#Yartzeit Synagogue

[newyorkthegoldenage]

D-Day services at Congregation Emunath Israel on West 23rd Street, June 6, 1944.

Photo: Howard Hollem et al. for the Office of War Information via Shorpy

[nehedar]

A synchromystic birth story

In 1986 I was a 5 year old living in North Miami Beach, and going to kindergarten. I dreamt that my mom was late picking me up from school and I was left alone on the playground. Noticing some movement in the tall grass at the edge of the playground, I saw a lion weaving in and out and decided to explore that area. (brave, right?)

I wandered in the grass, and soon began to hear two women screaming for help. I followed the voices until I got to a clearing. In the middle of the clearing was a fountain, like a large cement birdbath, the screaming was coming from the fountain. As I approached I saw with horror that inside the fountain was my teacher’s head and my mom’s head, each cut in half and sewn back together. They both looked at me and screamed at me to separate them. I felt such pity and horror but I knew that if I were to separate them, they’d both die.

I woke up crying and upset, naturally and went into my parents room, at which time my dad told me that I could learn how to control my dreams. He gave me the instructions to “find my hands.” He gave me a rudimentary lesson in lucid dreaming that I would develop throughout my life, first lucidly dreaming around 7 and developing from there.  It’s a work in progress.

In the meantime, I pondered the meaning of the dream, always mystified by the lion and fountain which seem like such strong, symbolic images for a five year old’s mind to construct a story out of. I loosely translated it as being torn between my mother and the outside world, represented by Mrs Cohen, my schoolteacher.

In October 2001 I was 20. I was living in a dorm room at Stern College in NYC and my mom had also moved back from Zion, Illinois to her native NYC as well. Only my youngest sister was living with her at the time.

My mom and sister weren’t getting along. My sister who was 12 at the time called me frequently and told me the problems they were having that mostly stemmed from my mom’s inability to find a job and sleeping all the time. My sister had little confidence in my mom’s abilities to care for her.

I had found them a therapist and was doing all I could, assuming it was normal relationship, emotional, and economic problems, until one night while my sister was complaining, I heard my mom in the background clearly slurring with an odd tone in her voice.

I told my sister to put her on the phone and when I heard her voice, I immediately got a very strong feeling that my mom had a brain tumor and was going to die.  I know that sounds made up, but it’s true. I remember that moment clear as day. I was in my dorm room at the time, smoking a cigarette out the window. I sat down and took a breath, realizing that the next step was getting her to the hospital.

The next day I had been excited because Maya Angelou was speaking at my school, but I skipped the event and headed to Brooklyn, to my mom’s apartment while my sister was at school.

When I got there, the door was open, and there were papers on the floor. I walked in and sat on the futon and fended off the cat’s attacks while I stayed, nervously wondering where my mom was.

She stumbled in the door soon after with one shoe on her foot. We called a car service and went to the emergency room. She had no insurance at the time but would be set up with Medicaid.

She was very dazed in the hospital. The clearest memory I have is of her reading French signs and slipping into French.

By the time she was seen, they didn’t want to keep her. Maybe they thought she was on drugs, or just mentally ill, but my friend was able to convince them to keep her. They left her in what I can only call a “cell” with no furniture, where they left her sleeping on the floor.

I was left with the assumption that my mom was having some kind of serious mental breakdown for a day or two but one day at work I got a message to call a doctor at the hospital. 

Someone had ordered a CT scan which found a large tumor in her brain that needed immediate surgery. The extraction biopsy would tell us the nature of the cancer. 

It was Chanukah when I came to visit my mom in the hospital post-op. When I first saw her, I gasped a little bit because the dramatic scar on her shaved head looked so familiar, the way the stitching had appeared years ago in the dream. 

They broke the news to me that she had an aggressive stage 4 glioblastoma multiforme, that would surely kill her soon. It could be as early as a couple months away. 

My mom didn’t want to die, she wanted to be a guinea pig for natural medicinal approaches to curing cancer. So my grandmother (who was also dying with non hodgkins lymphoma) gave me $10,000 to spend on these experimental efforts. 

I was doing what my mom wanted, but I still regret not just getting her high at that time. That was her favorite thing to do. Of course nothing we did worked. The best time to start something like that is before the surgery, and we would have needed vast sums of money to have the ability to take her somewhere that could care for her.

One day while my mom was in the hospital, I had a dream where the chime of an email arriving sounded from the basement of the house where I was living.

I went down to the basement and found there was a rainbow gathering in there.  I figured that my life was so stressful, I had created something to give me a sense of peace and calm in my dream.

But when I woke up from the dream I figured, might as well check my email.

In my inbox there was an invitation to a rainbow gathering in Emilia, Italy, which happens to be my name.  I felt a little shaken up by such an intense invitation (It made sense that I’d be on a rainbow gathering email list, but don’t remember getting any other invitations other than that one).  

I went  to the rainbow gathering, which made my mother really proud. I had taken her to her first rainbow gathering the previous summer and she had the best time of her life. She actually considered that her brain tumor had been caused by the shocking difference between the depression she’d lived with in her home life, back in Zion, Illinois, and the bliss she felt at the rainbow gathering.

She hung on through the summer but not much longer.  On June 20th, I was approached about signing a DNR by the hospital. June 20th was my 21st birthday and it just so happened that was the exact age I had to be in order to legally sign it.  Me and the social worker shared an otherworldly chuckle about that. 

She died on September 8th 2002, more importantly on the second day of Rosh Hashana.

I muddled through life for a while after that, pretending to want to go to school, but really just enjoying the dorms’ midtown location so I could work on my music in the city. I had been an orthodox Jew since the age of 18 but chose to exclude any personal concern about the Jewish kol isha law from my practice after I began writing songs. The first song I recorded and the first video I made was called Mama and feature old home movies of my mother and her mother (who died 3 months prior to my mom’s death.)

A year or two after, I brought lice from a rainbow gathering to the dorms at Stern. I shaved my head to protect my roommates and classmates after trying unsuccessfully to manage it on my own. A rumor started that I did it to protest agunot. I didn’t discourage the rumor. That year when it was time for high holiday services, I was pressured to wear a wig, borrowed from a married neighbor, so I wouldn’t bother the congregation. I felt a clear message that my mom, whose yarzeit it was didn’t want me to put up with this crap. I haven’t really been open to shul since.

I got married in 2012 and was pregnant the next year, at which time I began to experience a lot of grief about my mother not being present for my pregnancy.

My mother had 6 kids, the last 2 at home, and always said she loved being pregnant and giving birth. I on the other hand, hated being pregnant, being poked and prodded and just wished I could talk to my mom about it.

I wrote a song about it called “Come in to the Light” which was a call for my mother’s presence to surface and watch and guide me through the pregnancy.

I enlisted a video artist to make a video to accompany the song and I talked to her about my dream imagery. She asked me for a photo of my mother, and she surprised me by flashing my mother’s bright smile at the end of it.

In the last trimester of my pregnancy I was looking for work and a friend put out a call for a temporary worker to help sign synagogue members up for high holiday tickets. The synagogue happened to be my mom’s favorite synagogue B’nai Jeshurun in the Upper West Side.  On the same block as the synagogue were 2 carvings on either side of an apartment building with actual fountains where the water came out of a lion’s mouth into fountain below.

I stared at this, utterly disbelieving what I was seeing. I wondered if I had ever visited NYC with my mom when I was very young, been to the synagogue with her and seen the lion and fountain which might have explained their presence in my dream. My dad told me that I had never been to New York with my mom.  I felt as if the present was affecting the past. I took this picture on my last day of work.

I left that job on my due date, but didn’t give birth until 10 days after that, which happened to be the anniversary (yartzeit) of my mother’s death. I had a hard time in labor, mostly due to the meanness, bullying and dehumanization of the mechanized, medicalized birth industry, and the particular hospital and practice that I gave birth at.

I didn’t want to use pain medicine, as my mom hadn’t used it.  But the hospital wasn’t accustomed to non medicated women, let’s say. At one point, tired of the combative standoffs I was having with hospital staff, I asked for it.

When the anesthesiologist began her speech about what she was going to do, I felt no option but to politely as possible ask her to stop talking immediately. She left the room and didn’t come back. I was able to get through the transition phase of labor because at one point my husband whispered in my ear “Your mom would be so proud of you.” That triggered the image from the end of my video that the artist had snuck in, of my mom’s radiant face to pop into my mind and remain there fixed, as a focal point. 

UPDATE: In 2020, (my son is almost 6 years old) I learned my doula has the same birthday as my mom (8/28). That same doula, super “randomly” had worked in the same position as me at the synagogue the year before.

https://youtu.be/WN_ITpDmJKE?t=263

[espanadiarywriter]

Rosh Hashanah

My grandfather’s yartzeit is on erev Rosh Hashanah.* We went to services last night, and listened to and read mostly Spanish translations of the Hebrew prayers. We read very little Hebrew outside a few main prayers (the Barechu, the Shema, blessing the candles and kiddish). But when we got to the end of the service, we said the Aleinu in Hebrew. My grandfather always used to say it was the most important prayer in the service because it declares that someday everyone will realize that G-d is one. He said you couldn’t leave until you said the aleinu. And it was the one prayer tonight we did in its entirety in Hebrew.  Tonight during the Aleinu, I kinda got chills. Here’s why.

I was missing our large Jewish community at home, and I spent the afternoon reading about the history of the Jews in Spain. I mean, I knew they were expelled in the 15th century and knew about the inquisition, but I didn’t know much more than that in terms of details. So I read.

I’m not gonna recount the whole history here. You know the old joke about Jewish holidays: What’s it about? They tried to kill us, we won, let’s eat. It’s not a new story, people trying to kill the Jews. But I found a few things fascinating about the history of the Sephardic Jews in the Iberian Peninsula, who were one of the largest and most prosperous Jewish communities in history. First of all, the period of the most prosperity was under muslim rule. It was called the Golden Age (starting around 882) when Jewish scholarship was welcomed and flourished. In fact, many Jewish scholars worked in Arabic as well as Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. 

As the Moors and Christians fought each other for the land that is now Spain, things went mostly okay for the Jews. But once the Catholics had consolidated power, things got bad. In 1391, massacres of the Jewish people started in Seville (4000 of the 7000 Jews were killed) and spread quickly through the whole region. Jews who were not killed were forced into Baptism to save their lives. The violence culminated in the 1492 declaration expelling the Jews from Spain and the inquisition coming after those that had converted. But by that time tens of thousands of Jews had already been killed or forced to convert. And for years before this edict, Jews were forced to wear a yellow sign on their clothes whenever they were outside to indicate they were Jewish. They were only allowed to live in Juderias (aka the Jewish neighborhood); only have certain jobs; not intermarry with Catholics; not allowed to build new synagogues; and not allowed to wear nice clothes or have any kind of wealth. (Sound familiar? The Germans were not creative.)

Before the expulsion of the Jews and before the massacres, in 1380, the Catholic rulers accused that the Jewish prayers contained clauses cursing the Catholics and that this phrase must be removed from the prayer books. No doubt this is the paragraph in the Aleinu prayer that says: "who has not designed our destiny to be like theirs, nor our lot like that of all their multitude, for they bow to vanity and emptiness and pray to a g-d who cannot save”. In fact, modern prayerbooks no longer have this paragraph precisely because it gives the impression of being superior to others. The vision of the prayer as a whole, however, is one that embraces the notion of harmony among all peoples. It expresses it as universal recognition of G-d, but the big picture is that we all are one human race. We have such a long way to go--it truly is an act of faith to think this might ever be a reality. But then again, the same country that expelled the Jews later helped them escape the Nazis by giving Spanish citizenship documents to the Spanish Jewish diaspora.

And so last night, in the land of the no-longer-expelled Jews, with my son next to me following the Hebrew better than the Spanish, and on my grandfather’s yartzeit, I thought of those many Sephardic Jews who were killed and forced to run away, and I got chills reading the Aleinu in Hebrew.

L’Shanah Tovah, may you be written in the book of life for a good year.

*Yartzeit means the anniversary of a death, and erev Rosh Hashanah is the evening that starts the Jewish New Year.

[asylvermoment]

I lit a Yartzeit candle tonight for Emily Heyer. I softly sang the Mi'Sheberach and cried thinking about the 20 people who were injured in Charlottesville, about all the articles I have read regarding the hatred people experienced last weekend. My office mate grew up in Charlottesville and Neo-Nazis were standing outside of her hometown’s synagogue with semi-automatic weapons. The congregants, amassed for Shabbat services, felt unsafe and the police did nothing.

I grew up in South Florida and experienced only a couple minor hate crimes, mostly involving anti-Semitic slurs, seeing a neighbor’s mezuzot get desecrated, or getting bullied by a girl in third grade who made it quite evident she didn’t like that I was a Jew. There was one time we saw a swastika painted on the wall of our Reform temple and Sunday school was canceled that day. I went through a period of my life where I wrestled with Jewish teachings and wanted to be a Rabbi but took issue with the text of the old testament. I seriously contemplated what my heritage, culture, family history and faith meant to me, and studied in Jerusalem for a month with the Jewish Leadership Institute. I was a Sturm Fellow with the Anti-Defamation League, and remember learning about the “No Place for Hate” initiative and hearing testament from law enforcement officials who had identified Neo-Nazi and other hate group activities in South Florida. I taught Hebrew and Judaics in a Reform synagogue for 4 years and worked earlier still as a Sunday school teacher’s assistant and tutor. I was a sleepaway camp counselor for a URJ Reform Camp in Georgia after attending the same camp as a camper for 4 years.

I have met and cried alongside Holocaust survivors. My own grandparents fled Germany and Austria at the beginning of WWII, to escape rampant anti-Semitic hatred and fear. I have been to Yad V'Shem and had my breath taken from me in the Children’s exhibit, with myriad floating lights representing the beautiful children whose lives were snuffed out in the Holocaust. I have listened to my grandmother’s stories, and countless stories of friends’ family members who survived concentration camps or their family members perished therein.

To say that Judaism, the Jewish community, and my family’s traditions have shaped who I am is an understatement. As a Jewish lesbian, hatred and intolerance are not a farfetched story for me. I have experienced it to certain degrees firsthand, here in the States and abroad. And I will not sit by and tolerate such abhorrent and insipid hatred, not now or ever.

The Mi'Sheberach is a prayer for healing. With a holistic view of humankind, this prayer asks for physical cure as well as spiritual healing – asking for blessing, compassion, restoration, and strength, within the community of others facing illness, of body and spirit. Now, the melody is sung as a mainstay in prayer services in Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist and Renewal congregations throughout the world. I don’t pray often in my life, but I believe in the messages transmitted by some of the prayers I have learned and studied. The Mi'Sheberach has always had a special place in my heart and seems appropriate now, so I am offering it to those who have recently suffered as an intention and promise to stand by you in tolerance and kindred love, and in fighting bigotry and hate without resorting to violence. “May the source of Strength who blessed the ones before us help us find the courage to make our lives a blessing.”

[sacredsocialjustice]

Sending love to Pittsburgh from Edmonton, Canada. Holding a yartzheit (memorial) candle to honour the 11 who were killed in at Tree of Life Synagogue because they were Jewish. #yartzheitcandlesforpittsburgh #yeg #jewish #pittsburgh #treeoflifesynagogue #yartzeit #pittsburghstrong #loveisstrongerthanhate (at Edmonton, Alberta) https://www.instagram.com/p/BpffwSvgJbC/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=u1s6odcxhxkm