Hear Our Voice

Every year, just before the school year begins, I have a familiar pang in my stomach. The transition from summer to fall always comes with a bit of melancholy for me. Some of it is leaving my parents’ home on Cape Cod to come back to the heat of Houston, but some of it is simply the years of feeling the anxiety of transitions that come at this time of year.  Yesterday I spoke to our new faculty and staff. My purpose was to allay their concerns about being a non-Jew in a Jewish school and as I looked into their faces and saw the mixture of anxiety and excitement it dawned on me that this annual wave of apprehension is really about one thing: belonging.  Once I am in the swing of things, I feel fine but when I am in transition the one thing that hangs in the balance is that sense of belonging to a particular community and a particular endeavor. Am I a daughter helping my aging parents around the house or am I teacher and a rabbi? Those moments in between are difficult for me and as I follow that familiar thread of melancholy I can think back to a moment when I felt particularly lost.  So many years ago, when I was not working full time as a rabbi. I was newly divorced and still reevaluating my life and it was that lack of belonging that really got me. I got a call one evening from a friend who happens to be a drag queen on the side, and he asked me to come and do the opening benediction for a club that raises money for different causes by performing drag shows. Of course, I said yes but as I made my way to the drag queen club a line from “Angels in America”, played over and over in my mind, “you know things are bad when even drag is a drag.”

Though I was happy to be going I was in a funk. I really thought that my leadership days were over since I had no pulpit. I had no formal place in the Jewish community and frankly I wanted to simply go under cover as a rabbi, so that I would not have to think about how lost I really was. I have to laugh looking back because it was actually rather pathetic when my friend called and explained that they had a hard time getting a clergy person because the event was happening on Valentine’s Day which is why he thought of me “Well Rabbi, and we figured you wouldn’t have a date.” So off I went, laughing at my predicament but still feeling lost and sad. I certainly did not feel a sense of belonging walking into a bar packed with glittering drag queens as the music blared and I searched the crowd for the one person I knew. I felt like a phony – like a rabbi in drag, I guess.

They asked me to go to the dance floor where they shone a pink light on a disco ball and handed me an exceptionally good microphone. At churches and synagogues, the sound is not always good, and people chit-chat sometimes as you offer a prayer.  But this was not the case. I opened my mouth, and the bar went silent.  Every false eye-lashed eye was on me and brimming with genuine tears. Two minutes of me speaking on how we are all created in the image of the divine and the crowd was absolutely moved to tears. It wasn’t my words.  It was the fact that I was there. This was 2009 – before gay marriage was legal and this was Texas not Provincetown or the West Village. And it wasn’t that it was me, the rabbi being there. It was because a member of the clergy from a mainstream religious tradition was there. It was not what I said, it was where I stood – a rabbi no matter how broken or confused, under a pink light on a parquet dance floor in a bar with people who were, like me, aching to belong.

I no longer feel adrift, nor do I feel like I am searching for a place to belong. But in moments of transition, I do recall those times and that feeling.  It’s like muscle memory. There are certain times of year when that feeling of being without a clear purpose comes back to me and August is one of those times. And then I am swept up in the work of this congregation as we prepare for the High Holidays or the work of the school as we prepare for students to arrive, and I remind myself that the memory of those difficult days has a purpose. I am grateful for the experiences of the past that taught me the value of belonging and the power that I have as an individual to invite others in.  At CSK I have always felt that the barriers to belonging are absent. If you want to be involved, all you need to do is show up and this, in turn, has made it easy for me to step into the role of associate rabbi even though my job as Director of Jewish Life at Emery/Weiner demands most of my time. I am grateful that CSK is a community fused together by the genuine desire of so many to simply gather together in times of joy and sorrow. I am grateful that belonging does not require jumping through hoops, earning your place or proving your worth.  Belonging here, for you and for me requires only that we see ourselves as part of this community and that we remain willing to show up for each other.  The reward is a sense of belonging and that is priceless.