You see, I read the book. And it infuriated me. I loved the beginning passionately, then felt increasingly angry and hoodwinked as it went on. The Elizabeth Gilbert who went to Italy to rediscover food and sensory pleasures after the breakup of her marriage was hilarious and witty. I loved her description of the “gorgeous flower-chain of curses” tossed onto a soccer field by an old Italian man watching the game. I loved that she was an unabashed word nerd like me, telling us that the word for fan in Italian is “tifoso,” derived from the word for typhus—“in other words, one who is mightily fevered.” I loved that she lusted for her young Roman conversation partners but knew that acting on that lust was a mistake.

Oh, I knew Gilbert had done some stupid things in the past. But she owned them. I respected the way she was cryptic about what killed her marriage—she was protecting her husband. I liked the way she was rueful about her self-destructive passion for a younger actor/writer/poet/yogi. When Gilbert took off for Italy, leaving both ex-husband and lover behind, I rooted for her. I rejoiced as she began to eat again. I wanted to suck down plates of pasta with her and giggle over glasses of Barolo. She was my buddy.

But then she left Italy. She went to India to learn how to pray. And I started to turn on her. At first, I made excuses for her inability to write about faith and grace with the same charm she conjured up when she wrote about food. After all, Anne Lamott had the same trouble in Traveling Mercies; it’s hard to make something as internal as spirituality feel immediate. The writing-class rule is “show, don’t tell,” but how do you externalize belief? The book began to feel labored. When Liz wrote about her difficulty meditating and being silent, her self-deprecation started to come off as cutesy. The chattiness I’d loved in Italy was starting to feel glib.

And then one scene pulled the yoga mat out from under me completely.

It’s the scene in which—spoiler alert—Gilbert has a revelatory, out-of-body meeting with her husband’s spirit on an ashram rooftop. She and her husband’s spirit forgive each other, and it is beautiful. The divide between them is gone. Suddenly, his anger and hurt evaporate, because she and he have transcended their earthly selves and their souls have communed.

I was infuriated by Gilbert’s creation of a situation in which she’s been absolved, in which her husband’s soul has done something the man himself could not. It felt like the laziest sort of self-justifying hippie nonsense. I think you have to live with people not liking you. And it’s hard for people like Gilbert (and me), people who really want to be liked, but that is the real work, accepting that not everyone will like you. It’s harder than creating a transcendent moment in which the other person really does forgive you, even if he doesn’t know it consciously.

Of course, I can’t know that Gilbert’s ex’s spirit didn’t meet hers on the astral plane. But I think it’s much more challenging and meaningful to accept that you may never receive absolution. It is braver—and I think more Jewish—to do everything in your power to make right the wrong you’ve done and still acknowledge that forgiveness may not be granted. It’s miserable to live with loose ends. It’s prettier to conjure up resolutions. But it isn’t authentic.

I finished the book because I am a masochist, but I was seething. So much self-examination to so little end! Maybe I just can’t escape my earthly Jewish guilt and perpetual ambivalence about everything. I realize that Elizabeth Gilbert isn’t Jewish, and she’s more than entitled to her own freeform spirituality. But it made me start thinking about how Judaism is more about community than self-acceptance. Ours is not a full-on feel-good religion, like Gilbert’s version of Christi-Bu-ism. But neither is it self-aggrandizing pablum. I do believe the world would be a better place if we spent more time turned outward than inward.

I think back to when I lived in San Francisco and heard so many High Holiday sermons about self-forgiveness—so much talk about forgiving ourselves, so little emphasis on apologizing to others. I think the reason I’m more comfortable with the word “religion” than the word “spirituality” is that religion involves doing rather than just thinking and feeling. Meditation and silence aren’t enough. Healing the world—the actual, physical world—is a more lasting goal.

I don’t want to be too hard on Gilbert. I actually think she did heal the world—her book made people happy. (Not me. Other people.) That’s nothing to sneeze at. Helping readers forget their troubles for a while, letting them in on a life of world travel and adventure, is a mitzvah. I understand that the real Elizabeth Gilbert is a lovely and charitable person. I am glad that she—another spoiler alert—found love again, and I don’t begrudge her a kid-free footloose life, a gazillion dollars, or the privilege of being played by a toothy movie star with lots of hair. But I still think the Jewish takeaway is that Eat Pray Love’s spiritual vision may be a nice place to visit, but we shouldn’t want to live there.

OK. But what starts out seeming like an attempt to defend religion from fed-up spiritualists turns quickly back-handed (“lame synagogues do promote mind states”), and Michaelson ends up subtly advocating for a more conventionally “New Age” spirituality by using the concepts of “values” and “states of mind” almost interchangeably. Secular Judaism offers “integrity, ethics, authenticity”; “social justice” Judaism’s got “righteous indignation, sense of moral goodness”; Zionism—“patriotism, strength, belonging”; and old-school synagogue Judaism has this loaded foursome: “particularism, security, traditionalism, Jewish survival.” Given this array, followed by his sly suggestion that “[m]aybe other mind states like inspiration, joy or introspection, might work better,” it seems that while he says, “[w]hat I’ve tried to suggest is that these seemingly Californian spiritual values are not so distant from hard-core New York religious and political ones,” he’s actually trying to sell one to the other.

Religion is Actually Spirituality [Forward]

At 7, Josie has a more complex image of God. “I believe in God except for when I’m angry,” She recently told me. Then she reconsidered. “Well, actually I do believe in God when I’m angry, but I want to be all, ‘I’m ignoring you!’” She’s interested in the idea of the yetzer hatov and the yetzer harah, the good and evil impulses that duel within us. “I think God is a force that tries to persuade us to do something good and tells us not to do something bad, but sometimes we don’t listen,” she said.

I thought about my kids’ different views about God when I read about research into the correlation between spirituality and happiness in children. The study, conducted by Mark Holder and his colleagues at the University of British Columbia, looked at 320 children aged 8 to12 in both public and parochial schools. It used a standard measure called the Spiritual Well-Being Questionnaire to assess kids’ spirituality in four components: Personal (finding meaning and value in one’s life); communal (the quality of interpersonal relationships); environmental (the sense of awe in nature); and transcendental (the relationship one has with something beyond the human level).

The researchers found that children who felt that their lives had meaning and value and who had strong relationships with others (the personal and communal aspects of spirituality) were happier than children who did not feel that way or have those connections.

But religious practices—defined as attending services, praying and meditating—didn’t have a statistically significant impact on the happiness levels.

I’m not so sure you can tease apart spirituality and religion. To Jews, at least, religious practices aren’t limited to prayer and being droned at in shul. A lot of what we do is home-based, tied to food (challah back!), costumes (Purim, anyone?), even camping (building and hanging out in a sukkah). For us, and for people of other faiths, religion is social. Through day schools, synagogue schools, and camps, we build connections and support systems. Holder and his colleagues view such social networks as spirituality-building, not religion-enhancing, but that clean division doesn’t work for me. Judaism emphasizes tikkun olam, healing the world— wouldn’t that fall under the researchers’ definition of the personal and communal aspects of spirituality?

Furthermore, I’m not convinced that spirituality without religion is good for happiness. I used to live in San Francisco, surrounded by nebulous woo-woo performance-art spirituality, which frequently existed in the absence of real community (other than Burning Man) and without any social-justice aspect. Spirituality, for a lot of folks I used to know, consisted of trying to “manifest” what they personally wanted, a la The Secret, a book that makes me want to hurl. (Not that I’m judgy.) And when you’re manifesting doesn’t work, don’t you then feel powerless as well as unmoored to something bigger than yourself?

I’m no researcher, and I’m no rabbi. But one thing is clear to me: Maxine’s view of religion isn’t very nuanced. (Most things are not when you’re a preschooler.) If she were an adult, I could see how her version of God—the celestial big meanie— would have zero correlation with happiness. (And it could drive anyone to God-free no-pressure Bay Area hippie spirituality.) Indeed, in The How of Happiness, an overview of positive psychology and happiness research by Sonja Lyubomirsky, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Riverside, the downside of seeing God as a punitive, controlling force seems clear: several studies have found that people who believe that negative events are God’s punishment for their sins have more depression and poorer health than those without such beliefs.

I hope Maxie will grow into a sense of faith, spirituality, and religion that’s more like her big sister’s. Last year on the Fourth of July, Josie watched the fireworks over the East River while alternately screaming with joy and watching silently with her mouth hanging open. “Your mind is bigger than your head, because your mind can go anywhere,” she told me afterward. Transcendental. And Josie, like all self-righteous seven-year-olds, loves the notion of assisting the downtrodden and saving the planet. That’s communal, environmental, and personal. In short, she gets, and I hope Maxine is starting to get, the notion that helping other people and searching for meaning are both essential parts of our religious tradition.

There’s a project called The Happiness Study, funded by the Steinhardt foundation, that explores how Jewish institutions contribute to four “quality of life outcomes.” These are connectedness to others, having problem-solving skills, having social and emotional competence, and having a sense of meaning and purpose. The theory is that these qualities are malleable in childhood and can increase one’s happiness as an adult. The hope, of course, is that they will make Jews feel more connected to the Jewish community.

Jeffrey Kress, a member of the project team for The Happiness Study and a professor of education at the Jewish Theological Seminary, agrees that religion as well as spirituality can contribute to happiness. “When you have a sense of connection and feelings of belonging, and a sense of purpose and meaning in your life, you have both social support and perhaps the strength to persevere when there are bumps in the road of life,” he says.

In the future, Kress says, he and his colleagues hope to offer insight into the very different takes on spirituality and meaning that people find within Judaism. Is spirituality something that’s really self-directed? Is it more externally related, like tikkun olam? Is it a peak experience—a sort of religious runner’s high we experience only rarely—or a habit, part of the daily fabric of our lives? To me, these are more interesting questions than wondering whether it’s spirituality or religion that makes children—and adults—happy.

I had gone to Austin, Texas, to read a paper at the annual meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology, and seeing so many musicologists at close range only served to convince me that I no longer wanted to be one. Not long afterward, I left academia.

So it was with some trepidation that I attended “Beyond Boundaries: Klezmer Music in the 21st Century,” a symposium held at the City University of New York in December. Alas, much of that apprehension proved to be warranted.

People have been collecting and studying Jewish music for some time, but the modern klezmer movement is still very young, and much of what passes for research in the area amounts to a kind of “scholarship-lite” (all the verbiage, half the content). There are serious thinkers in the realm of Jewish music, to be sure, but few of them made it to this symposium. Instead, what we got was a mixed bag of genuine experts, mediocre performers, and cheerleaders. Several of the participants spent most of their allotted time patting themselves on the back and congratulating one another on the terrific job they’ve done reinvigorating Ashkenazi music.

There is some truth to this last claim. Klezmer was indeed once dead, and is now in rude health. But it was hard to listen to drummer Eve Sicular deliver an advertorial for herself, when her playing is so unresponsive and so devoid of stylistic nuance. And it was almost as hard to listen to violinist and one-man klezmer factory Yale Strom refer to himself as a balkulturnik, or “master of culture—both because it is embarrassingly immodest to make such claims in public, even when true, and because Strom demonstrates such poor command of his instrument. (He appears to suffer from what a colleague once described as “an unusual sense of pitch. )

Still, the event was not a complete bust, thanks in large part to the presence of violinist Alicia Svigals, clarinetist and ethnomusicologist Joel Rubin, and pianist and scholar Hankus Netsky—three highly knowledgeable and skilled artists who made most of the truly substantive contributions to the three-hour-long session. All had a lot of interesting things to say about the historical evolution of klezmer, its recent trajectory and the reasons for its enduring appeal.

Netsky floated the idea that klezmer enjoyed a successful comeback in part due to its long hibernation, suggesting that because it had “dropped out for 60 years,” the music had a frozen-in-time quality that allowed it to serve as a link to the past for those who rediscovered it—although, as Svigals pointed out, if klezmer seemed to return from the grave with its historic sound largely intact, that was because many early revivalists made a conscious effort to construct a canonical collection of melodies and performance styles from archival recordings. Successive generations of klezmer performers have taken an increasingly flexible approach to that canon, resulting in the efflorescence of creative klezmer hybrids that we see today.

Rubin, meanwhile, called attention to the increasing presence of religious imagery in klezmer since the mid-1990s. What was once an avowedly secular movement—“the new left,” as one audience member put it—now makes room for religious allusions in everything from CD cover art to pseudo-niggunim delivered in faux Hasidic style by non-observant Jews. This rising tide of musical religiosity jibes with the general trend toward heightened spirituality and observance among many American Jews, a correlation that was made explicit by writer Seth Rogovoy.

Rogovoy, who wrote The Essential Klezmer, asserted that “klezmer has a spiritual component at the DNA level.” As a result, once bitten by the klezmer bug, even listeners who were initially drawn to the music out of simple curiosity “will get drawn further in by the spiritual quality inherent in the music.

I happen to disagree with Rogovoy. I don’t think that klezmer—or any music, for that matter—is “inherently” spiritual; rather, I believe that spirituality is something that we invest in music, consciously or unconsciously. But I recognize that some performers do intentionally aim to give their audiences a spiritual experience, and that many people receive Jewish music in this way, regardless of the performer’s intentions. This may be one of the primary factors underlying klezmer’s contemporary appeal: it provides a convenient and painless means of establishing a connection to a religion, and a culture, that can otherwise seem unapproachable. (I don’t know about you, but I find that a nice freylakh goes down a lot smoother than a little one-on-one time with the Babylonian Talmud.)

This tendency to use klezmer as a means of approaching a great religious and cultural tradition goes a long way toward explaining why relatively mediocre artists can thrive on the Jewish music scene. With so many people looking for something that goes beyond mere sound, sound itself will sometimes suffer.

This does not demean the efforts of the many fine klezmer musicians out there who can really deliver the goods. But it does mean that, for the foreseeable future, they—like their scholarly counterparts—will have to share the stage with folks who can’t.

As happens in walk-ups, one day I passed the woman—petite, beautiful, black-haired—on the stairs four times. We finally introduced ourselves; Carole warmly welcomed me to the building. I met her husband shortly after that. Yitzhak Buxbaum is a small, wiry 63-year-old with a close-cropped beard. He usually wears a beret and jogging shoes, and has an odd air about him—at once intense and distracted. In our hallway chats, I learned that he had written several books about Judaism and spirituality (among them The Life and Teachings of Hillel, A Person Is Like a Tree, and The Light and Fire of the Baal Shem Tov), and that he has a commercial website—jewishspirit.com—that bills itself as a “gateway to spirituality, mysticism, and kabbalah.” Most interesting to me was the fact that he was a maggid, an ordained storyteller. I’d never met one before, and I was curious about how and why he came to be one. Luckily, Yitzhak loves to talk.

We met in the second-floor apartment, which is full of books and decorated with exquisite religious paintings—Hindu, Buddhist, and Christian as well as Jewish. This is where Yitzhak does his teaching and writing, and Carole gives yoga lessons.

On your website, you mention in passing that you used to be an atheist. That surprised me.

When I went away to college, that was the first time I was required to put religion on a form, and I put “none,” because like many people of my generation—maybe yours, too—after the bar mitzvah that was the end of it. I happily call myself at that period a fastidious atheist: philosophically hardcore and strict. My mother was an atheist. My father believed in God, but not in a very active way.

I was studying biology and zoology—that was my field of science. There is an inclination in science, of course, to be materialistic: not in a greedy sense, but in terms of spirituality, needing proof. I didn’t have any belief in a big person in the sky. That was my scientific attitude, coming through my rationalism.

But as far as I can tell, your life now is devoted to the religious and mystical. Something clearly changed. What happened, and when?

Because of the crisis of the Vietnam War I was depressed, like many people, and I had to decide what the meaning of life was. So I started to explore, just a little bit, religion, which was very strange for me. I was influenced by Tolstoy, who at the age of fifty became totally religious. His Confession is amazing. It’s a seventy-page book that explains how he came to believe in God. And I read Kierkegaard; his idea of the leap of faith was also influential for me. I had to figure out how one departs from rationalism.

I had been going to graduate school at the University of Michigan. Then, because of the war, and the turmoil connected to it, science seemed irrelevant. And my interest in animals seemed irrelevant. I learned about rich and poor, and the suffering in the world, and oppression. I dropped out. I was in my early twenties. I was this wild radical, with what I called a Hebro, the Hebrew version of the Afro.

If you weren’t a student, it was a matter of going to the Army, going to jail, going to Canada, or teaching. I followed a friend, a Harvard guy, back to Cambridge and I started teaching high school, but it meant nothing to me. I had to discover the meaning of life, or else I was going to lose myself. I spent weeks and months thinking. I’d sit in the Pamplona Café for hours. People thought I was doing nothing, but I was the most intensely focused I had ever been in my life.

Then one night I was walking down the street, and I realized that the deepest thing I knew was that I had to do good. If I felt obligated to do good, what was obligating me? It was not from my parents, it was not from the culture; it was something very, very deep. Half a year later I realized it was God.

Was your search for the meaning of life always tied up with Judaism?

At about the same time that I had that realization, I was also thinking about being Jewish, which had previously seemed of no interest or relevance. I reflected on my Jewishness along the lines of the “black is beautiful” and women’s movements, and recognized that I was ashamed of who I was due to an internalized anti-Semitism. I opened up to investigate Judaism. I read Martin Buber, and then went to see Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, my great rabbi.

The first time, I went with a friend to Brandeis, where Shlomo was appearing in the student union building. He spoke and sang so beautifully. Forty-five minutes into the event he jumped up, and all the people around us jumped up—and started to jump up and down to the music. I said to my friend, “Let’s get out of here. This is a worship service!” I wasn’t ready for worship. I was dipping my toe in, and someone shoved me in the pool—but I didn’t know how to swim. But after some months I was so attracted by the perfume of Shlomo’s holy presence that I just had to see more of him.

I started going to the Hillel at Boston University regularly. Shlomo was teaching there. After some time of attending, I came up with the correct question for him. I realized that God is not an object, so we can’t ask, “Does God exist?” the way we ask, “Does a table exist? Does the building exist?” A person from a rationalist perspective thinks they can just cogitate, “Is there a big person in the sky?” God is something different. So at a question-and-answer session, I said, “Shlomo, I’ve never met God.” And Shlomo said, “Brother, I would like to introduce you.”

What happened next?

Well, I left Cambridge, came to Brooklyn, and went to Lubavitch yeshiva. I studied with them for half a year. I grew payes and a beard. I always have to be a radical.

What did your mother and father think of all of this?

My mother was a very tolerant, nonjudgmental person. She wondered why I did this, but she was okay with anything that I did. My father was thrilled, because he had been trying to tell me for years and years and years how Judaism is the meaning of life. He was a businessman, and he hadn’t been very articulate, but he was sincere. But he couldn’t bear the fact that I had long payes, these sidelocks. I learned in Lubavitch that you can make a deal—a business deal—about religious things, which, from a secular point of view, seems totally bizarre. I said, “Dad, if you’ll put on tefillin, I’ll cut the payes.” So he put on tefillin every morning and I cut the payes. And it had an amazing effect, because he came back to religion.

Well, from the beginning, it was the center of my life. Once I decided what the meaning of life is, I didn’t go back to a relaxed attitude. In fact, Abraham Joshua Heschel, the famous rabbi, said, “If God is not the most important thing, He is nothing.”

When you decided to make God the center of your life, did you go through any emotional or psychological changes?

In one sense your personality changes. In another sense, it doesn’t; I am the very same person I was when I was an atheist. One thing that happened was I ceased being interested in music other than religious music. I am not proud of it, or think this is the correct way to be. I just lost an interest in secular music, because music speaks emotionally—and emotionally I am tuning into God all the time.

How did you figure out how to combine your religious life with a way to exist in the material world? You didn’t want to be in academia anymore, you weren’t a businessman like your father.

Martin Buber’s Tales of the Hasidism showed me the kind of lifestyle that I admired: people who were tremendously devout and religious, but had friends and family. So as I started to read more and more the Jewish stories, I started a little group. I would read a story and we would discuss it. And that evolved into my becoming a maggid, meaning an inspirational speaker and storyteller. I received s’micha, the ordination to be a maggid, from Shlomo.

And then I started writing books. I was constantly reading all these texts that presented high ideals, religiously and spiritually, in Judaism. I said, “Yeah, I’d like to do that.” But I didn’t know how. So when I encountered nitty-gritty, practical ways to attain something spiritually I would note them down. And then I realized, “Gee, this stuff is not available.” And that’s when I produced my first book, my gigantic book, Jewish Spiritual Practices.

What happened after you published this gigantic book?

I became a teacher of Judaism. I taught for many years at the New School. I taught Jewish mysticism, and also ecumenical courses, like “Spiritual Stories from Around the World.” I taught at Makor for a number of years. I have taught at, like, five hundred synagogues.

After I had been doing this for about twenty-five years I decided it was time to train other people. I started a program to train people to be maggids. Twice a year people come for an intensive. I have ordained ten people already over the last two years.

How do you decide whether they are ready to be ordained?

I am not trying to put impediments in people’s way if someone wants to spread God’s light. If they go through it with some attention I generally give s’micha. My wife, Carole, went through the program, and she had no aspirations to become a maggid. But I gave her ordination as a baal misapair ruchani, a master spiritual storyteller.

If God is the center of your life at every moment, how do you also have a marriage?

One of the things about Judaism is that it is nothing crazy, you know? Camus said that he didn’t want to be more godly, he wanted to be more human. And I think that’s the Jewish attitude. Carole is religious, but not as “fanatical” as me. I think it has become more central to her, but my secular interests are limited. It sounds bad, but it isn’t, I hope. She’s a big outdoors person. She has more interest in the world and seeing things. I go along and have a great time, but I am less motivated. It’s like Rabi’a, this great Muslim mystic in the early days. Her assistant told her to come outside and see the wonders of God, and Rabi’a told her to come in and see God Himself.

Why do you feel it’s your job to teach people about God and Judaism and mysticism?

You know that Muslim group called Tablighi Jamaat? They are worldwide, but they are more based in Pakistan. They are proselytizers, and the Western intelligence services feel they are providing a pool for the Jihadists. But ten or twenty men go out to another country or a remote area of their own country, and proselytize for a month. The Mormons do something similar. And Lubavitch has it built in, too. But I feel that the other branches of Judaism have to come up with some radical way to institutionalize proselytizing among the Jews. Nobody is ashamed to stand out on Court Street and pass out literature about environmentalism or politics. So why should people be ashamed to pass out spiritual literature?

The idea of proselytizing rubs many people the wrong way.

I feel that the Jews have to get over this. So many of our people are unconnected religiously.

Have you had any doubts since all this started? Any dark or confused days?

I don’t have any doubts. For my intellectual integrity, I have to allow that there is, like, a one percent chance there is no God. But I don’t operate that way. And if there wasn’t a God, it would be some kind of glorious mistake, just about the noblest mistake possible. I am not a seeker; I am a finder. People too much glorify this questioning in Judaism.

In 1990, Rodger Kamenetz traveled to Tibet with a group of American Jews to meet the Dalai Lama. On that trip, which he describes in The Jew in the Lotus, he happened to learn that some Buddhists meditate within their dreams. He began to wonder how dreams had been understood in Jewish texts and found that, while they had once been considered a source of revelation, dreams had been all but exiled from the tradition because they were deemed too disturbing or difficult to understand. As Kamenetz went deeper into his own dreams, which he calls “the oldest spiritual technology on the planet,” he found that they did not have any explicitly Jewish content. But in their own strange way—as he recounts in his new book A History of Last Night’s Dream—they did, over the years, begin to lead him back to something like God.

You say that dreams have been exiled from Judaism since Genesis.

There is a twin tradition. One is of the dream as direct revelation that requires no interpretation. That’s embodied in the dreams of Joseph as a boy, and in Jacob’s dream of a ladder between earth and heaven. And then there is the whole tradition of interpretation which actually begins with Joseph’s brothers, who have been quite correctly identified as the first dream interpreters. Their interpretation is full of anxiety and rage.

And you see that same mistrust reflected in the Talmud?

To give them credit, I think the rabbis were concerned for the average person who may not want to take a mystical venture into dreams, or who may not be equipped, or who may be fearful. They also wanted to assert that the Torah is the primary spiritual guide. They limit the scope of the dream very severely based on a passage in Deuteronomy essentially saying that no dream can contradict the Torah.

How has this affected the way we understand dreams now?

Our own response to dreams is often that they’re painful or that they are difficult. They bring up feelings we don’t want to face and we call out for an interpreter who will remove the sting of the dream and soothe us. One can find this not only in the rabbinic project but in the Freudian project, which says that the real meaning of the dream is hidden. But in my view the real meaning of the dream is right on the surface.

You once dreamed of an enormous book that was keeping you from writing.

I walk into my study and I have this feeling I’m going to write something. But in front of the computer monitor is this very large blue book with the letters “K de G” on the cover. The author is the Rabbi K de G, which seems to stand for “Kamenetz on Genesis.” The book reads from back to front and it appears to be a commentary on Genesis. As the dream ends, I’m thumbing through the pages from back to front and have completely missed the fact that behind the book, at a distance, was my father who had given it to me.

So the problem wasn’t so much that this holy book was keeping you from writing, but that it was standing between you and your father?

The book was a gift from my father that could have brought me closer to him. A few years ago I had a dream where my house is falling down and I just call my dad and ask for help. And he comes with a bunch of painters and carpenters and suddenly the house is repaired. It was just the first in a series of dreams that helped to lead me closer to him. One of the great gifts for me was to have this different relationship with my father in the last years of his life.

And what was coming between you and your father in waking life?

My pride. There’s another dream where we’re sitting at a kind of Talmud study. My father knows what a certain word means and I don’t. But I don’t ask him; I think I can figure it all out for myself. I don’t want to be the vulnerable son who needs help. But at a deeper level, this was not just about my relationship to my father, but about my relationship to the Father.

You hear people talk that way in church, but not as often in synagogue.

My answer would be two words: Avinu Malkeinu. Our Father, our King. Obviously Jesus said stuff like that because he also went to Rosh Hashanah services. There’s a whole Yiddish tradition of referring to God as tateynu, as “dear Father.” Our ancestors were very comfortable with the idea that God was a father and a king and a shepherd. But now if we have an emotional relationship to God, that’s immediately seen as goyish. We have drained the feeling level out of our liturgy and then we wonder why people can’t connect. They’re not just words. If God is a father, then I must be like a child.

So how does God appear to you in your dreams?

At the end of the book, I describe a dream where an orphan boy is being visited by his father. The father shows him his hand and says, “My hand is the same as yours.” Then the father leaves and the boy starts sobbing and looks in the mirror. And he’s me: I see my face. That sadness of having lost the Father, in this case not my father but the Father, that yearning to reconnect, not to be an orphan but to be his son—that’s the quest. It’s rather like what Rabbi Nachman said: You have to connect to God from your broken heart. The dream reawakened the feeling of loss, the pain of the separation from God. It’s a tremendous gift to feel that.

You’ve been studying under Marc Bregman, a self-styled “dreamworker” in Vermont.

Marc Bregman grew up as a Jewish kid in Philadelphia in a kind of anti-Semitic environment. He had a strict Jewish father and he rebelled in the 1960s. After he moved to Vermont he was working in the post office by day and seeing clients about their dreams at night. He’s certainly not a traditional Jew or even a nontraditional one. But I know that he is a man of God.

And you have your own clients now. How do you work with their dreams?

We meet once a week for an hour. We try to find the feelings in the dream, the belly button, as Marc calls it. Then we have homework, which is to visualize a moment from one of the dreams that needs change. There’s a rhythm back and forth from night dream to daydream and from daydream to actual life. Usually people come with a problem they’re trying to wrestle with but the dreams often point to some underlying predicament. It could be other people’s expectations. It could be family obligations, guilt, or a sense of duty. We just keep going deeper and over time there’s a shift. The dream becomes a live rehearsal. The changes you make in dreams can change how you behave.

In what sense is this approach to dreams Jewish?

When you’re taking a dream seriously it becomes a spiritual practice. How does that connect to what’s offered by this tradition we belong to where we have Torah and commentary and rabbinic authority and services and holidays and all of that? We struggle with a feeling of loss of connection to God. Religion tries to give us intellectual or ritual answers. People often outsource their spiritual struggles to the experts. Hence the tremendous pressure on rabbinic figures in our community. If we don’t have a personal feeling of a quest, at least if some of us don’t, then it makes the rabbi’s job very, very hard.

Could you have understood your dreams without coming to them from a Jewish angle?

It seemed necessary for me to go through the books, to go through Genesis, to go through the rabbis. And yet it’s true that having done that, it no longer seems quite as relevant. You can find the gift of the dream without Genesis. But it’s promised there.

/lost/lost/lost/lost/lost/lost/lost by monkeyinfez / Paul Hockett; some rights reserved.

You had a series of dreams in which men kept trying to feed you meat.

I had alternated between various dietary restrictions from semi-kosher to vegetarian and wasn’t too faithful to any of them. And all of a sudden these guys are showing up in my dreams serving meat. It started as hors d’oeuvres and ended with giant hunks of beef thrown on a grill by bare-chested Mexican chefs. It was obvious that these were good guys and that they were challenging me with a kind of a male generosity of spirit.

What did you dream last night?

Recently I dreamed I woke up and went to the window. I looked outside and the ground was covered with snow and I felt such joy. It took me back to being a kid in Baltimore thinking, I’m going to spend the whole day playing and I won’t have to go to school. You worry and you plan, you try to make yourself happy, you try to make other people happy and then the snow just falls, you know? It falls on its own.

While this surprised me for a moment, it didn’t affect my impression of Laura at all: it was just one more aspect of a very unusual person. Over time, I came to know another aspect; the way in which her dark and ironic sense of humor was coupled with a completely uncynical approach to spirituality. True to form, she had worked out her own way to pray.

Laura grew up in Rockland County, New York, one of four sons of a furrier father and teacher mother. She has been a musician and composer and an exhibiting art photographer, and is now a graduate student in social work at NYU.

I’ve long wondered how Laura’s thoughts on gender connect to her thoughts on faith. Also, as someone who once wrote a gentle satire of transgender narratives, I’ve wondered how someone with a nuanced and flexible view of spirituality came to make such a literal and irreversible decision to alter her body. Recently I had a chance to ask when I visited Laura at her home on a winding road outside of Nyack.

You’ve mentioned to me that your mother thought you might turn out to be a rabbi.

She always thought I had this teacherly quality. And when I was in my middle teens, post-bar mitzvah, I went on to get a confirmation—something most of my peers didn’t do. I think I was turning to religion because I had so much angst inside me, and it seemed like a path to meaning. I became active in the synagogue. I was involved in the Jewish youth group, I was volunteering to do various things. There were times when, for instance, the rabbi might be away for a week, and I would be the one who led the service in his place.

As a teenager?

Yeah, he would call me and say, “I’m going to be away for this weekend, and here’s the service,” and he would leave me some latitude within the traditional structure of Jewish worship. I was dating a girl who was a singer, and she used to sometimes be the cantor at the service. It was sort of sweet.

I think a lot of why I did all of that was because I was struggling with my coming of age—and issues like my gender, my sexuality, my relationship to other people, my feeling like there was something more to life than a lot of the paths that I saw.

What was your family like when you were growing up?

My parents are very traditional Jewish people—not in a deeply religious way, but in the guilt-and-Chinese-food kind of way. My mother is the only child of parents who made it out of Europe in the early part of the Holocaust. They were never in the camps, but the rest of my grandparents’ family was. My name came from a great aunt, Lore, who didn’t make it out; she was taken away and probably died in Auschwitz. Following Jewish custom my parents called me Lawrence after her.

As you grew up you didn’t remain as observant as when you were a teenager. What changed?

I think part of what ultimately soured me from organized religion is having gone to synagogue a lot, and seeing people say the prayers and know the prayers, but it didn’t seem like it was touching them in their heart. None of them understood Hebrew, and I never learned Hebrew. And yet I knew prayers in Hebrew. I felt like I was being more spiritual when I was sitting playing the piano than when I was in a synagogue saying words that I didn’t understand.

What do you think motivates people to recite prayers they don’t understand? Do you think that the thinking is: Well, if there is a God, and he is as scary and big and strong as he seems to be, I’d better say this prayer?

I think some of it is that whole paternal thing: We’re afraid that God, the Father, is going to punish us for not doing the chores, not taking out the trash. I think some of it is that—especially in Judaism, especially with Reform Jews, especially in the Northeast of the United States—there’s this fear of letting the traditions die, especially after the Holocaust. How can we go through something so traumatic to our people and then let the traditions die?

I would hope people would be able to be introspective and sort of find their own inner peace. But that’s not really encouraged in our culture. And I think that’s kind of sad.

How did you arrive at your personal inner peace?

I was working at a corporate job that I couldn’t stand, doing market research. On the day of the winter solstice in 1998 I came home from work late. I was standing in the backyard, and I was desperate and miserable and depressed. And there was this huge full moon. So I just thought, “What the hell, might as well pray to the moon.” I did, I started calling to it for some kind of sign or some kind of message. Of course nothing happened. I mean, nothing was written in fire across the sky. So then I went to bed. I got up during the night, and on the way back from the bathroom I remember feeling all of the energy drain from my body. I passed out. I think of it as a near-death experience. I remember having a sort of vision and seeing the moon and the earth as if they were on a string, a continuum between the two. And between the moon and the earth were my physical body and my spiritual body, for lack of a better way to put it. And I really felt like I was seeing who I was.

For the couple months leading up to my surgery, I used to go outside, and I would light a candle, and I would sit there and I would just pray to the moon. I would meditate, and ask for good luck and protection and guidance, hoping that this was the right thing for me. Because this was surgery, this was the big shit-or-get-off-the-pot moment. Sometimes I’d say a Jewish prayer, sometimes I’d say a nonverbal prayer. The surgery happened in Montreal; the place where I stayed leading up to it and during recovery was this little island in the middle of the river. And on the island there were two houses and then some woods. I used to do walking meditation on the grounds. Also afterwards, although I wasn’t walking quite so well. Trust me, after that surgery it takes a while before you start walking comfortably.

I’m sure. Ow. Do you see a relationship between your teenage yearnings for meaning through Judaism and your decision to change your gender?

There was this Hindu mystic named Ramakrishna who lived in the mid-1800s. For a time he put aside his Hinduism totally and lived in each of the other major religions. His ultimate realization was that no matter what tradition he followed, he came to the same place of enlightenment; he felt he contacted the same spirit, the same God, the same whatever, regardless of what path he was following. Since no matter which path he followed they all led to the same enlightenment, he said that it didn’t really matter what path you followed. We tend to follow what path we’re born into. I had this epiphany one day where I sort of applied that to gender, and it’s like—living as a man or living as a woman, neither one has any more right or ability to find happiness. They’re just different ways of living.

Another thing that Ramakrishna says is that if you feel drawn to a different path, if it sort of suits your temperament, then why not change, because all the paths are heading in the same place anyway? Then I started thinking about that part of it in the context of gender, and for whatever reason I felt drawn to changing. There was no meant-to-be-ness about it. I saw a lot of different alternatives for my future, and this just seemed to be the one that fit the most.

“Why not change” is a very strong statement when it comes to having surgery to change your sex. I feel that gender is a spectrum, and sometimes I wonder why someone would do something as literal as take hormones and have surgery.

Laura Jacobs in 2004

I never know quite how to say this; I always struggle to find the words. You know, I was born male, I lived as a boy and then a man for most of my life, and in my late 20s I started to explore outside of just living as a man. Over the course of a couple years (or who knows how long, because where do you mark the beginning, and where do you mark the end?), I changed. Now I live as a woman, I am a woman; I’ve gone through the process of changing my gender.

I don’t so much like the words transgender and transsexual. And I don’t like the standard way people think about those words. I think a lot of people who use those words, and the way most people understand those who change their gender is, “I was always meant to be the other, I was born in the wrong body, some sort of mistake happened along the way, and I need to be fixed to make myself right.” In some ways my story fits that. I had questions about my gender going back to being five years old. I can remember even praying to God that I would wake up one day having been magically changed into a girl overnight. But in some ways my story doesn’t fit that. I made a choice about where to live on the spectrum. Even today I feel connected to both my masculinity and femininity, and that’s heresy to some trans people. I still feel I am both, as we all are.

How did your very traditional parents deal with the change you made?

Initially they really struggled. They didn’t understand. It was a shock to them. But one of the things that they said on the day that I told them was that they didn’t want to lose me as their child, that I was still their child. That impressed me. I brought them to my therapist a few times, and that helped a little bit, but didn’t really. Then I referred them to another therapist who specializes in LGBT stuff, and they sort of clicked with her a little bit, but then sort of didn’t. And so I turned to their rabbi, who I hadn’t had contact with in a million years—the same rabbi I used to sub for when I was a teenager. I said to him, here’s some of what I’m going through, and can you help us? He was kind of shocked, but he said, “I’ll see what I can do.”

My parents were more comfortable talking to their rabbi. After one of the conversations we all had, he got on to some Reform rabbi Internet news group, Rabbi-Net or something, and sent an email around saying, “I have this person in my congregation who’s going through this change, and is there anybody out there who can help me?” A female rabbi from San Francisco responded. She had a trans son, meaning a daughter who became a man. The child was around my age, and went from Laura to Larry. Our rabbi put my mother in touch with her. Here was a woman who was a rabbi, so it was an authority figure, and was about my mother’s age, had a child who was about my age, who went from Laura to Larry, and it was a little too much for my mother to turn away from. The woman rabbi said, I had a daughter, now I have a son, and I love my son. Yeah, it was hard losing my daughter, but I’ve gained this wonderful son, and we’re closer than ever. After that it all just shifted.

You told me in an email you’d been hesitant to have this conversation because you’d recently been in the throes of an existential crisis. You said you were wondering what the meaning of it all was.

All the hopes and the dreams that I had when I was young, so many of them didn’t come true. Some of them did. I just kept coming back to the futility of life. It’s kind of ironic: Here I am working as a therapist trying to help people find meaning in life, and I still struggle with finding meaning in my own. What I’ve been thinking lately is that sometimes what it comes down to is that maybe the meaning is what we make of life. Maybe life is about the exploration of life.

Do you think that’s why you’ve wound up becoming a therapist and not a rabbi? The two are related, but when you’re a therapist and you’re confronted with these existential questions all the time, you’re not really expected to provide theological answers.

I’m more of a guide, which I think was what clergy used to be. In spite of the fact that my mother thought I might become one, part of the reason I never wanted to be a rabbi is that I find a lot of organized religions to be very limiting. I think it’s also that in some ways living in the angst is kind of a healthy place to be, as much as it’s not always the easiest place to be.

(“bark mitzvahs”). She also guides readers in creating their own traditions, and explores how traditional communities can move beyond skepticism to turn invented rituals into sanctioned, even beloved, tradition.

What, broadly, is the purpose of religious ritual?

Religious rituals give us ways to shape and focus our experiences, ways that take us out of ourselves and connect us to other people in our tribe, in our community, in our group—both people who are living and historically. And they also link us to God—or to a power, however we’re defining that—which is larger and greater than ourselves. They make our lives not arbitrary. We need new rituals when the old ones don’t work anymore to shape parts of our lives.

Why do the old ones sometimes stop working?

In some cases, our contemporary realities are such that no ritual was ever developed which can mark what’s happening to us. For instance, we need rituals now to mark retirement or menopause, because we expect to live long after those events, and we want rituals to shape and comment upon those things.

But doesn’t religious tradition exist in part to create a sense of something ancient and unchanging, something an individual can turn to during major life events—a stable base when other things are shifting?

I think that often religious people demonstrate their love and commitment to their inherited faith by changing practices. They do it so that their faith can remain vibrant under new, current, or challenging situations…. We usually think of being a stickler for past practices as a sure sign of piety, but we can surely see a different form of piety, that practiced by people who are willing to put up with the discomfort of novelty and experimentation in order to preserve Judaism as a living tradition.

Can new rituals be considered as valid or as important as preexisting ones? For example, how can a “car mitzvah” have as much religious weight as a bar mitzvah? Can an orange on the seder plate be as important, given larger contexts, as, say, the charoset? What about a so-called bark mitzvah, the new practice of bar mitzvahing your dog?

It depends how you define “valid and important.” A bar mitzvah used to be no big deal—a boy went to shul with his dad in the morning, had an aliyah, downed a glass of schnapps, and went off to school. Now it costs thousands of dollars and a year of preparation, it keeps a kid in religious school, and allows families to demonstrate their commitment to Judaism. So in a sense there is a “new” bar mitzvah that has become a very big ritual. As for the car mitzvah—that is, a ritual in which a synagogue gives its new teenage drivers a token, like a tree of life keychain, to remind them to drive carefully—it has a small chance of catching on, I think, only because 16-year-old kids in liberal Judaism don’t tend to go to shul much…. The orange on the seder plate will fade away because there isn’t much to do with it aside from notice it, and, God willing, the inequities in Jewish life that it points out will hopefully be addressed in the coming years.

The bark mitzvah—that’s just silly. What isn’t silly, and what will perhaps expand, is the practice of Jews finding ways to mark the death of their beloved pets.

How, in general, does one go about creating new rituals?

When we are inventing new rituals, we turn to our available cultural practices—what I call the “Jewish ritual toolbox.” You aren’t going to just think out of nowhere, “Okay, what should I do?” You want to make sure that other Jews feel that your practice is within the language of Judaism—not just the verbal language, the prayers, songs, texts and so forth, but also the language of ritual gestures, or ritual objects, such as lighting candles or dipping something in water. Even if there weren’t a ritual to name my baby daughter in my rabbi’s manual, for example, it is incredibly comforting to know that there are psalms and proverbs and sacred texts that I could turn to to create one, that with a little tweaking or some adjustment, I can make use of what has been there all along.

Some of the rituals you describe in your book seem, at least from a more conservative point of view, to stretch the limits of religious practice—or to defy traditional rules outright. For example, you mention the “new ritual” of getting a Star of David tattoo, but isn’t there a law against burying a tattooed body in a Jewish cemetery? Can we really consider such inventions—the ones that are a stretch or an instance of defiance—rituals?

I don’t know that there are really limits on what can and cannot be a ritual. For instance, when someone came up with the idea of the afikomen, I can picture most people going, “Are you kidding? Hide a matzoh?” It’s easy to imagine that it seemed silly at first, but, for whatever reason—whether it had something to do with God’s hiddenness, or with, say, just keeping children interested—we accepted it. And now the seder cannot officially end without it.

Funny about the tattooing rule: People can know next to nothing about Judaism (or even a lot) but they’ll say this they know for sure: that if you have a tattoo, you won’t be buried in a Jewish cemetery. If you speak to members of chevra kadishas ["burial societies"] and Jewish funeral parlor directors, I bet you will never meet anyone who has ever stood in the way of a burial for someone with a tattoo. Studies of the biblical prohibition on tattooing, by the by, reveal that it is not about making a design on oneself, but about gashing oneself, as some non-Jewish peoples did, in antiquity, as a sign of mourning.

While some new practices—Torah yoga, say—might represent a spiritual undertaking, can they always be included in the category of religious ritual? Isn’t it possible to define ritual a little too broadly?

I agree: There are big lifecycle rituals—bris, marriage, death—and big holidays—Passover, Rosh Hashana. And there are less grandiose spiritual practices—having a seder on Tu B’shvat, the new year for trees, an upsherin, a haircutting ceremony for a three-year-old boy about to wear tallit katan for first time, putting tzedaka money in a blue-and-white box before Shabbat. A women’s seder or a torah yoga practice would fall into that category, I think.

In your book, you talk about some of the ways in which even Orthodox Jews are inventing rituals. But is it more acceptable to invent rituals in the Reform movement? How much latitude do Orthodox Jews really have to create within the boundaries of their own beliefs and their communities’ expectations?

What makes things difficult for Orthodox Jews wishing to institute new practices is a strong sense of communal norms. Years ago, when Orthodox feminists wanted to have monthly women’s prayer groups—even when they found rabbis who said this would be acceptable according to halakha, if done in particular ways, which the women were happy to follow—they were told [by community leaders] that having this monthly three-hour service would destroy family unity…. Changes terrify us, because our Jewish practices are so very dear and hold us together, so we think that a bit of change will threaten the whole structure. But change happens: Women’s prayer groups have become a new norm in many Orthodox communities.

Is it okay for people to invent rituals themselves even if they’re not observing many of the normative ones, like keeping kosher or observing Shabbat?

Anyone can invent a new Jewish ritual practice and perform it…. As for “normative Judaism”: Many of the leading rabbis in the Reform movement do not keep kosher; this does not make them, in the eyes of those who have ordained them and those who follow them, illegitimate transmitters of Judaism. The rituals that have the best chance of catching on are made by people with a love of Judaic tradition and some textual knowledge.

I have a pretty common condition called poly-cystic ovarian sydrome (or PCOS). Which means, without getting too graphic, that I don’t ovulate properly. It’s estimated that 10 to 15 percent of all women have some form of PCOS, and a disproportionate number of these are (surprise!) Ashkenazi Jews. I should be okay to have babies, says Dr. W, but it will never happen “accidentally.” It will probably require basic fertility drugs, though hopefully nothing major: no Petri dishes or hormone shots or surrogates or donor eggs from a desperate grad student. Hopefully.

Dr. W and I have the same conversation in her office every six months or so.

“Are you thinking about getting pregnant?” she’ll ask.

“No,” I always answer, and then promptly burst into tears. “But someday, maybe…”

Dr. W has dealt with worse; she’s treated women with reproductive challenges much more significant than mine, and proverbial clocks ticking much more insistently. Her walls are covered with plaques and awards and elaborate thank-yous from legions of elated new mothers and fathers. There are offerings of crayon drawings accompanied by notes: If it weren’t for you, Jakey wouldn’t be here at all and thank you for making all our dreams come true. There is even a gorgeous sampler with a rainbow poem of gratitude.

Invariably, Dr. W will hand me a Kleenex, offer a seen-it-all smile, and tell me, with total conviction: “It will be just fine; you don’t need to worry.” The relief and gratitude that wash over me then are immense. I want to learn to sew and make her a sampler: I thought my eggs were all fucked up/ after every single useless shtup/ but Dr. W showed up and saved the day:/ I ordered me a Bugaboo and now it’s on its way!

From Dr. W’s mouth to God’s ears, I find myself thinking, reflexively, after every pap-smear, drying my eyes as I emerge onto the sidewalk.

But whoa: God? What could “God” possibly have to do with the science that may (or may not) one day help Dr. W help me to conceive? Here’s where I’m momentarily—if uncomfortably—a knee-jerk true believer. Do I believe in a God? Let alone a Jewish God? I can’t really say for sure. If there is a higher power governing the universe—and I do sort of believe there to be one, if only in the notion that life itself is precious—it is certainly not a higher power concerned with the specific struggles of my one journey through this lifetime. Let alone the realities that may prevent me—one tiny part of the human race—from reproducing myself. Surely individual cases of reproductive trouble are of little consequence to the universe at large, to the continuation of the species, to the meaning of being alive in the first place.

Still, there’s that silent, reflexive appeal to God. President Bush—science-bashing father of test-tube twins!—would be proud. As would any number of American rabbinical associations, who’ve run themselves ragged for years telling us how low birth rates among American Jews are, for purposes of Jewish continuity, worse than Hitler.

I recently turned 28. Not an age at which it’s necessary—in 2006, at least—to seriously take stock of one’s reproductive prospects. But regardless, I’ve been preoccupied with thoughts of babies—my babies, to be specific—for almost as long as I’ve been (irregularly) menstruating.

It’s interesting to note the obvious, I think: that the word “pregnant” is metaphorically synonymous with “heavy” and “weighty” and “uncomfortable”, as in “a pregnant pause” or “a pregnant question”: both cases in which something is to be borne out and that thing may or may not be positive or pleasant for all involved. My wanting to have children has felt at times like a burden—a huge, awkward thing to be carted around through my adolescence and into my twenties. It’s led me more than once to make bad decisions where men are concerned, blinded—like some terrible evolutionary case-in-point—by some pseudo-ideal trait of prospective daddy-hood.

Not to mention the fact that I feel increasingly sheepish openly admitting that I do in fact want kids—and want them, actually, a lot. A significant part of me feels like it’s a cop-out, a weakness, a shameless bowing to bourgeois convention, to want children. The notion that babies are the best and main thing a woman can do with her body and life is stupid, at best. Some of my most beloved, respected friends are of the sort to sneer at endless reams of unsolicited baby photos and hiss “Breeder!” at passing stroller-pushers. I myself am wracked with self-loathing whenever I wander through Park Slope: the insufferable smugness! The unapologetic materialism! The seething competitiveness! The baby-style narcissism! Oh, to want to be a mommy in gentrified Brooklyn: for shame.

For reasons good and bad, selfless and narcissistic, considered and totally naïve, however, I do want children. I know it’s not cool or cutting-edge or intellectually defensible, but there it is. Now back to my aging reproductive organs.

For my 28th birthday, I took myself on a solo trip to Greece. I had a pocket of free time, I had a little extra cash, and I’m ever-conscious of the fact that, ahem, backpacking without an itinerary isn’t the sort of thing I’ll always be able to do. (Which is code for: get all your livin’ out of the way now, girlie-girl!)

On the isle of Rhodes, a few weeks into my travels, my main objectives included: conclusively identifying the best strawberry-nutella crepe in town, finishing Anna Karenina, watching the sun set from the roof of my lovely guest house, and giving the finger to the monument declaring the Nazi-murdered Jews of Rhodes “martyrs” (when, of course, the Greeks handed them over, lambs to the slaughter, in 1942).

And one other thing.

Rhodes is famous for its mythical colossus and for the only inhabited medieval fortress town in all of Europe, a stone’s-throw (literally: the walls are pockmarked with cannon-wounds) from Turkey. Rhodes is less well known for the Tsambika Monastery, also known as the “Baby Monastery”, which I found mentioned only briefly in my trusty Lonely Planet, buried under “Other Things to See”. Halfway between Rhodes Town and the small fishing village of Lindos, the monastery is perched 300 km up the side of a mountain, and is home to an approximately 750-year-old religious icon said to bring luck and fertility to those in need of both/either.

Legend has it that generations of reproductively-challenged (much nicer than “sterile”, no?) women from near and far needed only to ascend the mountain barefoot to pray for and be blessed with conception. An elderly woman on the bus told me that on September 7th—a saint’s day—the most desperate women would actually climb up the mountainside on their knees to appeal to the icon. What else were they to do without a decent endocrinologist around? These child-free women faced a different brand of societal disapproval than is routinely dispensed today. Alternately, they were thought to be diseased, cursed, possessed, and/or simply bad luck. Their poor knees.

Even still, wannabe-mommy Rhodian women continue to make pilgrimage to present offerings to the icon. The name Tsambikos for a boy or Tsampika for a girl is unique to the island of Rhodes, bestowed by grateful mothers whose prayers were ostensibly answered by the Madonna and child icon nestled into the tiny, Byzantine chapel attached to the Tsambika Monastery. Apparently one can call out “Tsambikos!” on any busy street in Rhodes and see for oneself just how effective the icon has been in fostering conception.

The ornate chapel itself was similar to others I saw throughout Greece, with its overflow of candles and frescoes. In the far right corner was the famous icon: a silver metalwork Madonna and child measuring about 8 x 10 (or, if you prefer, about the same size as the issue of Vanity Fair heralding the long-awaited Annie Lebowitz snapshots of little Suri Cruise).

Their painted faces were worn clear away into wood, their expressions gone. Standing before the thing, I was tempted to cross myself—despite the fact that, no, I do not believe Jesus Christ was the son of God—it’s just theatrics, after all, and couldn’t hurt! If there is a higher power, no way does one set of religious observance have the monopoly. Synagogue, church, mosque, I don’t care. If it’s quiet and there’s some discernibly good ju-ju around, I’ll pay my respects and give Feeling Something a fair shot. Being a Jew, to me, isn’t about shutting out everything else.

So I sincerely tried to have a religious moment, staring intently at the icon. At the hundreds of tin baby charms hanging around it. At the dozen or so giant wax-baby candles (yes, truly: there were actually life-sized wax-baby candles, with wicks sticking out from the crowns of their bizarre little heads).

I thought about what it might be like to share a careless night (or afternoon, or morning) of passion with my honey and wind up—whoops!—with child.

I giggled at the thought of the birthday card a hilarious friend had threatened to send this year: Happy Birthday! Seven years to go until your uterus is useless!

I reflected on my painfully small (and ever-shrinking) family of origin.

I conjured the wonderful face of my beloved.

All I could feel was ridiculous, however, followed in quick succession by shame and boredom. Pretty much the same feeling I get in any house of God. This baby-obsession, it occurred to me as I stood there, rustling around in my heart for some reverence, is absurd. A total waste of time. If it happens, it will happen.

And if it doesn’t? Surely I can live a worthwhile life that doesn’t include reproducing myself. I’m sick to death of carrying around the weight of wondering whether it will happen, and how, and with whom. I’m sick of those emotionally cumbersome visits to Dr. W.

Is letting go of the concern, the worry, not itself a demonstrative act of faith?

It was getting hot in the little chapel, and I was hungry. And anyway, what was actually moving wasn’t the icon itself or the prospect of divine intervention where my fertility is concerned, or imaginings of my possible future organic-produce-fed progeny. It was the thought of the thousands upon thousands of beseeching prayers that had preceded my mighty ambivalence before that 8 x 10 piece of metal and wood. Legions of women who so desperately wanted children, wanted to grow them in their wombs and give birth to them and nurse them and hold them and raise them—and who couldn’t do any of it. Women without endocrinologists or the promise of Clomid or IVF or the privilege of adoption, or, if all else failed, the option to simply have a full, happy life sans kids. All coming here in hope, resignation, anger, as a last resort. The air, if I may be permitted to further abuse so cruel and overt a metaphor, was pregnant with their prayers.