Packing

My living room is already stacked high with brown boxes, filled with books and linens and some art and the beginnings of the kitchen stuff. I’m hoping that by the end of the day, there will be a lot more filled boxes and a lot less stuff on shelves and in cabinets.

Moving is always a pain in the tuchus, and this time is no exception. We’ll be subletting for a couple of months while we find a place that we’ll actually want to live in, so I’m packing knowing that I might not see my stuff until as late as September. With the books, particularly, I’m finding this amusingly difficult. I have a close relationship with my library, and I have to figure out what (minimum) number of books I’ll ship to have on hand over the summer and which ones (most) to pack. I just packed my Shulchan Aruch, and I keep wondering–well, what if I have a halakhic emergency?? What if I have to look something up??? (Never mind that I subscribe to Spertus and thus have access to the Shulchan Aruch and a whole lot more there. Still.) And as I go through some of my other books, I’m having all these great ideas for teaching–I could plan such a great lesson around that essay there! But it’s time to let it go–the books will be waiting for me when I get settled, and teaching brainstorming can commence after that. I’ve got plenty of ideas that can last me in the interim.

It’s all a little surreal, still. I’ve been in LA for a long time, and I still haven’t totally registered that I’m leaving for good this time. In some ways, it feels like just another organization for another summer away or year in Israel. I’m trying to make time to see the (many) people that I adore, but there are too many people and not enough time. There’s never enough time with the folks you love the most, really. I’m just grateful that I have them at all.

Photographic Evidence

It’s in writing, even:

Fresh from the RabbiTron. Maybe someone that’s not my husband got some good pics of the actual Beit Din itself. It was pretty cool.

And yes, a full 30 seconds after they declared me a rabbi and handed me my ordination certificate, I was making silly faces at my family. After all, it’s rabbinic ordination, not a personality lobotomy.

Into the RabbiTron

As of last night, I’m a rabbi.

Ordination was really amazing. Rituals do things, after all, and this was a big ritual meant to do a big thing. And it did, somehow, impossibly.

It was really powerful. Maybe there will be more words later. For now, though, I’m just awed and humbled and so grateful that I have the friends and family and teachers and colleagues that I have, and that God has granted me the opportunity to get to this moment. Now it’s on me to do something with it, of course.

WordPress is being a bit wonky and not letting me upload pics. But I’ll try to get on that soon.

A Love Letter, of Sorts

Dear Laurence, Gary, Shlomo, Jay, Gershom, Warren, and Scott,

Thank you for being my teachers and my friends. Thank you for having my back and giving me hugs and being my fellow travelers and taking me way down inside Torah and showing me what fellowship is really about. Thank you for this year, especially, and all the years that preceded it. Thank you for the years to come, via Skype and iChat and the phone and the visits when we can manage it. I adore and am utterly indebted to each and every one of you, and so grateful that I have had the privilege of being your classmate.

See you tomorrow night, at gametime.

Love,
Danya

Happy Happy Thing

It seems that some folks have done a bunch of photo reenactments of children’s drawings. My Russian is not so hot so I can’t understand the full story, but the pictures are all kinds of awesome. I’m guessing that the writing and photo folk are Japanese, but would love it if someone could confirm that.

The End is Nigh

When you hand in your key to the locker in the beit midrash (um, study hall), you know rabbinical school is just about over.

And, indeed, rabbinical school is just about over. I have one more exam–tomorrow–and Ordination is Monday night. It’s a little hard to believe, but it’s also very exciting, and it definitely feels like time, insofar as it would ever feel like time to do something as momentous as this. Becoming clergy? A pretty big deal. The only analogy I can think of is to getting married–except even there, the nature of the commitment, and the things that are hard and the things that are beautiful are not quite the same, I think. Well, I’m married, but I’m not yet clergy, so maybe I’ll have something intelligent to say about it all on the other side.

I’m sorry, blog, that this has been such a slow year for posting. It all just sort of zoomed by–the full load of classes, the internship, the working on various books and things, the planning for next year. I haven’t had as much time as I would like to have had to reflect on the whole process, or even to share some of the things that’ve been interesting, as they’ve happened. Zoooom. Hopefully soon I’ll have a little more time to catch my breath and blog and stuff more often.

So as for the news. I guess the big thing is that I’m moving to the Boston area in about a month. That’s pretty big. I’ve been paying California taxes for 11 years, now. It’ll be nice, though, I think, to go back to a city culture that’s a bit older and more established than SF or LA–lots of brick and mortar and history, or something. I went to college in Providence, though, so I know the whole New England scene a little bit, and have spent many fun days playing in B-town. It’s a great city, and I’m looking forward to getting to know it as a denizen. This now brings the places I’ve lived total up a bit–Chicago, Providence, SF, NYC, J’lem, LA, now this. Time to explore a whole new city. Anyway, the impetus for the move is that my sweetie will be starting a post-doc, but it’s a happy thing that it’s happening in such a Jewishly excellent place. I’m looking for the right (thing or combination of things that will be a) fit, work-wise, and may spend the fall freelancing and gigging and working on a few other book projects (more on that in a sec) and seeing how things unfold.

In that spirit, I’d like to officially make myself available to you as a scholar-in-residence. Check the “Speaking” link above to see some of the talks I give, and be in touch with me (”contact,” natch) about whatever you’d like–I do have a whole big fat pile of text under my belt, and a lot of different things I can do.

Books–so I’m editing this anthology for NYU Press on Judaism and sex. It’s been a lot of geeky fun to work on, and I’m close to the end; all the essays are in, and most of them have had their final adjustments. There are still a few details to take care of, though, all on the “stuff I actually have to do and can’t actually blame on contributors for being late” tip in order to get the mss ready for delivery to the publisher. I’m also co-editing a series of books on Jewish ethics for JPS. My co-editor is Rabbi Elliot Dorff, a teacher of mine and one of the universe’s true great mentsches. I’ve never co-edited before, but it’s been a pleasure, so far, to work with him on it (we’ve been meeting once a week-ish all semester), if a bit insane. We’re doing three volumes at once: Sex, War, and Social Justice. Three entire separate books, at one time. That’s keeping me entertained for the moment, really. That and getting ordained and trying to figure out how exactly we’re going to pull off moving in the next month, and all that fun stuff. Never a dull moment.

Oh! And I a nice little pre-Ordination mention in the Forward. Can’t not share that!

OK, dear blog. I’ll try to be better about you from now on. Don’t be too mad about my neglect, OK?