Holy updates Batman! An… um… update?

My life is made of midrash. This is how I usually look at things, midrash is kind of my obsession. What this means, basically, is that I seem to very intuitively see connections, echoes, reflections, patterns in my life that make the whole look cohesive and somewhat understandable… manageable… drashable. This may have been why, when I was a little girl, I wanted to be a writer and a poet. Now it is how I approach my rabbinical education and career.

Yeah that’s right. I’m in rabbinical school. I’m actually, finally, really, in rabbinical school.

And right now, the echoes in my midrash are pretty darn deafening.

I’m a student at JTS, the Jewish Theological Seminary. I went to Hebrew school here through junior high and high school. I live in the dorms and when I look out the window in the morning I see the courtyard where I used to toss a frisbee with my sister and friends on sunny sunday afternoons during bagel break. I’m in the place where my Judaism originated… my mother studied here for her conversion. I live in a room 4 floors below the office of my first Rabbi, who was at my naming. It is a new year. I am moving forward with new beginnings… very new things happening and a bright clean shiny future all laid out in front of me.

And what it is is my past. Nothing here is actually new. It is my whole life come together, polished, rearranged, and set before me as it was gearing up to do this whole time.

This is why my life is Midrash. Everything leads to everything else. It makes it a story. And it makes it beautiful.