I.In this Issue

How wonderful for this tiny publication to start to feel almost routine! In addition to updates on my Jewish meditation world and my Ph.D. world, this issue contains a piece on the continuing adventure of praying in public. I would like to dedicate this issue to Pete Seeger who has always taught me by example to be unafraid to share even my craziest ideas in whatever stage of readiness or accessibility they may find my listeners' ears.

May I be unafraid to be a fool for Love.

Ph.D. News
Forget everything I've ever told you about my research interests. Environmental issues? That was five years ago. Breast cancer activism? That was the master's degree. Art and politics: last year. Here's the real deal (for now anyway): I am looking at what the gendered division of unpaid work in the home can teach us about Jewish identity in the context of conversionary and interfaith families. Got it? Let me provide a brief example to try to clarify. One of my mom's favorite Chanukah songs is a parody of "Oy, Chanukah" which tells the story of how the latkes cooked by Mrs. Maccabeus were responsible for her sons' victory over the Syrian Greeks. The chorus goes, "You may not guess, but it was the latkes that gave them the courage to fight" (Note: "not guess" is made to rhyme with "latkes"). So, my research questions revolve around who does this type of mostly behind-the-scenes "kinwork" these days in conversionary and interfaith families and what (if any) interesting interplay this might have with our great mish-mash of cultural and religious identities. This is made all the trickier, of course, by sneaky questions like: But what is gender? What is work? What is Jewish? Having now shared this inkling with all of you, we'll see where it takes me. Please include me in your prayers for those in peril on the sea.

Next Issue
The next issue brings another installment in the "Praying in Public" series. In some ways, this month's Minna-drash is a set up for next month's in which I want discuss an unpleasant and challenging set of encounters I recently had in public, one while praying and one while simply walking down the street minding my own business.

IV. Minna-drash: Praying in Public II and III
Praying in Public II: "Evangelista"
I had never really lived in a city before I moved into my apartment on Chicago's far north side three years ago. Living about a block from Lake Michigan means that I can thrump down the three flights of stairs, walk out the front door of my three flat, turn left, cross the alley, walk past the big ivy-covered building on the corner, wait for what seems like forever for the light to change so I can cross Sheridan Road, walk to the cul-de-sac which blends right into the park and then continue if I like across the bike path, and then onto the sand until I reach the water. From there it's all water until it laps up against the shore on the Michigan side, invisible around the earth's slow inexorable curve. I have never watched the sun rise here, but every time I sit here facing east I imagine that it must be perfect. The park itself has wide lawns with one set of netless goalposts set up for soccer games or, more frequently an informal session of kicking the ball around. If there are rules, I haven't discerned what they might be. Trees dot the lawn sporadically as do makeshift barbecue pits and plenty of odd brown patches of dirt where the grass is worn.

Though I cling to a sense of myself as a country mouse at heart, I do love my neighborhood. In the summer especially the park is so alive. Not in the smooth way that parks in fancier neighborhoods are, all green and full of white people being quiet. But alive in a chunkier way. I remember my friend Sarah in tenth grade talking about how she loved the dirtiness of cities. Cities gave me a headache. I could not at the time imagine willingly moving toward such a place. And here I am at my neighborhood beach loving the messiness of the city at least at its very edge. Ice cream vendors pushing carts with bells that swing and ring with every step lead inevitably to trails of popsicle sticks and wrappers with pictures of butterflies on them. Kite flying ends in piles of tangled string and flapping plastic. I hear at least four different languages. English, Spanish, Haitian Creole and a whole mixture of Russian, Serbo-Croatian, and Polish which I must admit I can't quite tell apart. I think I can tell the Russian from the rest of them, but that's where my ignorance takes over. And the children! Children of every shape, size, color, and texture. Sure, some of the children play with kids who look just like them, but there are also frequent small mixed up collections. Two Russian kids on bikes with a Black kid riding on one of the sets of handle bars. Someone from the "Bosnian bench" kicks the soccer ball back to the Latinos who kicked it out of bounds. Two-person outposts dot the lawns in which couples of all skin tone combinations snuggle together as if this park were exactly what it seems to be: a tiny haven in an unforgiving world. This is one of the most racially integrated neighborhoods in Chicago, a city which regularly ranks in the top five most segregated cities in the country. And even in this neighborhood people regularly seem to be successfully living past each other rather than with one another as if striving for days of "no incident." But here at the park our shells seem softened a bit. Not completely disintegrated, but fraying pleasantly, reminding me of Rabbi Arthur Waskow's teachings on the fringe of the tallis as a way to imagine that we blend with others while maintaining a fabric of our own. And so my meditation and prayers seem particularly close to their world-healing target here. I feel there is no better place to pray.

One afternoon last summer I had gone to the lake for a lovely session of napping, meditating, and mincha (the afternoon prayer service). I read myself a bedtime story from my childhood called "Fanshen the Magic Bear." It is a perfect period piece which could really have only come out of Southern California in the early 70's. Laura, the book's main character, is the tax collector for the king. She hates her job because it involves taking money and goods from her friends and neighbors who actually need everything they have and giving it to the king who has much more than he needs. The king is depicted as bored and boring. He has no friends and his castle is too big for him. He's a very sad character really, surrounded by his toys in a huge cold castle. The story line offers your run of the mill moral. Many more mainstream books for children seem to share this sentiment: "socialism is a fine thing for kids as long as they become capitalists once puberty hits." But beyond this, the book is painfully careful to employ as much gender and race equality as one could squeeze into its mimeographed pages. In addition to Laura's femaleness, we have Molly the Ferrywoman (one of my favorite characters), and Fanshen the Bear is herself, well, is herself. One family sports huge Afros and appears to have the father as the primary if not sole caregiver and all the old folks in the book are treated with the utmost respect.

Laura is doing her job that she hates when she stops in the forest to let Marigold, her pony, take a break. There she meets Fanshen, who up until now she has only heard about in her grandfather's fireside legends. Laura admits that she's unhappy with her job and Fanshen says that she doesn't have to do it if it's wrong. After a brief moment of doubtful protest, Laura agrees. She retraces her steps returning the chicken, the goat, and the bolts of cloth she had taken in taxes and inviting all the citizens to come to the king's castle to let him know they are ready for a peaceful revolution. Laura stands up to the king who acquiesces and all his land and wealth are redistributed. The king is happy because now he has friends and Laura gets a new job: she manages the large new park in the center of the kingdom, playing with children and making cotton candy. Fanshen disappears but we are reassured that if her wise counsel is ever needed she will come back to set things right.

I am careful while turning the thirty-year-old pages. More than for its story line, I love this book for the way it reminds me of my own personal heritage. It reminds me that I spent my first years in a warm and magical place, a land flowing with breast milk and homemade granola. When I finished the story of Fanshen, I drank a small container of chocolate soymilk and ate a plum and then I curled up under a tree amid the park's Sunday afternoon bustle and took a nap. After imagining that I could not possibly sleep peacefully in public and turning over and over on the rough ground, I woke up an hour later. I sat up and did some quiet meditation and then began to daven mincha.

A woman pushing a baby carriage approached me and started speaking in a language I didn't understand. My first thought was that she looked very old to be the baby's biological mother, but that perhaps her worn face and sad expression were not a function of time alone. She sounded like she was asking me a question. I didn't know what to do so I just smiled at her. She touched my prayer book as if gesturing for me to close it and show her what I was reading. When I complied she started saying something that sounded like "Evangelista? Evangelista?" Assuming that this was her word for an evangelist, I lowered my head and shook it. Then she indicated -or so I imagined-that she had seen me praying from across the park and had come over to investigate. She made gestures which I read as "you look so peaceful and beautiful praying here." But as soon as I read her gestures that way I immediately dismissed them, doubting both my ability to understand her this way as well as what suddenly felt like a very self-serving understanding at that. I too started trying to use my body and my face to express what words couldn't, as if gestures were somehow universal even when words and thoughts aren't. I hunched my shoulders, tilted my head shyly. A video camera might have even been able to catch me batting my eyelashes. I imagined that she saw a rather lofty mantel riding easily on my shoulders and I was desperately trying to slip out from under it. But she was insistent. "Evangelista," she repeated quietly and nodded her head as if to indicate that the matter was settled. She touched her hand to her heart in a gesture which I read as thanks and love. I did the same to her. We bowed slightly while smiling to each other.

I felt a heart connection with her. But seeing these words on the page, I immediately want to include caveats and equivocations. I can't be sure what she was saying. And besides, she must have been assuming that I was a Christian. I don't know exactly what evangelism means in my own language if that was even what she was getting at, but I don't usually associate the term with nice Jewish girls sitting in parks on summer afternoons. But at the time I felt none of these doubts. It felt like a simple exchange across the barriers of language and culture. A simple sharing of life's preciousness and beauty.

I saw her once more several days later about a hundred yards from the site of this encounter. I was sitting on the top of the concrete bench which overlooks the bike path again davenning mincha and she walked past me pushing the same stroller. She smiled, I smiled back. We each touched our hearts. I could imagine this becoming a lovely routine. I could simply relax into the realization that it was my place neither to manufacture nor to diminish whatever inspiration she was drawing from my actions.

Praying in Public III: "Boo!!!"
The more I pray in public, the more I realize how much I have to learn from the people who "interrupt" me. The border between park and bike path is concrete shaped into one long bench which runs for a hundred yards or so. Each year in the summer this bench is divided into four-foot sections which community members then paint with various themes. I like to sit on top of the bench near a certain small tree to daven mincha. Ahead of me to my right there is a huge willow growing right on the beach and just past it a small pier stretches out into the lake. The beach spreads out in front of me, several hundred feet deep before it meets the lake.

When I have time, I begin by sitting quietly: my left hand on my left thigh, my right hand on my siddur (prayer book) on top of my right thigh. I decided one afternoon to try a meditation technique developed by Abulafia centuries ago which involves working with the letters of the Divine Name in coordination with the breath and a series of small head movements. It's a concentration practice which can also be quite invigorating because of the energy required to keep track of where you are in the cycle of breath and movement and sound. The fact that the Hebrew letter "hay" appears twice in the Name doesn't make things any easier. Was that the first "hay" or the second "hay" I was working on? And by the time you figure that out, you've gotten out of sync with your breath and have the blessed opportunity to start all over again from the beginning. Meditation of all sorts can provide similarly blessed opportunities. But this particular practice is different from an awareness practice where you are letting all of the sounds and sensations of the world meld with your meditation. Here the practice itself tends to mesmerize.

I closed my eyes and at first I could hear the wind in the branches of the trees and people passing by on the bike path. Some were riding bikes, some were pushing strollers. Every once in a while someone would come zipping by on roller blades. I felt comfortable enough with the bustle to close my eyes and give my full attention to the Name. I didn't realize how thorough this attention was until it entered my mind that just half a second ago, someone had come right up to my ear and shouted, "Boo!" and then run away. It entered my consciousness not as an alarm but in the same way I might notice a crow calling incessantly just after its call had stopped. For the entire split-second length of the "Boo!" itself, I was still in my meditation.

I can't think of any other time that I have been tested this way while meditating. I doubt that I would ever have otherwise known this feeling of being unshakeable. This was a moment of truly synchronizing mind and body -as is frequently discussed by the Tibetan teacher Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. My mind was meditating, my body was meditating, my sense of fearfulness or insecurity, it was meditating too. We were all there together and unshakeable. It was a tiny moment of perfect faith, fleeting and nothing I could hope to capture but also entirely unforgettable. It is a shaky, shaky world. Truly, as I love to sing, "Kol ha'olam kulo, gesher tzar m'od" ("the whole world is a very narrow bridge"). What a blessing that for one brief moment in my neighborhood park by the shores of Lake Michigan, I was not afraid at all.