Samansky is one of 15 students who graduated in May from the Los Angeles campus of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, the Reform movement’s seminary. At ordination, fewer than half of her classmates had jobs. On that day, a stirring sense of calling prevailed, she and her classmates say. But then, diploma in hand, it was back to reality. “I really felt like I was going to spend the next year or two filling time, just making enough money to pay student loans, health care, day care,” said Samansky, who has a 15-month-old daughter.

Samansky eventually landed a job as part-time assistant rabbi at a synagogue in Northridge, California, where she handles a mix of adult and youth education, services, programming, and life cycle and senior staff duties—all, somehow, in 15 hours a week. She also teaches two nights a week for the local Florence Melton Mini-School, a pluralistic adult Jewish education network. “I ended up with two amazing jobs,” she said—ideal in content, just not in billable hours. “Five years and a hundred thousand dollars later, I’ll be making slightly less than before I entered rabbinical school.”

As unemployment continues to rise, Samansky and many of her colleagues, both rookie and experienced, have had to invoke their professional training to weather the current dearth of professional placement. “I just decided I’m going to practice what I preach and have a little faith that it’s all going to turn out,” she said.

The recession has not spared the rabbinate. At a bleak and stressful time, when pastoral hand-holding may be more in demand than ever, full-time pulpit jobs in America’s liberal movements—Reform, Conservative, and Reconstructionist—are in short supply. Seminaries and synagogues have had to pare their budgets down to essentials; individual rabbis, likewise, have had to figure out what it means to be a rabbi without working as one. But as painful a moment as it is, some in the field suggest that this perhaps relatively short-term hardship for rabbis and institutions could ultimately prove to be, as they say, good for the Jews.

“It has been an unprecedentedly difficult year,” said Rabbi David Ellenson, president of Hebrew Union College, noting that back in early summer—by which time 90 percent of a graduating Hebrew Union class usually has job commitments—almost one-third of the 47 graduates in the class of 2009 were still looking for work. Rabbi Leonard Thal, interim placement director for the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the professional association for Reform rabbis, said that now approximately 10 are still looking. (Those who find work with organizations or cobble together part-time patchwork, like Dalia Samansky—and more of her peers than usual this year—are not obligated to report their status to him.) “Five years ago, when this group entered, an awful lot of folks out there in congregation-land were complaining about a shortage of rabbis,” Thal said. “Now the pendulum has swung in the other direction, even farther.”

Representatives from the main Conservative and Reconstructionist seminaries report that the large majority of their classes of 2009, which number 43 and 10, respectively, have found jobs. It should be noted that the latter two institutions in particular—for philosophical rather than economic reasons—typically encourage their students to look for work beyond the pulpit to begin with; generally about half of Reconstructionist graduates find jobs outside synagogues, in organizations and institutions such as Jewish community centers. That held true this year.

But it’s not only newly minted rabbis who’ve been pounding the pavement. Many mid-career rabbis, their positions eliminated, have also found themselves with nowhere to go. Their employed counterparts, like many other American workers, are postponing retirement or staying put when they might otherwise move on. Cash-strapped synagogues, like many churches, are balking at hiring at all, in some cases giving up the now-luxury of an assistant rabbi. And as part of its massive restructuring last spring, the Union for Reform Judaism—the organization that supports Reform congregations in America—eliminated 20 percent of its employees nationwide, erasing scores of potential positions and sending numerous on-staff rabbis back into the pool. Since it’s not exactly a boom time for organizations, foundations, or non-profits Jewish or otherwise, even non-pulpit jobs can be hard to find.

Exact numbers on the rabbinic employment landscape—past and current—are hard to pinpoint, in part because some rely on self-reporting and are not closely tracked. But the bleakness of the current mood is palpable. “There’s a lot of anxiety and sadness,” said Kim Geringer, 56, a Reform rabbi among those who lost a position at the URJ. “We don’t have a model for this; we haven’t been here before. Up until now I think rabbis felt pretty confident that, let’s say something didn’t work out with a congregation, as difficult and sad as that might be, there was a sense—even if it was in the background, unarticulated—that if you were willing to be flexible, you could always find a job. At the moment, that’s not there.”

Some rabbis, maxed out and disillusioned, are leaving the rabbinate altogether. Amita Jarmon, 48, a second-career Reconstructionist rabbi ordained in 2004, lost her job as the first-ever full-time rabbi at a small synagogue in New England earlier this year when the money to pay her simply ran out. She moved to Massachusetts for a relationship that has since ended and found no work; colleagues there were already losing their jobs as area JCCs and Hillels cut budgets.

“I applied for a job teaching first grade at Solomon Schechter. That’s not what I went to rabbinical school for,” she said, noting that the school, of course, hired someone with teaching experience. “What I’d be reduced to if I were to stay here would probably be teaching and tutoring, which is stuff that I did before I became a rabbi.” Unwilling to work “just anywhere” in the United States, and noting that she saw few listings for Reconstructionist rabbis anyway, she is in the midst of a permanent move back to Israel, where she lived for five years after making aliyah in 1983, and contemplating a return to her training as a physical therapist. “I’m willing to do all kinds of things there just to be in Israel,” she said. “But if I were really attached to being a rabbi, I would be in a bad way.”

Others within the field have found a rather rabbinic way to view the recession. They say it’s painful, to be sure, but it also presents an opportunity for self-reflection, even positive change, for both rabbis and the institutions that support them. While seminaries along with synagogues are struggling—Hebrew Union reportedly came close to shuttering one of its four campuses; the Jewish Theological Seminary has implemented significant pay cuts; the modern Orthodox Yeshiva University reduced its non-academic staff by 120 in response to an endowment decline of 30 percent (thanks in part to Bernard Madoff)—many see an upside to Jewish institutions’ being forced to do more with less. “The economic contraction is going to accelerate a process of reexamination and reorganization that’s already going on in the larger Jewish community, in order to figure out how to best serve a 21st-century population,” said Rabbi Julie Schonfeld, executive vice president of the Rabbinical Assembly, the international association of conservative rabbis. “How can we best use our resources to help rabbis work more effectively? How can our synagogues strengthen the Jewish community in times of greater challenge?”

For individual rabbis as well, recession is the mother of invention. Many are exploring—even inventing—new professional options, whether hospital or military chaplaincy, Hillel positions, or a non-pulpit rabbinate of their own design. “This trend has been happening for a few years, but there’s nothing like an economic downturn to really force some innovative thinking in terms of what it means to have this degree and contribute to the Jewish community in ways that aren’t your standard pulpit options,” said Elie Kaunfer, a JTS-ordained rabbi who is executive director of Mechon Hadar, an institute that oversees an egalitarian yeshiva and helps organize independent minyanim. “We’ve been presented with the opportunity to broaden even further what it means to be a rabbi in America.”

Rabbi Howard Cohen, 51, a canoe builder and former volunteer firefighter, left a Reconstructionist congregation in Vermont in 2006 when he became concerned that the congregation might not be able to continue paying for a full-time rabbi. He was until recently the interim dean of Jewish life at a Jewish boarding school in North Carolina. Now he’s no longer setting his sights on existing Jewish institutions. “There are very few jobs to pursue,” he said. In addition to officiating at life cycle events, he’s “considering a constellation of small enterprises: revamping my Jewish outdoor adventure program called Burning Bush Adventures, spiritual and general counseling, and something connected to the graying segment of our society.”

Synagogues continue to be the key to Jewish community, says Hebrew Union College’s Rabbi Ellenson. “But we live in an age when not all congregations are able to hire the set of rabbinic professionals they would normally desire. So rabbis themselves have become more entrepreneurial in terms of bringing their skills into other settings—coffeehouses and elsewhere—venues that provide novel opportunities for teaching and learning. As a result, they’re able to bring the message of Judaism to a larger audience and to forge Jewish community in new, unconventional places.” In this way, the economy can only help accelerate the kind of change already envisioned by, for example, Rabbis Without Borders, founded this spring to encourage and train rabbis to offer Jewish leadership and insight to a broader cross-section of the public.

“Rabbis Without Borders was founded because it was clear even before the recession that rabbis needed to change and grow in order to respond to the postmodern world,” said Rabbi Rebecca W. Sirbu, its director. “Jews are not found only in synagogues; in fact many Jews never enter a synagogue or Jewish institution. No matter what the economic situation is rabbis need to be more creative in how we teach the meaning of Jewish wisdom.”

Cohen, along with other rabbis interviewed, believes that the rabbinic educational community had laid the groundwork for a bit of a rabbi glut even before the economy began to nosedive. “Rabbinical schools are pumping out rabbis,” Cohen said. “But nobody really addressed the question about where they were all going to work. And where there are jobs—in communities that are dying with no real hope of being revitalized—rabbis are not willing to go.” While the Reform, and Reconstructionist movements each have one affiliated seminary ordaining rabbis, and the Conservative movement has two (in addition to JTS, there is the Ziegler School at American Jewish University in Los Angeles), there are several non-denominational rabbinical schools in operation—including Hebrew College in Newton, Massachusetts; the “Modern Open Orthodox” Yeshivat Chovevei Torah in New York; and the Academy for Jewish Religion in Riverdale, New York, founded in 1956— that also add about 30 new rabbis to the market each spring. Some rabbis claim, with frustration, that graduates of unaffiliated seminaries will work for less, thus “taking” jobs from their affiliated counterparts.

The president of the Union for Reform Judaism, Rabbi Eric Yoffie, counters that there’s room for everyone. “I am someone who believes there can never be too many rabbis,” he said. “At any given moment the congregations in our movement may not be able to absorb more, but there are other things to do. We need more rabbis on campuses, in JCCs, in federations, in youth work.” Rabbi Ellenson of Hebrew Union echoes that thought. “We need liberal rabbis on college campuses and in Jewish organizations” he says. “There is a strong need for humane, liberal interpretations of Judaism to be put forth in the public arena. By placing our rabbis in these positions we serve the religious needs of a very diverse population, and that is all to the good.”

URJ’s Yoffie even says, perhaps counter-intuitively, that now is a time to redouble recruiting efforts. “There’s this notion that you have more students in, for example, business and law school during economic crisis because while there aren’t jobs now, there will be when they get out. Will that same dynamic work in the rabbinate? It’s not clear. All this talk about there being fewer jobs and all the uncertainties may lead to fewer students,” he says. “My concern is that four or five years from now that as the economy comes roaring back—we hope—we’re going to need more rabbis to serve our congregations and our communities and they aren’t going to be there.” So far, Yoffie can rest easy: seminary admissions officers say applications—from people seeking deeper Jewish meaning and a detour from the job market—are up.

Rabbis in pulpits may be forced to reexamine their roles as well—in ways, some say, that can strengthen the communities they serve. They and those who work with them concur that many synagogues will survive, even thrive, based in large part not just on the size of their endowment, but also on their ability to forge most fully the relatively new model of congregational rabbi as neither autocrat nor employee, but as leader and partner.

While a generation ago, many Jews grew up with “their” rabbi functioning as a top-down (and white, straight, married, male) head of household, healthy congregations—and smart rabbis—today strive for a “brit” (covenant) or “sacred partnership,” said Rabbi Steven E. Kaye, a rabbinic employment coach and consultant based in Denver. It’s even more necessary in the downturn—especially with many rabbis foregoing raises and doing more for less—and it creates an even more vital community for the long term. Eric Yoffie offers the example of congregational bikur cholim, visiting the sick. “If rabbis are saying to their congregants, ‘This is more than I can handle; people are not going to get visited unless our laity comes forward and takes this on as an ongoing project,’ then that’s a wonderful thing,” he said.

For many adult Jews, “their” rabbi was also the same rabbi that saw them through Hebrew school and high school, welcomed them back from college at High Holy Days, perhaps even married them. That model has changed in recent decades as well, with rabbis leaving jobs more frequently, including those they once might have been expected to keep until retirement. Now, though, we may see a return, if small-scale and short-term, to the earlier pattern, with rabbis staying in positions they might otherwise have left. “There is some good in the natural shifting and dynamics of life in terms of positions opening and then being occupied by a new generation,” he said. “In many instances at the current moment, that has certainly been placed on hold.”

Still, individual rabbis are endeavoring to see the upside. One Conservative rabbi in his late 40s is on the last year of his contract at a New England synagogue; while he’s ready for something new, he’s not about to leave: “As much as I don’t want to be looking for a job at age 50 in a bad economy I don’t want to be looking for a job at age 60 in a bad economy, either.” (He requested not to be named because of the sensitivity of his upcoming negotiations.) When it comes time to renew his contract, he said, “I’m going to say this is it: I’m going to stop looking around until I retire.” Much as he’d like to be somewhere “more exciting,” he said, his commitment to not leaving has renewed his dedication to finding ways to build and revitalize the congregation. He also recalled the pleasure of coming back from rabbinical school to visit the rabbi who’d been at his home synagogue since he was 6. “There is a benefit to longevity,” he allowed. “I’m not sure the old pattern wasn’t better.”

Of course there also is a silver lining for synagogues in an economic downturn: those hiring right now are able to choose from more, and more qualified, job applicants. And within a few years, future applicants might have more diverse resumes after they’ve held jobs in universities, social service agencies, Jewish communal organizations—and as some rabbis interviewed reported doing, take college-level classes in the increasingly attractive skill of fundraising.

“It’s a sad and difficult time, no two ways about that,” said Ora Prouser, executive vice president and academic dean of the non-denominational seminary Academy of Jewish Religion. “But the economic situation has also led to some moments of real creativity.” Reform rabbi and former lawyer Tom Alpert, 54, whose interim pulpit job at a Connecticut synagogue recently ended, is considering—among other things—building a circuit-riding rabbi program for underserved communities in the Northeast based on existing models in the South. Margot Stein, a 48-year-old Reconstructionist rabbi, seeing her longtime freelance gigs for Jewish organizations dry up, is launching a tutoring and bar and bat mitzvah prep business for children who, like her son, have special needs.

As more rabbis expand their own horizons, so too do they expand the scope, and definition of Jewish community. Whether in Jewish organizations or fundraising class or even Starbucks, rabbis may come into more contact with unaffiliated Jews, those without a rabbi they call “theirs.” That in itself holds promise. “The Talmud says that when questions of law arise, one way to find the answer is to ‘Go see what the people are doing,’” said Rabbi Alpert. “If we are looking to create, and perpetuate the rabbinate, we have to go see what the people are doing.”

Especially not me. David has his younger sister, Anna. But right now, Bess and I have something major in common: we are only children. For Bess, that coveted status will last until early December, when her little brother, whom we are calling Ptui-Ptui-Ptui, is due to arrive. That is when my daughter’s world will change forever, and when I, her mother, will be officially, and utterly, out of my depth.

I’m not the only parent in this equation, of course. But when David was younger and his parents ran errands, they would leave Anna in his charge. My husband would take his sister by the shoulders and say, They’re never coming back. We are not going to him for tips.

Friends tell me it can be heartbreaking to watch a first child try confusedly, even desperately, to cling to her never-before-challenged spot as the center of the known universe. I see it already: Bess gestures for me to hold her sippy cup like a baby bottle, or she suddenly starts suckling at my collarbone, even though she hasn’t nursed in almost a year.

Maybe my own experience as an only child puts certain things in perspective. To be sure, being a doted-on singleton has advantages. In the post-college period, for instance, I lived in my own place and worked at an office in my father’s office building, enabling me to drop off dirty laundry with him, and get it back clean and folded, sometimes with a side of brisket.

Still, it’s not all upside. There were also lonely days. Looking back, I guess it’s significant that my most vivid daydreams were about all the kids from ZOOM coming over to play. It was often very quiet in our house, save for the plodding basso profundo of public radio’s Robert J. Lurtsema. My parents, through some sort of echolocation, always knew exactly where I was. If I opened the door to the basement (repository of a mildewed copy of Looking for Mr. Goodbar), I’d hear, from three rooms away or another floor entirely: Don’t let the cat in! Small wonder that I spent a lot of time at my friend Liz’s. She had four siblings and parents who listened to the Beach Boys and a house so big you could smoke pot even when they were home.

When I did leave the house, I generally had on my person a nametag, pepper spray, water wings. With no siblings to compete for my parents’ attention, I was overscrutinized, overprotected. I still cannot get over the fact that my husband was instructed to leave a message on his mom’s office phone if he was going to be out late, so that he wouldn’t wake his parents. Are you kidding me? His mother slept while he was out? Bess may chafe at her competition, but she will not suffocate.

Maybe I’m getting ahead of myself. By adolescence, Bess will have gotten used to the two-kid setup, and have found other, more complex things to blame me for. And later, she’ll be comforted, at least, to know she won’t have to deal with us in our crotchety dotage alone. Right now, I’m more concerned about helping her through the most immediate adjustment. Like all the fuss, for example, at the bris. (Oh God, the bris. Kein ayin hora.)

Who knows, maybe she’ll thrill to the sight of a sharp object poised over the reviled interloper. Plus, we know Bess loves whitefish. But on that day, I don’t want her to play the role of the toddler who needs to be entertained (or who will no doubt entertain us with some darndest-thing as did one of our friends’ kids who recently asked of a new brother, What will happen if we stop feeding him? ). I would like to see the bris—a ritual representing God’s covenant with Abraham and the Jews—as an opportunity to start forming the shape of our new family quadrangle. Via the bris, I want to enter into a covenant with Bess too. I will help her, fumble though I may, find her place in the world apart from being a big sister, and as a big sister.

How? I haven’t been able to find a dedicated blessing for a sibling to read at a bris, or any particular sibling blessing at all. Plus, well, she can’t read. So here’s something else to start with. On the occasion of brit milah, the baby is traditionally placed briefly on the chair of Elijah —carved and fancy for the occasion, or any chair designated as such—as the prophet Elijah (who, according to legend, wanders the earth serving as witness to and guest at liminal moments including circumcisions, seders, and Havdalah rituals). I would like to designate for Bess, to honor her role at the ceremony and in our family, a chair of Miriam.

See, I can’t really tell her how to be a big sister. But I can tell her about Miriam, perhaps the Bible’s best-known big sister. After Pharaoh [insert toddler-friendly euphemism for "gave the order to kill all newborn Jewish boys"], it was Miriam who brilliantly prompted Pharaoh’s daughter—having plucked her little brother Moses from the life-saving bulrushes—to take on their own mother, the Jewish slave Yocheved, as his nurse, thus raising him with his family, as a Jew. Miriam’s relationship with her brother was not uncomplicated (later in life, God struck her with a gross skin disease for speaking ill of Moses’ wife, but then relented at Moses’s own request) but her legacy as a prophetess remains intact, and revered. At Bess’s naming ceremony, we invoked Miriam’s well—said in the Midrash to follow and sustain the Jews as they wandered through the desert—by dipping her heels in water. Midrash also has it that Miriam’s well appears at Havdalah. So Bess’s very birth, at the fading of Shabbat, invoked Miriam, too.

For Bess the birth of her brother—Ptui Ptui Ptui—will be a Havdalah, a separation, a shift from before to after: from only to sibling, from owning to sharing, from certainty to challenge. He will never know the difference. She will. I know that shift may not, at least at first, smell sweetly of wine and spices. But Bess will also have the chance, like Miriam, to protect and nourish and celebrate freedoms she cannot now contemplate. So here is something we will soon have in common, too: I’m actually a little jealous.

Lynn Harris is the co-creator of BreakupGirl.net and the author of two novels including, most recently, Death by Chick Lit.

But I’d never been screamed at like this before. And this time, I was the one trying to pray.

It was early morning—the sun muted, but already hot—at the Wailing Wall, or Kotel as it’s known in Hebrew. I had jumped at the chance to join some of David’s female colleagues at a prayer service there. Though I’d been to Jerusalem before, it still felt more like David’s city than mine: He had more friends there, more history, a deeper connection. But this was an only-in-Jerusalem chance to do something I would not have done if it were not for him; it was something I could do only by and for myself. It was a perfect marriage of, well, us: meditative and combative, prayer and protest.

This particular service was the monthly gathering put together by Women of the Wall (WOW), an interdenominational group that has fought since 1988 in courts and in situ to allow women to pray as a group at the Kotel, wearing tallitot, and handling, being called to, and reading from Torah. All those things constitute a colossal violation of the way some Orthodox interpret halacha, Jewish law. Officially, only individual (liturgical or personal) prayer by women is permitted at the Wall, and then, of course, only on the women’s significantly smaller side. (Egalitarian groups are now—with some limitations—permitted to conduct services at the outlying Robinson’s Arch.)

We’d first gotten our bearings in a brief preparatory service in the nearby ruins of the Hurva Synagogue. And then we wrapped ourselves in prayer shawls, hoisted the Torah, and started walking, shoulder to shoulder, toward the women’s side of the wall. I felt a fizzy surge of defiance, of “Look at me, Mom!” pride. Years earlier, my mother, whose feminism I’d had the good sense not to rebel against, had shown me the feminist documentary Half the Kingdom, which featured women reading Torah at this sacred site in 1988. Attempting to, anyway; men hurled invective—and chairs—from the other side. This visible, visceral, tangible display of misogyny had made me cry tears both angry and inspired.

So that morning I was prepared, at least, for the reaction of the men on the plaza in front of the wall, their heads turning toward us, one by one, faster and faster, their eyebrows flying high, their mouths forming perfect Os of anger.

But being warned and being prepared are two different things. And what I was not ready for at all was the reaction of the women among whom we had come to pray. (Was this part not in the movie? I just don’t remember.) As we tried to make our way down the narrow passage toward the women’s side of the wall, they—and their children—closed a swirling circle around us, blocking our way, drowning our voices with their own, screaming into our ears and eyes, shaking fists at the sky.

I tried to stare at my siddur, blur my peripheral vision, and concentrate on the words of the opening psalms. But there was no way. All I could do was mouth them, and still I lost my place. The women surrounding us hissed, they spat; I shook. In a rumble with Operation Rescue—who, recall, are protesting what they consider murder—these women would win. At some point before we completed the service, our group members nodded to each other in silent agreement that yes, it was time to retreat.

In the presence of those women, I have to admit, I felt less defiant. Deflated. Maybe even a little chastened. With the men, it was easy to feel “us” vs. “them.” With the women, it was “us” vs. “us.” I felt as if I’d committed an act of intimate trespass.

Yet I was not trespassing. Not on that day, or any other day when I, a liberal Jew, go to experience the wall. On one level, I realize that it is just that: a wall. A structure of immense archeological, historical, and symbolic significance, but not of magical wish-granting powers. Even so, when I am there, I get all goopy and moved and superstitious. Even though I don’t believe in wish-list prayer, I believe that any entreaties—including, pretty please, Barack Obama—we write and tuck into a nook will at least land in the inbox of a higher power. I tear up when I think of the famous photo of Israeli soldiers reaching the wall for the first time in 1967; I tear up when I think of my mother, in tears herself on her first post-1967 visit to Jerusalem, touching the wall with one hand and holding mine in the other.

But when I’m at the wall, I am also made to feel—at best—like a visitor, like someone poking her head into a beautiful old church while Mass is taking place. We own this place, say those who make the rules there; you tourists, we tolerate. Mostly. This past summer, when I went to take Bess—l’dor va’dor—to touch those stones, and to pray for the health of her then-microscopic sibling, I was reprimanded by a roaming modesty cop for removing my shoulder-covering sweater, even though I was way up near the exit. I do not mind covering up, in principle, in any place of worship; I would anyway. I do mind being told to do so. Our wall, our rules. Us here, you there, praying only one way.

Of course, just about any liberal American Jew’s feelings about just about anything in Israel are mixed. So, yes: I resent that my—and, I imagine, many other liberal Jews’—experience of the wall needs to be mediated through someone else’s. For me, a glimpse of the mechitza inspires rage even as a glimpse of the stones inspires awe; when I see the wall, I have equally strong urges to drop to my knees and to bare my breasts. Why should this wall belong to one particular group of Jews any more than it belongs to those soldiers, to David’s congregants, to my daughter?

But as I left the wall this most recent time, grousing about the sweater incident—it was 95 degrees, for God’s sake!—I started thinking about how I’d explain it to Bess if she were old enough to understand. Tempting as it is to be ornery, I knew that a gentler, accepting-of-difference approach would probably be a more wholesome way to go. Which brought me, in a conversation with David over fresh-squeezed juice, to the concept of clal yisrael—the community of Israel as a whole. In that spirit, here is the homework I’m giving myself: to consider that everyone who finds meaning in the wall, no matter the “rules,” are my brothers and (yes) sisters. It’s not as hokey as it sounds. After all, that’s precisely why my encounters at the wall rankled far deeper and longer than any clinic protest. You know, it’s always worse when it’s family.

And that’s exactly where, by the very same token, I must work to find a place of peace. Contrary though it sounds, it is possible, and maybe necessary, to both protest unjust divisions and avoid perpetuating them. My prayers may not be halachically correct to all, but they are as authentic as any. And that, for me, is enough. Because the wall belongs to all of us. And that is why, with or without tallit and Torah, I will keep going back.

Where we happened to be—eating our ritual first-night shwarma on a bustling avenue called Emek Refaim—it was as if a busy street had suddenly frozen into the motionless tableau at the end of a play. Everyone stopped walking and talking; people got out of their cars in the middle of the street. For one moment, once this year, the street became its name, translated literally: “valley of ghosts.”

Then, when the sirens stopped, everyone picked up just where they’d left off, many of them brushing away tears. There it was, it seemed to me: life in Jerusalem, and Israel, all in three moments. You eat, you walk, you laugh. Then, a memory—or a threat—intrudes, and you stop. And after that, you keep going. This, I have come to learn, is the shape that life and hope take here. Not because a particular day brings particular promise, but because, in Israel, just being here, and going on, is what you do. (Speaking of going on, the Day of Remembrance is directly followed by Israel Independence Day, which you might also call, like our July 4, Hibachi Day.)

And in fact, the first draft of this column was about how May’s Grill Day in the park set the tone, how peaceful Jerusalem feels this summer: cafés full, security guards slouching out front. That was until around lunchtime early this month, when text messages started zipping around the city: bulldozer piguah. A terrorist attack. A bulldozer?

A friend called to check in; the bus overturned in the melee was “our” line from our rented apartment into downtown, but we were all fine, nowhere near.

Now, though, it does feel as if our trip this summer—three months, for my husband’s half-sabbatical—has a before and an after. Even though the driver seems to have been a lone gunman (and we have those at home in New York), I feel—rightly or wrongly, superstitiously or realistically—a little less safe. I was thinking of writing this in a café, but instead I stayed home. This could change, I’m sure, but the way I feel right now, I may also be done with the bus.

This means my previous trips to Jerusalem with David now have a before and after as well, though in a slightly more complex way. He has been here many times, as a college student, a rabbinical student, and guy who loves Israel. I’ve been here four times: once with family to tour the country and see cousins in Haifa, thrice with David. We first came here together as boyfriend and girlfriend when he was doing a two-week rabbinical study program at the Shalom Hartman Institute. (My six-word memoir from that time: “Engaged in Jerusalem. Thank you, God.”)

On that trip in 2003, I knew deep down that fearing a piguah at every turn was like being a tourist convinced that New York City after eight p.m. really was just like The Warriors, but still. I was scared. It was a tenser time: two bus attacks in the two months before we arrived (and two the two months following). We rented cell phones (as people used to), “only for emergencies.” We walked everywhere. And even so, every time a bus passed, I’d actually brace myself and think—perversely—“Kapow!”

The next trip, one summer later, was quieter. We drove into East Jerusalem, more than once, without feeling like war reporters or clueless daredevils. On a day trip with Rabbis for Human Rights, we visited an Arab town that the still-new security wall had divided clean in two: students on one side, school on the other. No attacks for six months, but I still would not ride the bus.

This trip, I bought a ten-ride bus pass. No attacks since 2004, except the yeshiva massacre in March, also apparently the work of a single madman. Still, it had taken a while for me to feel comfortable coming here at all—especially with our daughter, Bess. How could I take my child into any situation with increased risk? (How—I eventually decided—could I both stick to that reasoning and ever leave the house?)

Once here, though, we are again reminded—both before and after the “bulldozer piguah”—most of life here is life. As Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai wrote in “Tourists”:

Once I was sitting on the steps near the gate at David’s Citadel and I put down my two heavy baskets beside me. A group of tourists stood there around their guide, and I became their point of reference. “You see that man over there with the baskets? A little to the right of his head there’s an arch from the Roman period. A little to the right of his head.” “But he’s moving, he’s moving!” I said to myself: Redemption will come only when they are told, “Do you see that arch over there from the Roman period? It doesn’t matter, but near it, a little to the left and then down a bit, there’s a man who has just bought fruit and vegetables for his family.”

The whole bus hushes when the news comes on the radio every hour—and here, there is new news every hour—but the passengers continue on, to school, to work, to buy fruit and vegetables. People find their own ways to feel safe: someone told a friend of mine, yes, visit Israel, come see us in Tel Aviv, but whatever you do, don’t go to Jerusalem. (Of course, Tel Aviv is no stranger to attack or threat; when we there a few weeks ago, an entire block of central Dizengoff was evacuated because of a “suspicious package.” That kind of thing is so routine that it would never make the news.)

Illustration based on Western Wall by Jon Caves; some rights reserved.

And people keep coming: tourists, students, individuals and families. The overall numbers of people making aliyah are going down—and research shows that fewer and fewer American Jews under forty consider Israel a significant part of their Jewish identity—but still: more than five thousand olim just this year. They come to live; they even come to fight. I keep thinking of the night we met a friend of Bess’s young babysitter (herself a recent olah), an American in his Israeli army uniform, barely twenty, pale-skinned and wispy, his massive backpack practically bending him in half. He could be surfing, or applying to grad school, but here, now, any day, something could happen and he could go to war. And yet here he is, on a brief leave, watching Grey’s Anatomy on our couch.

David’s father made aliyah, too, staying for eight years in the ‘50s and fighting for a country whose religion he did not espouse in a ritual or theological sense, but whose very existence moved him enough to pick up his life, and a gun. (Having served as a soldier and worked on a kibbutz, he ultimately decided that he needed to return to a more stable life in the States.) During part of his service, he was stationed on Mount Scopus, then an island of Israeli territory in the middle of Jordanian-controlled East Jerusalem. Thirty-five years later, in a reunified city, David studied at the Hebrew University on Mount Scopus, in freedom.

I admire David’s father. I admire David. I admire all the people who come here planning to stay. I admire the people who live here and don’t leave. I admire their ability to live with—not in spite of—danger and uncertainty as part of their lives. “An attack like this won’t bring life to a halt,” the owner of a business near the bulldozer attack told Haaretz. “There’s no such thing as a lull in Jerusalem.”

Still, now that I’ve been here for longer than I’ve ever been in any other foreign country, now that—thanks to ulpan—I’m much more comfortable ordering coffee and arguing with cab drivers in Hebrew, now that I’ve stocked a pantry and hired babysitters and hung my laundry out to dry, now that I’ve dipped in more than a tourist’s toe, I see the importance of moving beyond my inherited relationship to Israel: Israel as reparation, Israel as testament to Jewish survival, as a living reminder of the Holocaust and of ongoing threat. This is the Israel of my mother (and so many of her generation), who heard, listening at the keyhole, the stories of her only Polish cousin who survived the Holocaust and made her way, through some miracle, from Auschwitz to Manhattan. It is the Israel that was safe haven for my mother’s father’s brother and his family, who left Poland for Argentina before the war and ultimately settled here. My mother visited here, alone (but for her dreamy affair with an Egged bus driver), before 1967; my most indelible memory of Israel—okay, after my engagement—is seeing her cry when she touched, with one hand, holding mine with the other, the Western Wall for the first time.

But as many Jewish thinkers now understand, Israel must not derive its identity only from the past, only from—inspiring though it may be—persistence in the face of threat. That’s surviving, not thriving. And to what end? That’s the real question. What about an Israel built on Jewish values, timeless and current? A country that has produced poets, philosophers, advances in medicine and science? Like Amichai himself, who, we like to joke, showed up at our wedding, when we each—unbeknownst to the other beforehand—chose to quote him in the vows we spoke to each other during our ketubah signing ceremony.

Stay with me. I want to be you.

In this burning country

words have to be shade.

Even though David fully supported the vote I cast—for Clinton, okay? For Clinton!—there were times as I contemplated my choice that I felt very, very alone. My neighborhood (home to a group of Obama boosters called The Audacity of Park Slope) was all Obama, all the time; in fact, it turned out to be one of only two Brooklyn districts that went his way that day. I kept getting email from friends, cool friends with enviably hip lifestyles, urging me to support his campaign. All Facebook kept telling me when I logged in were things like “So-and-so has joined the group Rock with Barack” and “So-and-so also has a crush on Obama.” Nothing there about Hillary. Nothing at all. I contemplated changing my “status” to something like “Lynn Harris wonders if she’s the only person on Facebook voting for Hillary Clinton,” but something stopped me. What was it?

Then, on the day of the primary, I got an email from a friend who made a point-by-point pro-Clinton case so solid that it erased any wisps of lingering doubt about how I had, earlier that morning, cast my vote. (That doubt mainly came in the form of wishing there were some way to both vote for Clinton and register some sort of official “rock on!” for Obama, as well as a “Luv ya!” for Edwards.) The only downside of the email was that it made me wish I had brought Bess to the polls, so that she would have been there with me to at least, you know, osmose the exhilaration of pulling the lever for a woman—woman running against a black man, no less, both with admirable and vote-forable-politics. May my daughter grow up in a country where this experience is utterly unremarkable. Without moving to Liberia.

I wrote my friend back to say thanks. “Yeah!” he replied. “It’s so nice to hear of other ‘young’ people for Hillary Clinton. Sometimes I feel like I’m in that old Saturday Night Live parody of Invasion of the Body Snatchers where all the hippies became Reagan pod people.”

Aha! That’s why I felt alone. It wasn’t so much that I was outnumbered, because if you look at the numbers that day, I wasn’t. It was this: All the cool kids are voting Obama. I, the Hillary supporter, am the pod person, the old guard, the fogey. And what irony! Under most other historical circumstances, the woman in Hillary’s position would be the boat-rocker, the bringer of a new day. But in this race, Clinton—with her husband, her entrenchment, her pantsuits—represents the “establishment.” Obama has a movement; Clinton has a machine. Obama is a Mac, Clinton is a PC. In this race, ladies and gentlemen, Hillary Clinton is The Man.

Should we consider this progress? We should, at the very least, consider it dumb luck. Obama’s presence in this race—the audacity of timing—is Clinton’s “Snakes. It had to be snakes.” But how did we skip the part where we have to actually elect a woman to high office before she can represent a certain status quo? What do we make of reports that some girls and young women find Obama to be the candidate—the candidate—who represents “change”? Is this refreshing, or depressing?

It’s refreshing if you take it to mean that we are collectively enlightened enough to be judging a female candidate solely on her merits, not her gender. To this I respond, “AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!” That’s not to say that certain individuals—my email friend, say, or Paul Krugman—are unable to form that kind of unfettered opinion. But come on. We have not come that long a way, baby. Never mind the peculiarly virulent anti-Clinton misogyny (which, it bears noting, has been compared—with all the proper caveats—to anti-Semitism). I think even feminists-on-paper have knee-jerk sexist reactions to Clinton, reactions analogous to that reflexive, racist urge to cross the street when a black person approaches. That niggling sense that she is cold or distant, inauthentic? It’s inconsistent with people’s personal reports—as described in George Packer’s recent New Yorker article about the leading Democratic candidates—and I believe it comes from an ingrained expectation that women should be warm. (Which, if Clinton were, would be taken to mean she’s not tough enough.) Would you ever accuse a man—in terms of being ruthless or calculating—of doing whatever it takes to win? No one calls McCain shrill—though really, they ought to start.

And the mainstream media, of course, is not helping. Not helping at all. Katie Couric asked Clinton to confirm the details of her proposed initiatives for constraining prescription drug and managed care expenditures nickname in high school: “Miss Frigidaire.” Couric also asked Clinton what she would do if she did not win the race. Uh, Hillary Clinton is a SENATOR.

Much is also made in the media about “how women are voting.” (As if we are all on one giant Listserv. “I’ll vote for her if you vote for her!” “Okay, what should we wear to the poll?”) I have seen great frowning upon the possibility that women—especially us stodgy old-guard feminists—would vote for Hillary because she’s a woman. But I have also seen articles reporting snidely, even gleefully, with a “Gotcha!” tone, that—this just in!—some women do not support Clinton. (One New York Observer article noted that women’s magazines did not endorse Hillary. It also noted, as an aside, that the women’s magazines do not endorse candidates. Where’s the story?) Globe and Mail columnist Karen Von Hahn—griping that her own daughter doesn’t know who Gloria Steinem is—ascribed the failure of women to support Hillary en masse to “feminism’s failure to create true sisterhood.” Good lord. Seems the woman—or at least the first woman in this position—can’t win for running.

There were also reports, though, of women who—having entered their polling places still undecided—closed the curtain, faced the levers, and found themselves unable to NOT vote for the woman. This I do not find reductive. This I find deeply stirring.

Also stirring: Hillary Clinton’s thank-yous on Super Tuesday. “I want to thank all my friends and family, particularly my mother,” she said, “who was born before women could vote, and is watching her daughter on this stage tonight.” (Cut to me, wiping away tears). No matter what happens in the next round of primaries, I want Bess, one day, to watch that clip. (Even if YouTube, by then, is streamed directly into her brain.) Von Hahn says—and here the two of us agree—”The hard truth is that we have failed to impress upon our own daughters that women’s issues still matter.” I do not want to fail there. I want Bess to grow up knowing who Gloria Steinem is. (For me, it’s easy: Steinem spoke at my high school graduation. Good story.) Seventeen or so years from now (which is really not that long), if a woman is a true establishment candidate by then, in a good way, I want Bess to to have osmosed the same wonder the Forward’s East Village Mameleh sees in her six-year-old. “Isn’t it amazing,” her daughter asked, in the voting booth with her mother, “that 150 years ago, neither of these guys could even vote?” I hope, in other words, that in seventeen years, it really isn’t a big deal if a woman is a real contender for president. And I want Bess to know that that is a big deal.

But what about a way to celebrate Bess’s birthday Jewishly? Her emergence at sunset, her very presence on earth: they are so tied up for me with Shabbat; with Chana’s tearful prayer for a child in the Book of Samuel, recited at Rosh Hashanah; with the “Oseh Shalom” I hummed to numb the pain of birth and of the long empty months that went before. We celebrate Tu B’shvat, the “birthday of the trees,” by eating special nuts and fruits (including pomegranates!). Is there, I wondered, a special menu for the birthday of a child? Any official birthday ritual, a particular blessing, anything?

As it turns out, there is not. Some Jews do believe that birthdays—our Jewish birthdays, calculated on the Hebrew calendar—are auspicious, full of mazel (fortune), good days to make resolutions. (Bess: “I will refrain from all ear infections.”) Traditionally, Jews celebrate a boy’s third birthday, the official start of his Jewish education, by cutting his hair for the first time, a practice known as “uspherin.” (It’s linked to Leviticus 19:23, which forbids eating fruit from newly planted trees for the first three harvests.) And there’s a traditional association of Purim with Moses’ birthday. (The story goes that Haman chose the 7th of Adar—the day Moses died—to issue his death sentence for Persia’s Jews. What he didn’t know was that Moses was also born on that date, making it an auspicious one). And, of course, we all know what 13th birthdays bring.

But that’s about it. According to the Encyclopedia Judaica, “The celebration of birthdays is unknown in traditional Jewish ritual.” There is no official birthday blessing or ceremony. Nothing. This from a religion with brachot for everything from hearing thunder (“Blessed are You, Eternal God, Sovereign of the Universe, for your strength and power fill the world”) to smelling fragrant trees (“Blessed are You, Eternal God, Sovereign of the Universe, who creates fragrant trees”). While much is made in the Torah of the matter of age—Sarah bore Isaac at 90, for example—the only birthday party mentioned in the Hebrew Bible is, apparently, that of Pharaoh. And yet we assiduously observe, every year, the occasion of a loved ones’ yahrzeit, or death-day. A little bit of birthday cake is too much of a kinehora? Truly, Jews are people of the bummer.

Or are we? Writing in Moment magazine, Lisa Farber Miller and Sandra Widener speculate that the lack of scriptural birthday hoopla may have more to do with the Jewish focus on doing rather than being. Miller and Widener reference this midrash on Ecclesiastes: “When a person is born, it is not known what he will be like when grown and what his deeds will be—whether righteous or wicked, good, or evil. When he dies, however, if he departs with a good name and leaves the world in peace, people should rejoice.” In other words, the mere fact that we show up may not itself be cause for celebration. It’s what we do after we get here that matters.

Interestingly, though, while birthdays themselves are not ritually observed, the concept of birth—and the possibilities it offers—is written into the Hebrew calendar. In Exodus 12:1, God says to Moses and Aaron, “This month (Nisan) shall mark for you the beginning of the months; it shall be the first of the months of the year for you.” This is said to be the first commandment the Jews received as a nation. It establishes the Hebrew calendar, where each month is marked by the new moon. (Since years are measured by the sun’s rotation, it’s called a lunisolar calendar. Our Gregorian calendar, in which the months no longer correspond to the moon’s phases, is solar; the Islamic calendar is lunar.) And the time at which the new moon appears—determined in ancient times by eyewitnesses reporting to the Sanhedrin—is, long story short, called the molad, or birth. Thus each Rosh Chodesh (“head of the month,” which comes with its own set of rituals and practices) is itself, in a sense, a birthday—of the moon, and of our people.

Though calendar computation had traditionally been regarded as a secret science, the fourth-century patriarch Hillel II began the practice of fixing the months and the leap years (more about that shortly) in advance. This was partly because persecutions under the Roman emperor Constantius made it hard for the Sanhedrin to meet, prompting confusion about which feast-days were when. (Modern-day analog: the alternate-side parking calendar in New York City.) Hillel’s innovation—which created the permanent Jewish calendar—established a sense of unity among Jews dispersed around the world, making sure that we could celebrate holidays as a single nation, that we all count our days together.

But, if you divide a solar year of 365 days by 12 lunar months, you get about 11 extra days. How to make it come out even? The solution, since ancient times, has been to insert before Nisan, every few years, a 13th “leap” month, Adar II. (Originally, this intercalation was also timed to help insure that Passover would not slip back into winter, and that “spring,” from an agricultural perspective, would not come too early.) A year with a second Adar is called a “pregnant” year. I love that, putting aside the image of actually being pregnant for 13 months, the gestation period of a bowhead whale.

The Jewish calendar is full of even more complex calculations. I haven’t even told you how, traditionally, hours are divided into “parts,” where one part equals 3 and 1/3 seconds, 1/18 of a minute, or 1/1080 of an hour. (You do the math. No, really—YOU do the math.)

Bess with her grandparents

All of which brings to mind Psalm 90:12: “So teach us to number our days, that we may get us a heart of wisdom.” What does this mean, to “number” our days, and how is it supposed to make us wise? I wish I spent less time looking at my calendar, figuring out what’s due when, making lists, keeping track, planning ahead. I wish I could be more like my husband, who has a boundless—if occasionally maddening—capacity for doing only what he is doing, right then, in that moment. I wish that all of my moments with Bess were like his: all Bess, all the time. (Mine: some Bess, some “That reminds me, we need mustard,” some Bess, some “When do I need to start dinner in time to get her into the bath and bed on time?”, some Bess.) But we do need to “number our days,” at the very least, to prevent chaos—and far beyond that, as Judaism shows us, to find meaning, to know who we are.

The wisdom we can discover, I think, is in working to discover for ourselves a balance between measuring moments and letting them be. Numbering our days: knowing that their number is finite, stopping once a year nonetheless to take formal, festive, buttercream-frosted note. Numbering our days: knowing that no matter how finely we slice them—1,080 parts in an hour!—no matter how complex our calculations and adjustments, we are only responding to the passage of time, not having dominion over it. Numbering our days: filling them full, following the traditional Jewish value of avoiding things that are bitul zman (a waste of time) but also remembering that downtime is hardly wasted. Part of Judaism’s beauty is that this balance is written into our calendar with Shabbat, into our weekly cycle of do, do, do, do, do, do, be. As much as Jews are expected to focus on deeds, actions, and mark-making, expected to follow our calendar as we followed Moses, we can also find wisdom in numbering our days—and our moments—this way: one at a time.

“Did you go to yeshiva?” they asked. “Not exactly. I’m a rabbi.” “Really! Where are you from?” “Brooklyn; my wife’s originally from Massachusetts.” Really! Where in Massachusetts?”

Naturally, it turned out that our tourmates were members of my parents’ shul.

Our daughter, Bess, who’d come along, was five months old. This age, we’d been advised, was the sweet spot for travel: old enough to be pleasant and smiley, not old enough to hurl tapas from tabletops. Or to require kiddie entertainment or solid food. Or to crawl. So for what was possibly our last grownup travel hurrah for a while, we’d chosen Barcelona: a city we already knew and adored, where I speak the languages, where we wouldn’t worry about checking every last thing off the must-see list, where our noses would be buried in garlic, not guidebooks.

I also wanted to take back Barcelona, my beloved Barcelona, much the way an assault survivor takes back the night. Within a week or so of my miscarriage two autums ago, we wisely made plans to visit Barcelona and Paris. We needed something to look forward to: David had longed to see Paris, and I’d longed to take him to the city where I’d spent a summer in 1987 with my family and had visited many times since,

where my father had taught in a summer linguistics institute and I had roamed, practicing Catalan and learning my way around the twisting streets of the Gothic quarter. On our post-trauma trip, joyful as I was to watch David fall in love with Gaudi and Cal Pep and crema Catalana, I could also never forget: This was not Plan A.

Taking Bess to Barcelona this spring brought it all full circle. I carried her everywhere in her BabyBjörn. Facing out and grinning, she cut a “swath of joy,” as we called it, through the crowds of delighted passersby. At the same time, I remembered walking those same streets the year before, swaying between bliss and grief.

And if there’s one city that’s appropriate for such textured layers of memory, such mottled layers of meaning, it’s Barcelona. Blessings for death, blessings for miracles. Turn onto Marlet Street in the Gothic quarter and you’ll notice—or maybe you won’t, since the streets are so crooked anyway—that one wall of one building juts out at a particularly funny angle. Turns out that wall faces southeast, toward Jerusalem. Turns out, in fact, that it’s the southeast wall of the Sinagoga Major, the oldest known Sephardic synagogue, and the oldest in all of Europe. With foundations dating back to Roman times, it became the property of the Crown of Aragon in 1391 and of the Inquisition in 1487. Only within the last decade have its two tiny surviving rooms been unearthed, excavated, and opened to the public. There’s no congregation, but the synagogue offer tours and makes the space available for religious ceremonies. Today, more than five hundred years since the Jews’ expulsion from a country in which we thrived—and which thrived, in part, because of us—Jews travel to the Sinagoga Major from all over the world, from flourishing synagogues of their own, becoming bar and bat mitzvah, standing under the chuppah, serving as living proof of our survival.

Walk a few blocks to the grand gray building housing the Archives of the Crown of Aragon, and go around to the left side. Look at the large rectangular stones that form the walls. Keep looking. Here and there, you’ll see Hebrew letters carved into the rock. But this building never welcomed Jews. Those building stones are gravestones—some upright, some sideways, some upside down—pillaged from the Jewish cemetery after the expulsion. “Blessed are you Adonai, source of the universe, the judge of truth.”

Take the train an hour or so north to Girona, a smaller city where Jews once thrived. Its winding, hunched stone alleys have remained virtually unchanged since the Middle Ages, though the storefronts now offer handmade espadrilles and excellent chocolate. It is the birthplace of the great rabbi and Kabbalist Moshe ben Nachman, or Ramban; it is a birthplace of Kabbalah itself. There, you can walk the narrow, windowless streets—street, really—of the Jewish ghetto, whose location one block from the cathedral nods to both the Jews’ importance to the court and the adage about keeping your enemies closer. I was fortunate enough to spend a summer there, too. In 1992, while my father taught in another linguistics program at the local university, we stayed in an apartment with a grapevined balcony, overlooking a patio in the Jewish quarter containing a modern mosaic of a Jewish star. An innovative Jewish museum has been built since my stay there, but there is no synagogue, no congregation, no Jewish community. And yet, there we were, outside the door of the home where I spent the most magical summer of my life—my husband, my baby, my new family, together.

Back in Barcelona: in the back of a modern furniture store, the clear remnants of a medieval mikvah (Jewish ritual bath). On the wall of a house, embedded like a fossil, are the remnants of an arch over which Jews were said to have climbed to escape a pogrom. They tried to destroy us; we survived to bear witness. A community nearly vanished; we, representing our own—and not just in Lexington, Massachusetts—now walk in its footsteps. In these places, in this place, do we see destruction or salvation? Which blessing do we say?

I believe we say both. Redemption, happy endings, new beginnings, they—as I have learned from the birth of my daughter, and as Barcelona always reminds me—may replace suffering, but they do not erase it. The most important thing about blessings is that we say them at all.

Problem was, she had no idea how. For her, as a kid in Manhattan (and the Bronx), Jewishness was to my mother as water is to whitefish. It was just there, all around. You breathed it. It was what you did, how—and where—you lived. But it was not about observance of ritual or halacha; that, for her father and his free-thinking intellectual friends, belonged back in the Old World. Instead, for my mother and her sister, being Jewish meant rallies, fist-pounding politics, landsmanschaft meetings, Yiddish theater, Zionist songs, noodle kugel, chopped liver. When she became aware that some of her friends were having bat mitzvahs, she asked her father why they didn’t belong to a synagogue. His answer: “Synagogues belonged in Europe, where Jews had nothing else. In America, Jews don’t need synagogues. They have everything else.”

While Lexington, Massachusetts is certainly America—it’s the birthplace of American liberty, after all—it bears little resemblance to New York in the 1940s. It didn’t (and doesn’t) offer the kind of “everything else” my grandfather was talking about. There were Jews there, sure. Lefty politics? Some of that too. But it was unlikely that my mother, no matter how good her kugel, would have been able to find or create for me a Jewish atmosphere there like that of her childhood. (Let’s just say that there isn’t actually a store in Lexington called Minuteman Bagel, but there might as well be.) She was going to have to turn instead to religious ritual and education—and not just for me.

After much soul-searching, and with much trepidation—specifically, the fear that someone would spot her and shout “Trayf!”—my mother decided to join Lexington’s Reform synagogue and enroll me in the religious school. A few weeks before the consecration ceremony for the new children, the rabbi met with the families to welcome us and describe what would happen in the service. We’d stand before the ark, he said, and we’d all recite the Shema.

Mom raced home to phone a Jewish friend. “Sally?” she asked, ‘What’s a Shema?”

I still have a very clear, comforting memory of sitting at the piano with my mother and learning to chant the three simple lines of the Shema, Judaism’s essential affirmation of faith. I had no idea she had just learned them herself.

And now I am a mother who wants to give her daughter memories like that one. (Not to mention a mother who wants to have an apartment big enough for a piano.) I know what a Shema is; if I didn’t, I have a husband who could pretty much break it down for me. That said, I don’t want to cede Bess’ Jewish upbringing to David just because he does Jewish upbringing for a living—though I’ll be happy to give him the floor the first time Bess asks, “Who’s God?” I don’t want him to be the default bearer of our household Jewish standard. I want to start new family traditions, help Bess find meaning in who we are already. But that’s also where I get intimidated. This past Passover, we enjoyed second seder with dear friends and their kids in Boston. When the mom rallied the troops to count the omer—which we never got around to in my house growing up—my first thought was, “What’s an omer?” (Counting the omer is a daily blessing for marking the days between Passover and Shavuot, the holiday commemorating the giving of the Torah. For some reason I can never remember that.)

This is a long way of saying that I am going to have to do some reading. Just because I am a rabbi’s wife does not mean I’m a ringer. We know that when less observant liberal Jews like my mother marry or start a family, they often feel the urge to become more observant—to join a Jewish community, to create a Jewish home, and, often, to give their children more in the way of Judaism than they themselves had growing up. Basically, we’re all looking for ideas and answers—to our childrens’ questions and our own. As I am beginning to discover, there’s an ever-growing library that can help.

The books I’ve collected so far seem to fall into two rough categories: first, those on how to be a Jewish parent; and second, those on how to parent Jewishly—or, how Judaism can help you parent. (Arguably, there’s also a third category of books by sleep experts, but that’s only because the guru status of the biggest-deal expert is such that I hear him called “Reb Ferber.”) The current big-deal book in category number two is psychologist Wendy Mogel’s The Blessing of a Skinned Knee: Using Jewish Teachings to Raise Self-Reliant Children—but we’ll get to that in a later column. Self-reliant only when in her ExerSaucer (referred to by fellow parents as “Overstimulation Station” or “Neglect-atron 2000,” depending), Bess is indeed old enough to sense routine, to respond to music, to be mesmerized by candlelight. So we’re on the Rituals 101-level books number one such as parenting columnist and web doyenne Meredith L. Jacobs’s new The Modern Jewish Mom’s Guide to Shabbat, which David and I just consulted because somehow we keep forgetting when in the rundown on Friday evenings you bless your children (right after lighting the candles). Its approach, like that of Anita The Red Tent Diamant‘s 2000 classic How to Be a Jewish Parent: A Practical Handbook for Family Life, is comprehensive and concrete: here are the blessings; here (traditionally) is when, how, and why you say them; here’s the deal with keeping kosher; here’s how to install a mezuzah on your doorframe; here’s the recipe for Grandma Hilda’s Carrot Ring. Both books invite and assert the flexibility that is key to liberal Jewish practice—it’s still Shabbat if you light candles after sundown, and even if you don’t make brisket—but without crossing the line from lenient to meaningless (“Here’s the recipe for Grandma Hilda’s Pork”).

More and more Jews, it seems, are looking for this kind of gentle, practical, substantive guidance. Traffic to Jacobs’s website, ModernJewishMom, has increased by 300% over the past two years. Diamant’s other venerable guide, Living a Jewish Life: Jewish Traditions, Customs, and Values for Today’s Families, is not only still in print after 15 years, but was just updated and revised. When I asked Jacobs what she thinks accounts for the success, new and renewed, of works like hers and Diamant’s, she said, “Whether it’s a response to September 11 and the kind of world we are now raising our children in, and/or a response to materialism, I think parents are turning to the traditions of our faith to give our children a sense of peace and a sense of self.”

True. But (gasp!) it’s not just about our children. Bequeathing them Jewish traditions can give us a sense of peace, too—as long as we’re able to be comfortable with our own Judaism. Just comfortable! Not experts. “Starting to make Jewish choices as an adult can feel very awkward, even for people who were born Jewish,” Diamant writes in Living a Jewish Life. “There is a sense that you ought to know Hebrew, and when Passover begins, and what the Talmud is. Being uncomfortable in a synagogue or at the prospect of lighting candles might seem to confirm the suspicion that you will never ‘get it,’ that you will never fit in.” True: everyone feels like they’re the one who doesn’t know as much as the person next to them—the one who doesn’t know the melody, who doesn’t know why everyone covers their eyes during that prayer. Thing is, the person singing along perfectly is also wondering how that guy over there knew just when to bow. I’m just learning, we think—they’re the real Jews. Like me: at my husband’s or home shul, I’ve totally got my Jewish game on. But when we have Shabbat lunch with a bunch of rabbis and their even frummier friends, I go into a very “What’s a Shema?” place. How do they keep track of where we are in the post-meal blessing? Do they actually feel joyful because it’s Shabbat, not just because they have the day off? I am always sure that every else’s experience is deeper than my own. Which, if I’m just sitting there feeling inadequate, it definitely is.

Which itself is why it’s a mistake to confuse being less prepared with being less adequate, less experienced with being less Jewish. As my mother ultimately learned, it’s just as Jewish to inquire as it is to know. (Their temple, by the way, has become the center of my parents’ social and spiritual lives. Good call, Mom.) The trick is to get over ourselves—to read how-to books, ask questions, or just observe, and quit worrying about looking stupid. If we’re doing this for our kids, we should learn like them, too. Sitting on the piano bench before my consecration, I don’t remember being afraid that I’d forget the words to the Shema. I just remember that my mother taught them to me.

When my blood pressure came up high on my then-weekly prenatal checkup, the doctor said, “It could be preeclampsia.”

“No,” I said, “It’s definitely Home Depot.”

As it turned out, it was both. Preeclampsia, long story short, is a form of pregnancy-related hypertension that can be life-threatening for mother and baby; the only “cure” is to induce delivery. They kept an eye on me in the hospital all day, threatening to send me home with a baby if I didn’t get my blood pressure down. I called David to tell him that in the race between the two impending changes that had come to define our lives, the baby was pulling ahead.

For several more days it was neck and neck. I was sent home for bed rest; the lighting was installed. Soon, all that was left was the counter. Then one Wednesday, the baby surged forward. I was admitted to the hospital; pre-induction began. My parents, in Boston, were told to start driving. We thought we had a winner.

But the pre-induction procedure, simply speaking, didn’t take. The baby wasn’t ready. I went home. The counter, we learned, was on the way. Looked like the kitchen would take the gold.

Then, at 3:30 a.m. on Saturday, I woke to the sound of heavy rain and felt a pop and a gush. Suddenly stupid, we Googled “water broke” and decided we should probably call the doctor. We left a note for the contractor. “Lynn went into labor, so we won’t be able to meet you and the counter guy. David’s father will be here instead.”

Our daughter Bess Rimona arrived at 6:45 p.m., just as the polish had set on the counter—and just as the sun had set on the city. Between the baby and the kitchen, we called it a tie. And between Shabbat and the rest of the week, Bess came on the cusp, just in time for Havdalah.

After so many false starts, how fitting. Havdalah, marking the end of Shabbat, is about separation and distinction: from Shabbat to the rest of the week, from holy to ordinary. In many ways, of course, our shift was different. We’d gone from holy to extraordinary, from pregnant to parents, from two to three. (And, concurrently, from Formica to fabulous.) Rather than mourn the departure of the neshama yetayra—the “extra soul” that visits on Shabbat—I gathered a tiny new neshama into my arms, slick and wriggling and whole.

At Bess’s naming ceremony, I spoke the words of birkhat hagomel, a blessing said upon emerging safely from a dangerous experience, including childbirth. (Or, under certain circumstances, a brush with Home Depot.) Blessed are You, Adonai our God, Source of the Universe, who bestows kindness on those who are committed, and who has granted to me all kindness. For me, this prayer had extra resonance. In my mind, it was not just for surviving labor. (Blessed are You, Adonai our God, Creator of the Epidural.) After all that preeclampsia fuss—and did I mention I had gestational diabetes?—Bess’s actual birth was blessedly uncomplicated (but for an unpleasant postpartum tangle with a recalcitrant placenta, which I’ll detail in my Rabbi’s Wife’s Placenta column, which is to say, not soon). For me, the danger had begun more than a year earlier: the specter of infertility, the risk of miscarriage realized, the chance that lightning would strike twice and we’d lose yet another. But now, welcoming my daughter into the covenant, I was safe.

Mostly. While I knew the grief of my miscarriage would never vanish, I had assumed that my daughter’s birth would be the next best thing to a cure. In some ways, though, it’s been the opposite. Now that I know what we have, I know even more what we lost. Sometimes I look into Bess’s eyes and think about the ones that never opened. Sometimes I look at Bess’s face and think about the one we never saw. Last year, I wrote a special Havdalah service to mourn our loss. On some Saturdays, even as our Bess gazes at the special three-wicked candle, I think about that, too. As we are also reminded when we recite the evening prayer—of this we can be sure, and for this we can be grateful—the sun will rise, and the sun will set. But when it comes to children—or whatever we believe will make us happy, there are no such guarantees.

Then there are the daily dangers of life: our splintery floors (that’s the next project), our stairs, our stove, our world. When Bess was a week old, we rushed her to the pediatrician because her mouth had turned a bit blue. Assuring us this was normal, the doctor asked, “Didn’t you call us on Monday because her face had turned red?” If Bess ever turns white, we’ll just have to deal with it on our own.

So the Havdalah of Bess’s birth was not simply a transition from sorrow to joy, from hope to happiness. It was, once I’d thought about it, more like the holy-to-everyday transition that we observe every week. Odd as it sounds, laboring all day Saturday struck me as really pretty Shabbat-appropriate. No phones, no email, no worldly worries; just a sheer and utter focus on one moment, then the next, then the next. For me, that made it holy. And so, in that sense, Bess’s noisy, messy, thrashing arrival represented a shift back to the ordinary—a new, fuller ordinary. Rabbinic midrash has it that Miriam‘s well—the well that, in tribute to her chops as a prophet, nourished the people of Israel as they traveled through the desert—appears at the end of Shabbat for us to drink from. And when we bathe Bess in our 9″ deep 18-gauge stainless Blanco Magnum kitchen sink and high-arc faucet with pull-out spray, I am sure, I am scared, I am sustained.

At the time, David had begun to draft a Rosh Hashanah sermon about the ways in which people walk around with invisible, private pain, and how we can support them even if we are unaware of its precise dimensions. In that sermon, he would have described our experience with infertility as one example of such pain. And in that sermon, our experience would have had a happy ending—or at least a happier new beginning. I started picking outfits in my mind. I couldn’t wait.

Then just before yontif, we learned that not only was the prenatal testing indeed behind us, but so, too, was our pregnancy. The baby, we were later informed, had been perfectly healthy. And the procedure we had chosen carried less than one percent chance of loss. But we, as it turned out, were the rare family who bore the heavy weight of that slim chance.

Our wounds too raw to expose, David revised the sermon. Last Rosh Hashanah, I held a friend’s hand as I listened to my husband’s words knowing exactly what was missing, feeling as if the “hidden pain” he was describing hung visibly between us like a thin, sharp wire that would cut me if I moved. And on Yom Kippur I listened more closely to the Unetaneh tokef than ever before. Who shall live and who shall die, indeed. Our creation, our creature, our tiny living soul: its life’s limit had been fixed, its destiny ordained. Like the angels, I shuddered.

This year, 5767, I got my Rosh Hashanah sermon. I am far along enough with baby Kinehora that my pregnancy is public knowledge, my belly practically public space, though it doesn’t always get me a seat on the subway, but that’s for another day. It was easy to select an outfit for the occasion; I have only so many maternity items (and people will just have to understand why I traded my trademark thrilling heels for arch-supporting clogs). David spoke, this year, about diverse approaches to prayer— including his own, last year, at our darkest time.

But my swelling belly was not the only reason I could listen and be okay. It was also because between last year’s Unetaneh tokef and this year’s, recited last weekend on Rosh Hashanah and to be recited again in a few days on Yom Kippur, I learned a little bit more about how to live. How to live all year long, that is, with the very uncertainty that we feel at the end of Yom Kippur, during Ne’ilah, when, we imagine, the gates begin to close.

There’s another reason David and I hid our pain last year. Just after our own loss, one of the synagogue’s families suffered an exponentially greater one. Their older daughter, a bright 28-year-old, was killed in a car accident on the Friday before Rosh Hashanah. The community convulsed with grief. And David and I were reminded that no matter how hard one works for, clings to, or focuses one’s life on a particular vision—get pregnant get pregnant get pregnant—other things happen. And not just to your own vision. Terrible things that you weren’t terribly worried about happen. All beyond your control.

Happy things you had nothing to do with happen, too, all the time. I’m not saying the lesson is that “tragedy lurks around every corner!” (Hard as my mom worked to teach me.) When I got pregnant this time, baruch hashem, I found myself a bit calmer. I certainly didn’t shrug off the possibility of miscarriage or other disaster; far from it. Believe me, I still haven’t. But I worked hard to separate the fact that we chose the procedure that ended our first pregnancy from the notion that we had any control whatsoever over the outcome. And this time, unless I hurl myself down the stairs like in old movies—which, I hear, is actually unlikely to do harm—I have found myself somewhat sturdier in the belief that my pregnancy is going to do what my pregnancy is going to do. And meanwhile, David could get hit by a bus. God forbid, but you see what I’m saying. Of course we have agency; I don’t believe in “fate.” But there is great freedom in accepting, living with, embracing, or—when appropriate—willfully ignoring uncertainty. The alternative, really, can make you crazy.

That’s also why I’ve been somewhat mellow, especially this time around, about superstition. It’s traditional for Jews not to have showers, to leave the baby-to-be’s room empty until his or her advent, and not to disclose names until after the birth. Just this summer, my cousins—who made me a beaded red bindel to ward off the evil eye—practically disinvited me from their father’s unveiling: too superstitious about bellies in graveyards.

I declined several kind offers to host baby showers—due more to a “Jews don’t do such things” gut feeling than to a belief that accepting a new pair of booties would cause us to give birth to an alien. It was also a karmic gesture to my infertile sistren: Should they suffer like I have? Instead, we planned two separate non-shower events to celebrate with friends and receive their non-Playskool blessings. While many mothers find a certain pregnancy book, the one that rhymes with “Mutts to Inspect When You’re Collecting,” the embodiment of evil, I do not believe that my hasty rite-of-passage purchase thereof last year was in any way related to our loss. It killed me to throw out the “pregnancy journal” I’d started, along with various other mementos of the first time—in fact, I made David do it—but it’s not as if our loss would have been easier without them.

For me, it’s come down to addressing this question: Which will make me more insane, having baby items in the house before she’s born, or not having them in the house before she’s born? In response, I have made utterly irrational and inconsistent decisions. The hand-me-down onesies stay in the hall, but the hand-me-down Boppies (current total: three. Please, no more.) make it into the nursery—I mean, den closet. The crib we ordered is ready for delivery, but we told Schneider’s we’d rather wait. In other words, I improvise. I ask myself what I can live with; the answers don’t always make sense. It feels good to wear the bindel, but mainly as a reminder that if God forbid something goes wrong, my family will be there.

Sometimes I wonder if writing about baby Kinehora in the first place will come back to haunt me. Sometimes I look around my expecting moms group and think, “One of us might not make it.” And when I hear Unetaneh tokef again, I may shudder anew. What will happen to me, our baby, our friends, our families this year? I cannot know, I cannot control it. All I can know is how it feels, at this instant, to be 34 weeks pregnant (currently, since you asked, it feels like someone’s doing Tae Bo in my belly), how it feels to watch my husband lead us in prayer, how it feels to mark the passage of another year, how it feels to be sitting, right where I am, in my sensible clogs, right now. To me—as I have learned, in a harder way than I might have liked—that is how it feels to live.

The group seems to have had some success, at least in the “unavoidable” department. Their ubiquitous presence has inspired inevitable jokes (“Isn’t that like vegetarians for Peter Luger?”) and, among some, foam-at-the-mouth rage. The New York Times reported that local Jewish groups were “barely able to contain their loathing.” In the Daily News columnist Lenore Skenazy declared, “Usually I take any piece of paper some poor soul is handing out…. So why do my hands clench into don’t-get-that-thing-NEAR-me fists when someone tries to hand me a pamphlet for Jews for Jesus?”

Why, indeed, do so many of us have a special hate for these people? To begin with, there’s the evangelizing. Most liberal Jews are really not comfortable with that. It feels so…shall we say, Christian? (Reform Jews got so squeamish about “proselytizing” that the URJ president had to issue an official reminder asking congregants to find a comfortable way to encourage conversion.) As Bradley Burston wrote in his column for Ha’aretz, “Believe whatever you want. Practice whatever you preach. Just stay the hell away from us.”

Then there’s the matter of the built-in mind-bender: I’m sorry, no, we cannot be both Jews and “for” Jesus. The “for Jesus” part—that would make us Christians. And it’s indescribably offensive to be told that to become truly “fulfilled” or “completed” Jews, we must, in effect, leave Judaism behind. In fact, the Jew/Jesus thing can be seen as an outright lie. The missionaries might move a step or two down the hate scale if they’d quit playing Jewish music and using the star of David and just say, “Hi there! Before you get on the subway, we’d like you to become a Christian.”

Even with a more honest approach, there’d still be the matter of Christians converting Jews—historically, an extremely uncomfortable maneuver. “There’s more than one way to wipe out a people, and poison, like gas, comes in many forms,” writes Burston. “Sometimes it looks like a leaflet. Sometimes it looks like the Internet. Sometimes it looks like a smile.”

As a Jew, I side with Burston. But as a granddaughter, I find myself trying to make room for a little compassion.

My father’s mother was a Baptist from rural Georgia. Her ancestors had fought in the American Revolution and the Civil War—on the other side. My grandmother was named after her black nanny, the daughter of slaves. She was 10 when the Titanic sank, 30-something during the Depression. She married a railroad man, my beloved granddaddy, who brewed clandestine beer on the back porch. She could fry the hell out of a chicken. And at some point, in addition to being a Baptist, she became “born again,” meaning that she accepted Jesus Christ as her personal savior, which was the one and only way to get to Heaven.

Then my father quietly converted to Judaism for the purpose of marrying a Jew. And my grandmother embraced her daughter-in-law—and my mom, her mother-in-law—despite their vast differences. This was the 1960s, long before our global village had emerged, long before okra showed up on the Food Network. To my mother, the child of Polish-Jewish immigrants, raised in upper Manhattan and the Bronx, where vegetables grew in cans, Atlanta might as well have been Atlantis. Grandmother had been to New York on one occasion, but spent most of her visit cowering in her hotel.

Grandmother truly loved my mother. In part—but not only—because she was a Jew. Grandmother had tremendous respect for Jews. I don’t mean “respect” the way we “respect” the views of people we don’t respect at all. I mean real respect. Grandmother had come to believe Jews were living history, conveyors of the Bible, the people who brought Jesus to the world. And, yes, to Grandmother, the most wonderful thing one could do—for Jews, for humanity, for the Lord—was to bring them to Christ. Long before my father even met my mother, among Grandmother’s favorite charities were the spiritual predecessors of Jews for Jesus.

Grandmother would never miss a chance to raise the issue of Jesus with her daughter-in-law. And so it was that my mother learned to cook pole beans with ham hocks, and also to gently say things like, “Well, it’s not how I was raised, but I’ll surely give it some thought.”

Then came me. When I was little, Grandmother was magic, like the enchanted uncle in the Nutcracker, forever pulling baubles and goodies from bottomless pockets. She’d show me how to blow soap bubbles from a wooden spool; she’d fold sheets of newspaper in an accordion, snip here and there with silver scissors, and—presto!—a dancing chain of paper dolls. When she sewed me a black velvet skating skirt for the town rink’s annual Ice Show, she sewed a matching one for my precious stuffed Bunny.

But interspersed with all the Grandmother stuff was what I called “the God stuff.” When she read to me, it wasn’t Curious George or Clifford, it was Jonah and Daniel, David and Goliath. I remember being scolded for saying, “Gee,” which evidently counted as taking the name of the Lord in vain. At one point, she offered to pay me $1 for every Bible verse I memorized. (Could I be the only rebbetzin who can recite John 3:16?) If Dad hadn’t put a stop to it, I’d have stood to earn a cool $31,202.

Eventually Grandmother got pretty specific. Jesus loved me, she told me, and if I loved him back, I’d be “saved.” Specifically, saved from spending eternity in hell. This was not because Jews go to hell; this was because everyone unsaved goes to hell. Grandmother truly meant this—and she meant well by it. For her, this, the Heaven with clouds, the Hell with flames, was real—certainly as real as anything in what we call the real world. Yes, it scared me—we laugh, but what if she’s right?—but mostly, even when I was young, it made me feel bad. I hated having to smile and say “I’ll try to believe.” Trust me, there was no refusing Grandmother—at least not openly. But it also broke my heart a little to lie.

For many years I wondered—and discussed with my rabbi—whether it would ever be okay to lie the other way. Say I’m with her on her deathbed. Say she asks in a weak whisper whether if I’m saved. Why crush her with a no? If I had the power to help my only grandmother die happy, why should I not use it?

No such scene ever occurred. When I arrived at her nursing home that last time, my parents were packing up: clothes and costume jewelry, numerous Bibles, crocheted coasters, and brochures entitled “Bringing the Jew to Christ.” I found, taped to her bedside lampshade, an art project she’d asked me to do 20 years earlier, at age 10: the 23rd Psalm, written in my best penmanship and with little pictures—green pastures, still waters—I’d drawn along the margin like an illuminated manuscript. Clearly that, at least, had brought her some joy.

I do not forgive or feel bad for Jews for Jesus the way I do my grandmother. For one thing, if you’d pressed her about nomenclature, she’d probably have said, “Well yes, accepting Jesus would make you Christian.” No confusion—that is, duplicity—there. When it comes to Jews for Jesus, what I’d like to be able to say is something like, “How our sympathies shift when we get to know the people about whom we make assumptions!” But it’s not nearly that simple. My own intimacy with their cause makes me both understand and resent them more. It also makes me miss my grandmother. Who also, by the way, would have adored my husband.

1) “Yay!”

2) “David will teach her to throw; ice hockey will be my job,”

3) “She can wear the fabulous baby clothes my grandmother made me, including the dress with the appliquéd dog that turns into a dachshund when you spread out the pleat,” and

4) “Hmm, no bris.” 

(Since you asked, by the way, we are currently calling the baby Kinehora.)

And about the brit milah (“covenant of circumcision”), or lack thereof, I also had several thoughts. The first, and most fleeting, was relief. Though the brises I’d been to had never particularly freaked me out, I’d also never been the parent of the child going—if briefly and anesthetized—under the wee knife. But for another passing moment, I also felt ever so slightly sad. Believe me, this had nothing to do with actually valuing boys over girls, or a bris over a naming ceremony. (Either way, our child will be a Jew, and there will be whitefish.) But to me—beyond rationality, beyond medicine, beyond anything anyone wants to say about patriarchy and leaving out the girls, most of which will be true—there’s something visceral about a bris. Something, given that blood and knives are involved, that says, “Yep, we’re pretty serious about that covenant.” Something that makes the ceremony so paramount that it’s performed on the eighth day of life, no matter what, even if it’s Shabbat or Yom Kippur. Something that fascinated and drew me in during my years of infertility and made me think, “Someday, we’ll get to have one of these.”

To my mind, it’s precisely the primeval nature of brit milah—blood is spilled, the very body is transformed—that both attracts and repels. There are certainly those who decide against or even actively oppose the ritual (perhaps along with non-ritual medical circumcision), considering it archaic and unnecessary at best, “barbaric” at worst. But there are also liberal Jews, Jews who (grandparent lobby aside) have a true choice in the matter, Jews who eat shrimp cocktail and shop on Shabbat, Jews who intermarry, and feel that the one ritual they will not forfeit, even after initial hesitation, is brit milah.

“If my kid said he didn’t want to have a bar mitzvah, I’d say okay,” a Boston friend of mine told me recently, so pregnant with said son I could practically see him kicking across the restaurant table. She and her husband do not keep kosher or attend shul. “But it never occurred to me not to have a bris,” she says. “It’s a strange tradition, but I don’t feel like I’m in a position not to do what Jews have been doing for the past however-many-thousand years.”

“I feel like, ‘Who am I to break that chain?’,” added her husband.

Why is the bris—as opposed to the bar mitzvah, the keeping of Shabbat—the one chain some non-traditional Jews simply will not break?

Anyone looking for logical, historical, or unanimous medical reasons to perform circumcision, especially in a brit milah ceremony, complete with mohel and festive lunch, will likely come up quite short. From an anthropological standpoint, the origin of the practice itself is unknown. In the Hebrew Bible, it’s in Genesis 7:1-14 that God tells Abraham that he and every Jewish male henceforth is to be circumcised as a mark of the Covenant; God does not say why the mark of the Covenant could not involve, say, the earlobe. The American Academy of Pediatrics, after years of going back and forth, now says that routine circumcision is not necessary, but that parents—including those with relevant religious traditions—should be encouraged to make informed choices about what works best for them.

Indeed, many liberal Jewish or interfaith couples, deciding that brit milah does not appeal, are exploring alternative ceremonies, or—given the pretty hefty weight of tradition—seeking reassurance that an uncircumcised boy is still a Jew. “They’re relieved when they find someone like me who says, ‘Hey, he’s gonna be Jewish because you’re raising him Jewish’,” says Peter Schweitzer, rabbi of The City Congregation for Humanistic Judaism in New York, who has spoken with many such parents.

In the same way, many nontraditional Jewish parents considering circumcision are not weighing one medical study against another; they are dealing with symbols and collective meaning. Many Jews do not feel a strict sense of obligation to perform certain rituals; rather, they view the ones they do choose as an opportunity to experience Jewish meaning in their lives, to make a connection to their community and heritage. For many of them, brit milah offers that opportunity in a way intense and vivid enough to trump other concerns.

“Lisa and I weren’t so thrilled about the whole bris thing,” says my friend Liz, who describes herself as moderately observant (Kosher, somewhat shomer Shabbos). “I mean, couldn’t some other mitzvah be the first mitzvah in Aviv’s life? Giving tzedakah, for instance.”

Still, Liz and her partner knew they’d do it. “While it’s not our favorite mitzvah, this one—which used to, among other things, separate us from our neighbors and mark membership in the Jewish people in the flesh of our children—feels so formative that it seemed very hard not to do it,” she says. Liz also considered the fact that Aviv has two mothers, wondering if that might make him “suspect in some Jewish circles.” Circumcision, she thought, could help mark his Jewishness in a way that his unconventional family might not.

For some, the sheer act of circumcision—even without the public ceremony—carries weight enough. Amber Powers, a Reconstructionist rabbi in Philadelphia, didn’t feel comfortable hosting a celebration that involved even a moment of her son’s pain, or that would require her to put on her happy party face while she was focused on her child. Nor did she feel that she had to circumcise in the first place. But she felt that the “chain of tradition” was a strong incentive, along with the fact that among those around her—though a non-circumcising minority is growing—brit milah remains the norm. So, she and her partner held a private bris with a mohel at eight days, and then hosted a welcoming ceremony for Elijah the following Sunday. “I take very seriously the collective sense of meaning,” she says. “My decision about what’s meaningful and relevant is not only about what’s meaningful and relevant to me, but also about what’s meaningful and relevant for my community.”

They may keep it private, they may believe that it’s archaic, challenging, even gross, yet many Jews who perceive themselves to have a choice in the matter still do it. Why does this ritual—as opposed to others with similar “’cause Jews have always done it” appeal—still hold so much power? I’m telling you, it’s about the blood. While the rules of kashrut, by contrast, are clear, the practice itself can also appear abstract. You eat a cheeseburger or you don’t, there’s no thunder and lightning; nothing happens either way. But a bris? Blood is spilled, the child is changed forever— now that’s a ritual. “My bottom line was this: we didn’t do a circumcision, we did a brit milah,” says New Yorker Daniel Radosh. For him, it wasn’t about the procedure; it was all, and only, about the ritual. All about this ritual: its ancient, mysterious origins, even—if not especially—its ick factor. “Most important for me,” he says, “were the continuity of the tradition and the almost mystical covenant made flesh.”

It’s mystical, and it’s primal. “I want to call it primitive,” says Rabbi Schweitzer. “And bringing in the mohel is akin to bringing in a shaman or witch doctor. It’s very powerful.”

That’s how Brooklynite Larry Kanter feels, too. He held a bris for his son even though—despite being raised in a Conservative household—he does not consider himself observant. “The circumcision ritual makes no sense, especially when you try to square it with contemporary standards and reasoning. Every time I go to a bris, I feel like I might as well be painting my face, beating drums and beseeching the rain gods. But I like that that feeling. At Carlos’ bris—perhaps because of the violence of the act—I felt a connection to something deep, timeless, pre-rational. I suppose, to some extent, that’s the point of all religious observance.”

If we ever have a son, whom we will call Ptui Ptui Ptui, I am sure we will have a bris, and not just because my husband knows all the best mohels. But because the very part that will freak me out—the shedding of his blood, the marking of his flesh, the sheer primitive craziness of it all—is what will give it, for me, its essential meaning. I understand why some consider the ritual irrelevant, even barbaric; I’m glad people are getting creative and finding meaning in alternative ceremonies. But I also think that in a Hallmarky, pop-songy, skimming-of-the-surface world, a world so detached from its own primal cycles that we buy peaches in winter and invent pills designed to stop our periods, that there’s room, here and there, for a little blood, for a bit of flesh, for rituals with real, timeless teeth. That’s the appeal of the bris for me—and, it appears, for others. But I’m not saying that, along with my whitefish, I won’t need a drink.

In short, these guys had pretty much nothing in common except that they were ultimately not right for me—and they were all Jewish. I always knew, just knew, that I wanted a Jewish family: to knock myself out preparing the Seder; to see my kids’ faces glowing in the Hanukkah candles. But I never liked a guy just because he was Jewish. Even when I reached my 30s, the all-the-good-ones-are-gay-or-taken decade, there were always enough to choose from that I continued to see Jewish as a given, not a plus.

Likewise, the handful of non-Jewish fellows I dated—the hockey player, the Scrabble champion, the Mainer I nicknamed “L.L. Bean”—I dated not because there was something I liked about dating non-Jews (The rebellion! The forbidden! The hockey!), but because there was something I liked about those guys. The religion part, I figured, we’d deal with later. Or, as it turned out, not.

Then there’s my Christian friend Karla, who loved Jewish men, particularly Dustin Hoffman, way back in junior high. But considering that the heartthrobs of the day were Scott Baio and the guy from The Blue Lagoon, I took this as an indicator of sophisticated taste. (Outsiders, Schmoutsiders; Karla and I preferred The Chosen, starring our boyfriend, Robby Benson. And why not?)

Here’s where I’m going with this: I don’t mean to sound open-minded to the point of cluelessness, but I’ve never quite understood the fetishization of Jewish men. I’m not saying I don’t see that Jewish men are lovable; I get why Woody Allen could be considered hot. I’m talking about the stereotypes: on the one hand, Jewish men are rarely presented in the media as particularly “normal,” likable guys; on the other, some women—yes, especially non-Jewish women—have a particular thing for Jewish men.

In 1978, for example, The Jewish Man was proclaimed “the new sexual hero.” This pronouncement was made in a now out-of-print book called The Shikse’s Guide to Jewish Men, but stay with me. “Throughout recent history, the sexual heroes have been the Clark Gables, Humphrey Bogarts, Gregory Pecks, Robert Redfords,” reads the foreword of the book, which I have on loan from a friend’s personal irony library. “Now, today, the Elliot Goulds, George Segals, Dustin Hoffmans herald the beginning of a new super sex star: the Jewish man.” It’s basically a humor book (we’ll get to that), but the core premise—we heart Jewish men, warts and all—is not winking or sarcastic; it’s entirely serious.

So on the one hand, you could say this book represents a step forward: not “all” Jewish men are nebbishy. (Or better yet: nebbishes can be sexy!) On the other—well, read the book. Oh, sorry, you can’t! It’s divided into subsections (“The Jewish Man and Things,” “When He Takes You Home for Dinner”), each of which contains a list of observations on the topic, usually starting with “he” (“He folds, never crumples, the paper”). Some are straightforward (“He uses hand lotion”); some have embellishments that make them less unfunny than they could be (“He has never washed his own clothes [even in the Army]“); some achieve the spare, abstruse genius of a Zen koan (“He is aged 30 to 55 whether he is or he isn’t”).

Lest you think, in the book’s defense, “Hey, but every Jewish guy I know folds, never crumples, the paper!” let me add this: I can guarantee you that my father has folded, never crumpled, the paper since the day he was born. Which, ahem, was about 30 years before he converted to Judaism. (My husband, while we’re on the topic, can be counted on to make a complete mess even of the sections he skips.)

But I know better than to spend my time picking apart the stereotypes in The Shikse’s Guide. After all, it’s a dated relic. Hello—it came out in 1978, and may have had about as long a shelf life as that which some of us secretly wish upon the engagement of Zach Braff to Mandy Moore.

Instead, I’d rather spend my time picking apart the stereotypes in last year’s Boy Vey: The Shiksa’s Guide to Dating Jewish Men, which is not a book to be cast aside lightly. Rather, to continue with the Dorothy Parker paraphrase, it should be hurled aside with great force.

“To find a Shiksa with a hilariously high-maintenance mixture of strength and prowess is an utter utopia for the libidinous Jew,” observes author Kristina Grish. I realize it’s a challenge to write a book about Jewish men without repeating the phrase “Jewish man.” Tip: give up. Repeat the phrase “Jewish man” instead of replacing it with “Hebrew honey,” “love mensch,” or, God help us, “Mr. Tall, Dark, and Circumcised.”

Even the flattering stereotypes in this book are annoying. “Jewish men feed mind and appetite, and they are the ultimate caretakers without a hint of machismo,” writes Grish. “They’re also generous and thoughtful, thanks to a matriarchal culture that’s taught them to appreciate women’s strength, candor, humor, and intelligence.” Oh, except the one who’s dating you in order to “explore your hidden temptress or piss off his family,” in which case you should “dump the loser and hide his yarmulke.”

To be fair, Grish doesn’t claim that her book is anything more than a “fun dating guide.” She tells you up front that it won’t teach you about “basic Jewish principles” or “extreme holiday traditions like Purim or Simchas Torah.” But experts like Dr. Sandor Gardos, who are willing to put their full names next to statements like, “Jewish men are always more attentive,” give the book the veneer of actual self-help, and several Amazon reviewers indicate that they bought it for advice when dating someone Jewish.

So. Harmless silliness? I don’t think so. On the upside, the book could pique a non-Jew’s interest in finding out what the hell goes on at Purim and Simchas Torah. But beyond that, it only reinforces stereotypes—glib at best, anti-Semitic at worst—that, ironically, anyone could dispel themselves by, um, dating an actual Jew.

Sadder still, Boy Vey suggests that not a whole lot has changed since 1978. The Shikse’s Guide makes a decidedly more rigorous attempt at wit, but the stereotypes are still the same: Jewish men as metrosexual mama’s boys who are neurotic yet giving in the sack. The books also share an exhausted yet apparently unshakable meta-premise: “the Jews, they’re funny!” They use funny words like yarmulke and meshuggeneh, and they’re funny because their over-the-top bar mitzvahs invariably end in slapstick. Also, a bris? Always funny.

What makes Boy Vey all the more grating is the publishing environment that spawned it. Today, dating books (some of which, to be fair, offer smart, realistic advice) replicate like, well, diet books. All you need’s a gimmick: Date Like A Man, French Women Don’t Get Fat. Likewise, I’m convinced that Boy Vey was sold on the basis of a punny title someone came up with at brunch; all the author had to do was crank out 162 pages of Hebrew-honeys-are-hot filler.

The larger irony is this: Jews, for better or for worse, don’t find the whole inter-dating/intermarriage thing all that hilarious. Admittedly, I can’t walk a foot in the Friars Club without hearing the one about the Jew and the Native American who named their kid Whitefish—but arguably, that joke’s less about making light of intermarriage than it is about stereotyping another worse-off group. Jews have a long and not-so-flattering history of discomfort with interreligious romance, especially when it’s the woman who’s the “outsider.” (Perhaps needless to say, both dating books treat this often fraught matter as an “aw, his mom will learn to love you” joke.)

For one thing, I’ve let the word “shiksa” sit around in this article like a big offensive rhino in the room. “Though shiksa—meaning simply ‘gentile woman,’ but trailing a stream of complex connotations—is often tossed off casually and with humor, it’s about as noxious an insult as any racial epithet could hope to be,” writes Christine Benvenuto in her cultural history Shiksa: The Gentile Woman in the Jewish World (2004).

Benvenuto explains that shiksa, in sum, is a Yiddish word coined in Eastern Europe (derivation: the Hebrew shakaytz, which means “to loathe or abominate an unclean thing”) that came to bear the weight of Biblical admonitions and cautionary tales (“don’t you dare date a Canaanite”) that posited consorting with a non-Jewish woman as a threat to Jewish identity and homogeneity. Take, for instance, Proverbs 5:3-10: “The lips of a strange woman drip honey…. [But] her feet go down to Death…. Keep yourself far away from her.” This is a “dire warning,” writes Benvenuto, with “the ring of a 1950s anti-venereal disease campaign.”

Thousands of years later, we still fear the shiksa succubus, though the evidence often comes in the form of rueful jokes about the “loss” of Jon Stewart to a woman whose maiden name starts with “Mc.” “In the guise of spiritual seductress, enticing Jewish men away from their heritage, the gentile woman is a scapegoat for the fear that, by their own neglect, American Jews will bring about the destruction of Judaism,” writes Benvenuto. “Contradictorily, when she actively pursues conversion, she is equally effective at touching off Jews’ ambivalence about their own religious identity.”

Shiksaphobia: that’s our problem. Worrisome as the specter of “losing” Jews may be, the Reform movement—and, to some degree, the Conservative—has come to realize that welcoming mixed-faith couples is precisely what can help the Jewish community to grow. My husband’s synagogue would not be nearly as vibrant—or, bottom line, as big—without its welcoming stance toward non-Jewish and Jewish-by-choice partners, or their enthusiastic participation.

The Union for Reform Judaism, concerned about sending the message that the movement “does not care” whether or not non-Jews convert, recently called upon synagogues to increase their efforts to encourage conversion of non-Jewish spouses. To some, this smacks of proselytizing. To others, it’s telling the truth: we are a Jewish organization; we love you no matter what, but we’d love, lurve, luff you if you were Jewish.

In short, the matter is more complicated than it is “kooky”—and fortunately for those mixed couples who are serious about the longer run, there are plenty of “serious” guides to negotiating interreligious relationships, with or without conversion. Still, it would be nice if the cheekier books would at least nod toward the notion that being involved with a Jew is more than a matter of learning to tell salmon from sable. Because what real life reminds us is this: often, people who fall in love with Jews also fall in love with Judaism.

To be fair, David does have excellent taste. He’s just a bit of a…minimalist? So I figured hey, if the Fab Five could set him up with three more pairs of shoes—even two!—I’d feel slightly less self-conscious about the vast amount of real estate taken up by my collection of cowboy boots.

David’s first reaction: no way. The world, he said, does not need to see Carson going through a rabbi’s underwear drawer. As it turned out, however, the producers were looking for clergy attached to some sort of social action project that could use some spiffing up: a dismal soup kitchen or run-down playground that needed a makeover.

After exhaustive consultation with every rabbi he knows, David was still wary, but agreed at least to audition. With the focus off his wardrobe, he reasoned, the show might be a great opportunity to spotlight something we don’t see so often on TV: images of a rabbi both maintaining appropriate gravitas and looking friendly, accessible, cool, three-dimensional—”normal.”

Ultimately, the Queer Eye producers went with someone else. But until David gets his own show, there is Shalom in the Home, starring megarabbi Shmuley Boteach.

On his new show (Mondays, 10 pm, The Learning Channel), Boteach cruises the country in his Heal Mobile, a tricked-out Airstream that’s half therapist’s couch, half mobile surveillance base, to bring peace to warring families: the surly kids mad at their dad for cheating, the banshee mom unable to speak below a shriek, the 9-year-old girl with “anger issues” who, I swear, came thisclose to spinning her head around 360 degrees and projectile puking on the camera crew.

Boteach is sort of like Supernanny with a beard, except his primary mission is not discipline. When parents sit in the Heal Mobile to watch video of their rugrats mouthing off or destroying the house, Boteach is quick to point out that their kids’ obnoxitude is all about them. Only when the parents pipe down, forgive each other, or face the pain of their own parents’ divorce will kids set the table without being asked twice. Encouraging families to cooperate might involve a game of hoops or a camping trip with “trust activities,” plus direct coaching from Shmuley through a Secret Service-style earpiece.

Does Boteach actually wind up helping these families? I’m pretty sure he gets them off to a good start, though I would have been more entertained if Mr. and Mrs. Lubner had opted to leave their feral 9-year-old in the woods. Despite the clown-at-a-party cadence of Boteach’s voiceovers, his manner is pleasantly sincere, perceptive, and respectful; he’s firm when necessary, but never a bully like Dr. Phil or Dr. Laura. I was especially impressed—moved, even—by how seriously Boteach took a 16-year-old’s offhand complaint that her squirrelly boyfriend had a habit of yelling at her. (“You’re hurting me, too—that’s what makes me raise my voice,” quoth the manipulative punk.) Happy ending: girl learns she deserves better; furious father scares punk straight.

Selfishly, however, I’m more interested in whether Boteach, with his presence on this show, is helping the Jews. And specifically, the rabbis among them. Given the wide breadth of his book topics (dating, misogyny, fear, “kosher” sex), a vast multimedia resume stretching from Oxford University to Neverland Ranch, and perhaps the caffeine intake of his publicist, Boteach has become the go-to Jew—”America’s rabbi,” if you will—on everything from psychics to pedophiles.
But arguably, this conventional, watchable show on TLC will bring him to a larger mainstream audience than ever. And what impression will that audience—the nonreligious, the religious who have never met a Jew or a rabbi, the unaffiliated Jews who have come to distrust “organized religion”—come away with?

Shalom in the Home will do nothing to disabuse strangers of the assumption that my husband has a beard. But does it reinforce other Jewish or rabbinical stereotypes? Well, there are brief moments of the kind of Jewish corniness that makes me want to stick a fork in my eye, such as shots of the ghoulish bobblehead rabbi on Boteach’s dashboard. And what does he say when he meets the family on the basketball court? “Short Jews can dunk!” What do I say? Me darf zikh sheymen far die goyim. Cringe.

But Boteach is exponentially more appealing—and intelligible—than he has been when interviewed on, say, Fox, where he’s nearly driven Tony Snow to drink with loony tirades like this: “There’s two million men and women who are part of a warrior class that protect us, and a lot of us are hiding behind plastic sheets, for God’s sake, Tony, and we are the inheritors of Washington, MacArthur. We have to learn to be contemptuous of evil again.” By welcome contrast, and I don’t necessarily mean to damn with faint praise, no one will come away from Shalom in the Home thinking, “I wanted to give the Jews a chance, but that rabbi is crazy!”

Shalom, overall, makes Shmuley look like a good guy. This, I believe, is good for him, and good for rabbis, Orthodox and otherwise. I like that he, on the show, upends the stereotype of the stern rabbi who says “Feh!” to the secular world, who is attuned to the minutiae of halacha but not the breadth of human experience, who (like me?) is unable to walk through life without his but-is-it-good-for-the-Jews? glasses.

More upside: I know that rabbis in many movements—and their wives—complain that people tend to think of rabbis as larger-than-life God People, not as actual humans, people with pasts and warts and dishes to do, people who are also rabbis. (I know. I’ve seen their faces when I mention that my husband watches American Idol.) We learn from the show’s goofy, cartoonish opener (narrated, gag me, by his mother), that Boteach himself is a child of divorce. This, he reminds us frequently on the show, is what motivates him to help others find shalom bais, peace in the home. While this conceit irritated me at first, it does help us see him as a guy with feelings, a rabbi who cares not just because he wants to make things Good and Right, but also because he’s been there.

Yet, for all its rabbi-hype, the show is only stealthily religious. Apparently, only one of the families Boteach helps this season is Jewish. And of course, shalom bais is itself a Jewish concept—though we’re obviously not the only faith or culture that values a home sweet home. Otherwise, even with Boteach’s charismatic presence, the show is not even really kosher-style—and I’m of two minds about this.

Of course, it would make no sense for Boteach to march in and try to get a Methodist family to both “use ‘I’ statements” and observe Shabbos. And it pretty much makes my day to see someone real or fictional on television who’s explicitly Jewish, yet basically mellow about it. Someone who’s not The Jewish Guy, not a Jewish joker, not a caricature, not tormented in some way by his faith. Someone who’s Jewish and really pretty fine with it. (For this reason, David and I love Hesh on The Sopranos. Of course, he is also a criminal.)

Still, I have to say that one of the show’s most real moments comes (alas, in one of the “outtakes” shown during the closing credits) when Boteach encourages the once-wayward husband to swear that he’ll cut off contact with the other woman. “Swearing: that’s a sacred oath between you and God,” Boteach says—and you can tell from Luis’ face that Boteach’s language really speaks to him. There is a broad “God” language—talk of a higher power, the “universe,” a connection to something larger than ourselves—that does speak to many people, religious and not, that inspires them to try to act like they’re not the only person in the world. So why isn’t there more of this?

The producers of Shalom in the Home say they conceived of the show rabbi-free, then cast Boteach. But I wonder, just a teeny bit, why it seems to shy away from opportunities to offer even this type of broad spiritual language where it might work—or at least make sense coming from a rabbi? I mean, otherwise, why hire a rabbi? Does this mean that it’s “okay” to have religious people on TV as long as they’re not, you know, too Jewish?

But enough conspiracy theory. Shalom will do no harm. What would help, I think, is if Boteach were not the only big-shot media rabbi, if he were not one of the few “out” Jews (fictional or otherwise) on television. He represents himself quite well, but he does not represent all rabbis. Not all rabbis are Lubavitcher; not all are hirsute; not all suck at basketball. (And so far as I know, none has been on Queer Eye.)

I know, you’re thinking of all the rabbis you have seen: the rabbi on Sex and the City who converted Charlotte, the rabbi on Grey’s Anatomy who dealt with the perennial pig-heart-in-a-Jew issue, to name just a couple. Still, it would be nice to see an even wider variety of rabbis—and of Jews of all stripes—on TV, doing a wider variety of rabbi and Jewish things, even just day-to-day life stuff. Why? So that viewers can see those fellows in black hats, say, as actual humans. So that the unaffiliated can ask whether it’s really necessary for that one bad experience they had in third-grade Hebrew school to make them hesitate to get married under a chuppah. So that people of all faiths can get even the teeniest taste of the massive diversity of Judaism and its clergy.

I’d say the same for other clergy, too. Might be especially nice, for example, to meet a fictional priest without a dark side.

These women—we’ll call them Shirley and Elena—did not come to New York for The Lion King. They’re here to have late-term abortions not available in their home states (in their cases, Pennsylvania and Connecticut); New York’s cutoff, more generous than most, is 24 weeks. This late in the game, it’s a two-day outpatient procedure requiring an overnight stay in-state. And who can afford a Manhattan hotel and a late-term abortion?

That’s where New York City’s Haven Coalition—of which David and I are proud to call ourselves members—steps in. Haven has no office, no budget, just a rotating team of coordinators who schedule its 50 members for on-call nights every month and phone us when we’re needed. When I get that call, part of me groans—what if she doesn’t want to watch American Idol? But part of me always remembers, even as I’m leaving work hanging and schlepping to the clinic: In all my years of activism and agitating, this is the most direct, intimate mitzvah I’ve ever had the privilege to perform. And it’s a reflection of how, over the years, my reproductive rights activism has, more and more, become an expression of my Judaism. And the same is true for my husband.

How so? Well, our “mission” does not come directly, or only, from what halacha has to say specifically about abortion. Strictly speaking, Jewish law permits abortion only when there is potential danger to the woman’s health. This generally puts Jews somewhere to the left of South Dakota, but “danger” and “health” have been interpreted in a wide range of ways—including mental health and overall well-being. Some interpretations apply the rodef (literally, “pursuer”) principle—a sort of preemptive self-defense, suggesting that the woman is permitted to abort a fetus who poses a threat. Also, the dominant (though by no means solitary) position is that the life of the fetus is not equal in value to the life of the mother—or even, in some opinions, to the life of existing children.

What moves us, what made us both instantly say yes when a friend emailed us about becoming Haven hosts, are the Jewish commandments to help and protect our neighbor, to shelter someone who is in—again, liberally interpreted—danger. And the notion of tzedakah, which is not an act of magnanimous charity—”Here, pitiable one, make yourself comfortable in my fabulous Brooklyn home!”—but one of justice: giving the poor their due.

Because for all our fretting about how changes on the Supreme Court and in South Dakota will affect Roe v. Wade, for far too many women and girls the right to abortion already exists only on paper. The legal and economic barriers that make it difficult, even impossible, for women to carry out their own reproductive choices trap the most vulnerable members of society: the poor and working class, the young, immigrants, and those without people around them to bail them out. Access to abortion—access, not just the in-principle right—is a fundamental matter of social and economic justice. The word “choice” doesn’t even begin to cover it. We, the Jews, are the people commanded to take care of the widow and the orphan. Shirley is 41, confident, single, and black; Elena is 19, shy, and Polish—she hasn’t seen her parents in Warsaw for two years. The only things they really have in common are that they are poor, they are pregnant, and they are in my house.

Recently, reading Eyal Press’ Absolute Convictions: My Father, a City, and the Conflict that Divided America made me think how far we’ve come—and how quickly we’re going someplace even worse. Press’ book is an account of how his home city of Buffalo became a magnet for violent anti-abortion protests and how his own father, an ob/gyn who also performed abortions, became a target. “Protests” is actually far too gracious a term for what went on in Buffalo for years: trespassing, vandalism, stalking, harassment—even murder. Remember Dr. Barnett Slepian, just home from shul, shot dead through his kitchen window while heating up some pea soup? He was Dr. Press’ colleague and, according to his son, the only other local doctor who performed abortions. The rest were—and still are—flown in from neighboring areas. No matter how interesting the ethnic eateries, or tempting the hockey opportunities, new abortion providers aren’t exactly moving to Buffalo in droves. Even though organized clinic attacks and protests have dwindled, I imagine it’d be kind of like buying a house you know is haunted.

Dr. Shalom Press, by the way, is Israeli. His son believes that his born-and-bred stoicism—perhaps more, at least at first, than his sense of justice—was what kept him going to work in the face of death threats: “A bomb went off in a nearby market? You shopped there the next day as though nothing had happened. War loomed on the horizon? You went about your business just the same.” Then again, Press’ mother barely survived her girlhood in a Nazi work camp. (You can imagine how well calling abortion “America’s Holocaust” goes over with her.) As a result, Press’ family was torn between two Jewish impulses: on the one hand, to bear and forebear, to find normalcy in a danger zone, to do what must be done; on the other, to do whatever it takes—quit your job, move, go into hiding—to survive and protect your family. The younger Press urged his father to choose the latter, all the while knowing that the next morning, just like the last, his father would walk out the door to go to his office.

When David delivers a Haven guest to the clinic in the morning, there’s almost always a protester or two, often male, usually the quiet, murmuring, “If you’re pregnant we can help you” type. David always warns the patients ahead of time that they’ll probably be there, tries to get between them and the patient, and then calls me in a rage from his cell when he leaves. The strong patients sass back, the resolute ones stare straight ahead, the frightened ones burst into tears—and yet not one wavers in her determination to do what’s right for her. So thanks, harassing guy, that was useful for everyone.

Of course, what these people are doing is a far cry from the weekly, large-scale clinic sieges I witnessed in Buffalo and in my hometown of Boston during the early 1990′s. There, the goal was to violently shut down a legal facility and interfere, in the process, with people exercising a constitutional right. Press argues convincingly in his book that in that violent climate, murder was inevitable.

Today, getting through the clinic doors is somewhat easier—and safer—than it used to be. It’s getting to the clinic doors that’s become harder than ever. Why did Shirley and Elena “wait” so long before seeking their abortions? I’m not sure; I keep my questions to “Do you have pets?” and “Peanut butter: crunchy or smooth?” (They usually don’t ask much about us, either. One guest saw our ketubah and asked if we were “Hebrews,” but David’s job hardly ever comes up and when it has, “rabbi” hasn’t really been on folks’ radar.)

But I can tell you what some of the other people who’ve stayed with us have volunteered about what brought them to New York. The 20-year-old who slept here last month got pregnant while on the Pill—hey, someone’s got to be that 1%—but was later sent home from the E.R., without an ultrasound, having been told she’d miscarried. She was secretly relieved. After all, she was raising a 2-year-old and her sister’s kid, her boyfriend was on his way back to jail for violating probation, and she was working full-time at Staples to put herself through Katharine Gibbs. Only thing was, the doctors were wrong. The 14-year-old Mexican girl didn’t tell her parents she was pregnant (the condom broke) because her dad had started drinking again and she didn’t want to be a burden. Only when she realized she’d have to travel to New York did she confess. She, her mother, and her father all slept on our sofa bed, lined up like little dolls—and that sight both warmed and broke my heart.

I can tell you why other women “wait,” too. Eighty-seven percent of U.S. counties lack abortion providers, thanks in part to Buffalo-style harassment of doctors. This is why it makes me want to spit poison darts when people like State Sen. Bill Napoli of South Dakota claim that “most” abortions are a matter of “convenience.” Then you’ve got parental notification and consent laws, Most minors hosted by Haven come with at least one of their parents—and the ones that don’t have good reason not to, like the ones with a parent in jail, whose whereabouts are unknown, or who has threatened, convincingly, to kill them if they get “in trouble.”

These roadblocks mean—and this, people, is the evil plan—that women often find themselves in their second trimester before they know it. And then they’re really in a bind. The cost of an abortion goes up from about $350 at 10 weeks to more than $1000 after 20. Even the cost of a first-trimester abortion may be more than a family on public assistance receives in one month, according to the National Network of Abortion Funds. On the way to my house from the clinic, Shirley threw up her antibiotics. She’d been told to take them on an empty stomach, but she hadn’t eaten since the day before. I doubt this was because she wasn’t hungry.

David and I have both long cared about women’s reproductive rights. He saw the tricky decisions friends and families had made; I marched and rallied and wrote. But only when we joined Haven was the reality—and inequality—of access to abortion brought home to us. That’s what inspired David to present a High Holy Days sermon last year about the crisis, right now, of access to abortion—a decision that many called “ballsy,” and for which even more people thanked him. To him, the topic didn’t seem ballsy so much as obvious. He is, after all, in a position not just to help, but also to teach. He’s not interested in trying to change the mind of someone who believes abortion is morally wrong. But he is interested in helping broaden the perspective—the Jewish perspective—of those who haven’t happened to see, in their own homes, the true face of need.

It’s so viscerally clear to both of us that Haven, and working to protect reproductive freedom, is about taking care of society’s most vulnerable. Yet Haven’s philosophy is also very clear: We are not saviors, just people fortunate enough to have extra futons and a little flex time. We do tzedakah not because we are righteous, but because we are just. Like Dr. Press, in a way, we are simply doing our jobs. In David’s sermon about reproductive rights, he reminded the congregation of these words from Deuteronomy: “You shall not subvert the rights of the stranger or the fatherless; you shall not take a widow’s garment in pawn. Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt and that Adonai your God redeemed you from there; therefore do I enjoin you to observe this commandment.” May women like Shirley and Elena, and those who follow, find an easier path to redemption next time.

These women—we’ll call them Shirley and Elena—did not come to New York for The Lion King. They’re here to have late-term abortions not available in their home states (in their cases, Pennsylvania and Connecticut); New York’s cutoff, more generous than most, is 24 weeks. This late in the game, it’s a two-day outpatient procedure requiring an overnight stay in-state. And who can afford a Manhattan hotel and a late-term abortion?

That’s where New York City’s Haven Coalition—of which David and I are proud to call ourselves members—steps in. Haven has no office, no budget, just a rotating team of coordinators who schedule its 50 members for on-call nights every month and phone us when we’re needed. When I get that call, part of me groans—what if she doesn’t want to watch American Idol? But part of me always remembers, even as I’m leaving work hanging and schlepping to the clinic: In all my years of activism and agitating, this is the most direct, intimate mitzvah I’ve ever had the privilege to perform. And it’s a reflection of how, over the years, my reproductive rights activism has, more and more, become an expression of my Judaism. And the same is true for my husband.

How so? Well, our “mission” does not come directly, or only, from what halacha has to say specifically about abortion. Strictly speaking, Jewish law permits abortion only when there is potential danger to the woman’s health. This generally puts Jews somewhere to the left of South Dakota, but “danger” and “health” have been interpreted in a wide range of ways—including mental health and overall well-being. Some interpretations apply the rodef (literally, “pursuer”) principle—a sort of preemptive self-defense, suggesting that the woman is permitted to abort a fetus who poses a threat. Also, the dominant (though by no means solitary) position is that the life of the fetus is not equal in value to the life of the mother—or even, in some opinions, to the life of existing children.

What moves us, what made us both instantly say yes when a friend emailed us about becoming Haven hosts, are the Jewish commandments to help and protect our neighbor, to shelter someone who is in—again, liberally interpreted—danger. And the notion of tzedakah, which is not an act of magnanimous charity—”Here, pitiable one, make yourself comfortable in my fabulous Brooklyn home!”—but one of justice: giving the poor their due.

Because for all our fretting about how changes on the Supreme Court and in South Dakota will affect Roe v. Wade, for far too many women and girls the right to abortion already exists only on paper. The legal and economic barriers that make it difficult, even impossible, for women to carry out their own reproductive choices trap the most vulnerable members of society: the poor and working class, the young, immigrants, and those without people around them to bail them out. Access to abortion—access, not just the in-principle right—is a fundamental matter of social and economic justice. The word “choice” doesn’t even begin to cover it. We, the Jews, are the people commanded to take care of the widow and the orphan. Shirley is 41, confident, single, and black; Elena is 19, shy, and Polish—she hasn’t seen her parents in Warsaw for two years. The only things they really have in common are that they are poor, they are pregnant, and they are in my house.

Recently, reading Eyal Press’ Absolute Convictions: My Father, a City, and the Conflict that Divided America made me think how far we’ve come—and how quickly we’re going someplace even worse. Press’ book is an account of how his home city of Buffalo became a magnet for violent anti-abortion protests and how his own father, an ob/gyn who also performed abortions, became a target. “Protests” is actually far too gracious a term for what went on in Buffalo for years: trespassing, vandalism, stalking, harassment—even murder. Remember Dr. Barnett Slepian, just home from shul, shot dead through his kitchen window while heating up some pea soup? He was Dr. Press’ colleague and, according to his son, the only other local doctor who performed abortions. The rest were—and still are—flown in from neighboring areas. No matter how interesting the ethnic eateries, or tempting the hockey opportunities, new abortion providers aren’t exactly moving to Buffalo in droves. Even though organized clinic attacks and protests have dwindled, I imagine it’d be kind of like buying a house you know is haunted.

Dr. Shalom Press, by the way, is Israeli. His son believes that his born-and-bred stoicism—perhaps more, at least at first, than his sense of justice—was what kept him going to work in the face of death threats: “A bomb went off in a nearby market? You shopped there the next day as though nothing had happened. War loomed on the horizon? You went about your business just the same.” Then again, Press’ mother barely survived her girlhood in a Nazi work camp. (You can imagine how well calling abortion “America’s Holocaust” goes over with her.) As a result, Press’ family was torn between two Jewish impulses: on the one hand, to bear and forebear, to find normalcy in a danger zone, to do what must be done; on the other, to do whatever it takes—quit your job, move, go into hiding—to survive and protect your family. The younger Press urged his father to choose the latter, all the while knowing that the next morning, just like the last, his father would walk out the door to go to his office.

When David delivers a Haven guest to the clinic in the morning, there’s almost always a protester or two, often male, usually the quiet, murmuring, “If you’re pregnant we can help you” type. David always warns the patients ahead of time that they’ll probably be there, tries to get between them and the patient, and then calls me in a rage from his cell when he leaves. The strong patients sass back, the resolute ones stare straight ahead, the frightened ones burst into tears—and yet not one wavers in her determination to do what’s right for her. So thanks, harassing guy, that was useful for everyone.

Of course, what these people are doing is a far cry from the weekly, large-scale clinic sieges I witnessed in Buffalo and in my hometown of Boston during the early 1990′s. There, the goal was to violently shut down a legal facility and interfere, in the process, with people exercising a constitutional right. Press argues convincingly in his book that in that violent climate, murder was inevitable.

Today, getting through the clinic doors is somewhat easier—and safer—than it used to be. It’s getting to the clinic doors that’s become harder than ever. Why did Shirley and Elena “wait” so long before seeking their abortions? I’m not sure; I keep my questions to “Do you have pets?” and “Peanut butter: crunchy or smooth?” (They usually don’t ask much about us, either. One guest saw our ketubah and asked if we were “Hebrews,” but David’s job hardly ever comes up and when it has, “rabbi” hasn’t really been on folks’ radar.)

But I can tell you what some of the other people who’ve stayed with us have volunteered about what brought them to New York. The 20-year-old who slept here last month got pregnant while on the Pill—hey, someone’s got to be that 1%—but was later sent home from the E.R., without an ultrasound, having been told she’d miscarried. She was secretly relieved. After all, she was raising a 2-year-old and her sister’s kid, her boyfriend was on his way back to jail for violating probation, and she was working full-time at Staples to put herself through Katharine Gibbs. Only thing was, the doctors were wrong. The 14-year-old Mexican girl didn’t tell her parents she was pregnant (the condom broke) because her dad had started drinking again and she didn’t want to be a burden. Only when she realized she’d have to travel to New York did she confess. She, her mother, and her father all slept on our sofa bed, lined up like little dolls—and that sight both warmed and broke my heart.

I can tell you why other women “wait,” too. Eighty-seven percent of U.S. counties lack abortion providers, thanks in part to Buffalo-style harassment of doctors. This is why it makes me want to spit poison darts when people like State Sen. Bill Napoli of South Dakota claim that “most” abortions are a matter of “convenience.” Then you’ve got parental notification and consent laws, Most minors hosted by Haven come with at least one of their parents—and the ones that don’t have good reason not to, like the ones with a parent in jail, whose whereabouts are unknown, or who has threatened, convincingly, to kill them if they get “in trouble.”

These roadblocks mean—and this, people, is the evil plan—that women often find themselves in their second trimester before they know it. And then they’re really in a bind. The cost of an abortion goes up from about $350 at 10 weeks to more than $1000 after 20. Even the cost of a first-trimester abortion may be more than a family on public assistance receives in one month, according to the National Network of Abortion Funds. On the way to my house from the clinic, Shirley threw up her antibiotics. She’d been told to take them on an empty stomach, but she hadn’t eaten since the day before. I doubt this was because she wasn’t hungry.

David and I have both long cared about women’s reproductive rights. He saw the tricky decisions friends and families had made; I marched and rallied and wrote. But only when we joined Haven was the reality—and inequality—of access to abortion brought home to us. That’s what inspired David to present a High Holy Days sermon last year about the crisis, right now, of access to abortion—a decision that many called “ballsy,” and for which even more people thanked him. To him, the topic didn’t seem ballsy so much as obvious. He is, after all, in a position not just to help, but also to teach. He’s not interested in trying to change the mind of someone who believes abortion is morally wrong. But he is interested in helping broaden the perspective—the Jewish perspective—of those who haven’t happened to see, in their own homes, the true face of need.

It’s so viscerally clear to both of us that Haven, and working to protect reproductive freedom, is about taking care of society’s most vulnerable. Yet Haven’s philosophy is also very clear: We are not saviors, just people fortunate enough to have extra futons and a little flex time. We do tzedakah not because we are righteous, but because we are just. Like Dr. Press, in a way, we are simply doing our jobs. In David’s sermon about reproductive rights, he reminded the congregation of these words from Deuteronomy: “You shall not subvert the rights of the stranger or the fatherless; you shall not take a widow’s garment in pawn. Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt and that Adonai your God redeemed you from there; therefore do I enjoin you to observe this commandment.” May women like Shirley and Elena, and those who follow, find an easier path to redemption next time.

“So, are you the rebbetzin?”

And then whoever’s asking laughs and laughs. Rebbetzin, you see, is Yiddish for “rabbi’s wife.” But “rebbetzin” also means a whole lot more. Really, what these folks are saying is, “Isn’t it hilarious to think of a spunky young woman like you, with fake red hair and cowboy boots—and didn’t you also play ice hockey?—in the storied role of the congregational first lady and devoted helpmeet who serves as Sisterhood president, hosts delightful onegs in her home, and teaches b’nei mitzva students for free?”

I get the joke. It’s why my friends gave me a custom hoodie that says “REBBETZIN” across the front, right where it might say “NOTRE DAME.”

But the answer to “Are you the rebbetzin?”—and all that it implies—is hardly a simple no. My role at my husband’s temple in Manhattan—a mellow, friendly, heimisch place—is not at all formal. No official duties are expected of me; I go to events because I want to. We don’t have congregants over for dinner, because let me tell you, not even the curious desire to see the rabbi’s apartment will get people to come to Brooklyn. And honestly, my husband’s congregants were just so happy that he got married, I could probably star in a porno about Christmas and they’d still invite me to Rosh Chodesh.

But to say “No” to this question, as in “No, I’m not that kind of lady,” seems disrespectful, dismissive, unsisterly. Especially given what I’ve just learned by reading The Rabbi’s Wife: The Rebbetzin in American Jewish Life. Historian Shuly Rubin Schwartz makes it quite clear that my fore-rebbetzins were hardly handmaidens of Congregation Beth Stepford. Rather, many were leaders in their own right, both inside and outside their congregations: teaching, lecturing, starting schools, engaging in philanthropy, founding and helming major national Jewish organizations—and having people over for study and sponge cake.

All of a sudden the term “rebbetzin” doesn’t sound so quaint, and so saying, “No, I’m not the rebbetzin” would be truthful, in that “No, I’m not Eleanor freaking Roosevelt” way. Apart from regular services and occasional shiva calls, I’ve attended exactly one hunger action event at the synagogue and have given a single talk to Sisterhood. I tinker with my husband’s temple newsletter articles (he asks!), but hey, that’s how I make a living. I do take some credit for inspiring my husband to talk more from the bima about reproductive rights. But otherwise I am, by historical comparison, a major rebbetzin slacker. (Though for the record, I am fairly certain I am the only person who completes this trifecta: rebbetzin and card-carrying member of both the Friars Club and the DAR.)

We have come a long way, haven’t we? It stands to reason, of course, that what it means to be a rebbetzin has changed, that I’m not expected to be a lay pillar for the ladies of the congregation or compile their cookbook. After all—as Schwartz documents in detail—over the past century, the role of the rebbetzin has evolved with the role of women in general. Earlier on, when few married women of means worked outside the home, the position offered opportunities they might not have otherwise had. (Amusing old-school anomaly: when we got engaged, the temple newsletter ran a blurb noting that I “intended to continue [my] career after marriage.” My husband was glad to hear this.) Schwartz writes: “Women succeeded in forging consequential lives through the ‘wife of’ role when direct avenues of power remained largely closed to them.” As those avenues began to open up, however, ambitious women no longer needed their rabbi’s-wife status—and they could get paid for their life’s work, not to mention be ordained as rabbis themselves—so the more formal expectations of the role began to fade.

Modern as our times may be, however, I’d argue that “rebbetzin” is still a role. I could choose to be like Howard Dean’s delightfully dorky wife, with her utter and unapologetic lack of interest in public life. But given that I have made myself a presence at the temple in the first place—because I want to—I have to learn names, be friendly, make political decisions. (Can I sell my book at the book fair even though it’s not about a Jewish theme—or is that nepotism? How out should we be about our ongoing fertility drama?) I become a public figure just by showing up.

Here’s the problem: the fact that the rebbetzin’s role is no longer formal makes it that much harder to figure out what its expectations are—and how to define the role for myself.

It might sound like I’m saying “Women’s lib has given us too many choices!” Uh…no. I’m not advocating a return to the 1920s, when, at the first-ever symposium on “the wife of the rabbi,” her duties—maintaining an elegant home, an exemplary family, and a solid presence at the synagogue—were explicitly outlined, and when one prominent rebbetzin pronounced that “a rabbi’s ability to choose a ‘good’ wife took precedence over his expertise as a sermon writer.” (Of course, I think my husband excels at both.)

But I read with envy Schwartz’s section about the 1950s, an era that saw unprecedented rebbetzin bonding, at least within more liberal denominations. There was a broad sense of solidarity among rebbetzins, who were more publicly honest than ever about the best-foot-forward, life-in-fishbowl downsides of the job. Specific groups even formed to train rebbetzins for the demands—both psychological and Martha-Stewartical—of congregational life.

Groups? Training? When we got engaged, I Googled “rebbetzin,” hoping to find some sort of helpful FAQ (“Do you hold your spouse’s hand on temple grounds?” “What do you say when someone tells you they don’t like his tie?”) But most of what I came across were either goofy attempts at satire, odes to frumtastic Lubavitcher wives, or posts about Esther “The Rebbetzin” Jungreis, who is not exactly typical. I’d grown up in a temple with a visible—and craft-loving—rabbi’s wife, but all that suggested was that I was going to have to learn needlepoint. There is an e-mail list for Reform rabbis’ spouses, but it’s infrequently used and often focuses on children or issues at massive suburban temples. (When I once answered an open question saying that I was proud to watch my [new] husband lead services, I basically got the response, “Yeah, that’ll wear off.”) Books? Well, there’s Silvia Tennenbaum’s 1978 novel Rachel, the Rabbi’s Wife,” in which “titties”—Rachel’s—appears on page 1. Her husband’s particulars (page 3), I’ll spare you. There are also the Ruby, the Rabbi’s Wife murder mysteries (Hold the Cream Cheese Kill the Lox, for one). The only guidance they offer is that fat-free, salt-free matzo balls can kill you.

To be fair, other rabbi’s wives—at my parents’ place, my husband’s friends—offered their ears and shoulders. And I keep saying I’m going to get a monthly rabbi-spouse group together in New York, though I don’t necessarily have burning questions to ask them and I don’t need constant support. But it would be nice to have some source of collective guidance, a sense of belonging to a ragtag rebbetzin auxiliary. (Maybe it’s different for rebbetzins in the suburbs, where synagogues may be even more deeply embedded in community life.) In general, though, I do believe that sense of collective purpose—divergent though our individual choices may be—is what’s been lost to rebbetzins amidst the welcome, indispensable societal changes of the last hundred years.

“Though women continue to marry rabbis, it remains to be seen whether the rebbetzin role will survive in the twenty-first century,” writes Schwartz. Right, but it depends what you mean by “role.” As long as women marry rabbis—never mind the matter of men marrying them—there will be a rebbitzin’s role. By definition. But it’s up to us to figure out what it means. And we’re working on it, especially with the help of the Internet.

She wasn’t around when I first Googled, but now there’s Rebbetzin Rachel, educated and with-it, and the “Renegade Rebbetzin” (“I am rebbetzin, hear me roar”), an Orthodox feminist equally conversant with halacha and 24. They’re not complaining about annoying congregants…well, mostly not:

I heard a really funny comment made by Bullhorn Sadie, whose hearing is such that she tends to “whisper” in a tone of voice usually reserved for pep rallies…”OH, I LOVE TO WATCH THE RABBI WITH THE CHILDREN. [insert affirming Gospel-style grunts from other Sadies] IT MAKES HIM HUMAN.” Human, Sadie??? Did you just say human??? Because otherwise my husband seems like what, a canine? A fish? A lump of wood? An extra-terrestrial?…Like most individuals who inhabit my shul, Bullhorn Sadie thinks of my husband as super-human. Because he is the rabbi, after all.

Mainly, though, these rebbetzin are blogging about the role of women in Judaism, the tensions between traditional observance and modern mores. It’s exactly what their predecessors did on paper, or in class, though perhaps with more frequent use of words “femme-licious” and “Oprah.” Seems to me that rebbetzins today demonstrate leadership, carve out their roles, and build community online. I hope the 2026 followup to Schwartz’s book includes a chapter on the Internet, which by then, will no doubt be wired directly into our brains. Know what? I think I’ll e-mail the RenReb right now.

(Yes, my friend Marjorie has a lap pool in her backyard on Third Street. It’s awesome. I know. Let’s move on.)

The word mikveh means pool, or more literally, a “gathering of waters.” It’s a bath used since ancient times by men and women for Jewish rituals of transition. Contrary to belief, immersion in the mikveh is not strictly a transition from unclean to clean, impure to pure. In fact, you’re supposed to get spic-and-span—no contacts, no jewelry, no errant eyeliner—before you dunk. The ritual can represent transition from the workaday week to Shabbat, from non-Jew to Jew, from menstruation to ovulation, from single to nearly not. When you go under, all of you must be submerged, even stray hairs, and no part may touch the sides or bottom. Dunkage therefore requires a fetal position, which is no accident. You float in the water like a baby in the womb, and emerge born anew.

According to Jewish law, an official mikveh must contain at least 480 liters of rainwater or melted snow (mayim chayyim, or “living water”), which can be supplemented with “tap.” My wedding mikveh: not so official. Marjorie deliberately left the cover off the pool a couple days before my wedding, but I’d be lying if I said we measured. Also, my nails were polished within an inch of their lives, and I left in that one earring at the top of my ear that’s impossible to take out.

But it was good enough for me. The idea to immerse at Marjorie’s had come from my husband-to-be, a Reform rabbi. When David told me he was planning to go to a mikveh that morning with his guy friends—his “bachelor pool party”—I panicked. What was I supposed to do with myself until 2 p.m.? I don’t care if I’m about to marry a rabbi, I thought, I’m not Jewish enough to go to a mikveh! And if I do go, how am I supposed to go and get my nails done in time? Plus, there was no way in hell I would subject myself, on the morning of my wedding, to an inspection by a frowning drill sergeant in a sheitl who would no doubt discover eraser dust under a toenail and send me home unimmersed and probably cursed.

Then David suggested Marjorie’s pool. This, reader, is why I married him. I loved the notion of preparing myself with something other than hairspray to stand under the chuppah. I loved the symbolism: water, women, womb. I’d visited the remains of mikvehs in Israel and Spain. The civilizations above them had crumbled, but down in those mossy spaces, I’d walked in the steps of my foremothers.

Out in Marjorie’s yard, my closest female friends and my mom gathered around the pool, holding copies of a brief service I’d written with the help of ritualwell.org. (Yes, my husband has the skills, but I wanted this to be my thing.) Everyone read a section. As Adonai cleansed the earth with the waters of the Great Flood, making it livable for a new generation, so I pray for renewal and prepare myself for new life. I dropped my robe to my ankles—this felt very Falcon Crest—and eased myself into the water.

Baruch ata adonai eloheinu melekh ha-olam asher kideshanu be-mitzvotav ve-tzivanu al ha-tevilah, I said. Blessed are You, Adonai our God, Sovereign of the Universe, who has sanctified us by Your commandments and commanded us concerning immersion. I dunked again, praying for a healthy marriage and for feeling to someday return to my toes. And a third time. Marjorie wrapped me in a fuzzy robe she’d warmed up in the dryer. And then we all immersed in whitefish.

Many months later, I found myself at a different mikveh. Again with Marjorie, but this time not so cold. Marjorie had read that, according to Jewish folklore, a woman in her ninth month of pregnancy has mystical powers to bless other women. And if a woman who wants to get pregnant uses the mikveh after a pregnant woman, she’ll get pregnant too.

Marjorie was the pregnant one. I desperately needed her magic.

This one, we felt, needed to be more official than Marjorie’s pool. The nearest mikveh was the Orthodox one in Brooklyn Heights, but that was out of the question; Marjorie has a nose ring and a tattoo. The middle ground: the Conservative mikveh up in White Plains. Marjorie had read about it, and from what she’d heard, she thought it would be welcoming, maybe even a little crunchy. Her hunch was confirmed when the mikveh lady told her on the phone that we could bring our own music to listen to. Laid back! Create your own ritual! Bring Enya! Perfect.

The mikveh lady had a long braid and an easy, if shy, smile; she looked like she’d be at home with a guitar at a song session at Camp Kutz. She led us into the mikveh, its bright blue-and-white-tiled spiral staircase leading down into the water like the inside of a shell. Pointing toward the changing room, she suggested—suggested!—we shower, then left us alone. What with all the scented candles and fluffy towels, I half-expected her to offer us a mud wrap.

Of course, we’d forgotten to bring CD’s. But I liked the silence. A soundtrack would have been a spa treatment; this, I thought, was a mikveh. I liked seeing Marjorie step down into the water, hearing the splashing and rushing as she dunked her giant belly, and wondering, because this is all about ME, which time she prayed for my pregnancy. I imagined what she called her “pregnancy mojo” seeping invisibly into the water like salt in the ocean. And, when I stepped in, I imagined the mojo making its way to my womb. As Adonai cleansed the earth with the waters of the Great Flood, making it livable for a new generation, so I pray for renewal and prepare myself for new life.

I was sure this was going to work immediately. I was sure that my “pregnancy story” was going to be “for all the fertility drugs and decaf, I believe it was the mikveh—and the sense of peace and blessing it brought—that did it.” But no. Not the following month; not for the next nine. Then one July day, shortly after consuming three consolation margaritas after a negative pregnancy test, I discovered I was indeed pregnant. Okay, I thought, we just hadn’t given the mojo a deadline.

Three months later, I underwent a diagnostic test that carries a less than 1% chance of miscarriage. Immediately afterward, my amniotic fluid began to leak in great, terrifying gushes. After a week of bedrest, petrified, I had an ultrasound. The doctor shook his head. “No fluid,” he said. “No heartbeat.” My womb was dry. The living water was gone.

I wrote a special Havdalah service in which my husband and I said goodbye. Be gracious to me, Adonai, for I am sorely wounded. My eyes, my soul, and my womb are consumed with grief. I am like a broken vessel.

And I went to the mikveh. In White Plains? No way. Too far. I was so tired, so limp. Walking distance was all I could manage, and so I went to Brooklyn Heights. I was a little nervous about passing inspection, or doing something so crazily, sacrilegiously wrong that they’d be forced to drain the mikveh and burn the building, but the anxiety took a back seat to my pain. This mikveh was to mark the end of my emotional shiva, the beginning of trying again. Marjorie couldn’t make it; that was fine. I just wanted to get in, get out, get it done.

The mikveh lady came rushing up late, harried and apologetic. (I found this promising; drill sergeants are never late.) She didn’t look any older than me, but—with her plain knee-length skirt, button-down blouse, sensible heels, and wig—she seemed like so much more of a Lady. Though she did have a set of those “invisible” adult braces, to which I also warmed; on some level she was my sistah in geekdom.

She showed me into the changing room, which might as well have been the Sheraton. Spotless tiles, tasteful shower curtain, inch-thick towels. And a giant sink equipped with every tweezer, clipper, pad, and file known to Walgreens. Cotton balls, Q-Tips, combs in a jar filled with blue fluid. Dental floss, polish remover, mouthwash. I showered and scrubbed, picked and smoothed. Finally, dainty paper slippers on my feet, my own special prayers in the pocket of my robe, I called for the lady and shuffled in to the mikveh room, beige and dark. God, thank you for removing my braces at age 11. And please, God, don’t let the mikveh lady inspect me.

“I need to check your back for loose hairs,” she said. Dammit. I dropped my robe. (Less Falcon Crest this time, more Heidi facing the governess.) No hairs had crept from the comb to my back, but I was busted on two other counts: My nails needed filing—and clinging to a lash, visible only to mikveh lady’s bionic eye, was an eensy clump of mascara.

On round two, I passed. I stepped into the water, realizing I’d forgotten to take my special prayers out of my robe pocket. I’ll just get them when she leaves, I figured. But mikveh lady wasn’t budging.

Dear God. She’s not leaving.

She explained to me how to make each dunk “kosher.” She’d watch, she said, for hair that doesn’t go under, for fingertips grazing the side. Rattled, I dunked. My silent prayer: OhGodohGodohGod please let me be doing this right.

I popped up.

“KO-sher!”

The mikveh lady’s proclamation was both sing-song and no-nonsense, like a kindergarten teacher saying “COATS on!” This I had not expected, this verbal green light. But once I’d suppressed a nervous snicker, it occurred to me that it was kind of reassuring.

My second dunk: denied. Hair issue. I tried again. “KO-sher!”

And again. “KO-sher!”

Then she said, “I’ll give you a minute.” I thought I’d want to scramble out, dripping, to grab my own prayers to say. But I didn’t. As Adonai cleansed the earth… I couldn’t remember. But it was okay. When I’d dunked, my mind had been blank, first with fear of mikveh lady, and then with nothing at all. Which was the first time in weeks that my head had been clear.

I dressed. That, I thought, went very, very well. It was just what I needed. Not the pool, not White Plains: the big guns. The real-deal ritual. I determined, superstitiously, that going through all that scrubbing trouble was precisely what made it more magical. If no one had caught that mascara, it—whatever “it” was—wouldn’t have worked! And those funky prayers I brought? Didn’t need them. When I was in the mikveh, I was just there. Floating. Open. Letting the water do its job, knowing one day it will fill me again.

I stepped back into the foyer, feeling clean and worn like I’d spent the day at the beach. The mikveh lady pointed out the sink near the door where I could do one last ritual washing, this time just my hands. As I let the water run through my fingers, I heard her speak behind me. “I hope you get what you want,” she said.

“KO-sher!” is now a running joke in our house. But honestly, it’s good to know mikveh lady’s got my back.