Shabbat Shalom!
Today is Rosh Chodesh when we bring an additional offering. Today, I am your additional offering.
It is also Chanukah, the season of the dedication of the temple, I get to dedicate all 5 of the temples where Rabbi Mark Bloom has served.
Miketz is today’s Torah portion where Pharoah has dreams of both fat years and thin years. Here is my story of some fat and thin years.
The story begins, as so many do, in a land far, far away. New Jersey. A nice Jewish girl is growing up in South Jersey, being raised Reform with Conservative grandparents and Orthodox great-grandparents, in the Askenazi tradition. As a child who thought turning 30 in the year 2000 was a million miles away, how could I imagine the life full of travel and tradition that would happen? How did this girl get to Cincinnati, OH to meet her bashert?
I grew up in Voorhees, the town next to Cherry Hill, NJ. Famous for absolutely noone and nothing. Kelly Ripa grew up in Berlin and went to my three towns combined high school, so I guess that’s someone?
Only two of my father’s siblings had gone to college, so I was the third person in my family to complete a BA. I chose Goucher College in Towson (but they prefer you call it Baltimore), MD. I had a fantastic experience there except while I was away, my parents divorced. You see, my dad was a gambling addict and his problem destroyed their trust and therefore their marriage. But I guess that’s where I get my gaming and poker talents. When I didn’t want to go home to NJ for the summer, my best friend Stephanie Dickinson from Cincinnati, OH encouraged me to apply for a summer job at the Cincinnati JCC’s overnight camp, Camp Livingston. The camp was located in Bennington, IN and kids and staff from Cincinnati, Louisville, Indianapolis, and Columbus all attended. This is important, it will come back later!
Camp Livingston was my first Jewish overnight camp experience, and I loved it! My parents, especially my mom, were a bit overprotective, and we only went to day camps growing up. Even going to college two hours away was a long distance for my family. Anyway, I made the best friends of my life and quickly moved from counselor to administrator through the summers that I worked there.
So I blame Stephanie and Camp Livingston for how I got to Cincinnati: When I was a senior at Goucher with my Applied Mathematics major, I realized I did not want to go to an office to work every day. I wanted to teach secondary math. So I applied to what we now call the other UC, University of Cincinnati, and THE Ohio State University for post-baccalaureate and Master’s programs in math education, respectively. I got into both and chose UC because I didn’t want to “price myself out of the teaching job market” by earning a Master’s before starting to work in the profession. I know, right?
So here I am in Cincinnati, OH. I am a student, and I need some money. I get several small part time jobs that worked around my school schedule. One of them was teaching Hebrew School at Temple Sholom and another is helping in the admissions and alumni offices of Hebrew Union College. At Temple Sholom, I taught 5th grade Jewish studies and dance and this rabbinical student was teaching music. All of the HUC students were required to teach Hebrew school at one of the three Reform synagogues, but this guy really liked it - he was great with the kids and could play guitar.
I had a boyfriend from Camp Livingston who grew up in Columbus and attended THE Ohio State University, so this student and I became “friends.” He drove me to Columbus one Thanksgiving weekend where I broke up with that boyfriend. The following January we went on our first date (he even wrote me a song for it!). After a year and a half we were engaged (another song!) and a year and a half after that we got married. In Cherry Hill, NJ. By Rabbi Fred Neulander and Rabbi Steve Kaplan. Yes, Rabbi Neulander is now in jail, convicted of having his wife’s murder arranged. But that’s definitely a story for another time.
My start in education in Cincinnati wasn’t terrific. I loved my year and a half of school as a student, but once I was certified, my first year of teaching was a job at George Washington Junior High School in Hamilton, OH. It was more blue collar than I was used to, but other than that, pretty similar to how I grew up. I had some good support from the principal and vice-principal, but man, I did NOT know what I was doing. I tried my best everyday, but I wasn’t a very good teacher, and the students pretty much ran the classroom. I had a mentor teacher who was both mean and jaded, and several times I witnessed fist fights in the hallways that I was powerless to stop. I hated waking up everyday and going to that school. It made me despise 7th through 9th graders. I never wanted to teach junior high school again.
My second year of teaching was a little better. I got a job teaching at Sycamore High School in the Blue Ash neighborhood of Cincinnati. It was more white collar with many more Jewish families, and I felt more comfortable there. I still had quite a rough year, getting sick a lot and not really enjoying teaching, but it was a bit better and I wasn’t giving up.
Those two years of teaching were not great, but were necessary experiences to make me the competent teacher that I am now. I needed a lot of sick days and mental health days off, and spent a lot of time in therapy working out my family issues and my lack of confidence. Jonah reminded me that I used to have dreams that my students’ heads were balloons and I was popping them with a very sharp pencil. Don’t worry, I’m all better now!
Now, once Mark and I met and started dating and planning our lives together, I spent a lot of time in his rabbinical student world. There were many feminists among the rabbinical students and current and future spouses of rabbinical students and future rabbis. These women, nearly universally, were opposed to the moniker of Rebbetzin. I personally had never even heard of the title for the wife of a rabbi. Some of the spouses would argue that if I were marrying a dentist, I wouldn’t be called “dentistzin” so why would I want a title just because my husband was a rabbi? In general, I wasn’t that sure about marrying a rabbi and becoming a rebbetzin in the first place. As a matter of fact, I told Mark that God brought us together in Cincinnati and now he didn’t have to go through with the whole rabbi thing! But he really wanted to do it. And so he was ordained and through a grueling placement process, he got his first job out of school in a small Northern Westchester County, NY town called South Salem.
When we were planning our move to South Salem, I applied to both public and private schools. I had to get my Ohio certification transferred to New York, and I took a few standardized tests and jumped through those hoops to earn that certificate. I ended up at a private school 45 minutes away from South Salem in Tarrytown, NY called The Hackley School. It was part boarding school, part very competitive college prep private school with students from Korea and Manhattan as well as Westchester and Rockland Counties. I absolutely LOVED it. I finally loved teaching, loved the students, enjoyed supportive parents, small class sizes (maximum of 18 students), and students who actually wanted to learn (or at least earn good grades!). It was a wonderful place to teach and really encouraged its teachers to work together and learn from each other. I was happy in my work life, finally.
My religious life, however, was another story. At the beginning of Mark’s tenure there, I would of course attend all the events and all the services. A lot of times, congregants made fun of me because I had to wear my gloves indoors because my hands were always so cold. We were making connections! However, with Mark coming home from meetings crying and devastated at how he was being treated, Jewish Family Congregation was no longer an option for me. You know how much I enjoy connecting with congregants and praying each Shabbat. Well, there I couldn’t even set foot in the place. I could not go and be in that building with those people who were hurting my husband. It was no longer a place where I could connect to my Judaism or the Jewish people. I stayed home.
Thank God we moved to Sydney Australia next. Here we both found healing. I was able to attend services again. And I met a wonderful widow, Rebbetzin Gottschalk. Her husband had passed away many years before, but she was a leader in the community. Her title of Rebbetzin was an honor that she enjoyed and lived. I aspired to be the rebbetzin that she was, and that is why I don’t feel the title is anti-feminist. I can still be a feminist and be a proud rebbetzin.
I enjoyed some relaxation as well as professional time there, working as a temp at ANZ Funds Management, doing math coaching (we call it tutoring), and casual teaching (we call it subbing). The people there were kind and caring to us and each other. Once, some Bar Mitzvah age students even wrote a song for their classmate’s Bar Mitzvah: (sung) “His name is Alex Justin Green, he just recently turned 13, he sits all day in front of the screen, his name is Alex Justin Green.” But it was more like thir-tain, not thirteen. Mark’s senior rabbi, Rabbi Brian Fox, and his wife Dr. Dale Fox also took good care of us. Dr. Fox was who I went to see for any medical issues I had that year. At their home on Shabbat, was the first time I had heard the first paragraph of the home kiddush. I just thought that was the first paragraph of the Amidah on Friday nights when we did the shortened form! I didn’t know it was part of the home kiddush. Their grown kids would sit on their laps and call them “mummy and daddy.” It was so sweet.
The year that we spent in Australia was wonderful, but it was only a sabbatical replacement job and the rabbi wanted his job, apartment, and car back, so we had to move on. The next stop was Cranston, RI. Mark and I had agreed to spend some time on the east coast so we could be closer to my family. However, my family never visited us in South Salem (about 3 hours away) and only came to Rhode Island (6 hours away) when Micah was born. So we no longer felt that staying on the east coast was necessary for happiness.
A lot of good things happened in Cranston. As I already mentioned, Micah was born. First child, many blessings. I also had another positive teaching experience at a school called St. Andrew’s School. Like Hackley, there was a boarding component to the school and very small classes of no more than 12 students. The reason for this was that St. Andrew’s was a place for students who were not succeeding in other schools, either because of learning or behavioral differences, or because they were simply falling through the cracks of a large public school system. Now, here I found my passion. Working with students of differing needs was where I was able to really succeed. And this work continues today. I love ALL my students, but I especially feel useful when working with students who have learning disabilities. Experiencing those light bulb moments is even more powerful with a student who has struggled to learn in the past. It’s an amazing feeling and one of the things that gets me out of bed each day.
Now, Cranston was a bit provincial as Mark mentioned. The congregant friends we made there could not believe that I would drive 25 minutes all the way to Barrington (basically on the other side of Providence which was right next to Cranston) to teach each day. They said, “we have our summer homes in Barrington which we close up each year when the weather gets too cold.” Wow. Also, though the Masorti group in Sydney was running a conservative shul within a larger Reform one, this is the first synagogue that was truly Conservative for me. I didn’t know very much. As a Bat Cohen, I was honored with the first aliyah at times. Once I also led the Haftorah blessings (but didn’t actually read the Haftorah, nor have the aliyah before it) and I got a nice rebuke from one of the more knowledgeable congregants. That didn’t feel good. But in general, unless I was too exhausted from school or sleepless nights with a baby, I enjoyed attending the services with Mark and Micah.
With Micah I also experienced all of the new mommy things like an online support group that I am still in touch with as our January 2000 babies become 20 years old, Gymboree, library story times, and an IRL (in real life) new mommies group took over my life as I retired from teaching to be a stay at home mom.
After our three years in Rhode Island, we finally came here to Oakland. Coming to California was coming home for Mark but it also felt like coming home for me. Everything we both had been through led us to this place where I could finally feel welcome and find my spiritual connection at services, spend every Shabbat with my husband and growing family, and really feel comfortable, accepted, and at home.
I loved the 10 years I spent as a stay at home mom, enjoying the same types of activities as in Rhode Island such as story time and mom’s groups, but one thing was extra special here and that was Kindergym. My boys and I loved it so much we came 2 or 3 times a week and I even was a substitute teacher for Dawn a few times (though there is NO substitute for Dawn Margolin, I did my best to fill those shoes temporarily.) “Choo Choo! Choo Choo!” Once when I made that sound, I heard little ones look around and exclaim, “Dawn’s here! Where’s Dawn?” Sorry, just me. It was great.
I also loved the friendships and connections I made through the Gan families, Joaquin Miller families, Bet Sefer families, and CCJDD families. There was so much overlap with TBA families and that felt really great to me. Sometimes, as a stay at home mom, I felt like in addition to being rebbetzin, I was leading my Bubby’s life: an active member of Hadassah who serves on the board and playing Mah Jongg like she taught me.
Even when I went back to work when Micah was in middle school, I still experienced so many TBA connections. In addition, I came to love the middle school age student because once my own children were that age, I got it. I understood who they were and how to work with them. And now I absolutely love it and can’t imagine doing anything else. I do a lot of special ed work at Piedmont Middle School (PMS) even though I am only certified as a math teacher. I also help students by supporting all of their identities through our Safe Space Club, our Gender Leadership Team, volunteering at Gender Spectrum, participating in the Piedmont Appreciating Diversity Committee, and an anti-racism book group that just started this year with a handful of PUSD teachers. A congregant, Diana Miller, is one of my colleagues teaching math at Piedmont High, and also my friend. In addition, I have mentored an Oakland student, Josiah Pratt, who you have heard about from Mark in the past, who passed away when he was in 10th grade, and currently mentor another Oakland student, Irvin Peralta. This work and these connections are a huge part of making a difference here.
Finally, Mark and I planning our final resting places here with this community as part of the new TBA cemetery. You are truly stuck with us for eternity!
Micah attending THE Ohio State University brings us full circle back to where Mark and I met and back to the beginning of this story. Bottom line:
I love this life. I love being your rebbetzin. And I love doing it here, at TBA. Thank you for always supporting me and my family as we grow and learn and love life here in Oakland, California. We couldn’t have asked for a better partner in raising our boys and caring for us. May you all find as wonderful a place as we have found here.
Shabbat Shalom.
Recent Adventures: To break Passover, we traveled to Walnut Creek for a sweet grandma pizza from Tony's Slice House, which we ate in the car, then immediately to San Francisco for a variety of pizzas from Tony's Napoletana (yes, same Tony, yes, two different menus) which we started to eat in the car and saved a lot for home. Delicious! Only Mark was disappointed because of the parmesan cheese sprinkled all over the ones from SF. We tried to get Swensen's ice cream (swiss orange chip is the Bloom family favorite for everyone but me) afterward, as is our tradition, but they closed their shop due to the virus on March 17th. That was disappointing to all of us.
