Here I am again. Despite visiting your grave throughout the year, the time between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur always feels the most potent, and this year, because I made the trip alone and not in the service of others, it feels even more sacred. Heaven’s gates are unlocked during this time, and I wonder how close you are standing to them. I feel you all around me, and my mind goes back to your last High Holy Days in 2008 when you got sick. You blew the shofar on Rosh Hashanah, but by Yom Kippur, you didn’t have enough breath. It was only a matter of weeks until that dreaded diagnosis followed. Yet still, you had hope and kept going, reaching out to life. By the time of the election that year, you insisted on voting in person, even though it meant leaning on a walker and pausing to rest on its seat at the polling station. I have heard your voice in my head commenting on the election process this year, as well as the situation in Israel, where we met – can it be that it was fifty years ago?! Indeed, it was, and I am so grateful that we were married for 31 of those years. You would be so proud now of the family we built together. All our kids are in their thirties and forties, and our eldest grandson is about to graduate Stanford University next year with a major dear to your heart and a mystery to mine – Mathematics! Oh, stop laughing, honey! Despite the odds, I have managed to keep myself afloat! I drove here to visit you in a car you would never have purchased, because it is not made in the USA. As the GPS guided me where to go, and which turns to make through the car’s computer, I thought about your working on the GPS system in its early years and how you would try to explain it at the dinner table, but I had no clue what you were talking about. It seemed futuristic to me then. Now I know you would have been up-to-date and fascinated with all the new technology of the last fifteen-plus years since you’ve been gone.

Most of all, you would have loved to see our eldest son and daughter-in-law with their four kids, each uniquely connecting to their community and world at large and making a difference.

You would have rejoiced with our middle son and his wife, our daughter-in-law whom you never met, and noted how they are changing the world with their creativity and thoughtfulness and having adventures along the way.

And our little one, our daughter – you would melt over her the way you did when she was born, and I can imagine you having conversations with her husband, our son-in-law whom you never met, and reveling in her choice if you could tear yourself away from their son, our youngest grandson, also a smart and loving child. I’m sorry that you don’t get to experience us on this earthly plain.

We keep you in our hearts, and when I curl up at night around your pillow, while I tell myself it releases endorphins to make me feel comforted, really, it is the memory of you and all you gave us, including hope, that keeps me afloat. Yes, I’m still floating, and I am different than who I was when you died. I had to learn how to be me on my own and grow my resilience muscles.

This morning, I prepared with my rabbi on Zoom (that’s like a video meeting, honey) for Yom Kippur, and I sang a song for her that I’d like to sing during the Yizkor memorial prayers. As I did so, I felt my voice catch as tears sprang to my eyes. The song comes from the movie “Mary Poppins Returns” which came out almost ten years after you died, and the lyrics that I had altered the pronouns for that made me emotional were: “Maybe all you’re missing lives inside of you” and “Trust they’re always there, watching as you grow/Find them in the place where the lost things go”.

I find you here, I find you there, I find you everywhere. I’m remembering you answering when asked how you were when you were so sick, “I’m above ground, so it’s a good day!” So here I am, visiting your grave, and I’m above ground, so it’s a good day! May it also be a good year. I love you forever and always.

Like Robert Frost’s poem, ‘The Road Not Taken’, our universe diverged the day you died, and we had to create another world in order to move forward. The day you were born, however, is always a cause for celebration even in this parallel universe, because it means we got to experience your love and love you while you lived. Since you’ve been gone, our children have all married, and three more grandchildren have been born, two of them bearing your name. I see bits of you in all of them and I am grateful for the gifts you gave us. I imagine how we would be celebrating your milestone birthday today. It’s a little bit like dreaming the impossible, because our whole world and the people in it changed, as did we, and you will be Forever 55.

Happy heavenly birthday, Mike, from our parallel universe to yours.

And so, the car-cleaning process. First, I emptied the glove compartment and console, finding the manual and odds and ends that I might have needed along my various journeys. Then I moved to the back and reached into the pocket behind the front passenger seat. I felt an unfamiliar object, which turned out to be a glasses case. Puzzled, I opened it to find my late husband Mike’s eyeglasses. I held them for a moment and then put them on. My vision blurred and I put them down, reaching further into the pocket, and pulled out an old leaflet on Cancer Care. One deep breath, and I tossed that cancer leaflet into the recycle pile. But I didn’t know what to do with the glasses. As I sat there holding them, I thought of some of the places that this car had taken me during the last 14 years. I remembered the day we bought the car together, and then celebrating with dinner that evening, a nod to our major purchase. That car took me on the journey to help move my daughter into college; it took Mike to five months of chemo treatments back and forth; it stayed parked in the hospital garage for the last week of his life, and took me to his funeral a mere 17 months after that celebratory dinner, and then to years of subsequent cemetery visits.

In addition to going to and from work, this car took me to my first joyous trip to Esalen and all the ones following, listening to music and stories and poetry from its sound system. I’ve lost count of airport trips it took me to and picked me up from on my frequent travels. The car took me to my daughter’s wedding after numerous drives along the California coast from South to North and back to see her; it took me to my son’s wedding two years later. This car was my transport to see grandchildren and also to be present at one grandchild’s birth.

This car has been such an extension of me that I even wrote a pre-High Holy Day article for my synagogue bulletin last summer comparing it to my body and soul, with its dings and dents, and how I care for its engine, mentioning that I often dream about warning lights in my car which tell me to pay attention to what’s going on in my body and my life. It is more than a car. It is a vehicle.

I reached for Mike’s glasses one more time. I remembered taking them with me to Portland twelve years ago to have a spiritual coach hold them while she gave me a reading, and from that meeting stemmed a relationship with her that I treasure and ultimately brought about the publication of my first book. The sensation of fear dissipated. I must have put the glasses in the car sometime after Portland. But now that the car is on its last wheels so to speak, I must replace it. I realize that my fear is the grief of letting go of the energy and memories it holds.

The new car has been built and is waiting to be unloaded in the dock. Daily, I wait for the dealership to call and tell me to come get it. When the dealership calls, I will create a goodbye ritual as well as have a celebratory dinner afterwards. In the meantime, every journey I take in my 14-year-old car feels like a farewell, a letting go bit by bit, that liminal space of no longer and not yet, tempered with gratitude for having this car in the first place. It is more than a car. It is a vehicle.

I hope that there will be new roads to drive that will transform me, and that the new car will become as familiar and trustworthy as the old. I might even put Mike’s glasses somewhere in the new car. C. S. Lewis continues, “I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.” I am no stranger to grief, and I know that it does feel very much like fear. I also know that very often, fear and excitement come from the same place. In my case, I keep on driving.

Mike would come home from work early to help set the table for our family and guests. He would put extenders in our dining room table so that sixteen people could fit around it easily. He set up an assembly line with our kids, pulling the Passover fine china and crystal that once belonged to my parents out of the garage where they were stored all year long, along with other gifts from prior guests that brought back memories. By the time the table was set, it was festive and dazzling and fit for royalty. One place setting was different though; when everyone was seated we deliberately left an empty chair at the table. It was Elijah’s chair. Jewish tradition teaches that Elijah the prophet will be the harbinger of the coming of the Messiah and the world’s redemption. It is a chair of hope. When we sat down to begin telling the story of the going out of Egypt, we raised the matzah, and sang the words “This is the bread of affliction that our ancestors ate in the land of Egypt. Let all who are hungry come and eat. Let all who are in need come celebrate Passover”.

When it came to the story of the four sons, Mike would tell it from his perspective of being one of four boys, always pointing out with a mischievous grin that he was the “wicked son”. At the end of the Seder, when the children would run to the door to open it for Elijah to enter, Mike would then tell the same story year after year about his grandmother in the Old Country and how she opened the door for Elijah to enter, to find a stranger was standing there. They invited him in and he sat in Elijah’s chair, ate, drank, and without saying a word, went on his way. Every year, while our children were at the front door, Mike would tip some of the wine out of Elijah’s cup so that when they came back to the table, the kids would think that Elijah had come like some ghost and taken a sip of wine.

Mike died the day before Passover in 2009 at the age of fifty-five. I insisted on having a Passover Seder the next day for my kids and me. In shock, I did what I knew how to do, trying to keep some normalcy where there was none. When it came to the empty chair, however, now there were two. One for Elijah, and one that none of us could sit in, because it was Mike’s. I’ve since led many a Seder at that table, and two chairs remained empty. Last year, I came home from New York just before Passover, two weeks after the pandemic lockdown had begun. I was alone in the house. I sat at the head of the table in Mike’s chair for the first time. All the other chairs were empty, and in front of me was my laptop, where I could connect with my family through Zoom. The youngest child always asks at the beginning of the Seder, “How is this night different from all other nights?” In 2020, this question was weighted with more meaning. None of us knew what would unfold in the year ahead.

Again this year, I will sit in Mike’s chair, all the other chairs will be empty, and I will again connect with family and my community through Zoom. Every Passover since Mike died, it has been a challenge getting into the spirit of the holiday, not because of exhaustion, but because of that empty chair which reminds me of loss. It has been twelve years now since Mike died, and this year, I know that there are hundreds of thousands of families around the world who will be facing empty chairs. My heart goes out to them, and if I could tell them one thing, it would be that despite the things going on in the world, despite being a Covid long-hauler, I am still here to tell Mike’s stories, and just like Elijah’s empty chair is one of hope, so too my empty chair of loss has transformed into a second chair of hope.

During the intermission of this interfaith concert “Together As One” at University Synagogue in Los Angeles, I spoke with my three Muslim neighbors who explained to me that I had just experienced a Whirling Dervish, and what that meant – how much training he had to go through to get to this altered stage of consciousness I had just witnessed. I was so deeply touched, and shared with them that I had felt a shift in my soul that evening. They smiled, I learned their names, I asked them to dance with me in the aisles during the second half of the concert to the wonderful music of the Yuval Ron Ensemble. During the second half, we listened to Yuval tell inspiring stories, and we did indeed dance to the music, our bodies swaying in rhythmic movement to the beat, allowing the joy to move us as we connected with each other in sound and touch. And then the Whirling Dervish came on stage again. Again, he connected with the source beyond the sanctuary and I gave myself over to the moment.

At the end of the concert, Cantor Kerith Spencer-Shapiro invited the clergy present to come forward to the stage to bless the food that had been brought for the homeless. The ‘ticket’ for entry to the concert was food and new clothing for the homeless. The audience had been so generous in their offerings. I stood on stage with my fellow Jewish, Muslim and Christian clergy colleagues, and when it was my turn to speak, I opened my mouth to bless the food, and I too felt blessed to be present, Together As One.

The concert ended with John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ and Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” – each verse sung in four languages: Arabic, English, Hebrew and Spanish, with the entire audience joining in with the chorus. I sat still as everyone was leaving, just trying to process what I had experienced. Nadia, my Muslim neighbor, pressed something into my hand that looked like a rosary. “This is called a Tasbih. I use it every day when I pray, and I want you to have it.” A profound gift. Together As One.

For sixteen years, I was the sole spiritual leader of a synagogue in a Jewish assisted living facility, as well as its chaplain. The synagogue had a closed-circuit TV that was piped into the apartments so that those who could not attend services could still pray with me. When it came to High Holy Days, I made a point to visit each resident who could not come to synagogue to hear the raw sound of the shofar; I blew the shofar for them, and then I went to the local hospitals to do the same. I was taught to blow the shofar by a layperson who also visits the sick. This mitzvah is not reserved for clergy alone; being present for those who need us is a basic Jewish value. Now I have another part-time pulpit, I lead workshops, and I’m an on-call chaplain. I still go the hospitals with my shofar to visit Jewish patients who yearn for that connection. Year after year, one thing is certain: no matter who we are, God listens to our many voices, and the true power of our voices can be heard in who we are and what we do.

Published in Sacred Sounds, A Publication of the Cantors Assembly, Fall/High Holiday 2017

I had not come here expecting to sing aloud. I was at the beginning of a leave of absence from my pulpit, grateful for my courage in taking that healing time to recharge, and my foresight to save the funds to facilitate it. This was my first time praying in a congregation since my leave began. It was Shavuot (Pentecost) and I relished the thought of not having to lead, of wrapping myself in my prayer shawl and creating my own personal space just for me to connect deeply with the Divine, the One who is always there for me and whose presence I have always felt no matter what. I came to pray in this particular congregation because it was the very first congregation I interned in seventeen years ago on my journey to the Cantorate, and I wanted to return to that sacred space.

The Rabbi spotted me there alone and came to ask if I would accept the honor of leading the congregation in the musaf (additional) service. Their Cantor was on a year-long sabbatical of her own. I hesitated. I really wanted to go deeply inside and touch the rawness of my exhaustion with my own personal prayer. My little voice said, “It’s only musaf, go ahead, say yes.” And so I did.

Musaf began. Standing under the skylight, I felt my feet rooted firmly on the ground, and I looked up, smiling as the sun shone down on me. Breathing deeply into the holy place in my chest, I felt my lungs fill with air and energy, and my spirit rise through my voice as it has so often on the pulpit, in the hospital rooms, and wherever else it has been needed. My voice rang out in perfect pitch to the Holy Blessing One. All my supplication, questioning, gratitude and joy came forth as I led the congregation in prayer, connecting my soul and theirs with the Divine, using the ancient melodies of my tribe.

Despite my exhaustion, my not knowing my next steps, and my having entered the sanctuary alone, yet seeking – now I was standing in the presence of grace, both seen and unseen. Sensing the journey that had started long before I first stood at this lectern, yet had become its first step, I knew that I was receiving an answer to the next steps in my journey. It was as if I were traveling along a continuum, coming closer and closer to my work and purpose in the world.

All is well. I can be at ease. I can trust that as long as I have the avenue of prayer to connect, it matters not where I stand in place and time. What truly counts is the secure knowledge that time is within me, and my prayer from deep within the recesses of my holy sacred space will speak and sing for me. Even when my prayer and its answer is silence.