Within the Jewish tradition, the months of Elul and Tishri (September and October) correspond to the autumn equinox, which marks the transition between autumn and winter. This was the time when evil spirits roamed the earth. The gates of heaven were open, souls were awaiting justice, and with such openings, the evil spirits could slip in, as well.  How to prevent them from entering?  Bells on the hem of the High Priest’s robes, and loud noises, like the blowing of a ram’s horn, would scare them away. 

College is the ultimate transitional place and space.  It is a time between high school and getting a job, while living in a temporary place amongst a temporary group of people.  We dropped our daughter off at college in Chicago, and as I watched her walk with the rest of her classmates under the arch that marks the entrance to the campus, I thought about Ruthe and how we gathered around to usher her from one place in time to the next.  I thought, again, about my father and decided that he is right.  It is the end times of a sort, for the times are always ending.  Which means another time is beginning.   On Rosh Hashanah, we’ll close the door on 5769, and open it onto 5770.  Gently, and with bells on, let’s welcome the future. 

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With my great-niece, Rayley, perched on my hip, I clamber with my husband and three kids through the three-room log cabin built by my great-great-grandfather, Johann Conrad, in the mid-1800s where my father and his ancestors were born. A 1932 calendar remained on the wall for over twenty years after they moved into the newly built farmhouse a few hundred yards away, and patches of wallpaper from the Depression still are on the walls today. My father had the house restored on the outside so that it wouldn’t deteriorate, but inside, it is dusty and run down. Nonetheless, I can imagine the world in which my father and my ancestors were born and raised.

All evening, with my brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles convening at the farm for supper, the past has seemed ever-present–from the blueberry bushes where Rayley and I pick blueberries  to the big garden where I spent many summers hoeing and weeding and picking vegetables. As dusk falls, and the kids wave sparklers around in the dark, I suddenly get the sense that ancestral ghosts are walking along with us, watching us, the inheritors of their hard work and their dreams. What do they think of me, their daughter, who has decided to leave, to create something different?

The next day, I’m standing in the hallway in the parish center of St. Joseph’s church in Jasper.  My son Daniel is using the piano in the presentation room to practice, in anticipation of the two week music festival in Portugal in August. As notes of Rachmaninoff float faintly in the hallway, a man in jeans and a flannel shirt comes upon me and asks me if I want to join him and two others in the archive room.  I happily follow, and we ooh and ahh over the various items behind plexi -glass: an old, brown Latin prayer book, four statues of the saints that once adorned the altar in St. Joseph’s, a relic box that contains cloths from popes and nuns. "Did you notice that each stone in this building is a little different?" the man asks.  "Every parishioner was expected to help erect the church, so each stone bears individual marks."  I spend about a half hour talking to the nice man, impressed by how knowledgeable and friendly and spiritual he is.   In the end, I introduce myself and he shakes my hand and says, "I’m Father Ray."

My sister Wanda whisks me and Daniel off to a mysterious destination out in the hills of Loogootee where the Amish clip-clop past in their horse drawn carriages, waving and calling out a smiling, "Hi!"  We pull up in front of a dome-shaped, 16-sided home which is surrounded on all sides by thousands of brightly-colored flowers.  A red-faced man waves his hands back and forth over his head in greeting. He’s Bill, the owner. He ushers us inside, where the dim space is lit with long strings of Christmas lights woven through hand-painted bird houses, some of which contain fake birds that squawk when you clap your hands or make a noise. Outside, we gaze out over the beds of red and white and purple flowers spread across his yard–each year he plants 13,000 impatiens, and an additional 13,000 or so seeds, and he spends 3 ½ hours every morning watering the blanket of flowers. Back inside, I spy a piano in the corner, and ask Bill, if it would be okay if Daniel could play a song, (trying to get in as much practice as possible). He says, sure, please, so Daniel sits on the piano bench underneath the twinkling lights and plays his Rachmaninoff.  When the last note ends, Bill smiles and claps, which prompts his fake birds to chirp and squawk and we all laugh, as if they are witnesses hovering above who want to make their voices heard, too. 

Just a week later, we are in Chicago, for my nephew’s wedding. Holding Anna’s arm, my mother-in-law makes her way slowly across the graveyard in Chicago where her parents and grandparents are buried. At the graves, she recites the prayers from the Yizkor book, and tells us a little about her parents, and I feel again the presence of ancestors, and a bitter-sweet, indescribable sense that the past and present are one moment. As I watch her mouth move silently over the Hebrew words, I am struck as I often am by how her faith and her practice are one and the same. The night before, over dinner at a restaurant in Chicago with my husband and three kids, we’d had a spirited, shall we say, discussion on belief and practice with respect to keeping kosher–does one have to believe in order to practice one’s religion, and if you don’t believe that God wants you to do it, then why are you doing it and are other reasons equally valid? I took the position that unless I felt that God required something of me, I wasn’t inclined to do it, nor did I think that it was necessary for anyone to feel compelled to do it for their parents or grandparents or tradition or anything else.

Still travelling, we go from Chicago to Portugal. It’s our sixth year coming to this festival, and when we arrive we are recognized around the small town. The shopkeepers smile hello, the waitress who speaks English at our café stops to chat with us, we smile hello to the woman who sits at the window and knits bright socks and we slip into the comfort and quiet joy that encountering the familiar and pieces of one’s past brings.

When Daniel auditions on the first day, and plays his Rachmaninoff, inevitably I am brought back to St. Joseph’s church and the nice priest who unlocked the door to the past for me and to the birdhouse man who has chosen to live his life however the hell he wants, to my father who has built a structure around the past to preserve it for the future, and to my mother in law for whom the past and the present, belief and practice are seamless and cannot be separated from one another. I can’t say for certain, but I can imagine that one day, when we meet our ancestors, it would be helpful for them if there are certain markers that are familiar and that help them to recognize us, even though we’ve carved our own individual stones.

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Sitting at an outdoor café on Broadway with my friend Lori, we are talking about eggs and cholesterol one minute, and in the next we’re discussing how, when someone or something disappears from one’s life, "You can feel empty," Lori says, "but that emptiness can also be space." 

Personally, I need a lot of space.  When I get too many phone calls, too many text messages, too many e-mails, too much communication in general, I start to withdraw, just to put more space between me and others. 

Space is on my mind later that day because it’s the 40^th anniversary of the moon landing and the first walk on the moon.   In 1969, I remember being a part of the national excitement.  It was an amazing, mind-boggling feat, to see the rocket soar into the heavens and to touch down on the moon, this planet that was so much a part of our everyday lives but, we thought, unreachable to humans.  However, after a few years of watching NASA send its space shuttles up, the whole undertaking became practically passé.  Of course we could go up into space, what’s the big deal? 

Who could have imagined then how much we would shrink the distance in space in 40 years?   And how  blasé we would become about being able to communicate by phone or video with someone on a mountaintop in the Himalayas, or to observe, in real time and from the comfort of our living rooms, a war being waged on another side of the world?  My children take this for granted, as much as I took space exploration for granted.  In today’s world, it feels not like a privilege but like our birthright to be able to connect with someone, anytime, anyway, even if the other person doesn’t want to.

Next week is another anniversary, far less glam than the moon walk, and not nearly as well known.  It’s Tisha b’Av, the ninth of the month of Av, the date on which both the First and the Second Temples in Jerusalem were destroyed.  It’s a day of mourning and fasting and contemplating not the vast reaches of space into which we might venture, but the internal, sad space from whence we come. 

I’ll be honest, I’ve never been a fan of Tisha b’Av.  It’s just one big, gloomy Gus of a pity party.  As sad as the destruction of the temples was, it happened a long time ago and frankly, we’ve managed to do okay without them.  There are those who would dispute that, and argue that there’s value in recognizing loss, in remembering. Anyway, it’s a little hard to relate to the destruction of the temples, because they haven’t existed in anyone’s real memory, though obviously in our collective, historical memory.  And we didn’t watch them getting destroyed.  Where was CNN when the Romans were pillaging?   On the other hand, maybe being privy to it would have rendered us even more blasé – hmm, Romans sacking and pillaging, I think I’ll turn the channel.  Saw that yesterday.  And the day before.

More interesting to me is a relatively recent destruction that also occurred and is commemorated on Tisha b’Av –  the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492.   Some say it isn’t coincidental that Christopher Columbus was in a hurry to get out of Spain by that date, because he could have been, himself, a converso.  Columbus’ presumed Jewish roots, (which have been well-documented and discussed amongst scholars) might, then, have partly provided the impetus for him to escape, along with a bunch of Marrano Jews who were part of his crew, the day after Tisha b’Av and discover a new land, one in which Jews wouldn’t have to secretly practice their faith. 

On Tisha b’Av, we try to relate to the past not by viewing video footage of the actual event, but by mustering up our own individual abilities to empathize.   Certainly, when you fast you feel the emptiness within, and who knows, maybe that’s a very small metaphor for the emptiness that we, as a Jewish people, feel without the Temple, which was the space in which God met man.    

It’s curious and very human, this instinct to close or bridge the distance between ourselves and outer space, between ourselves and the distant past, between ourselves and others.    But the question for me is, to what end?  So what if we recognize the loss of the temples?  And as cool as I think it is that America sent people to the moon, it didn’t do much for me individually or for the world, except for non-stick frying pans and more advanced computers.  I could live without them both.  A philosopher would say that it’s only in looking back at the past, utilizing our ability to remember, that we can understand our present.  Without our individual or collective memories, we’re lost in space.  Similarly, scientists say, well, now we can understand our own origins better, but that’s completely not true and even if it were, again, so what?  To my mind, it seems more like an excuse for these (mostly) men to send their phalluses up into the air, seeking to conquer space that doesn’t belong to them and in which they have no business, much the same as the conquering armies took Jerusalem, to stick their flags (so to speak) on territory that was not theirs, and just as Christopher Columbus sought to make a land grab on the other side of the world on behalf of Spain.  This, I’m aware, could be perceived as an anti-American and anti-progress and perhaps anti-man sentiment, but I’m holding to it.

Admittedly, I’m one who finds it off-putting when my space is invaded, even if it’s only with too much communication.  I need my space.  It’s not emptiness.  It’s just space – between us and the past, between us and the stars.  Why not let the space be? 

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Most Jews have "J-dar"–they get the inside Jewish jokes or references.  I’ve developed this, myself, but once upon a time, I was absolutely clueless.  I remember watching Bridget Loves Bernie as a kid and, granted, I was only 11 or so years old, but the premise of the show–that an Irish Catholic girl had married a Jewish man–completely escaped me.  I knew that she was Catholic because her brother was a priest, and I knew that his parents had a problem with the girl, but I thought it had something to do with the "deli", this weird store in which salami hung from the counter and above which the couple lived.   I don’t remember knowing that he was Jewish–I think it was assumed that the audience would glean that information from cultural clues, without any overt mention of God or of faith.

Stories involving Jews, and Jewish and Yiddish phrases, abound in American pop culture and in the entertainment world, but I don’t believe they are as widely understood by the rest of the populace as Jews might think.  For example, I once asked my sister Mary what ethnicity she thought Fran Drescher was playing on "The Nanny."  She thought for a few seconds and said, "Italian?"  To Jews, "The Nanny" was the stereotypical, Jewish girl from Queens, complete with thick accent and a mother who wanted her to marry a doctor.  To a good part of the rest of the world, she was some ethnic woman from New York City.  There are any number of other examples: off the top of my head, "schlemiel, schlimazel" were part of the theme song of Laverne and Shirley, but I don’t think either woman was ever identified as being Jewish.  In Welcome Back, Kotter, which I watched when I was older but not any wiser, I realized that the teacher, Gabe, was supposed to be from Brooklyn, but again, I never thought of him as being "Jewish."  It’s not that it’s necessary to know, but what’s puzzling to me is that there are these shows in which being Jewish is at least a part of the story – but half the audience (at least) doesn’t know that the character is Jewish, or what it’s supposed to mean that he or she is Jewish!  The assumption that the audience will pick up on it because of the cultural references is simply wrong.  How can anyone who didn’t grow up around Jews be expected to think it’s funny when someone is described as meshugenah?    However, if the characters made a reference to synagogue or God or something, then non-Jews would understand.  Non-Jews still labor under the impression that being Jewish is a religion first, and a culture and tradition second.  Christians have no problem inserting openly Christian characters in television shows–The Flying Nun was another of my favorite shows and in it, her faith was an integral part of the plot.  There’s a real discomfort, I think on the part of Jews, with portraying ourselves in the media in connection with our faith, as if that is not hip or cool, but a reference to a bris or a bar mitzvah (words, again, that many, many non-Jews don’t understand, despite our thinking that they are part of the universal lexicon) is fine. My daughter told me that recently, when Anna Kournikova was wished ‘mazel tov’ by a photographer on her reported engagement, she asked, "What does that mean?"  When told it was a Jewish way of saying "congratulations", she became upset and said, "I am not Jewish – can’t you see my cross?"   My daughter thought this reflected poorly on Kournikova, and I agree her reaction was over the top – it wasn’t as if someone were putting a demonic curse on her in another language.  Nonetheless, I defended her – she probably thought that if it was a Jewish word, then it was a religious wish, not a secular one.   Mazel tov may be fairly well-known, but not everyone knows how to respond correctly to it, and it’s somewhat grandiose to expect others to understand our very specific cultural lingo.  Bridget Loves Bernie was cancelled after one year, the highest-rated television show that was ever canceled.  Why?  Supposedly, they received a lot of hate mail from people who were upset about the inter-religious marriage portrayed on television – and it wasn’t the Christians who were offended.   I would bet that many of the Christians at that time, like me, had no idea that it was an inter-religious marriage.  Because actually, it wasn’t.  It was inter-cultural. 

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My initial reaction is to be tickled by this mental image of my 33-year-old sister sitting patiently in God’s lap until God decided, "Hmm, I think I’ll hook Rachael up."  But then, looking at daddy’s serious expression, I find that I admire his ability as a parent to be willing to accept that, while he would move heaven and earth for his children, there are things that are beyond him.  I admire, too, his unshakable belief in an approachable God who, with all of the other things to contend with in this world, is willing to personally care for each individual.  

As a baby, Rachael was in my 14-year-old lap many nights.  My mother was 42 when she was born (what business she had having sex at that age was beyond me!) and she’d had a C-section, so for the first several months I often got up in the middle of the night to give Rachael a bottle.  I’d sit in the rocker and sing her lullabies and feed her.  Sometimes, when I was particularly tired, I would just put her in bed with me, stick the bottle in her mouth and prop it up with a pillow and close my eyes.  A few times, I woke up to a loud thump.  Rachael had fallen on the floor.  She didn’t cry much, as I recall, and was a happy baby and child.  I have other fond memories of placing a one-year-old Rachael in the folds of sheets hanging on the clothesline and, along with my sisters Sarah, Mary and Liz, we would wave the sheets and bounce her high in the air.  We still think she liked it, despite falling out a few times.  When Rachael was eight years old, she was the only one left at home.  The rest of us were in college, married, or living on our own.  So she grew up somewhat as an only child, with my parents hovering about anxiously, literally jumping up and running to her when she sneezed.  You’d think they hadn’t already had ten children.  But she was different than the rest of us, in many ways, at the very least because my parents thought so, and if others believe that you are special and amazing, then you believe it, too, because why would your parents lie?  There was no way that Rachael would accept being with some guy who didn’t think, too, that she was the bees’ knees.  Thus, she sat in God’s lap.     I tell Rachael about my conversation with daddy, and ask her how it felt to be sitting in God’s lap.  She quips, "’Let Go and Let God,’ you know?"  I haven’t heard that phrase for a while, but I admit that I like it.  "Letting go and letting God" is the antithesis of the intellectual Jewish world that I mostly inhabit.  God might be an important component of one’s life, but few Jewish mothers or fathers that I know would leave their daughter’s marriage up to God.    Rachael continues, "Daddy would always say, ‘You don’t know how much I worry about you,’ and I would say, ‘You don’t have to worry,’ and then he would say, ‘Oh, I pray for you every day.’" "But if he was really letting go and letting God, why did he have to pray for you?  Shouldn’t he have been doing one or the other?" I ask, ever-logical. "He was covering his bases," she says.  "Maybe," she goes off on another tack, "God didn’t want to let go?  At some point, God has to let go, too.  I needed a ‘Get-out-of-God’s-lap-free’ card."  "You got it," I say.  "Anyway, you haven’t told me how it felt to be sitting in God’s lap." She laughs and says it was cozy most of the time, but that she’d never viewed God as being an old white man with a beard.   Though both Rachael and I grew up in the same church, I will admit that for most of my life, that’s how I saw God.  Even today, I’m not uncomfortable with imagining God as having human features – Jews tend to be, I know, probably because a human looking God is too close to the Christian iconography of Jesus as a baby in the bosom of his family or as a man on the cross – but there are a number of Biblical passages that refer to God’s breasts and God’s loins and God’s face and hands and arms.  Oh, Biblical apologists can say "metaphorical" all they want, but I would bet the Biblical writers meant those descriptions to be literal.  "So how did you view God?" I ask Rachael. "When I was 6 years old, and in one of the church programs, we were asked to draw a picture of God and the image that came to mind was of a rainbow colored gumdrop," she says.  "Maybe we all have little pieces of a rainbow colored gumdrop in us!"  She is being purposely silly – but not.  In much the same way that my parents’ image of Rachael shaped her perception of herself as being special and different, her view of God is indicative of who she was, and it also became a self-fulfilling prophecy.  For Rachael, God is an all-embracing, accepting of differences, sweet and bright-colored, cheerful, happy God.  It reminds me of the old adage: God created man in His image and man, being a gentleman, returned the favor.  When my parents said they’d chosen the name "Rachel" for my sister, I suggested spelling it with an "a" in it (I don’t know why – it looked cool).  My parents agreed, and thus we have Rachael.  Of the 19 famous Rachaels mentioned on Wikipedia, 13 are in the music/acting world, 5 are in sports, and Rachael Ray is a cook/television personality.  Maybe there’s something to be said for self-fulfilling prophecies, because my sister has been in the music/acting world her whole life.  I guess I’ll take credit for that.  It might make up for dropping her on the floor.  Rachael’s fiancée, Adam, is well-named for her.  The first human being created, and created in God’s image, God had to find someone very special for Adam – not just anyone would do.  Adam had to hang out in God’s lap for a while, too, until Eve was designed, just for him.  All of us siblings are happy that she’s found her beschert, her intended.  My sister Liz thinks that we might be too "long in the tooth" to be in a wedding party, but you know, if my mother could have a baby at 42, then I can be a bridesmaid when Rachael gets married.

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