I first experienced the Mystery when I was quite young through child's play and my imagination. Then, through my maternal grandparents, first-generation Americans, who were Orthodox members of a Conservative shul in Brooklyn a block from Lubavitch headquarters, I was introduced to a life of Jewish practice for which my parents -- except for Shabbas dinners and Pesach seders -- didn't share my passion. Through United Synagogue Youth groups during my high school years and Hillel at the University of Wisconsin, and Camps Ramah in Connecticut and the Poconos, I continued my love affair with G!D and Judaism and Israel and developed a sense that being a “religious†person obligated me to act politically for all who are, like we were, "strangers in Mitzrayim". In the spring of 1963, Reb Zalman came to Madison and led us on a Shabbaton. I knew I had been "touched" that weekend by something that was deeply familiar, but it took me years to put the feeling into words. Eventually I could say that what Reb Zalman awakened in me was the sense of my wholeness -- that I was simultaneously a woman, and a Jew, and an American, and a human being, and a teenager, and a music lover, and a political activist and much more than the sum of these parts.(My experience with alopecia -- the complete loss of my hair during my junior year of college -- has been an essential element of my spiritual development. Now, having just turned 61, it marks 20 years with hair, 20 years hidden under a wig, and 21 years "unmasked" in more ways than I could ever have imagined.)When I graduated from college in 1964, the idea of being a woman rabbi, which might have appealed to me, wasn't yet a glimmer on the horizon of possibility. I worked as a journalist and as an English teacher and “fell into†the field of teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages. In 1979, with several partners, I created the Riverside Language Program, an intensive ulpan for newly-arrived immigrant and refugee adults in New York City, which I still direct.In my "volunteer" time, I founded the Solomon Schechter Day School of Bergen County, so that my children, Josh and Morissa, would have from childhood the Jewish education that seemed so much harder for me to master as an adult. I also was one of the founders of Havurat Reyim, where, for the first time as an adult woman in a Conservative congregation with an Orthodox rabbi, I was again welcomed -- as I had been in earlier years -- as a leader of prayer.Soon after Arthur and I became a couple (multiplying my family with his children David and Shoshana, and later their partners Ketura and Michael, and now our grandchildren Yonit, Elior, and Shifra and another expected b'sha-a tova), Arthur once said at a P'nai Or retreat that he loved Torah more than anything else. I remember at the time feeling horrified and hurt but am tickled to note that, over the years, particularly because of opportunities given me by R. David and Shoshana Cooper who invited me not just to leyn but to deliver divrei Torah at their silent meditation retreats, I too can say that I have my own passion for Torah.The years of chanting with R. Shefa (we met at the second Kallah) and the years of silent meditation weeks with David and Shoshana have changed my spiritual practice. I am deeply called into the silence from which I re-member my place of connection within the Great Mystery. Since 1993, a year after it was first opened by R. Jeff Roth and R. Joanna Katz, I have directed the summer program at Elat Chayyim, a labor of love and amazing experiences. I've had the privilege of officiating at weddings and Bar/Bat Mitzvahs and baby covenantings and get ceremonies and shiva minyans, of leading Shabbatonim and holiday retreats, and of teaching adults. In recent years, I have found myself drawn, through chant and focus on the breath -- probably because of the precious year I shared at the end of her life with my beloved friend Shira Ruskay -- to working with people in the liminal space between life and death.With Arthur, I have co-authored Tales of Tikkun: New Jewish Stories to Heal the Jewish World (Jason Aronson, publisher) and, recently, A Time for Every Purpose Under Heaven: The Jewish Life Spiral as a Spiritual Path (Farrar Strauss Giroux, publisher).In Arthur's best-known book, Seasons of Our Joy (which, parenthetically, is central to the start of our relationship, but that's another story) he recalls a Hassidic tale in which a Hasid, enroute to his Rebbe, is asked if he's going to study Torah with the Rebbe; the Hasid says no, that he's going to study tying his shoelaces.These then, are (some of) the generous and wise Rebbes who have taught me both Torah and tying my shoelaces: Mentors -- R. Zalman, R. Shefa Gold, R. David Cooper, R. Shaya Isenberg; Teachers -- Rabbis Judy Abrams, Avruhm Addison, Sami Barth, Leila Berner, Andrea Cohn-Keiner, Sue Levi Elwell, Mordechai Gafni, Elliot Ginsburg, Leonard Gordon, Julie Greenberg, Victor Gross, Judy Hauptmann, Naomi Hyman, Joanna Katz, Miles Krassen, Marcia Prager, Jeff Roth, Rami Shapiro, Daniel Siegel, Steve Silvern, Max Ticktin, Brian Walt, Arthur Waskow, Zari Weiss, Gershon Winkler, David Zeller, Shawn Zevit; and Susan Berman, Barbara Breitman, Shoshana Cooper, Jack Kessler, Arthur Kurzweil Peter Pitzele, Chaim Rothstein, Shira Ruskay, Bahira Sugarman, Esther Ticktin.
