Last Rosh Hashanah looked nothing like Rosh Hashanah usually does for my family. Normally, there is the familiar rhythm of the holiday: going to synagogue, hearing the shofar, eating apples dipped in honey and sitting around the table eating challah, matzah ball soup, brisket and dessert. I have always loved that Rosh Hashanah gives us a reason to gather while also asking us to reflect.
Last year, I missed all of that. I was recovering from a double mastectomy with DIEP flap reconstruction. This Rosh Hashanah, I am preparing to become a rabbi. Even as I write those two sentences, it’s hard to believe they describe consecutive years of my life. Maybe that is why I have been thinking so much about time lately, and how rarely our lives unfold according to the timelines we once imagined.
Professionally, I’m a professor of counseling psychology. I teach future school counselors and mental health counselors about human development, identity and resilience. But it turns out that understanding resilience and needing it are very different things. I was first diagnosed with breast cancer just before my 40th birthday. By then, I had spent years teaching students about coping, about what happens when life doesn’t go according to plan. I understood the theories. I knew the research. Knowing them didn’t make cancer any less terrifying.
I had a lumpectomy, chemotherapy, radiation and years of medication. I did what came naturally to me: I learned everything I could, kept track of appointments and focused on whatever needed to happen next. People called me brave. I never particularly identified with that word. Mostly, I was doing what people do when there isn’t another option: getting through it. I assumed I would eventually feel like myself again. But cancer doesn’t hand you your old life back on the last day of treatment. My body had changed. My relationship with time had changed. I found myself thinking about things I had always wanted to do, things I assumed there would be time for later.
Judaism has always been central to my life. I attended a Modern Orthodox yeshiva in the 1980s and 1990s and loved Jewish learning so much that I later majored in Judaic Studies. But there were parts of Jewish life that simply weren’t open to girls in the world in which I was raised. I didn’t lead services. I didn’t read from the Torah. I wasn’t counted in a minyan. Women were already becoming rabbis elsewhere in the Jewish world, but that wasn’t the world I knew. The rabbinate wasn’t a path presented to girls like me. I didn’t decide against becoming a rabbi; it simply never occurred to me that it was something I could become.
After my first cancer diagnosis, I traveled to Israel and began thinking differently about the things I had been saving for “someday.” One of those things was deeply personal: I wanted to read from the Torah. Hillel’s famous question in “Pirkei Avot” — “If not now, when?” — suddenly felt a lot less theoretical. So, in my 40s, I celebrated an adult bat mitzvah and committed myself more deeply to Torah study. Eventually, that path led me to rabbinical school.
This is where being an older millennial woman gets interesting. I look around at my friends in our 40s and realize we’re all over the place. Some are raising toddlers. Others are sending kids to college. Some are changing careers, getting divorced, getting remarried or starting over entirely. Midlife did not come with the organizational chart I was promised. Thankfully, Judaism doesn’t seem particularly concerned with that timeline. “Pirkei Avot” teaches, Ben arba’im le-binah, “At forty, one attains understanding” (5:21). I love that Judaism doesn’t tell us that at 40 we’ve arrived. It tells us that at 40, we’re finally beginning to understand.
When I was younger, I thought wisdom meant having answers. Now I think it means having better questions. Maybe that’s why becoming a rabbi at 44 doesn’t feel like starting over. I don’t have to discard the psychologist, professor, mother, wife, cancer survivor or yeshiva girl I once was. I bring all of them with me.
The Hebrew word teshuvah, often translated as repentance, literally means “return.” I’ve come to love that meaning. Maybe we don’t need to reinvent ourselves every Rosh Hashanah. Sometimes we need to return to something that has been inside us all along. Last Rosh Hashanah, I was recovering from surgery. This Rosh Hashanah, I am preparing to be ordained as a rabbi in December.
When I hear the shofar this year, I will think about the woman who couldn’t hear it last year. But I will also think about the girl who loved Torah without knowing that one day she would be able to stand before a community and teach it as a rabbi. They are both still part of me. I’m no longer asking whether I’ve finally become the person I was supposed to be. As 5787 begins, I’m asking a much more interesting question:
Who am I still becoming?
New Year, More Kveller. A few dollars keeps Kveller joyfully, honestly free.
