Yehudith Podolsky

Yom Kippur 5768

How did you first come to Beth Am?  How did you connect?  What kept you connected?  What do you give the community?  What do you receive from it?  Each of us has a story of how we came to Beth Am and for each of us this community has a particular meaning.  I’m honored and grateful that Rabbi Marder asked me to share my thoughts about this community, because it has given me the opportunity to reflect, in a more focused way, on how I became part of the Beth Am community, what it has meant to me, especially in the last two years, and what it means to me as I think about my future.  My story is just one of the hundreds of Beth Am community stories, but I hope it helps you reflect on your own.

My husband Joe, of blessed memory, brought me to Beth Am in 1992.  For weeks before he brought me here – well, not here to Flint , but to our beautiful campus, for weeks, as our friendship deepened, we had been trading histories and talking about what mattered to us.  It was immediately clear to me that Beth Am mattered a great deal to Joe, that he had invested deeply in this community since he and his family joined it in 1967, and that belonging to Beth Am was part of who Joe was.

From the first, Joe had invested his time, his energy, his creativity, and his knowledge in the Beth Am community.  Joe understood that we create community for ourselves by showing up.  He did what he was asked to do and sometimes what no one had yet thought to ask.  He brought his whole self to Beth Am, saying what he believed needed to be said, taking the risks that we take when we let something matter to us.  He grew to full manhood in the Beth Am community, defining himself as a husband, a father, a friend, a Jew, and a citizen.  His self concept reflected much of the values and ethics of Beth Am.  And Beth Am – including the walls where his photographs hang – reflects a lot of Joe.

Listening to his stories, I could not help but learn how we shape and are shaped by our community when we show up – when we participate actively and courageously, when we share our honest selves.

Because I came to Beth Am with Joe, I never came as an outsider, a stranger.  I was immediately welcomed with the warmth and friendly curiosity that any newcomer would hope for.  I found my place first in our dear Chavurah, but Joe urged me to explore further, to make my own connections and my own investments.  I did that first at one of Rabbi Block’s neighborhood coffees, where speaking up resulted in my life-changing connection to the Ecumenical Hunger Program.  I made my next big connection to Beth Am when I joined Rabbi Zweiback’s wonderful Talmud class which, after my Chavurah, is really my Beth Am home.  Although Joe had zero interest in joining the Talmud class, he loved and encouraged my interest.  Our Thursday night conversations almost always began with his slightly skeptical – “so, what did you talk about in Talmud today?”  As Beth Am had been part of Joe’s life, it became part of our life together, even when we did things separately.

I think I valued the Beth Am community from the first.  I think I was mindful of all that I reaped from my small investments in the community – the friendships, the learning, the spiritual connection, the opportunity to share joys and sorrows with people I came to know and care about.  But my sense of what that community meant to me and to us shifted when Joe was diagnosed with incurable lung cancer in 2005.  Joe and I didn’t set out to create community for ourselves at Beth Am so that it would be there for us when we needed it.  We invested ourselves in Beth Am because it was a pleasure, because it enriched our lives, because we loved being part of something larger than ourselves – being connected to traditions and friends.  But when we faced Joe’s death, we saw immediately how this rich and generous and loving community would help us through this hard passage.  We would never be alone.  We would never lack guidance, and if we had been willing, we would probably never have needed to cook another meal.  There were so many offers we didn’t say yes to – honestly, we couldn’t have eaten all the meals that were offered.  But what we did accept, and most gratefully, was the love and concern that prompted each offer.  And that love and caring was a light in the darkness.

From the first, we saw our sadness and fear reflected back in the faces of dear friends, of the wonderful professional staff, and even of members we scarcely knew.  At first, for me, this actually made it harder to cope.  I could hardly deal with my own sadness and fear, and in a perverse way, seeing it reflected in every greeting at Beth Am made it feel bigger and more real.  But very quickly, this intensification of sadness changed.  Beth Am became not a place where I had to talk about what we were facing, but a place where I could talk about it – a place where so many of our values relating to illness and death were shared, where the traditions for facing sorrow were there to comfort us, a place where, when words failed us, we would be held.

Many people feel the presence of God when they walk through the valley of the shadow of death.  Joe didn’t.  He felt your presence.  From the first days after his diagnosis he knew that you would be there for us and with us, and he had no fear.  He knew, too, that when I came out of that valley without him, I would not be alone.  He knew that you would help me bury him and mourn for him and celebrate his life.  He knew that you would help me find my future.  He knew the words with which you would welcome me back from mourning.  He knew that you would help me laugh again, and that when I didn’t know what to do, you would remind me how to take the next step – to come to services, to come to Talmud class, to greet friends, to get back to the work of life.

I suppose the Beth Am community would have done as much for anyone in the community as it did for us.  But I could not have received what was done for us with all the meaning it has for me if I had first come to Beth Am when I needed help and support.  The loving arms that reached out for me were the arms of friends I had made, not of strangers.  The Talmud class I returned to was a nourishing home – not something new to start when I was depleted.

This is my Beth Am story so far.  Each of us has our own unique Beth Am story, and it is the intersection of those stories linked to the larger and longer story of our people that creates our community.  I hope we continue to write in this book together in the year to come.