by Laura Geller

I went to my grandfather's to say good-bye;
I was going away to a school out West.
As I came in,
My grandfather turned from the window at which he sat
(sick, skin yellow, eyes bleary--
but his hair still dark,
for my grandfather had hardly any grey hair in his beard or on his head--
he would sit at the window, reading a Hebrew book)
He rose with difficulty--
He had been expecting me, it seemed--
Stretched out his hands and blessed me in a loud voice:
In Hebrew, of course,
And I did not know what he was saying.
When he had blessed me,
My grandfather turned aside and burst into tears.
"It's only for a little while, Grandpa," I said
In my broken Yiddish. "I'll be back in June."
(By June my grandfather was dead.)
He did not answer.
Perhaps my grandfather was in tears for other reasons:
Perhaps, because in spite of all the learning
I had acquired in high school,
I knew not a word of the sacred text of the Torah
And was going out into the world
With none of the accumulated wisdom of my people to guide me,
With no prayers to talk to the God of my people,
A soul...doomed by his ignorance to stumble and blunder.
--Charles Reznikoff, from Early History of a Writer

We know that grandson, all grown up now. He's successful, educated, worldly...but ignorant of his Jewish heritage. All that remains, perhaps, are a few photographs of the old man who sat by the window with a Hebrew book. What will become of this stranger in his own house who knows not the accumulated wisdom of our tradition, or the prayers of our faith?

In past generations Jewish identity was almost a given. Our parents could bless us in Hebrew. We could take pride in the new Jewish state. Or, at the very least, having grown up in a more intolerant America, our Jewishness was an inescapable part of our self-definition. But the Jewish identity that shaped generations of Jews--an identity primarily forged in reaction to the outside world--is no longer adequate.

For many Jews, the path to a meaningful Jewish life is unmarked, and those who journey it are often uncertain of their destination. As the poem suggests, there are moments when we glimpse that our lives might be richer if only we felt a greater connection to the cumulative wisdom of our ancestors, for a language to connect us to divinity, for insight about life's meaning and purpose to sway us from the stumbling and blundering of our souls.

I have seen evidence of this longing in our synagogue on Yom Kippur. Over the past few years, during the afternoon service, right before Neilah, we open the arks in the sanctuary and the chapel and invite individuals to stand in silence before the open doors. Two years ago, when we first introduced this ceremony, about forty people bravely stepped forward. This year there were more than a hundred. Some were sobbing; others were covering their faces with their hands. Something important was going on, something about doors closing and opening, something to do with the yearnings of souls. Maybe this is what the High Holy Day prayerbook hints at in the prayer that begins: We knock at your gates, merciful God; please don't turn us away empty.

The poet/grandson was not in our synagogue before Neilah knocking on the gates, but there will be moments in his life, both joyful and sorrowful, when he will stand at doors that the cumulative wisdom of our people could help him unlock. When someone he loves dies, there will be a door. When he chooses to marry, there will be a door. When a child is born, there will be a door. Such doors stand on the path all human beings walk; going through them presents a sacred opportunity to transcend alienation and aloneness. How a man, woman, boy, or girl passes through a door can encourage--or discourage--connection with the wisdom of the Jewish people. And who stands at those Jewish doors? Often it is a rabbi, but anyone can open the door to Judaism for another. Now comes the critical question: will they be intimidating shomrim (guards), who close doors, or welcoming mezuzot, who open them?

In one of my first encounters as a Hillel director, a twenty-year-old woman came to see me. She had just had an abortion. As an unmarried college senior, the woman, whom we will call Sarah, felt confident that she had made the right choice. Reared in a nominally Jewish home with little ritual or tradition, she stepped into the Hillel House because her therapist had recommended that she talk to a rabbi to deal with her feelings of guilt. "Rabbi," she asked, "what's the ritual for abortion? Should I say Kaddish for this fetus?" Twenty-five years ago, the CCAR's rabbis manual didn't mention abortion or miscarriage or pregnancy loss. What was I to do? I knew it would be wrong for her to say Kaddish, because doing so would imply that a person had died--and that she, therefore, had committed murder. I could have been a shomeret, telling her that there were no Jewish keys to this door. Instead, I chose to be a mezuzah, signifying that this door did have a Jewish key, though different from the one she thought she needed.

Sarah and I created a new ritual by focusing on the themes of the upcoming High Holy Days. We studied texts about teshuvah (atonement); she gave tzedakah (charity); she volunteered a few hours in a Planned Parenthood clinic; and eventually she was ready to participate in a new ritual built around the themes of tashlich, during which she symbolically cast her feelings of guilt into the Pacific Ocean in spiritual preparation for a new beginning of her life. I still hear from Sarah, who sends me Rosh Hashanah cards with pictures of her children and husband, and news of their synagogue involvement.

Another story. Paul entered Judaism through the door of creative expression. He was one of two artists who had won a commission funded by our synagogue in cooperation with the National Foundation for Jewish Culture to create an artist-in-residency program. For over a year, Paul, and his artist colleague Ilene, interviewed congregants who shared an object which evoked a story that had shaped their Jewish identities. Paul photographed the object as Ilene recorded the conversation. Husbands revealed stories of wartime terror they had never shared, not even with their wives; children reflected on family memories in ways that surprised their parents. Through it all, Paul listened. And it opened a door for him, this totally assimilated artist with no connection to his Jewish roots. The door led to a Jewish marriage, joining the congregation, forming a chavurah, and finding an older man to be his Jewish mentor. The installation he and his collaborator created has become a meditation space on the threshold of the sanctuary, where individuals sit and look and listen and perhaps begin to trust the power of their own stories. Paul had never imagined that his art could be deepened by a connection to Jewish tradition. His experiences with the rabbis and congregants he met through the project not only helped him open a door as an artist, but taught him that it was a Jewish door.

How we as rabbis respond--as shomrim or mezuzot--can make the difference between people like Sarah or Paul choosing to enter a Jewish door or taking a different route entirely. Even in those cases when some of us rabbis feel we have to be shomrim--when asked to officiate at an intermarriage, for example--we can still be mezuzot, by gently directing individuals to colleagues who will be mezuzot. Or perhaps, if we take enough time, we can turn the encounter into an opportunity that might lead to a different door--perhaps the door of study or even conversion.

To be a mezuzah, we need to pay attention to our own spiritual paths. What doors did we encounter along our way? Who helped us open them?

For me, the first door was social justice, which I later learned had a Jewish name: shaarey tzedek, gates of righteousness. As a college student in the late '60s, I was deeply influenced by two Protestant chaplains whose religious commitments had led them to become civil rights and anti-war leaders. They showed me the door and encouraged me to study my own tradition to discover the Jewish keys.

Along the way, there were so many other doors with different keys. One important key has been the feminist conviction that there is a Torah of my life as well as the Torah of tradition, and that both are deepened and changed through interacting with the other. The Torah of my life taught me that God was present in important moments of transformation. I longed for rituals to help me acknowledge God's presence. Through exploring the Torah of tradition I discovered sources and stories that helped me both remember and invent new rituals for menarche, weaning, healing, growing older, and other significant transitions.

Most recently, I entered a door opened by the Spirituality Institute at Metivta, A Center for Contemplative Judaism. With Rabbis Jonathan Omer-Man, Arthur Green, and meditation teacher Sylvia Boorstein as faculty, and Rabbi Nancy Flam as director, this two-year program involves thirty-five rabbis from different movements around the country who have made a commitment to deepen their own spiritual practice through semiannual retreats, ongoing telephone chevruta study of Hasidic texts on spirituality, and regular practice of meditation and spiritual direction.

The process has been a real stretch for me. It has included several significant firsts: my first silent retreat--not an easy experience for a talker like me; my first attempt to keep a daily journal; my first encounter with mindful meditation, a technique learned from Buddhism; and my first experience of being in spiritual direction. Spiritual direction, which draws on Christian models, is not therapy or pastoral counseling. Therapy assumes something is broken which needs to be fixed; pastoral counseling assumes something is hurting which needs to be healed. Spiritual direction begins with the assumption that the mystery we call God is present in our lives and we need to learn how to notice it. My spiritual director is a Protestant minister who understands the challenges and the blessing of my work, and she is particularly sensitive to the ways in which my schedule and the intensity of the work crowd out my spiritual connection. Her task is to help me notice God's presence in my life.

These doors are surprises to me. Some of them didn't feel Jewish at first...until I realized that other traditions can inform our understanding and practice of Judaism--and that the context of my search was the mezuzah.

In the process of searching for that mezuzah, I discovered that it's okay to learn from other spiritual traditions, as many of our congregants already have. As part of a d'var torah, I once observed that the sound our ancestors heard at the epiphany at Mount Sinai might have been the silent aleph. Afterwards, a congregant came up to me and said: "You mean the revelation at Mount Sinai might have been connected to the breath of God? I've often felt that connection while meditating, but I never associated it with Judaism. In fact, until now, I've never connected my daily meditation practice to Judaism, and I've been meditating every day for twenty years. I've always considered myself to be very spiritual, but I never knew that my spiritual practice might connect me to the synagogue." He now comes to services almost every week.

I am beginning to understand that a spiritual path is a lifelong journey. The more I am attentive to my own doors and the Jewish keys, the better I am able to be a mezuzah for other people.

Ultimately, the Jewish encounters at these doors can lead the poet/grandson to understand that his soul is not doomed to stumble and blunder, that he does have access to the cumulative wisdom of his people, that his life can be richer as his path becomes a Jewish one. And when he enters one of these doors, our task is to empower him to take responsibility with us for the transformation of the Jewish institutions which he, and all of us, will need along the way.

Rabbi Laura Geller, HUC-JIR class of 1976, is spiritual leader of Temple Emanuel of Beverly Hills, CA. This article is based on a paper delivered at the first Mifgash Harabbanim, an inter-denominational gathering of rabbis organized last fall by the Reform, Conservative, and Reconstructionist rabbinical organizations.

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