by Shifra Freewoman

This blog is a reflection on my many years at the Havurah.  I first came to Havurat Shalom in 1978, when I was only 17.  Still nominally orthodox, and becoming a feminist, I did not like mehitzot or exclusion.  It was a terrible frustration for me to be so full of love for Torah, Judaism, God and learning and to be kept from fully participating.
 
I loved coming to the Havurah, where I was called up to the Torah and could hold it in my arms.  I loved being somewhere where I was an equal and included in the minyan.  I loved how haimish and down home the Havurah was and is.  So fun to sit on cushions on the floor and daven and be a part of rather than apart from.  I loved the kavannah, the religiosity/devotion minus dogma.  I wanted inclusion, and got that at the Havurah.  I could be part of, along with all the women and the men.  It's hard to describe being part of something for the first time in my life. I had attended as an outsider/insider since a small child, but I could not truly join in with until I was 17. It had been excruciatingly painful for me to be so excluded.
 
The Havurah felt so life giving to me.  Like a breath of fresh air; it was a mechaya.  It brought me alive again.  It was special to have a place that was both traditional, in that we said most of prayers in Hebrew, yet, at the same time, that was welcoming of women as well as men and of gays and lesbians as well as straight people.  I loved the deep commitment to tradition and devotion, yet openness to women, gays and lesbians and also to people who were not Jewish.  They were welcome too.  I loved how the Havurah was steeped in Jewish language, tradition, history and practice without being insular and forbidding.  A special combination that was perfect for me.
 
I first heard of the Havurah from Sharon Strassfeld, who taught at my Chabad School.  She, Michael Strassfeld and Daniel Siegel wrote the New Jewish Catalogs and helped start the Havurah.
 
The Havurah was started in 1968 by men who were unhappy with the mainstream Jewish Community.  They were involved in The Civil Rights and Anti- Vietnam War Movements.  They wanted something more intimate and deep. They wanted an alternative rabbinical seminary.  Why? Deep interest in Judaism, and also, a way to avoid the draft. The alternative rabbinical seminary never did materialize, though people did study a lot at the Havurah.
 
The founders got a grant and used it as a down payment on the building that became Havurat Shalom.  In those days only men could join and their wives or girlfriends.  They borrowed from the different movements, the devotion of orthodoxy, with the reform spirit of the Reform Movement, the evolving nature of Halacha, Jewish law, of the Conservative Movement. the reconstruction focus of the Reconstructionist Movement and the kavannah of the Hasidic movement.  
 
Women were not originally counted in a minyan until one day, a woman asked the 9 men if they were going to daven. They kind of looked at her sheepishly.  She said, “Well there are 10 people here.” The men looked around and began davening.  That was the start of women being counted in a minyan, and we have not looked back!!  
 
When I arrived in the 70s I loved the lingering 1960s era funkiness:  a shul in a house, with pillows on the ground to sit on and a macrame Torah Cover.  I loved how down to earth it was and how well I fit in.  I often slept over at the Havurah while still in high school.  It was a safe, comfortable place for me where I could be myself.  I certainly did not have this in the orthodox community, where I never felt like I was understood or truly welcomed in any way.
 
In the 70s the community was about half men and half women, and that is when it became fully welcoming of gays and lesbians.  Since I am a lesbian, it meant a lot to me that I was accepted.
 
During the 80s there was a great preponderance of women and a big focus on lesbian feminism.  That is when the Siddur Project started, ultimately writing Siddur Birkat Shalom. The Siddur Project feminized the Hebrew for about half of the siddur, and there was less emphasis on hierarchy and more focus on the immanent aspects of God and the community, as well as less emphasis on punishing evil doers and more emphasis on destroying evil itself.  There was also more acceptance of other religious paths.
 
I kept attending through the years, enjoying the davening and learning and meals and holidays. I believe it was in 1985, after I graduated from college and came home from Israel, that I became a member of the Havurah. 
 
A highlight of Havurah history for me was when we offered sanctuary to Emilio, a refugee from El Salvador.  I was touched that our community was taking in someone who had faced such horror and was refused asylum.  I had heard so much about how awful it was for Jews during the holocaust, who had nowhere safe to go.  I was haunted by the story my Bubbie told me about her favorite sister Beileh, who asked her to send money, so she could flee Hitler.  I asked my Bubbie with great worry, ``Did you send it Bubbie, did you send it?"  And Bubbie said, " It was the Depression, and I didn't have a nickel."  "What happened to Beileh, Bubbie?" I asked in fear, and she said, "Hitler came and that was the end of that." 
 
I was so glad that Emilio would not have the fate of Beileh and so many other Jews during the holocaust.  For me, the lesson of the Holocaust was to save people who were subjected to such cruelty and to offer asylum.  That to me is the lesson of Jewish History, for Jews and for All People.  I felt terribly proud of the Havurah for doing this and grateful to be part of such a wonderful community. 
 
I had the honor of living with Emilio for a few months. It was a great time.  I got to hear him tell his harrowing story of how he ran away, because his family had the chutzpah to ask for things like electricity and running water.  We heard him tell about how he fled across Honduras, Nicaragua, Mexico and how he had been put in a detention center in San Francisco and went on a hunger strike.  I remember how he planted food in the backyard of the Havurah, what a good farmer he was. I saw him use his considerable handyman skills to do work for the Havurah, and I read his poetry,  
 
We also helped Emilio’s family.  A member at that time who was pivotal in the Havurah’s offering Sanctuary, hired a coyote to bring his sister across the border.  His sister stayed at the Havurah for a while too, and gave birth to a baby girl.  Then she was in sanctuary at Temple Beth El in Sudbury.  
 
The Jewish Sanctuary Network was a beautiful thing.  Participating in it is a part of our History/Herstory at the Havurah.
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Since The Havurah was and is all about inclusion, we built a ramp to welcome people in wheelchairs or with mobility impairments, as well as educating ourselves about disability rights.
 
I remember so many wonderful meals together, great davening, especially over the High Holidays, when so many people would come, crowdeding into the front hall and spilling out the door onto the porch.  So many “lecha dodis” and “lecha dodati's” on the front steps.  Muslims and Hindus and Pagans all coming to visit.  A Haitian woman coming and telling us about her organization and how it was helping people in Haiti, and a woman telling us about how to help immigrants today by going to court for them and accompanying them. 
 
I left the Havurah in the late 90s. It just was not working for me.  Not sure why, nothing bad, but I kept trying to make it work and it would not.  My membership was on hold for about 15 years.
 
Then Reena Kling, a beloved member of the Havurah, died. Reena embodied everything loving about Judaism. She had a strong, beautiful, mystical spirit about her and she was also practical and stood up to injustice and worked for Tikkun Olam.
 
I went to Reena’s funeral, and I heard a voice saying, “Come back and rejoin.”  I think it was Reena’s Spirit calling me back.  I listened. I had been gone so long that many current members did not know who I was.   I had to go through the joining process like a newcomer.  I frankly was upset. But a friend said, with some heat, “just do what they say, that is a good community.”  So, I did and I have not looked back. 
 
I have led many services, including a Tu b'shvat seder, the High Priest Service on Yom Kippur, did a d’var Torah on the story of Hagar being thrown out of her home, and lead many Shabbat services. I leyned for the first time this year and I give many divrei Torah.
 
Before the pandemic, a friend and I hosted Open Mic dinners and led workshops at the Havurah.  I stay there often, and it is my home away from home.  Other friends have stayed over with me.  I appreciate the welcome we extend to people in the broader community and so do my friends.
 
I have helped with the Havurah’s little free pantry. Sometimes I take fresh food to the homeless in Davis Sq. I participated in an interfaith Peace Service that Havurat Shalom was part of at a local Catholic Church that is predominantly Vietnamese.  My poem was featured in the flier, and we read it during the service.
 
Starting in the 90s, there have been more trans and nonbinary people at the Havurah, who have been welcomed as were gays and lesbians in earlier times.  Now we are changing our liturgy to include some non-gendered references to people and God.  For example, when calling people up to the Torah, we no longer say, “ben” or “bat.” We say “mi beyt,” from the house of, so that trans and nonbinary people can also feel welcome at the Havurah,
 
While there have been many changes through the years, what has not changed is the devotion and kavanah, and the openness towards different kinds of people. We are welcoming to all and our dues are completely affordable to all.  Our services are free, including High Holiday services.  The haimishness, and openness and love of Judaism has not changed.  The commitment to peace and justice and caring has not changed. 
 
We have adapted to the ongoing pandemic. We give tzedakah, do interfaith work, feed the hungry, give clothes and diapers to those in need, stand up for Black people and immigrants and for housing for all.  We are also involved with a community fridge in conjunction with our Catholic neighbors. 
 
This is Havurat Shalom. We invite you to join us to daven/pray, sing, study and celebrate in the 21st century. In a time of anti-Semitism, racism, sexism, transphobia, xenophobia, climate catastrophe, hunger and poverty, we still stand for justice, peace and love and offer a welcome to all.  We would be honored to have you join us.  We know you will be glad that you did and hope you will join your voice and presence with that of our ongoing, beloved Havurat Shalom.  Welcome!

by Aaron Brandes

Recap of Vayera

The parshah Vayera (“And HaShem Appeared”) is packed with familiar action. It opens with angelic guests informing Abraham and Sarah that they will have a child in their old age. Abraham tries to convince God to spare Sodom and Gomorrah, but when a minyan of righteous people cannot be found, God destroys those cities. While traveling, Abraham again has Sarah say she is his sister, fearing that the locals might otherwise kill him. Sarah gives birth to Isaac, and later insists that Abraham send away Hagar and Ishmael. God hears their cries and reveals a well to Hagar, adding that Ishmael will be made into a great nation. Then God puts Abraham to the test, asking him to sacrifice Isaac.

Origin of my midrashic idea

The core of this dvar is a midrash on the Akedah, the binding of Isaac. The idea occurred to me during the High Holidays as I read and listened to the Akedah yet another time. My attention was drawn to the ass, the beast of burden that accompanies Abraham and Isaac for three days before they proceed alone to the traumatic action on Mount Moriah. I thought of another ass, Balaam’s ass who sees what its master cannot – an angel with a sword prepared to slay Balaam, and imagined that Abraham’s ass could have prevented the tragedy of a father binding his son as a sacrifice from happening.

Parallels between Vayerah and Balak

The stories are very different in tone and purpose, yet I have found a few connections. In Vayera it says “So early next morning, Abraham saddled his ass” and parshah Balak tells us “When he arose in the morning, Balaam saddled his ass.” To start early in the morning is to be committed, no avoiding, no dilly-dallying, and for a man with servants to do the saddling himself is to take on personal responsibility.
 
Both men climb to a height and have transformative experiences involving the number three, and the Hebrew root ר - א - ה. Abraham travels for three days, ascends to a height, sees a ram caught in a thicket, and changes his intent to sacrifice Isaac. We read “And Abraham named that site Adonai-yireh whence the present saying, “On the mount of HaShem there is vision.”  Hebrew: be-har y-h-w-h yera’eh. Three times Balak takes Balaam to a height and asks him to curse Israel, but Balaam obeys God and blesses Israel each time.  We hear “As Balaam looked up and saw Israel encamped tribe by tribe, the spirit of God came upon him.” Hebrew: vayar et-yisrael.

My midrashic retelling of the parashah

Sometime afterward, God put Abraham to the test, saying to him, “Abraham.” He answered, “Here I am.” “Take your son, your favored one, Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the heights that I will point out to you.”
So early next morning, Abraham saddled his ass and took with him two of his servants and his son Isaac. He split the wood for the burnt offering, and he set out for the place of which God had told him. On the third day Abraham looked up and saw the place from afar.
 
Then Abraham said to his servants, “You stay here with the ass. The boy and I will go up there; we will worship and we will return to you.” Abraham took the wood for the burnt offering and put it on his son Isaac. He himself took the firestone and the knife; and the two walked off together. Then Isaac said to his father Abraham, “Father!” And he answered, “Yes, my son.” And he said, “Here are the firestone and the wood; but where is the sheep for the burnt offering?” And Abraham said, “It is God who will see to the sheep for this burnt offering, my son.”
 
As the two of them walked on together, the ass broke free from the servants, pursued and passed Abraham and Isaac and moved in front of Abraham, blocking his way. Abraham turned to the left and tried to go around the ass, but again found his way blocked. His third attempt, to go to the right side of the road was also stymied by the ass. Abraham yelled at the ass – “Who are you to keep me from fulfilling my vow to HaShem.” The ass said to Abraham, “Look, I am the ass that has served you many years until this day! Have I been in the habit of defying you?” And Abraham answered, “No.” The ass gestured with his head toward a green area near the road. Abraham’s eyes fell upon a ram, caught in a thicket by its horns; thereupon he bowed right down to the ground.

While Abraham went to fetch the ram the ass said to Isaac, "fear not, and know that in time God will prefer the offering of prayer to the offering of animals. You will learn the way of prayer, and will be in a meditative prayer-ful state when the woman you will come to love first sees you from her camel."
 
Abraham returned with the ram, and said to the servants, “one of you speed home on this wise donkey, and tell Sarah that Isaac and I will return soon, for I fear she will be worried that we have been gone so long and I said nothing about my plans.”
 
They continued with the other servant to HaMakom, the place pointed out by God, a place that is a Name of God. Abraham offered up the ram as a burnt offering in place of his son. He had known since his youth that unlike his father’s idols, God spoke and acted. Now through this story his people would know that although God would require ritual animal sacrifice, God would never expect or accept human sacrifice. 
 

by Larry Rosenwald

There’s a Philip Larkin poem I love, called “Church Going.”  Not an obvious poem to turn to in reflecting on the experience of the chagim, but I found myself thinking about it as I did that reflecting this year.  This is the passage I had in mind, especially its last line.  The speaker is himself reflecting, in his case on what it means to enter a disused church, why he does it, why others might:

It’s hard, for me at least, to feel every year the same intense, renewing energies that the chagim often bring – the joy, the buoyancy, the clarity of vision and purpose.   Things change from year to year, what was fresh becomes routine, the necessary tasks (which are also honors) of ushering, caretaking, leyning, leading can occupy us so intensely that we haven’t much room left for experiencing.  (When I lived in New York, I had a job in the choir of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.  The choirmaster there, a wonderful musician named Alec Wyton, used to say that no one who was making the service happen had any business being moved by it.)  It was cold outside this year, and rainy, and we were together but apart, masked, more distant from the leader and leyners than when, in the days before the pandemic, we were crowded together, shoulder to shoulder, voice to voice, face to face; we were not, at the moment of the priestly blessing, standing with arms linked, hands on heads, swaying.
         
None of this, though, affected my experience of the Yizkor service on Yom Kippur.   We are invited to name the dead we are recalling, and we say a few words about them.  They are our friends, parents, spouses, partners, teachers, students, public leaders and inspirers, even sometimes, alas, children.  We put aside the liturgy and hear the voices of those present.  Mourners tell stories – comic, heartfelt, poignant (a word that by its etymology means, appropriately, “piercing”).   Affection is stated, but candor is possible, difficult relationships can be frankly recounted, the good parts of a difficult person clearly and lovingly recalled.  And what we hear, telling these stories, are the voices of mourners – not, as so often, our voices together, but a voice by itself.  (This particular year, when it was so hard to see people, and some of us were on Zoom and some of us were in the backyard, it was the voices in their variety and distinctiveness that also carried identity – “I know that voice,” I kept thinking, and rejoiced at the knowledge.)  And when it was over, the we said kaddish together, I felt more serious (not more gloomy), more reflective, more deeply connected to all other mourners, more aware of how varied we are, and at the same time of what we have in common:  our mortality, the mortality of those we love and are bound to, the power to mourn and to comfort and be comforted.  I felt that this place of mourning was, in Larkin’s word, a place “proper to grow wise in, / If only that so many dead lie round.”

We come together as a community on the High Holidays, on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, to celebrate the New Year, to confront ourselves, to pray and to reflect. Whether you engage in this practice regularly or occasionally, we hope
you will find this machzor meaningful. At Havurat Shalom, where we have dedicated ourselves to creating a truly egalitarian liturgy for Shabbat, we feel we need this balanced and accessible liturgy as much or moreso at this time of the year.

For many years, Havurah members have been adapting the liturgy for the High Holidays and adding it to binders we called “anthologies”. Building on the efforts of those members, we proudly and humbly present the fruits of our
efforts: the complete Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur machzor in one volume.

The Hebrew of our machzor incorporates all the adaptations of the traditional High Holiday liturgy that were made previously by Havurat Shalom and placed in our Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur Anthology. The Hebrew that was not
previously addressed has been adapted in a similar manner.

The English translation and transliterations prepared previously have been incorporated. Additional translations have been written with the intention of providing a fairly literal key to the meaning of the Hebrew, but also to be texts
that worshippers can pray from. It is possible that these translations will be revised and refined in future editions. An attempt has been made to align the Hebrew, English, and transliterations in order to enable readers to move among
them easily.

The Hebrew and translations have been crafted to conform to the principles of the original Havurat Shalom prayer book, Siddur Birkat Shalom. This includes use of egalitarian language, greater variety of appellations and images for God, greater depth and openness in the portrayal of non-Jews, focus on the evil in the world as opposed to “evil people” and increased emphasis on our being a part of the vast web of life, and the divinity within us and in all of creation.

In addition to adapting the traditional machzor, we have added an original meditation to remind us of our potential goodness as we face our wrongdoings, in order to help us in our teshuvah.
Although much has changed in our lives and in the world since our original work began on the first Havurat Shalom siddur thirty years ago, we hope this newest volume will continue our long tradition of revising and opening the liturgy in order to help us all to open our hearts in prayer.

​- Havurat Shalom Machzor Committee

The first edition of Machzor Birkat Shalom was produced more than seven years ago during the course of a spring and summer. There were some prayers where we wished to do further editing but were constrained by deadlines. After the
Machzor's printing, we also discovered typographical and other errors in both the English and the Hebrew. In addition, since 2014, Havurat Shalom has been able to incorporate non-gendered Hebrew for prayers which previously had different options for male and female davenners. We are excited to present the
second edition where the errors have (hopefully) all been corrected, where some of the issues we were wrestling with have been further developed and where the non-gendered language adopted in our Shabbat prayerbook is reflected in our
Machzor. We have retained the same pagination as the original printing to faciliatate davenners being able to follow the service no matter which edition they are using.

By Aliza Arzt

​During the summer, I found two errors in the Havurat Shalom prayerbook - Siddur Birkat Shalom. This isn’t terribly unusual. Since we released the second edition of the prayerbook a little more than a year ago, I and other people have found a number of minor errors, which we have corrected in our PDF so that the next version of the Siddur will be more accurate. What was so annoying about these errors is that they weren’t part of the new material we’ve added to the Siddur in the last few years. In both cases, they belong to text that we produced more than 15 years ago. For the past 15 years, I have prayed with that text every Shabbat and, since March, I have read it every day as I’m attending morning minyan to say Kaddish for my father. The mistakes are insignificant. In both cases they involve use of the wrong “dots” below the word and they don’t change the pronunciation significantly. No one would ever notice the errors but me. Still, it’s annoying.  How could I have missed them for so many years?!
 
Needless to say, as we approach the High Holidays, this has me thinking about my own “errors” in my life and the question of whether I can identify them and correct them. The errors I found in the Siddur are part of a finite collection of words.  There are clear and specific rules with which I am very familiar and if I’m not sure, I know where to look them up. I have proofread these prayers at least 20 times in the last 15 years. Yet I still missed them! By extension, it seems nearly impossible that I would be able to identify and correct errors in my own thinking and behavior, which are not nearly as rule-bound as Hebrew grammar.
 
Reflecting on this situation, I’ve found cause for both pessimism and optimism.  Even though I implied that my own life isn’t a closed, finite system like the words in the Siddur, in many ways my life is constrained by environment, habit and expectations. The range of stimuli I respond to is relatively limited and I tend to react the same way to the same prompts and cues. If the curse of maturity is not having as many options, the blessing is not having to figure out what to do about every single situation that arises. On the other hand, if it took me 15 years to locate and change these minor errors in 100 odd pages of text, what are my chances that I’ll succeed this year (or any year) with the elements in my life that need correcting?
 
We know that the process of Return - T’shuva - change for the better, is complex and never-ending. At best, we’re caught between two poles of insight: we don’t have to be perfect; we’re never going to get it right. The minor errors in the vocalization that I’ve been reading for the past 15 years haven’t changed the meaning of the text and haven’t had any effect on my attention to the prayers.  Once discovered, they are a lot easier to fix than the instinctive and regrettable reactions I have to certain situations that I find myself involved in over and over again. And yet, they’re still mistakes.
 
The High Holiday liturgy can make us feel as if our lives are a morass of failure to meet God’s (and our own) expectations. On Yom Kippur, we pound our chests and recite an entire alphabet of misdeeds. We make resolutions that we suspect we won’t keep. We resolve to try to “fix” aspects of our behavior that have been broken for decades. Do we really think we’ll have nothing left to change next year?
 
The High Holiday season is a time to engage deeply in the examination of our shortcomings and also to rejoice in the renewal of creation. Many of our “mistakes” aren’t so important in the scheme of the whole of creation. Some of them are more devastating and have had far ranging consequences. These are the ones we should spend the most of our energy acknowledging and endeavoring to correct. This is also the time to spend contemplating our unthinking reactions that lead us to the same regrettable behaviors again and again. Can we think of any of them in a different way so as to respond differently? Can we give up on any of them with the understanding that they reduce our level of “perfection” but they don’t change the pronunciation of who we are? Can we be grateful that we have been given this time to meditate on who we are, how we behave and the potential we have for change?
 
May this season be for all of us a time to braid together reflection about our sins and renewal of our place in constant creation, remorse for our failings, and revitalization of our desires to be more of a light and a hope for ourselves, our friends and families and our world.

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.