Miracle Update

13: San Miguel Miracles

San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, is a miraculous place. Air balloons coast over the town as the sun rises over the red-tile roofs, musicians take to the streets at all times of day and night, poems jump off the page, and people you know but have never met show up at exactly the right time.

 
I've experienced the power of this very special place more than once, filled as it is with gentle beauty and creative people, but this last one was one of the most amazing of all. I made my sixth trip to San Miguel this past December, taking a 10-day writing vacation in one of the lovely casitas at Quinto Recreo and arriving in time to spend Shabbat morning with the Torah study group that meets each week at the Loreto Quinto Hotel. I was delighted to see that the group had acquired a new, beautifully crafted ark and a full-size Torah scroll. The group was as lively as ever. I saw a few familiar faces from my last visit two years ago, and met some new people, too. One new acquaintance, an American who lives in San Miguel and now calls himself Carlos, was very surprised to hear my name.

"Are you the one who published that book of 19th-century prayers for Jewish women?" he asked.

"Yes, that's right," I answered. "It's called Hours of Devotion."

"Oh, my goodness!" he exclaimed. "I was just listening to your podcast on Nextbook.org yesterday while I was working out!'

"Really? That interview was more than a year ago."

"Yes!" he answered. "I download the Nextbook podcasts to my iPod and just happened to listened to that one!"

He then asked me if I had a copy of my book that he could buy for his wife, Linda. The next day Carlos called to tell me that his wife had also recognized my name but for another reason. Linda Soberman is an artist, as is my best friend, Terry Braunstein, and the two of them are also good friends, having both lived in Washington, D.C., at the same time. Terry and I will be marking our 50th year of friendship in 2010 (we were college roommates at the University of Michigan), and I am hoping we can celebrate it in San Miguel! If so, we will certainly be inviting Carlos and Linda to join the fiesta!

But that's not the most exciting thing that happened to me on this trip. I had an even more surprising encounter on New Year's Eve. I had been invited to a progressive dinner by Miranda Nadel, former leader of the Jewish Community of San Miguel. In 2001, when I spent two months in San Miguel de Allende on a writing Sabbatical from the J. Paul Getty Museum, I regularly participated in the Torah study group, where Miranda had first introduced me to the Jewish Renewal movement, including the tradition of Jewish meditation, which I have been practicing daily ever since. As I mention in the preface to Hours of Devotion, I took several books with me to San Miguel that time:

I packed (along with several volumes of poetry, astronomy, physics, birdwatching, and a music dictionary) Rabbi David Cooper's inspiring book God Is a Verb and Rodger Kamenetz's The Jew in the Lotus. . . . I didn't know at the time that Cooper had studied with Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, one of the leaders featured in Kamenetz's book, nor that "Reb Zalman" had inspired and guided the Jewish Renewal movement, to which I would soon be introduced.

Dusk was beginning to fall as Miranda, her husband, Eli, and I began our meandering walk down the cobblestone streets and alleys of this gracious, Spanish colonial town with its brightly colored walls and old stone fountains. As we approached the gate of the first house, where we would gather for appetizers, we met up with another couple, who were introduced to me as Shoshana and David. As we began to greet one another inside, I learned that Shoshana and David had just returned from leading a meditation retreat and that Shoshana was an artist. She told me that her husband, David, was a writer. Over hicama and dip, I began to chat with David. He said he was working on a novel. He was also quite interested in my book and asked me if I would be doing any upcoming events with it. I mentioned that I I had applied to teach a workshop at the ALEPH Kallah gathering this coming summer.

"Oh, really?" he replied. "Shoshana and I will be teaching there, too!"

"Is that right? What's your last name?" I asked.

"Cooper."

"You're David Cooper?!" I exclaimed. I could hardly believe my ears! I had taken his book God Is a Verb with me to San Miguel eight years earlier, and it had had a profound effect on my life. And now here was Rabbi David Cooper himself, having recently moved with his wife to this very place. How miraculous is that?!

12: The Blue Pencil of Brahms

Yesterday, after an overwhelmingly busy work week and conducting a Havdalah / Rosh Hodesh book event and writing workshop for a group from Congregation Makom Ohr Shalom, I decided to treat myself to a Los Angeles Philharmonic concert at Walt Disney Hall. The program featured the Brahms Piano Concerto No. 2, performed by the Finnish pianist Leif Ove Andsnes, and selections from Wagner's Ring Cycle. I knew that the concert, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen, would be nearly sold out, but since I needed only one seat, I thought I'd try my luck. The most I could lose was a few gallons of gas (not a small consideration in Los Angeles these days, however) and the price of parking.

I was also motivated by the fact that Fanny Neuda might very well have heard both of these pieces of music performed live in Vienna. Knowing that Fanny's daughter-in-law, Rosa Neuda-Bernstein, studied piano with Brahms has made me listen to his music—which I've always loved—with even greater attention and enjoyment.

I arrived only 15 minutes before curtain. A thin, intense woman immediately approached me, surreptitiously hawking a ticket. We agreed on a price, but she kept jacking up the price the longer we spoke, so after a few minutes of this, I walked away and decided to try the box office instead. The best-price seat was $96, a bit too high for my budget.

As I left the box office feeling dejected, a gentle and dignified woman who had been standing there for a while caught my eye. She appeared to be waiting for someone but must have seen the disappointment on my face and asked me if I was looking for a single seat. I told her I was, and she promptly offered me one of the tickets she was holding. When I asked her how much it was, she said, "Oh, it's free. My husband couldn't make it, and I was just looking for someone who might need one." I glanced at the ticket and read the price: $142—more than I've ever spent on a single concert ticket in my entire life! I immediately reached out and gave her a giant hug, thanking her for her generosity and offering her whatever gifts I could think of in return, including a complimentary copy of my book. She seemed pleased just to be able to offer the ticket to someone who appreciated it.

My impromptu benefactor, Margaret, and I sat together in the third row, just steps from the stage, and began an animated conversation about classical music and European travel. She even gave me specific tips on my forthcoming trip to Vienna, where I plan to do further research on Fanny Neuda's life there.

The hall grew quiet as the concert was about to begin. Because we were opposite the keyboard side, I had the unusual experience of being within the line of sight of the pianist, which was such an intimate experience, I often needed to look away. He played the Brahms concerto with such a depth of understanding, precision, and contained emotion, it may have been the most moving experience I've ever had at a concert. This feeling was made even more profound by the exquisite cello solo in the third movement, which literally brought me to tears.   

Sitting there, feeling so enormously blessed and moved, I felt convinced that life—a real, authentic, lived life—was essentially a delicate balance between joy and sorrow, that both were essential, and that to make art from this place had to be the highest form of human expression. I also decided once and for all that I needed to spend less time on promotion and more time writing poems. When I come to the end of my life, I will certainly never regret not doing more speaking engagements, but I certainly might regret not writing more.

As Margaret and I parted company, I felt grateful on so many levels—for the generosity of this stranger, for Brahms' musical genius, and for the insights that had come from being in a place to receive them both.

I returned home that afternoon to an e-mail message from Ludek Stipl, director of the Respect and Tolerance foundation in the Czech Republic, giving me the contact information for Celia Male, the genealogical researcher who had found the place in Vienna where Fanny Neuda once lived. I had hoped that Celia and I might meet when I travel to Vienna in September. I wrote to Celia immediately and decided to share with her the information I had gathered about Fanny's descendants, including the interesting fact that Fanny's daughter-in-law had studied piano with Brahms (see my post 003: Einstein and Relative-ity). Celia responded by telling me that her own grandmother actually sang to Brahms on his deathbed. "I have quite a few Brahms song manuscripts with blue markings," she writes, "which experts tell me was his pencil."

Our mystical tradition teaches that the divine force operates within and through us to continually create and repair the world. If this is true, then connections of this sort are taking place everywhere and at all moments. Most of the time, we're hardly aware of these threads, but sometimes—just sometimes—they penetrate our very beings like a concerto by Brahms.

 

11: Therefore, Let Us Rejoice

Hi, everyone! Nice to be back. I apologize to anyone who was wondering whether this blog was still alive. The answer is a resounding YES! One of the disadvantages of such a long break, of course, is that far too much has happened to tell it all in a single post, so the various events may need to spill out in pieces.

First on the agenda is to wish everyone a joyous Passover! I hope all of your Seders were rich with stories and the surprises that always occur whenever the order of things is gently, or not so gently, disrupted. Are any two Seders ever the same—even in the same company? Mine never are. Perhaps this is because Pesach represents the very essence of freedom. Despite the fact that the word Seder means "order," no two are ever alike.

I will always remember the family Seder that took place when I was about eight or nine years old. My father and grandfather began to argue quite loudly about how the Red Sea, as we called it then, actually parted. This discussion must have been after the meal, because I remember my father and grandfather pacing around the room and gesturing as they spoke. My father, who was an attorney and devoted to logic, surmised that there must have been a freak storm of some kind, perhaps a sudden change in barometric pressure combined with high winds or low tide, or both, to cause the waters to part. Grandpa, a scholar and mystic, born in Kiev and a student of Kabbalah, listened to his grown son's argument and responded, simply, "It was a miracle." They went back and forth like this for quite a while, both equally firm in their convictions and unpersuaded by the other, as I watched and listened, fascinated by the dialogue.

I'm not sure if I thought about it then, but it seems clear to me now that both of them were probably correct. If the Sea of Reeds, as we now understand the place to be, did allow any crossing at all, it might have been possible to explain the event within the laws of nature. But still, for this "freak of nature" to occur at just the moment that we were about to escape from slavery to freedom would surely have been a miracle in itself. No conflict there!

On April 19 this year, Fanny Neuda’s prayer “On the First Days of Passover” was sent out to about 35,000 readers as part of the Knopf Poetry Newsletter "poem-a-day" project, along with a nice explanation of the relationship of poetry and prayer. Fanny's second prayer for the holiday, “On the Last Days of Passover,” contains verses that beautifully resolve the conversation between the two positions that my father and grandfather held and elevate the discussion even further:

The time of visible, manifest wonders
May have long passed. Nature may no longer
Step off its track on our behalf.
Yet your eternal might, my God, still surrounds us.
Your miraculous power still works,
Silently and invisibly, to assist us.
Natures’s factories remain in perpetual operation
To produce everything that aids and benefits us.
When we—pursued, oppressed, or lost—seek escape,
You still show us the path of our redemption,
The path of rescue and hope.
Sometimes it is a faithful friend
Who helps and counsels us;
Sometimes it is the inner voice of the heart,
The angel of God within us, who guides us,
Safe and unharmed, across the sea of life,
Over waves where you, O God, reign
And where billowing surf alternately rages and subsides
According to your almighty will.

Therefore rejoice, O my soul, in the Source of Being
And continue onward in faith and humility
When life’s sky turns cloudy
And when the ground beneath your feet
Threatens to give way, don’t lose heart.
Don’t falter in your trust in God.
The Eternal One will come to your aid at the right time.
For all our help comes from the Eternal One.

And now here’s this: When I started this blog tonight, I decided to consult my Haggadah to decide how to title it, and I found these words, “Therefore, let us rejoice.” How perfect, I thought, without yet knowing what I would write—without yet having decided that I would be including this part of this prayer from my book, and without even knowing until typing it just now, that this prayer contained the words, “Therefore rejoice, O my soul.”

Therefore, let us all rejoice in the miracles that surround us daily. Enjoy the rest of your Passover, every unleavened crumb of it, with Love!

10: Calling Out from the Heart

I've recently learned that Professor Aliza Lavie of Bar Ilan University in Israel, who compiled an anthology of Jewish women's prayers in Hebrew in 2005, including Hebrew translations of about a dozen of Fanny Neuda's prayers, is bringing out two new books: a bilingual edition of her anthology, titled The Jewish Woman's Prayer Book (available in November) and a Hebrew edition of Hours of Devotion (due out in August). At the same time, Ludek Stipl, director of Respect and Tolerance in Lostice, Czech Republic, has just received a grant to translate Fanny Neuda's prayer book into Czech! Ludek Stipl's work comes out of our work together, but Dr. Lavie's is completely independent.

This is remarkable and also to be expected, since, as my teacher Ronnie says, "That's how the world works." Amazing things are discovered by different people simultaneously all the time. Three people invented photography, for example, two of them in France and one in England, within two or three years of one another—because all the elements were present, and the time was right. So it seems to be with Fanny Neuda's book of prayers, which, after its tremedous popularity in the German language for 63 years, remained virtually unknown in English for nearly 120 years. We need Fanny's prayers so much now, and so they have returned to comfort and to teach us. Dr. Lavie has suggested holding a seminar or study day in Israel on Fanny Neuda's life and work in the near future. May it happen soon!

I've been busy lately preparing to lead a study session at the LimmudLA conference next weekend in Orange County. My talk is called "Calling Out from the Heart: Fanny Neuda and Jewish Women's Prayer." I'll discuss Fanny's book in the context of the evolution of Jewish women's prayer, beginning with Miriam and Hannah, ultimately giving rise to tekhines (supplications), written especially for women from the 16th to 19th century, in Yiddish, then in German and other European languages.

Chava Wiessler in her wonderfully researched volume, Voices of the Matriarchs: Listening to the Prayers of Early Modern Jewish Women,  tells us about the prayers of Sara Bas Tovim in the 17th century and other early women writers of tekhines. Their work tends to be limited to certain specific themes, such as the three mitzvah's for women (candle lighting, baking challah, and ritual hygiene), the holiday of Rosh Hodesh, of special importance to women, prayers for the High Holy Days, and others to be said during special cemetery rituals. These books were followed, in the 19th century, by collections of tekhines written by men disguising their identity with first initials only, or by anonymous sources. And then came Fanny Neuda, an educated woman from a family of rabbis, a young widow of the rabbi of Lostice, the mother of three young sons, bravely publishing a book of women's prayers all her own.

I'm looking forward to exploring the theme of women's prayer further with the participants at LimmudLA next Friday afternoon and perhaps leading them to compose new prayers of their own—because we need them so much!

Meanwhile, for your use, here is a short bibliography I'll be handing out to those who come to my session:

Suggested Reading on Tekhine Literature

Cardin, Rabbi Nina Beth, ed. and trans. Out of the Depths I Call to You: A Book of Prayers for the Married Jewish Woman. Jason Aronson, 1992.
   A book of tekhines written in 1786 by an Italian man for his wife.

Kay, Devra, trans. and ed. Seyder Tkhines: The Forgotten Book of Common Prayer for Jewish Women.  Jewish Publication Society, 1994.
   Translation, with commentary, on a standard Yiddish prayer book for women compiled in 1648.

Klirs, Tracy Guren, Ida Cohen Selavan, and Gella Schweid Fishman, comps. The Merit of Our Mothers: A Bilingual Anthology of Jewish Women’s Prayers. Hebrew Union College, 1992.
   Most valuable for its succinct introduction to the history of Jewish women’s prayers.

Weissler, Chava. Voices of the Matriarchs: Listening to the Prayers of Early Modern Jewish Women. Beacon, 1998.
   Detailed research on tekhine literature from the 17th to early 19th century, with a wealth of notes.

And, of course, my own Hours of Devotion: Fanny Neuda's Book of Prayers for Jewish Women. Schocken, 2007.

009: Signs

The Torah portions from Exodus that we are reading now are filled with signs from God—the sorts of signs that seem to give rise to the very definition of the word “miracle.” As slaves in Egypt, the children of Israel cried out to God in their misery, and God heard them. All the miracles that followed came from that singular, collective outpouring of the human soul.

It may not seem possible for the Sea of Reeds to part for most of us today, but that doesn’t mean that miracles aren’t taking place right now, everywhere, this very minute, and that their signs aren’t all around us. (See a story about signs from Reb Nachman of Breslov that I just stumbled onto on this wonderful Mystic Link blog from Australia.)

While working on my book, Hours of Devotion: Fanny Neuda’s Book of Prayers for Jewish Women, miracles seemed to unfold one after another, beginning with the return of my son, Adam, who had been estranged from me for more than eleven-and-a-half years. As I tell in my preface, finding Fanny Neuda’s book, with it’s prayer “For a Mother Whose Child Is Abroad” was only part of the story. I was also preparing for my father’s 90th birthday when I went to Rosh Hashana services, where Rabbi Emily Feigenson gave a sermon on signs from God. “The sign that it’s time to reach out to someone who has hurt you,” she said, “is a broken heart.” I heard myself sob out loud and knew at that moment that I needed to try to contact him again. I would send him an invitation to his grandfather’s birthday party, something I had deeply wanted to do. Although I had tried and failed to reach out to him in the past, the time was finally right, and this was the sign. Two weeks after I sent him the invitation, he called me on the phone, and the first words I said was, “Adam, I have to tell you. This is the answer to a prayer.”

This formative miracle led to my bringing Fanny Neuda’s prayers back into the world again. Soon after I began editing her beautiful outpourings of the heart, I became aware that I was probably one of the only members of my Song of Songs study group who didn’t observe Shabbat. I felt a nagging desire to do so but wasn’t sure if I really could. As a committed workaholic with a full-time job and a book project to boot, how could I ever give up one whole day to “just rest”? How would I ever get all my work done, run errands, go shopping, and do all the other things that normally filled my Saturdays? And if I did decide to do it, how would I even begin? When I asked my teacher Ronnie Serr this question, he replied simply: “Start by looking forward to Shabbat. The rest will follow.”

So I went out and bought Sabbath candles, challah, and wine, and made sure I had a clean white tablecloth and something to nice to cook for dinner. Although I did it all alone at first, just the acts of shutting down my computer, turning off the stereo, arranging the table, and lighting the candles at the brink of evening brought a sense of peace and relaxation—as if I were taking the sky’s last light and drawing it inward. I would often take my glass of wine and a piece of challah outside, sit in the garden, and watch the last whisper of daylight evaporate from the sky while saying my own personal prayers of thanksgiving.

Yet the Sabbath day still confounded me. What do you do when you’re not working or shopping or going to the movies or a million other things that seemed so un-Shabbatlike? My dog, Buffy, was eager to provide the answer: “Take me for a walk,” she announced with her steady stare and tailwagging smile. Spending time in the beauty of nature seemed like a perfect solution, so off we went to Will Rogers Park in Pacific Palisades.

I was still thinking about the dilemma of what else to do with my “day of rest” as Buffy and I headed up the trail to Inspiration Point. At the end of the first switchback, I saw a corrugated, silver trash can in the distance. Stenciled across the side of the can were five, thick black letters: W-R-S-H-P.  Why does that trash can spell “Worship”? I wondered. And then it hit me: of course! That’s what I’m supposed to do on Shabbat—I’m supposed to worship! It took me a minute to realize that the letters were actually the acronym for Will Rogers State Historic Park. But no matter. I had my “sign,” both literally and figuratively. Since then, Shabbat is the day I look foreword to more than any other: a day of celebratory meals with friends and family, and rising on Shabbat morning with hours of study, song, friendship—and, yes, worship(!)—in a welcoming religious community to look forward to.

If I were ever asked if I had personally experienced the miracle of leaving the narrows of Egypt—a place of constriction and fear—I would be humbled by my own answer: It all started with a sign, I’d say, a sob from the depths of my soul.

008: An Auspicious Blessing

Recently a woman by the name of Gloria Orenstein told me a story from her own life that is so miraculous that I asked her if I might share it with you in this blog, and she graciously agreed.

Gloria is one of those gifted people who is blessed with an awareness of the miracles both large and small that surround her. “I have so many miracles in my life,” she writes in an e-mail message, “I used to call them ‘le hasard objectif’ (surrealist synchronicity), or else I thought of them as ‘saved by the bell,’” when she would find herself “levitated out of disaster” by an unexpected hand.

Raised Jewish, and a seeker of spirituality from an early age, Gloria loved learning the Hebrew letters. Her joy in Jewish learning was cut short, however, when the director of her Sunday school walked into the classroom and ordered all the girls to leave. They could no longer study Hebrew, he told them, because they had to make room for the boys, who needed to prepare for their bar mitzvahs. She soon learned that she would not be able to receive the “auspicious blessing” bestowed on her brother, and couldn’t even dream of becoming a rabbi. She wasn’t asking for "permission" from anyone. All she really wanted was "a blessing to go forth in my life," like her brother had received.

Eventually, Gloria emerged as “a feminist activist, rebelling against every form of patriarchy, and claiming that I first learned about this in Judaism.” She drifted far from her roots, ultimately becoming a student of a shaman from the North Pole in Norway and udertaking “a pilgrimage to their sacred site in the tundra.” It wasn’t long before she began to see the shadow side of this severe practice and became seriously ill. As she suffered through her illness, praying to seventeen shamanic gods for help, she began to question where her own God was in all of this. To her surprise, she discovered that “My God was right beside me all the time, listening to my prayers.”

After returning to Los Angeles, Gloria began to work with “a healer and clairvoyant,” a Jewish woman with knowledge of shamanism. One day the healer told Gloria “in no uncertain terms,” as she puts it, “that God wanted me in a Jewish temple immediately. I protested that I could not find one that pleased me.” The healer asked her—with arms upraised to the heavens—to tell her exactly what she required in a synagogue.

First, Gloria told the healer, “It had to be in walking distance from my apartment,” though Gloria lives in an area of Los Angeles without a synagogue for miles and only one small church on the corner. Second, “It had to have a woman rabbi, preferably over 50, and she needed to be from Israel.” And third, “The congregation had to be mostly in my age range, and made up of spiritual questers.” She was certain this combination of requirements would be impossible to satisfy.

Imagine Gloria’s astonishment when the very next day she received a phone call from a friend and neighbor telling her to look out her window. “They’re moving a Torah into the Little Church in the Glen!” her friend told her. The little church on the corner was to become the new home of Ahavat Torah, a congregation founded and led by Rabbi Miriam Hamrell, an Israeli woman of the right age, with a warm and friendly community of spiritual seekers also in Gloria’s age range.

“I could hardly believe that it was absolutely the answer to my prayer,” she writes in a speech she gave at Ahavat Torah on June 10, 2006. “Ever since I joined this wonderful congregation,” her speech continues, “I see the Hand of God in this, and in so many other miraculous occurrences in my life. I want to thank God in the highest way I know how,” she writes, by becoming a bat mitzvah.

On that day, in the congregation that seemed to have appeared out of nowhere just for her, Gloria read from the Torah, in Hebrew, and became a bat mitzvah, a daughter of the commandments. There she received, from an Israeli woman rabbi, the “auspicious blessing” that had been denied her since childhood. And here she stands today, still telling her miraculous story, in the presence of the One who has been listening to her prayers all along.

007: The Paradox of Perfection

One very lively and ongoing inspiration for this weblog is David Crumm's richly diverse interfaith web site, ReadTheSpirit, in which he explores religion-based writing of all kinds, in print and on the web. If you want to know what's happening now in religious writing, learn about some intriguing books, and meet their authors, I highly recommend that you visit ReadTheSpirit.

In his January 7 post, David mentions my last entry "Starting Fresh," in which I used the turning of the calendar to play with the notion of trying to "live better, do better, be better"—as if the ideal of perfection were a useful goal.

Then, at Ohr HaTorah on Shabbat morning, Rabbi Mordecai Finley turned my head around with a quote from Voltaire: "The perfect is the enemy of the good." Why is it, the rabbi pondered, that otherwise good, fair, intelligent people often become so frustrated and irrationally angry with those closest to them? The answer, he suggested, is that our own unconscious imperfections are so intolerable to ourselves that we assign our spouses, partners, or children the job of being perfect instead, as if they could "complete" us. When they don't live up to that impossible demand, we often become enraged—a reaction, whether voiced or not, that is clearly the enemy of the good.

So, for example, if I struggle against all odds to clean up after myself while cooking dinner, my blood may start to boil if my boyfriend leaves onion skins, ginger peels, and plastic bags strewn across the countertop. Since I always feel so close to the brink of chaos myself, I might flip out if I see him bounding over the edge.

The solution to this moral dilemma is clearly to get a little clarity on the situation. How about turning up the lights—bringing my own unfulfilled expectations into the open and showing us both a little compassion? He is doing some of the cooking, after all! And we can clean up together, too.

Taking this to a higher level, a classic story is told in Lurianic Kabbalah about the creation of the world. According to this original "big bang" theory, God first contracted, or withdrew from the divine self, to make room for creation to take place. God then poured all the light of the universe into special vessels. But the light was too intense for the vessels, and they shattered, scattering countless sparks through the universe. As a result, each of us contains a spark of that divine light, and it is our job to release those sparks and reunite them with the divine source.

At its core, tikkun olam, or repair of the world, begins with recognizing that the spark of life that burns within each one of us has its origins in divine brokenness—an imperfection that only goodness can fix.

What are you willing to do today, this week, this year to be more compassionate and good to yourself, to cut yourself a little slack? I'd love to know! And maybe, if you'll share your ideas of self-acceptance, you'll be helping us all to be a little kinder to one another as well. Now wouldn't that be a perfect miracle?

006: Starting Fresh

What I like best about the new year—any new year, be it religious or secular—is its illusion of freshness, newness, another chance at perfection. Or maybe I've got it wrong; maybe the world is made new every day and thinking of it any other way is false. . . . In any case, I savor the idea that I could actually start fresh—really do yoga every day, keep my office as clean as it is today (having been ruthless with my stacks of books and papers for once), be more patient and compassionate, even with myself.

This diving into "tikkun," or fixing, is what we are charged to do: to fix the world, beginning with ourselves. That's a big order. So why should it feel so good to clear the decks and start over—knowing full well that I probably won't be able to do more than graze the edges of my goals and that most of my resolutions will get broken in the end? Maybe it's because no one ever gives up hope. To have hope that I really can do better, live better, be better is not just a choice; it's a leap of faith. And I call that a miracle, too.

One thing that feels true to me is that the celebration of the new year is more than an acknowledgment of the cyclical relationship of the earth and the sun (though that's certainly a valuable and deeply human source). It must also have to do with our own capacity for change—a capacity that is present to us every single day but that we seldom acknowledge except at junctures like this one, a moment in time that requires us to do something different, even something as small as forming the habit of writing the year with a different last digit or as life-altering as committing to talking out loud to God every day.

Since any longer span of time can only be lived from day to day, here's a gift for 2008, for 5768, and for every year to come, from Fanny Neuda's prayer "At Morning I":

In hours of pain, teach me, O God,
To accept your will with humility
And to recognize your presence in everything.
Bless this day for me, that it be a day of goodness,
A day of purpose, a day of success,
A day that sanctifies my life. Amen.

May your year and mine be filled with such days.

005: Little Ripples

Sometimes synchronicities occur like little ripples riding to shore. For example, the morning after I posted my last entry (004: "There Once Was a World"), in which I mention congregation Emanu-El B'ne Jeshurun in Milwaukee, I was about to sit down to meditate, when the phone rang. It was a telemarketer. I went back to my chair. About 10 seconds later, the phone rang again. I almost didn't answer it but decided on impulse to pick it up. To my great surprise, it was the wife of Rabbi Herbert A. Friedman, my beloved childhood rabbi, who conducted my bat mitzvah at Temple Emanu-El nearly 50 years ago (find his remarkable autobiography here). Rabbi Friedman is 89 years old now, and was not able to make the call himself, but his wife wanted to thank me for the prayer book I sent him, so she just decided to pick up the phone, which I almost didn't answer . . .

Then this morning another ripple: After Shabbat services I was walking back to the parking lot when a young man I hadn't spoken to in a long time (I'll call him Rick) was walking behind me and called out my name. He asked me how I was doing. I told him that I was thinking about this morning's Torah portion—the part when Moses balks at God's assignment to speak to the people, but God tells him to just do it and God will tell him what to say.

I told Rick that I was thinking about this because I've been doing a lot of public speaking about my book lately, and I never know exactly what I'm going to say until I say it, and even when I carefully plan a talk, I often say something entirely different. Rick said he gives talks that way, too, and then asked me what my book was about. I told him about my being estranged from my son, Adam, for more than 11 years and then finding a 19th-century prayer book, called Hours of Devotion, that contained a prayer for a mother who was missing her son. I told him that within about six weeks of finding that book, Adam was back in my life—in part, because that prayer had given me the courage to reach out to him again.

"I was estranged from my mother for more than 11 years, too—12 years, actually," Rick said.

"Really?" I replied. Ever since the book came out four months ago, many people have confided their personal stories of estrangement, but virtually all of them have been parents, or relatives of parents. This is the first time I'd encountered a young person who went through what my son did—and under very similar circumstances.

He said he would read my book. I gave him my card. Maybe we'll talk. We'll let God tell us what to say.

004: "There Once Was a World"

The extraordinary story that led to the idea of this "Miracle Update" blog in the first place began with a simple phone call. My book was to be published in August 2007, and a few months earlier I had decided that one of the first places I wanted to visit was my childhood congregation, Emanu-El B'ne Jeshurun, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where I had had the honor of being the first bat mitzvah. So I called the rabbi, Marc Berkson, to discuss that possibility. We hadn't talked for more than a few minutes when he said, "You know I've been to Lostice." Lostice (formerly Loschitz) is the small town in the Czech Republic where Fanny Neuda, author of "Hours of Devotion," was living with her husband, Rabbi Abraham Neuda, the rabbi of Lostice in the 1850s, when she wrote her book, the first full-length prayer book for Jewish women to be written by a woman.

"You've been to Lostice?" I asked with surprise. Lostice, nestled in the rolling hills of eastern Moravia, is so remote, I had to buy a detailed road map just to find it. "How is that?"

"My wife's family is from there," he replied.

"Really?!" We talked for a few more minutes until the full impact of the rabbi's statement struck me. "Excuse me," I said. "Let's back up a minute. Do you mean to tell me that you are the rabbi of my childhood synagogue, where I was the first bat mitzvah, and your wife's family just happens to be from the same small town where Fanny Neuda—the author of the book I'm about to publish—lived and worked?

"You should really talk to my wife," he replied.

A few days later, I was able to reach the rabbi's wife, Deborah Carter-Berkson, in the car, on her way to visit her mother, Edith Knopflmacher Carter, then aged 92 (she turned 93 this month) who lives in Cincinnati, Ohio. After a few minutes of conversation, Debbie said, "You should really talk to my mother." To my delight, I immediately found Mrs. Carter to be one of the sharpest people of her generation I had ever spoken with (and I used to work in Leisure World!).

In preparation for our conversation, I was holding a copy of a booklet called "There Once Was a World," published by the Respect and Tolerance foundation of Lostice, an organization dedicated to preserving Jewish history and culture of the area. Although there isn't a single Jew remaining in the town, the 500-year Jewish history of the town will not be lost, thanks to this remarkable group. I had visited Lostice on a research trip in 2006, and the foundation was, and continues to be, extremely generous in assisting me with my research.

Without any prompting on my part, Mrs. Carter was able to tell me the names of at least half a dozen victims of the Holocaust from Lostice whom she remembered and whose names are recorded in the booklet. After our conversation, I immediately put the pamphlet into the mail to her, along with a flyer describing my forthcoming book. About a week later, I received this extraordinary message on my voice mail:

I just opened my mail and I found your very nice note, and I found the little booklet . . . "There Once Was a World," and to my greatest, greatest surprise I saw first thing, on the cover, a picture of my grandfather’s 70th birthday with my father, my mother, and the six siblings of my mother! It is just amazing! . . . And I can hardly believe it! How ever did you get that picture, because nobody in that picture is alive. There are only three left alive [in the family] . . . so I can hardly believe it.

And the other thing is about your book by Fanny Neuda . . . Fanny Neuda’s are the best prayers that any woman can have if she is really in need of some kind of help. I had one that my mother used to have, and I had it with me in the concentration camp [Thereisendstat]. And I had it on the way to Auschwitz, too, [but] when they chased me out of the wagons, they hit my hand, and this way I lost the book. . . . But [now I have] one from my mother-in-law. It is the nineteenth edition of the prayer book, the 1903 edition. So you can imagine how surprised I was with everything. it’s just unbelievable!

Edith Knopflmacher Carter survived Thereisenstadt, Auschwitz, and the long march from the concentration camps after liberation. She made her way back to her decimated hometown and waited for years for her husband to return after the war, only to learn that he was killed by an American bomb. And then, by the grace of God, she met and married her husband's first cousin, Debbie Carter-Berkson's father, and emigrated to America. Finding this remarkable survivor alive and well, and able to witness what is being done to preserve the history of her people in the place where she lived, seems to be a miracle made just for her.

Naturally, I couldn't wait to share this information with Ludek Stipl, director of Respect and Tolerance. He promptly called Mrs. Carter and gathered even more information, including details on her birthplace, which was a short distance from Lostice. This is the story he included in an e-mail message to me, dated October 1, 2007, after a trip there to see what he might find:

I went to visit the town Nemecka Huzova (formerly Deutschhause) where Mrs. Edith Carter Knopflmacher was born. The town is located in the former Sudetenland about 38 km [23 1/2 miles] from Lostice. It was populated mostly by Germans who were sent to Germany after 1945. Many houses remained empty for many years and later were torn down, some of them were repaired and modernized without much taste during 1970s. Not very nice place tell the truth. Soon I gave up any hope of discovering any useful site from the Knopflmacher era. Even houses in the historical town square were torn down . . . There is only one nice historical house on the square and most probably in the entire town. After going through the period photographs we realized to our great surprise that this is the house where Edith Knopflmacher was born and where she lived with her parents and siblings. Hard to believe but it is the truth.

In November, Mr. Stipl made a longer trip, from the Czech Republic to Cincinnati, to interview Mrs. Carter in person. He brought with him pictures of her native village, pictures of her family, and the clear assurance that her story would be documented not only in the several videotaped interviews that have already been conducted by Holocaust study centers in America but also that it will be preserved and remembered in the Czech language, in her own childhood home, in Lostice.