“… The workshop was held in a big, drafty barn, with peeling paint and hard chairs. Lots of people were crammed in. Everyone left their shoes outside. My feet were cold. Most of these people were used to going to writing workshops and brought their manuscripts to receive guidance. Grace was tiny and majestic, wearing a huge grey sweater and sweat pants. Her hair was wisps of grey. She was in her 80s, a cancer survivor, pure energy, who gave total attention to each person. She seemed to know a lot of the women in the hall. Maynard was one of only a couple of men. Friday night Grace Paley spoke about how her stories and her politics were inseparable and invited a few people to share their work.
At the close of the session she said, “I am really interested in the stories you have not told. Think about what stories are waiting for you to tell. Tomorrow we will hear some of those stories.” Maynard and I returned in the cold and starless night to our room. While I was getting into my pajamas I turned to him and said, “I have a story that I have not told, about my brother, Chester. He died before I was born, but though I knew that, no one ever talked about it. I used to sneak into my father’s drawer to look at Chester’s picture.” I felt pressure on my heart as I spoke.
Maynard looked at me with his kind eyes and said, “This is a perfect opportunity. You can tell the story tomorrow.” “I really don’t think so.” He was insistent. “You must do it.” “I don’t know,” was all I could say before climbing into bed. Next morning, Maynard practically pushed me up in front of all the writers and Grace Paley to tell my story. I am fine in front of people. I have been a congregational rabbi; I get energy from an audience. Still, I had never told this story…
When I was little my mother told me a story about when her mother came to America. My mother’s mother’s mother packed a huge basket of fresh baked bread. My grandmother was leaving Bialystok for America and knew she might never see her mother again. The two women cried into each other’s arms for a long time. They cried a river of tears. The tears went into the bread basket. When my grandmother opened the basket later that day on the ship, the bread was soggy and salty from her mother’s tears and her own. When I hear this story, I am no longer a separate little girl. I am part of this immigrant experience. I am part of the love of women, the grief of separation, the sweetness of those tear-drenched loaves of bread. Stories straddle all the worlds. They are grounded in the particular and the unique: my story, my life, my experience, my family, my community.
The Torah is mostly stories of the Jewish people. Stories also reach into the depths of universal life experiences—temptation, rivalry, love, faith, doubt, leadership, journey, liberation. All sacred texts are rooted in time, place, culture, and context. Yet they all drink the same water of life and breathe the air of this planet. They all cope with the failings and triumphs of human beings. The narratives in the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous chronicle experiences of vastly different individuals finding freedom from suffering in unique circumstances. I listen to someone’s story and I identify with it, even though the details are radically different. Sometimes I enter your story and discover a truth of my own. All literature counts on this. Stories reveal truth, not scientific truth but heart truth, truths of loss, return, freedom, and healing. Sometimes stories reveal painful truths.
Another favorite story of my mother’s was about the day my Uncle Louis was born. My mother’s mother Fruma came from Europe with her firstborn, a girl, Leah, renamed Lillian in the new country. Lillian was three years old when they arrived in New York and were reunited with my mother’s father Samuel. A year later another girl, Ida, my mother, was born. According to my mother, Fruma didn’t want any more children because she was afraid she might have another girl. The second girl was not greeted with great joy in this typical Jewish family of 1907. A few years later, however, Fruma became pregnant again. She was planning to have an abortion. Samuel woke her one night to tell her he had a dream that the child would be a boy. She agreed to carry the pregnancy to term. The day my Uncle Louis was born, according to my mother, was the happiest day in her parents’ life. “It’s a boy!!! It’s a boy!!!” my grandfather screamed with delight from the stoop of their tenement in Harlem.
This is a story that carries a psychic wound of patriarchy. Multiply it by every story of rejection, exclusion, and oppression—all the stories growing scar tissue from the beginnings of time. The painful stories unite us too. They may invite a bonding that is tender enough to offer the balm of awareness. They may provide the scaffolding upon which to build a solidarity movement of liberation. Jews retell the wound of Egyptian bondage every day and every year as a catalyst to the ongoing project of personal and social liberation.
But not all stories liberate or heal. Not all stories inspire reconciliation or lead to solidarity. Some stories prop up my obsessions or delude me and keep me locked into cycles of hatred and resentment. Some stories call me into battle with my own shadows that I project onto another. Some stories trap me in confusion, greed, and violence. Most stories do not fall neatly into one category or another. They invite me to ask myself where is the truth, light, healing, joy, compassion, the energy, the connection in this story, in my reaction to this story. Where is the aversion, the fear, anger, hatred, sadness, separation, judgment, confusion in this story, in my reaction to this story?
Where is God hiding in these stories, in daily life, in resistance, struggles, relationships, twists and turns of choice and chance? Where is the light hidden—the light that was concealed in all matter after creation, the sparks of the divine? I ask these questions to create space to wait and listen. I do not need to do anything with these stories. The stories will reveal me to myself. The stories will reveal everything. The story of Chester is important for me because it softens my heart, especially toward my father. I recognize in his gruffness, anger, and repression an effort to control and adapt to overwhelming grief. His anger was a condition of my childhood. It is stored in my cells. When I tell the story of Chester, compassion rises in my heart toward my father. His anger was not meant for me. It was the best response he could muster in a world where he felt helpless as a father to protect his children. I can embrace him or allow the God filled with mercy, el maley rachamim, to be my surrogate.
The fact that I was born in 1946, after one and half million Jewish children were killed, is not a random detail for me. I see anger and hatred as one Jewish reaction to the powerlessness of not being able to protect our children. I don’t like the response but I can understand it. Unfortunately, the outer trappings of power—army, state, wealth, education, leadership—do not restore a sense of real power after such great loss. I see alienation from a God of mercy. A God of mercy after the Holocaust? You must be kidding!
The only God we know is absent! I see spirit-seeking Jewish souls of my generation wandering to the far reaches of the East to hear a message of compassion that might restore balance and ease suffering. Awareness of the Holocaust has been my companion since birth. Its story lives in my bones. Over the decades, many other terrible stories have joined this narrative of hate, all signaling the potential for depravity in human life. These stories rely on the illusion that violence will not contaminate those who perpetrate violence, that we can throw away what we do not like or what we fear and it will not return to destroy us. But there is no “away.” There is only this present moment, this planet, this interweaving of life. There is only this, zot, a word for the Shechinah, God’s indwelling presence. This is the story I want to tell.”
~ Sheila Weinberg, Surprisingly Happy: An Atypical Religious Memoir
“Are you happy because you are getting older or because you’ve found spiritual peace?” Rabbi Sheila Weinberg, Institute for Jewish Spirituality’s co-founder and Director of Outreach and Community Development, offers intriguing answers to that question in her new memoir, Surprisingly Happy: an Atypical Religious Memoir.
Snapshots of Rabbi Weinberg’s life, as told through poetry, prayers, and accounts of this Jewish Baby Boomer’s experiences, offer clues about her search to find God, and carves a path for others to learn from her journey. It addresses her spiritual quests through yoga and meditation, and provides a candid look at her struggle with addiction, her philosophy of feminism, and her life as a wife, mother and grandmother.
The book incorporates the author’s eye witness accounts of many iconic events of her generation: the 1968 student protests at Columbia University; the challenges of the Peace Corps in Chile in the late 60s; the outbreak of the 1973 Yom Kippur War; the influence of Eastern practice on Western religion; the breakthrough of women into religious leadership; and the Feb. 15th, 2003 massive movement to stop the war in Iraq.
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