I am back from my sabbatical, albeit a short one by sabbatical standards – just a month and a half. I return full of gratitude for all the talented leaders in this community who not only kept things running but offered such beautiful music and words and spirit. I was able to have a time away in which I wasn’t worrying about Ner Shalom, and that was a real gift to me.
Since I’ve been back, people have been asking me: how was it? As if a one-word, one-foot answer existed.
The truth is I don’t even yet know how it was. It is still in large part undigested. I don’t even feel quite home yet. In my dreams at night I am still in Europe, just as I was before I went. Not the real Europe, obviously, but a kind of dreamscape, where I am walking cobblestone streets under the brooding eye of Medieval castles; stepping between golden sunset and long shadows. My dream-self is still searching for something even while my waking self isn’t quite sure what.
I can say with certainty that it didn’t go anything like what I’d imagined or planned. Because truth be told, I did something impulsive. I went to Germany and rented an apartment for a month in the town of Worms. It was a romantic idea without much grounding in real life. I chose Worms because one thousand years ago it was the hotbed of northern European Judaism. They called it Jerusalem on the Rhine. It was home to scholars and mystics and pietists and poets, and it was a place I, for some reason, kept reading about in Jewish encyclopedias when I was a kid. Along with the nearby cities of Speyer and Mainz, it formed a cluster that the Jews called Ashkenaz – an old place-name from Torah whose actual location was long lost to memory. It is from Medieval Ashkenaz that Jews spread throughout Central and Eastern Europe, taking their Rhinish German dialect with them, an insider language that nowadays we call Yiddish.
In Worms is the oldest standing Jewish cemetery in Europe. It has legible graves dating back 1000 years. The cemetery is called Heiliger Sand – “Holy Sand.” It is beautiful and old and peaceful. It’s unique among Jewish cemeteries in that its graves don’t face Jerusalem, but instead face due south. Some think that orientation is to remember the community’s journey from Italy and across the Alps to the Rhine, commemorating not a connection with our ancient homeland but with the previous stop on the road – Rome – elevating our Diaspora journey over our ancient origins. I spent a lot of time at that cemetery, every other day in fact, until the dead there felt like friends.
Worms also has a synagogue, unused, serving as a museum, rebuilt from a synagogue destroyed in the Shoah, which was rebuilt from a synagogue destroyed in the Black Plague, which was rebuilt from a synagogue destroyed in the First Crusade. The medieval commentator Rashi studied there, and so it is called the Rashi-Shul. It is unusual architecturally in that instead of having a women’s section at the back as you’d expect from the Middle Ages, it has a Frauenschule, a “women’s synagogue” perpendicular to the men’s space, forming an ell-shaped layout, with the front of both sections meeting at the aron kodesh. That is still the shape of the synagogue. I tried to go there every couple days as well to meditate or pray, although visiting tour groups often got in the way.
At both the synagogue and the cemetery, men were required to wear head coverings. I was, as a rule, the only person who arrived with a kippah of my own. For those who didn’t have a hat, they offered these disposable paper jobs, which always made it look like a gathering of Jewish short-order chefs.
I came to Worms because of the cemetery and the synagogue and the mystics. I wanted to be immersed in that history, and to feel whatever spiritual ripples continue to emanate. I got an apartment whose window overlooked the Judengasse, the medieval Jewish street, now almost entirely occupied by Turkish immigrants and Syrian refugees, including women in scarves and long coats, who kept looking to me like Jewish women of the 1100s – at least for the blink of an eye before I gathered my wits. I found it fascinating and moving that these particular cobblestones, just inside the medieval walls, were consistently the home of a non-Christian minority.
I came to Worms to feel the ripples of ancient Ashkenaz, but it wasn’t like that. Despite its Jewish past, and despite having played a role in the history of Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation, and despite being the setting of the medieval epic poem, the Nibelungenlied which is the source material for Wagner’s Ring Cycle – despite these Christian, Jewish, and Pagan milestones, modern Worms is not mysterious or glamorous. It is a small modern town, with grocery stores and more haircutting salons than I could count. Time has moved on, and cultural centrality has moved elsewhere. I realized quickly that I had done something akin to a European taking a sabbatical in Santa Rosa. A perfectly nice place to live, but an odd choice for a pilgrimage. And the look on every single German person’s face whom I told I was living in Worms for a month confirmed that.
Because of the fact that Worms was not filled with art and culture and other distractions, I quickly began to feel all the things. I felt oceans of sadness – the grief of this past year. The desire not to get out of bed. Regret at having chosen Worms when I might have chosen, I don’t know, Rome or Barcelona. Gratitude for my Deutschebahn regional pass that got me out of town every other day so I could see other cities and faces. I felt loneliness, boredom, isolation. I was living in a town where not a single person knew my name, and the only ones who knew my face enough to even say hello were two waiters, a barber, and the Columbian security guard at the cemetery. I felt gratitude for my friend Lisa with whom I got together at least once a week in some city or other, who kept me anchored in human connection.
I watched as my ambitions for the sabbatical crumbled away. I had intended to write. I did write, but they were words for my own eyes and no one else’s. I had intended to meet with the City of Worms’ cultural coordinator, and establish a useful relationship for whatever project would unfold. We scheduled a coffee, which I put in my calendar, but my calendar had not yet updated to German time and as a result I stood him up. I had an ambition to translate some medieval piyyutim written right there in Worms – how cool and cosmic it would be to dive into that in the town of its composition. I found an academic in Frankfurt who offered to provide me unpublished manuscripts to work with. I said yes. And then she never wrote to me again.
I see in retrospect, and I think I even knew it at the time, that my inability to be productive was not a failure of the sabbatical but the point of it. My challenge was not productivity. My challenge was being alone and empty in a sea of unstructured time. I had to let go of striving and attachment, which I do not let go of easily. And what’s more, I had to let go of striving and attachment over and over and over.
But there was also magic. There was also beauty. There was beauty in my very anonymity. Beauty in the geography. Beauty in special moments – like meeting the Jews who pray in an egalitarian minyan in Frankfurt, one of whom, as it turned out, used to be a Ner Shalom member before my time. There was beauty in meeting the archivists in Heidelberg who hold in their hands post-War Jewish history, and who allowed me to hold in my hands the Third Reich identity card of my grandfather’s cousin who shares my name, and whose tragic journey I followed two years ago. There was beauty and surprise in noticing – just a block from my apartment in Worms – a Stolperstein, a memorial plaque on the ground, for someone who had lived in that house and who, I knew instantly from the date and details on the plaque, had been transported with my cousin to their shared death. Same bus. Same gas chamber. I was stunned at the coincidence and felt privileged that it had revealed itself to me.
At the end of a month, my husband came and relieved my solitude. I showed him my ancestors’ graves on a hillside in Waibstadt and the little prayerhall they’d built nearby and he was moved. And then we met our family’s older kid in Poland and I showed them both the shtetl where my mother’s family came from, and we were shown around by Johanna, the Christian woman who, without concern for being liked, goads the town into remembering its Jewish past. She herself learned Yiddish on her own and attends Ner Shalom’s Yiddish Tish every month. We saw my cousin Alden, who was in Bialystok helping to restore that Jewish cemetery, and I introduced him successfully to Polish bison-grass vodka.
Then Oren went home, and the youngin’ and I continued on to Berlin where we explored and ate vegan lox. And on Erev Shabbos two weeks ago, we snagged tickets to hear the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, an ensemble founded by Conductor Daniel Barenboim and scholar Edward Said, made up of an equal number of Israeli and Arab musicians. They were performing at the Waldbühne, a 20,000-seat amphitheatre built by the Nazis for the 1936 Olympics. We took the train and stood in line in the rain to see the orchestra under the baton of Maestro Barenboim himself, now 81 years old, joined by Anne-Sophie Mutter playing the Brahms violin concerto. The music, the setting, and the presence of these greats – all surreal; that constant dance of the beautiful and the terrible and the momentous that Germany represents.
There were many moments. Many insights. Hopefully more insights still to emerge. These might appear in sermons or poems or maybe they’re just for me. I had to remind myself about the sabbatical what Abraham Joshua Heschel says about Shabbat – that it is not there for the sake of greater productivity afterwards. I had my sabbatical, my shabbat, my shmitah. I rested. I come back a little overgrown and untended. My feet are on the ground; my neshomeh hasn’t quite landed. And isn’t that a wondrous thing?
