We’re all looking to alleviate our stresses, to feel the weight lifted from the shoulders of the world, to rise above burden and pressure. We look for it in different ways—meditation, exercise, prayer, intoxication, pleasure and creation, to name a few of the activities. We also look for moments of wonder and joy, and we often discover those moments with laughter. Humor is often responsible for alleviating our stress. We create inside jokes and sit giggling at the conference table like school children. We play pranks and stage scenarios to make our co-workers, families and students laugh. Many have chuckled at The Church Lady, asking, “Could it be Satan?” on a Saturday Night Live rerun. Yet, religion has rarely been employed as a humorous subject by a female spiritual leader—that’s a movement into the 21st-century of spiritual practice. Rabbi Andrea Myers, author of The Choosing: A Rabbi’s Journey from Silent Nights to High Holy Days (Rutgers University Press, 2011), writes a memoir in which spiritual practice and humor are merged for a look at formal religion. Rabbi Myers centers the text on annual Jewish holy days and writes about her movement away from her evangelical Lutheran-based upbringing. She comes out as a lesbian, moves to Jerusalem, and converts to Judaism. Now, she is a Rabbi and a writer.
Rabbi Myers and I arranged a meeting on Skype to talk about her book and her role as a spiritual leader.
My first question was about employing humor. “So much of your book is about discovering the humor during serious moments, but you retain your spiritual grace and respectfulness at the same time. Do you have advice for others on how to inject humor into their spiritual practices?”
Rabbi Myers answered, “One of the tricks about humor is knowing when to use it and that humor is a lot like religion in that it’s either a tool or a weapon. And, sometimes people use humor to hurt and use humor for different things. It’s another emotional tool that we have. And when we talk about religion and we talk about the things that people go through in their lives to make them who they are, humor is a wonderful way of addressing topics that sometimes have no good answer. And for me, especially when we think about the people that we care about and the people that we love, especially when we talk about remembrance—there’s a certain kindness that humor can bring. Even to the most difficult of stories, and it can give warmth to a story that might not have been warm to begin with but in the telling of it, it can give a lot more depth. In spiritual practice, a sermon can come alive a little bit more when you reach people in that place—that place where they’re just not expecting to feel much. You could put something in there and make people laugh and enjoy something that they weren’t expecting to enjoy. That’s one of the things that I like to do—to give, to let people see the joy in what I do and the way I see it.”
So, I wondered how her background informed her sense of humor. Rabbi Myers writes in her book, “I was born in Hollis, Queens, and raised on Long Island in the 1970s and 1980s.”
I asked, “You came from a traditional Christian background, right?”
She laughed, “Yeah, I know, right? Ironically enough, my Christian background was very traditional. I was raised in an evangelical Lutheran church, which was an accident because my parents are like so many American parents—they just don’t do the research on the church to see where they’re dropping their kids off. It’s like they slow down just enough to kick the kids out like a drive-thru and keep going. It was the local church. It’s what everybody went to. The people were lovely. I have nothing ostensibly negative to say about them at all. The people were just lovely—it was the belief system that didn’t fit me. I still talk to many people from that community, even though they may think I’m going to hell in any number of ways. That’s okay. I’m really okay with having dialogues with people that disagree with me.”
Since Rabbi Myers’ mother is a Sicilian Catholic and her father is a German Lutheran, and she is a Rabbi and a lesbian, I assumed that she must have participated in dialogues with people who didn’t agree with her. I said, “I would think that you would get used to it. Is that possible, to get used to it?”
“Yeah,” Rabbi Myers said, “and you learn very quickly, who respects you and who doesn’t. And, I think that’s one of the differences—can people approach a conversation where they disagree with an amount of respect?”
In the chapter Chanukah: Miller Light, she writes, “My mother is particularly proud of her daughter and daughter-in-law, the rabbis. She has lost life-long friends over my being Jewish and gay, and her support of us is unwavering. History is rewritten to include lines like ‘I have always been supportive,’ ‘Of course I have a problem with that,’ and my personal favorite, ‘What kind of a person cuts off their children?’ After the migraine subsides, I can smile” (92).
I thought about the difficulties of progress when a conversation contains disrespectfulness, and how we often try to avoid those moments. I asked, “Was there a time when it was difficult in your religious life to be honest about your sexuality?”
Rabbi Myers said, “For me, they were very tied in (religion and sexuality). The life that I was living as someone who was Christian on Long Island was a very privileged life. I had so much good stuff going on, and it would have been very easy for me to just stay on that path. Don’t rock the boat—just go with that. The promise was that if you do everything that you’re told, and you work hard enough, you will reap the benefits shortly and sweetly in your days. And, one of the things that I realized pretty early on was that that promise wasn’t going to happen for me, that my lot in life was going to be elsewhere—it was going to be a little more scrappy, for lack of a better word—and I didn’t know where I had to go but I knew that I had to get to the place that I was supposed to go, and it was not necessarily going to be my own backyard.
“When I left Christianity,” Rabbi Myers said, “I didn’t necessarily go right into Judaism, I sort of went into my own little private desert, …and I was very much absorbing the world and how people interacted and didn’t really think much about these things. As a sixteen-year-old kid, who just put two and two together that okay, you’re totally going to hell, and your family is going to have problems with this and your life is not gonna be what it’s supposed to be, I made the decision to kind of keep my mouth shut and go to college and go to the college that was farthest away, which was in Boston, which doesn’t offer much promise (for being far away) at all, but Brandeis is such an open place that my mind was opened in so many ways, ways that I was seeking out, that they weren’t necessarily offering, but that I was seeking. And for me—I know this is gonna sound odd—if I wasn’t gay, I would not be Jewish. Because had I not asked myself the primary questions about the nature of who I am, the nature of God, and the nature of my role in the world, I never would have gotten to those questions.”
I asked, “You’re saying that you would have just followed along with what was prescribed for you?”
“Yeah,” Rabbi Myers said, “Volvo. Two kids. Yeah. That would have been so easy, but that wasn’t going to happen. Judaism has four questions…not four answers. (…) I have applied this to my life on some level. The more questions that we ask of our lives and the more honest the answers are, doesn’t mean that it’s going to make it any easier or neater, but sometimes it makes your life not neater for a while. Very few people come out without shrapnel. Except for my partner Lisa, and she came out in the most elegant and dignified way, but that’s just who she is. For me, I was the hippo on ice skates. (…) My parents who are very traditional people, this was not easy for them. At some point, they made their decision at different increments. You can’t expect people to radically change their thought processes on things all at once. It doesn’t happen like that. It happens over time and patience, if at all. The more you can meet people where they are—I don’t ask people to like and/or agree with me, but just to meet me where I am. I’m a parent. I have two beautiful girls. I’m a wife. I have a partner. We’ve been together for thirteen years.”
In the Chapter titled Elul: Hit-or-Mitzvah, Rabbi Myers writes about how different her life became from the prescription, “Lisa and I got married the month after 9/11. Some of our friends and relatives couldn’t come because of new limitations on travel, and, for most who were invited, it was the first celebration they would be part of since that cataclysmic day. (…) It was a great gathering. People came from across Jewish denominations and across faiths. Our parents met for the first time the week before. (…) There is a concept called hiddur mitzvah, which entails taking something that is required and making it beautiful” (178).
This discussion reminded me of the chapter Shavuot: Take Two Tablets, in which Rabbi Myers writes, “any major life change should only make you more of who you are” (147).
I asked, “In this passage you are discussing conscious life changes, but for a confused individual, how does she or he know if that’s the case or not? Do you think that there are signals out there, pointing to, yes you are on the right path?”
Rabbi Myers said, “I want to tell you how much I appreciate this question. That’s the whole point of my work. That you picked that phrase out of the whole book meant so much to me because that’s the whole take-away. Sometimes, it’s a long-term plan. It’s not just an overnight, ‘hey, oh I think I want to do this or that today.’ It’s a slow process of life-assessment based on the reality of what you have around you, the resources you have around, and the support system that you have around you. Getting to that place is sometimes difficult for people who are younger, who have a lot of questions and for whom there’s very little out there to be able to say not only is it okay—and, that’s my whole point in the Huffington Post article, the “It Gets Better” campaign is very critical here, and they are doing great work to tell young people who are confused, lost and don’t see forward. That’s one of the trademarks of being a teenager, the passion that they have going into everyday and everything that they do is multiplied, and the problem with that comes with seeing beyond the day. So, all of that energy that goes into a day sometimes doesn’t get translated into seeing the larger picture. What’s important to anyone who’s younger and trying to figure themselves out is that’s what the “It Gets Better” campaign is trying to show you. It’s a long life for you—please let that be the case. You will have many chances to deal with this and there are many different answers. Your life shouldn’t be anyone else’s life, and that takes a long time to figure out. It might not be a wife and kids. It might not be coming out. But the most important thing is that it will change and you will have an opportunity to make choices that are informed. There are supportive people out there.”
“Sometimes, that’s what I get upset about in the rhetoric that I read,” Rabbi Myers continued. “There’s the bullying that goes on, on a grown-up level. The message that politicians give and other people give to children, and kids watch the news. Kids are much more a part of the political discussion now, and when they hear politicians saying, ‘gay people are barbarians’ and that ‘they need to be disciplined’, …I say to myself, there’s a grown-up bully. That’s what a grown-up bully looks like, and how awful that is on so many levels, that a kid could come away from that thinking that not only who they are on a primal level is less of a human being than somebody else but that these bullies are leaders. I need to respond to that as a spiritual leader and say, ‘No, it doesn’t just get better, it could get beautiful.’”
I said, “You write on page 166, ‘There is so much brokenness in this world. The best we can do is to share our stories, and begin to comfort one another.’” Then, I asked, “Do you think sharing stories offers a potential to heal at a greater depth than many of our other interactions?”
Rabbi Myers said, “Very much so. This is a very rabbinic thing. When we tell a story, you recreate history. When you tell part of a story and you share that moment with somebody—some people make a big, grand deal out of it and say, ‘these sacred moments’, but I say, just any moments. When you’re telling about your day or a funny story about when you were a kid, whatever it is, when you retell that story, you’re suddenly translating it. Any translation is an interpretation. If we’ve learned anything from biblical scholarship, it’s that. I think that this applies to storytelling as a genre. That when done well and appropriately, it lets you smooth out the parts that you may be struggling with on some level.
“When I do talk about sharing stories,” Rabbi Myers continued, “I usually use the metaphor of luggage. Everyone has luggage, and I don’t care if it’s a garbage bag or Louis Vuitton, everyone has luggage. You may have beautiful luggage, but that’s not the issue. The issue is how you pack your clothes. And I know people with the most beautiful luggage you can imagine with their underwear hanging out or whatever it is, or with some very functional suitcase that’s well packed and they have room for so much more. Because they’ve taken the time to go through these stories over again and again, they have room now to hear other peoples’ stories as well. That’s one of the gifts of figuring out how to process your own life and how to integrate those stories. When you make the room to hear other peoples’ stories—this is what I talk about when I discuss the theological pain of the universe—you hear other people, where they are, and you’re able to empathize with them, and help them with their own script too. And it becomes this greater realization that people have real problems and we are all part of that solution. Listening is one of the greatest gifts that we give each other. Story-telling and sharing these situations and listening, because I think that’s the most important part of storytelling—it isn’t just telling your story, it’s listening to the stories of others and making sure that your baggage is appropriately packed so that then you can pack some souvenirs. Does that make sense?”
In the chapter, Tisha B’Av: Broken Sound, Rabbi Myers describes going to the morgue to look for her neighbor’s family members who had been on a flight that exploded over Long Island. She writes, “When I walked into that room, I walked from my Long Island world to the front of a war zone” (161). Following that, she admits, “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. I left that morgue with a desperate need for light. (…) I slept with the lights on for two years. I had no health insurance and I came from a culture that did not believe in therapy. And so I did the best I could. The brain is an incredible thing, constantly moving, trying to heal itself, reliving traumas to imagine them better. Maybe this time it will be different…except it never is” (162).
I connected Rabbi Myers’ discussion of PTSD in the book with her analogy of the baggage and thought about soldiers who may have PTSD, but our discussion could apply to anyone suffering from PTSD. I said, “Soldiers are always carrying bags, and what I noticed when teaching on an Army post was that what they need most when they return is to feel that they can tell their story and have someone listen.”
“No one knows how to fold and pack luggage better than a soldier does,” Rabbi Myers said. “They are trained from day one on how to do it. (…) They’ve had all of these experiences that are completely out of their control and you are giving them a measure of control over what happened to them. And, that is a huge gift for anyone suffering with this (PTSD). To have some control over what happened in any way, shape or form, and sometimes the only thing that they’ll have is to be able to say, ‘Here’s what happened. I don’t know what to do with it. I don’t know what to do, but it doesn’t matter, all I can do is tell the story.’ And every time they do, it may change, they may change, the story itself might change—this happens. Every time you read a piece of rabbinic literature, they can tell the same story a hundred times, you know? A hundred different ways. And, it just reminds me of how much it’s worth telling.”
I said, “When you retell it, you think of different things, you see it in a different way, from another angle, you remember a smell that you didn’t before, and I can see why it changes. It makes sense that it would as we change too.”
Rabbi Myers replied, “I think that’s a sign of life. Even the smallest incremental change means that they’re processing and it’s not just remaining a constant. Anyone who has experienced major trauma, and they are trying to wrap their heads around it and think about it, that’s fantastic.”
I considered the challenges of telling our stories to others who have very full lives and are busy sorting out their own stories. It wouldn’t help anyone to compete for the storytelling spotlight, so how do people get help in this busy world?
Rabbi Myers said, “That’s why therapy is so important. People have a safe place. Their whole worlds were shattered considering the things they’ve had to see sometimes. In terms of families, as much as we want to help people, especially people that we love—it’s the same as if someone you love comes to you with a busted foot, you aren’t going to say, ‘Oh, go walk it off.’ No, you’re going to take them to a doctor and let it heal on its own good time, understanding that the brain heals differently than the body does, but that’s how I see it. When people are…having real challenges, you want to get them help, you don’t want them to suffer unduly and you don’t want to add to their suffering. Coming from a culture that has had very negative views about therapy, very, ‘oh, we don’t do that’—that was very difficult for me personally. When I realized, I need a therapist, and that was a real moment for me because in my culture, where I come from, that wasn’t done.” Rabbi Myers changed her voice to impersonate a stern command and said, “We’re gonna suffer because this is what we do.”
She cleared her voice and said, “What I came to learn as a professional, and certainly as a clergy, is that the best clergy people I know, the best leaders I know, they go to therapy because it helps them, again repackage their own stuff and make room for more. That’s the take-away that I get from storytelling, PTSD, and the integration of it.”
When I return to Rabbi Myers’ book, I find the following passage marked by my thumb: “I believe our task is to make the best of any situation, to try and find humor and creativity and grace. This can be hard to do when you are watching someone you love being stitched up, or letting your child be taken from your arms. But we still aspire to elegant solutions to practical problems…. May this little one become big, and may we be privileged to watch her grow” (178).
Currently, Rabbi Myers teaches, writes and is a stay-at-home Mom. She teaches at a congregation, Rodeph Sholom. She has also taught at the 92nd Street Y.
Book Giveaway Winner!
Congratulations to Wendy Withers for winning a copy of The Choosing.
Book Giveaway!
Leave a comment at the bottom of this Interview anytime from August 15-30, 2011, in order to qualify for a chance to win a copy of The Choosing: A Rabbi’s Journey from Silent Nights to High Holy Days (Rutgers University Press, 2011). Entrants must be 18 years or older with an address in the United States or Canada. No purchase is necessary. The winner will be chosen randomly and notified by August 31, 2011. Her Circle Ezine respects your privacy and does not share email addresses with third parties.
The Choosing: A Rabbi’s Journey from Silent Nights to High Holy Days, published by Rutgers University Press, is available now.
Rabbi Andrea Myers is the author of The Choosing: A Rabbi’s Journey from Silent Nights to High Holy Days (Rutgers University Press, April 2011). She has also written for the Huffington Post and the NY Jewish Week. She received a BA in neuroscience from Brandeis University, and was ordained at the Academy for Jewish Religion, an interdenominational seminary in New York City. She is a member of the New York Board of Rabbis, and has led congregations from the Rocky Mountains to the Borscht Belt. She is married to Rabbi Lisa Grushcow and they have two wonderful children, Ariella and Alice.
Connect with Rabbi Myers on her website and through twitter and facebook.
About Shana Thornton
Amazing interview with an amazing woman. READ THE BOOK, PEOPLE!
Thank you for posting this interview. I’m an ex Lutheran and Jew by Choice, so it helped me put some of my own experiences in perspective. I look forward to reading the book!
Fabulous interview of a brilliant and hilarious woman. Read the book. It’s amazing. Love you, Andrea!
What a wonderful interview with one of my favorite people.