It came from Syria, like an unwanted refugee. A dust storm that laid itself across the land of Israel – and the entire Middle East. 5 days of hot snow. With vision-choking, car-coating, throat-fulls of sand.

Scientists say it was inexplicable and unprecedented. They have no natural explanation for it.
All we know is that it came from Syria and it demanded a full-bodied reckoning of all who waded within it.

Imagine the whole country kvetching its way through one vast communal shvitz. Like a semi-apocalyptic sweat, like a cleansing fever, like the clouds that gathered around Mt. Sinai, like the pillar in the desert. It was a mythic & metaphoric agony and it escorted us straight into Rosh Hashanah.

All we could do was wipe our brow, raise our eyes and wonder aloud, “What, dear Lord, are you trying to articulate with this dust plague?”

For me, the answer came that muggy Friday night at my Shabbat table. Most serendipitously, we had among our guests a woman who is part of the Syrian/Lebanese Christian community here in Jerusalem. As we commiserated over the dust storm and its accompanying discomforts, this woman, with hot tears on her cheeks, spoke up. She told us what she was witnessing in her community. She said that the Syriac Christians saw the dust from Syria as a sort of divine message. For their families – the Christians of Syria – are being genocidally slaughtered by ISIS.

She told us how they are mourning, terrified and undergoing a soul-searching return to their faith. – Teshuva. She asked that we pray for the Christians and the innocents being murdered brutally & senselessly across the border.

As I sat there listening I heard the quiet whisper of response from G-d I was yearning to hear. For me, it was a message served straight onto my Shabbas plate.  It was my call from G!d, clear as any shofar blast. Asking me to pray for the innocents being slaughtered.

And I realized, shockingly, that I had not yet done that simple, obvious, human act.

I mean, I am a pray’er. I know that prayer transforms reality. I have seen it. I preach it. I believe it. So how could it be that I have not prayed a stitch over one of the most atrocious horrors on the planet?

And then I saw it, in stark fluorescence. My own smallness. My fear. My trauma. My wound-licking sense of self-preservation. And not without reason, after all. I’m a Jew in an embattled Jerusalem.

But is this the way I want to live? Is this the fate of my people – to be so traumatized that we fail to pray for, to care for, another’s glaring pain? This is not the kind of Jew I want to be.

This dust storm was my wake-up cloud. To be bigger than my own triggers.

Our tradition teaches the spiritual technology that if you want something for yourself, pray for someone else who wants it as well.

G-d knows I want peace. I want the monsters of the Middle East to retreat back into their dark caves. Enough of this violence.

I care something ferocious for the innocents, the forgotten, the children, a short border-cross away.

Dear friends, this is the season of fixing our sins of omission. I, for one, am done feeling victimized. I have a world to care for. I have a region to pray for. I have a heart big enough to break over my neighbors’ pains.

Please, join me in this prayer made of dust.

*
I’m sorry, Syria
for ignoring you & your endless
reel of travesties.

I have looked away
I have hidden my  face
& hardened my heart
lest it be singed by your sharp
flames.

But then the dust storm came
and kicked you
into my face
and reminded me that I too am but small
dust and ash and

I too sleep
on a bed of swords
with my neck against the world.

I too am but a breath
away from devastation
by desert wind.

Thankful for this pre-Rosh Hashannah
choke-hold of sand
that did my blindness in.

That roused me
doused me with its astounding heat
and reminded me
that my neighbor’s misfortune
is my own burden
to shoulder
to shudder
to keep.

For my roof is made of wood
and I can not fiddle this fire away.

So forgive me for I have not sufficiently
prayed
for you and your innocents
for you and your bruised bloodied
blue tongues
though they would wag
against me.

Forgive me
for I have not sufficiently prayed.

What can I say,
I am scared of you, Syria.
Terrified of your open-box of horrors.

And I have not yet mastered
the act of praying for the ones I most fear.

Have not yet mastered the art of
turning dark into sparks
turning stray  into straight
and straw into gold
but I will try to do so
with these tears, these prayers
this clasping hold.

I will lift your children from the dust one by one
and pray for their safe keeping
as if my own.

I will turn my heart into a turnstile for all
to pass
who are innocent
and caught in the cross-fire of your monsters & militants.

I will weep my way through your maze of corpses and
join forces with every well-intentioned citizen of your land.

To pray for the ceasing of this senseless beating
that has befallen you at the hands
of Isis, of darkness and ill-fortune.

Dear Syria, may your dust cloud of devastation lift with the sun’s soft rays.

Please G!d, have compassion on the innocent
the frightened, the helpless,
and guide them
to safety
to family
& safe passage.

Please G!d put an end to all that is murderous
and heal the broken
the limbless
the hopeless
the friendless.

And forgive us for our callousness
in the face of human suffering so close and so far away.

Help your children Israel
shed our victim mentality
that we guard like a precious
fragile crystal
vase.

Help us be bigger than our own triggers
that we may better serve You, our Father, our King.

Let us be a light unto darkened nations.
To act like the children of royalty we were raised to be.

You have invested us with mission
to do a higher bidding
than our fears would have us keep.

Let us be stronger than our own shattered backs.

Let us be humble as the dust
and yet great enough
to muster the world’s direst of prayers.

Forgive me, Syria
for my silence.
And take this flask of tears.

Your dust is my dust.
I offer you my dearest treasure
– my prayer.

Shehechiyanu. We have witnessed the day when it is no longer an Orthodox sacrilege to see a woman ordained as a communal leader – whether she be called Rabbi or Rabba or Maharat. The long awaited wow of attainment is upon us and count me in for the celebration.

And yet, so help me G-d, my eye is still twitching and there is a rant waiting restless up my sleeve. Because the unfortunate truth about this otherwise shiny new thing is that it’s a waste of an opportunity.

Here we have a chance for an unprecedented paradigm shift. And yet – lamentably – we have committed the sin of simply hitting ‘copy’ & ‘paste’.

We have copied leadership models & training programs built for men and pasted them onto women.

And here’s why that’s such a colossal shame:

Because the gifts of the feminine are the tincture for the world’s worst maladies.

And, more pointedly, the gifts of the feminine are what Orthodox Jewish communities most direly need.

When those gifts are checked at the door to the beit midrash, then we have lost out on the most promising piece of this feminist progress yet.

By ‘gifts of the feminine’ I am referring to Jewishly-rooted Kabbalistically-sourced notions of femininity. Characteristics such as receptivity and internality, nurturing, emotion, equality, communication, compassion, family. Skills honed by females over millenia. Strengths inherent in our very spirit and physiology.

These feminine ways of being, when well-polished, have the understated power to impact issues as big as Isis and as minute as a couple’s morning clashes over who takes out the garbage.

The ordination of women as Orthodox Rabbis – for all its monumentally important progress  – has not yet mined the treasure of natural resources in their female cohorts. And we are a people poorer for it.

And herein lies the opportunity that is ours to seize.

Right now we as a people are ripe to create a new and much needed genre of female leadership – and feminine leadership. A genre that capitalizes on the incalculable gains that come with women – in all their G-d-given gifts of femininity – finally occupying positions of public influence.

This shift is about more than women merely attaining the status of Rabbi, it is about our communities attaining the medicinal riches of having women in the lead.

Yes, women’s enTITLEment as leaders is essential. But it needn’t stop with the technicalities of ordination. This paradigm shift should also be about creating more feminine models of leadership for the male Rabbis in our midst.

It is happening in precious drips and drabs but needs to turn into a torrent, my friends.

What would it look like for traditional male Semicha programs to pick up skills  from the other side of the mechitza? What might it look like for all of our leaders to go through a training that teaches them the feminine gifts of how to make space more than how to take space? How to listen as well as how to speak? How to nurture, how to feel, how to embody, how to receive?

What if our scholars were encouraged to grow taller than their thoughts? To go deep into the caverns of their internality to find the wisdom their hearts speak? What if our leaders were required to become intimately acquainted with each rock of their own emotional terrain?

I promise you, our communities would be more gentle, nurturing and healthy havens than they are today. Our dialogues would be more healing than heated. Our politics more unifying than divisive.

Forgive me for being utopian, but these words come straight from my rechem. Straight from my deepest seated mother instinct for creating the nest that will best keep my progeny the vibrant and vital light unto the nations they are meant to be.

Imagine a Jewish community whose leaders – male and female alike – are proficient in how to midwife souls. Where Rabbis are just as equipped to help you through your depression & your spiritual angst as they are equipped to answer shaylot aboutkashrut. Where Rabbis can paskin halacha but they can also interpret dreams. Where they have the skills to unburden the heavy hearts of their congregants and uplift the lowest among us with their nurturing.

The questions we are now called to answer in this new paradigm of female leadership is how can we bring uniquely feminine wisdom to the enhancement and ennobling of our entire tradition?

For the entry of women into Rabbinic leadership uplifts the very institution of the Rabbinate itself.

Let’s strive for something higher than parroting long-standing masculine ways. Let’s bring women’s best virtues to bear on the most pressing public issues of our day.

Women have heart and soul to bring to the helm. Let the new cadres of female Rabbinic students be taught to do just that. Let us lead with our strengths, our feminine IQ, EQ and acumen. Let’s not base our modeling solely on the model for men. For their sake and ours and for the sake of our future generations.

Let us no longer perpetuate cut and paste ordinations. But rather let us strive to have women’s ordination be like a hypertext. A hypertext that links us to storehouses of feminine wisdom finally brought to bear on the Jewish public sphere.

This is the vast historic opportunity at our fingertips today if we would but reach out & grasp it.

Let us not squander this precious window with another cut and paste.

*

Post-Script on ‘How To’ & Hakarat HaTov:

Emotion, not only intellect…

In the current paradigm the skeleton key to entry into the Rabbinic chambers is halachic proficiency. Leadership is accessed by intellect alone. Yet halachic knowledge does not a spiritual leader make. Not in our day and age at least.

Yes, let us have halachic authorities. Of course we need hachamim to call with our shaylot.

But for that to be the core criteria for spiritual leadership!?

Spiritual leadership needs to be defined by the SOUL, not solely by the intellect.

Transformation, not just information…

All too often rabbinic training entails the transmission of INFORMATION.

If you are lucky you get some INSPIRATION.

But what we need as a people is TRANSFORMATION.

Our leaders should be trained in how to help others transform their lives….how to take a ritual celebration like a wedding or Bar-mitzvah and squeeze the fruit dry of its juice for change.

Training leaders to be proficient in the realms of spirit, emotion & psychology are essential.

Classes in Hassidut, Kabbalah, Jewish meditation and psychological training would all go far in creating this paradigm shift.

Clearly, the outline of the dream program I am envisioning is beyond the scope of this post.

I just know that I am yearning to see it birthed and pray that this rant is another push along the way.

*

That being said, it is crucial to offer hakarat hatov acknowledgments to the institutions which have already started moving in these dire directions.

Below are mentioned a few institutions which I have been in touch with. Surely there are more. Please do share in the comments section about programs in the Orthodox world that strive to integrate a more feminine/soulful/emotional/psychological approach to their training.

– Jerusalem’s Sulam Yaakov Yeshiva – founded by R’Aaron Leibowitz – is where my husband received his Orthodox ordination. His program required a weekly “chabura” where the Rabbinic students went through a process of intensive self work together in a group-setting facilitated adeptly by R’Daniel Kohn. It was astonishingly transformative and helped to sculpt these men into deep vessels for spiritual leadership.

– Yeshivat Maharat has a robust Pastoral Care component which integrates much of the psychological/nurturing pieces referred to above. I have heard from their leaders that  they are committed to finding ways to further flesh out the gifts of the feminine within their program. I look forward to hearing more about how they go about this process.

– Yeshivat Chovevei Torah has pioneered so much of this movement. It has done and continues to do invaluable work in moving the notion of Orthodox Semicha forward to train truly sensitive & spiritual leaders.

– Finally, there is a new Shlomo Carlebach semicha program opening this fall. It is called Hazon Shlomo and it is working to create a more spiritually oriented training for Rabbis with a strong Hassidut component. The Shalev Center, founded by my husband R’Hillel and myself, is involved with Hazon Shlomo, working to create a track for the psychological rounding out of their training.

Again, please do share in the comments sections about programs in the Orthodox world that strive to integrate a more feminine/soulful/emotional/psychological approach to their training.  All rantings aside, I am eager to hear and celebrate the invaluable progress that has already been made.

It’s August. Time of my annual reckoning. My yearly heart-break of a return to America, to the grandparents, the cousins, the aunties, the floor to floor carpeting, the ritual visits to Target, to Costco, to Morningstar Riblets in plastic packages that taste nostalgic like you-know-when before I  became religious and left all of this luxurious mouth-watering wonder & creature-comfort known as America to live the epic run on sentence of an Israeli dream.

Over the course of our great North American journey I will cry regularly.

I will cry watching my brother play with my baby, absolutely aching with the knowledge that he won’t see him again for another year and this child won’t be much of a baby by then.

I will cry watching my progeny romp around crazy joyous with their seldom-seen and wildly-adored cousins. I will wince with the knowledge that these 5 days will have to make up for the next 360 of distance.

I will cry when my Dad holds my daughter’s tiny hand as they walk to get the morning paper, wishing this were every morning.

I will cry when I watch my mother’s face darken as she stands in the kitchen, making pancakes for the grand-kids and she remembers again – for the thousandth time – that they are leaving in a few short sunsets. To a land 8 time zones away. A land where everything is foreign. A land with no grandma’s pancakes. A land with no family over for the holidays. A land with no Sundays.

And I will ask myself why, why in the world, am I doing this again? To my mother, my father, my children. To my entire extended American clan.  Why am I leaving again?

As I shlep this mythic weight over my shoulder onto yet another airplane set for that deliriously distant holy land.

*

So, let’s just put the PR machines on pause for a moment friends. Turn off the tape recorder please. For a moment I just want to be totally transparent. Just you and me and all my post-modern Zionistic complexity.

For the Truth, it seems, is a multi-layered and contradictory thing. On one layer I am utterly devoted, committed and enthralled with every silky stitch of the fabric of my Israel reality. But there are other layers too….

And at this moment, my weary soles are sticking strong to the layer where I just don’t have it in me to shlep back to fulfill the great Israeli dream. For all its glory, this morning, I just don’t want to leave.

For here, behind all the hype and hope, is a very real, very blurry-eyed sense of loss and home-sickened grief. In the dark corners of my otherwise bright historic prayer come true, I am weeping.

And I will continue to weep, bitter and quiet, as we board the plane to Tel Aviv in a few days. No one will see. The children will not know. I will not speak of this to the students visiting, to the Birthrighters, to the tourists at our glorious Jerusalem Shabbas table.

But, God as my witness, I am weeping up something tragic as I write this from the comfy familiar of my parents’ living room tweeds.

*

The Gemara says that Israel is acquired by yissurin, by agonies.

And though my agonies are minor in comparison to the enormous sacrifices of so many others, I still ache with my own unique and bottomless bleed.

So please God behold these two dripping handfuls of my yissurin as I prepare to leave. For these tears are as real as any choice bull set upon the altar in the Temple.

This wince of homesickness is my very finest offering.

Accept it please in all its pungent agony as I depart again from the place my bones best know as home.

And if You don’t take it as a worthy offering then by all means turn Your eyes to my mother’s trove of yissurin. I have seen her hide away far too many tears and bite her tongue each time we step on that departing plane.

That woman’s pain is far more weighty and worthy than mine. See her, God, as she stands and waves bewildered and shattered at the airport as we take our kids and leave.

See how she hoists up the sacrifice of her own bent and splintered hopes of a close-knit family. There it burns atop the altar of the Land of Israel won by a grandparent’s yissurin.

*

So this one’s in honor of her and all the grandmothers whose beloved grandchildren have been spirited away by a colossal national-religious Jewish dream.

This one’s in honor of my father and his relentless commitment to my living my own dreams, even at the expense of his own grandfatherly fulfillment.

This one’s in honor of all that is given up on the other side of those great big Nefesh B’Nefesh chartered planes.

It’s in honor of all the grandma’s pancakes that will never be tasted, never made.

All those soccer games gone unwitnessed, uncheered for and way too far away.

This one’s for all those missed trips to the zoo that are the birthright of every grandparent that has ever loved their grandkid.

I acknowledge it loud and clear dear parents. I and Israel, together we have snatched untold hopes out from under your feet.

And you, you never signed up for this mission I have so single-mindedly claimed. You are just watching from the sidelines of history with the agony that only a grandparent aching for their grandbabies can claim.

Please forgive me. And know that I weep bitter over it with you too.

My Israel, my Aliyah, is your sacrifice.

You are the reluctant pilgrims caught up in some mysterious & historic current of Jewish destiny. Weeping bitterly with your own Israel-winning yissurin.

They say that we wept by the rivers of Babylon on our way out of our homeland.

No one told us that we’d also weep on the way back in.