Tashlich

Yesterday, Jacob and I celebrated Tashlich by going out to Montrose Beach and throwing the leftover challah into Lake Michigan to symbolize casting our sins away as we turn back towards God and community in the New Year of Rosh Hashanah. It was glorious. The sky was overcast and the waves somewhat threatening. Jacob and I scrambled over the big limestone blocks that line the shore until we were a little bit north of the dog beach. We began hurling big chunks of challah into the waves. The wind would catch it and it would hang in the air, which made me think that maybe I could hit one of the seagulls that was starting to converge on our coordinates. Jacob said that maybe that would be a bad omen for the new year. He began to read the traditional scripture off his phone but I barely paid attention in the baby maelstrom.

Micah 7:18 Who is a God like you,
who pardons sin and forgives the transgression
of the remnant of his inheritance?
You do not stay angry forever
but delight to show mercy.

19 You will again have compassion on us;
you will tread our sins underfoot
and hurl all our iniquities into the depths of the sea.

20 You will be true to Jacob,
and show mercy to Abraham,
as you pledged on oath to our fathers
in days long ago.

I am often guided by some words spoken by one of the members of Sweet Honey in the Rock that was spoken on one of their live albums: "If you want change in your life and there is a storm, walk in to it. When you get to the other side, you will be changed." I am always emboldened by the assumption that you will get to the other side and that change is choice that one makes, not something that simple happens to us.

Yesterday, thought, as I was hurling the last of my iniquities into the depths of a seagull's gullet via the lake, I did not think too deeply on what was happening or remember Sweet Honey in the Rock because I was, quite simply, caught up in the joy of furious weather. I looked up above me and found that the few seagulls I used as targets had multiplied until they were legion and they were thick not just in our area but all up and down the beach. It was glorious! We watched them hover in the wind and they didn't fight at all or make any noise. We grinned at each other and gushed about how cool it was.

Then, one particular bird whose plumage we were admired took a big shit where our sins used to be and we decided it would probably be a good moment to head back to the car.

To be honest, the other reason that I didn't really engage in the meaning of the tashlich ceremony was that I'm feeling a little steamrolled by Judaism lately, especially in the last few days. The wedding was almost entirely Jewish in form, even if it was interfaith in interpretation. Jacob and I have spent a year researching and reading and talking to dig out a place for ourselves inside his community and inside his own theology. My emotional responses to the behavior of my in-laws, who are unavoidably associated with Judiasm, have been exhausting. In the last few weeks before the wedding, I was taking the advice of so many of my closest advisers: just get through the wedding; then, you'll have time to breathe.

But just as I surface again after the honeymoon, it's Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur and Jacob thinks it would be cool to build a sukkah in our parking space and then Simhat Torah and we need to plan for a trip to New York for Thanksgiving and maybe a trip to Ohio before that for a charity event for the hospital that is so good to Jacob's niece and Channukah is early this year.

Where is that breathing? Where is that space a new couple needs to simply be without having to be . . . something? Of course, it could be that this is not something we're entitled to at all. I recently read a fantasy book called Trickster's Queen by Tamora Pierce in which white imperialists are referred to as "luarin." A line of dialogue spoken by one of the "raka" or native people struck me.

"That's the problem with luarin," Boulaj observed softly. "They think gods have rules and follow them. They should dedicate their lives to the Trickster, as we do. They would not be comfortable, but they would not have illusion that life is supposed to make sense, either."

This has made me start thinking that I easily think of Jesus as subversive and this could easily be communicated using a Trickster framework, like stories of Brer Rabbit, Coyote, Raven, Reynard the Fox, Enki, Loki, Hermes and Bugs Bunny. This shift in perspective to Jesus as Trickster might help with my overall sense of entitlement and give me the strength to be a good daughter-in-law and wife rather than letting myself be less than God calls me to be because I didn't expect the situation that I find myself in.

Last year, I read a book called The Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared and the spiritual journey that a deliberate celebrating of the High Holidays can lead one through is really beautiful. And there were moments in the 3.5 hour service on Saturday morning that were really beautiful, especially because they value storytelling and gave two members of the congregation amply time to reflect on the theme of the New Year in addition to the rabbi's homily.

But on Friday, I had a tough day because I missed the spiritual journey that I used to be on: the one of finding God's love for me as shown by the gift of Jesus in previously unlooked-for places so that I would feel it more deeply and hopefully be encouraged to reflect that love to others as my main action in life, seeking social justice and extricating myself from systems that oppress other people that God loves just as much as she loves me.

There hasn't been as much Jesus in my life lately, what with all the Judaism needing so much attention.

About two weeks before the wedding, Jacob and I decided that we wanted to do big group family pictures before the wedding so that we wouldn't waste any of the time we had scheduled for the band to be there. However, to make this work logistically, we had to do these two hours before the ceremony, because we had already paid money for the rooms for our kabbalat panim during the hour before the ceremony and we didn't want to waste it. So, we changed everything around and decided to have separate pre-chuppah receptions that were divided by family rather than gender.

This is maybe the best decision that we could have made for my peace of mind. When my extended family gets together, we often have family Bible studies where we briefly examine a piece of scripture, pray together and sing out of tattered Murphy hymnals that are about 20 years old with construction paper covers decorated with glitter glue and filled with our favorite xeroxed hymns. I decided that I wanted to do this before the wedding. My dad led a brief reflection on the scripture for the ceremony, we sang A Mighty Fortress Is Our God, Wonderful Grace of Jesus and Come Though Fount of Every Blessing and then we prayed: once when they laid hands on me and once in a big circle that concluded in a recitation of the Lord's Prayer and followed by singing the traditional Johnny Appleseed which is always sung holding hands and swinging our arms back and forth. I think I cried the entire time.

Although I did not realize why I needed this time, I look back and can see that it allowed me to reside in the center of where I come from. I gave a lot of lipservice to the faith traditions that we come from in The World's Longest Wedding Program but had become distanced from what those traditions really were. By spending the hour before the wedding doing one of the rituals that has made me who I am, I could bring my whole self to the wedding ceremony. Without it, I would have only brought the harried, joyful, event planning self that I had been for the last 6 months to the chuppah. Instead, like Esperanza on her birthday from House on Mango Street, I could be all the Rebeccas I had been up to that point. I could bring the Jesus that lives in my heart with me down the aisle instead of having to just meet him there because my pastor brought him along.

But Friday, I felt like I had lost him again with all this Judaism swirling around my head like seagulls vying for stale bread. Maybe writing this post has helped me catch sight of him again so that I know which direction to walk in this new year. We'll see.

Shanah Tovah.

We get married in circles

So, let's talk about the hora, shall we? Like A., I don't really want to report the wedding to you in a blow by blow, chronological fashion. Instead, let's use the topics that occur to me (or to you, just ask in a comment) and see where that takes us. Chances are, I'll get distracted and not tell the whole story, but then I get to relate it little by little as I tell other stories.

Fun, right?

So, the hora. What a great way to re-enter a celebration after taking my man by the hand and leading him off into yichud. I remember realizing that it was time after everyone shouted "Mazel Tov!" and realizing that no one else would tell us what to do next. I think I said something like, "OK, let's go!"As an aside, yichud is a time for the bride and groom to be together alone immediately following the ceremony. After hearing a horrow story about a woman whose mother-in-law followed them into yichud because "her feet were tired," I made sure to get good yichud guards and their 2-year-old son. Because who doesn't want to talk to a 2-year-old as the first public thing they do as a married couple? Our friends told us they thought they would be ceremonial but had to turn a surprising number of people away.

But after talking to young Sam about shoes and fruit for a little bit, we got down to the business of celebrating. Although we spoke to a few people who were still in the foyer near the food and wine, we quickly entered the hall and threaded our way to the dance floor and started spinning. At least that what it felt like.

I don't know if Jacob and I danced alone at first and people joined us or if people jumped right in. I know that early on, I really liked dancing the actual grapevine steps because it made the ruffles of my skirt flare. Soon, Jacob and I were grinning intensely into each other's faces as we spun and then his parents and then my parents joined us in a big circle. I think that as I looked beyond Jacob, I saw probably 60 people in two circles around us. It's all kind of a jumble, actually. I know that at one point, the girlfriend of one of Jacob's closest friends, danced a different step with me and I was so grateful to her for welcoming me into her Jewishness. I then went and found my friend Tabitha (who introduced Jacob and I) and danced with her.

In yichud, Jacob told me that he really came into appreciating the work I did to prepare for the wedding because he panicked right before the ceremony about being put into the air on folding chairs. He found the site coordinator and asked for solid ones and was shown that they were already in place in the front. I melted a little bit when he told me that because there was always a little bit of niggling struggle in the back of my head that we were falling into stereotypical gender roles. He plays the sugar daddy who can't figure out why I'm so exhausted at the end of each day planning the wedding and I play the whiny woman who holds all the cards tightly in order to validate her existence. I swear, when he said on the day before the wedding that we should remember to take the marriage license that I already had packed in a box to take to the venue, I could see our special guest appearance on Everybody Loves Raymond clearly in my mind. In economic terms, for the last 3 months, we have had a differentiated household. Jacob takes care of the living expenses; I take care of wedding logistics and process the concommitant family drama. However, it wasn't until Jacob noticed the fruits of my labors that I really felt that we were equal partners in our differentiation.

So, with the solid chairs that were stationed at the front, Jacob's mother took charge of the chair lifting during the hora. She told me how to sit on the chair and where to hold on. The part of me that longs for a good relationship with her was glad to see that she felt like she was welcome and an integral part of the action. Later, she pulled the chairs together in the middle of the dance floor and said, "Sit. Now we have to entertain you." I had not prepped anyone for this Jewish tradition because I decided to use my persuasive skills on other things, like getting people to actually feel comfortable dancing and getting people to move outside their comfort zone to make us quilt squares. But Jacob's mom led the way, dancing across the space in front of us holding an imaginary baby in her arms and getting a friend to dance back with her.

And people really caught on. I was amazed to see my friends and Jacob's family huddle their heads together to figure out some goofy dance that they could do. Every time I thought the pause between acts felt uncomfortably too long and was about get up and go back to dancing, someone else stepped in. My mom traipsed across the space looking ridiculous and completely lovable in her vulnerability. I clapped my hands above my head each time someone finished. It was an extra special gift when my cousin's brother-in-law danced for us since he is a principal dancer for the Hubbard Street Dance Company.

Then, it was back to the circle dancing. I could have done this all night. On the wedding blog I wrote:

Love sometimes feels overwhelming and too fast but also just plain fun. It is exhilarating and makes you feel like you might fall down. When you feel love, you want to make all of the right steps but sometimes you’re just so busy moving forward (or moving in an oblong orbit) that you can’t really get your feet under you enough to dance the pattern.

This is an argument for dancing the hora. It recreates and affirms our own experiences with love and communicates our hopes for more love to find us in the future.

I didn't realize until just now that the explanation I published in our program for the circling at the beginning of the ceremony is also reflected in the hora:

Bride and bridegroom performed the Dance of Isaiah. Hip to hip, arms interwoven to hold hands, [They] circumnabulate once, twice and then again, spinning the cocoon of their life together. No patriarchal linearity here. We . . . get married in circles, to impress upon ourselves the essential matrimonial facts: that to be happy, you have to find variety in repetition; that to go forward you have to come back to where you began.

Meg of A Practical Wedding told me that it "slayed" her that I was using footnotes in my program. In the footnotes, I credited Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex for that quote.

We actually forgot to circle each other at the beginning of our ceremony, even though we had practiced a couple of hours earlier. When I remembered, I stopped the rabbi and we did it right before the first kiddush. It was a good thing, too, since my pastor based her whole sermon on the idea that we get married in circles. We dance the hora in circles.

And it's stinkin' fun, too.

Home from the honeymoon!

The first photo to come back from our great photographer.

More words later.

Aufruf

When I was in junior high, I met with a group of girls and my youth director on Wednesday nights for Bible study and some other weekday morning to go out to breakfast before school. When I needed to, my youth director helped me tell them that my dad was going to prison. She then asked if they wanted to pray for me. I have such a vivid memory of being tucked up on this old wooden chair with arms that had been repainted yellow in the basement of the chapel, feeling so vulnerable and angry and worn out from weeping. They all put a hand on me somewhere and I can still recreate the view in my mind as I looked up through all of their arms and bodies while each prayed for me.

In high school, our confirmation ceremony involved a laying-on of hands and I remember that PC, who had worked with our youth group so much but who was dying of cancer stood behind me and put her hand on my shoulder that was bared by the new sundress my mom had bought for the occasion.

Last Sunday, I had an aufruf at church and Jacob and I sponsored the regular potluck afterwards by bringing kosher meat for the grill and pareve side dishes. At the end of the ceremony, Nanette encouraged the community to surround Jacob and I and to lay their hands on us and to pray for us. I tried to focus on being in the now, but the memories of the two other important intercessory prayers kept creeping in. Despite that, I was deeply moved, maybe because I felt just as worn out and exhausted as I did that Wednesday night in the youth lounge.

I wrote out the text of my reflection and read from it, apologizing that I had not had time to familiarize myself with it in order to deliver it in a conversational way while making eye contact for emphasis. Everyone seemed cool with it. :-) This is the text I delivered with a few things changed since I've had time to think about it.

Most of you know that I am marrying a Jewish man while I am a practicing Chrisitian. Jewish tradition holds that a member of the community who is getting married during the week following a particular Sabbath is honored by being allowed to read the scriptures and to give a brief reflection. This is called an aufruf. Most Jewish faith communities have a proscribed schedule for which scripture gets read on a given week, so a person’s “Torah portion” is kind of a crap-shoot.

Because my faith community is so important, I asked my pastor, Nanette, and the worship committee if I could have my own aufruf at Wicker Park Grace. To reflect the tradition of the Torah portion, I’ve used the Revised Common Lectionary, which fulfills a similar purpose for Protestant Christian faith communities.

As luck would have it, the assigned Old Testament scripture for August 30 is an underhand pitch of a piece of scripture:

Song of Solomon 2:8-13 (The Message)

The Woman

8-10 Look! Listen! There's my lover!
Do you see him coming?
Vaulting the mountains,
leaping the hills.
My lover is like a gazelle, graceful;
like a young stag, virile.
Look at him there, on tiptoe at the gate,
all ears, all eyes—ready!
My lover has arrived
and he's speaking to me!

The Man

10-14 Get up, my dear friend,
fair and beautiful lover—come to me!
Look around you: Winter is over;
the winter rains are over, gone!
Spring flowers are in blossom all over.
The whole world's a choir—and singing!
Spring warblers are filling the forest
with sweet arpeggios.
Lilacs are exuberantly purple and perfumed,
and cherry trees fragrant with blossoms.
Oh, get up, dear friend,
my fair and beautiful lover—come to me!
Come, my shy and modest dove—
leave your seclusion, come out in the open.
Let me see your face,
let me hear your voice.
For your voice is soothing
and your face is ravishing.

Perfect for a wedding, right? Listen to the barely contained excitement of the woman awaiting her man: “My lover has arrived and is speaking to me!” Who doesn’t like to be reminded of times when we’ve felt like nothing else mattered but the attention of the person we are infatuated with? Then, the passage goes on to describe the man’s attempt to persuade the woman that she should do the scary thing and leave the safety of the life she’s always known and join him “out in the open.” I have never denied that getting married again scares the hell out of me. I mean, I know more than most that there is no guarantee. You can never know someone well enough to know for certain that he will want to do the hard work of staying compatible ‘til death do you part. I have needed a little persuading, needing to be told that my voice is soothing and my face is ravishing.

So, a perfect verse for a wedding aufruf, right? I mean there’s that gag-me-flowers-puppies-and-sunshine stuff in the middle but we can all publicly laugh at that with ironic cynicism and know that it’s OK that we secretly nurse a hope that someone will think we are the Spring that banishes their Winter.

It’s a perfect verse but as I read it and re-read it, I was not quite content. It was too easy. Building community requires being open to each other and this easy verse wouldn’t allow me to do that fully. So, I read some of the other options in the Lectionary, which also provides a designated psalm, New Testament epistle and Gospel reading. As I continued reading, the Gospel lesson tugged as my heart. It is such a difficult passage for Jacob and me in our endeavor to create a life where our two different faith traditions are compatible. Because Wicker Park Grace is a place where to which people feel safe enough to bring their whole selves, I chose to speak on this passage to talk a little bit about how I resolve some of the apparent conflicts to our interfaith life.

Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23 (NIV)

Clean and Unclean
1The Pharisees and some of the teachers of the law who had come from Jerusalem gathered around Jesus and 2saw some of his disciples eating food with hands that were "unclean," that is, unwashed. 3(The Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they give their hands a ceremonial washing, holding to the tradition of the elders. 4When they come from the marketplace they do not eat unless they wash. And they observe many other traditions, such as the washing of cups, pitchers and kettles.)
5So the Pharisees and teachers of the law asked Jesus, "Why don't your disciples live according to the tradition of the elders instead of eating their food with 'unclean' hands?"
6He replied, "Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you hypocrites; as it is written:
'These people honor me with their lips,
but their hearts are far from me.
7They worship me in vain;
their teachings are but rules taught by men.'
8You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to the traditions of men.

14Again Jesus called the crowd to him and said, "Listen to me, everyone, and understand this. 15Nothing outside a man can make him 'unclean' by going into him. Rather, it is what comes out of a man that makes him 'unclean.'”
17After he had left the crowd and entered the house, his disciples asked him about this parable. 18"Are you so dull?" he asked. "Don't you see that nothing that enters a man from the outside can make him 'unclean'? 19For it doesn't go into his heart but into his stomach, and then out of his body." (In saying this, Jesus declared all foods "clean.")
20He went on: "What comes out of a man is what makes him 'unclean.' 21For from within, out of men's hearts, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, 22greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. 23All these evils come from inside and make a man 'unclean.' "


Yeech!

When I read this passage, it seems to me like Jesus is saying, “You know those things that Jews do that help them identify as a distinct community of people? You don’t really have to do them. In fact, they get in the way of doing what God wants you to do.”

Harsh. Especially for an interfaith couple that keeps kosher, the practice of eating only “clean” foods, as directed in the Torah.

Last week we studied a passage similar to this and, in fact, for the past several months we have been studying Acts, the book in the Bible that describes in painstaking detail how people who followed God by following the teachings of Jesus separated themselves from the people who followed God through Jewish practices by changing their habits, loosening lifestyle restrictions and including the Gentiles as part of the club.

Separation is hard. Remember adolescence? So many of us needed to declare that our parents’ beliefs –about our hair, about our friends, about God – were wrong in order to clear out the space that surrounded us. Once we had that space, we were free to determine for ourselves what we believed and wanted from life. Often, the process wasn’t black and white and our parents (sometimes rightly) insisted on maintaining closeness. Sometimes shouting ensued.

Jacob and I stopped coming to services at WPG recently because Acts is full of this kind of separation pain and reading about and discussing that pain makes us fight. For instance, Stephen is a real jerk about it, comparing the Jewish people who he had been trying to convert to the Jews in history who had turned away from God, like with the golden calf. Is Jesus being a similar jerk? Is he saying that if I want to follow him, I can’t keep kosher?

These kinds of passages make Jacob and I fight because they seem to be saying that we have to choose one side or another. Either you keep kosher dietary restrictions or you don’t. Either you follow Jesus or you don’t. And if you are going to be a couple traveling the same path, you both must choose the same things. But conversion for either of us means living a life trying to talk to God in a language that is not the one we were born into and neither of us could do that. And yet, we love each other. More than that, we have the ability to make each other’s lives better. It is like “The whole world's a choir—and singing!” when we live our lives together.

We have spent the last year hashing out whether or not there was a third option. Could we both continue to claim our separate faith identity while still being full partners in life, including raising children? We have decided that we can. However, this truth is still tender and vulnerable. We are still liable to lash out, or crawl inside of ourselves or get stuck in a bout of melancholy when someone challenges our resolve.

But when I look a little deeper, I don’t believe that Jesus is testing our resolve. I think that Jesus is manifesting one of the most Jewish characteristics: iconoclasm. The midrash - which is a collection of stories told by rabbis to help explain the scriptures – describes Abraham, who was considered the first Jew, smashing the stone and clay idols in his father’s shop with a hammer. This is iconoclasm: destroying idols. Worshipping god and nothing else is the first commandment handed down to the Jews by Moses at Mt. Sinai. “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; Do not have any other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.”

And what do we like to worship most? Personally, the idol I worship most often is my own life. I love looking at my own Facebook profile and reading my own blog posts after I have posted them. When I got my yearbooks in high school, I looked up my picture first. When people intrude upon my plans and interrupt my routines, I get upset and whine: “Is she going to be there?” “Do we have to leave so early?” I gather possessions around me and tell myself I’m special because I’ve made just the right choice, finding the perfect item for $1.50 at the thrift store or priding myself on going without things that others believe are necessary.

These habits and choices are no different than the hand-washing rituals that Jesus condemns. Again and again, the scriptures tell us that the way to worship God is to serve others: to welcome the stranger and to care for the weak. The people Jesus was speaking to in this passage loved their carefully-chosen practices more than they loved making people feel affirmed and welcome. Instead of saying, “Hey, we’re glad you’re eating,” they said, “Hey, what do you think you’re doing?”

Many spiritual practices and regular everyday practices serve to bring us closer to God and to create a more strongly-knit community. For instance, prayer brings us closer to God and tooth-brushing allows us to draw close to each other. But Jesus says that we must never fall so far in love with these practices that we forget about the feelings of others. For “sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly” are, at their core, things that hurt the feelings of others. Literally, they make other people feel bad. It is the opposite of caring for others. If the necessity to pray in a certain way or time spent on Facebook cause us to neglect our duty to serve God through serving others, than it is itself an idol or “unclean” and must be smashed.

Jacob and I believe in this kind of iconoclasm. We believe that together, we can mend the world a little bit. By destroying the “traditions of men” that state that two people must stay within the well-defined boundaries of different religions, we think we are following God more closely than we would if we quietly, safely, peacefully accepted their restrictions. Those traditions have become idols that get in the way of serving God. And so, when Jacob says with his life, “Oh, get up, dear friend, my fair and beautiful lover—come to me!” I do.

Simple

It's been a roller coaster day. I had a little show-down with the ED, which sucked. Then, I tried on my dress to get it fitted one last time and we took another inch and a half off the hips, which was cool on two levels. Then, I got a free gyro to celebrate Free Gyros Day, which was awesome. I sat in a park on a mid-seventies day with my back to the traffic and my face in the sun and just read for an hour, which was soothing. I racked my brain for a chuppah solution and finally decided to spend the money on buying one, which took a load off. I've need a nap for the last two hours, but every time I try to close my eyes, my brain won't stop problem-solving, which sucks.

But this made me laugh for the juxtaposition of simplicity and complexity.



Call me immature if you must, but I laughed. Today. I laughed. There's blessing there.

Angry

I made a resolution at the beginning of the week to get to bed by 10:00 so that I would not look haggard for my wedding this weekend. Also, when I don't get enough sleep I'm super-cranky. It is 12:17 as I write this because I am ANGRY.

We searched up and down for chuppah poles to borrow since renting them was $200 and making them was a pain in the ass. Most people we asked told us to just get them from a florist, not realizing that they would cost $200 and not being able to see our vision of using Jacob's grandpa's quilt. Finally, someone told us to ask a synagogue and since we had just started attending one that we liked, we asked them. They said yes, of course. I went in to look at them. We scheduled a day when I would pick them up: September 1st. For September 6 wedding.

We love this new spiritual community. While I was in solidifying the chuppah deal, I wrote them a big check to purchase our tickets for the high holidays and Jacob and I were planning to purchase our membership shortly thereafter. We felt so comfortable there that Jacob gave a D'var a couple of weeks ago (the equivalent of a short sermon). There's lots of things to like about them. They accept our interfaith relationship. They are intelligent and interesting. They have infrastructure. They work actively for social justice. Moreover, they are just plain nice.

But today, August 31, the Executive Director called to say that they had given the chuppah poles away to someone else. She mentioned that it was to paid members and that they were paying to rent them.

No one asked me to pay for them! If I had known, I would have gladly done so. I had my checkbook out to pay for the tickets and she made a joke about giving them a picture of the chuppah "as my donation" so that other couples could see it. Was that passive aggression? Should I have offered?

I'm six days away from my wedding and they tell me that I need to just run out and find something else.

I am pissed. Not so much at the running around I'm going to have to do or the money I'm going to have to spend but at the way we were treated. We made a deal with these folks and they betrayed our trust.

A spiritual community that values social justice treats actual people poorly.

The fucking hypocrisy is keeping me from falling asleep because I'm so angry.

And now we have to reconsider whether or not this will be our spiritual home. I think that's what makes me angriest. How could we ever invest in this place if this is how the institution treats people? And we were so happy with it. How can I ever forgive them?

I have to get to sleep. I keep weeping and I don't want to wake Jacob up since he has to work. There is more loss here than a crucial wedding prop. I feel like we've lost the one Jewish community we have found that fit us well, or at all.

---------UPDATE----------

I don't know if I'm feeling any better or not for having gotten that out. It's 1:27 now and I've explored a couple of options. One friend told me earlier that he would help me a chuppah stand. If the rental place still has one, we're willing to spend the money. Since the ceremony takes place on an actual stage with an actual fly space, we might be able to hang the chuppah from the battens.

Also, I know that this might seem like a bigger deal to me than it is because the wedding is so close and I have so many pressures on me right now. I know that Jacob and I will make decisions about the community when our heads are cooler. However, I am not very good at ignoring powerful emotions simple because I know that they are irrational.

Tomorrow, I will go out to the synagogue as scheduled and try to get the full story. Or maybe not. Maybe that will be too stressful and not actually solve anything. Maybe I should just give up and resign myself to finding another option.

A helpful diagram

This is floating around the internet and I find it to be pretty cool. I spent a little more than five minutes trying to find the original source, to no avail.

If only I could use this new knowledge to find happiness with one of the three sewing machines I have. I used to only have one. Then, two got donated to me for yarmulke making purposes. After the wedding, I will donate them to a friend of the family's who works with African immigrants to teach them to sew for extra income. I love the features of the two new ones, but even after being taken into the shop, I can't seem to make the bobbin happy on the one I like in theory the most. The other just doesn't jive with my energy, somehow. I suppose I'll just stick to the simple one that has served me well.

A delicate question

Let's talk about weight, shall we?

The other day I had a completely irrational moment of outrage when a friend who I don't see very often commented on a status I had posted to Facebook. It went something like this:

R. just kicked her own ass working out.
Friend: 30 day shred?

Upon reading that, the rage flared up inside of me at the idea that someone would think I was doing something so predictable as losing weight before my wedding. That would be as bad as growing out my hair to fit some sort of romance novel fantasy of myself. I mean, that's what brides do. And I'm not a regular old bride! I'm a divorcee, damnit. I know better than that!

I fully admit that there were a few personal insecurities fueling my internal response. However, I contained myself and wrote:

R. Nope, just a regular part of staying healthy.

I'm not sure if that reads as bitchy or not but in my head I wanted to add, "And I just cut my hair, too." Of course, that is bitchy.

But the thing is, I am trying to lose weight. I'm just not losing it in order to fit into a dress made for a shape other than mine.

Grad school made me pudgy and slow. Now 9/10 of my clothing no longer fits, including all of my business clothes, which are very expensive. Plus, I know from experience that when I'm 10 pounds lighter than I started the summer, I have a lot more energy. And while I'm unemployed and the weather is nice, it's the perfect time to jump-start an exercise routine.

So, I've been riding my bike every day it doesn't rain and watching my caloric intake. You know, losing weight. Like every other bride on the planet.

And I'm jealous of the blogs that I'm reading about women with healthy body images who refuse to be someone other than themselves even though the vendors and family that they talk to indicate that they should think otherwise. A. writes in her recent post:

But for all my love for wedding blogs, it is shocking and contemptible that you so rarely see overweight brides represented online, as though by our very size, we cannot possibly fit the archetype of “bride”.

Offbeat Bride directed me to Natalie's post of advice for brides that don't fit the common mold where she gets to say things like:

For some reason, I had it in my head that my wedding day would be a celebration of love and happiness between Nick and I however it seemed that foolish me had little idea of the true wedding agenda - basically some kind of reality tv show where the ugly duckling turns gorgeous siren.

She follows this great demonstration of her correct priorities with some great advice and her commentors are pretty awesome.

I can't write those kinds of posts where I give a big efyou to the WIC but I'm sure glad those women did. Check them out.

A Mugging on Lake Street

For my degree, I took a Crime Policy class with Jens Ludwig, who wears awesome sport coats. He was fantastically enthusiastic but also completely realistic in his expectation of our ability to enthusiastic about the topic. I was impressed by his ability to successfully walk the line of introducing humor to leaven tragic subjects without being disrespectful in any way to parties involved. I also appreciated his willingness to devote a portion of most class sessions to explaining the statistical mechanics of the studies we were reading. He would go so far as to make up simpler data sets and write them out on the board so that he could mathematically manipulate them in ways that were parallel to the ways the data were manipulated in our research. I liked that dedication.

Jens had two overriding morals in every discussion that we had: the data is ambiguous AND this is the best research we have on any particular topic.

In other words, there is no truth about why crime occurs or how to stop it that any group of experienced, knowledgable and educated people will agree upon.

In other other words, who knows?

This morning I read a first-person account by a white investigative journalist about a random attack he suffered while biking on the west side of Chicago, a predominantly poor and black area of the city.

It was terribly honest in its reluctance to make public the internal searching he has to to give meaning to this experience and, ultimately, ends up with the same conclusions that Jens voices. It's all ambiguous. There are no answers yet.

I appreciated his willingness to be honest about his anger for the kid who did it but also to recognize that anger won't answer the question, "why?" Anger will only lead to repeating stereotypes and will tear the world apart further. So he does research to answer the question in an attempt to mend his own soul (although he never speaks in spiritual terms) by talking to police officers and his friends and other victims and his attacker and the kid's mom and experts on hate crime and members of the juvenile justice bureaucracy. He listens to his friend who is also a pastor who suggests that he examine how much he wants to invest in the rehabilitation of his attacker. He displays his own thought process as he moves through his analysis.

Through it all it is clear from the tone off his writing that his statement early in the article is correct:

At a moment when millions of Americans set race aside to vote for an African American presidential candidate, I've been forced by juveniles to look it square in the face. Last February, Attorney General Eric Holder said that we are a nation of cowards when it comes to addressing race. I plead guilty. There is no joy in writing this.

The article is in this month's Chicago Magazine (September 2009) but it isn't online. However, it is worth purchasing the paper version to read "A Mugging on Lake Street" by John Conroy. For me, it was the perfect complement to my class that studied the quantitative data analysis regarding crime. It uses one crime as an object lesson to analyse the wisdom of experts and eyewitnesses: sources that are just as valid as numbers.

The conclusion of both sources of knowledge are the same. What we know is not enough. If problems must be solved by digging out the roots, we still have a long way to go to discover the extent of the underground tendrils and branches that crime grows from.

Shower!

So, my wonderful Bridal Brigade threw me a wedding shower on Sunday. It was so nice to be the center of attention. Right now it feels like this wedding is about everyone but me. My friend Mark tried to cheer me up by reminding me that your wedding is the one day when it's all about you. I laughed a tired laugh of derision. If it were all about me it would have happened in a courthouse 3 months ago or a small ceremony in my parents' backyard. I think big events must only be for first-time brides. This wedding is a day that's all about Jacob's family, from the scale of the event to the way I am struggling to treat his parents to the $800 impersonal rabbi. I'm not complaining. It's important to Jacob and I chose all of it because I want our marriage to start off on the good foot of compromise and because I know the relationship between he and I will be better for the next 40 or 50 years if his family feels included, loved and wanted. It's a worthwhile thing to sacrifice for.

Plus, I know it will be a rocking party. We've got a great band with a phenomenal band leader. If I want, I can dance the whole time and not talk to anyone. I've planned lots of quiet into my morning. My dress will be gorgeous and fun to wear. The ceremony will be full of God and I'm sure the hugeness of what Jacob and I are doing will move me in meaningful ways. I will be happy.

But the shower was especially lovely. It was truly moving that so many women from so many different aspects of my life came together and gamely threw themselves into the process of entertaining themselves with each other, asking, "So, how do you know Rebecca?" I hate being at parties where I only know one or two people, so this party was especially appreciated since this was a party where all the attendants had the potential to feel on the fringe but came anyway.

I felt loved.

I felt celebrated.

It was held at my mom's house since she has enough room. However, they don't have air conditioning and this past weekend was the hottest so far this summer. Lots of sweaty faces and glasses of homemade limeade. I went early just to hang out with my mom and to help her with any last set-up things. Once other folks started arriving, she disappeared and read her book for most of the time. Perfect since I knew that made her happy.

And did they start arriving!

With armloads of casserole dishes and tupperware containers. With pineapples and dip. With balloons and flowers. With presents.

I was a little unnerved as I opened presents since at most showers, that's sort of a side activity while the women kibbitz. But my ladies were quiet and all of them watched me. So, I told stories. No need to rush this thing. I told stories about the givers. I told stories about the presents and why I had chosen them. I told the story about my grandma offering up a bottle of astroglide as hand-sanitizer at a picnic. It had been left on her bathroom sink by one of my cousin's and she mis-used it unknowingly for weeks before the picnic.

I asked my friend Susan why they were all so intent. She reminded me that I didn't have a traditional registry. I'm using www.alternativegiftregistry.org and have simply listed the types of things we would like rather than specific products. We also emphasize heavily that folks should feel free to shop in their own cabinets and at thrift stores. Susan pointed out that at a normal shower, everyone has seen all of the gifts before on the store registry. At this one, each was a surprise. Also, Susan was kind enough to tell me that I was interesting and had interesting friends so the gifts had even more potential to be interesting.

And they were, in fact, interesting. One woman bought us a teapot and serving dishes from a cooperative of women in Africa and wrapped it in boxes she hunted up from all over her house. My brother's girlfriend found us a great serving tray. I got a gift-certificate to a fair-trade bead store. I got yoga props and a used sensual yoga book. The giver told the story of realizing too that maybe we would be grossed out more than appreciative of her desire to fulfill our wishes not to contribute to our world's hunger for more new things. We all laughed and I assured her that I love it. I got an assortment of spices from the local freshly-ground spice store including cinnamon that my friend's two toddlers chose by seriously smelling all of the offerings. My sister-in-law gave me a water-boiler that we want because it uses so much less energy than boiling on the stove or in the microwave. My other sister-in-law brought a fun game that involved competitively cataloguing the items in our purses. My 4th grade Sunday school teacher and now-friend gave me a 1976 cookbook published by the ladies in the church who watched me grow up. I was especially moved by my friend Carrie's present from Crate and Barrel. For my first wedding, she had made special effort to track down bowls we had registered for but that had gone out of stock. My ex-husband got those in the divorce and I've always felt bad about her wasted effort. But she didn't hold it against me went back to Crate and Barrel for a beautiful glass bowl for this wedding. Another friend gave me one of her family heirlooms that I've known the story of since high school. Her family in Germany had sent a desperate letter to "Daniel Pinkham, Cicero, America" during WWII begging for the scraps from their tables. The family sent weekly shipments and received lovely things in return because the Germans didn't want to accept charity. Elena gave me one of the lovely little demitasse cups. A friend who couldn't make it sent a bowl made by an artist local to their family's hosue in Michigan. Add to these stories lingerie, potluck paraphenalia, massage oils and gift certificates to IKEA and I feel completely showered with the love that the intimacy of sharing experiences creates.

We didn't get around to making our quilt squares but seeing the fabric I had brought and the examples up-close and in person spurred a lot of folks to say they were getting started. Then, those of us that could stay cleaned up and replaced all the cold bottles of Mexican coke that we had drunk so my mom never even knew we were there.

Thank you, ladies. Planning a big event is totally worth it if I get to swim in the smaller eddies of gatherings like this.

This made me laugh very hard.

Both the music minister who treated me so hurtfully and the 33-year-old boyfriend who admitted later he was actually 38 and then had the nerve to break up with me by not returning my phone calls I was making to ask when the flight was leaving for the trip he mischievously asked me to let him surprise me with. Both have attempted to friend me on Facebook. Although I sent a message to both to give reconciliation a chance, their responses were so deficient that I quickly hit "ignore." Kudos to the men who have broken my heart and kept far away from my profile.

Thanks to Breakup Girl for the video.

Hopefully

Over the past couple of days, I've made an interesting revelation that is liberating in its own way. I was having tea with a good friend of mine and admitted, without really intending to, that I hate being at home all day from 9-5. I don't enjoy either implementing the wedding plan or finding a job. In fact, trying to find a job actually makes me feel bad. But that's what I need to be doing all day from 9-5. This generally involves being at home on my computer. When I have a job and I have a shitty task, it's OK because I have at least one co-worker that I like hanging around with on breaks and stuff. But at home, there is only me. Feeling crappy about the work that has to be done. Sometimes, I cope with this by not doing the work and surfing the internet or taking a nap. This does not get the work into a more completed state and generally makes me feel worse about the whole predicament when I realize how unproductive I've been all day. Especially when I realize that Jacob spends all day doing stuff he'd rather not do but he gets paid. Now, everything sucks AND I'm living off a sugar-daddy whom I fear will ultimately resent the mis-match.

This kind of thinking has a tendency to spiral in a downwards direction. When that happens, I try to go for a walk or do some yoga. Sometimes that works. Otherwise, I give up for the day and read a book or watch a DVD. That's at least productive int he sense that my creative muscles get a work-out.

But it liberating to actually name this thing that makes me feel so bad: I don't like being at home all day.

Hopefully, the next step is being able to say to myself, "OK, that's stinks, now suck it up and get some work done."

Hopefully.

Digging wells

On Monday night, Jacob and I went to a support group for interfaith couples who are not yet married.

I don't know how to sum it up.

I liked it in that way that I like humanity and I like it when people are vulnerable to each other. Many of the personalities that I got to observe were enjoyable. I felt like Jacob and I were super-advanced and my ego likes that while my soul hangs its head in premonition of the work its going to have to do to clean up that mess.

We're in a very peaceful place right now and I am reveling in it. The wedding still has to be implemented and a job still has to be found but we're no longing fighting and having quite so many discussions. My mom says she can hear a difference in my voice when she talks to me. There are still things to be worked out about how our interfaith life will look but, honestly, Jacob's doing most of that work right now, examining his insides. He recently read the book Nothing Sacred and I think it blew his mind a little. He keeps quoting it in different formats, like the interfaith group and at Torah study on Saturday morning. I am reading Common Prayers, even though I protested it for awhile since no one ever seems to recommend any inverse books by Jewish interfaith partners who find their spirituality deepened by their exposure to Christianity. After two different people responded sarcastically to my complaint with "Oh, wah. It's hard being part of the dominant culture, isn't it?" then I decided I should actually read it.

So, with all of this reading and the research we did before we got married, we are very prepared with answers to dilemmas that get brought up in a group like the one on Monday night, which I am glad about personally. However, in the context of the group, it really reinforced to me that every interfaith couple has to come to its own decisions; there is no template that works for everyone. One couple had been dating since high school with a long-distance interval during college and are starting this conversation now that they are considering marriage. It was interesting to listen to their concerns about baptism and conversion and their struggle since it is important to them both that children undergo these rituals and that both of them considered the rituals mutually exclusive. This isn't an issue for Jacob and I and so I had no wisdom to offer. I could only tell our story.

I also interjected at one point in the large-group discussion and commented on the repetition of the word, "belief." I didn't want to be too much of an evangelist for the emergent movement but did want to share the sense of liberation that I feel because I've stopped focusing so much on beliefs and shifted my attention to practice and transformation. So, I told my story.

I was attending a hip, young evangelic church in the city that emphasized social justice. To become a member of the church, you had to download a form from the website that had a list of 12 statements that you had to "believe." If you could agree with these statements, you signed on the line at the bottom, met with someone to discuss it and were then considered part of the club. I couldn't agree to all 12 and, in fact, outright disagreed with several points. I sat down with the pastor to discuss this and said that I believed in this community of people and what they were trying to accomplish. Could I still participate in community activities? I specifically mentioned continuing on the worship team and starting a nursery for all of the babies that were being born. To both he told me that he would be uncomfortable with me being involved because there was a fear of "wrong teaching." That hurt a lot because I was starting to feel like I was forming real relationships with some of the people at that church. To be pushed to the fringes because of "beliefs" seemed unfair and contrary to the truth of the bonds we were forming as fellow human beings. In attempt to heal this pain, I did research and found a movement of people who were trying to explore spirituality in a post-modern context that acknowledged that all of us see God differently because we're all looking through the lens of our individual experience. To expect everyone to believe the same things in counter-productive since it negates the commonality we have as humans in that most of us are all trying to move toward God in whatever way we can. I described this article that uses the metaphor of Australian cattle ranching versus American ranching. Americans build fences to keep cattle together since the boundless lushness lures them to wander. Since Australia has so little water, ranchers dig wells to keep cattle in one place. They never wander far from their source of life. This metaphor allows spiritual communities to redefine who is a member. Instead of those who have all come to the same conclusions banding together for safety and putting a fence (or numbered list) around those conclusions, a community can be defined as people walking toward the water. You can be part of the community if you are in the process of exploration and transformation because knowing that God is bigger than our vision means that you have no choice but to keep discovering new ways that we are wrong about what we believe. People on different paths can reach across the paths and hold hands while they walk.

This is incredible liberating to me and makes an interfaith relationship very easy to consider. My struggle is making sure that I keep my behavior with Jacob loving by making room for his struggles since he comes at this from a different place.

I wish that I could reach into the heads and hearts of all interfaith couples that are struggling and shift their spiritual paradigm in the same way that mine was shifted. Once beliefs become secondary to building community (while remaining primary for personal practice) discussions regarding rituals change and become less combative. Of course, I don't have the power of paradigm shifting, only the power of storytelling and storylistening. I tried my best at both.

I loved listening to another couple that described attending another young, hip, urban church. When there were a couple of sermons that made it clear that the Jewish partner wouldn't be welcome, the Christian partner immediately agreed to find a new church home but was still concerned about doing as God commands him in his practice. This kind of flexibility reflects how good Jacob has made me feels when he adopted my organic lifestyle, despite its increased costs and the intensification of his spiritual journey that he chose in order to accommodate my presence in his future.

We'll keep going back to the group after we're married. I'm curious to see the transformation in the lives and perspectives of these people and I like the atmosphere that affirms raising children in both religious traditions since, like being bi-lingual, this will only enhance their ability to communicate with God.

F$@K!

In the process of rounding up RSVPs, I found three families that didn't make it from one spreadsheet to another. Luckily two are local and one of those got a save the date. However, one is out of town and probably won't get to come now.

This sucks.

Mend yourself

I have nothing really to write but I feel like I owe you folks an update. I have been feeling that sense of soul tiredness that I described before pretty intensely. It sort of hit its peak yesterday morning when Jacob and I went to temple. Temple is a really interesting place full of strange and interesting people, real spirituality and unique worship experiences. But I was just bored. As we talked about it in the car afterwards, I realized that I had been super-cranky even before we left. When we got home, I sat on the couch to read my interesting novel, I felt bored. I went to finish the tabouleh in the fridge and put it down after two bites because I was bored. As I examined myself through conversation with Jacob, I realized that my neck and shoulders felt like rocks and remembered that that's where I store all of my tension. Then, as a result, the lack of circulation and flat-out pain affect my moods. This happens all the time when my life is stressful.

In our pre-marital counseling session on Thursday night and my therapy session on Friday, we talked about spiritual Valium, which would be something I could do to make me care less about the seemingly urgent relationship issues that must be worked out RIGHT NOW and focus a little more on living in the moment. I realized yesterday that getting someone to loosen up the ropes in my neck might be a source of that.

So, I called Thousand Waves Spa, made an appointment for a massage, went an hour early to sweat in the sauna, soak in the hot tub and breath in the eucalyptus in the steam room. I drank water and sat quietly in the relaxation room then barely spoke to my masage therpist, who understood my needs perfectly.

I came home feeling like a new woman. I was affectionate to my fiance and I got a bunch of crap done for the wedding. I fixed the printer/scanner that has been broken for nine months. I spent some time with one of my closest friends and she told me first that she had gotten engaged. I was able to be excited for her in a way I would not have been that morning, for which I am very grateful.

Today has been an extention of this feeling of wholeness. Soon, I'll start the casserole that we'll take to church with us. Jacob has been playing Final Fantasy 3 non-stop every hour he's been home this weekend. This marriage and wedding are about tikkun olam, mending the world. Part of that involves mending ourselves from time to time.