Me

A year ago today I stepped down from my rabbinate, entering the realm of Life 2.0.

It was supposed to happen much earlier than that, closer to the date of my 65th birthday. It got extended a smidge and then we hit COVID. At that point, I felt a rush of protectiveness and didn’t want to abandon my post. I worked with my successor to help stabilize our program and hold hands with our leadership through the worst of the pandemic.

But by this time last year, it was time to disengage. In the course of the High Holidays, I said my formal farewells and then did more of the same during a celebratory blow-out. I never really wanted the celebratory blowout, but my resistance was judged unseemly and small. Sometimes it’s best to just sit down and be quiet.

I have lots to say about the issues of retirement and hope eventually to say a lot of that here. It was useful to think about my years in the pulpit and identify the things that gave me pleasure. My goal was a kind of continuity. I’m truly terrible at sitting around and didn’t want to curl up with a book. Sports and travel are more empty pursuits, and I didn’t want to build a plan around either of them.

What I wanted was a set of nourishing satisfactions related to the work I have always done. The result is that I have engaged in deportation resistance and organizing local clergy on reproductive freedom. Our goal is a constitutional initiative that will likely take place in the next two years.

The greatest pleasure so far has come from traditional campaigning, especially the election of our first Black mayor. An election turns out to be a lot like the High Holidays. You prepare for months, step into the spotlight, and try to propagate all the memes you’ve got. I liked the everything about it, including the risks and the rush.

And I hope that things get more and more complicated. I love to sing as part of a group. If you are forming an ensemble, please ask me to participate. I’ve made a promise to myself not to sing at our Synagogue for all the appropriate and obvious reasons. But the right synagogue out there can have me for a song. Nefesh Congregation in Los Angeles: are you listening?

One very good thing has already happened. At a beautiful bar mitzvah this weekend in Tulsa, I felt perfectly at home watching from the pews. No half-suppressed longing. No desire to perform. Just a general sense that I was in the right place and that there was nothing more I could add to the experience. It was the classic case of la petite mort, an almost biologic sense that I am done at the Synagogue. Whatever comes next, I’m eager and ready.