of segregation and Jim Crow laws, but did not know that the project to separate human beings by skin color in the South got as granular as laws forbidding play. It speaks to the insanity and inhumanity of the project. The 1896 Supreme Court ruling Plessy vs. Ferguson made "separate but equal" laws for Blacks and whites legal and solidified the way for a century of increasingly restrictive laws, that, with the end of Reconstruction and the federal will and support to protect Black rights in the south, created a climate so hellish that it drove the great migration to the northern cities.  My one afternoon in the museum was not enough to absorb all the lessons that it has to teach me. I plan to go back and bring my family, and hopefully my friends, with me.
 
Our group spent the next day in Selma, walking the Edmond Pettus Bridge, learning the history of the Civil Right movement – Bloody Sunday, Turnaround Tuesday, the walk from Selma to Montgomery. I met Jorge, the park ranger from Puerto Rico, and learned how he came to work at the parks service education center in Selma; and how they could use some more volunteers for Jubilee weekend, the first weekend in March when this history is celebrated. We meditated underneath the Edmund Pettus bridge with the torn-out seats of a car and piles of trash and 30 members of Zen Peacemakers. We saw the vines reclaiming the commemorative plaques and the rotted and broken boards in the park celebrating this history. I spent the hours before and after lunch working in the heat with Selma’s public works service, carefully picking up broken glass from around a playground on the banks of the Alabama River, while my friends mulched plants and picked up trash. At the end of the day I sat in council with my small group, listening and speaking our truth, lean of word, saying only what needed to be said. Then I got a phone call from a doctor at a Hospital in Massachusetts telling me that my 87 year-old father, who had been recovering from COVID, had taken a turn for the worse. The rest of my time in Alabama was a counterpoint between bearing witness to the legacy of racism in America and bearing witness to my father’s impending death. 
 
The next morning, I joined three new friends for breakfast at the Waffle House. We walked around the Alabama State House with its huge monument commemorating the glory of the Confederacy and its many tablets commemorating the bicentennial of Montgomery. We walked the arc of the tablets backwards, staring with the aspirations for the 21st century and making our way back to the dinosaurs roaming the shallow seas. While Black leaders like George Washington Carver were mentioned in the text on the tablets, most of the images of “200 years of success” in Montgomery were white men. With one exception, the many statues in the parks around the statehouse were all of white Christian men. The exception is a Black woman, holding the hands of a Black child and a white child, representing Education for Commerce, which stands opposite a statue of 2 white men representing Commerce and Education.
 
We visited Jefferson Davis’ first White House of the Confederacy and saw photos of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, who in 1900 built the huge monument to the glory of the confederacy which stands on the State Capitol lawn, and in 1921 moved this house across the city to sit near the Capitol building to commemorate the few weeks that Montgomery was the capital of the Confederacy before it moved to Richmond. I wondered, who were these white women, whose tragic loss of their husbands and sons, and whose commitment to the glory of White Supremacy drove them to fundraise, build and commemorate the Confederacy into the 1940s? What did Jefferson Davis do for the 24 years after the end of the Civil War? Our last stop before we rejoined the group was at the Civil Rights Memorial of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which was designed by Maya Lin of Vietnam Veterans Memorial fame. I stood with my hands pressed up against the black stone wall, below Martin Luther King’s words, “Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.” As the sheet of water rolled over my hands, I cried.
 
We rejoined the group to walk silently to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, “the nation’s first memorial dedicated to the legacy of enslaved Black people, people terrorized by lynching, African Americans humiliated by racial segregation and Jim Crow, and people of color burdened with contemporary presumptions of guilt and police violence.” Just as entering the Legacy Museum had the familiar feeling of visiting the Holocaust Memorial in Washington DC, entering the National Memorial for Peace and Justice had the familiar feeling of entering Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, in Israel. On this beautiful green hillside in Alabama there are different memorials centered around a square complex with a walkway that brings you face to face, and then under, over 800 large metal monuments which commemorate over 4400 documented lynchings in the US. Each metal monument has the name of a county and state where lynchings happened and a list of the names and dates of the people who were lynched. When you enter to walk among these columns your feet are on the ground, at the same level as the base of the columns and you see each one with its list of names at eye level. Names of people you know, like Gabriel and Michael, my son’s and husband’s names. As you continue to walk through the pavilion, you descend until you are walking below the coffin-like monuments, which are now suspended above you, as Black bodies were suspended from tree limbs while white communities picnicked and celebrated their murder and torture.
 
You read bands of text with the justification for racial terror lynchings: people were lynched for being human – for being successful and refusing to sell their crops at unfair prices, for loving someone, for talking back to disrespectful treatment, for speaking out against lynching. It is profound and overwhelming to stand among these monuments and contemplate the number of people whose lives were taken and whose families and communities were terrorized by white people asserting white supremacy. That morning, at the first White House of the Confederacy, I learned that at the time of the Civil War, 1/3 of Alabama’s voting delegates voted to stay part of the union, which was not uncommon in Confederate states. Many white people abhorred lynching and racial terror, but for decades there was not the national political will to pass a federal anti-lynching bill or provide the law enforcement needed to stop it. This terror shaped our country by driving a mass migration of 6 million Black people out of the south to the northern cities in the early years of the 20th century.
 
After exploring the monument and the memorial grounds, I came back to sit by the wall of water near the end, inscribed with:
 
For the hanged and beaten.
For the shot, drowned, and burned.
For the tortured, tormented, and terrorized.
For those abandoned by the Rule of Law.
 
We will remember.
 
With hope because hopelessness is the enemy of justice.
With courage because peace requires bravery.
With persistence because justice is a constant struggle.
With faith because we shall overcome.
 
I read the quote over and over again and promised myself I would memorize this passage. I decided I would make a monthly contribution to EJI’s work, which includes a duplicate monument for each of the 800 counties where lynchings have occurred, which they can claim and install to commemorate this important, tragic history. For it is through knowing our collective history that we can heal and build a just society. I contemplated the line: “With persistence because justice is a constant struggle” over and over again. It reminded me of a Thomas Jefferson quote I often cite, “The tree of liberty must be watered by the blood of Patriots every 20 years.” They mean the same thing to me: we are not “there yet” and we cannot be like children on a long car trip just waiting to “get there.” The struggle for a just society never ends. We are all called to act again and again.
 
I contemplated the difference between visiting the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC and the Legacy Museum and The National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery. While antisemitism remains a real problem, the Holocaust is, in fact, over. Today, in the US, money is being made off disenfranchised Black people and the system of oppression is wired into our legal system. The banks we use, the insurance companies we use, and the intergenerational wealth transfer we benefit from was and is made through exploitation. We are all complicit in the present and being paralyzed in ignorance by that fact is inhuman. To be human we must keep learning new and uncomfortable things and figure out what we want to do about them. Dismantling racism is a journey that will not end in our lifetime. As Rabbi Tarfon said, “It is not up to you to finish the task, but you are not free to avoid it “ (Pirkei Avot 2:16).
 
I am committed to looking at hard history because I love my friends and family, 
Because I am Jewish and my world has been touched and shaped by hard history, Because I am American, and the life of my country is being shaped by hard history, Because I am a woman and we are always fighting for our rights, 
Because I am human and we are destroying each other and destroying our ecosystems, Because I am a parent and want a just world for myself and for my children and for everyone else and for their children.
 
As I find new ways to bear witness to the harm of racism, my compassion for all of us and my commitment to anti-racist action grows.  I know that you are on your own anti-racism journey and I would like us to accompany each other. Email me at ellen.krausegrosman@gmail.com if you would like to share some of your journey and tell me what your next step is. What are you doing today to dismantle racism and build a just world? To be a “good ancestor” in the words of activist and educator Layla Saad. 

By Monica Holland

​Some changes have come to the Havurah’s backyard davening space this year. Among them, prompted by the loss of our beloved apple tree, are two newly planted pawpaw trees, one by the back porch steps, the other between the driveway and the patio. The former is in the full sun while the latter is in partial shade. We hope they will be happy in their new homes and will cooperate with each other in the task of cross pollination so we can eventually enjoy their fruit. Pawpaws (Asimina triloba) are understory trees native to the humid woodlands of the mid-Atlantic region. Their native range does not quite reach to Massachusetts, but they’ve become popular in New England recently, mostly due to their fruit which some describe as having a taste like bananas and a texture like custard.
 
To help with fruiting, we’ve invited some pollinators to join us by planting a butterfly and pollinator garden in the sunny area by the steps to the back porch. If our rabbit-foiling devices work, we hope to attract butterflies, moths, bees of all sorts, and other pollinators, including perhaps some hummingbirds, with our all-star line up of native beauties:
 

• In center and right fields and gracing the third-base dugout, two large stands of wrinkle-leaf goldenrod (Solidago rugosa) have been pinch hitting for us for a few years.
• Sweet Joe Pye weed (Eutrochium purpureum, formerly Eupatorium purpureum), a true butterfly magnet, has taken up its position in left field.
• A large clump of bee balm (Monarda didyma ‘Jacob Cline’) stands in front of the goldenrod, ably covering first base.
• At shortstop, a swamp milkweed (Asclepias incarnata ‘Cinderella’) will, with care and luck, grow into a fair-sized clump in a few years and provide a home for Monarch larvae.
• On the pitcher’s mound, a low-growing clump of butterfly weed (Asclepias tuberosa) should light up the area during the summer with bright orange blooms that no pollinator can resist.
• Rounding out the team on third base is a Virginia sweetspire (Itea virginica ‘Scentlandia’), a bush whose luscious-smelling flowers have already done their pollinator-attracting job for the year.
• Out back in the bleachers, some of our shady native friends are cheering on the team: a large stand of goat’s beard (Aruncus dioicus), two large oakleaf hydrangeas (Hydrangea quercifolia), and a columbine (Aquilegia canadensis) reliably attract bees, butterflies, and moths.

 
“But wait,” you may say, “I see who’s on first, etc., but who’s on second?”  You mean what’s on second? Why the pawpaw, of course! So, grab you butterfly book and come to the Havurah to cheer on the team and enjoy the blooms of summer.
 

by Larry Rosenwald

Reboyne shel oylem!
 
There is, O One Without End, a story told about me by great sages.  

I was, says the story, distraught at being cast out of Sarah’s name, and went about heaven wailing and lamenting.  I asked, “is it perchance because I am the smallest among the letters that Thou hast taken me away from the name of the pious Sarah?”  And you consoled me by saying, “formerly thou wert in a woman’s name, and, moreover, at the end.  I will now affix thee to a man’s name, and, moreover, at the beginning.”  This promise you fulfilled, the story concludes, when you added me to Hosea’s name and made him Joshua, before the spies went into the land of Canaan. (Legends 3:266)
           
I do not know who wrote this story, but do not believe it can have come from your inexhaustible and ineffable Self.  It is a misrepresentation of my character and my needs, and a denial of my importance.
           
To begin with, I held it no indignity to be in a woman’s name.  Do letters have gender, after all?  Did you, did the writer of the story, have any reason to think I was male, or female?  And whether male or female, what reason could there be for supposing I would share in whatever prejudices that story, no doubt falsely, attributes to you?
           
As for the difference between the beginning and the end – surely you who are both beginning and end, the Aleph and the Tav, who were before the beginning and who are without end, understand that this is a difference of little importance.  Both beginning and end are places of honor, and the end, after all, has the last word – or, in this case, the last letter.  And there are enough hierarchies in your book without adding to them the hierarchy of beginnings and endings!  (In any case, if there is honor in beginnings, surely I had honor enough already, beginning as I do not only the name of Judah, who gives his name to our people and his lineage to our Messiah, may he or she come soon, but also your own name of names, the numinous and unspoken tetragrammaton.)
           
I did, in truth, weep at leaving Sarah’s name;  how noble a character to be connected to, with all her fits of generous temper, her astonishing laughter, her zeal for her family and her people.  But that you – or rather, forgive me, that the writer of the story - should think to console me by placing me at the beginning of Joshua’s name astonishes me.  It is written, in another story, that in being added to Joshua’s name I made him more divine, having the honor as I do to be the letter with which your most sacred name begins. May I speak frankly?  Joshua – humble Hosea as he was before – did not, really did not, need the balance of human and divine in him tilted towards the divine.  When I read of what he did later, fueled by the divine zeal strengthened in him by my presence in his name – when I read of his implacable hostility towards all the Canaanites and their works – I wish only that he had been left more human, more humane, less possessed by the zeal that I, all unwittingly, may have contributed to augmenting. Perhaps, O Ruler of the universe, you would have done better then, and would do better now, to leave the letters in peace. 

​Or perhaps you should have asked me what sort of honor I actually desired!  I would, I assure you, have proposed something quite different.  I would have said, for example, that to honor me, you should have chosen to honor more greatly the woman whose name embraces me, the prophet Miriam, where I am, happily, in the middle, finding that too a place of distinction.  (Perhaps it is because whatever I represent is, in Miriam’s name, in such intimate relation to the other letters and their meanings, that Miriam had so great a gift in dealing with those unlike her.  Perhaps – though I leave this to your divine judgment – there is something masculine in the fascination with beginnings and endings, something feminine in seeing the virtues of middles?)
           
And had you done greater honor to Miriam, in token of doing greater honor to me, what good  results could have come about! That destructive quarrel between Miriam and her noble brother, Miriam’s leprosy, the corruption and weakening of authority among the children of Israel generally – all this might have been avoided, Miriam’s strength enhanced and her time increased, and with her guidance, perhaps, the spies her brother sent into Canaan – including, perhaps, some women! –  would have been less dubious, less affected by the weakening of the community, bolder in encountering the Canaanite wonders they beheld, and the living community might have proceeded into Canaan.
           
Perhaps, O Inexhaustible Spring, you might learn in this regard from how human beings treat me in that most human of all Jewish languages, namely, Yiddish – which I know you must speak, since otherwise you would be denying yourself the pleasure of conversing with Tevye the Dairyman!  There, indeed, my place of honor is assured.  For there they call me dos pintele yid, the essential dot of Jewishness, what remains Jewish when all else seems gone.  And they honor me, too, not only when they write me, but also when they speak my unmistakeable and plaintive sound.  The greatest of prophets, the greatest of kings and poets, whom the sacred tongue calls Mosheh and Shelomo – these great eminences receive an admixture of humanity and ordinariness through me when they are spoken of, and become the more accessible, less dogmatically zealous Moyshe Rabeynu and Shloyme Hemeylekh.  What greater honor could I have than this, what greater contribution could I make?
           
​We are all your creations, O founder of good and of all, and who am I, who is any letter, to reproach you?  And yet, did you not make us so we could speak?

by Aliza Arzt

Larry Rosenwald, in the April edition of B’Shalom, wrote a wonderful essay where he described Havurat Shalom’s use of both masculine and feminine pronouns to reference God and humans in the liturgy. He went on to explain why he thinks these very careful and thoughtful changes have been so important, allowing us to “. . . change the liturgy so that we can breathe it”.
 
In the 1980’s when we began the process of carefully changing roughly half the masculine pronouns of the liturgy, we felt that achieving gender parity was the ultimate feminist challenge. We have come a long way since then. We now wrestle with the question of how to make the liturgy accessible to those who see themselves as gender fluid or non-binary. This is a much more difficult situation to “fix”. Hebrew is gendered. It’s much more gendered than English, and more gendered than even the European languages (such as Spanish or French) with which some of us are familiar. Consequently, replacing “him” and “her” with “them”, which works well in English, doesn’t work in Hebrew, since Hebrew uses both a masculine “them” and a feminine “them”. 
 
The most consistent and complete solution would be to replace all noun and pronoun references with new, gender-neutral references, such as those provided by the Nonbinary Hebrew Project (https://www.nonbinaryhebrew.com). The project, created by Lior Gross and Eyal Rivlin, makes use of the vowel “ֶ “, (pronounced “eh”), among others, to replace the traditionally “feminine” ending “ah” and to neutralize the male and female pronouns. For example, in traditional Hebrew, “he” is “הוּא” (“hu”), and “she” is “הִיא” (“hee”). The Nonbinary Hebrew Project has changed both pronouns to “הֶא” (“heh”).
 
This is an elegant and well thought out solution. It’s one that we may arrive at some day. At this point in our development, we felt the departure from words that connect us to other davveners was simply too great. We have, however, taken some other steps to be more inclusive in our referents.
 
In order to accomplish this, we have taken advantage of two constructions in Hebrew which are already gender neutral: the infinitive (e.g. “to pray”, “to write”, etc.) and the first person (e.g “I wrote”, “I did”, etc.). In the most recent editions of Siddur Birkat Shalom and upcoming second printing of our Machzor, we have replaced all prayers where the davvener has to choose whether to use the “feminine” version or the “masculine” version with a gender-neutral version. For example, in the very first prayer of the morning service, traditionally the “modeh ani” (I thank you God), we have replaced our previous choice of  “מוֹדֶה אֲנִי - modeh ani for men” or “מוֹדָה אֲנִי - modah ani for women” with a single option - “אוֹדֶה אֲנִי - odeh ani, I thank you God” which works for all genders. We have also been able to redact some short prayers, such as the blessing for those who have come up for an aliyah, so as to eliminate gender references to the blessing recipients, even though God remains gendered.
 
We’ve been working consistently on our liturgy since 1984. We’ve created and adapted prayers in ways that we couldn’t have imagined when we first started. We look forward to continuing our quest for a liturgy that we can all “breathe” and are excited to see what we’ll come up with next.

by Beth Gallaway

In 2017, I did not have a spiritual practice to speak of. A very nice man I met online dating, Josh, disclosed that he was Jewish in our first conversation and I countered with, “I'm a recovering Catholic, formerly pagan atheist who believes in ghosts and reincarnation.” His response was, there’s actually room for all of that in the Jewish tradition!

After a few weeks of dating, Josh was missing his Shabbat dinner practice. He asked if we could do it at my house and I said yes, of course! I prepared a meal that didn’t mix meat and milk (or include pork or shellfish). He brought challah and candles, and was surprised I offered a salt shaker when he did the blessing for the challah. (I’m a librarian; I did my research!) We started lighting candles every Friday we were together.

In mid-August, Josh put me on the spot and asked if I had learned the candle blessing yet while we had a table full of friends waiting to light Shabbat candles. I was surprised--not being Jewish, I didn’t think it was allowed! A Jewish friend led the blessings.

Over the next two weeks, I learned that candle blessing, and the next time Josh was scheduled to join us for a Shabbat meal, I put a special effort into cleaning the house and making dinner. The table was laid with a cloth and set with matching dishes and cloth napkins and flowers. Josh dashed in, washed his hands and quickly hid the challah under the clean linen dish towel I'd laid out. I picked up the lighter and told him I thought I could do the candle blessing. He looked a tad surprised and said he'd help.

I lit two candles, explaining to my family that one was to keep Shabbat and one to remember it, and then lit four more--one for each of our beautiful and precious children, only one of whom was with us that evening. Josie helped me light hers. I stumbled a bit at “קִדְשָׁנוּ” and we said the rest together: 
 
בָּרוּך אַתָּה ה׳ אֱלֹהֵינוּ מֶלֶך הָעוֹלָם אַשֶׁר קִדְשָׁנוּ בְּמִצְוֹתָיו וְצִוָנוּ לְהַדְלִיק נֵר שֶל שַבָּת
 
Josh made kiddush and said hamotzi, and we feasted on the fancy dinner I had made. Later, Josh confided that it totally freaked him out that I lit the candles and said the blessings so well and with such conviction. We had only been dating for about three months and my adoption of this custom didn’t feel to him like the “one day at a time” pace we were trying to set in our relationship.
 
I explained I looked at the blessing as a challenge accepted, but also as something I was trying on to see if it fit. He asked what Judaism meant to me and I did my best to explain it was not, actually, all about him and what he wanted (a life partner to make a Jewish home with). I talked about how spirituality has not always been part of my life, but I have sought aspects of it in many ways through the years, starting with the occult as a teenager; and through paganism as a college student.
 
I found religion for a while through baseball. I went to my first game ever in 2007 and the sensory overload and focus on the field, food and music and rituals (the wave, the seventh inning stretch and belting out “Sweet Caroline”) led me to follow the Red Sox for several more seasons. It felt exhilarating to be part of something bigger than myself and there was an easy camaraderie with other fans.
 
When I was living in Haverhill, a local Methodist church began putting on a monthly Friday night board game meetup. I went for a year and a half. Again, I liked the food, fellowship, predictability, and the activity--but not the Jesus-y, revivalist, “come forward if you’re a sinner” part. And, once established in Grafton, I attended one Simple Church meal that included freshly baked bread and provocative dinner conversation from the pastor’s prompt, in lieu of a sermon. When pressed, I confessed to Pastor Zach I’d loved the people, the music, the meal… “So, everything but the Jesus part?” he asked. Baptized as a Catholic, even as a child, I loved the Old Testament stories more, and never had bought into the concepts of a virgin birth or Jesus as the Son of God.
 
Contra dancing became my ritual of choice for a time, one that involved setting time aside from my regular busy life, putting down my phone, meeting new people, hearing live music, and moving my body. It was meditative and grounding in spite of the noise and the twirling.

I explained to Josh that what Judaism held for me, thus far, was an appealing combination of ritual and routine that I craved throughout my life and more as I grew older. I was keeping an open mind about it, and enjoying everything that I had been exposed to thus far, and I didn’t find anything so far out of line with my own feelings about a greater power in the universe.

Josh and I hosted an “Electric Ferbrengen” on the Saturday afternoon of Labor Day Weekend, with singing, schnapps, and the promise of playing the video game Rock Band--after dark--if there was interest. It was also a housewarming to celebrate his move back home, and I gave him a mezuzah as a gift. Three months prior, I hadn’t even known what a mezuzah was. The standout from that event though, was the Havdalah ritual: joining in the yai-dai-dais, the scent of the spices, the warm smiles of friends in the flickering candlelight, the way the light reflected in our eyes, the hiss of the flame extinguished in wine and the song that drew his sister to come join our basement gathering and join in.
​
A few weeks later, Josh invited me to come to an Open House at Havurat Shalom, where he was a member for over ten years. I said yes, as I was curious. The Friday night before the open house, I asked what to expect. Instead of a short answer, Josh pulled out the siddur (prayer book) and spent about an hour going over the service and the liturgy. The highlights that I remember were: that davening started at 10am, but people would be straggling in for the first hour; there might be talking at the back of room and people coming in and out, bringing in cups of tea while children played and ran around upstairs; that informal but nice dress was the norm, but I could feel free to kick off my shoes and sit on a cushion on the floor; that I was not expected to participate or even follow along; and that the congregation itself was at different levels of observance and participation, but the service would mostly be in Hebrew with some transliteration and English translation. And then he said it was around a three-hour service followed by kiddush and lunch. I gulped. I couldn’t imagine sitting through a three-hour religious service.
 
When I came downstairs the next morning in my favorite blue dress, wearing a white knit kippah with threads of blue, red and gold interwoven, he just laughed and said, “Why am I not surprised? Where did you get that?!” And I shrugged and smiled and said I figured I’d be needing one eventually.
 
Two things stick in my mind from that first service. One is that everyone was kind and welcoming. The second is how at home I felt, and how compelled I was to participate, not just observe, and somehow mostly kept up, pronouncing things correctly and catching on to the tunes quickly. The three hours flew by. 
 
I became a regular davenner, then an associate member, and continued with classes, observance and participation, and converted in October 2019. Due to complicated family bubbles and immunocompromised status, in-person davening has not been something I’m willing to attend during the pandemic. Instead, I go to some Zoom services, support my partner in events at his rabbinic internship, take online classes when my bandwidth is up for it, and maintain my observance in the first rituals I was introduced to: Shabbat candle-lighting, and Havdalah.
 
We set the Friday menu and take turns cooking. Sometimes it’s elaborate, sometimes not. Sometimes we make the challah from scratch, sometimes we don’t make it to the grocery store in time to buy some and end up with two loaves of sourdough. Sometimes we take out the china, sometimes we opt for dishwasher safe plates. Sometimes we eat at 6:30, and sometimes at 8:15 and it has nothing to do with candle-lighting time! A tablecloth and fresh flowers are the constant.
 
The other constant, for me, is the breath--or three--that I take after circling my hands over the candles, before I chant. I imagine myself, a Jew by choice, somehow tapping into a lineage that I don’t have a blood or familial connection to, and draw in the rich history that came before me and breathe out to the future. Only when the energy feels right do I begin. Incidentally, it’s also something I have done at the Hav: imagine myself standing where Art Green, Merle Feld and Zalman Schachter-Shalomi z’l stood, imagining who else will stand in my place in 50 or 100 years, embracing a feminist, social justice, countercultural, neo-Hasadic style of Judaism.
 
We don’t always avoid technology or travel, but Saturday tends to be a lazy day with a cold lunch and a nap. And before bedtime on Saturday, we take out the Havdalah set, tune the guitar, and sing together to mark the transition to the new week. Our Havdalah set was passed on along with an immense library from the estate of philosophers Hilary and Ruth Anna Putnam. Since I have no one to inherit Judaica from, it gives me great joy to use ritual objects from a family who rebelled against the antisemitism they experienced during their youth by establishing a traditional Jewish home. When we unpacked it, Josh didn’t recognize it for what it was. I thought it was a havdalah set: look, the wine cup, the spice cup, and a plate with some writing on it… which I shocked myself when I was able to read the Hebrew around the rim: הַמַּבְדִּיל בֵּין קדֶשׁ לְחול  (hamavdil bein kodesh l’chol: Who distinguishes between the sacred and the profane). I think of the Putnams every week when we light the Havdalah candle, and honor not only Shabbat, but their family and legacy.
 

by Larry Rosenwald

One of the important, challenging, quietly revolutionary aspects of Havurat Shalom's liturgy is its feminism, by which I mean chiefly the fact that both God and human beings are referred to sometimes in the feminine and sometimes in the masculine. This is true in the English and still more frequently and more strikingly true in the Hebrew, where so much is gendered, not just pronouns, but nouns, verbs, and adjectives as well.  All of this may well be disorienting to people not familiar with it, as it was to me when I began coming to Havurat Shalom in 2003 – I kept expecting one word and getting another, and I felt as if I were riding some especially unpredictable roller-coaster.
           
I’ve been to services at other congregations, some of them politically progressive ones and self-declaredly feminist ones (those being the ones I like to attend), and in my experience the Havurah's liturgy is unique.  Other congregations add the matriarchs to the patriarchs, other congregations have women leading services and leyning the torah portion.  Some other congregations have English translations of their liturgy that diminish the degree of masculine domination in the traditional Hebrew text – e.g., the Purple Valley Siddur produced by students at Williams College.  But even there, if you turn from the English to the Hebrew, you find God referred to exclusively in the masculine, and human beings almost exclusively so.
           
I’ve thought a lot about this gulf, this asymmetry, I’ve talked about our liturgy recently with friends both sympathetic and critical.  I’m no less supportive of it than I was before those conversations, no less inspired by it, no less in need of it.  But I have a better sense of what’s radical about it.
 
Theologically, it seems to me, we’re on firmer ground than supporters of an exclusively masculine God-language can be.  G-d transcends gender, that seems axiomatic.  It follows that it cannot be just, cannot be adequately capacious, to speak of God exclusively in the masculine, because doing so constrains God within a single human gender category. Speaking of God sometimes in the feminine and sometimes in the masculine does better justice, however imperfect, to the ein sof, the one without end or limit.
           
We are also on firmer ground than those who argue (the focus here being on the language used to describe people rather than the language used to describe God) that of course “he” means “he and she,” “man” means “man and woman,” ish means “ish and ishah.” I was taught such ideas when I was a grammar school student. I was taught the notion of the generic he; I’m familiar with the notion.  But that was a long time ago, and if it was ever true – and I’m not sure that it was – it’s surely not true now (nor do I teach it now to my students).  One fruitful consequence of feminism has been to challenge what used to be taught, even at the level of grammar, to change the ways in which we actually speak and write.  If someone today were writing a Declaration of Independence, would that person write “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”?  (Angelica Schuyler’s response in Hamilton is on the mark: “And when I meet Thomas Jefferson/ I’m ‘a compel him to include women in the sequel!”)  And no translator today, I think, would render the title of Viktor Frankl’s concentration camp memoir as Man’s Search for Meaning;  too much is excluded, too much is distorted.  (And it’s a fanciful translation, which a strict literalist of my sort has to reject on other grounds as well, the original title being, in strict translation, “Saying Yes to Life in Spite of Everything:  A Psychologist Experiences the Concentration Camp.’)  And the English of the prayerbook needs to be our English, the English of this moment.  Not, to be sure, the slang or perishable colloquial idiom of this moment – nothing goes out of fashion more quickly - but the English we write at this moment to formulate prayer. 
           
All of this seems straightforward enough, to me at any rate, and justifies the Havurah's liturgy on grounds both of theology and of feminism-inspired living English usage in the 21st century.  I would make that argument anywhere, to anyone.
 
But then we come back to the fact that these commonsensical arguments seem to persuade only us, or almost only us, that elsewhere than at Havurat Shalom the Hebrew liturgy remains, with the very moderate exception of the addition of the matriarchs, a masculinist one.  (This is true even in siddurim and machzorim where other aspects of the liturgy are changed for what one might call political reasons, e.g., in the Reconstructionist siddur Kol Haneshama, which alters the Hebrew of the aleynu prayer to eliminate its invidious comparisons between Jews and non-Jews but leaves G-d and the worshipper in the masculine.)
           
Why?
           
For two reasons, I think.  (I exclude sexism as a reason, not because it plays no role, but because, as noted, even self-declared feminist congregations retain a masculinist liturgy.)  First, because of the desire, the principled desire, to be in accord with tradition.  Al tifrosh min ha-tzibbur, “do not separate from the community,” that is a real desire and a real principle, and I respect it. It is wonderful to think that the words one is saying or singing in prayer on Friday night or Saturday morning are the words being said or sung all over the Jewish world.  Changes are made when necessary – few congregations I have visited retain the blessing thanking God “for not making me a woman” – but these are minimal, the goal being not to separate, to have all of us together saying or singing sh’ma yisra’el.
           
A second reason:  because it seems so khutspedik, so insolent, so whipper-snapperish, in oneself or in others, to alter a liturgy established so long ago, by people of great authority and wisdom, who created beautiful and meaningful poems and prayers.  We should be hesitant, the argument might run, to put ourselves forward as empowered to alter what others of greater authority have constituted.  Who are we, anyway?
           
I feel the force of both these reasons;  but they are in my judgment not so much reasons to refrain from altering the liturgy as reasons to alter it in some ways and not in others.
           
Regarding the first reason, I would quote Joel Rosenberg’s colloquial and wise extension of it:  “al tifrosh min ha-tzibbur except when you have to.”  Necessity, that is, should be our guide, not caprice.  We should change the liturgy not when we casually dislike it, when we have a problem with, when it’s not to our taste;  we should change it when we must, when the language makes the prayer an obstacle to praying, a diminishing of ourselves, of the persons and energies we bring to davening, when the prayer as written sticks in our throat, and I mean that almost literally, when we cannot breathe it out.  And for me, and for the long train, di goldene keyt, the golden chain, of our liturgy-makers, the exclusively masculine characterization of God and the worshipper has exactly those effects.  We change the liturgy so that we can breathe it.  Nishmat kol chay tevarech et shemech we sing, the breath of every living thing will praise your (feminine) name, and for that to be true, we too have to be able to breathe.
           
Regarding the second reason, I would say that it should stimulate us to think about our relation to the authority of the past.  I might not go as far as Emerson does, lover of Emerson as I am:  “meek young persons grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero . . . Locke . . . Bacon have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young persons in libraries when they wrote these books.”[1]  I would go as far as Mordecai Kaplan did, who said often and in various forms, “the past has a vote, but not a veto.” I would also go so far as to say that it is intellectually and emotionally unhealthy to think that all wisdom is in the past, is in those who happened to come first, is in those men who happened to come first. Mayn neshome iz nit keyn rozhinke, my soul is also no raisin – or, more colloquially, and shifting the metaphor from fruit to meat, “what am I, chopped liver?” 
           
We should in remaking the liturgy certainly hold ourselves to a high standard, philologically and literarily.  We should not presume that replacing old formulations with new ones is easy, that Hebrew can be easily made to say with authenticity what we wish to say.  We should look with humility as well as pride on the new liturgy we have made, and change it when we need to.
           
​But if those are the criteria - acting from necessity not from caprice, rewriting with a judicious mixture of philological humility and human self-reliance – then the liturgy we make new, our mutkan liturgy, fixed and healed and restored, will be an essential element in the fruitful multiplicity of Judaisms, the seventy faces of Torah. Or rather it already is.
 
[1] http://digitalemerson.wsulibs.wsu.edu/exhibits/show/text/the-american-scholar, accessed September 26th, 2017.

by Aliza Arzt

by Bev Schwartz

by Ruth Abrams

I can make an eight-strand braid and an eighteen-strand Jewish star. I’ve learned to make sourdough challah, challah with no eggs, and challah with no salt. But so far I haven’t tried making gluten-free challah. There is a good gluten-free recipe that another havnik, Josh Shalem Schreiber, adapted, and he gave it to me to share with people. (But he can share it with you himself!) I’m not an expert in challah dough sculpture and I usually don’t add exciting fillings, but I have done those things a little. Once I dyed the dough with gel food coloring to make rainbow challah for the week we read the story of Noah. 

I could just buy loaves of nice bread instead of baking Ashkenazi-style braided loaves. I have done that. My kid is in college. I don’t eat tons of bread during the week. Slices of challah fill my freezer. Why do I keep baking?

On days when I feel a little blue, it’s hard to say. It’s difficult to want to bake when I can’t have guests or potlucks. I got super excited that we were going to be able to have guests in the month or so after vaccinations were available to everyone, and then we got slammed with the viral variants. It felt even worse after that. 

For me, Judaism means doing the same things all the time, as well as I can. Sometimes my voice is too rough for singing or I’m too tired for Talmud or Torah study. I want to do my best and pay attention, but I sometimes have to do the action whether I am ready to do my best or not. Even if I’m the only one who will eat the bread, I try to bake it anyway. 

As with prayer or study or any other part of Jewish religious life, baking challah involves repetition. You get to know the ingredients and the finer points of the process. This obviously applies also to Torah study, to prayer, to everything we do. There is always something new to notice, something important to do, something essential to contribute. I do the same things all the time, but I am never the same and the conditions are never the same. Every mitzvah is a fractal, through which we see ourselves very large and very small, again and again, shaping Jewish life. ​

by Heidi Friedman

One of the many things that I love about Havurat Shalom is that it makes it easy to combine my favorite things. Right now, we’re in the midst of our 2nd annual crafts project / winterwear drive, where we both knit hats and scarves and also collect donated ones to give to people in need. I’m knitting my hats out of donated yarn – knitting and upcycling ‘trash’ being two of my favorite things. Maida and Aliza, who had never knit before last year’s drive, are using knitting looms – in the Havurah spirit of learning new skills and DIY, more of my favorite things. And several of us attend the Somerville Public Library’s weekly crafts Zoom to work on our hats and scarves – combining the library – everyone’s favorite thing! – as well as the Havurah’s emphasis on social connection. At the end of January, we’ll donate all the winterwear we’ve made and collected to local organizations that support unhoused people.

Some years ago, Havurah member Todd built a Little Free Library for his front yard. The moment I saw it, I knew the Havurah should also get one. I got the LFL built as a time trade – one of my most favorite things! – out of scrap lumber (upcycling trash!). And voila, the Havurah is helping to circulate free books – everyone’s favorite things – in the neighborhood. When we were inundated with donated books,  Merit started curating the LFL, slowly putting books of different types and topics out in it for passersby to peruse. More recently, Meryl read about a project to diversify the books in LFLs so that they better represent all of us. Now the Havurah is purchasing some new and some used diverse children’s books, and slowly stocking them in our LFL. We’re funding the diverse books project with money that was donated in memory of Reena Kling, z”l, always a staunch proponent of tzedakah and tikkun olam.
​
Finally, when a Little Free Pantry appeared in my neighborhood, I again thought that was something that would be in the Havurah’s sweet spot. I had no idea how it would take off! I wasn’t able to get it built as a time trade, but a former Havurah community member, Nathan Rome, built it as a volunteer. That people who came to the Havurah even decades ago continue to love it is one of my favorite things. Meanwhile, Todd had gotten active in supporting Somerville’s community refrigerators, and Monica had reached out to Saint Clement Church in Medford as part of a Sukkot ushpizin program, to invite guests into the Havurah sukkah. These two streams have combined so that the Saint Clement congregation is donating LOTS of food to the Havurah to distribute through the LFP and the community refrigerators.

I love these projects that the Havurah has undertaken, and the processes through which we work on them, the people who nurture them and the results of the Havurah being a good citizen in the neighborhood, knitting the local community together a little bit more snugly. I love that they combine so many of my favorite things, and of course, as you can see, the Havurah itself is one of my very favorite things.

Heidi Friedman is a long-time member of Havurat Shalom and on the board of one of the local time banks, the Time Trade Circle.

by Todd Kaplan