Except that I’m returning to work.

In preparation for the auspicious day, I’ve been maniacally going through drawers and scrubbing under sinks. We had to rearrange our house to make room for the new baby, and I’ve been uncovering every crevice in an attempt to find more space. Unlike the mother hummingbird, who spent less and less time on her nest before her babies flew off, I have become obsessed, spending hours going through bookshelves and re-arranging the angles of chairs before I fly off. I am trying to leave my mark, so that when I’m no longer home when the baby cries, turning his head from side to side in his crib, searching for me, he will know that I love him, because he has a dresser now, and a cubby at the bottom of the crowded closet, and a quilt hanging on the wall. Maybe I’ve been trying to make the new seem old, and comfortable, before the old routine returns, belying its name, and bringing more change.

It’s a strange business, this “returning” to one’s self. Pregnancy and childbirth are especially powerful physical metaphors for the reality that we are always in flux. My grandfather used to say that change is the only constant. In the past months, I have watched my body wax and wane like the moon. I have cut dozens of white crescent fingernails, surprised at how quickly they grow. I have built sandcastles by the side of a lake, and thought of nothing else but how much more water we need for the moats, and how sweet it is that children of a certain age don’t walk, but run, no matter how small the distance. And my ears are full of the sweet sighs and grunts of a new life. I have been present in my motherhood, having nothing else tugging at my attention. I return now to a life conflicted. I will have to go through my internal drawers and closets and create more space. Perhaps I will uncover a moonlit stream of space for spirit and self and soul. For God to leak in and help me to be present. And remind me to leave some drawers unoccupied, some walls blank, some space between my ribs to breathe.

A British soldier led me down a flight of slippery stairs into the prison cage, into which hundreds of half-naked men, women and children were wedged. It was a black and white drawing of the inferno. Blindly, I shot photos of their agony. Back on the dock, a young Haganah woman standing next to me said, “Now you will see the birth of the Jewish State.”

This is just one of the many stunning images which appeared in Ruth Gruber’s 1988 article in Lilith Magazine, “40 Years of Rescue.” Now you can get the full text here! Gruber is featured in this recent New York Times piece, and is the subject of a brand new documentary film opening at the Angelika in New York on September 10. And a happy upcoming 99th birthday to Ruth Gruber!

Yes, I had a Friday night bat mitzvah and chanted a haftorah. And I had the privilege of being the first girl in my synagogue to say Kiddush during her bat mitzvah service. My sister had celebrated her bat mitzvah seven years earlier and chanted the Kiddush during her bat mitzvah when we lived in Youngstown, Ohio, and my parents, who wanted no less for me, took months to persuade our rabbi in Trenton, New Jersey to allow my chance.

But come Shabbat mornings, the mechanics of the Torah service eluded me, as I wasn’t taught to chant from the Torah or to dress it after the reader finished chanting from the scroll. Yet somehow I was taught the prayers for an aliyah, to sing along with my whole Hebrew School class.

So flashforward forty-some years when I find myself a member of an egalitarian congregation with ushers who one Shabbat morning offer me the sixth aliyah. 

My first response is to think it’s an honor. My second is a bolt of electric anxiety. Not because of chanting a Hebrew prayer before the congregation, but because of a host of logistical questions that run through my mind:

Where do I stand before I chant? Where do I stand afterward? Whose hand do I shake when I’m done? And which side of the bema do I leave from? Our sanctuary, built in 1959, is complete with steps leading up to a large pulpit area.

Although I’ve watched many men and women go up for their aliyah, I didn’t observe the choreography of how they did it.

The usher sees my worry.

“Everyone’s nervous the first time,” he says and kindly answers my quickly whispered questions.

All goes well, and I feel more prepared if offered an aliyah another time. But when it’s my nine-year-old daughter’s turn to lead the congregation in the Ashrai prayer—one of the ways our congregation includes children on the bema– I understand when she asks me to walk her to the bema steps and walk her back down the aisle with the chorus of yasher koach greetings that she anticipates other congregants will greet her.

Rachel knows the prayer well, whose hand to shake, and which side of the bema to leave from. But the walk through the aisles she finds daunting, and as she stands to walk through the sanctuary, I’m right behind her, knowing one day she will no longer need me, and grateful she’s learning to navigate the etiquette of ritual in girlhood.

-Bonnie Beth Chernin

Over twenty years ago, this woman of color publicly struggled to come to terms with the personal implications of the systemic racism that defined her childhood and later civil rights work. Then, this week, Fox News repeatedly aired a decontextualized and heavily edited clip, purporting to prove Sherrod’s anti-white racism, based on a lecture she had given at the NAACP. Sherrod was then summarily hung out to dry by the conservative media machine, the federal government, and the NAACP. Later retractions aside, these initial reactions mark a gut-wrenching willingness to willfully ignore the past and present role of race and racism, and gender and sexism, in American society.

Here’s a parallel to learn from: In the early 1920s in the Soviet Union, Jews for the first time entered into the upper echelons of government in Russia. It was a huge challenge to balance the very real, chronic and endemic societal antisemitism with the public visibility of a highly enfranchised elite group of Jews in government. This shift threw off what, until then, was often seen as a static ethnic hierarchy—with Jews hovering near the bottom. This shake-up forced a reassessment of what constitutes political power.

And thus, when, in America, a person of color, or a woman, or a woman of color, functions as a representative of The Establishment, people get freaked out. It throws off a balance that is, if not desirable, at least… familiar. We then have to re-assess our understanding of the distribution of political power.

As Jews learned in the 1920s, and have learned time and again, power is a mixed-up thing. It’s not statically distributed—it shifts and mutates by the second. To my mind, one of the political media’s most important roles is to disseminate information so that individuals can make informed decisions, to speak truth to (or at least about) the ever-shifting dynamics of institutionalized power. But the density and speed of this media-driven mess shows that, often, these institutions are just leading each other by the nose, around and around in twisting circles, driven by old prejudice in new forms.

-Sonia Isard

Over the past six weeks, during which I have been home with my newborn and two young children, one of whom is being toilet trained, I admit to hatching numerous plans to escape to my quiet office and its spacious rooms, far from the unquenchable, insatiable mouths of babes. But now, as the midpoint of my maternity leave is incomprehensibly already behind me, I contemplate returning to work with apprehension. Is it possible that this period of time is almost over? That to these days which fold over each other and melt together, clouded in the haze of interrupted sleep, will be added the extra responsibility of functioning in the work world? 

A friend told me that when she returned to work after having a baby, she was asked how her vacation was. A colleague of mine once called maternity leave a “three month sabbatical.” Given the state of affairs of maternity leave policies in the US, I feel lucky to live in California, where there is a generous state-based maternity leave policy , and to work with a group of understanding and generous women. But even in California, it is standard fare to be required to take all of one’s vacation and sick days at the beginning of one’s leave. Even in the most flexible of situations, there tends to be an unspoken idea that maternity leave is a type of vacation. In Israel, it is even called chufshat leidah – a birth vacation.

Almost a century ago, Virginia Woolf argued that in order for a woman to become a writer, an artist, to express herself, she needed the means and the physical space to sit and be – a room of her own. As I sit here, between the bookends of family responsibilities and work responsibilities, it occurs to me that perhaps the room that women need today is a room in time. Abraham Joshua Heschel described the Jewish Sabbath as a “sanctuary in time,” and, in a cover piece in the Sunday Times’ style section last week, Judith Shulevitz noted the modern desire for the revival of the Sabbath. People are coveting “sweetness and slowness.” As an observant Jew, I treasure that particular sanctuary. But it is a communal sanctuary. As a woman, I want more; I want a room of time of my own, to sit hovering between the two forces, family and work, that have thoroughly penetrated the house of my hours.

Somehow, I’d imagined that maternity leave would provide that temporal space of possibility. I had had such hopes for the chunks of time which fall amidst the feedings and the cleaning and the cooking, those chunks of possibility, unstructured morsels.

Novels were to be read. Scrumptious meals were to be cooked. Great films were to be watched. And more. Novels were to be begun; poems completed. Untended friendships were to be nourished. The piano was to have been played. Not to mention that closets and bookshelves and drawers and toy-chests and shelves and the garage were to have been organized and cleaned. And – I was going to spend special time with each of my older children, together and alone, playing in parks and going to libraries and teaching my older daughter to swim and ride a two-wheeler and giving my two-year old my full attention, for once. And wonderful dates with my husband, too. Movies and restaurants and theatre and music and perhaps, even, a night or two away.

Instead, when those pockets of time arise, I find myself wandering within them, wide-eyed and lost. They seem simultaneously vast and fleeting, and the knowledge that when I have finally settled into them and inhabited them, they will already have begun to wilt, that I am grasping at air, keeps them at bay. I wander from one temporal room to the other, aghast that so many are behind me, so few left. Isn’t this how life is, really? And isn’t it our relationship to those fragrant slivers what ultimately defines us? At first, during them, I planned for them. Then I ignored them, filling them wildly and quickly. Then I mourned them. Now, I creep into them quietly, so as not to disturb their fertile possibilities, and I watch their reflection in my own eyes.

-Maya Bernstein

Blessed are You, God, who clothes the naked. My mother’s closet is full of clothing from various eras of her life. Suits hang in every jewel-tone from decades of shul-going. She has even saved her Bat Mitzvah dress, yellowed lace with patches of pastel. When I was younger, I used to love playing dress-up in her closet, awaiting the day I would grow into her clothes.

Among the diverse discussion topics when a group of women rabbinical students gathered in Jerusalem living rooms this past year was the contents of our own closets: how we see ourselves and how we are seen; the ways we choose to cover and uncover; the garments we have inherited and those we have taken upon ourselves. My hevruta (study partner), Kerrith Solomon, and I convened this group of women from the Jewish Theological Seminary and the Ziegler school so we could talk with our peers about things we have not yet had safe space to explore within our schooling, reclaiming and exploring our identities as women on our paths toward the rabbinate in the Conservative Movement. 

For my first two years in rabbinical school, I felt pressure to be both a Jewish man and a Jewish woman. I accepted the full gamut of ritual obligation, but never had any conversation around integrating my gender identity into the role of rabbi. I fastened kippot to my hair and didn’t quite feel at home. When a male colleague argued that all female students should be obligated to wear kippot, my reflex was to guard my hair from the demands of others, to preserve it as a domain for self-expression. I found myself choosing to wear my most feminine garb to class and spending time in front of the mirror with a mascara wand. Encountering older layers of text from the tradition I thought I was in love with, I experienced a sense of loss and lack that I didn’t know how to name. A committed feminist, I felt alienated and disconnected from so-called holy sources that related to women as objects and second-class citizens. Many days, I felt like a spinning head, detached from my body. Often, I would end up with the mascara as a smudged trail down my cheeks.

Some of the women in our group wear kippot, others choose not to cover their hair. Still others have dipped into Jerusalem’s colorful market of headscarves and hats of all shapes and sizes. Some of us worry about how Conservative congregations might react to a rabbi in a fancy hat on the bimah. Two female classmates who wear kippot cover the covering with a scarf or beret when venturing into public spaces in Jerusalem.

Walking through Jerusalem, I often feel as though everyone is in costume or uniform. We all feel hyperaware of how what we wear here conveys messages about who we are. When I arrived in Israel, newly engaged, I bought a book with instructions for tying intricate designs with headscarves. Some days, I have wrapped my hair in flowery cloths, perhaps for practice or perhaps to entertain my curiosity, noticing if people treat me differently when I code into my outfit a message of being off-limits. Though my mother might have palpitations if she saw me, there is something sacred to me in making space for ritual role experimentation.

As I brace myself to enter marriage this summer, I am particularly grateful for one open conversation we had in the group around roles and responsibilities at home, telling the stories of the models we knew growing up. One classmate shared how her mother pours her father’s cereal every morning. Another spoke of her parents’ emphasis on performing chores of choice, having themselves been raised with servants in South Africa. Where will we carry on family traditions and where will we create practices of our own?

This year, meeting as a group with our teacher Rabbi Miriam Berkowitz, we have looked at halakhic and traditional texts and examined our own emotions around niddah, mikveh and kissui rosh (head covering). We have spoken about boundary issues, rereading the laws of “yihud,” in the Shulkhan Arukh (a 16th century authoritative Jewish legal anthology), which regulate men and women spending time alone together.

Some women were comforted to find a place in the traditional sources that supports our right to say, “These are my boundaries.” I saw it as an opening for discussion of sexual tension and transference that may arise in pastoral work and steps we can take to establish healthy contours for relationships in our professional lives. We encounter these conventional codes for gender relations with awareness that in our group and communities, people have a range of identities in regards to sexual orientation and differing comfort levels with intimacy of various sorts.

What does it mean to pick up and dust off things the Conservative Movement has stored away in corners, such as hair-covering, or niddah (the laws mandating, in their most stringent interpretation, no physical contact at all between husband and wife during her period and for seven days after) that I have generally associated with Orthodoxy and with the perpetuation of gender hierarchy? Why are we reaching for these rituals? Can we call our search for meaning feminist, or is it something else?

One participant spoke of her commitment to observing the laws set out by Jewish tradition as well as the need to attribute new meanings to Halakhah to make it relevant to our lives. “When the tradition says go to mikveh, I go. I find joy in fulfilling the mitzvah. I find it meaningful to have time apart from my partner to reinvest in my self. I find immersion in the water relaxing. Once, a mikveh attendant told me that if you pray in the mikveh, God will hear your prayers more. I have made it a time for spontaneous prayer, to acknowledge what is happening in my life, to ask God for strength and healing. I feel like it is the closest thing I have to a “Holy of Holies,” an intimate and quiet space, alone with God.”

* * * * * * * * *
“God, open my lips and my mouth will sing your praise”

I have a recurring dream in which my teeth fall out into my hand. I have spent the past few years in rabbinical school spiritually sore, as if my soul has been teething; as if I have been waiting for something to break through, to catch the cries and to form them into words. In this group, I feel finally able to speak, to articulate, to give language to an intensive search effort for who I might be, as a rabbi and as a person.

One Wednesday evening, over lentil stew, we spent time on questions of feeling authentic, about perceptions of what a rabbi “looks like,” about dreams of becoming pregnant or raising families and concerns about how that might impact our careers.

“How big do you want to be?” Aderet Okon Drucker was asked by a mentoring rabbi when she sought advice about which internships and jobs to pursue as she begins her rabbinic career.

“How big do you want to be?” What does it mean to want to be big? What sacrifices will we have to make in order to make room for our influence to grow? Are we allowed to not want to be big? We discovered we were annoyed with the go-to definition of “big” and the culture of comparing congregation size–A, B, C, D–that we have heard permeates rabbis’ gatherings. I joked that mine would be a Double D, if only there were a correlation between shul size and bra size.

One woman redefined big as an integrated identity that allows you to be your many selves as a rabbi, partner, parent, friend, daughter and person. Being big would mean having a sense of self that could hold and weave together many facets of life beyond the professional realm.

We spoke of hopes that our generation can redefine rabbinic identity in this way, taking some of the pressure off of the expectations of unyielding self-sacrifice placed on the rabbi. Our vision of the rabbinate would involve a makeover of communal expectations, in which it would be acceptable and encouraged for clergy to have time and life outside of the pulpit/office etc. We see benefit in this for rabbis-to-be and rabbis-that-are of all genders.

If this is what it means to be big, I would like to super-size my rabbinate.

-Annie Lewis

The women are now working on a photography project to expand the image of what a rabbi looks like. Stay tuned here for more stories!

Her announcement is in response to a Scholastic News article. Her third-grade class had read that morning about water found on the moon and the possibility of people making their homes there one day.

I ask Rachel if she would like that and receive her vehement reply. I am driving us home after her after-school program and my trying day at work. The day has also brought the news my mother’s blood pressure had shot up, and multiple phone calls with the insurance company about a biopsy I needed a month ago. Thankfully it turned out benign but left me with a claim mix-up I could use Columbo to unravel.

I brake for a red light. “Are you concerned about growing up or the future of the world?” 

“The future of the world.”

Relieved that we need to address just one of the two, at least for now, I think to myself “I know what you mean.” But I feel I should offer something more, and no breezy answer comes to mind, no maternal instincts kick in. I do what I do when I’m at a loss for some shred of guidance I can extend to my daughter. I pause.

“Would you like ravioli for dinner?” I ask.

“Sure.”

Dinner is decided. I wonder when a nugget of insight would follow.

The next day riding home from work on the subway, I mull over Rachel’s remark and worry that I have added to her fear.

The week before, while Rachel glanced at Yahoo News as she waited for her Internet game to load on the computer, she asked about global warming.

“Is it only in Haiti?”

Somehow she associated Haiti’s recent earthquake with climate change.

“No, it’s happening to the whole world.”

“Even in New York?”

“Yes, even here.”

Her game had loaded. She began to play, her fingers flurrying across the cursor keys.

I dropped the discussion, but maybe I should have added that scientists and people in many countries were trying to reduce global warming. Had I stopped talking because Rachel’s attention had turned elsewhere, or because of my own despair that humanity may be too late to reverse our current precarious course?

The subway car fills with more people and my mind fills with possible reassurances. Science would prevail. Governments would intercede. Businesses would make greener products. Each thought I discard as cold comfort, not the right temperature to sustain my daughter.

What could I tell Rachel that is something she could believe in, or, rather, a truth I believe in enough to give to her?

Shabbat morning arrives, and I walk into the sanctuary carrying The Bedside Torah: Wisdom, Visions, and Dreams by Rabbi Bradley Shavit Arston and my Conservative synagogue’s Bokser siddur. During the reading of the Torah, while my husband follows along in the Hebrew in the Etz Hayim chumash, I study the parashah in The Bedside Torah. I had attended religious school back in the day when it was called Hebrew school and students learned to read Hebrew words without learning their meaning. As a result, text study eludes me but I welcome interpretation. In October, after Simchat Torah when we began reading from B’reishit again, I had intended to keep pace with each week’s parashah, but I fell behind and started to search the book at random and let the evocative subtitles call to me as I flipped the pages.

This Shabbat, the title “Immune to Despair” about Parashat Va-Yehi/He Lived, catches my attention. The parashah tells of Jacob on his deathbed giving his blessing to his sons and in the middle of doing so exclaims, “I hope for your deliverance, O Lord.” Rabbi Artson writes how facing death, the end of all he knows, Jacob insists on hope. Two paragraphs later Artson interprets this text to mean, “To be Jewish is to hope.”

But what do you do if you’re filled with dread? How do you turn fear to hope, or at least let them live with each other? How could I take this Jewish teaching and make it alive for Rachel? How could I help her find a better balance?

I look to my own life and a universal time of crisis: 9/11.

On that September day and the days that immediately followed, we had gathered at a neighbor’s home while she waited for news of her husband who worked on the 70^th floor of the North tower. We brought food and water for the rescue workers. We came together at synagogue, the need for community great. We did what we could.

An inkling of what to say to Rachel begins to form.

The next day, Sunday morning, a treasured time of unstructured activity, while Rachel practices her newly learned cursive writing skills, making looping l’s across her notebook paper, I ask, “Can I tell you something?” It is our code question we use with each other when we want to signal that the words to come deserve special notice.

Rachel looks up from her writing, “Okay.”

“You know how you said you were scared about the future of the world?”

“Yes.”

“I can understand how you feel that way. But no matter what happens, you won’t be alone. If something happens it will touch everyone and people will try to help each other to make things better. You might be someone who could help make things better.”

Rachel picks up her pencil and begins shaping lower case n’s across the page. She says nothing but radiates the silence of someone who has listened.

I know I used a euphemism. But I didn’t need to spell out the possibilities of what could happen. My daughter already identifies a deserted part of our neighborhood as what the world would look like after everything falls apart. She doesn’t need me to add to her apocalyptic vision. She accepted my vague words, I think, because to be specific would make the possibilities too immediate.

I was going to say more. About tikkun olam, about Jewish community. Another time. I know she has received the message. What Rachel will do with it, her life will tell. She will, I trust, find the responses that speak most deeply to her, day after day, filtering into the years to come.

-Bonnie Beth Chernin

Bonnie Beth Chernin is a staff writer for a non-profit organization and lives in New York City with her husband and daughter. Her writing has also appeared in Mom Writers Literary Magazine now known as Mamazina.

Here, the Forward’s web editor Gabrielle Birkner talks with Lilith editor in chief Susan Weidman Schneider, Lilith assistant editor Sonia Isard, and the Forward’s editor, Jane Eisner. Listen in on our conversation on everything from Jewish anti-choice organizations, to a new pitch for a reality television show, to our own “click” moments.

Enjoy! And join in the conversation in the comments section below.

Say you’re a man. Say you’re an Israeli man. Say you’re an Israeli man writing a novel in Hebrew. Say the novel’s about a woman. Say you’d like some people to buy your book. Who writes your blurb?

I was taken aback over the weekend when I read on the Guardian’s book blog about some recent writing from Nicole Krauss. Not about her new novel, or a rehash of her “Twenty Under Forty” short for the New Yorker, but about a blurb she wrote for David Grossman’s new novel. A blurb! Slow news day, much?

Hmmm… what’s all this about? The Guardian, a massive British news outlet, found Krauss’s blurb “strikingly effusive,” and, apparently, pretty hilarious. “Our challenge for you today is to outdo Krauss,” the moderator urges, inspiring almost 50 comments parodying Krauss.

I’d expect this kind of gleeful snark from the gossip blogs, where mockery is the money-maker. But here we have the intersection of the old media Guardian meeting its new media offspring, meeting serious literature, meeting a publishing industry that is literally dying to sell its books in print. 

A few bloggers came to Krauss’s defense, so there is that, I guess. But I keep going back to the strange confluence of dynamics that turned this tiny blurb into a full-on news story. There’s the gender piece mixed up with the hierarchy piece—I doubt anyone would have jumped on Grossman for writing enthusiastically on the back of Krauss’s book. And there’s the Jewish piece—anytime someone revels in mocking a Jewish woman’s emotiveness, I get more than a little wary.

And what about the whole international aspect? I once had a professor tell me that the first thing she reads on college recommendation letters is the name of the recommender, to see if it’s an overenthusiastic American or a presumably dour and dry recommender from pretty much anywhere else in the world. Maybe Americans still just don’t get British humor.

The Guardian quotes Paul Auster (yes, another Jew) as writing: “Flaubert created his Emma, Tolstoy made his Anna, and now we have Grossman’s Ora.” This, I think, helps clear up some of the confusion. Grossman, yet another man, writing a woman character—in this day and age, maybe publishers think they need a woman to place her seal of approval. And the fact that an American Jewish woman was selected to write the blurb (or at least, the blurb that got the biggest reaction) highlights all the tensions of writing a Jewish novel in a language not English, for an audience that hopefully extends beyond the Jewish literary sphere.

All in all, a bizarre little snippet of media frenzy, with a talented Jewish woman at the center of this highly localized maelstrom. I sure hope at least somebody gets some book sales out of it.

-Sonia Isard