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Collected Stories

 written by Rabbi Goldie Milgram, author of

Reclaiming Judaism as a Spiritual Practice, Meaning and Mitzvah, & Make Your Own Bar/Bat Mitzvah

Reclaiming Judaism as a Spiritual Practice	Millenial Meshuganosis
Please Turn the Camera Off	Aunt Annie, Qigong and the After Life
Talking to God in Holland	Encounter with a South African Tzadik
Kids Teach Spirituality	Mommy, Why Not A Candle, A Feather and a Spoon?
Forks in the Road	Notes from the State of Ambivalence
Intergenerational Yizkor Story	Barry and Goldie's Cyber-Spiritual Travelogues -Cross North America -Cross Europe -2002 USA South West  -2002 West Coast USA  -2003 South Africa and South East USA -2003 Budapest -2004 Passover and South Africa -2004 Project Kesher - Volga, Russia -2006 Israel To receive these travelogues as they happen, please email R'Goldie at rebgoldiem@aol.com.
Miriam and Tza'ra-at - A Notion
The Etrog Grove	Italy and the Parsha
Miracles and the Grave of Reb Nachman of Bratslav	A Tale of Messy Messianism
A Sacred Story about a Torah [Ukraine]	Teshuvah Walks
The Bat Mitzvah Girl	The Mezuzah Story
Grandpa Sam's Silly But True Bar Mitzvah Story	Spirituality of Tefillin
	Tu Bishvat in South Africa

1. The Hands of God                  by Rabbi Goldie Milgram

   We were at Dorshei Derekh, a Reconstructionist oriented minyan in Mt. Airy section of Philadelphia. The part of Torah being read had to do with the sacrificial system. It was the practice of this minyan to give maximum participation to congregants in commenting on the portion by either going around the room or letting each person call on the next person, being sure to alternate by gender so that women wouldn’t be under-represented.

   To my surprise my son raised his hand to be recognized. "The way I see it is that for thousands of years the Jewish people sacrificed aminals to God in hopes that there would be an end to war, hunger, disease and earthquakes. It took a really long time but eventually we realized that God doesn’t have (and he paused dramatically)................a nose. Then we tried a new idea, sending prayers instead of sacrifice fumes. And we prayed and prayed and prayed in hopes that there would be an end to war, hunger, disease and stuff like tornados. It took an incredibly long time but we started to catch on that maybe God doesn’t have (another dramatic pause...where does he get it?) ears!

   So I think today my mommy and her friends have another idea they’re trying out. They’re working hard to put an end to war, hunger and disease and they think that God has hands.

   (Then he grabbed onto the hand of the person on each side of him and lifted them up and said:)

   "And these are the hands of God." And then he sat back quietly.
    

2. Please Turn the Camera Off               by Rabbi Goldie Milgram

Years ago I organized a holocaust video-archive for survivors' and allied forces' memories. It started when a woman came into my office at the Jewish Federation, where in a previous career I was executive director. She was carrying a yellowed square of newspaper in German. "You are head of the community council," she said, "you must guard this for the future." "What does it say?" I asked. She shook her head and gently whispered, "I entrust it to you."

She left quickly. I went across the hall to the insurance office run by another German-Jewish survivor. He translated it for me. It was a small town paper and listed the deaths of a number of children at what we call Auschwitz.

I went to her house and she let me in, sat at the table and told me this was the day after her children were separated from her in the line at the camp, this for her was their obituary. She told me she had hidden with them for 20 months in 12 non-Jewish "safe" houses in Germany til a Jewish man informed on them to save his own life. It was late, I was pregant and tired and stunned by the evidence of it all right there in a daily newspaper.

The next day I told my board of the incident, an adult child of a survivor responded to my request to tape her story in depth by raising money for the archive from other children of survivors in about 48 hours. (Now of course there are many such archives, then there was only Yale's.)

There were five years of taking depositions for the archive. Many of those who were unable to bear children after the war asked if I would say kaddish for them, of course I do..........so do you perhaps.

And one more story still holds my heart in a vise...............a pre-teen at the time, in the Riga Ghetto, this survivor narrated to me the narrowing of the ghetto, crowding people closer and closer together....Watching the columns of Jews being marched to the Black Forest to be shot and buried.

His father was a pharmacist and secreted stockpiles of medicines around the ghetto, thus becoming precious to the Nazis as a source of antibiotics and antiseptics. After he dad was shot out on the streets, one night, while bringing medicine to another Jewish family, the son became the Nazis' source of medicine and the protector with this power on his block. With time and the imminent end of the ghetto, his power diminished. He spoke to me of watching his mother dragged out and forced into the columns being marched to the forest.

Then he made me abruptly stop the camera and said the interview was over.

His wife who was in the room came over to comfort him.  He seemed, unlike the other survivors who appeared joyfully unburdened by their tellings, terrifyingly tight,and controlled, very unlike his usual kind self. "There's more, what I've never told." ... "Keep the camera off, if you tell this it must be from you alone, not the tape, you who know me, you alone will retell the end."

We sat down, he looked like death. What I recall him saying was that ten young women with infants were still in hiding in a cellar, he would bring them things. When the ghetto was down to a very few streets they surrounded him and asked him for a drug that would allow them to poison the babies so they would die in piece in their mothers' arms, not shot in the forest. He was only a boy, he didn't know what to do.........for days he tried to convince them differently. Each day more and more of their friends, family, parents were seen marched in the columns..................he used the expression "the columns" so that it held the most dread of any term I'd ever heard.

He gave them the drug that he believed would lead to a merciful death.

They surrendered themselves to the Nazis with the dead infants in their arms.

Days passed, he was given a task on a crew to pack and transport furniture on trucks.....he went out of the ghetto with the furnishings, escaped and survived. He turned to me saying in the greatest anguish I hope ever to see in a human: "You see I survived, I am a murderer.............who knows how many of them might have survived if not for me?" Then this kind man, by now a retired pharmacist beloved by the town, father of wonderful children, beloved to his wife who had never before heard the whole story............he had a psychotic break right in front of me and was never the same again.

Every year different stories float up, ghosts in my soul stream.........people I've only met in their children's and parents' nightmares.

This year I said kaddish for them, the 3 and 4 year old who were informed on, the father and mother of the burdened young boy, and the ten young women and ten infants, and most recently for the boy himself who has passed on as an old man. In that time would we have acted differently? In this age of assisted suicide how do we know when or whether to end suffering?

As is said, there, but for the grace of God, go you and I.  Zichronam l'vrakhah, may their memories be for a blessing.

3.   Talking to God in Hollan                         by Rabbi Goldie Milgram

What do Holland and Amsterdam bring to mind for you? A quaint, anything goes place?

Superficially, yes. In red lit windows scantily dressed voluptuous women and transexuals offer professional sex services with dignity, signs note that printed rate cards are available upon request. Decorative canal boats float through the mist bearing a lone jazz musician haunting the night, others hold romantic diners in formal attire, and there are the ever-present curiously silent, flat and lengthy water buses and water taxis.

Crossing the street means cautiously fording bicycles two and four rows deep - no one wears a helmet and infants dangle happily in front handlebar seats. By evening the "brown cafes" will be alive with munchie driven youth and aging hippies, high on more than life. Two women with wine glasses dine on their stoop in the precious late autumn sunlight and offer us a glass and a surprise toast to life.

Europe is not like America in manifold ways. So fragile is the tentative healing of Holocaust harrowed hearts in Holland. Despite my perception of the historic menschlichkeit of Dutch people, I am told over and over in soto vocce moments that "they had actually turned the Dutch Jews in three days before the German's deadline."

It is Rosh Hodesh. I am invited to one of the several women's Rosh Hodesh groups in town. Some thirty women are present, old and young, half a dozen expatriate Americans and many Dutch Jews.

The organizer asks "Rabbi, how long will your talk be?"  Talk? I thought we were to have an informal discussion on teshuvah. Uh. Oh. I close my eyes and pray to God for transparency, to be sent a proper inspiration for guiding this group. In Europe it is common to talk about God or about Judaism more then practicing it, similarly intellectualizing teshuvah (forgiveness practice) has become an excuse for not doing it. A memory dawns of an Gestalt-based experiment that had worked well in a class of mine at Elat Chayyim. Taking a deep breath, I trust the memory is sent and try it.

We form two lines facing each other, each finds a partner across the way with her eyes. I instruct them that if at any time a woman feels unsafe or unsure, to sit out that part of the experience, that it is ok to take care of yourself, there is no reason to give up one's power.

I instruct the women on one side to call out to their partners: "Where were you?" To do this seven times, varying the voice to try out different feeling tones. Then a pause, allowing each person to store what comes up in her sacred memory nest. Now the other side has a turn at the same thing.

We do several phrases:

"Where were you?"

"I missed you."

"Don't ever do that to me again."

"That was great, let's do it again."

"I forgive you."

"I love you."

Then everyone in the two lines turns their back to each other and faces outward.....repeating the same phrases, out loud, to G-d. As their arms go up in an instinctive movement of beseeching, and two Americans race over to stop me from continuing the exercise, I feel a rabbinic anxiety attack coming on.......of course, several of the upraised arms reveal the tattooed numbers, of concentration camp survivors.

A survivor turns to toward me and the Americans.........."Do not dare get in the way of my having conversation with God," she speaks the words in English, levelly with slow, great emphasis. "It is long since time, and don't worry, we survivors know how to take care of ourselves better than you ever will." The others nod in agreement, we continue. One person leaves, two sit down and remain as witnesses.

At the end the group members insist that every woman must have a chance to debrief, no matter how long it takes. That evening I utilized what felt like every ounce of professional training I'd ever received. Unforgettable are the sharings of that night, so full of love, risk-taking, longing, anger, healing and hope. Hard realities are confronted, not only the obvious terrors of the camps and a God treated as one who is absent, hateful or dead, but also that of sexual, emotional and physical abuse and losses.

Some who share are radiating a kind of light from the sense of God-connection that has come through the experience that some might call a form of "hitbodedut".

Healing from the wounds of growing up Jewish is very holy work. "Dutch Jews won't allow themselves to feel joy?" Someone bursts into song and we all join her, it has been very intense.

3b.   Forks in the Road       by Rabbi Goldie Milgram

Goldie: On the way to Crater Lake Barry turns to me and says, "I wonder if we should have driven straight to Portland. We could have attended the Native American mask making demonstration tonight and have taken a highway instead of these winding mountainous roads. What do you think, Goldie?"

My response -- swift and automatic - was from my repertoire of personal philosophy: "Once I take a fork in the road, I never look back on the road untaken." Subject closed and I return to working on a piece for my " manuscript of stories from my overseas rebbe travels.

"Her signature sound," murmurs my guide and friend David. The heat rolled off of dunes in its own rhythm and I foolishly wish for a desert wind. We are walking to a Bedouin camp and a woman he wants me to meet there. I see nothing but oceanic waves of sand.

"We should have brought more water, a return ticket for the bus, how do you know this is the direction, how will we find the road again?" Nattering reveals my growing concerns.

"Listen, it's her song. Goldie, I'm not crazy.....listen for the rhythm.....bonk, donk, bonk.....bonk, donk, donk, bonk......bonk, donk, bonk....."

"You're imagining thi............I hear it. Or I think I hear it....bonk, donk, bonk....bonk, donk, donk, bonk........they must be over there! What kind of instrument is it?"

"You'll see." he replies.

His strong profile set in the direction of the sound, my hatted shadow bobbing with the effort to keep up, together we stride deeper into the desert. Mirage puddles tease my horizon line only to be replaced by dots of movement, white wanderings against the golden sand. Sheep.

Still the strange sound.......Bonk, donk, bonk....bonk, donk, donk, bonk....bonk, donk, bonk.

Now the tents become visible as well as two brown shapes against the sky. I ask about them. He laughs: "The camels. They are status symbols, expensive for them to keep and really useless now that they have jeeps."

"Let me tell you more about the woman I have brought you to meet. Her first husband died. Her second beat her so she left him. This is unheard of with the Bedouin. They say a Bedouin woman can never divorce her husband. She went on to form her own "shig", a traditional hospitality center focused around her campfire. She even has her own tent. You two will be a real pair of Semitic feminists."

Only ten years apart in age from me, she looks like she could be my grandmother. Darting eyes show above the elaborate face covering to which are attached beads, bullets, coins and charms. Later I will be gifted with one and discover it is very heavy, needing the whole head for support at different points.

Her name is Fadaeia. Out comes a rush of uniquely fluid guttural Arabic, I almost understand the intent from context and Hebrew cognates, though it is the curiosity in her eyes that speaks loudest. Translation: "She has asked how long it took you to get here."

"Twelve hours."

"Such a long walk!" she exclaims. I hasten to tell her about the airplane and distances to America and bring a tennis ball out of my pocket to serve as a globe.

His hand squeezes my arm in warning, arresting my intentions swiftly.

"Prime directive," whispers David who is doing research on the sedentarization of the Bedouin for his doctoral thesis in urban planning.

"This isn't Star Trek"," I responded defiantly and incredulously.

"We try not to wreck their innocence excessively," he responds. "O.K.?"

Settling in for the night. I marvel at the small revelations of the day. Children wandering barefooted among jagged tin can lids carelessly tossed by Bedouin unromantic about the environment. No diapers, an open air drip dry system is in use. Her grandchild of 3 months is being lulled in a burlap saddle bag draped over a donkey which wanders freely about the campsite. Squealing in delight, the little one watches events with big eyes, the burlap occasionally oozing an emission which dries spontaneously in the intense heat.

The cool, calm morning offers endless blue sky and we enjoy coffee to the sound of her "instrument." The pestle dancing against the mortar:

Bonk, donk, bonk......bonk, donk, donk, donk, bonk.....bonk, donk, bonk.

A breeze has begun and the tent seems to dance lightly with her tune. She's dropped her veil, we are accepted as more than guests, he has become a family friend.

"She has questions for you." For me? What could she possible want to know about me?

"O.K., sure."

"Do you have children from your first marriage? Why did you leave your husband? Who cares for your children while you are here?"

I respond by asking if she would answer the similar questions about herself, meanwhile pulling out a photo of my two beautiful sons, Adam and Mark.

Her eyes seem to wax compassionate and a woman-sharing grief shapes her face. "How sad, Allah has only blessed you with two children. The same for me. My husband never forgave me for it."

"Oh, how unfair! For me it was conscious, contraception, you know."

Again the warning hand on my arm, a translation of my comment is rendered as something like "this is grief women can surely share and know."

I turn to him, angry and annoyed hissing: "Why are you corrupting my response?"
"Shhhhh.......they don't know about that, it's against the Shariya (Muslim ethical code) to use contraceptives."

I begin a melancholic internal reflection on my two Caesaerian sections, in this nomadic culture I would surely have died of childbirth without recourse. "Ask her what happens if a pregnant woman comes due and the midwife can't get the baby to come out."

He asks, his body language giving away discomfort with being caught in women’s talk.

Her response: "Oh course, we get her to the main road and travel into Be’er Sheva, the nearby city, go to the hospital and have a C Section. What would you do?" She even audibly uses the word C-Section in her Arabic response. Mutely, I lift my shirt to show the C-section scars.

"Ahhhh." Her vowelish understanding is universal.

Repressing laughter at the absurdity of modern medicine allowed, but talk of air travel not, the conversation takes a serious turn as the Green Patrol becomes our topic.

Bedouin are no longer allowed to wander in the Middle East. Virtually every country is forcibly sedentarizing them.....oblivious to boundaries, following ancient routes ingrained by forebears, their flocks wreck havoc with modernity, trampling fences and fields, in some regions tripping land mines....some families are known for heavy trafficking in drugs.

Bedouin are in the way of regional economic development. Towns are being built for them, advanced education being offered, free immunizations. They will be "properly" cared for.

Fadaeia is a rebel who will not give up all her ancestral ways. The desert is huge and she is part of the tribes who are still on the run. Even when forced into the new towns, as soon as backs are turned, for some, out come the tents. She points to our tracks disappearing in the wind...."It is not so hard to disappear in a desert." I reflect internally on the powers of radar and aerial surveillance.

David tells me they are given two story houses but don’t use the second floor, "it is too uncomfortable and alien to them. They use the toilets as pots to grow herbs. The "shig" structure isn’t recognized by the housing set ups, their forms of socialization are completely disrupted. They feel set too close together and the youth fight. There’s no work because they can’t keep flocks or trade. I think of Indian reservations, will a casino to provide employment be next?

The children run among the sheep and donkey....they seem somewhat like herd animals, left to wander, getting responsibilities should they survive long enough to be of value.

Earlier at a tour of regional health facilities a doctor tells me he wants to shake the Bedouin men. "They won’t pay for fees for fresh water hook ups in the towns. The women carry the water so the men see no reason to pay for getting it. Dysentery kills many of the children." He asks if I could stay and work with the women, organize them to change their husbands’ minds.

We walk outside, Fadaeia and I. A distance away from the tents she digs up a root for me, it tastes like a form of seedless cucumber, succulent, sweet. Not so far away archaeologists and anthropologists are cataloguing civilizations past......."a people once dwelled here who worked with iron...copper, the stables were over there...." Serious funds are set aside to preserve King Solomon’s mines, horse stalls..."

Are there no rights for an anachronism? Just museumification? Before my very eyes another indigenous people is being terminated by modernity.

Over coffee and pita made fresh before our eyes over an open fire she tells of her plans to protest. She will pitch a tent in Jerusalem in front of the Prime Minister’s home. "Who better than Jews, she asks, "to understand the meaning of preserving one’s ancestral lands and ways of life?"

On the road home I ask David: "How can we help her?" No answer.

"You will use her life for a doctoral thesis and just document? These are real people, you have an obligation!"

He couldn’t see my point, he is just an observer.

And the sad thing is, looking back to that day ten years past, so was I.

Footnote: Went back to find her not long ago. No one knows where she went, a few remember her appearance in front of the Prime Minister’s house. Even among the Bedouin, no one seems to remember her name.

This story has continued to haunt me after all these years. The absurdity of not being allowed to taint the purity of their culture by talking about contraception and airplanes while the government is far more radically destroying their way of life. The ethics remain very unclear to me.....lobby for her freedom to roam? What about the burgeoning kibbutzim nearby and danger to Fadeia and family of tripping over mines near the borders...borders they barely feel and don’t recognize? Teach her daughter about contraception?.....she probably quietly knows and isn’t it my obligation to respect the Shariya (Moslem religious law) as their choice? Rally supporters to at least gather some more land so the Bedouin came move about somewhat? Is a "reservation" really a better life than accommodating fully to modernity? I still don’t know. I just don’t know.

But mainly I am bothered that I did nothing.

We are still driving. Ahead of us looms Mount Mazama, Oregon. Snow capped and magnificent. Returning to my laptop, I read this story to Barry, my trusty spiritual partner.

Barry: "So let’s look at the options available to you at that time. You had a choice. You could have stayed and worked pro-actively with the Bedouin, or returned home, finished your final semester of rabbinical school, rejoined your children, and completed the legal work on your divorce. Am I correct?"

Goldie: Y....es.

Barry: And you’ve thought about this for the past ten years?

Goldie: I guess you could say that.....a mitzvah undone seems to burn within the soul.

Barry: (Now smiling) And when you take a fork in the road, you never look back?

About an hour later, we found ourselves hiking the trail alongside the Rogue river with its 410,000 gallons per minute rushing through a narrow gorge. Coming to a fork in the path, Barry stops and says: "Imagine Fadeia is standing on the right hand fork. Speak to her. What do you want to say?"

I begin to ask what has happened in her life these ten years, to ask for forgiveness for my inaction...he gently tugs me down the other fork, she gets further away, the conversation disrupted by events.

He lets us move back toward her only to then be tugged back the other way....towards resolving the marriage, the children, work...studies....

My friend Louise Vanett, zl" always says "Don’t should all over yourself or anyone else." Barry says: "You try not to use the term "should," but in effect you "should" all over yourself on a regular basis. A person of God is more humble, more tolerant of being human, more forgiving of others and self.

Goldie, you did do a mitzvah that day. You were a compassionate listener. It’s time to let it go....graciously integrate your humanness with your rigorous mitzvah expectations."

The residual issue Barry has revealed is not so much "teshuvah" (forgiveness of self or another for miss-stepping), as it is the need for greater "shiflut" (humility). "Shiflut" is the quality which Chassidic masters teach is the real source of spiritual integrity, the knowledge of how limited we really are. In an earlier post I criticized a colleague for excess zeal in pressing others to do mitzvot....how true it is, what some therapists say, that what troubles us most about others is often what remains to be transformed within one’s own self.

Barry places a small dead branch into my hand, attached to it are intricate lace lichens, the tip is curved like a finger. "This can be a ‘yad’ (pointer used during reading from the Torah scroll) for our Torah." He says.

 

4. Italy and the Parsha                        by Rabbi Goldie Milgram

"Why do so many Jews visit Italy? Why would we want to?" So responded a colleague to whom I'd written a question about an upcoming double Torah portion "Mattot/Massei." The easy and less than correct answers to his question are "stunning scenery and awesome vegetarian and kosher food."

The trip would prove to teach me much about that Torah portion I never consciously wanted to learn.

Through lush scarcely populated valleys lined with wildflowers, fields of sunflowers and rivers of grape vines and bleating sheep we trekked toward walled cities set upon hilltops like Torah crowns. Geraniums abound with the visual texture of a pomegranate's bursting flavor. This is where they were meant to be, steadfastly radiating hot-colored beauty against the ochre, peach and occasionally curiously blue pigment of the stuccoed aging interior walls.

Every slightly peeling surface becomes a possible painting in the mind's eye.....shapes leaping out like when the sky is decorated with cotton ball clouds. We cross paths with castles and villas.

We are in the region known as Tuscany.

Even whispered voices ring conspiratorially amid the stone acoustics, one imagines the clatter of carts and horse hooves would create an unthinkable din. Night sounds and the at first charming, then increasingly maddeningly omnipresent church bells chiming on the quarter hour dive through the window of our room, usually we stay over in a medieval tower now turned into a classy bed and breakfast inn.

Our trek takes us through incredible, twenty foot deep carved rock mercantile passageways, from perhaps 600 B.C.E. carved by Etruscan traders indigenous to the region. Our guide, a delightfully Bohemian transplanted American art historian named Jane, is twinkling and mischievous this day.

We come upon an Etruscan acropolis (hill town) recently uncovered by an archaeology doctoral student who accompanies us, chopping at vines with his machete to reveal new areas rich in antiquities. The edenic hillside moment is shattered by the booming of cannons........he shrugs, the Italian national guard base is half a mile away. A country too-rich in history, we watch as a few more bits of the amazing historic site are shaken to the ground by the air compression of the distant, non-life threatening shelling. Having been to Israel many times and impressed by her antiquities, I never realized even more amply endowed is Italy.

We emerge from the Etruscan passageways, trying to imagine dragging carts laden with goods the long distances between cities. Swallows dance and dive in the air currents, and we follow their glider-like existence on the wind currents into the next town, our sixth hill town and I find myself sighing at the thought of another "duomo", cathedral tour. Oh yes, their edifice complex was fully realized, don't get me wrong, these are buildings of structural beauty and musical resonance I'd scarcely imagined, more impressive are the hills than those of Provence and the cathedrals than in Paris.

It's just that church art in Italy minces no imagery. The walls were the religious textbooks of the masses before the printing press. I had always wondered how people raised on the gospels could partake in such terrors as the Crusades, Inquisition or Shoah. No amount of reading can give you the answer the frescoes, sculptures and castings seem to yield.

At every turn from the constant gaunt forms of Jesus dripping blood on the cross, to the esteemed Pieta sculpture and omnipresent motif of Mary and baby depictions across the centuries..............mother holding sacrificed child.........to the endless depictions of the apostles and descendants being grotesquely tempted by demons or martyred, the message calls out "this is what was done to us when we held to our true belief, when we would not conform," and so they have done to others similarly.

Empowered by the artwork of faith, recreating real life scenes so familiar they must have lost the power to shock or horrify long ago.........atrocities become just animated extensions of the acts of faith on the walls. Perhaps this confirms and is even the source of our fears of the danger of a steady diet of violence on the screen, I fear it may be so.

In the Museum of Torture, located in the quaint hill town (not Hilton) of San Giamingiano, etchings show Dominicans sawing off the feet of Franciscans for not sharing the correct side in a detailed debate about an article of faith. They depict crude tools and machines for the specific torture of particularly women in unspeakable ways.

Two British parents wander in with young children and begin explaining how the tortures were done, matter-of-factly, we could have been in a science museum. The children's eyes are falling out of their faces in terror and my husband suggests to the oblivious, thorough, parents that perhaps this isn't really a place for children. They laugh at him and say how surely he knows how much children enjoy watching violence.

We are in Italy in part because I want to stand in a particular square in the relatively minor town of Ferrara. It was there that a little known moment of transformation took place in human history. A professor friend at Hebrew University once placed a manuscript into my hands that had not yet been translated. It was written by Rabbi Dr. Yitzhak Tzahalon and I labored over it while in rabbinical school.

You see, there was to be an "auto-da-fe," a burning at the stake of the town's Jews. They seemed to be surviving the Black Plague in numbers disproportionate to the general population and so were accused of practicing witch craft. Already at this time the popes had declared the medical schools off limits to Jews. The Chief Rabbi of Ferrara was also a physician and he would go on to build the first Jewish medical school, a pattern later to be followed during times of prejudice even here in America.

A Christian colleague of Rav Dr. Tzahalon  requested permission to study the situation in Ferrara before the burning, in case there was a medical idea that might prove useful to the general population. What he and his team found, was that the Jews did two unique things that might bear on their likelihood of survival.

One he discounted, the Jews would wash their hands before each meal, recite what he termed an "incantation" (actually a blessing in Hebrew which is practiced by myself and many Jews to this day) and then lift their hands up symbolically.

Secondly, when someone fell ill with the plague, they would be removed to a building on the edge of the city and required to stay there for forty days should they recover. It was this practice that then re-entered human consciousness. The Jews were practicing a requirement from Leviticus, removing to a "beyt merhak", a "house of distance" those who fall sick with plague, for a minimum of forty days.

Forty in Italian is "quaranta," and so quarantine was instituted as a "contemporary" health practice and the Jews of Ferrara survived that episode because of approval of the biblical grounds for that behavior. Unfortunately for humanity, "germ theory" would not emerge scientifically for a long time, and the importance of hand washing remained encoded in ritual. It is often said that just as the Jews preserve the Torah, so has the Torah preserved the Jews. This is a clear example.

We never made it to Ferrara, history had other lessons in store for us. We crossed the river from the Etruscan acropolis, visited their necropolis (city of the dead) and began our northward trek toward the hill town known as Pitigliano. It lacked the golden charm of other hill towns, here the narrow streets of this most remote place felt eerie to us, there being far fewer flowers, recent rains had led to land slides and fear. We were off the beaten track, there were no echoes of fellow tourists like in other towns.

Buttery smells of a bakery added a sense of hope to the dimness of a town that felt built to keep out the sun. I startled to see a hecksher, notice of kosher certification, posted in a bakery window. We enter curiously. It is owned by one of the three Jews who still live in Pitigliano, once known it seems, as Little Jerusalem.

We are rather surprised to find that matzah is being sold off-season, the bakery serves a wide region it seems. Shaped-like the Italian cookie Americans know as pitzelle, which resembles a flower-shaped stained glass window, the matzah is sturdy and delicious to us. We will carry some for days like a talisman of connection to this place and as a firm grip on our Jewish identities.

The term ghetto comes from Italy, Venice actually. It means "foundry", we learn, for in Venice it was a section rich in foundries to which the Jews happened to be residentially restricted. In Pitigliano, the ghetto area once housed Jews fleeing the area of Rome and persecution during the Inquisition and thereafter. Eager for economic growth, the remote town welcomed the fleeing Jews, on and off housing us and nurturing our mercantile contributions to the economy, then expelling us and reaping our stored assets back time after time.

The small long-dead synagogue has just been physically restored by a foreign donor, the young women behind the counter told us. We go to witness it, my husband and I feel overwhelmed with a bitter sadness. The guide mentions that at one time the town was completely abandoned when overrun by the plague and it is still recovering almost 400 years later.

We continue on our way to Florence where the opulence is magnified to the limits of passion. Like in Rome the synagogue is well and visibly guarded. The frescoes are paisley-like orange-red patterns, none of the text book images are to be found. It is lovely and worth a visit, though a trip to the rabbi's study teaches us of the few children being raised as Jews in Florence and it has the usual geriatric character of many European congregations. The little Jewish museum in the synagogue is interesting, it also houses a small Jewish community center and a delicious kosher-Italian restaurant is situated right next door.

In Florence the newspaper headlines scream out at us in Italian, French, German, and English newspapers. A healing ritual planned for the interment of Tsar Nicholas' bones in the Kremlin will not be supported by the Patriarch of the Eastern Orthodox church. Why should I care? Subtitle, the autopsy reports are not being bought by growing right wing segments of the church who believe Nicholas was ritually decapitated by Jews. In a related story one of the bishops burns in a pubic square the papers of two priests who helped keep Christianity alive under communism, they are denounced by the bishop as heretics. Interesting how these nuances have not been covered in the American press to the best of my knowledge.

My heart clenches in fear, for I often travel to Russia and the Ukraine as an invited teacher of Jewish spirituality. With the downward spiral of that region's economy will antisemitism, the church and the state again rise of terrible partners? I recall a chance meeting in the town of Nemiroff in the Ukraine.

We are shopping in the marketplace, I and perhaps eight women from my seminar and a translator. Spotting an Eastern Orthodox priest by his garb I ask the translator to introduce us. She pales and she and the women try to convince me not to disturb him. "You do not understand how dangerous and powerful the priests are." She translates the women's concerns for me and adds that she, who is Eastern Orthodox herself, completely concurs. "The church is rising rapidly and it will not be good for the Jews."

Seeing their fear and thinking it irrational at the turn of the 21st. Century, I back off. By coincidence as we are leaving I drop a bag and bending over to pick up spilled fruit rear end someone behind me. Turning to apologize I see the translator looks like all the blood has run out of her already pale skin into the earth. I have rear-ended the priest.

She introduces us. He is incredibly tall, I am drawn up to my full five feet.   I suggest that I would like to come to visit his church or perhaps have lunch and discuss the re-emergence of religion in the Former Soviet Union. He scowls and asks: "How does it feel to still be waiting for the messiah after thousands of years?" I respond: "Our tradition teaches us to pray as if everything depends on God and live as if everything depends on us."

He swirls away from me declaring: "I knew there was no such thing as a woman rabbi." The translator looks phenomenally relieved at his departure, "The priests often have little formal education and fear embarrassment even on biblical matters, it's best not to anger them, they can act irrationally."

I drift back to earth in Florence, the troubling newspaper clenched in my hand. Why can't religious people be more like the Jews? Peaceful, serving on the boards of non-profits, kissing mezuzzahs, concerned with loving and listening. I imagine common people breaking open the display cases at the Museum of Torture and coming after us. The article on the next page is about a Palestinian youth beaten to within an inch of death by Jews, it doesn't break through my self-righteousness.

That night I return to preparing the Torah portion I must teach upon my return home. I drop the text on the bed as it sears my soul, I am instantly humbled and horrified. There the frescoes of the Jewish religious imagination, the words pictures of our Torah sear into my soul, and I imagined instead of an aliyah for this section, a yeridah........a deliberate stepping away from our ancestors' complicity with that moment in Torah.

I am speaking of Numbers 31 where HaShem speaks to Moses saying: "Avenge the Israelite people on the Midianites, then you will be gathered to your kin." Moses enacts this with a vengeance organizing troops from every tribe and succeeds in killing every Midianite male in that town, including five kings.

The Israelites take the Midianite women and children captive, which is not enough for Moses who is furious at this and instructs them to kill all the captive Midianite women who have ever had sex with a man. The remaining women and children are described under the category of "booty" to be divvied up in specified proportions among the men who engaged in the military campaign, the priests and Levites, and the rest of the community. The Torah records that God tells Moses to impale all the Israelite ringleaders of the intercultural contact.

Don't ask me to kiss the scroll wherein this chapter resides. Perhaps this is a reading that calls for a Kaddish like that of Reb Levi Yitzhak, son of Sarah of Berditchev, who shrieks out that "from my place I shall not move until there be an end to all this." Who am I to wish new, politically correct frescoes for the cathedrals while actively preserving parallel media in my own tradition!?

I search the commentaries for repudiation of this as a basis for faithful action. Nothing. So far there is no-one's shoulder's to stand on and I pray never to find it has been used as justification of holy warfare since that time. Let us not forget that Moses' father-in-law is a Midianite priest, who brought him his wife and sons in the wilderness, who gave Moses good counsel in his time of need.

Moses dies not as a great leader, but rather as a vengeful functionary.  With Miriam dying just shortly before is his ability to find new resources lost? With Aaron gone has Moses no balanced voice of his own? He first strikes the rock and then the text has God redirecting that anger into murder and vengeance. Moses' incredible life ends in a crescendo of loss and violence. It is the Israelites who try to save the Midianite women and mothers.

God does not tell Moses to kill the women, Moses chooses to require this. We must find a way to recognize the burnt-out vengeful leader, to calm the Medieval inner-child and each people begin the construction of new frescoes in words, images and deeds.

When I brought my son to a rally regarding the situation in Bosnia a few years ago, he tugged on the CNN anchor person's coat until she turned the camera on him. He said: "I don't know why my mommy and these people are standing here at the Liberty Bell yelling at those bad people in Bosnia. Do you think they are watching television? Why don't you rent airplanes and fly over there and lift up their hands like my mommy does when I am bad and say "This is unacceptable behavior."

Would anyone care to join me on a trip to dialogue with the Eastern Orthodox Patriarch, the Dalai Lama's already been spoken for and appears a bit tame by comparison? And no, dignifying anti-semitism with a response isn't wrong, it's just action before it's too late, or, certainly I'm open to better suggestions.

 

3.  How Kids Teach Spirituality   My sons Adam and Mark have been a constant source of spiritual education.

The Burning Bush Episode

          Our Mancesters    happened at Temple Beth El, Hammonton, NJ where I served for almost a decade.

"Rabbi, Rabbi! We went to a big synagogue in Cherry Hill for our cousin’s bar mitzvah."

"Isn’t this the first one you’ve attended that wasn’t here at our synagogue? How was it?"

"Really weird, rabbi. They are so radical, can you imagine? They took the imahot (matriarchs) out of the service!"

The Best Laid Plans

My sons' Day School invited me to come teach on tefillin to pre-schoolers.  So I show up with my racoon hand-puppet, Raggy.  She (Raggy) explains how one day she was looking in the window of a human being's house and saw the most amazing thing.  The human was winding dark coils around her arm, just like the coils on the tail of a racoon.
Do you know what those coils mean?  Raggy asked rhetorically.
They symbolize that we are the closest animals to God in the whole universe, they are a symbol of God's love!
And can you believe it?  Raggy asked the children.  Humans are so jealous of how close we are to God that they are putting coils too!
Well, I said to the puppet, in my role as Rabbi/teacher.  I wonder if what really happens is that every time you notice your coils you feel especially close to God? And you remember your own joy at how beautiful creation is and that you are a part of it specially put here by God?
Oh, yes, yes!  said Raggy.
And what the human was doing, I continued, is to put on an ancient Jewish prayer tool called tefillin.  These do work just like your tail seems to, helping us feel closer to God and to remember that we are an important part of creation, too.
I asked the children, who were raptly watching this skit, if they had any questions.
Oh yes, said one little boy.  Rabbi, I'm confused.  Exactly what is it that you want us to fill in?

sigh.

4. The following story also appears on Jewish Communications Network and also The Virtual Yeshiva Website:

Millenial Meshuganosis              
A female rabbi searches for the messiah in the Chabad-Lubavitch capital of Crown Heights. A student of Reb Zalman, she finds there's still spirituality amid the messianism
by Rabbi Goldie Milgram

Disturbing emails have been arriving on my screen decrying a perceived Chabad practice of worshipping the Rebbe and/or equating the Rebbe with the messiah. There was even an email discussion on whether the Jewish Agency should cut off funding to Chabad on the grounds that such practices remove a group from the boundaries of the Jewish people.
So off I went to 770 Eastern Parkway, the Lubavitcher headquarters in Crown Heights to find out what's really happening with messianism and Chabad, and also just to make some connections and learn. Why be second-hand about the breadth of our beautiful people?

Now, mind you, I have trouble with messianism as a concept. I wonder how it can be used as a paradigm in the spiritually relevant Judaism that the Jewish Renewal movement has been working to create. With the increasing levels of -- to coin a phrase -- "millennial meshuganosis" that are upon us, there is a human tendency to let hopes and desires run away with reality. Just remember the fiasco with Shabbatai Zvi, not to mention other messiah candidates. For myself, I believe in pluralism and don't want to see liberal Jews visit sanctions on the other end of the spectrum -- any more than I am receptive to being oppressed by those who don't choose to practice in the part of the spectrum where I am comfortable.
So, we visited seven shtieblach, a real matzah bakery, and the Rebbe's own shul. While mitzvah mobiles with the Rebbe's photo abound, and his likeness is borne prominently on study halls and exterior building walls, it was noticeably absent in the sanctuaries themselves. As I understand Jewish tradition would have it.

And I saw that spirituality is still alive amid the messianism.

As I peered down from the second floor women's gallery of the cavernous main Lubavitch synagogue at 788 Eastern Parkway, I discerned what seemed a lovely (and new-to-me) spiritual practice. Men who were celebrating yahrzeits of loved ones would light five candles on the table from which they led prayers. The candles symbolized the spiritual ascent of the soul during the yahrzeit. I was also informed some light the candles as a meditation during ordinary prayers as well.
Numerous minyans meet at staggered times through the day, overlapping, and joyfully chanting their way through the service, each in their own corner. Of course, not all was spiritual: some of the worshippers were obviously discussing business, as I could see from my perch behind tinted glass in the women's section.

Not all the spirituality was reserved just for the men. There were several women's study sessions, covering everything from the Mishna to the Tanya, a Lubavitch devotional text.

We were befriended by a formerly Conservative, now Chabad rabbi. This Rabbi Epstein referred to the Rebbe as a "prophet" and the "recipient of prophecy." Wouldn't Maimonides be jealous!?
I told him that what has been confusing to me is the idea of a "moshiach who comes." I had thought that the messiah was not a tangible agent of history, but a "world oversoul," that we can access at times when our personal refinement allows us to be in contact with "it."

Bringing this up created confused agreement from those we met, as they validated it as one of the ways the idea can be authentically expressed. Yet, the personification of the messiah also appears to be important and a matter of great attachment and invested energy in that community.

Furthermore, locals here didn't like the idea that the Rebbe's "Moshiach Now!" program was purely about attaining a degree of spiritual elevation. Almost all expected a physical messianic advent. Plus, there's a tinge here and there of apocalypticism - that catastrophe might precede the messianic arrival.

One of my beloved teachers is a former Chabad rabbi and one of the founder's of the Jewish Renewal phenomenon, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi. This visit helped me understand why Reb Zalman wrote and urges promulgation of a piece he titled "Renewal is Not Heresy." Reb Zalman now teaches at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Co. and the Elat Chayyim: Center for Healing and Renewal, in Woodstock, NY.

Nonetheless, my visit was sweet and non-confrontational, full of shared teachings.

At one point we were in a study hall where an elderly man was stacking chairs, so I helped him. To pass the time I asked him about one of the highlights of his life experience and he glowingly told me of his trip to Reb Nachman's grave in Uman, Ukraine. It turned out he was both chair stacker and rabbi of his shtiebl. Having been to Uman recently myself, I joining the sweet reminiscing and commented, "Isn't this great?

"We're just two rabbis stacking chairs and remembering Uman." He responded, "I didn't need to know that."
There was a stiff silence and then he added some more thoughts about the Ukraine and we conversed onward most pleasantly, becoming just two Jews sharing our experiences and pieces of Nachman's teachings that meant a lot to us. I did not otherwise identify myself as a rabbi during the visit or intend to.

After a few hours, however, I was asked about where I'd done my learning and how had I come to understanding about individual and world souls. They told me they assumed I was a Reform rabbi, but all the Chassidus I knew didn't fit with their assumption. They flat out asked if I was a musmach of Reb Zalman.

I explained that I was ordained Reconstructionist, and that for a while I was executive director of Reb Zalman's organization called ALEPH: Alliance for Jewish Renewal. Hearing this they became even warmer and more hospitable. One person marveled that we could share so much and at the same time be so separated by our relationship to halakhah.

How simply true.

I really loved their matzah bakery, which appeared to be operated on the principle of a sheltered workshop providing employment to many older Russian women and men. Every eighteen minutes they changed their gloves, the bowls, the table coverings to make sure the matzah will be right. A constant mantra of "l'shem matzot mitzvah" was picked up by those present as each piece came to their station.

Hearing this kavannah, this devotional meditation, the idea of shmurah matzah - guarded matzah -- finally took on meaning to me. Reb Zalman used to keep a piece of it (presumably the afikomen) in a baggie tacked to his dining room wall in Mt. Airy, where he then lived in Philadelphia. While I don't know what he meant by it, whenever I saw it I would reflect on the meaning the year's seder themes had taken on for me.

Aunt Annie Qigong and the After Life   by Rabbi Goldie Milgram

My Aunt Annie’s unmistakable voice spoke out from behind me in pure agony: "If only we had known about this when Jack was alive." I had been praying for my best friend's fragile pregnancy to hold and another dear friend's father's brain cancer to desist. It had been an exciting day at the Psycho-neuro-immunology conference. The Qidong healing service would have been just one of many interesting events, except that my aunt Annie is dead, has been for about a decade. Her husband, my beloved Uncle Jack had died of cancer more than a decade before she passed away.

I’m gradually becoming accustomed to such strange experiences. A few months earlier a friend who is studying a new spiritual diagnostic technique tried it out on me. Her questions revealed that I have three female spirit guides. I identified them as possibly my three deceased aunts - Annie, Miriam and Sylvia. She said they were walking behind me. Privately my view was that my friend is getting too "new agey."

Still, the thought of those three exceptional women at my back stayed with me. During a rare lie, I would want to melt away in shame thinking of them as overhearing me. During a special teaching moment with my students I'd hope the aunts were kvelling in nachas (receiving pleasure from my efforts). Sometimes I'd just wish they could answer all the questions I’d been too young or self-centered to ask while they were alive. Mostly, I thought of notion of their presence as a nice metaphor for drawing inspiration from one’s "aunt-cestors."

By the time I left the Qigong session my aunt's voice had faded from my awareness. I headed off for a half hour pre-Shabbat massage to remove a persistent kink. The skillful masseuse seemed to soothe every affected fiber. I arise grateful and happy.

Upstairs while degreasing in the tub, I thought about an upcoming retreat would be teaching at Kripalu Retreat Center for Hanukkah. None of the Hanukkah chants and songs with which I am familiar seemed just right for the occasion. So, inspired by the many effective researchers at the conference, I, an utter non-composer, started to play with a verse from Psalms: "b'orakha neer'eh or, in Your light we see light." Ten and twenty minutes go by and the verse becomes a melody, then a chant and soon a Jewish tribal rhythm. The water is my drum and like all shower singers I sound great to myself.

The memory of Aunt Annie's voice drifts back to me. I send her a blessing as well as the other Aunt's for their presence in my present. Then I sense "her Jack", my dear Uncle's presence. Palpable, sweet, trying to contact with her. He exists in a dimension which I can see but it is obviously a different dimension than the one in which we live. I then see her, in what is yet another dimension. I realize she still has herself wrapped around the radio she used to sleep with after he died, it would play on all night while she hugged it, a lone elder-woman in the middle of their king-sized bed. Oh how sad I would feel to see her like that.

Uncle Jack is reaching for her now, one hand out-stretched with pointing finger like the image on the Sistine Chapel ceiling.........from one dimension, yearning for her to reach out for him. He begins to age backwards, his face and size changing back through the years to the point of impossibility..............to ages when before my own conception. I sense it is a permanent departure, she may lose her chance. No longer aware of being in the tub, I emplore her to fly on the wings of the chant, to let go of the radio and realize her soul is no longer in her body, to sense the full range of her spirit.

I then experience Annie growing younger, her arthritic crunched body-self opening up. A young radiant girl-like glowing begins within her. In the other dimension I witness Uncle Jack shimmering in similar youthfulness and yet she isn't rising, the radio is still clenched in one hand, though she is no longer bent over it.

I start to weep and my spirit heads toward her in some way and I keep saying "rise up to the light, rise up, go to be with him, you can do it, you don't have to stay here."

She looks at me and the aunts who are now very visibly behind me. She is so hesitant, unsure, and I realize to say: "Go for a honeymoon with him, if you are allowed to come back and visit afterward I will love that you do; if you can't we will understand. Now, go, go, go!!" I see her rise to where he is and they curve into each other as lovers in a painting. Jack's being is tender and perfused with love. I am crying very hard now. They become as fetuses in a womb, and begin to glow with a great white light. Soon the white light is all that there is.

I become aware of a pull from the two aunts remaining behind me. "We must still need each other," I say to them. "When your time comes perhaps I will hear you and be able to help you as well." Aunts Sylvia and Miriam don't respond. They resume their guardians demeanor

I realize it's time to get out of the bath, there are only a few minutes til Shabbat candle lighting.  It's hard to know what to make of the experience, except that it has shifted everything.  Everything.  Yitgadal, v'yitkadash....

Encounter with a South African Tzaddik    by Rabbi Goldie Milgram

He was Political Prisoner 6063 on Robben Island, South Africa during Apartheid. We spent a day with him there yesterday. Just one day in the blazing heat, searing our protected eyes in the white limestone quarry where political prisoners and hardened criminals labored side by side.

He is a Moslem of great warmth and kindness.

"How can you bear to be here, back on the island?" asks my husband, Barry, a Jew who was born here in Cape Town of family who had fled the Cossacks.

"It is talking therapy for me." Prisoner 6063 answers. "If such talking can help prevent inhumanity, I will talk forever."

A local Moslem anti-drug group has become infiltrated by HAMAS and some of its members are now highly politicized, angry and dangerous. Bombing public sites has become common, over six hundred episodes have occurred. A synagogue in the town where I will appear tonight was bombed just one week ago. The police station was hit yesterday.

This is a country being reformatted, it has endured only two and a half of the coming wilderness years. Despite an magnificent constitution which took them out of the Egypt of apartheid, it is not an "instant promised land - just add theoretical equality and stir" by any stretch of the imagination.

Oh, yes! This land is geographically stunning and agriculturally fertile beyond my imagination. Certainly South Africa is the most beautiful country I have ever visited (Israel forgive me, it is true). Everyday we hike or traverse mountain passes down to any one of dozens of stunning, unblemished beaches framed by cerulean splashed blue-green seas.

We feast on amazing fruits - fresh lichees (orgasmic flavor), gooseberries (a close second), sabra, mango, guava, kiwi, granadilla, plum, pear, grape and other more familiar fruits. Whales, dolphin, seals and penguins hang around in various areas seemingly oblivious to humans. Baboons leer at us from boulders along the highway. There is a forest legitimately named "Garden of Eden" not far from here.

From Robben Island’s prison you can see the mainland with its fantastic flat-topped "Table Mountain". Robben Island is a hot rock imprisoned by the azure sea.

Moments of agony sift through our guide’s recollections as we walk. "Black prisoners were not issued underwear until the late 1980's....They told us they had scientifically calculated that Colored and Indian prisoners needed several more grams of meat than Blacks....They let the hardened criminals have their way with us...sometimes we were raped or made to sleep between the buckets so when they relieved themselves they could splash on us.....If a pen or paper was found amongst us, we would lose a day’s meals...should we find a thick leaf to shield us from whipping winter winds while gathering kelp to be processed for fertilizer, it would be taken away and we would be denied the day’s meals..."

"In the beginning we were allowed one phone call every six months. Later one visit each year. If your visitor did not speak a dialect which the guards could understand, they were sent away and the annual visit was over. You could not touch that visitor during your 20 minutes together. A Solomon’s choice had to be made, would your wife visit or one of the children?

Some served seventeen years, some more, some less.

The political prisoners tried to influence the hard core criminals. Prisoner 6063 still had an element of surprise and dismay in his voice as he related discovering not only the cruelty of most of the hardened criminals but also their lack of interest in the cause.

He was a student when he was arrested for organizing against apartheid.

Power in contemporary South Africa is increasingly concentrated into the hands of gangs and such criminals. The police fear for their lives and are utterly ineffective. My husband, Barry, asks: "How do you feel about the leadership going to the kind of criminals who served in this prison beside you?"

"We tried to teach them, to reason with them and we learned not all humans can be elevated. It is terrifying to discover this. Even worse is to know this and live under their domination every day."

Fearing the efforts of political prisoners to coalition with the criminals would succeed, eventually the Afrikaners made the political prisoners build themselves a separate prison, rich in solitary confinement cells.

We are told that in the beginning the racial and religious divisions between prisoners had been greater sources of identity and pride than their common status as prisoners. Diverse tribal peoples would not collaborate with each other, nor black with colored prisoners, nor with Indians, nor any with each other. Ultimately the crucible of imprisonment melted these divisions of humanity.

"We had many educated political prisoners among us. Men learned whole graduate degrees here. We taught each other. Our egos and group identities had us fighting each other on the outside, in here we slowly learned to care for each other regardless of racial origin...we became united."

"Prisoner 6063, do you hate the Afrikaners?" I am so uncomfortable that he insists on being called by his prison title, but continue to respect his choice. (Afrikaners were the government oppressors of the times, a nationality forged out of Dutch, French and German trader-colonists.) His answer is passionate, delivered in soft tones with the eyes of one who loves life and its potential:

"I believe in reconciliation, in a unified South Africa, in mutual respect and support. Only this makes sense of my suffering. While I feel endless anger, I know revenge would render all the suffering meaningless."

South Africans’ initially high hopes for successful unity are terribly frustrated these days. There is 40% unemployment (60% in the non-white areas), an uncontrolled AIDS infection rate destabilizing families and what trained labor force there is, and an utter brain drain from emigration affecting all levels of government and professions. Extensive efforts at affirmative action that put people by dint of their color into governmental roles with little or no preparation or education for their tasks are resulting in dissolution of prior infrustructure ....some officials are even found to be functionally illiterate.

My husband left South Africa because he could not tolerate Apartheid. Today he wanders the streets of this country delighted and amazed at the successful co-mingling of peoples, marveling and rejoicing at the sight. On the beaches we see total integration and he kvels at this accomplishment by his former country-persons. I am so ignorant. He describes a time when blacks would say "Yes, Boss" to any white person, holding their bodies deferentially. It is a phenomenon erased virtually overnight.

Prisoner 6063 returns to the topic of the recent spate of bombings here in Cape Town. He describes the successful bombings as becoming perversely important to giving minority youth self esteem and a sense of empowerment. He decries the phenomenon, urging our involvement in drawing industry and hence jobs to the region, instituting activities for teens, volunteerism to increase literacy, a need for rapid expansion of low income housing developments....

Prisoner 6063's eyes cloud with sadness as he speaks of a western world that helped to bring apartheid down but has not stayed to build South Africa back up. I think of the effective work of UJA’s Project Renewal in reviving Israel’s inner-city areas......such meaningful partnerships based not so totally in money, as in skillful management of change, might matter greatly. Perhaps relevant expertise exists likely others have realized this earlier and it is being applied.

It is past time to leave. I implore that he share his real name.

"Tzaddik Levy." he replies after a great, searching pause. "You can say you were speaking with Tzaddik Levy."

I double check with a guard with whom he chats familiarly as we exit . "Yes, that truly is his name", which, the guard tells me in the spirit of a confidence, he "understands it to be Arabic for Righteous Servant."

Notes from the State of Ambivalence by Rabbi Goldie Milgram

Zoos and military installations are two points of ambivalence on our trips. We passed on the albino tigers and simulated rain forests promised by the Omaha brochures and highly recommended by my hairdresser in Iowa.
Instead an hour later I found myself leaning against a metal canister about three feet high and seven feet wide as a WWII veteran explained the "Peacekeeper" airplane in whose shadow we were standing. Vaster than my sci-fi conditioned imagination, the impact of the plane which circled the world during the Cold War as a "deterrent" was diminished by his next comment.

"We never used them, but, the woman in the beanie is leaning against a nuclear bomb six times the power of that used at Hiroshima. These were stacked inside the Peacekeeper as it constantly circled Russian airspace."
My husband recently studied how to use Gestalt to deal with those who suffer from toxic shame. The Strategic Air Command Museum docent's comment sent me into toxic ambivalence. A sequence of memories played through in what seemed like years, yet must have been seconds.

The first was during my years as director of an archive, taking depositions on video from holocaust survivors and allied soldiers. Changing his voice from sad reverie to pure passion, the survivor described furiously scribbling notes to the President of the United States and begging every passerby to see it would get there.....he would slip the notes through slats in cattle cars into fearful fingers...sometimes they were dropped like electric shocks after being read, others were furtively pocketed.

Always the same message....."Just bomb us all. Stop the death camps. We are prepared to die." Later inside Auschwitz he waited for a message to tell him to have everyone turn on their attackers and climb atop the crematoria to mark the spot for allied bombers. "Just make it stop." Until he died whenever he would come to my office he'd leave a message with my affectionate name for him, "Queen Esther will be dropping by." I was one of two people in town who knew his secrets, gay and Jewish he was marked twice to die.

Sixth graders on our tour caress the cruise missiles on display as we are told the US inventory is down to only 100 and it takes a year to go back into production. Barry photographs a girl hugging the missile unconsciously as she listens. So elegant and sleek in design, both of them.

I flash to a Bosnia rally. My sons are with me at the Liberty Bell. From the stage I see my youngest tugging on the jacket of a camera person. She pushes him away...don't bother me little boy. Undeterred he goes to the anchor person, who obligingly films his passionate view which airs for 16 seconds on the ll o'clock CNN News. "Why are you all standing here shouting at bad people in Bosnia? Do you think they are watching television? Why doesn't my mommy and her friends charter airplanes and go right up to those bad men. Do what you do when I make a mistake. Take their hands and lift them high into the air and say "this is unacceptable behavior."

Flash to the Yamim Noraim. An angel of a board member has given me a week at Club Med on Turquoise Island as a gift between leading Rosh HaShannah and Yom Kippur services. The trick to meeting people turns out to be what language you speak at the entrance to the dining room. Each day when asked "how many people?" I mutter my lonely "one" in a different language. That day I spoke in German....the Berlin wall was coming down as we ate.
Seated at a table of young German businessmen on a company holiday I feel foolish and out of place. The German banter flies over me, I don't really speak the language. At some point though, I start to make out some of what they are saying. Blood freezes in my veins. "We will defeat America on the battleground of commerce. Then our might will rise again as it always has and next time we will prevail...." "Yah...Yah..."

A word which has become holy to me is supporting horror... "Yah...Yah.....".anger churns up inside me from more voices than my own. I speak out involuntarily.....something to the effect of "How can you say that? Was it all for nothing?"

Heads turn toward to me. One asks in German: "What language is she speaking? Why can I understand it?"

Silence. The blond-haired, green-eyed man beside me finally speaks. "It is Yiddish." They look blankly at him. "Yiddish?" one asks. He responds, "It was the language of the Jews." Silence. Another man looks at him and says slowly, distinctly, "and how would YOU know that?"

Hot tears are splashing down my face. The green-eyed man looks at his peers, wipes my cheeks with his napkin, stands and says to me in English...."come, let us walk." To this day we are still in touch...the secret of his Jewish grandmother wandering between us like a lost missile.

The tour has moved on, we are beside a Russian MIG that was flown against our forces in Vietnam. I walk off lost in oceans of ambivalence. On the other side two tourists stand talking. One reveals he is an air force engineer that works on fighter-planes. He is in transit from a base in Germany to one in Utah. The other was a pilot during the Vietnam war. He recalled that the technical superiority of the Russian MIGs was terrifying. "That plane could outmaneuver us, we would have been doomed, if not for the fact that our pilots were better trained and we had more aircraft than they."

Flash. Economics 101 when I was a student at the Wharton School. The thick accent of the Hindu professor stills resonates in my ears......"One foolish, arrogant leader of a third world country can attack us with a nuclear bomb for no sane reason. How much for guns, how much for butter? Nothing I can teach you will give the right formula. How will we ultimately decide? That is the question that really belongs on the final exam."

The Legend of Abraham Hebrew by Rabbi Goldie Milgram

We are hiking through western Colorado’s dinosaur-laden desert mountains, on our way to Moab, Utah. I am pondering a question posed by Rabbi Arthur Waskow about Ruth. If she were to show up at an American border station, how would she be received?

One answer is embedded in an encounter this past week in Denver. Jan Cooper greets us at the door one morning filled with joy: "I got two of the daughters out of sweatshops and into jobs at the JCC." Got who...what?

I met them at Shabbat morning services, young and gracious in their saris. Five daughters and a son, one looking to be about eight or ten years old and upward from there. Indian complexions, limpid hopeful eyes and despite scarce resources, bearing home-made dahl and pourri bread for the oneg shabbat.

Their father’s presence coming toward me will forever fill in my understanding of Abraham from Torah. Patriarch is the only proper word....physical strength, engaging smile, intelligent, direct eyes, totally welcoming me to his side with offers of food and drink, keeps his large black hands folded when I stretch my small pale hand out in greeting.....I think I understand when his wife steps forward to grasp mine instead, pulling me to rest against her cheek....a sister’s welcome.

His legal name is Abraham Hebrew. The community calls them the "Hebrew family." "Would you tell me your story and may I tell it to others?" "You must," he responds with eyes that compel, and he begins: (Note: I try not to write on Shabbat so this is all recollections and will likely contain some unintended errors.)

"A Moslem friend convinced my father we should stay in our rural town in Pakistan near the border of Afghanistan. He said our friends would keep us safe." His voice and face grew bitter, "My father was too reluctant to part with the little wealth he had gathered, so we stayed. Some years the Christians attacked us and took what we had.....other years it was the Moslems....some years we were safe because we were not the oppressed Hindu. Mostly we were what you call other, just "other" and so to blame always."

"Once we were a whole Jewish community. Representatives went to the Jewish authorities to ask for help....always we were told help was coming, it never did. The Christian missionaries would say ‘see, the only route to salvation is through Jesus. We will give you some land, or seeds if you join us.’"

"But I had a memory of my grandfather. My father died young, the grandfather was with us longer. On Shabbat he put on his tallit and tephillin.....remember we had no rabbis left, just traditions that sometimes got mixed up. But he did more than that, he would tie a rope from his leg to the chair and slip a loop of leather over a hook in the ceiling and around his neck and there he would pray, carefully held awake, in his place for the whole day. When I would ask him, ‘Grandfather, why?’ He would say I must not forget that I am a Jew and he would bemoan that we had stayed and that now he was to old to bring us out."

"The other families gradually accepted the persistent offers of the missionaries or married their children into Moslem families......my daughters began to come of marriageable age and I kept them apart from the boys of the village."

" I owned a bus company and one day the Moslems again blamed an injustice of the state upon the Jews. They burned my buses.....my way of support. One unique family that had been the last to convert to Christianity was also attacked.....their eyes distinguished them, it looked like light came through their eyes....I can’t describe it to you, you would be amazed. ..everyone in their family had eyes like that...pale, pale eyes with flames (ed.note ?) They stood in front of their homes and instead of claiming safety from their Christianity they said defiantly, "Yes, we are Jews first...we won’t deny it."

He showed me where he’d been attacked during the local equivalent of a pogrom...lifting up his shirt to reveal what he called human bite marks up and down his arm and the deep scar on his abdomen received while defending his home, turning the hilt back and choosing not to kill his aggressor. "I asked myself," he said, "what is justice?"

The story becomes sketchy for me at this point for a while....official routes out didn’t work, a chance delegation of Americans had connections to Rabbi Gary Ellison’s community, he was able to organize papers to get the family permission to enter America....Rabbi Ellison changes communities just as the family ends up in America, some kind of disconnect happens and they end up in Denver where they believe there is someone whom they know.

The family tries area synagogues, wandering as strangers with no where to glean, until the Reconstructionist community adopts them. Jan describes finding all eight living in two small rooms, eschewing furniture so humans can fit, seeking jobs without papers. The children have some English because Abraham "went to the Missionary school and paid for the girls education. I told them no free education for us, my daughters will not go to Church with you...let us pay just for the education. But the pressures were very great for the girls and at times I found they had been taken to church."

"What do you think of this idea of a messiah?" "It is a trap, an escape from our responsibility for each other. This is why it is so attractive, I think". I tell him of the idea of a messianic era of human collaboration. He shrugs. "Why confuse it with the messiah idea, say it for what it is, we are responsible for our lives and each other."

Steve had contacted the Israeli consulate. A university expert on the Jews of the region is brought in to answer the question of whether their story could be true or was this a con? Having struggled with getting the Ethiopian Jews out (now a Christian evangelical group’s offer to pay to airlift those remaining in Sudan has finally been accepted by Israel after a three year delay......I distrust the delay and urge bringing in advocate agencies in addition to Israeli sources.) Jews of deep color, a challenge to integrate, while Albanian Jews were airlifted to Israel years before our current crisis...feet are dragged while Pakistani and other Jews of color are decimated by aggression, or famine or the assimilatory forces of time..........how it hurts to take this in about my people..

"What now, Abraham Hebrew? How can I help or give you a blessing?"

"My dream is to bring the other families to Israel. Their life is very hard and they need not be lost to our people. Bless me to succeed, only this, bless me to succeed for them."

This time he takes my hands to receive the blessing....time is meaningless as this descendant of the Babylonian exile via Persia to Pakistan, takes it in as one who understands the power of a blessing.

"And your family? "Some of the children want to go to Israel, others would stay here......it is very shaking of their souls to move around so much, they need stability." And you and your wife? "I am listening for the voice which will tell me the land to which I am to go. I explain the term "Hineni." "Oh, yes," says Abraham Hebrew, lowering his eyes humbly, "Hineni."

We are getting closer to Moab, only 45 more miles. Then it strikes me, RUTH WAS A MOABITE! Hineni.

A Tale of Messy Messianism       by Rabbi Goldie Milgram

Messianism usually strikes me as one of our worst ideas.  One that not only hasn't panned out, it has backfired on us. Colleagues sometimes tell me they have affection for the wistful stories and lovely songs and prayers of hoping for, waiting for the messiah...because they are beautiful evocations about the human capacity for hope.

Lots of things can be beautiful.
I say, know when to change the product line.

For those so inclined, here is a true story.
About once a year I go to the Ukraine as a volunteer rabbi to teach mother-daughter workshops for Project Kesher. One year it was just before Pesach, so naturally we made plans for a model seder. I emailed the groups: "What should we bring?"
Their response, "Bring Passover food."
    So we brought matzah and kosher wine. Right? Well, it turned out not to be what they wanted. They meant to bring the whole meal. The women took me to the market in, I believe it was Berditchev. "See the problem?" They pointed to the empty stalls, the rotten apples and wormy nuts and not a bit of karpas (green matter for the seder plate) to be found anywhere.
    Across the way I saw an Eastern Orthodox priest. "Look, a colleague!" I pointed him out enthusiastically while Tanita translated almost simultaneously for me. The womens' faces paled as they saw me head off toward him. "Nyet, Ravvin, nyet!" They called out in stage whispers. (No, Rabbi, No!).
    "Far vus nyet?" I responded in my ridiculous yet often effective concatenation of Yiddish and Russian. Assorted explanations of the dangers of the newly re-emerging Eastern orthodox church and assorted evangelical western groups acting as predators on their children emerged. The basic point, not likely to be a nice guy, stay away.
    I thought maybe I could go over to his place, experience a mass, compare notes on working locally...who knows. The women were getting panicky and pulling on my clothes toward some really ratty looking planks of very, very trefe pig heads.
    So we finish what little shopping we could really do and on the way out my basket of soggy walnuts for the haroset (apple/nut mixture to simulate mortar from the bricks of slavery......not everyone one this list happens to know a lot about Judaism, as some have written to me to point out, assume nothing) gets pitched over by a little child running by. I bend down to re-gather the walnuts and accidentally rear-end someone behind me. We both swirl around and it is.........you guessed it, the Eastern Orthodox priest. Replete in black hassock, tall hat, gigantic crucifix at my eye level...a very tall man.
    My translator Tanita gulps and I hear her go into her usual spiel: "What a pleasure, sir. Allow me to introduce Goldie Milgram, a woman rabbi visiting from America." He speaks one sentence and I see the blood running out of her already skim milk complexion and spots of pink blooming on her cheeks.
    "What did he say?" She is very nonplused. Come on Tanita, I'm paying you to translate for me, "What did he say?"
    She tries to spit it out. . . .and finally does. "Reb Goldie, he said, 'How does it feel to still be waiting for the messiah after thousands of years?" (She herself was raised Eastern Orthodox.) She is obviously embarrassed at his inhospitable greeting.
    I look at him and say something like, "I don't preach messianism. We made a mistake putting out that idea. I believe the one thing we know for sure is that the world to come is the world we leave to our children. That's something we can work on together and right now. No lines, no patiently waiting. Not so far from here, Reb Nachum of Chernobyl pointed out that the word messiah in Hebrew can be understood as mae-siakh, from conversation. If peace is to be brought, it is through person to person understanding."
    He looks at me and Tanita translates him as saying: "I knew there was no such thing as a woman rabbi" as he swirls around and departs with haste.

Miriam and Tza-ra-at - A Notion             by Rabbi Goldie Milgram

During our Rosh Chodesh's group's discussion of B'ha-alotekhah (Numbers 12) and Tza'ra-at, a sudden wave of
awareness came through me. Miriam was not punished with Tza'ra-at as has long been presumed.

Why?

It happens that when the Torah was translated long ago into Greek, that a mistranslation occurred. "Lepros" is the Greek term for a eczema-like skin disorder. Leprosy did not develop, according to epidemiological studies until later. Nor do the symptoms of Hansen's Disease (leprosy) correlate with the symptoms of tza'ra-at.

(The documentation for this can be found in a paper  I wrote for the journal Koroth of Hebrew U School of Medicine Vol 9, No. 11-12, 1991, pp 818-825.)

So what happened to Miriam? She and Aaron confronted Moses and lost. Aaron went on to hold and maintain a major leadership position. Miriam's body manifested the stress - for some of us it is heart burn, others hives, others stomach cramps or back pain. She wasn't punished with it, she went into a physiological manifestation of the hurting of her spirit (psychosomatic). Now, one doesn't die of tza'ra-at, one goes off out of the camp and heals. Goes where?

To a beyt merkak - a house of distance. Today we would call this a retreat center. Getting away to develop some perspective on what happened. Perhaps some spiritual mentoring. Meanwhile, let things calm down back at the ranch, so to speak. Miriam really was loved, the people would not move on without her. And instead of returning in confrontational mode, after some time Miriam could be reabsorbed into community, able to lead in her own best way, perhaps with the power of song.

It is really important not to call tza'ra-at leprosy. I will suggest why. Because that misinterpretation has been used by fundamentalists of all stripes to say that AIDS is a punishment from God, and tza'ra-at being leprosy is the biblical linkage used to clinch that assumption.

At points one learns that people with plague were sent to the beyt merhak for 40 days. During the middle ages some Jewish communities adopted this practice.

The Italian work for forty is...........???

Quaranta.

Hence the term quarantine.

Our retention of this seemingly odd parsha over time led to the re-emergence of this life-saving concept when direly needed.

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