A story about Lynne

This is a profile I wrote about myself for my synagogue bulletin.

It’s very early Sunday morning as I sit at my desk, listening to the hummingbirds outside, already hovering around the feeder on our porch a few feet away. I have already been outside to admire my red geraniums and see if the deer have feasted on any flowers during the night -- and to sit in our hammock and think. I realized, just yesterday, that I had not written a profile for the upcoming Beth Shalom bulletin, and as Libby Katz Hogan reminded me, it would be due Monday. If my husband or children were awake, perhaps one of them would be the victim, er, subject, of this profile, but it will have to be me.

If I weren’t such a last-minute kind of person, I wouldn’t be so comfortable working in a newsroom, where the name of the game is producing under pressure. But more about that later.

I grew up on the south side of Indianapolis, and have one sister, Lee. My parents, Bob and Pat, were high school graduates, but there was never a question, as far back as I can remember, but that my sister and I would be attending college.

My dad’s parents had dreamed, back in the ’20s, of their son and daughters going to college, and bought a farm close enough to Franklin College to bike there. But those plans were put aside when my dad’s father died suddenly in 1931, leaving a widow with a farm and children aged six weeks to 14. My dad dreamed of being a pilot and watched his older brothers go off to World War II, but his eyesight was not adequate. Though he served in the Air Force, he came back to Indiana and after marrying my mom, worked in Indianapolis for many years as a manager for the Coffman brothers out of South Bend. Their Indianapolis properties included six parking lots and a garage downtown.

My mom, Pat, worked for L.S. Ayres for several years before her good buddy there, Matilda, invited her to a baseball game in her hometown, Franklin. My dad met mom that evening (he was playing on a VFW team, as he had served in the Air Force in Alaska, not then a state) and quickly took home the other girl who was his date.

My parents were Lutherans, though we did not go to church much as I was growing up (my parents later found much comfort and community, especially in my dad’s last months, with a warm, open-minded Lutheran church in Greenwood.)

As a child, I read a series of books by Sydney Taylor, called All-of-a-Kind Family. They were about a Jewish family on the Lower East Side in the early 1900s. I was captivated by them, and by the Jewish rituals I learned about.

As I grew up, I searched for the right “spiritual home.” I was not impressed by the Christian churches I saw. My best friend in high school went to a church where the members were in a quandary about how to handle a black family who had started coming. Their solution was to let them attend, but not invite them to be members. In college, I tried out Quaker meeting and Episcopalianism. I liked the people at church in Bloomington very much, but after I graduated and moved home to Indianapolis, found the people at my Indianapolis church very much into how much money people made and who they knew....and, I took an adult education class and just didn’t get it. I really wanted ritual and a spiritual community, but I just didn’t feel comfortable with Christian beliefs. They did not make sense to me, inside.

In my mid-20s, I had moved back to Bloomington to live and I met the director of Harmony School at an anti-nuclear protest. I mentioned that I was looking for a new job and he said that he had a teacher who was going to run a camp that summer and needed to hire people. I called Jordan Shifriss to set up an interview. It took him about two minutes before he told me that I was totally unqualified to teach kids art at his camp. (I tried to persaude him that I was a nice person and that I could “wing it,” but he didn’t buy that.) Howver, some time down the road, he did marry me.

Jordan was Jewish, but his primary spiritual focus at the time was living in an ashram. As many young people did at that time, Jordan found a teacher, Rudi, and studied and lived in his ashram in upstate New York. After Rudi’s death, Jordan moved to Indaina to live in the ashram in Bloomington. A good friend of mine had begun to attend meditation classes at the ashram, and found them very beneficial. I decided to try it out, and eventually moved into the ashram to live with Jordan. There were several Jews in the ashram, and there did not seem to be any conflict with practicing Jewish ritual and doing the meditation. Potato pancakes were served at Chanukah time, and we invited friends from the ashram to share Jewish rituals with us.

At the time, we had good friends, the Olenicks, whose home was kind of a Jewish renewal center here in Bloomington. Reb Zalman Schacter came to stay at their home several times and we celebrated wonderful Shabbat evenings there, with lots of singing and joy. I asked Reb Zalman whether I should convert officially, and of course he said “Oh, you don’t have to do that.” And I thought inside “I’ll decide if I have to or not, and I think I have to!” Later I learned that his response was a traditional Jewish one, and he was encouraging and kind to me. Reb Zalman had been a friend of Rudi’s, the meditation teacher, and he came to visit the ashram and say kaddish for Rudi. (The ashram, which did lots of multi-cultural programming back then, also sponsored a Bloomington appearance of Reb Schlomo Carlebach.) But when we thought that we would have a wedding ceremony that included both our meditation teacher and Reb Zalman, our families were very uncomfortable with the idea. We ended up having a wedding ceremony one morning performed by our meditation teacher, and a big Jewish ceremony later that day in Brown County State Park, which was attended by most of the ashram and most of Harmony School.

We moved to Boston with the ashram, and Jordan got his master’s in education down the street at Harvard, while I got used to being the mom of small Amalia. Later, he taught for several years at The Park School in Brookline and I was very happy working for three geology professors at MIT. (When I interviewed with my future supervisor at MIT, Judith Stein, and we discovered that we were both Jewish feminists and had both graduated from IU-Bloomington, we decided it was meant to be.)

Over the years, I had another child, Adam, and Jordan and I realized that in Boston, we would never be able to own a home. We would emphatically never be able to own a home in Brookline anywhere near where Jordan worked. And we looked at each other one day and said “Let’s get out of here!” As the demands of daily life had increased with becoming parents, I had stopped attending class at the ashram. I had also come to feel that, while I loved being part of a community, that the ashram was not really meant for families. We sublet our Watertown apartment for the summer and took our tent and the kids and traveled to several areas to consider moving there. Jordan really wanted Chapel Hill, N.C., and I really wanted Colorado. As we traveled back home, we stopped in Bloomington to stay with our good friends Daniel and Donna Baron. As we sat in their home, surrounded by friends, we realized that Bloomington had everything we were looking for as a place to raise our family. And so we returned, and Jordan taught at Harmony School for many years (he now works doing conflict resolution classes).

We had another daughter, Abby, and eventually I came to work at The Herald-Times in 1995. In 2004 I was promoted to being assistant to the editor. My favorite part of the job is paginating the editorial pages. “Paginating” means that I take the material that Bob Zaltsberg, the editor, has chosen for the next day’s editorial page, and use a program called Quark to put it on the page and make it fit (and there are lots of fun little tricks to accomplish that).

In the years before we were members of Beth Shalom, I thought that perhaps it would be a place where we might not be comfortable. I thought it might be a place where I could not mention having lived in an ashram. I thought it might be a place where my lack of Jewish background might be embarrassing. (Someone had said to me, soon after I converted in 1981, that I would never really have to mention to anyone that I was a convert...and my reply was “Like that’s not totally obvious!”) And, I was worried that we might dress a little too casually or be a little too loose in our practice of Judaism to be accepted there. Needless to say, for anyone who knows Beth Shalom, it was totally unnecessary to worry.

As I looked around at our congregation while listening to Greg Stone do a beautiful job chanting Torah at his bar mitzvah yesterday, I thought how lucky my family is to have found such a warm home at Beth Shalom. I remembered standing in the kitchen and becoming friends while peeling hard-boiled eggs for Passover. I remember sitting in one of the evening classes that Rabbi Mira started and laughing and learning, and getting to know more friends. I thought of how easy it is to ask Rabbi Mira anything, and of some of the good advice I’ve gotten from her. I thought of how much I have learned from participating in the Renewal minyan, and how much I value having a Jewish community where respect and affection abound between those who practice in different styles. I remembered how so many people at Beth Shalom were really kind to me and my family when Jordan’s mom died in 2000, and then my dad died in 2001 (may their memories be for a blessing.) And I looked at some of the women with whom I have shared being part of the Chevra Kadisha, and thought how deeply I value their teaching, their understanding, and sharing such a profoundly moving experience with them.

I have thought many times that my past spiritual searching had kind of a pastel feel to it, with no depth or excitement, a bland feeling. And I thought again yesterday, as I looked around our overflowing sanctuary, that Beth Shalom, and Judaism itself, feels to me like a beautiful homemade quilt, one full of colors like deep purple and blue and red and gold, one that I can wrap myself in and feel comforted and totally at home.