A Spiritual Life: Exploring the Heart and Jewish Tradition, Revised Edition

1. Beginnings

1 h Beginnings 2 A SPIRITUAL LIFE 3 BEGINNINGS A Spiritual Life A few years ago a Jewish magazine decided to devote an issue to spirituality and asked me to contribute a short piece describing “a spiritual moment.” I thought, a moment is best captured in a poem, I’ll submit a poem. In fact, I submitted not one but two poems, two very different poems. The first captured a poignant memory of packing away my Passover dishes one year, an act which forced me to acknowledge that the holiday had come and now was gone, that my unspoken, unconscious longing to see my mother during a holiday so full of childhood memories, my mother who had been dead already several years, was of course a longing unrealized, unrealizable . In the poem were the tears of my feeling abandoned by her, abandoned in the Universe, alone, alone, so alone. Out of the depths I call to you . . . The other poem, a very different moment, though actually also a moment of tears. A twenty-year-old me sitting down to Friday night dinner for the first time with my life’s partnerto -be. He began to make kiddush, the traditional blessing over the wine, and I was overwhelmed by feelings of gratitude that my journey had delivered me to love, to shared meaning, to connection. As the Psalmist sings in Hallel, “The stone that was discarded is now the cornerstone.” In the poem I felt like that once discarded stone, as I sang out with joy through those old tears. The Jewish magazine decided they had room for only one poem. For a while I thought I’d insist “both or none” but finally I gave in and told them to use the one with my Passover dishes: it seemed an unusual moment to share with readers, at least it could make them reflect on the idea that “a spiritual moment” was not only a moment of consummation, that a spiritual moment might equally be a moment of longing, of stretching toward something precious that was out of reach. 4 A SPIRITUAL LIFE But really, what I wanted to do in offering both those poems was to give a glimpse of the complexity of terrain which constitutes spiritual geography. In some sense, I’ve been waiting in these intervening years for an opportunity to share not one, not two, but many many pictures of the life of spirit. I’ve been waiting for an opportunity to share through stories, through poetry, the important life stuff I know something about—the struggle to become who you are, the work to achieve peace with your past, the search for meaning and the assertion of meaning. Increasingly when I’m asked to teach or speak, I am conscious of the constraints of the agreed upon topic, and I work to make room within it for what I think is really important to say, for what I think the audience, whether it knows it or not, is hungry to hear about. To break through the cerebral , the polite, the conventional, the pseudointellectual, and to speak face to face, human to human, heart to heart, soul to soul. Scary. Easier to write a well-reasoned paper with respected accepted sources and then just get up to the podium and read with expression. Much safer. But I never seem to be content with safe. I want alive. More and more I want alive. h h h As I write these particular words, wrestling with the creation of something new, something which has never existed before, I don’t know how it’s all going to fit together. It’s a lot like the story of my life (it is in fact the story of my life) and women’s stories are so complicated. (True of men’s stories too? Probably, but for the moment I’m taking refuge in one of my particularities.) Women’s stories: not a linear plot, but levels of reality simulcast on three or four different screens. How to tell one coherent story when you know you’re not living one coherent story. So, a patchwork. For a while I was a quilter and my favorite part of the whole process was gathering all the different pieces of fabric, seeing the explosion of color and pattern, and then creating a design which celebrated each individual 5 BEGINNINGS piece but also...