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Rebbe on the Road: Travelogue

 by Rabbi Goldie Milgram, author of

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

Rebbe on the Road: Travel Trouble and Kallah Nachas

Goldie:  The train from Berlin, Germany to Amsterdam pulled up two minutes early. My friend Ania and I climbed in eager for the comfort and privacy of European train travel. Seats wide and luxurious, a glass privacy panel encasing our conversation. As we recap our conference experience and reflect on our parents’ choices in guiding our lives, the hours sprint by much like the evergreen landscape. Finally we begin to wonder when the gentle rolling fields and dikes of Holland will emerge. At long last a conductor takes our tickets and shaking his head attempts to communicate an apparently critical problem. 

Seems we are on a train to Hamburg; headed several hours in the wrong direction! We have to get off there, and be re-routed to Hanover. No problem catching a train to Amsterdam from there, he assures us. How did this happen? It seems the departure track hosts a train every few minutes, and we’d step on an earlier train, by two minutes! 

At ll p.m. after a full day’s travel we reach Hanover to learn there is no train out until the morning. What’s more, a festival of woodworkers is in town, and there is also no room at any inn, not even at the youth hostel. As the station prepares to close for the night, the police listen to our plight and not amused. I contemplate calling the village priest and requesting sanctuary. Hold that thought, the police captain has an idea for us; we can pass the night at the station’s Christian Mission. 

G*d bless Ania who did not blink at the notion; if anything I sensed her soul join mine in pure curiosity at this twist in the road. Two models of the milk of human kindness greet us, lock up our belongings and offer respite among the incontinent and inconsolable men who dribbled in through the night. Mercy was granted after some time when it seemed perhaps safer to offer us the medical exam room as refuge. There Ania insisted I take the exam table and she buffered herself with pediatric exam table padding shifted to the floor.  

Around 3 am the inevitable gonging of the town tower clock sent me out to find the men, playing poker without stakes, at the insistence of the ladies of tender mercy. Using my pathetic Yiddish, meager French, and ten words in Dutch, I managed to clown enough to add to the friendly aura of everyone’s sleepless time. The really hard part was pushing down the urge to offer each fellow traveler a taste of toothpaste or ten. 

Contrast that scene from a month ago to today, traveling contentedly beside my beloved Barry whose infinite attention to detail sets the stage for wandering the back roads of Washington State beside endless lakes, surprising Victoriana, fascinating festivals and leery lane passing lane moments as Weyerhouser trucks bearing huge logs sway perilously on their hilly treks. [Postings about Amsterdam, Valencia, Girona [home of Nachmanides and Isaac the Blind] and Barcelona will follow over the next few weeks; need to find some down time to edit them before posting in fairness to ya’all.]

Goldie: This Kallah revealed Aleph: Alliance for Jewish Renewal in a state of increasing maturity – sweet, deep, interesting, logistically excellent, carefully creative teaching, music, and davening abounded. Even Middle East politics felt safely shifted in this context, at least in the sessions we attended. During one powerful evening service, a blending of Rabbi Shefa Gold’s chanting with a teaching by Rabbi Miles Krassen on when G*d chose to slay truth so that peace might live, created open hearts in place of the potential for heated debate.

Barry: A cascade of davening attended us each morning. Sequenced, I think, by 15 minutes, all around the circle in front of our dorms (facing a lovely pond) were creative minyanim. Whenever you woke up, enroute to breakfast a minyan of music, or movement and more awaited.

           Another perennial feature is the Shabbat Walk. The planning group responsible for these set up across the campus, in a wending, winding way, many musicians, banners, greeters, inspirational and humorous hangings and sayings and more. And one set of services was in a building perched high over the port of Bellingham with spectacular sunsets and as Kallah continued, bursts of July 4 fireworks from towns all around.

 Goldie:  Cindy Gabriel and her team were amazing organizers. This Kallah approached some kind of perfection. Only the intensely noisy dining room was daunting, and this led us to discover the silent dining room – yet another pleasure! Since the food was quite good.

         Some have analogized Jewish renewal to doctors without borders, calling the phenomenon Jews without boundaries. On the one hand, it is a great description for the repertoire of skills which yield depth and joy that is diffusing from renewal into all the denominations. On the other hand, renewal’s extended 60’s-style experimentation with loose personal boundaries no longer applies. The traumas secondary to that experimentation are still being healed and Barry and I are among many blessed to be a part of renewal’s rapid process of moving on from that period of its development.

For the second Kallah in a row Barry and I were invited to offer a session on the creation and maintenance of healthy boundaries for the Kallah faculty. With all of the horror stories about clergy in the news, it is all the more important in a setting of intense spirituality to bring to consciousness the risks of overly permeable boundaries and to offer effective methods for self regulation.

Barry: I did not want our teaching to be a lecture, nor focus on the obvious major possible boundary transgressions. Rather, I thought to introduce the subtleties of boundaries from multiple perspectives. The theme that we built on was of interpersonal boundaries being a place of separation, allowing for the preservation of one’s identity, as well as a place of meeting and paradoxically the creation of identity. In preparation for this class it dawned on me that the legendary Goldilocks is an example of a boundary-challenged person – someone who did not appreciate the importance of personal space, so she felt free to invade the bears home, food, bed, etc.  My glee at this discovery came down a peg when a Google search revealed 1200 entries for Goldilocks+boundaries! The teachers focused with great interest upon where a boundary, like a line under high magnification on the computer, gets fuzzy. Using dance, hevruta and gestalt, we encouraged that line of inquiry.

Goldie: In studying the historical roots of the mussar movement, I find a clear intent to coerce, force and shape the student. In American liberal Judaism there is has long been an ethic of freedom of the seeker to grow at one’s own rate of interest and permission to participate in shaping the Judaism of the future. Our teachers were appropriately concerned about how to support students to stretch in abilities without pushing, seducing or coercing them. The line between cult and opportunity was felt to lie in the spirit of the teacher and when s/he uses power to empower and teach the seeker replicable skills and material or disempowers and mesmerizes, resulting in more of a discipleship among the students.

Goldie:  We also co-taught a course during Kallah week and each took one. Barry reveled in Eli Lester’s drumming class and I was transported by Hazzan Richard Kaplan’s course on Breslov niggunim. He offered much about how to give over such niggunim as individual and collective expeditions of the spirit. We focused upon seudah shelishit, that deep, twilight time towards the end of Shabbat. There was nothing trivial about the niggunim Hazzan Kaplan offered up; works rich in range of emotion, pace, tone, depth of sound and leaps of life spark and faith. We’ve been listening to his newest CD while driving the Northwest and each time hear nuances which delight even further upon discovery. I pray he’ll create -  more, more!!

Barry:  An unforgettable moment from Eli Lester’s drumming class was when we were asked to drum chaotically, not to allow any order to the sound in the room. It proved impossible, chaos deteriorated into order! This was a profound teaching, to be believed only in the experience.

Our Kallah week-long course was on the subject of “Rock” in Jewish liturgy, Torah and mysticism texts. We were blessed with a stunning thick arboretum dense with ferns and carefully kept rains on the mountainside of the campus and a full measure of sunny days poking through the dense shade. Our hope is to enliven our students’ experiences at services when they go back home by making some core metaphors more accessible. In Judaism rock functions as an object, a symbol, a metaphor and a doorway to higher consciousness. Preparing for the course was a matter of joyful intensity for Goldie and endless irritation for me, only because Goldie was trying to grasp some meta-level idea about the material and in doing so generated too much for the fairly brief teaching segments allotted at Kallah. (It’s a festival there, not an intensive.)  Somehow I always end up being the tough guy who helps trim back the teaching plan.

Goldie: Readers may appreciate the feeling of one’s mind as a Jewish CD rom, new tracks being laid day with each subject one emphasizes in one’s studies and all the while the connections on your “drive” begin leaping out at you. Tzur is in Adon Olam (tzur hevli b'et tzarah), it is in the blessing before the amidah (tzur yisrael, kuma v'ezrat yisrael), in Tzaddik katamar, (tzuri v'lo avlata bo), many more psalms and biblical texts, like Moses hitting the rock, and Jacob’s pillow, let’s not forget the Kotel and the role of rock vs water in the Tree of Life meditations.

At first in a frustrating trickle, then a landslide of awareness, as an integrative perspective was triggered by a piece of Zohar. This was while I was away from Barry in Europe for the prior month with my son Adam. So hard for Barry and I to be apart, it felt like we were coming apart! We’re excited to again offering this course at Elat Chayyim the week of August 4th, where we have a full hour more per day to deepen the experience of our participants through meditation, immersion in some great off-campus waterfalls and other direct moments in nature.

Barry: We gave ourselves a treat after Kallah, several days of long walks on Orcas Island, off the coast of Washington State. Full of sweet trails, profuse with wildflowers and vistas of islands and in the distance of three great volcanic mounts, Victoria and Vancouver Canada. 

And after stunning came time with dear friends in Portland, Oregon who brought us to something you just have to find time to attend, the Eugene Oregon Country Fair!! 200 acres of folks dressed in tie-dye, with angel wings or tiny clay devil’s horns, engaging in foot-stomping wash tub music, belly dancing, theatre, poetry reading, fine crafts and lots more. Somehow it has escaped commercialism and is a breath of authenticity and frivolity, with tremendous attention to the little details that make a person welcome and comfortable. A personal favorite was the joy of watching pregnant women with bellies floating free in the filtered sunshine, only to realize some had stopped by face paint stations and painted upside down fetuses on their taut abdomens. A sweet, holy, healthy day, and for me an antidote to formal spirituality and religion.

Meanwhile, we’re looking for a furnished sublet for the fall, somewhere pleasant, and good for writing since a book contract falls due in December. Let us know if you hear of an option.

Girona, Spain July 2003

It is afternoon of Tisha B'Av here where I'm writing this, back in the states at Elat Chayyim, my teaching perch for the week. A few weeks ago, while walking the streets of Girona, Spain with my son Adam, age 19, a Vassar student and his Spanish roommate Francesq,Tisha B'Av energy blew its hot chilling breath our way.

Girona is preserved like a gem. The winding medieval stone streets, city walls, grotto-like store fronts, the disproportionately huge church in the center with an infinity of steps leading up to it....it is only the oddly modern dress of those present that belies the century of our visit.

R' Moshe ben Nachman, 1194-1270, of Gerona, Spain, one of the leading Torah scholars of the Middle Ages; who successfully defended Judaism at the famous debate in Barcelona in 1263, lived here. Today he is called Nachmanides.  I wish to bump into him, to fly out of this time, into his, to listen in and dispell mysteries.

But at a curve in the cobbled road, is the immaculately restored Jewish house (no furnishings) that is a Jewish museum. Essentially its contents are tomb stones.Huge stones bearing names and simple inscriptions.  There are rooms full of these stones four to six feet wide and two to three feet high. If G*d is known as tzur, "rock" then a person is an "evven," a stone cleaved from that Rock. We read of the biblical practice of stoning a person to death; symbolic, eh? That brings us to the idea of a tombstone and visitors leave a stone to symbolize their own soul stopped by. Yet our ancesters preferred to intern the bones of their beloveds in a stone cave, returning perhaps the rock to the womb of stone.

The tombstones in Girona have none of the elegance of those you'll see in the cemetary where Spinoza's wife is buried outisde of Amsterdam. They are huge, simple, and numerous. My son's roommate Francesq is from Valencia, his parents are socialist democratic atheists, by self description. Very ethical, cheerful and caring people. She had warned me: "This country has not been kind to the Jews. I don't know if you will be able to hear beyond the echoes of ancient anguish."

In Exodus 25:1 one reads: "Make a sanctuary for me, that I might dwell in your midst." Nachmanides' commentary explains that G*d wanted a place where the revelation at Sinai could become a daily occurence. These were the words of the local sage that came to me as we walked those streets.

Francesq wants to know what does Nachhmanides meant? I wonder if my son has an opinion, he was USY'er of the year status but his Jewish involvement faded rapidly upon his entrance to college. He eschews the Jewish Student Union building, reveling in the diversity of the campus, eyes aglow with curiosity, wanting to taste every idea and quickly dropping his physics and math major for art and philosophy. What will he say?

"It is about the temple that stood in Jerusalem. Right, Mom? That's what Nachmanides meant. But he was a mystic, so it must mean more. Yes?"

Azriel (Ezra) ben Menahem also lived in Girona, a primary student of Isaac the Blind. Isaac the Blind gave names to the ten Sefirot, first adopted the idea of metempsychosis and it is to him that some scholars attribute authorship of the Bahir. Isaac the Blind fiercely opposed the public teaching of Kabbala, he felt it must remain a closely held wisdom tradition available only to those who would practice Judaism with integrity and have sufficient learning to be able to learn the details of the Kabbalistic depths. He described the men of his time as "cutting off the shoots," of  subjects related as "the flame is to the coal." So how to answer Francesq's quest for understanding. When my teacher Reb Zalman stood at this cross roads, so far as I can tell, he chose to share.

So, a bit of an answer for Francesq and my listening son. "The Temple in Jerusalem was more than a building, its front pillars represent the Tree of Life. One pillar is Justice, the other is Lovingkindness. In the center, that's the Royal Road, the pillar of harmony, where balance must be created. But Francesq, that Temple, or that Tree, it is also you, and also me. The balance starts with us."

Francesq is a passionate Catalonian nationalist, more accustomed to making common cause with Basques, members of the IRA and Palestinians, this excursion out of his hometown of industrial Valnencia (with a very cool Gothic historical section) is his first confrontation with the Spanish Inquisition. Short, lithe, olive-skinned, huge brown eyes, an excellent orator, he wants to know more. "So the temple was an illusion? It is really inside of you? Can Moslems take on that practice too?" He is also quick. I restrained myself from making linkage to his own nationalism, hearing my husband Barry's voice in my ear - "Seeds are planted, let it evolve." My son is nodding, he who keeps telling me why socialism is the ultimate best way to reorganize the world. And I keep imploring him to tackle the great challenge of our times, to invent a new, fair economic system, to help us reach beyond the known, to help us get past the now decaying benefits of capitalism, to vision. Adam!! Francesq!!  Help us vision.

The six hour return train ride to Valencia became a milk-the-rebbe seminar. As Reb Zalman is fond of quoting, "just as much as the calf needs to suckle, the cow wants to give." Francesq elicited practices, history, tried on meditations, and truth to tell, it was my joy to find my son willing to expand his awareness alongside his friend.

We returned to Holland for a Bat Mitzvah to be held in a tiny rural synagogue outside of Amsterdam. It is now officially a church, the notch in the wall where the ark once stood is empty. It is so tiny, the size of a decent living room in the states. The young girl being b-mitzvah is an amazing young woman. When her family finally managed the impossible, to convert to Judaism in a way acceptable to the Dutch liberal rabbinate (long story), she refused to go to mikveh a second time, declaring G*d to be quite clear that her earlier Orthodox conversion in Germany was sufficient. What a turn-around, the Reform establishment trying to disenfranchise an orthodox conversion. Ultimately they recognized her point.

Our golden-haired chutzpanik, she decided to also tackle the Reform establishment in the rural town where she lives. There they don't allow women to wear a tallit at services, though a woman can lead and leyn. [And it's apparently the vote of two women that keep the custom this way!] Her parsha, as it happened, included the mitzvah of tzitzit, and the Haftorah was the story of Rahab letting down the red string to mark her home as a safe house when the Israelites took Jericho was her parsha. Our bat mitzvah girl pulled out the Talmudic proof for women and tzitzit and waved it like a red flag: (Menachot 43a) reports that Reb Yehudah attached fringes to the aprons of women in his household and there it reads: "All must observe the law of tzitzit, Cohanim, Levites and Israelites, converts, women and slaves." She experiences Rahab as showing the importance of women and fringes, that when we take on the mitzvah of welcoming the stranger, the world changes toward Shalom.

Smoke is a kind of fringe, the fringe of the flame. As she chanted her parsha in a crystalline voice with extraordinary precision, I heard the words "rey-akh hani-ho-alh" - meaning the burning sacrifice on the altar is a "sweet savor."  Or, G*d loves the smell of barbecue. The words clicked a shutter in time, I blinked and saw the room softly buzzing with terrified men talking about deportations, the notch where the ark would have been had a resplendent cabinet there, the doors open, two other Torahs waiting. Their anxiety was infectious, I wanted to scream to them: "Blink!  Look up through time - see HER!!" Hot tears poured down my cheeks as I slipped out of the pocket in time and struggled to return my attention to the Dutch rabbi whose words were being softly translated into my ear by a dear friend.

It is a challenge to recover from such jolts in the fabric of time. Nava Tehilla, a mid-life Dutch woman with a beautiful voice serves as cantor. On the wings of her song spirits rise. She has just been accepted as the first woman in the first Dutch Rabbinical school, being founded by Rabbi David Lillienthal this autumn as his retirement gift to Europe. Then, out in the central stone square of the tiny Dutch town we later came upon a huge concert organ. The kind that would be wheeled through the streets and patrons offer coins in exchange for running a wooden template through the back that, just like in a music box, would result in the right chords. Powerful, joyful, requiring a dance for sure.

Our time in Europe ended too quickly. This kind of traveling and teaching brings the most amazing friends, students and teachers into one's life. Friends Ania and Kess took us sculling on the Amstel River. There we recalled the Rosh Hodesh group's ideas about the red thread, which in the Netherlands is a known metaphor for what connects us all. It is an umbilical cord, Rahab was midwifing the departure of the Israelites from the womb of the wilderness, her home was set into the wall around Jericho, she was able to bridge worlds, to create a safe house in a strange land.

This morning we sat on the floor here at Elat Chayyim, some chose to rub ashes into their skin. It came to me that we might pray the Modeh ani, without the modeh. Not, "I am praising before the king of life that sustains all."  Instead take the other meaning of l'faneckha, take "in your face" and simply chant, "ani l'faneckha", "I am in Your face."  For our shema we completed the shema of those who went to the gas chamber, who died in the inquisition, who were thrust without time to blink through with the staves of Babylonian conquerors. A kapo once told me that was how he redeemed his job, he finished the shema for those inside the gas chamber, while he stood, in anguished privilege outside. The hard energy of Tisha B'av is here.

May we be blessed to bridge worlds, like Rahab, to create safe houses in strange lands. With love, Reb Goldie