It's Called a Calling: An Interview with Lynn Gottlieb
IT'S CALLED A CALLING AN INTERVIEW WITH LYNN GOTTLIEB Moment: How long have you wanted to be a rabbi? Gottlieb: Off and on, and around and through, since about ninth grade. M: Why? G: Up until...
...It seems to me that there is something that's very strong about her tradition that we don't know, that they stayed away from...
...I am made from the dust like you...
...First, there's Lillith...
...M: Where are you, at this point, in the formal process...
...it's a woman's role...
...And the rabbi becomes a functionary...
...I grew up going to my grandmother's house on Christmas to celebrate my grandfather's birthday...
...The way I work, by contrast, is to take characters, like Rachel and Leah, through their midrashic journey...
...He thought I would be interested, and I was blown away...
...Also, the story is very polemic, and I think polemical against women...
...M: Did you learn sign in order to participate with the congregation, or did you know sign and therefore get invited...
...A prophet is a spokesperson of God, a charismatic leader, who must have some insights into the process, into the event that's happening...
...There are very few story tellers left...
...On Shabbat, you take the model of slave-master, and you say that for one day a week, you give up using people...
...So who is speaking to the community of Israel if Moshe and Aaron are speaking to the Pharoah...
...And the problem is not even how much they know, but rather a loss of insight into Jewish imagination and lifestyle...
...G: That's right...
...M: What you're defining is a good teacher, and what you're saying is that the shock of the new experience is, in itself, an educational shock...
...I want to take a traditional Jewish mode of looking, and because of the search, and the way it is seen, it is going to be both traditional and new...
...Leprosy...
...Again, it's no accident that it's a birth image, that "Mitzrayim" is "out of...
...I understand when people express hostility to an idea, or to me...
...The scary thing to me is that so many of the women who want to be rabbis have a tendency to see themselves in a very traditional way...
...And it's very exciting in that way to be a woman, because women have been denied their own oral tradition...
...And I think this is such a moment...
...It has to do with the fear of mother being all-consuming, with separation, with the projection of all one's fears onto another person...
...It's the oldest, deepest human fear...
...What's the first thing that comes to your mind...
...M: Can you offer an example of what it means to look at a text Jewishly as opposed to looking at it academically or secularly...
...M: Not much...
...M: That's called a calling...
...The original intent was for us to stay in the Garden...
...It means that you go through this process of looking at, say, Shirat Hayam, Song of the Sea, and you read it line by line, and you try to understand its meaning by figuring out which line is the oldest...
...At that time, they were very short on teaching staff...
...It makes things interesting...
...Well, about a month ago, I started working on Miriam, and I feel like I've discovered this whole new woman...
...You have fragments all over the place, and you weave them together in a tapestry, in a way of looking, or a story...
...Because it challenges the most basic pattern of our existence, and, like any change, there has to be this great mourning period, release period, Lech Lecha period, separating period...
...Something is happening in Egypt, and she is a prophet in Egypt...
...People are so thankful and so hungry that I know what I'm doing is right...
...When Senators Javits and Ribicoff were the only Jewish senators, they bent over backwards to stay away from specifically Jewish issues...
...They're going to pay attention...
...And then the angels look at Adam and they think he's God, so God puts him to sleep, and Eve is pulled out, and she looks up at Adam when she wakes up, and she sees him standing there in all his glory, and she says, "My God, my master...
...And it's so overwhelming that the generation that left cannot be the generation to enter...
...It's about Lillith...
...She writes and performs for the Bat Kol Players, a Jewish theater group...
...I'm grateful to the deaf community...
...I think it's the Lillith syndrome, it's feeling that there's something bad, or naughty, or dangerous about what you're doing, and that therefore, you want to be like everyone else...
...The definition of slavery is when you stay satisfied with the place where you find yourself...
...So what's a prophet...
...M: Is it difficult to be a trail blazer...
...There's the whole notion of the feminization of American culture which has been written and spoken about, and priests, rabbis, being an extension of that...
...That's another reason I use the storytelling mode...
...Our mode, my mode, is not an academic mode...
...I think that's the source of the resistance...
...The rabbis reduce Miriam to^the sister role, the birthing...
...The response is very strong, and they really feel an exchange, and it's very exciting...
...Freedom lies in understanding yourself and understanding all of the influences in your life and ultimately finding that place in yourself for your own image...
...It's a metaphor...
...G: You know, a good story comes out of the particular, and, if it speaks, it touches the universal...
...I think I tried on all the isms during my college years...
...Instead of using that power in an investigation of what is possible, there's an assumption of old modes of doing things...
...I'm not an academician...
...M: Still, it must have been a difficult adjustment...
...It's very exciting, an opening up of a way of looking at things which is completely unique and allows a prayer experience to occur...
...Many of us haven't been taught our own powers, abilities, for transformation...
...Suppose, for example, I say to you, "Miriam," whom I'm working on now...
...What does that mean...
...M: The celebration, the whole business with the singing...
...It's a profound rethinking of relationships and arrangements...
...In Jewish life, there is this image of God that's fragmented...
...I gotta get outa here...
...Kolyom ma'aseh b'reshit...
...And then I hear, "I really like what you did...
...It's impossible for me to write academic papers...
...And women have that tremendous opportunity to create an experience of "I never thought of that before," or "You've opened something within me that has been closed for a long time, and because I've felt the opening, I can now think about myself in a different way...
...The traditional male activity is fratricide, and there has to be a profound rearranging...
...M: Are rabbis—male rabbis— frightened because there are some very feminine aspects to the rabbi's role, and if women come into the system these men are going to feel terribly vulnerable to being thought of as doing a woman's job...
...And my understanding may be aided in some way by a piecemeal approach, a splitting-up approach to a discipline, but that does not allow the text to speak to you so that you find the text in you and yourself in the text...
...And then you find out that women, in fact, had a whole different role in terms of the community, that an Em Yisrael, a mother of Israel, is a political leader of sorts, that the singing is part of a political recording, that at the moment when she sings, it's not just this nice dance, but it's a recording of the event, making it official through her...
...And then she looks at the Tree again, and she has the first human aesthetic experience—it's beautiful—and the first human practical experience—she understands that the Tree is to make her know...
...They really held back...
...I don't think you could ask for a better job...
...M: But the contrast is your assertion of particularity as a starting point, whereas women who are involved in a more superficial equal rights agenda are not arguing from the particular at all...
...G: I did go to HUC for a year...
...So that when people see what they get from me there's usually an experience in which they've been touched...
...There are some men in our time who have played with midrash-making...
...It's using that same mode of looking, but finding different things...
...But the very fact that I'm suggesting a new possibility by my being there, that I'm suggesting a different way of existing, of being, of looking at things, is, in fact, what religious life is about...
...M: Nothing specific happened in the ninth grade...
...There's a feeling of God coming out of her, of God leaving her in the desert, of losing her voice, and of her needing that isolation, that time, a healing time for herself...
...G: I consider my process the formal process...
...And the rabbis say that the commandment not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge is given to Adam and Lillith, and not to Chava...
...M: Did you grow up in a Conservative background...
...It is the occasion for coming back to a more traditional, imaginative, symbolic life, which is connected to traditional Jewish concerns...
...It's very simple...
...But if rabbis were really strong in their sense of Jewishness, and in themselves, then you wouldn't have to worry about women, because Judaism is such a powerful religious drama, religious mode of being, so strong and so deep, that if that is felt and understood, and there is an eagerness to transmit it and explore it and be in it, then we have nothing to worry about...
...The first step is with Eye as active initiator, and that's what gets us in trouble...
...His initials are J.C...
...They came here in the 1820's...
...G: That's right...
...And the reasons for it, which sometimes are not articulated, and sometimes come closer to the surface, have to do with my love for things Jewish, my feeling, very deeply, a Jewish person, and my wanting very much to be part of the perpetuation of the people, and the imagination and the lifestyle...
...We are in a midrashic crisis in Jewish life...
...G: Not at all...
...I think we need to...
...In the very sense of my being a woman, I have a tremendous advantage because people come with a question...
...And the assignment was to write a paper about a fragment, one fragment in comparison with another fragment, and to show which one came first and why...
...He was the rabbi in Allentown, and he was very encouraging with me, and in general we had a great group, part of the Reform youth movement, and I was very active...
...What do you think of...
...There's an unending hunger, and a need to invite me back, and to find out where I am, to send something, to write, all of that...
...Then a couple of years as an atheist, universalist, existentialist, communist...
...That's the first statement about her...
...All those fears have been projected onto her...
...She was the first woman in my myth to understand that in order to be free, you can't allow yourself to be created in someone else's image of you...
...In that same way, I speak of women...
...There's no imagination...
...Now they have a much larger faculty, but then they had maybe three men that you could study with, and I just couldn't see spending five years of my life with that narrow a choice...
...M: The sex-blind image...
...G: I think it's an internalization of society's critique on women...
...I reject that, also...
...Many men are excited by it...
...G: Pesach is certainly a major moment, and paradigmatic...
...You're saying something that goes beyond the usual debate about women's rights...
...You put a male body up on a bima, and you can see what's going to happen, but there's no real wondering that takes place...
...It was her last radio tape...
...It says of her when she dies that the well waters which she brings to the desert dry up, and Moshe is reduced to beating the water out of a stone...
...That's my Jewish background...
...That's Mae West...
...Because it's not really a job...
...G: Up until this point, at least, it has been a journey...
...Right now, I'm working on a woman's midrash to the Bible...
...If they had been true to type, they would have given her a role that was a very negative one in the golden calf episode...
...Lynn Gottlieb serves as rabbi for Temple Beth Or in New York City...
...It's saying, for instance, "We want to be counted in a minyan...
...It's Jewish thinking...
...She didn't want Adam deciding where she was to stand...
...So 1 feel that through women's stories, we can gather the seeds, and uncover a hidden tradition—like Esther—finding the moment to reveal...
...I looked for a midrash about Miriam's seven days in the desert by herself...
...It's positive in some ways because it's a first step...
...IY1: Except that unless and until there are radical changes in the system, for the women who come after you, things will be just as they are now...
...What JTS will require of me, if I'm even accepted, is a whole other question...
...Planting the basket, sister...
...And Adam, who has just been through the Lillith experience, says, "Yes, that's right...
...So both Conservative and Reform are misnomers, because, except for the Orthodox community, which has its own problems, Conservative and Reform Jews do not understand, or live in, traditional Jewish ways of seeing the world...
...You allow animals their own existence, the earth its own being, and you don't utilize or exploit anyone...
...It brought to my consciousness the Jewish People, in a way that nothing really had before...
...I would like to think that we're the generation of the wilderness...
...There is a huge resistance to understanding the dynamic possibilities of themselves as women, as revolutionary, as something positive...
...There you have an image or relationship which is, I think, the seed for relationships between men and women...
...It is conceivable that the way women come together and pray, and use breath, song, even the way they sit, is going to be different from men...
...There is a sense that the period of the desert and the women of the desert were very strong...
...It's much more involved with finding place for myself, for people, than it is for a distanced examination of text...
...That is, to look at them through the biblical text, and through the midrashic texts, the mystical texts, the Yiddish texts, to take their cumulative journey, and to gather it together again, and to try and uncover what their story might be...
...Or, what happens when you combine those energies...
...But they studied women's issues in this way: What does Rabbi Akiva have to say, or Hillel and Sham-mai, about women...
...M: What you're saying, if that's the case, is not that Judaism today ought to be sex blind...
...Certainly I love to sit and daven with a male community, but at the same time I'm interested in exploring what is there for the female community...
...You internalize other people's projection of you into a scary human being...
...They've not said the kinds of things that you're saying, that there's a certain perception of the tradition that women are more prone to be witness to, or capable of...
...G: Sometimes it's very difficult, because people get very angry at you for stirring things up—although I can keep going, because the groups that I present to respond so overwhelmingly...
...G: Right...
...And so it is Adam, according to the rabbis, who changes the commandments, who says, "Well now, look, sweetie, there's this nice garden, and you can have anything you want, but not that...
...I'm interested in doing a whole series of stories which have the same journey focus as the men's stories have...
...Because I'm a rabbi...
...I have been taking those texts, and transcribing them into my own language...
...You're studying the Bible, for example...
...Religious life is about opening doors...
...In a way, I use women's stories as an approach to midrash...
...My grandfather was very active in UJA, but he died before I knew him...
...G: I do a lot of performing, a lot of presenting...
...The blacks in Congress make no bones about a Black Caucus, as clearly they would have 15 years ago...
...Therefore, the meaning of the text is limited in some way to the first meaning rather than emphasizing the collective meaning...
...We often speak of men and use them as symbols...
...And in it, her perception of the Garden was, "Boring...
...And the snake, which is a leftover goddess symbol anyway— it's no accident that the mother of all creation is created at the very end of the creation story—the snake comes, and when she touches the Tree and she doesn't die, she understands that Adam lied to her, has not given her everything...
...Every day at Sinai...
...M: The halachic objections to the ordination of women are fairly easy to deal with, but clearly, you're dealing with a psychological block on the part of a lot of people...
...G: Long before Moshe, and long before Aharon, Miriam grew up . among midwives...
...I would say that if you go through Tanach, you can find almost every single woman involved in some kind of turning point...
...G: Yes...
...So maybe there can be a compression of the normal process...
...I don't agree with everything, but I like what you did, so I can now talk about it...
...M: Let's push for a minute on the theoretical side...
...Our exile from the Garden begins when Adam names Eve, when Adam puts Eye outsideof himself...
...And then I spent a year in Israel as an exchange student on the Eisendrath program...
...It's a very old fragment, the story of Lillith...
...G: And the question is why...
...I don't know where it came from...
...you say that sex is particularly relevant, because women have a particular contribution to make, as women...
...M: Can you say whether you find there is more reluctance to accept you as a rabbi among men or among women...
...Not one...
...G: No...
...The first line about Miriam is Miriam the Prophet...
...It's very difficult to distinguish me from my work...
...For the last six years, I have been intensively studying Jewish texts in one way or another for many hours of the day...
...There's the sense of this huge leaving, a respite that followed the momentous occasion...
...What I try to do is not present something that is exclusive, or which cuts men out...
...You give up putting your image of what they are on them, and you allow them their own existence, their own being...
...Recently, it has really come together in the way that I express it...
...We begin to have this woman, this prophet in the desert...
...They've taken the traditional Christian model because the community itself can't sustain traditional Jewish activity...
...How do you meet Miriam...
...Perhaps we're bamidbar...
...Lillith doesn't start out as a temptress...
...And a lot of talk about God, which in itself is unusual...
...For example: "You have texts A, B, C, D, which one is older...
...And there are some indications that those things are happening...
...If you're given something unique, you want to^feel normal in what you're doing...
...When I go to a congregation, and I tell a story in my own way, and talk about mid-rash, using very physical illustrations—weaving, and digging deep, and taking seeds, and putting them all together—people from the congregation will go up to the rabbi and say, "Why didn't you ever tell us about midrash...
...M: It could have been worse...
...Not one midrash...
...G: Absolutely...
...G: Except that there's an ambivalence...
...It's a legitimate thing these days...
...The midwives were the first, really the first, in their soothing and singing, and wiping brows and pulling birth out of the womb, to begin die journey toward leaving Egypt, leaving the narrows, into the wilderness, into Torah...
...rebirth...
...When I went to the Women's Rabbinical Alliance, their conception of organizing themselves was not to investigate women's spiritual community and what that means, and what it means to come together as women, but it was meeting to set up a constitution, and laws, and chapters, all of which was received very negatively, thank goodness...
...This is a new thing...
...So she is dangerous...
...M: Why did you not choose the easy route at this point...
...It's amazing that I'm Jewish at all...
...Because when I first started, I thought of this little kid, schlepping along the water, saving her brother, singing at the sea with some other women, doing a nice Israeli folk dance, and leprosy, and I never quite understood that...
...I heard this incredible Mae West tape a long time ago...
...And then, two years after the crossing, she's zapped with leprosy...
...But when you tell the story, there are two ways of telling it...
...You have the feeling of the desert, bamidbar, experience, v There's a tremendous leaving of a way of being...
...I occasionally get that kind of continuous response from men, but generally, men have to be at a certain point in order to get into that...
...And the part which is in exile is the female, and redemption depends upon the return of the female to her rightful place...
...People often say to me, "What do you do...
...Again, the teachers that you study with raise the questions that you want to be concerned with, and they're all studying with men, and the questions that they raise, very often, are the questions of the teachers, so that when they look at the issues, they're looking at them in a traditional way...
...I'm hot really interested in congregational work now because I feel that rabbis in some ways have become social workers...
...So in eating, she is seeking knowledge of herself, and I don't think it should be interpreted as a negative act because the difference between human beings and God is that we are finite...
...M: That makes the women's movement in general a much more profoundly revolutionary movement than most generally passive observers have thought it to be...
...It makes one wise...
...Miriam...
...It is completely new, so why don't we look at it and figure out what it's about...
...She turns into a witch...
...And you read about Moshe and Aaron later, and they go to Pharoah because the children of Israel won't listen to them...
...And we have to break that, and say, "Now wait a minute...
...In the abstention from the master-slave relationship as it applies to Shabbat, you have the sanctification of people, not according to what they do, but who they are...
...G: Well, when I was 11 I read The Last of the Just, and, as much as you can say for an 11-year-old, it changed my life...
...Well, it's not leprosy...
...But the harmonizing is not necessarily the traditional way that Jewish men sing...
...So, first there is Lillith—Lillith/Chava...
...I've chosen to avoid the sermon, to try new ways of transmitting the material itself, using my theater training and background, and writing, to do that...
...And there is the recognition that none of us can use the same kind of language that has been used in the past, and there is a need to change...
...It's found its way...
...Rabbis, in addition to being interpreters of Jewish law, are also storytellers, because stories are useful ways of understanding the world...
...Then you go on, using academic training...
...If you ask a personal question about the text, it's regarded as ridiculous...
...Some of the people who have defended the ordination of women have said, "Look, given the needs of congregants at this juncture in our social history, given the rise in pastoral needs, given the family crisis, it is especially important to have women, because they are more nurturing, and better as social workers...
...Mostly, they're taking the American mode, which is to make it entertaining, Judaism as entertainment...
...It's a new kavanah, a new intention that gets revealed...
...It's incredible...
...and usually that's a lead question for, "What is your work...
...Miriam the prophet, sister of Aaron, leads the women in a victory dance by the sea, and you're given a fragment...
...We're at the beginning...
...And it's wonderful...
...Seven days in isolation, and the people will not journey until she comes back, so obviously, there's a very strong relationship there...
...But it's clear that there's a deeper connection, and subsequently, I've heard women interpret it in that way...
...But what's incredible about Judaism is that there is at the same time this deep recognition that redemption depends on the return of the female to her rightful place...
...You have the same story, you're moralizing it, you're giving it a different practical application, and I think that's legitimate...
...When Avraham went to Israel, he immediately went to Mitzrayim with Sara...
...And then I guess the next mark along the way would have to be Rabbi Stephen Schafer...
...And part of what I feel women are about today is taking the threads, looking at the story, and seeing whether if you tilt the prism just a little bit, different light comes in...
...The sense that I get is that, while there is definitely a concern for women's issues, most of the women are tired of talking about women, and want to get down to being rabbis...
...The moments where they overlap, and enrich each other, are the very special moments...
...I know when I go places, women are generally very excited...
...Then you go back into Egypt, to the mid-wives, and Miriam is growing up among these midwives who are refusing Pharoah when Moshe and Aaron are still in their birth clothes...
...I have been working with a congregation for six years, which is longer than any other woman except Sally Priesand, so my formal training has been very stiff...
...M: Also the woman is the occasion for the man's sense of lust, and he , projects the lust onto her...
...Separating men and women has meant war...
...One of the things that I like about what I do is that it allows me to do rabbi-things...
...There is no play...
...M: Since you've clearly gone so far beyond the mundane debate, how do your critics answer you...
...I've been talking about this from my pulpit for five years...
...That's clearly no longer the case for those two, or for Senators Metzenbaum, Stone, or the others...
...Then, if I do something exciting, I have them...
...I had a class with a man who shall be nameless, who is a great midrashist, What does that mean...
...It's only in the recognition of death, finiteness and momentness that we can expand...
...It's something deep inside me that's been with me for a long time, and has had many different faces, and different expressions...
...I don't have the pictures on the wall, but my family is sixth generation Reform...
...Like in anything else, it's finding a few mentors to help open those ways of thinking, allowing ourselves to be a support group for each other...
...And then, in subsequent stories, Lillith is transformed into a baby killer, and women become afraid of her...
...We have seed stories in the text, not from our own point of view usually, but told about us from someone else's point of view, written down for us by someone else...
...You may try to get into a certain mode of thinking—a 13th century French rabbi's mode of thinking about a certain problem— but there's no eclecticism...
...And then the journey begins, in all different kinds of ways...
...G: Lillith...
...We can sit back and say, "It would have been a bore to have been stuck in the Garden, and it certainly would not have permitted a moral existence if there were no choices involved," but that's just a nice apologetic...
...And that is the occasion for...
...Very often, in my life, they have not gone together, not coincided, because my way has been different from the kinds of things that institutions require of rabbis to learn...
...G: How do you relate her...
...In our search, we will be opening up new ways of looking at things which are also old ways of looking at things...
...G: Right...
...I think people intuitively recognize that...
...Shab-bat, Pesach, many of our major holidays, speak of that value...
...the narrows," and that the womb closes, and you can't go back...
...I think it's very profound...
...I think it's perfectly legitimate...
...So I'd say that for the last six years I've been intensively involved in becoming a rabbi...
...M: Isn't that forcing the text, which does want us to lament the expulsion and not celebrate it...
...If you're really a part of a religious life, then you welcome dialogue...
...G: Some people call it that...
...Lillith has left because she didn't want to be on the bottom...
...There's nothing to do...
...I am an equal...
...We are ivrim, we pass through, we are on a journey...
...That means that you take a text and you give yourself a distance from it, and you may try to understand where the text was, but not imaginatively...
...There is the formal process, and the institutional one...
...There are nig-gunim, which in the traditional setting go on for hours and hours, and of course we've lost that...
...There are always two ways of looking at things...
...G: In my congregation, we daven "Elohay Avraham, Elohay Sarah...
...So the kind of paper that I write is a midrashic journey...
...The Jewish people are people of exile...
...We found ourselves doing harmony, for hours...
...I really feel that is the task of women, of women rabbis...
...For us now, there is an interest in the fact that we are women, whether it's to deny it or to be it...
...What happened to Miriam between the crossing and the isolation...
...You join yourself in the prayer activity of men...
...G: A friend of mine, in 1972, took me to services...
...She becomes a temptress, and she becomes the wife of Satan...
...It's not inherently a woman's role...
...An extension...
...What are the details of her life...
...Something clicks...
...M: What were some other times when women played this key role...
...And she goes through this thing of eating the apple to leave, to make something happen...
...Or the same...
...I know I'm not alone...
...But nothing independent...
...We've lived always with difference, with being on the outside, with being witnesses, and I feel that women have to assume that Jewish part of themselves in order to be part of what could be a major contribution to the spiritual life of the Jewish people in our time...
...You don't say that sex is irrelevant and therefore the Seminary should ordain rabbis...
...That's important, but a rabbi, a really good rabbi, has to be the interpreter of Jewish seeing to the community, and right now, I can do that...
...You have a sense that there is something going on between Moshe and Miriam and their relationship to God and their rule among the people, and it's an undiscovered story...
...Once you say "Elohay Sarah," you have to know what that means...
...We have to recover that...
...M: That kind of social change is accelerating generally...
...G: What I've discovered, and the reason I go about my studies in the way I do, is that most of the Jewish community has very little insight into Jewish thinking, into Jewish seeing, Jewish modes of thought...
...There is an attitude toward the women of the desert and the women all during that time that holds that they were very forceful, very strong in getting the Jews out of Egypt...
...And I make it a point when I'm invited to congregations of doing services in sign, because the service becomes physi-calized, and it's a lead-in to symbolic thinking...
...they don't know how to play...
...I didn't like their approach to the material very much, and I felt that there were too many people I wanted to study with, and I also felt that I couldn't get traditional text training there...
...And I think that exploring that can only enrich the total fabric...
...And of course the range of issues is vast...
...You have to have the courage to leave, to go out, to make that first act, and not be afraid of feeling crazy...
...Put a single female in that same place and it's unexpected, people don't know, they have no former impressions...
...It goes from male-female to very specific textual questions, to Jewish ways of seeing, to every possible kind of question...
...G: At this moment, yes...
...It's saying that you have to have courage to do what they did...
...It's a kind of spiritual archaeology...
...It's suppressed, it's taken out...
...Speaking in psychological terms, the woman symbolizes all that is earth, blood, death—a mess...
...I'll go back to the very beginning...
...I use women's stories as a way, but the way has to lead to what I'm really interested in, and that is Jewish collective imagination, survival, life...
...And the fault of the training institutions is that they're not helping their students transmit to the people that they serve, because the style of studying at the institutions is extremely academic...
...Yet not one midrash...
...I had occasion to be present at a Rosh Chodesh cermony, and the singing was especially striking in that traditional melodies almost immediately became harmonized...
...The danger is if I fail...
...I think that women's spiritual energies should be directed to finding their own voices and therefore the collective voice...
...Just as the story of Avraham and Yitzhak moves me, when I tell the story of Sarah, which I do in sign, the response has to be a communal response...
...But the question for me is, do women pray differently from men...
...G: Sure...
...And in order to study the Bible you understand Ishtar and Marduke and the Babylonian myths and the Canaanite myths and so on...
...A facilitator...
...so to be a teacher, you have to be involved in video, you have to do a song and dance...
...So I'm not arguing for women and men to pray separately...
...I think people sense that there is a certain deadness to the way we look at things now, and to the way we transmit, and people are fumbling in all kinds of ways to make things more exciting...
...I think women in the women's movement understand that and can be patient...
...There are moments in Jewish history where women really serve in that midwife way...
...You don't live in the totality, you're not allowed to be in the text...
...What happens is that I take the research, the form, the study, which is~helpful, and apply it to an understanding of the text that I can transmit...
...My work with them is constantly challenging me to find new ways of presenting material, ways which can appeal to all of us...
...He's now head of the National Federation of Temple Youth...
...Most of my day is spent not just doing what I do, but being who I am...
...I think people understand in some deep place that there needs to be a rearrangement, because the arrangement in our world right now is terrible...
...Judaism's richness and imagination touch mine, and has made this wonderful, productive life for me which is very flexible, and touches on all the things that I love best—working with people, and creating work, and writing, and reading and studying...
...That doesn't mean I don't use academic training, that I'm not disciplined in my studies, but my mode is much more personal...
...And I don't think the academic mode is particularly helpful to the survival of Judaism at this time...
...The action is in itself a midrash on the meaning of each word...
...What's it about...
...And also, because women's bodies are involved in the most extreme moments of life— giving birth, bleeding—and very much involved in nuturing and in life-death things...
...It would have been so easy to go into the Reform movement...
...And then you get a rabbi from the pulpit telling about the stories in a very intellectual way...
...But take those two models...
...And for me, it's very exciting...
...Take the kinds of questions that they ask...
...And because we need so much to be in this spiritual journey in Jewish life, I think it will be through our search that the whole reawakening of symbolic thinking and imaginative thinking will happen...
...You create a dynamic with an audience or the participants which says, "I am telling you something, it's a bare background, and your imagination is invited in to participate...
...and he was born in Bethlehem...
Vol. 4 • May 1979 • No. 5
