When you wear a kippah full-time, it’s not uncommon for people to come up to you every now and then to ask you about Judaism. When I first put mine on in 2010, I found the questions a but unnerving. But when you wear religious garb of any sort, the fact is you become a public representative of your chosen faith, like it or not.

For me, usually, the inquirers have been Christian or unaffiliated. (Though sometimes they have been Muslim and Jewish, too.) I’ve most often been asked about why I wear a kippah, about the Hebrew language, about whether I observe kashrut, and once or twice about Jewish mysticism.

But I’m rarely asked the big, $5 question, and almost never enter into the dialogue necessary to answer it. Waiting for a bus to make a short hop up to my favorite independent local market last Friday, I shared the bus shelter with a middle-aged black woman whose eyes immediately zeroed in on the top of my head. Before I had time to pull out my phone and check arrival times, she jumped to her feet, walked over, and said, “Let me just put it out there–why don’t Jews believe in Jesus?”

(It’s worth noting we’re not a city given to unnecessary flights of PC linguistic fancy. In Chicago, an ex of mine was once forcefully corrected by a black co-worker for referring to her as an “African-American”, noting she was neither from Africa nor desired to be referred to with a hyphen. A few years later, visiting friends from stridently PC Seattle noted to me how shocked they were to hear the “B” word used in regular conversation here. But I digress…)

She was Christian and looking to deepen her understanding of the underpinnings of her faith. She was honestly interested to know why Jews don’t believe in Jesus, and we had a lovely conversation throughout our wait and for several minutes on the bus until she got off before my stop.

Now, there are two good Jewish responses to the “Jesus question”. The short one, and the long one.

The short one, which I’m fairly certain mirrors the inner dialogue of most Jews who get asked this question, is this: Because Jews aren’t Christians. When you think about it, it’s really a question that answers itself. It’s a bit like asking why aren’t apples oranges? Because they’re apples. And no matter how great oranges think it is to be oranges, that doesn’t mean that apples want to be oranges, too.

Or need to be, for that matter. Sometimes the Jesus question is asked in a way that makes it clear the people asking think the leap from Jew to Christian is a natural progression because that’s how it’s presented in the Christian Bible. But the response remains the same. The Christian Bible–specifically, the “New Testament”–is not a holy book for Jews. No matter how devoutly one may believe in the foundational texts of one’s chosen faith, that doesn’t mean those texts are relevant in the faith of another.

But my bus friend wasn’t as self-centered as that. She wanted the lengthy, nuts-and-bolts answer. So I responded that Jews don’t “believe in Jesus” for a variety of reasons:

• For Jews, “messiah” denotes a human being–the Hebrew moshiach means one anointed with oil–i.e. a king or great leader, not a metaphysical being.
• Jesus did not fulfill the messianic prophecies of rebuilding the Temple in Jerusalem, ushering in world peace, or uniting humanity under One God.
• Jesus did not fulfill the personal qualities of the messiah, being a descendant of the House of David, increasing Torah observance, and being a prophet (which is not possible unless a majority of world Jewry lives in the Holy Land–which was not the case during the lifetime of Jesus.)
• Passages in the Hebrew Bible interpreted by early Christian scholars to describe Jesus as the messiah were mistranslations, likely willful ones, in order to give Christianity a more comprehensive backstory.
• The messiah will usher in national redemption (the restoration of Jews and the Temple in the Holy Land), not personal redemption. There is no “original sin” in Judaism, the faith sees all human beings as born unblemished. As a result, Jews need no one to “die for their sins.”

So no solely human leader? No world peace? No Third Temple? No unity of humanity under One God? No blood descendant from the House of David? No increased Jewish observance? No national redemption? No messiah, at least from a Jewish perspective.

That’s not to denigrate Christianity, of course. Within the Christian tradition, Jesus does satisfy the criteria for being the Biblical messiah. I can understand how Christians arrive at that belief and I respect that. Nor do Jews deny the existence of Jesus of Nazareth. But Judaism considers him one of several “false messiahs” that have appeared throughout Jewish history. By ending up as the central story within a new religious tradition, Jesus of Nazareth was the most successful of them all. But that doesn’t accord Jesus a special place within Jewish tradition, too.

Which I guess brings us right back around to the short response: one Biblical messiah; but two traditions that differ in how you identify that messiah.

And a healthy respect between apples and oranges necessary to ask–or respond to–the question.

Another Father’s Day come and gone. The older I get, the more the manufactured holiday matters to me, and the more surprised I am that that’s the case. I guess after forty, I feel the regrets I thought I could live with for the rest of my life with greater intensity as the rest of my life starts to arrive.

I never knew you as my father. My mother didn’t tell me the name of the man I’d never met pictured in an old family album until I was 24. Until then, I thought I was John Doyle’s son, a full sibling of my brother and sister. I never met him, either, but I never had a reason to question the fiction that he died shortly before I was born.

If you had stuck around, I might have been Michael Oropesa, son of Angelo, instead of being born with my mother’s widow name. You knew that John Doyle had died six years before my birth. If you had remained, I would have known that too, all along, instead of feeling the entire backstory of my family shift two decades later.

My mother used to tell me that she sent you away because my siblings didn’t want anyone taking the place–and replacing the memory–of their father. They were already over 18, of course, and old enough to know better. It could be that mom just didn’t love you, or didn’t want you there as a reminder that she was about to be an unwed mother. Shame has always played a key role in my family, after all. I wonder if you ever knew that she put a long-dead man’s name on my birth certificate in place of yours?

She told me you knew she was pregnant. I half-remember her telling me that you knew my name, and that you were still around in the immediate days after my birth. It could be that ours was an unequal relationship. You may actually have known me, if even for a brief time, though I have no memory of ever knowing you.

You would also have known how fractured my family was. The seams were already showing in 1969 when you met my mother. Growing up, I spent a lot of time trying to hide from the hurt that my family carried around–and often unleashed on itself. That might have been different had you been there. I doubt you’d be surprised that I could not find it in myself to begin to look for you until five years after I learned about you.

My mother told me the last she knew of you, you had moved to Orange County, California. By the time I started looking, you had already passed away. And so had my mother. If you only knew how many times I’ve pored through family records that I carry with me to this day. Old phone books. Old love letters you sent to my mother. Looking for clues.

You died in Santa Ana. It’s the next town over from Anaheim. Every single time I’ve been to Disneyland, I’ve asked God for some serendipitous moment to find the siblings I know I have, your other children, whom I’ve never met. Every moment I spend in my “happiest place on earth”, you are never far from my mind.

I wonder what your life must have been like that almost no electronic trace was left at the end of it? No obituary, no mention of relatives, almost no mention at all. Were you destitute at the end of your life? Was your family hopelessly fractured, too? After years of searching, I know where and when you were born, and where and when you died. And along with your name, that is all that I have ever learned about you.

There is so much more I wish I knew. Why did you stay away? Were you respecting my mother’s wishes, or was it you who didn’t want to be around? Did you, perhaps, have another family?

Did you ever try to contact me? To learn about me? Did my mother ever speak with you while I was growing up? Were you ever there in the background, just to be there, even though my mother had sworn everyone in my life to secrecy about your existence?

Did you ever wonder about me over the years? Did you ever look for me, too? Or did you sign me off as an unfortunate relic of your past, a book that just couldn’t be opened again?

Would it matter to you to know that at the age of 42, when I least expect it, I can think of you and be reduced to tears? That as a middle-aged man, I yearn for any trace of my father? That I sometimes fantasize that somehow, somewhere, I meet your family and finally know who you were?

That after years and years of prayer, no matter how hard I try, I just can’t seem to make peace with what I long ago came to feel to be true, that prayer is always answered, and sometimes the answer is no?

Did you ever suspect that I love you? That I so deeply love you, and mourn not ever having had the chance to tell you?

Did you love me too? Of all the things I wish I could know about you, this one thing haunts me most of all. I can’t imagine loving my mother and not loving me, too. I suppose all I can ever be sure about is that, for whatever reason it was taken away from us, we had a right to be in each other’s lives.

And that for someone I’ve never known, I will always remember you. Dad.

There isn’t a lot I choose to hold back on my blog, but I am an ex-New Yorker and I am a Jew. (Although, since I became a Jew in Chicago, perhaps surprisingly I am not a New York Jew.) So in this case, I didn’t want to jinx myself, either, by putting this out there too soon.

This is the personal statement I submitted with my rabbinic school application. In May, a week after submitting my application, I was informally informed that I was admitted. On Monday, I sat down with Rabbi Douglas Goldhamer, president of the school, for the second time since January, and he made it perfectly clear that a.) I was going, b.) I was going, and c.) furthermore, I was going. Not to worry about perceived obstacles (doors are very apparently being opened for me), I’m expected and highly desired to have my butt in a seat in September, and our mutual courtship of each other–rabbinic school and potential student–is Adonai, not accident. (As well as several other amazing things that at the moment his ability to see in my is greater than my own.)

So as I now begin to let that finally sink in, search for appropriately flexible employment, and continue to drown myself in modern and biblical Hebrew, Jewish history, and other preparatory subjects to help ensure I don’t drop dead on day one, here is what I wrote in my personal statement. I drew some of it from my earlier writing on my experience as a Jew-by-Choice, as well as from things I’ve blogged regarding what I see as the limitations of contemporary denominational rabbinic training.

My path is a different one. I’ll be studying at Hebrew Seminary, formerly Hebrew Seminary of the Deaf, in north-suburban Skokie. The program’s original intent was to train rabbis specifically to be of service to deaf Jews wherever they may be, either in deaf Jewish communities or as members of majority hearing communities. In recent years, the school has enlarged its focus to embrace rabbinic training for service to all types of Jews including deaf Jews.

It is a non-denominational program drawing on wisdom from all streams of Judaism. It is heavily text based with a high expectation of Hebrew fluency. It embraces religiously mixed families. And it is a 45-minute transit ride from my Chicago apartment. That last part is actually pretty significant. No, you actually don’t need to leave Chicago–one of the most heavily Jewish areas in the country–in order to attend a non-Orthodox rabbinic program.

So, you know. Holy crap. I’m a rabbinic student.

———-

PERSONAL STATEMENT

A wise woman once said to me, “The inherent nature of Jewish tradition is to wrestle with the status quo, not to be the status quo.” That woman was Marcey Rosenbaum and I have a feeling it’s something she learned at Hebrew Seminary. Much like Marcey, I’m approaching rabbinic school midlife. I had to chuckle the first time I read through the application form. What were my honors in college? What have I done since then? You know what? It’s been quite a life that led me here. I don’t think that makes me in any way unique. It’s quite a life that leads all of us wherever we end up. Here’s how I ended up sitting at my desk in the final hours before Shabbat writing this statement.

My Family and Religion of Origin
After my conversion to Judaism, I began to describe myself as “An observant Reform Jewish Chicagoan born to unobservant Roman Catholic New Yorkers.” I was born and raised in Queens, New York, not far from Kennedy Airport. My family of origin was never particularly close. My brother and sister, both a generation older, had a different father and when he died, they became lifelong substance abusers (a thing which ultimately killed my sister in her fifties.) I never knew my birth father. He died in Santa Ana, California, shortly before I learned of his existence and began looking for him in the 1990s.

My mother, raising me on her own, tried to shield me from the drama of our family by sending me to parochial school. Throughout six years of Roman Catholic education that my mother could barely afford, my clearest memory is sitting in religion class knowing that I did not share the same beliefs as everyone else around me, and that I never would. I will never forget the sense I had as a child that miracles are actually everywhere, but virgin birth is not one of them. I was angry at God for putting me in my tumultuous family. But I didn’t need a priest as a go between. I told God that directly, and often.

Gay and Lesbian Youth of New York and Holiness
I never once thought God didn’t love me for being gay. (My mother told me when I came out to her at the age of 16, “This is okay. I still love you. Just don’t turn out like your brother and sister.”) The same year I tested into the Bronx High School of Science, and there I found other brainy, nerdy, insecure gay teens just like me.

Through my new friendships, I eventually became a steering committee member of the first, and at the time largest, peer-run gay youth rap group in the United States, Gay and Lesbian Youth of New York (GLYNY), a position I held until I aged out of the group at 21. Facilitating three hours of weekly Saturday discussions among a group of more than 100 teens yearning for validation and acceptance taught me a lot about how we should and shouldn’t treat each other on this planet. In hindsight, I realize that Saturday became a holy day in my life long before I became a Jew.

GLYNY was also the time in my life when I realized I was searching for God. I couldn’t say the “G” word in public yet without feeling a twinge of discomfort, and I knew that I wouldn’t find what I was seeking in Christianity. By my teenage years I was well aware I simply wasn’t born a Christian. I spent a lot of time reading through works on eastern spiritual traditions–mostly ways of getting to God and community without having to make a public declaration that you were looking for either one. And that agnostic in-between zone is where I let it lay for the next twenty years of my life.

My Education and Urban Planning Career
I’ve been a city boy my entire life. I used to draw trains and buses while I was sitting in front of the TV watching Sesame Street in the early 1970s. I commuted to junior high and high school on the subway. The only two cities in which I’ve lived (New York City and Chicago), don’t require a car to get around, and at the age of 42 I still don’t know how to drive one. I started college in 1990 with the intention to go on to grad school and study urban planning, and that’s exactly what I did–entirely at Hunter College of the City University of New York. Even as an undergrad, my studies and practical work centered around urban public outreach and urban politics. I graduated cum laude.

When I finished grad school, I was given the choice of a doctoral fellowship in planning at Rutgers University in New Jersey or what was at the time my dream job–joining the staff of the Permanent Citizens Advisory Committee to the Metropolitan Planning Authority/NYC Transit Riders Council (PCAC) as staff transportation planner. I eventually became the organization’s associate director and spent four years advocating on behalf of the needs of rank-and-file New York transit riders. It was ethical work and I loved it.

How I Became a Chicagoan
The year after 9/11, my hometown changed for me. I found the security state that New York City was turning into very unnerving. It was hard for me to make sense of seeing National Guard rifleman patrolling Grand Central Terminal and NYPD tactical teams armed with automatic weapons stationed in the middle of Times Square. But what bothered me most was the lack of public discourse about the changes. It reminded me of the message of the Christianity of my parochial school years– “This is for your own good, so don’t question it.”

I had also just begun a new job as a community planner at a privately held engineering firm. For a year, I was paid to keep silent as I watched the firm’s owners send their clients inflated bills for work that had never been done. It was unethical work and I hated it. I didn’t yet know that what I now identify as God was leading me to finally grow up. Like everyone else, I had heard many stories of people needing to leave their place of birth in order to become the people they were meant to be. At the time of course, I knew nothing about Parashat Lech Lecha. But like Abraham, I never saw the change coming.

A friend had moved to Chicago and I knew I needed a break from New York, and from my life. I spent a weekend in the city–my first in several years–and something struck a chord in me. I came back every two weeks for three months until I was almost out of money, and then I spent a weekend at Disneyland in California trying to decide what to do. While I was there, an old PCAC colleague who had moved to Washington D.C. and become a Buddhist told me over the phone, “New York will always be there, but if you don’t leave you’ll never know what could have been.” Two weeks later I was in Chicago looking for an apartment.

My Time in the New York Diaspora
After ten years in Chicago, I’ve never regretted the move. The city reminded me of the sense of community I had been seeking since my teenage years, and which I felt slowly dying in my hometown after 9/11. At first I thought it was the laid-back friendliness of the city that drew me here (versus what a friend once called the “aggressive ambivalence” of New York.) I changed careers and spent several years doing research and communications work, full-time and as a consultant.

I also started a blog to diary my experiences as an ex-New Yorker in Chicago. [Ed. note: this one!] I’ve written my blog for eight years, and from time to time I’ve used it to weigh in on civic issues. Several times my blog has generated local (and once, national) news coverage of issues that sometimes go unremarked upon by people who grew up in the Chicago area. If there’s one thing I brought with me from NYC, it’s my fearlessness in speaking my mind. Over the years, writing my blog has helped me come to see the importance that I place on everyone having a say in the decisions that affect their lives–and on helping people get to the point where they find the bravery inside to speak up. (In modesty I share that I regularly receive email from around the world from people thanking me for my writing, and for inspiring them to be outspoken, as well.)

Writing about my life, my blog also taught me that my exit from New York had as much to do with running away from as running towards something. I could not find a way to engage with the changes I saw in my hometown. But until I left New York, I had no idea just how hard being an adult could be. Moving to Chicago, I was faced with all-new challenges on top of the inner limitations I had brought along with me. Carving a new career niche for myself while managing to pay my bills was hard enough. Doing it while being diagnosed with ADHD–I use years of learned time- and task-management techniques to stay focused, and entering recovery for codependence–after my childhood spent in an substance-abusive household, took things to an unexpected level for me.

It all gave myself no choice but to engage directly with my city and with my life. My first few years in Chicago were a struggle, but I persisted in seeking a connection with something greater. With encouragement from my Washington friend, I began learning about Buddhism and engaging in Buddhist meditation, and although I never formally joined a sangha, I identified as Buddhist for several years in my thirties. But things still didn’t feel right.

Not a Reform Jew, Not an Anything Jew, Just A Jew
In August 2010, shortly before I turned 40, my recovery and my Buddhism brought me to the point in my life I know now that the previous 39 years had been leading up to. Through my recovery work, I reached a place where I yearned to be able to share my lifelong growing experience of a power greater than myself publicly. I knew that could not happen in the anonymity of the rooms, and I also knew that could not happen within the context of my Deity-agnostic Buddhism.

That month, I finally realized that from parochial school through Buddhism, all along I had been spiritually homeless. I remember sobbing for an hour in my bedroom and wondering where it was I actually belonged. At my beit din nine months later, I shared the story of how, that afternoon, I got on the Brown Line, pulled out my Android phone, and asked for guidance. I was headed from downtown Chicago to Lincoln Square to blog at Starbucks. I began Googling the religious traditions of people I have known in my life. Very quickly, I began reading about Judaism.

As I told my beit din, it took a long time for me to begin to walk down the stairs from the ‘L’ when I arrived at my destination. I had spent most of the trip reading about Judaism and finding reflected back at me everything I’ve ever felt, or yearned for, or simply known about my relationship with God and with the people with whom I share the planet. I could say it was a difficult realization, that I had doubts along the way, or that it was a struggle to discover my inner Judaism. That would probably be more believable than saying that I knew in an instant who I was when I got off an ‘L’ train, although that is how Hashem finally found me. But the real shock was all of my Jewish friends from New York City–which in retrospect I realized was virtually all of my friends from New York City–telling me that they had waited my whole life for me to figure out something they had always known about me.

I get that you want me to tell you about why Judaism is important to me. You’ve asked about my connection with observance and ritual, how Judaism lives through me. I think you have the question backwards. You should ask me how I live through Judaism. To me, Judaism is both spiritual and practical. It was meaning discovered bit by bit in moments of “doing Jewish to learn Jewish” during my conversion journey, and is continuing moments of insight and inspiration arrived at through living Jewishly in the two years since then, which together taught me that exploring and adopting one mitzvah does, in fact, lead to another and another.

Judaism creates a wholeness in my life in many ways. First and foremost, it is a spiritual vocabulary for me that helps and guides me to express what I feel about God, justice, and fairness, and an ethical user’s guide for helping me make the decisions that affect my life. If offers me a body of prayer that helps me feel grounded and rooted in ancient tradition, yet allows me to express myself and gives me permission to actively engage with God and with my faith–and most importantly to doubt and to question without guilt or fear.

I have been affiliated with Emanuel Congregation in Chicago’s Edgewater neighborhood for most of the past three years. Throughout that time, I have lived a life informed by the Reform Jewish principles of ethics, fairness, and an open mind about the nature of the commandments. However, I’ve always found myself in the deeper end of the mitzvah pool, so my level of observance, voluntary though it may be in a Reform sense, often reminds me that I am a Jew first and a Reform Jew second. (There were, of course, no denominations standing before God at Sinai.)

I have tried to create as many opportunities as possible for Judaism to inform my day-to-day life and to allow me to express my sense of awe and gratitude for my life and for Creation. I attend Shabbat services regularly on Friday evenings and often on Saturday mornings. Last year, my partner, Ryan, and I moved to the block where our synagogue is located to make Shabbat services easier to get to without driving or carrying. I daven three times a day or as close to it as I can manage, in the morning with tefillin and a rescued tallit from a Jewish family that no longer continues. I recite brachot before eating or drinking. I study Hebrew and do my best to understand the liturgy and the Torah without transliteration.

Every Sabbath I bake (and take) challah, do kiddush, and and sit down to dinner with Ryan. Together at home we observe the rich calendar of Jewish holidays, often hosting friends and neighbors for holiday meals. As you might expect, I blog regularly and frankly about my Jewish life and experiences. My Jewish blog posts have often been carried by national Jewish websites including the Reform Judaism blog, Jewcy.com, and InterfathFamily.com. Through my Jewish blog posts, I am blessed to have made many Jewish friends around the world with whom to learn and to debate differences of Jewish opinion (including an incredibly candid haredi student in Mea She’arim who shares my interest in Disney parks, and an equally thoughtful Orthodox mom living across the Green Line who shares my belief in a Jewish people that includes all types of Jews.)

I wear a kippah at all times. (How could I not? Since my last name is Doyle, without one on my head, being introduced by name to someone for the first time would instantly erase a Jew from the world.) And each year on the Hebrew anniversary of my conversion, I return to mikveh to reiterate to God my commitment to Klal Yisrael.

I do none of this out of a sense of obligation. The best I can say is that I pray and observe Jewish ritual in the manner that I do because I cannot do otherwise. It is my connection with Creation and humanity, with my jewish heritage and the generations that came before me, and ultimately with life. Judaism is in my life because Judaism is life to me. I joined the Jewish people because I fell in love with something that I never knew that I’d always been. From day one the sense in me has been of wanting to dive as deeply into Jewish teaching and tradition as I can and never come up for air.

As I told my rabbi, Michael Zedek, the day he told me I was ready to go to mikveh, in response to being asked what more I thought I needed to learn about Judaism, there is a lifetime to learn. At the time, I told him I had already chosen to engage in that lifetime of learning, so it made no sense not to continue it as a Jew. That’s what I’ve done over the past two years since mikveh–I’ve lived through my Judaism to engage with the world, and to learn. That includes learning and re-learning to be humble every day, often in spite of myself.

I Don’t Ever Want to Expect to Be the Most Important Person in the Room
More than anything, my Jewish life is a struggle. Over the past three years I’ve come to realize that’s how I know I’m doing it right. My style of observance is not in keeping with the norm of my congregation. Although I belong to a Reform synagogue, I do not always agree with the policy decisions of the board, much less the policy decisions of the Union for Reform Judaism–or any single denominational body. I do my best in my daily activities to help, in the words of Rabbi Daniel Bogard [Ed. note: And, of course originally, Isaac Luria], “heal the broken shards of Creation”. But that doesn’t mean I place the goals of peace and mutual understanding before the goals of justice and fairness. I have never been that kind of a fan of the status quo. I much prefer to wrestle with it.

Am I fluent in Hebrew? Not yet. Am I well-versed in Torah? Not yet. But these things will come.

You ask about my commitment to serving the deaf Jewish community. It doesn’t seem like an exceptional question to me. A rabbi must be competent in several languages–Biblical, Rabbinic, and Modern Hebrew, and Aramaic, besides the one they brought with them. Why shouldn’t the list of required linguistic competencies include the sign language appropriate to the nation or community in which a rabbi intends to serve? As a Jew-by-choice, I was not raised under the assumption that deaf Jews are unable to be fully included in Jewish community, nor do I find it persuasive that we must abide by halacha that limits deaf Jews’ participation in communal life simply because the last Sanhedrin capable of changing the law was dissolved 1,655 years ago. I think a Judaism unable to find a way within the halacha to include and uphold human rights–or that holds only those rights recognized in Biblical or Rabbinic times are valid today–is not a living Judaism.

Rabbi Zedek has made a point of saying that rabbis often fall into the trap of thinking that they are the most important person in the room–or even expecting to be so. It’s an interesting observation for me. There are so many rabbinic models–in theory and in person–to learn from. From them, I have an idea of the rabbi I want to be. I want never to expect to be the most important person in the room. I want never to forget that it is a wide and wonderful Klal Yisrael, and that my approach to Judaism is not the only valid approach. I want always to remember that ruach comes in many forms, and that if I’m not aware of the way those who seek out my guidance best connect with the Ephemeral, then I’m not doing my job. I want to have the courage to cede leadership to others the moment I know that I don’t feel inspired anymore.

But Why Do I Want to Be a Rabbi in the First Place?
Still, there are many other things I could spend the rest of my life doing. Of the many things I’ve been told in response to voicing my desire to join the rabbinate, most often from Jewish clergy:

• Judaism doesn’t need another rabbi, what we really need are more congregants who know how to lead services;
• We have too many rabbis, you could always be a Jewish educator instead;
• Why would you want to take on so much debt when you’ll never find a job?;
• Even denominational programs can’t place graduates in jobs these days;
• Denominational programs turn down so many people because they have to protect the existing pulpit jobs for rabbis who are already working;
• I’m not happy where I am, I don’t know if I’ll be able to find another pulpit job, and I can’t tell you how many fellow students of mine are unemployed or working in jobs that have nothing to do with their training;
• I can’t tell you not to do it, I can only tell you what the dangers are that you’re going to face; and
• I think you’d make a wonderful rabbi.

I happen to agree with the last bullet point. As for all the others, who said my life was easy now? Or more to the point, should be in the first place? I’m not approaching rabbinic school to fix my problems. I’m approaching rabbinic school because I embrace them. Judaism is about living life, not avoiding it. Why should the life of a newly graduated or mid-career job-seeking rabbi be any different?

Although my partner and I may never have children, Jewish continuity is important to me, as well. After half a life behind me not lived Jewishly, I feel a duty to use whatever may be remaining in front of me to make up for lost time. I feel an inexorable desire to help other Jews to embrace their Judaism more fully, and to inspire potential members of our people to begin their own Jewish journeys. To use Jewish teachings to help Jews and non-Jews find within themselves the courage to speak out, live out, and be who they are.

Yes, I could do that as a Jewish educator. In point of fact, I do that now as a Jewish blogger. And I have no way to be certain to the core of my being that becoming a rabbi is the absolutely right decision for me. I only know that every time I think I have a choice not to pursue the rabbinate, a still, small voice leads me back to the idea. And every time I tell myself that still, small voice is full of baloney, I turn around and choose to pursue the idea, anyway.

Six months ago, when I originally met with Rabbi Benay Lappe to discuss applying to Hebrew Seminary, she suggested I give myself a break, follow Rabbi Lionel Blue’s lead, and simply let the answer of why I want to go to rabbinic school find me in rabbinic school. I am just mystical enough to believe that the answer will find me there.

Judaism Must Include Those Who Are Not Yet Jews
And then there is Ryan, who is not yet Jewish. Two years ago, he found so much inspiration in my Jewish journey that he decided to begin his own. At the moment, that journey is on hold in an official sense while he seeks a rabbi with whom he feels comfortable enough with to continue formal study. He is quite Jewishly knowledgeable, together we keep a Jewish home, and long ago he began to self-identify as a Jew. I love him and share my life with him, and I make no apologies for his timeline.

I did not apply to HUC-JIR because of their restriction on accepting rabbinic students in relationships with non-Jews. I happen not to consider intermarriage to threaten the extinction of the Jewish people any more than I consider mere survival to be the best we as Jews can hope to achieve from our existence on this planet. But I do believe that telling rabbinic students that their partners make them unworthy candidates for the rabbinate is a good way to make the Jewish community smaller–by alienating, by extension, the many non-Jewish partners and family members whom we should instead be including under our communal tent. For if we don’t include them in love and understanding as non-Jews first, how can we ever hope that they will ever say “yes” when we invite them to join the Jewish people?

And Rabbis Must Help Build Communities
Finally, why am I applying to Hebrew Seminary? Because the program is rigorous, rooted in original text, and mindful of the breadth and depth of Jewish tradition. Because I’ve been guided there. Because I found Rabbi Lappe’s Talmud class which I audited in October immense fun. Because I found Rabbi Goldhamer’s open-mindedness remarkable when we spoke in January. Because Marcey Rosenbaum would be disappointed in me if I did not follow through.

And perhaps most of all, because Hebrew Seminary is a small community. Given the inestimable ways I would personally learn, grow, and improve by attending Hebrew Seminary, what I possibly have to give back cannot compare. Yet everyone I’ve spoken with at the school has shared with me the wish that the program had a larger community of students. If a rabbi’s central task is to serve the Jewish community, as a rabbinical student I think I should be helping to build that community every step of the way, too. That’s not easily possible attending a large, ponderous, legacy rabbinic school. Because of Hebrew Seminary’s size, together with its curriculum together, the program is my first and only choice.

So this is who I am, how I live, and what I aspire to. I hope you found meaning in it. It was extraordinarily meaningful to me to have the opportunity to share it with you.

B’shalom,

Michael Benami Doyle

A heck of a question as the title of this blog post, I know. Here’s how it came about. I’ve often wondered why people who take their primary religious texts literally have such a fervent belief in the exact things written there. Obviously both within Judaism and beyond, some religious adherents allow for textual uncertainty and some do not. What drives some of us to claim absolute certainly about our religious beliefs? That anxiety-inducing avenue of investigation is not the point of this post, you’ll be happy to know.

What I find more curious–and important to explore–are the implications of claiming such certainty, particularly from a Jewish perspective. A synagogue friend forwarded to me this morning a blog post from Out of the Ortho Box, an Orthodox blog by Ruchi Koval that I’ve found interesting in the past. In the post, Why I’m Not a Pluralist, Koval says that she cannot allow for other Jewish perspectives to be equally valid to her own Orthodox Jewish perspective because:

“Religious pluralism does not make any mathematical sense to me, because to me, religion is based on facts.  Either God did or didn’t write the Torah as we have it today.  Either the Torah was or wasn’t given at Sinai.  Either Moses did or didn’t perform those miracles.  If religion isn’t based on a belief in facts, then what is it based on?”

There’s a healthy comment thread under the post as you might imagine. (When you’re done here, I encourage you to go there and read it.) I’ll make no earnest attempt to answer Koval’s question beyond saying that religious beliefs have a wide basis. What stood out to me more is the idea that the only valid religious perspectives are those that are based in fact.

If that were true, it would mean that the only valid religious perspectives–or truly religious people, for that matter–would be those religious adherents who believed in the literal nature of their primary texts. That would leave no room for doubt, but would offer almost infinite room for the most fundamental of religious perspectives. If religious perspectives were required to be vetted by this one thing to determine validity, no non-Orthodox Jew would be considered religious–but most Taliban would.

That was the red flag for me to delve a little more deeply. There seems to be a category error here. I don’t believe you can be a “religious Jew” and claim factual religious certainty at the same time. Why? Because for us Jews, the only one who knows with certainty the absolute, concrete “facts” about religion–whether Judaism or any other faith–is God. God knows all. We do not, nor can we.

We can make educated guesses. We can follow our heart and our inner sense of knowing. We can listen for the guidance of the still, small voice. And we can use all of that as a basis for belief. But we will never have proof because what we don’t have is fact. Merely saying that you believe what is written in the Torah is literal fact does not make it so. Neither does it falsify it. In fact, it has no bearing on textual veracity at all.

No matter how fervently you believe.

The value of our sacred texts comes in how well we allow ourselves to learn through them. And that learning is almost always about how to treat each other on the planet. How many times in the the Torah does saying “I’m right and you’re wrong” get anyone ahead? (We’re still in Bamidbar–Korach, anyone?)

The only one to whom deferment is required by the Hebrew Bible is God. Judaism–and its daughter religions as well (Christianity, Islam)–centers on the belief in one God. Not a multitude of God, not worship of ideas or inanimate objects, not worship of human beings. Just ephemeral Deity.

On those grounds, I do happen to think it’s idolatrous for Jews, at least, to claim certainty about religious “facts”. To say we have factual religious certainty without hard, verifiable knowledge that remains known only to God creates two problems. It elevates those alleged “facts” above God, because God may not be in agreement with us that they are, indeed, facts. And it elevates us to be equal with God, because to know such things with certainty as “facts” gives us an omniscience about the world that up until now has been solely available to God.

Both of those are idolatrous acts. If there is but one God and we–and any possible fact or concept–are not God, then to claim knowledge of factual verification of the Hebrew Bible and all that is contained within it without a.) being given independently verifiable proof by God or b.) having an omniscience equal to God is problematic. Far from being the definition of Jewishly “religious”, from a very traditional Jewish perspective, claiming absolute factual certainly about Judaism more appropriately meets the definition of heresy. (For idolatry is exactly that for Jews.)

Now I don’t for one minute believe that Koval is an idolater or anything less than a just, loving, religious Jew. But I do think we need to keep the implications of our words in mind when we talk about Judaism and what makes us Jewish. “Fact”, or the lack of it, does not in any way denote or separate religious Jews from anyone else. The real facts is that Judaism is plural, like it or not. Until Orthodox Jews or anyone else gets a telegram from Hashem telling them at they’re the most chosen of the chosen, no one can say heirs is the only true Judaism.

You can think you know. But that’s as far as you can go. That inability to know for sure–an inability created by God–is what brings pluralism into being in the first place. If we truly want to learn how to love each other on this planet, making friends with pluralism would be a better idea than considering everyone else’s path to God as an unworthy one.

The doubt, the struggle, and the lack of absolute certainly within Judaism are among our religion’s most challenging and most instructive elements. They make us what we are. The more we try to lessen the struggle and claim certainty as Jews, the more we needlessly cut ourselves off from each other.

The merit we accrue from the mitzvot depends on how well we love, not on how much we’re right.

This is an off-topic (not specifically Jewish-themed) and epic (long) post: a trip report of the five-day stay Ryan and I just spent in Walt Disney World. We were surprised to find ourselves counting the days until we could come home to Chicago–and start planning our next Disneyland vacation. This post explains why in detail. I’m writing it for the benefit of fellow Disney park fans–especially Disneyland vets (like Ryan and myself)–who are researching the differences between the Anaheim and Orlando resorts.

However, I’m posting it here and not on the mainstream bi-coastal Disney discussion forum I belong to because experience has proven that feelings get easily hurt there when anyone criticizes the East Coast parks. I ask that you bear that in mind if you’re reading here from that community, because while I don’t intend to offend anyone, I do intend to write frankly about our experience at Walt Disney World–and why it just wasn’t for us.

(Note: this post will eventually be updated with trip photos once our PhotoPass+ CD arrives in the mail.)

Prologue: How We Ended up At Walt Disney World Instead of Disneyland Resort

As I’ve blogged previously, although I grew up in New York and live in Chicago, I’m a long-time Disneyland Resort “vet” (the Disney fan term that identifies the resort–Disneyland or Walt Disney World–that you consider to be your “home” resort.) It’s the place where I decided to move to Chicago in 2003. It’s a place where I dragged Devyn in 2005. And in March of this year a trip there was Ryan’s 40th birthday present from me. Luckily–and happily and surprisingly to boot–Ryan loved it as much as I do.

The always amazing food (and near-universal annual passholder dining discounts), live pop-up bands, constantly roving characters, and charming ambiance–not just in Disneyland (especially our favorite land, New Orleans Square) but also in the newly re-Imagineered Disney California Adventure park, the easy 500-foot walk between the resort’s two parks, the spotlessness and over-eager trash pickers, the friendly, highly Disney-savvy Southern Californians who grew up with the place and make up the majority of visitors, the compactness, high concentration of rides and attractions, warm days and cool nights. All are part of the magic of a West Coast Disney vacation.

For Ryan’s 40th birthday, I purchased Premier Annual Passports allowing us to visit all six Disney theme parks on both coasts for a year. We had planned our next trip to be back to Disneyland Resort because Ryan loved it so much (and needed the break from him stressful job.) We figured we’d eventually make it to Walt Disney World before our passes expired. However, after unexpected fines from Cal/OSHA led Disney to close several major rides including our favorites (Space Mountain–mine–and Soarin’ Over California–Ryan’s) for an undetermined period to improve the safety of after-hours maintenance workers,  we decided to change our already-purchased plane tickets to Orlando. Team Disney Anaheim eventually re-opened those rides before our trip, but we kept our WDW plans in place.

We both looked forward to seeing the East Coast parks, I especially, since they were my first Disney-parks experience. At the age of three, my sister took me to a two-year-old Magic Kingdom in 1973. Later, in 1977, my Aunt Juanita and Uncle Ron drove their clan with me included down to Florida, where I took my first ride on the brand-new Space Mountain. Though I’ve been to Disneyland Paris (in 2000), 1977 was my last time in “the World” and I was very curious to see Magic Kingdom again.

How We Spent Our Time at Walt Disney World

This trip report isn’t chronological because the things we learned and felt on our trip mostly happened–or built up–on each day we were at WDW. But for the record, here’s how we spent our primary park time–you’ll be able to tell the point at which we just kind of gave up and stuck with the familiar:

• Day One: Magic Kingdom
• Day Two: Epcot
• Day Three: Disney’s Hollywood Studios
• Day Four: Magic Kingdom
• Day Five: Magic Kingdom

The Good: What We Liked at Walt Disney World

Now to be clear, we didn’t dislike everything about Walt Disney World. In fact, some things we liked a lot…

We loved the free Magical Express airport transfer coach (versus the $32 round-trip on Disneyland Resort Express), and the associated luggage service that delivers your bags to your room from the airport for you (a service which isn’t available on the west coast.) Checking our bags at our resort hotel for the trip back was a great stress-saver too, and again isn’t something Disney offers in California.

We didn’t have much of a problem with Disney’s on-property bus service, which is necessary to get anywhere if you don’t have a car, given WDW’s great size. In five days we collectively had two or three longish waits, and several waits of five minutes or less. Though we did have a few issues with people not used to riding buses taking up additional seats or blocking the aisle, but then again everyone else on the bus had to put up with these people, too. (On one bus, a father had to tell an older teenager to stop using his son’s wheelchair as a footrest.)

We enjoyed the over-the-top theming, thorough “mousekeeping”, beautiful, lakeside grounds, and exclusive bus service of our “value resort”, Pop Century.

We loved charging everything back to our room with our RFID-enabled “Key to the World” keycards. The simple tap-and-PIN system made purchases a breeze. We also loved paying down our room charges with pre-bought Disney Gift Cards (an easy way to “silo-off” Disney vacation monies to make sure you don’t overdo things on your credit or debit cards.)

We thought the new RFID-enabled “open turnstiles” were amazing. Once we got to WDW we were able to convert our existing standard passes to RFID passes (that still work at Disneyland), and after that it was just “tap until the Mickey light spins and touch your fingerprint until Mickey turns green” and walk into the parks. I wish Disneyland had this easy-peasy entrance system already.

We loved (loved) Wifi being enabled *everywhere*. In the parks–outside, inside, and in ride buildings. At the resort hotels–outside, inside, and in rooms. Disneyland has nothing like this and it sure made using Disney and third-party visit-planning apps without running down your phone battery easily possible.

We very much enjoyed attractions that, at least to us, were clearly better in Orlando, including a longer Haunted Mansion, a slower Splash Mountain with a wider ride vehicle, and a more robust Big Thunder Mountain Railroad with real airtime. (Sorry, East Coast Tower of Terror fans, we thought the much-touted “Fifth Dimension room” ruined the ride’s pacing versus the “ghosts drop then you drop” suspense of the California version.) We also liked the original attractions that aren’t in Disneyland anymore, including the Country Bear Jamboree, the Carousel of Progress, and the People Mover.

I personally (Ryan not so much) loved riding the grandfather of all Space Mountains. Yes, it’s rougher and less thrilling than Disneyland’s version. Yes, the starfield effects are nowhere near as good. Yes, I broke my glasses in the exit station. And yes, I rode every chance I got and each time was a blast. (Then again, I grew up riding the Coney Island Cyclone learning to hold on with my knees, so I already knew how to brace myself on a rough coaster.)

And though my beloved peanut brittle is absent from Magic Kingdom’s Main Street U.S.A., Mickey crisped rice treats were happily eaten every night we were at WDW.

The Bad: What We Didn’t Like at Walt Disney World

Ultimately for us, though, there was a lot more we didn’t like at WDW. The following section is the reason I decided not to put my trip report on the DIS boards. So if you’re a WDW vet, as I said earlier, I’m going to be frank here about our experience of the things we didn’t like in the World. Some of this is chance and some of this is unchangeable. But a lot of this I feel is due to a different–and as I see it, lacking–management culture in Orlando (that I’ll talk about at the end of this post). At times we really found ourselves pulling for the World, and it was maddening to realize that much of what we found disappointing wasn’t at all inherent in WDW, itself, but was put there by Team Disney Orlando’s corporate culture…

We hated the weather. Ninety degrees and an extremity-swelling level of humidity, going down to 80 degrees with the same humidity at night, just isn’t for us. We longed for Disneyland’s warm, dry t-shirt days and cool, breezy hoodie evenings. Not something anyone can control without completely avoiding visiting during summer, so lesson learned here.

We disliked the guest vibe–or more specifically the guest-behavior vibe. We knew going in that WDW guests are once-a-year or even once-in-a-lifetime guests, often entire extended families, and often from other countries. Maybe it was the heat or the great distances or other elements that we didn’t like about WDW, either. Or maybe it’s a cultural thing. I warned Ryan that my fellow northeasterners might act rudely (oh boy, how some of them did!) and that many people on the DIS boards complain about the rudeness of Brazilian guests (again, after five days in the World, no argument there!) I guess WDW is a place where lots of cultures clash, often in a jarring manner, and where it’s very easy–and very common–to melt down. (Several times, we definitely did.)

Whatever the reasons, though, we constantly witnessed–or had aimed at us–really bad guest behavior that you don’t often see at Disneyland. Just an overall air of rudeness and “me and my kids come first” everywhere we went. Parents threatening and screaming and cursing at their kids. People pushing other people out of the way on pathways and in queues. Line jumping. Arguing with Cast Memembers. Ignoring Cast Members. Attempting to change seats on rides after the restraints are locked. Dozens and dozens of flash pictures taken throughout indoor/dark rides. (This was an immense peeve, as it’s something I have *never* witnessed at Disneyland Resort. Not once.) That’s not how people act at Disneyland. There, guests of all ages know intimately and love the parks. They rarely treat each other or the parks the way WDW guests do because they live there. They feel a sense of ownership. The lack of this sense of ownership by visitors was a real WDW downer for us. I can’t tell you how much we missed being surrounded by Southern Californians during our five WDW days.

In return, I suppose, for the above behavior, we also witnessed lots of surly behavior on the part of Cast Members. So many times before our trip I read reports from WDW vets complaning about lack of a magical vibe from West Coast CMs. However, I’ve never witnessed West Coast CMs yelling at guests, ignoring guests, ordering guests around without please and thank you, not knowing simple answers about the parks and shrugging their shoulders, or just so obviously phoning it in and hating their jobs.

But from ride staff to restaurant staff, we never knew how friendly, knowledgeable, or otherwise “magical” a Walt Disney World CM would be with us. At Disneyland, CMs overall are very knowledgeable, very polite, and very into the vibe. Maybe you have to be a regular DLR visitor to get that vibe. (Disneyland CM’s can be very tongue-in-cheek, which goes over very well there because the basic assumption is that both they and the guests love the park.) But hearing various versions of “I don’t know” and “move the line NOW!” for five days from Walt Disney World CMs was very much not a magical experience for us.

We didn’t like how spread out WDW’s four parks are. Not at all. WDW vets often cite WDW’s greater size (the World is about the size of San Francisco while Disneyland Resort is about the size of Golden Gate Park) as evidence that WDW is “better”. It’s not a contest, but if it were, bigger is not always better. It’s just always bigger. People familiar with the Anaheim and Orlando resorts will tell you, there are just about the same number of rides and attractions in Disneyland Resort’s two smaller parks as there are in Walt Disney World’s four larger parks. That means that the convenient strolls from ride to ride DLR vets enjoy in California are often commando marches in Florida through sweltering humidity from one side of a park to the other–or off on a 30 to 45-minute bus or monorail journey to another park entirely. Not fun at all. It’s also worth noting that DLR may be smaller, but it is, of course, in the middle of the Los Angeles metropolitan area. Anything you can do in WDW you can do in L.A. That may break the Disney “bubble” that WDW vets enjoy, but as I note further below, that bubble can be a liability, too.

I also don’t agree with all the things I’ve read about the “benefit” of Magic Kingdom’s wider walkways. Crowded is crowded at MK or anywhere else, and the park definitely has its pinch points, just in different places than Disneyland does (the western sides of Fantasyland and Frontierland at MK versus Adventureland and the Hub at Disneyland.) And when we ended up at MK on this year’s 24-hour night, wider walkways or not, we were still led from the Hub to Town Square via backstage in order to avoid punishing crowds along Main Street. It was a sad walk, too–backstage on Main Street we got to see all the Main Street vehicles they never run anymore at Magic Kingdom (unlike at Disneyland, where the Main Street vehicles always run) stored in their lonely parking bays.

What we found worst about the diluted nature of the East Coast parks was what is in-between those far-apart attractions: shops, shops, and more shops, and occasionally a really bad counter-service restaurant (I’ll get to those soon.) At DLR located between rides and attractions are usually other rides and attractions. Yes, Disneyland and California Adventure both have an immense amount of merchandising in them. But you never get the feeling that you get at Walt Disney World that merchandising is the primary reason for the existence of the parks (and especially of Epcot’s World Showcase and just about all of Disney’s Hollywood Studios.)

We also encountered many instances of bad show maintenance. Yes, Space Mountain at Disneyland has all those blue lights dark in the hyperspace tunnel. Yes, WDW has some well-maintained attractions. Still, imagine four parks filled with rides with broken show–that’s WDW. Everywhere we went in the parks we saw peeling paint, chipped railings, badly painted and repainted walls (especially the atrociously bad repainting of the black walls in it’s a small world’s Hawaii room), air ducts covered with mold, broken audio-animatronics, grimy ride and attraction interiors, show elements simply turned off, duct-taped ride seats and orange cones marking off broken ride vehicles (seriously, WDW?) It was pathetic to experience and just screamed “we don’t care about the show experience at WDW”. There’s really no other takeaway from things like this in a Disney park, and from a West Coast perspective it’s just not excusable.

In addition, we often saw trash just laying there–on walkways, outside restaurants, piling on top of garbage cans, littering queues, and even tossed inside ride buildings. At Disneyland Resort, trash seems to be picked up almost before it hits the ground, the West Coast parks are that spotless. At WDW, and especially at Magic Kingdom, it’s just another world. Trash pickers didn’t seem to have any sense of urgency (not at all), and we’d watch the trash just sit and sit. At one point, I counted more than two dozen discarded water and soda bottles littering an elevated pre-show area in the Space Mountain queue. From a Disneyland perspective, it was quite a shock. Disneyland gets 95% of the guest volume that Magic Kingdom does and still manages to remain almost spotless. Again, there’s just no excuse for this.

But the worst shock–and worst part of our trip–was the food. It’s bad. Really bad. Counter-service (casual) dining everywhere we went in the World–our resort hotel, our neighboring resort hotel, the parks we visited–was almost uniformly bad and occasionally disgusting. We know many WDW vets don’t agree. Some would tell us we should have reserved Table-Service meals at sit-down restaurants, but we don’t think you should have to make ADRs (and plan out your vacation months in advance) just to *save* yourself from Walt Disney World’s regular food options. Other WDW fans might point out the few good in-park counter-service options (MK’s Columbia Harbor House, Epcot’s Sunshine Seasons), but who wants to eat the same thing every day? Not to mention, who wants to slog all the way across MK or Epcot for the one good food option?

We’re former Six Flags annual passholders, so we know rotten food when we eat it. Most of what we ate in the World was worse than Six Flags food, and that’s saying a lot. Most food was poorly prepared, often cold, and filled with obviously low-grade commercial catering ingredients. It was also the same bad food everywhere we went. Over the course of five days it became very obvious that this was another area Team Disney Orlando decided to value-engineer, and it made staying on property in the Disney “bubble” a gastronomic nightmare. We pretty much dreaded meal time in the World, and with no exaggeration I tell you our best meal in Orlando was at the airport McDonald’s while waiting for our flight home.

Disneyland Resort food, on the other hand, is fabulous. It’s always good, often seeming gourmet (which is a neat trick with common kitchens), and far more varied than WDW’s everywhere-you-go mediocre burgers, pizza, and bready hot dogs. I can’t emphasize this enough, and don’t know how to explain it if you’ve never been to Disneyland Resort. People go on dates at Disneyland to eat this food and soak up the ambiance. People laze at tables at Disneyland over this food. People run from one side of each park to the other so they don’t miss all their favorite foods in Anaheim. This entire, decades-old, inexpensive, no reservation required, casual foodie scene is absent–totally and unequivocally absent–in Walt Disney World. And again I have to ask, why?

Adding all of the above together, apparently you end up with Epcot, and what a surprise it was to experience the place. We absolutely had an intense negative reaction to Epcot. Oh boy, we hated it. We didn’t expect to, but we did. Everything is such a deliberately long, sunny walk from everything else there. So much of Future World is painfully outdated or in desperate need of refurbishing. Ellen’s (early 90s) Energy Adventure touting 20-year-old science? The filth and bad lighting in the main tank at The Seas with Nemo and Friends–not to mention the Nemo overlay on the main ride that removed actual science content (and much of which was broken)? The broken video screens outside Turtle Talk with Crush? The ridiculous Tron overlay at Test Track that removed the science/engineering story *entirely*? The let’s-be-drunk-in-front-of-our-kids (because there’s nothing else to do) vibe of World Showcase? We kept waiting for it to get better at Epcot. We left really disappointed. Comparing the state of Future World, especially, with science attractions here in Chicago, we found it laughable that Disney would charge people for a far worse science/learning experience than many of us can have back home without taking the expensive trip to Orlando. The current state of Epcot is is not the best Disney can do. Not by a long shot.

Finally, and on a personal note, I’ve often read first-time Disneyland trip reports from WDW vets grousing about how comparatively short Disneyland’s Sleeping Beauty Castle is versus Magic Kingdom’s Cinderella Castle. (Not to mention Disneyland having somewhat shorter and less elaborate Main Street U.S.A. buildings.) A recent such trip report I read said “no one cries over this castle.” On the contrary, I think we all have an emotional attachment to our “home park” castle. Many people definitely do cry upon leaving Disneyland on the last night of a trip, looking longingly back at our beautiful, pink castle. Often me included. I just don’t get what all the fuss over a taller castle is about. MK’s castle is tall, but it’s also a lot blander than Disneyland’s, and with all those loud, repetitive castle stage shows, you can seldom really get near it. It just didn’t resonate with me the way that Disneyland’s Sleeping Beauty Castle does. Certainly not just because it’s taller. I kept looking at the castle in MK and thinking, “And..?” as if it might roll over or fetch or do something interesting. Nope. Just taller.

How We Explain Our WDW Experience

In the end, Ryan and I discovered that while there were things we enjoyed at Walt Disney World, overall some important core elements of the Disney “magic” we experience at Disneyland Resort in California were lacking in quality–sometimes significantly–or just completely absent in Florida. No one is to blame for the weather and people will be people, in the parks our outside of them. And nothing can change the spread out, overly-large nature of Disney’s four Orlando parks.

But persistently crummy food, surly CMs, ever-present litter, and widespread shoddy show maintenance are inexcusable in a Disney park. To the WDW vets who don’t see these things as being problems in Orlando, all I have to say is visit the Anaheim parks once in a while. The experience in these regards is like night and day and not in Walt Disney World’s favor. These four things made us feel like we had taken a five-day vacation to Six Flags–and I mean that literally. We became Disney Premier Annual Passport-holders to get away from these exact four things at our local Six Flags park in the Chicago area. We encounter them rarely in Anaheim. They seem to be the baseline experience in Orlando.

I’ll also backtrack a little and say the spread out nature of the Orlando parks is changeable. It would take Team Disney Orlando deciding to concentrate rides and attractions in each park and to rock back the dial on the super hard-sell of merchandise.

Fat chance? Maybe not.

All of this comes down to management decisions, and all of it is fixable. Disneyland Resort went through a similar diminution in the baseline guest experience in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The controversial Paul Pressler/Cynthia Harris era of DLR park management saw maintenance take a back seat to merchandising, and regular guests complained, a lot. Their management background was retail (The Gap), and it showed. Harris replaced Pressler but kept his management style in place. But eventually Matt Ouimet became Disneyland Resort president. He and his successor, George Kalogridis, reversed many of the show-detrimental management decisions of Pressler and Harris, and returned a lot of “magic” to DLR, especially in the above four areas, as well as lessening the merchandising emphasis that Pressler and Harris had brought with them. DLR regulars will readily tell you (myself included!) they felt a positive change in the parks.

Unfortunately, as Disneyland Resort put its magic back together, the equally controversial Meg Crofton, as president of Walt Disney World Resort, put in place in Orlando basically the same mediocre management culture with which Pressler and Harris damaged Disneyland Resort. At WDW under Crofton, hourly rider throughput became far more important than fixing show or picking up trash or maintaining the dining standards. (After all, since most WDW guests visit so rarely, who would bother to notice or complain?) Google any Disney fan board and you can read complaint after complaint about bad show in the Orlando parks–complaints just like the ones I listed above for Ryan and me.

Would We Ever Go Back?

Earlier this year, Disney replaced Meg Crofton with Kalogridis. While Disney regularly shuffles its executives around the country, Kalogridis is the person who oversaw the spectacularly successful $1 billion re-Imagineering of Anaheim’s California Adventure park (including opening Cars Land). Moreover, last August Disney sent Cars Land’s lead designer, Kathy Magnum, to Orlando to head Walt Disney World Imagineering. So the chatter seems to be that maybe Disney’s board finally realized that Crofton’s profiteering at the expense of the guest experience was damaging the brand’s magic and wanted to see if the West Coast management team could improve things in Orlando.

I certainly hope that’s the case. Walt Disney World is a magical place that used to be much more magical and can be again. Main Street deserves to have its vehicles out and running. Small World and Space Mountain deserve to have all those discarded water bottles finally picked up. Guests deserve to eat food that doesn’t remind them of bad mall food courts. CMs deserve to be proud of their jobs. Ellen deserves an updated Energy Adventure. The People Mover deserves not to have broken seats–much less broken seats guarded by orange cones. WDW didn’t begin this way–it became this way through bad management decisions that almost ruined Disneyland Resort, too.

Ryan and I would go back to WDW to experience the things we already like about it. But we’d go expecting to experience a lot of mediocre things, too. At least until Kalogridis can get things worked out. Someday, we’d like to be able to have the same enthusiasm for the Florida resort as we have for the Calfornia resort.

More than likely, though, we’ll just keep going back to Disneyland Resort until we hear news of positive change in Orlando. While we were in Orlando we could not wait to come home from Walt Disney World. While we were in Anaheim we could not wait to plan our next Disneyland trip and come back.

WDW vets like to say that in a comparison of Disneyland and Magic Kingdom, the Anaheim park is better, but in a resort-to-resort comparison, Walt Disney World is better. I beg to differ. Bigger is just not better if the magic’s hard to find. When we set out on our WDW adventure, we expected that afterward we’d want to split our Disney trips between Anaheim and Orlando. But instead, we two Disneyland vets learned a very important lesson.

Sometimes smaller is better.

So now that I’ve gotten into rabbinic school, now what? Besides trying to figure out how I’m going to afford to go, along with the expenses and overdue bills of the rest of my life, and, you know, how I’m going to survive learning and studying in biblical Hebrew, rabbinic Hebrew, and ancient Aramaic (not to mention American Sign Language, a specialty of my new school) for five years, something else won’t stop gnawing at me.

How does rabbinic school change you? Who will I be if I manage to make it through to smicha (ordination)? For that matter, who am I now, really? A lot of navel gazing, but here’s the thing. I keep wondering over and over, what do all the rabbis whom I know personally do when they’re angry? When they’re annoyed? When they’re sad? When they’re just human and feeling edgy-lifey?

For those of you who are reading, that magnanimous smile can’t always be there. Can it? Is that part of the way rabbinic school changed you? Or did you go in that way, too?

What about the moments when the very last of your nerves has frayed and far beyond, and then beyond that? Those moments when you just want to scream? Or not hold your tongue? Or walk behind closed doors and through something that isn’t a pillow at something not amenable to its continued existence in one piece?

Because I have those moments. Those very human, very imperfect, very I-just-want-my-mom moments. I know my Jewish life is a journey to learn to transcend them. To find the humor, and pathos, and compassion towards myself and everyone else on the planet that hides behind the ups and, especially, downs of daily existence. But still, I have them. And they suck. And they make me wonder how fit I am really for rabbinic school.

I’d love to know, how much a rabbi is the person she or he was before beginning rabbinic school? How much a rabbi fundamentally changed in rabbinic school? And maybe more importantly, stayed the same?

I’ve encountered so many totally self-assured prospective rabbinic students. They’re all so much younger than I am. Is this one of the anxieties that comes from making such a big decision in the middle of your life? Would they wonder the same thing if they were old enough to have seen (and finally admitted) another couple of decades of their personal patterns?

At the moment, all I know is who I am and where I’m hopefully headed. In five years, for better or worse, que sera sera, I guess.

Whoever I’ll be, I’ll be.

It was the best of Shavuot. It was the worst of Shavuot. Maybe a little bit of both in each place that I experienced the “Festival of Weeks” this year to mark, as our traditions tells, God’s giving of the Torah to the Jewish people at Sinai. Wherever I went, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was missing: Jews of all ages together.

I spent Shavuot with young Jews, and with older Jews–but not at the same time, and that left me pondering once again how and why we Jews often abdicate our experience of our religious holidays to our children. I’ve made waves on the issue before, but I’m not alone in my thinking. Last Sukkot, Rabbi Peter Knobel (backstory) shared the bimah at Emanuel Congregation and asked rhetorically why the morning festival service he was co-leading was far emptier than the evening family service had been. He answered his own question: because time and again liberal Jews make our experience of Jewish holidays completely about our kids.

I agree. But why do we do it? What is that costing us? And what might happen if we did things differently? Hold those thoughts for just a moment.

Ever since Rabbi Rick Jacobs became the new president of the Union of Reform Judaism, the URJ has adopted an earnest Campaign for Youth Engagement. No secret within the Jewish community, study after study for the past few decades has pointed out that synagogue membership and participation by Jews under 40 is miniscule–and membership from Jews over 40 is in many areas declining. As our houses of worship and teaching and other Jewish institutions continue to combine and close, even in big cities, what to do? For the URJ–replenish the older-adult members who have walked away with young adult Jews.

Of course, there’s a problem with that. Why are the over-40 Jews walking away? And what’s to keep our newly engaged youth (if indeed we manage to engage them) from walking away, themselves, when they become too old for our earnest “engagement campaigns”? Hold onto that for a moment too.

So back to Shavuot. I originally intended to attend my shul’s evening festival service. Emanuel, like many other Reform congregations, celebrates the “Confirmation” of its oldest religious school students at this service. Last time I attended, it was a beautiful ritual–our exiting students standing on the bimah reciting in their own words what Judaism meant to them. (Just like I did when I converted.) But that’s where it ended. As for adult discussion or contemplation of the actual meaning of the holiday–receiving the commandments that guide our Jewish lives to holiness–not much was said.

That’s the standard way my Reform synagogue observes the many holidays that give life to the Jewish calendar (often including, as noted above, the weekly Shabbat). However, this isn’t meant to be a particular criticism–most liberal synagogues (and some Orthodox ones, too) make what to outsider eyes (or convert eyes, like mine) might seem like a fetish out of what Rabbi Knobel called that day on the bimah at Emanuel “the infantilization of our holidays.” Yes, we are a Jewish People including Jews of all ages. But somehow, for some reason, when it comes to observing, celebrating, or otherwise experiencing the religious holidays that are the heritage of all Jews, we concentrate almost completely on the experience of those holidays by our children.

And that removes a really important element that our Jewish children need to experience if we want to keep them as affiliated Jewish grown-ups: useful modeling of how to experience Jewish holidays in a meaningful way as adults. Keep that ball in the air for a moment, too.

As it turned out, this year I chose to go elsewhere on Erev (evening) Shavuot. Though I don’t attend very often, I enjoy very much the energetic, musically inspired nature of Chicago’s itinerant independent congregation, Mishkan. I decided to attend their tikkun (a traditional late-night study session in honor of Shavuot) instead. I never feel exactly at home at Mishkan but I’m always enriched by my time there–the community skews far younger than I am, and in fact was founded as an alternative for Chicago’s disaffected young Jews to have a Jewish spiritual home beyond a synagogue that might ask them to pay several thousand dollars a year to help pay salaries and keep the doors open.

The evening was crowded and inspired–and funded by mainline Jewish institutions and congregations. File that away, too–and I promise I’ll help you review all those files soon.

The following morning, I attended Temple Sholom‘s festival/Yizkor (remembrance) service (shared each year with my own congregation.) As is almost always the case with non-”family” festival services outside of the High Holy Days–and as was the case at the aforementioned Sukkot service led by Rabbi Knobel, which is why he made his observation in the first place–very few people were there in attendance. And I, at nearly 43 years of age, was obviously the youngest person in the room. Hold that, too, and I promise we’re almost there.

The biggest reason I wanted to attend Mishkan’s tikkun was Rabbi Benay Lappe, head of radical yeshiva SVARA and Talmud professor at Hebrew Seminary, to whom I owe the most gratitude for nudging me to submit my rabbinic school application there. (The application that got me in!) I wanted to hear her popular CRASH presentation. In it, she examines the nature of worldviews–religious and otherwise. That is, that they never last forever, and when they crash, how the pieces are picked up determines what parts of the old worldview will or won’t live on. Either you run back to your failed worldview and hide from reality, reject it completely and cut yourself off from your past, or explore ways to synthesize what’s new about your world with the pieces of your old worldview that still have relevance.

The implications of the talk for an audience like Mishkan were clear: don’t fear the decline of synagogue affiliation, it’s just what happens. Every time Judaism has crashed, it has shrunk in numbers, often greatly, and then recovered in an altered form. Communities like Mishkan might–or might not–be the Jewish model of the future. But what’s really causing the current crash? And are legacy institutions powerless to do anything about it? That’s the last thing to keep in mind before we come in for a landing, I promise.

Rabbi Lappe was joined by Rabbi Dan Libenson discussing his also popular ideas about disruptive innovation in Judaism. He explained how the change that survives and often replaces the current status quo almost always comes from beyond status-quo institutions. He laid this out explicitly: existing synagogues can’t reach out properly to Jews like those who fill Mishkan services because they have their hands full taking care of the needs of their existing members.

But…do they really? How does a year of Jewish holidays and Shabbat mornings concentrating almost exclusively on the experience of those Jewish holidays by children and remaining silent on the holistically simultaneous experience of those same holy Jewish moments by the adult Jews to whom they are related and with whom they share their congregational communities “take care of the needs” of existing members? How does it turn young-adult Jews into lifelong synagogue members? How does it keep older adults engaged at all on an adult level?

How does it, in fact, keep anyone from continuing to walk away?

In the words of Rabbi Lappe, CRASH.

So why do we infantilize our holidays? One word: fear. After three millennia of off-again, on-again tsouris, our people can be forgiven for fearing for our survival. But after so many pause-inducing population surveys trumpeting our approaching demise, have we made survival our only goal?

For a people dedicated to living joyously within Creation under the yoke of the mitzvot, funny thing about survival. It’s not really living at all. It’s merely the art of not dying. This is not the best we can do. This is not why God created is. If you think about it, how could it possibly be so?

Yet this art of not dying penetrates Jewish living so thoroughly, that it is as if we idolize it. Loving or marrying someone who isn’t Jewish? Making ourselves noticed by proselytizing Judaism? (From a convert’s eyes, not necessarily a bad thing–we all had to be invited in somehow.) Adopting innovative pay-by-conscience synagogue membership models (which are working in real life in several places already) rather than excluding Jews who don’t have deep enough pockets to pay to experience their own religion in a communal setting? Wasting a minute–or a second–of Jewish time with any heightened religious meaning on not making a pageant out of our young doing junior Jewish things? After surviving often in spite of ourselves for three millennia, do we really believe that these things will kills us off as a religious civilization?

Could it not be that acting on our fear for survival, we are actually bringing about the current Jewish crash ourselves? Could it not be that our fear of Klal Ysrael getting smaller is leading us to take actions that are actively making it smaller?

How does a synagogue survive financially or communally when older members disengage? Or when younger members, no matter how engaged we make them in their youth, walk away eventually anyway for lack of active mid-life religious role modeling–because we have sent them the astounding message through the infantilization of our holiday observances that the moment you’re allowed to read from the Torah on the bimah, it ceases being important for you to be on the bimah anymore? 

For that matter, how does a community of young-adult Jews survive without either the financial support of the same legacy Jewish institutions whose decline has turned off these Jews in the first place, or growing their own mid-life machers, which gets such communities dangerously close to the legacy synagogue model that they so clearly want no part of?

They don’t. Neither one. How could they? Our youth in either case have been trained very well that synagogues have nothing for them. But not because there’s nothing for them as youth. Because there’s nothing there for them as adults.

Except there is. Or there could be. But we never model it. We never crow about it. We never step away from keeping our Jewish children Jewish children long enough to show them how to be Jewish adults–in the building, in a pew holding a siddur, on the bimah holding the Torah, regularly in a synagogue at all.

Whenever I have raised this with other Jews, they immediately bristle. If we don’t spend so much time on the children, they say, they’ll never stick around as adults. I can take care of my Jewish needs on my own, anyway. I don’t need to spend time in synagogue for myself.

It’s pretty clear which of those messages our children have found most resonant for many years. It’s not the one where we shove them up on the bimah at all costs. It’s the one where we walk away as adults, so they do too. No one else is doing this to us. We are crashing Judaism ourselves.

And we’re doing a really good job of it, too. Our idol should not be survival. Our allegiance belongs to Deity. We show that allegiance through the way we live our lives. The best way to put on the brakes and stop crashing Judaism would be to start actually living those Jewish lives.

If legacy synagogues want to survive–and if communities like Mishkan have a chance at continuity–they have to find a way to be inclusive of the adult experience of Judaism. That is what our Jewish children need to see. That is how we are failing them, although we think we are doing the best we can.

It doesn’t matter where the programming is. It does matter that it not be strictly age segregated. If synagogues want Jewish youth to stick around, they need to make room for healthy, joyous, relevant adult modeling throughout the Hebrew year, on every day that we come together as Jews. If communities like Mishkan are to survive, they need to be reaching out to older adult Jews with the wherewithal to sustain the cost of leadership, materials, and events. Of course, our legacy and innovative institutions are both exploring such things. But out of fear or simple inertia, lots of us simply aren’t on board.

That’s a shame. We need to be in the same worship spaces and beit midrashim together, young, midlife, and old, so that we can learn and model for each other how important every stage of the Jewish lifecycle is. Most importantly, as KAMII’s now-outgoing Rabbi Batsheva Appel very astutely noted while visiting Emanuel on Shabbat a few months ago, so that together we can find again the emotional relevance of Judaism in our own lives, which is the only enduring thing that makes and keeps us Jews.

Our youth need us more than we realize. They need us to be active, engaged, Jews, and they need to see us choosing to be active, engaged Jews for our own sake, not for theirs. Then, and only then, will they choose to step back in the doors of our synagogues.

And if they do, they’ll be doing it for their own sakes. Not for ours.