Origin Story

When I was a young girl in Sunday School, at the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue, in New York City one of the things I loved best were the coloring books we were given for each holiday. I remember pictures of bunches of grapes at Passover time and taking great care to color each one in individually and so carefully so as not to go outside the lines. I loved those grapes. And the picture of Yocheved placing the baby Moses, wrapped in his basket of rushes, in the river. I understood that it was to save his life and I also understood that he would be found in the next picture of the elegant Egyptian Princess, having rescued him from the water and handing him over to the young Miriam, who promised to bring him home, back to his mother. And now he was safe, being protected by the power of the princess but even more, the power of God. Wow what a story! And I could color within the lines and use any colors I wanted.

I think that memory has stayed with me because it was when I fell in love with those few women characters in those bible stories I loved to listen to, and later read about. There were other women who came later on, the beautiful Rachel and her not so beautiful sister Leah.

But nobody else talked about them much and I came to understand that the stories were really about the men and I loved them too, especially Jacob and Joseph who seemed very romantic to me. But they were boys. And somehow I wanted have a bigger role for myself in the stories. By this time I was going to the movies and I could see very clearly that there were women in all of them and the stories were about them, the women. And by this time I knew I wanted to be an actress, like so many of those women in the movie musicals about vaudeville, like Judy Garland and Betty Grable.

And I loved Judaism and I loved that I was Jewish and that fed me and sustained me through my childhood and my difficult adolescence which was punctuated by my baby sister’s bout with polio.

Life was getting complicated, there was the news from the war that came unfiltered to me from the newsreels at the movies, the pictures of survivors with their skeleton like limbs that looked the same way my sisters leg looked as a result of the polio. And I understood that that, as a Jewish girl, it could have been me. The publication of ‘The Diary of Ann Frank,” which I devoured like kids of today read Harry Potter, brought me closer to that reality. It could have been me.

But I was growing up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan where most of the kids in school were Jewish and since my world was made up of PS 87, Sunday School and my family, the whole world was Jewish. I was safe. It could have been me, but it wasn’t.

I still loved Sunday school but now it was because the boys there were friendlier than the ones in school and I got to sing in the children’s choir, and I knew the building inside out, and the children’s seders celebrated with children from the Church of The Masters in a mysterious place called Harlem, and where I got a chance to read out loud as we passed the dog eared copies of The Children’s Haggadah around the table and everyone complimented me later because I read “with so much expression.” The pictures in the Haggadah might have reminded me of the long forgotten coloring book, because they were so real. I knew that world of Egypt and slavery and Moses.

Yet here, every year there were four sons. Did it ever occur to me that there were no daughters? In my house there were only daughters. And there certainly was no Yocheved or Miriam, not even the princess. Did I miss them? How was it that they stayed in my unconscious for so many decades that when I found myself writing about them all these years later, after staying away from synagogues and even seders, when I was an actress in the world, on the road mostly, living the life of an actress, marrying two men who were not Jewish and listening to the Purim carnivals around the corner and seeing the people coming from services on the high holidays on those crisp and gentle autumn days in New York City when the light is so impossibly clear that I ached to be a part of Judaism. But though I ached, I couldn’t find my way back. The path that led there was as choked and clogged as the way back to the castle where Sleeping Beauty lay, unconsciously, awaiting her true love.

Eventually I did find my way back, but that’s another story.

Still so much had changed within progressive Judaism in the time of my hiatus. I walked away in the early 1960’s and I lived in my self-created dessert until 1992. Thirty years. We had experienced the Civil Rights movement, the women’s movement, the war in Viet Nam, Richard Nixon, Ronald Regan, the assassinations. Looking back at it all helps me remember that we’ll get through our crazy times now also, but not without the deep pain of history. Still, in that time, the first synagogue in New York to welcome Martin Luther King was Stephen Wise and the first synagogue to hire a female rabbi was Stephen Wise and the world was changing in wonderful ways as well.

When my dad died in 1978, I went back to say Kaddish and there on the bima were two magnificent women, the rabbi and the very pregnant cantor, who sang more beautifully than the proverbial angels. It could have been my way in, but I guess I wasn’t ready.

Then when I was ready, as they say, the right teachers showed up at a Jewish Retreat Center in upstate New York where I found myself in search of a Jewish, Hindu teacher from Boston with a sense of humor who’s audio tapes had seen me through my last divorce.

But at that retreat, it was Judaism that seduced a willing accomplice. It was my time. I held a Torah in my arms for the first time, I heard the history in new ways, I considered God from my point of view as an adult. I was surrounded by Jews for the first time in thirty years. I had come home.

One of my teachers read a piece that she had written about the experience of the freed Hebrew slaves in the desert which began, something like, “I am a forty year old woman who has been wondering the desert for twenty years and I will never make it to the holy land.”
I burst out crying. I was that woman. I knew her, I knew her pain and determination, I knew slavery and I knew what it was to live for freedom whether it ever came or not. I thought about creating a one-woman play about that women but eventually, when I got back home and involved in my life, the idea faded. But one morning, maybe four years later, I woke up and without a thought in my head, I wrote in the words of Leah.

I was so pleased to have written it and I read it to anyone who would listen. I felt like a child with a drawing needing everyone to see it and have my mother hang it on the refrigerator. I had never done anything like it before, I was an actress, not a writer. I didn’t look in the Bible to check my facts, I just wrote it. I could see it had elements of my relationships with my sisters, and that pleased me, but it was Leah who spoke.

During the next year Sarah, Rachel, Rebecca and a little later Miriam spoke to me as well.

I was thrilled, I kept reading them wherever I could, the Leah story was actually published in Tikkun Magazine and then, that was that. No one called me up out of the blue to tell me I was the greatest Jewish woman writer ever, or anything else. So I put them away, in a file. Not even a computer file, just a paper file in my old wooden file cabinet. And they sat there while I dabbled at writing some personal stories for my own amusement but I always remembered that the women in Geneses had spoken to me, and they would not be silenced.

It took years but I had made friends with a woman named Susan and Susan ran an organization named Miriam’s Well, a small retreat center in upstate NY where I had moved to in 1996.

One day I said to her, “I once wrote a story about Miriam.”
“Oh she said, I’d like to read it.”

So I got the stories out of the file, and typed them into my computer, printed them all and handed them to her on an airplane when we were headed for a weekend trip to see one of our cotemporary matriarchs, singer Barbara Cook, in concert. We were sitting apart on the plane, and when she finished reading them, she got up walked down the aisle and with true tears in her eyes she said to me, “These are wonderful. We have to do something with them.”

And what we did was transform the stories into a play called “In The Voice of Our Mothers,” and that play toured for 4 years at synagogues, churches, universities and theaters. And when we put it to rest, our blessed rabbi, Jonathan Kligler of The Woodstock Jewish Congregation asked, “what’s next for ‘In The Voice of Our Mothers?’ ” Well we put our heads together and thought, we’d done Genesis, what’s next is Exodus and the rabbi said, “You can make a Haggadah.” “Who us?” Not something we would have come up with on our own without the special kind of official permission he often gives, but the more we thought bout it, the more we breathed in the idea of a Haggadah where the story of Passover is told by the women of Exodus, the more we knew that we were going there.

We gathered a group of women together, we danced and we sang and we shared confidences and we studied and we wrote.

And now it exists! And now you can read it, pass it around your own seder table, and, along with us, learn, about the magnificent lives and voices of our mothers.