When Lynn and I work in the Chicago basement, it doesn't clearly feel like a cycle, but more often like one, unending difficult state. A jumble of reverence and frustration and ambition and despair. We look at all the holy relics with which my mother was entrusted and ultimately burdened. We sit inside of it and wish it had a cyclical quality. After all, even Sisyphus has his "up" moments. Where are ours?
Read moreA Ghost of Shtetl Future
But being a ghost here seems fitting... There are no more Jews in Krinek. Not a single one, as far as anyone knows. In 1941 they were corralled into a long, narrow ghetto running along the river from the town center to Gabarska Street, where the Jewish tanneries stood. And a year later the Jews were gone altogether and Krynki became a ghost town.
Read moreReflections of a Retiring Drag Queen
Winnie and I have stuck together for 21 years now. She’s seen me through a lot: legal practice, new love, marriage, children, the boomeranging of a long cast-off rabbinic calling, and the loss of both my parents. And she’s no picnic either. I’ve seen her through meltdowns, relationships, hairdos, artificial insemination, Republicanism, cleaning obsessions, and even prison (trafficking in Julia Child pornography, if you don’t recall). But sometimes it is time to say goodbye, and you may be surprised (or relieved, or sad, or indifferent) that Winnie and I are, at long last, bidding each other farewell.
Read moreParashat Kedoshim: Generation Sandwich
You youngins, we try to help you develop good habits, deep compassion, impeccable manners. And true, we don't always know when to stop. We don't always know the difference between you and a developmental stage. (And, I hasten to add, neither do you.) So all we can do is give it our best shot; give you our best advice; hope we can spare you some of the mistakes we made (as if any of us ever managed to avoid our parents' mistakes, and as if somehow we actually could keep you from all harm).
Read moreThe Rabbi's Dress (Or Why I Wear a Skirt on the Bimah)
When I was growing up, I had a remarkably keen awareness of gender codes in our culture, like a little gender-role prodigy. I never felt terribly boyish, and so the way that the world was poking and prodding me toward a set of male behaviors, affects and preferences always felt artificial to me. Boys had to act and dress and behave in specific ways, and mostly these ways made no sense to me. Aggression? Athleticism? Taunting girls? These values were alien and distasteful to me; my experience of them was something like what a Jew feels observing an activity that our people curtly dismiss with the term goyim naches.
Read more