The Voice Within ~Part 3~

**If you have not already, please read the previous two posts before this one. It will make much more sense if you do.**

Since that first Shabbos at the Moshav I have continued to go back for more. I now know a great number of the people who live there, and more than a handful of people have asked me if I myself have moved in. The Moshav has, in effect, become my second home. I travel between two worlds of Orthodox Judaism, both reading the same Torah, but one so indescribably different from the other that I get culture shock every time I leave one for the other. And although the singing is truly transcendent at the Moshav, now that I have basically mainstreamed myself into the community, the holy glow of the first Shabbos has focused itself into a more realistic perspective. And the more time I spent at the Moshav, I realized how the singing is not the real issue here. My being able to sing is just a manifestation of a greater tension in myself. My voice, the one I use to speak and sing and express myself, how do I want to use it? How will all of these tensions between what my heart wants and what God wants come to meet? A million questions spring from here.

I spent the week before Sukkot, almost all of Sukkot, and Simchat Torah at the Moshav (Jewish holidays which you should feel free to research---they are both incredibly joyous and full of rich potential for understanding the Jew’s relationship with God), and in that time I really got to know a lot of people who live there, seeing them both in their religious capacity as well as in the day to day. And that’s when I first started to see what was really different. At the Moshav I could see the ‘religious’ side of a person and the ‘secular’ side. In Har Nof I haven’t seen so much of that dichotomy. It’s all Judaism all the time. Wake up in the morning, pray, eat, play, go to work or go study Torah or go to school to study Torah, pray, eat, pray, eat, pray, study, pray, sleep, pray, start again. In Har Nof, life is dedicated to God in a very physical way, in time and in space. There is so much ritual and so much learning going on all the time, it is a world in which Judaism plays itself out minute by minute. It’s an amazing thing to watch. At the Moshav, Judaism isn’t so….obvious on weekdays. The men pray in the morning and evening, but other than that life goes along as normal with people going to school and doing their jobs. It’s not so obviously Jewish. I’m not saying this is bad or good, it’s just a very different lifestyle. A different Judaism.

For a lot of the adults who started the Moshav, there is a continuity of character, but with their children I can see a divergence, a dissonance. Their children are very much a part of a different world. They drink and smoke and party and a number of them don’t observe the Sabbath. The ones I know are absolutely wonderful people, please don’t get me wrong. But the dissonance for me was deafening when, right after Sabbath ended and I was still buzzing from my religious high, there were people dancing to loud rap music and drinking, enveloping themselves in the opposite energy and purpose of the entire day before. It just didn’t add up.

To be realistic, these are teenagers and young twenty-something and they were acting the same, if not better than, most people their age. But something was still off. There was some sort of rebellion going on. These kids love the music of the rabbi that their parents connected with so deeply, and many of them are deep and beautiful people, but there are also a lot of lost souls on that Moshav. One of the parents and I were talking about it and I was asking him about Kol Isha, women singing in front of men, and he told me that Carlebach had let them ‘stretch the rules’ a little bit. And there it was. I live in one world that was rigid, where rules guide your every movement and are never broken. I live in another world of stretching rules, of tweaking and bending, of flexibility and the paths are more…personalized. And both places are imperfect. Neither interpretation of Judaism suits me. I am, as always, somewhere betwixt and between.

You see, I got to discover Judaism for myself. None of its rules and regulations were imposed on me as a child, and although I went to Hebrew school and learned a bit here and there, everything I took on was my choice. This was the same for the first generation of people on the Moshav. They all wanted to be there, they had all found Judaism and chose it. Their children then grew up in an environment full of beautiful philosophy and music, but they did not have a rigid or ingrained structure to follow and replicate. They were given the freedom to walk their own paths, some of them choosing to believe in God and all of the values their parents spoke of and lived, while some got lost and confused along the way. And which is better? Is it best to create a culture, like in Har Nof, where praying in the morning, afternoon, and evening is the norm and people do it just as naturally as brushing their teeth? Judaism can be mechanical, meaningless for these people, but they keep doing because everyone else does and continue the lineage, whether with faith and belief or not. Or is it better to take that chance and give your children more freedom to decide on their own and possibly end up with no connection, sending your children into the world with no set path of rules or morality, like at the Moshav?

I have been grappling with this whole situation furiously since first stepping foot on the Moshav. It has brought up questions upon questions upon questions and I have been running myself in philosophical circles trying to ‘figure out’ what kind of Jew I want to be, what kind of parent I want to be, where I will live, and whether or not I should sing in front of men. And each time I start thinking about this, as the wheels begin to spin faster and faster towards a brick wall of impossibility, I remember that there is a brick wall in Judaism. Actually, it’s made of stone. It’s called the Western Wall, the Kotel. And this wall holds all of the possibility in the world. It has been standing for more than 2,000 years despite the best efforts of the Romans, the Crusaders, the Inquisitors, and the Nazis. It is a wall I am running not against, but towards. It represents the utter impossibility of a people lasting, yet rising victorious over the most evil of tyrants, the most hopeless of situations. And the wall still stands. We still stand. And so as I remember this I begin to breathe once again and remember that God does everything for a reason. I am flopping (or flying?) between Har Nof and the Moshav for a reason. I love to sing for a reason. I have a reason in this world. But I don’t know the reasons yet. All I can do is keep learning, keep breathing, and keep on searching for my true voice within, letting it rise and fall, hum softly, and crescendo, until the day it finds its true pitch and harmonizes with God's.