A little more Purim fun before she’s back
The following is a reprise (slightly edited) of a blog I published seven years ago. I figured I’d share it again in the spirit of Purim before Rabbi Drill’s return from her sabbatical tomorrow. Enjoy!
Growing up on the mean streets of New City, New York, I learned the hard way what it meant to be Jewish, short, skinny and unable to jump higher than 8 inches off the ground. In other words … wait for it . . . “scrappy” was my game. The experience hardened me to the outside world’s cold reality. A jaded, chip-on-my-shoulder, eat-or-be-eaten attitude pervaded everything I set out to accomplish. I learned to control most of my impulses, assuming a mild-mannered, soft-spoken persona everywhere I went. Everywhere, that is, except on the basketball court. Between the lines, I could be myself, let go of my inhibitions, run wild, heatedly pursue, charge at the hoop, display my bumps and bruises as badges of honor. Ironically, all that pent up anger, frustration and aggression that found its expression in my game was lauded as something good, something to be admired and copied.
Those of you who have seen me play over the years (with the 9- and 10-year-olds at recess, especially) have called me competitive, like a Mr. Hyde to Rabbi Jekyll. What you see is nothing, however, compared to the dark madness that once lurked in the soles of my high-top Converse sneakers (the white canvas ones). That’s just me having good, clean fun. Once I retired from competitive hoops at the age of 28 (the year I started rabbinical school), the cloud that once enveloped my heart lifted, and the beast was gone forever. Until . . . .
Rabbi Paula Mack Drill, who’s been with our OJC community for 20 years now, began her professional relationship with me at Camp Ramah in Nyack some 22 years ago. She was Program Director as I was Assistant Director, and Assistant Director (a position formerly also held by our own Rabbi Ami Hersh, the topic of another Purim spoof one day soon) as I was Camp Rabbi. We always had a great, easygoing, complementary style of working together. From Day One, people referred to us as the “Craig and Paula Show.” That relationship carried over into her internship here at the OJC, where I functioned formally as her mentor for the Seminary. The day she was ordained was a great day. I should have known something wasn’t quite right, however, when she informed me that her JTS GPA was .0185 higher than mine.
That single fact was the beginning of a disturbing pattern. Two-letter words like “XQ” were suddenly making their way into our Shabbat Scrabble games on triple word scores. She would casually mention to each congregant we met that she was older than me, taller than me (she took up heels), and could stand on her head longer than me. She would give her students colorful stickers and point out that I offered them nothing for their efforts. At the end of a day’s work she would ask me how many hours I had billed, as she filled my e-mail inbox with cc’s of every e-mail she sent out. I lashed back by working later, sleeping less, and leading more trips to Israel. I could feel the old Craig emerging, and it wasn’t pretty.
Rabbi Drill’s popularity has grown over the past 20 years. As has my therapy bill. But I have learned how to control the beast. Looking in the mirror each morning, I remind myself that I am good enough, that I am smart enough, and doggone it, people like me. Then I steel myself for the day ahead, trying to appreciate how good each day can be with Rabbi Drill at my side.
And then I pray . . . for the moment I will get her on the basketball court.
Happy Purim to all, and welcome back Rabbi Drill with us this Shabbat! Rabbi Drill, Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise–I’ve missed you and the many ways in which you enrich each of us and our community!
Rabbi Craig Scheff
Our Yiddish library
We welcome, once again, our rabbinic intern Lindsay Goldman as a guest contributor to our blog!
There is a Yiddish library inside the walls of the Tel Aviv bus station. It’s on the fifth floor among the artists’ collective that began when the artists were offered old storefronts as cheap studio spaces. When I was living in Jerusalem before the start of Covid in 2020, we went on a field trip to the library and it was exactly what I expected–a dimly lit room covered with old tchotchkes and floor-to-ceiling stacks of used books. It felt old and stale. While my friends oohed and aahed at the plethora of Yiddish books, I was pretty creeped out. I had never felt a connection to Yiddish or to my ancestors in the shtetls in Eastern Europe. They had all passed away before I was born and it felt like thousands of years existed between us, though it was probably closer to 80 or 90.
More importantly, however, I believe the disconnect came from how I imagined they would feel about how I am living my life today. I am a single woman living in New York City becoming a rabbi. Would they be proud? Furious? Disgraced? In my head, they and their beliefs–about the way the world works and about what I can or cannot do–were old and stale.
I am pursuing my master’s degree in Jewish Gender and Women’s Studies along with my ordination. This semester fewer classes were offered to fulfill my requirements, so I was compelled to sign up for a class entitled “Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Women’s Literature.” Each week we explore a different female author, mostly poets, who either wrote in Hebrew or in Yiddish. As we studied Celia Dropkin, our first Yiddish poet, I was quite moved. Her writing about her womanness and about her body felt incredibly modern, like something that could have been written today. She writes about love and sexuality in a way that felt radical for her time, and especially for Yiddish language literature. It felt fresh. And I learned she was not alone in this exploration of thought and language.
The dusty Yiddish library didn’t feel like my story, but Yiddish was the language my great-grandparents spoke so that my grandparents wouldn’t understand what their parents were talking about. Today my siblings and I speak in Hebrew so that our parents won’t know what we are talking about. Every Shabbat, I light my great-grandmother’s candlesticks and say the same Hebrew words she said week after week. But this week after reading Dropkin’s words, I began to wonder what my great-grandmother and my great-great-grandmothers thought about, what they prayed for, and what they talked with their female friends about. And I realized that perhaps we’re more similar than I had ever known.
Lindsay Goldman, OJC Resnick Intern
Ukraine is Personal
Twenty years ago, in April 2002, Sarah and I flew with twenty others on a MetroWest New Jersey Federation Mission to Cherkassy, Ukraine. Sarah had raised $20,000 through her bat mitzvah project to support the nursery school of the burgeoning Jewish community there that called itself Hesed. We traveled with duffel bags filled with medicine, sports equipment and school supplies. I remember that Sarah had a violin as carry-on and I carried an envelope filled with American dollars and a box of donated Women’s League benefactors pins to give away.
We spent a transformative week in Ukraine, visiting small towns like Smela and Zvenigorodka and the larger cities of Cherkassy and Kyiv where we paid homage to the past by participating in a solemn service at the Babi Yar Memorial, cleaning a Jewish cemetery, and saying Kaddish in a forest where in 1941, three thousand Jews had been murdered and buried in a mass grave. We assisted the present-day communities with home visits to isolated indigent elders, meetings with community leaders, and participation in their Sunday School and Jewish culture club.
And we dreamed of the future of Cherkassy – young people learning Hebrew as they prepared for aliya and others dedicated to building Jewish community there in their homeland. For me, the highlight was officiating at a group b’nai mitzvah of nineteen teenagers between the ages of 13 and 17. Many of them had no Jewish names and I spent Friday afternoon helping them choose Hebrew names. I felt like Adam in the Garden.
When we were there twenty years ago, the community was only about eight years old. Prior to that, such a Jewish community organization would have been illegal. Many of the children we met on that trip have since made aliya. But many of the people did not leave. They have been building a solid Jewish community of loving care for all this time.
What I remember most about Ukraine is that it is not a beautiful place. My memories are painted in shades of gray. The streets looked frozen from the 1950s, Soviet bloc style buildings created a depressing view. But the people of the Jewish community we met were incredibly beautiful.
For more than a week, like all of you, I have been praying for the people of Ukraine. On Friday morning after the incursion began, I sat with four-month-old Teddy Louis in my arms. I wondered how many four-month-olds were in their grandmothers’ arms in Ukraine on that same day. My biggest concern that morning after his 7:00 feeding was whether he would take a nap in his bassinet or whether he would sleep in my arms. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian grandmothers’ lives had been turned inside out. Their concerns were matters of life and death.
And now we sit helplessly as spectators to the international stage, listening to the platitudes of governments around the world and finding it impossible to tear our eyes away from the pictures on the front page of the newspaper.
Yesterday in synagogue, Rabbi Scheff taught that we must remember our particular Jewish concerns as well as the universal concerns of this war. Because the Jewish people have been refugees since we left Egypt, we must act according to this legacy. We cannot forget what it means to be forced out of homes and endangered by violent actions beyond our control. And so I made one donation to assist the Hesed community in Cherkassy and another to HIAS to help an entire nation that is suffering. I cannot turn away from the suffering but neither can I let it bury me. I continue to use my most powerful tool, my belief in a God of Peace and Justice. I pray to God to bring our world into balance and alignment before more lives are destroyed:
God of our wandering ancestors, protect the innocent people of Ukraine who have left behind their homes, their desire to build democracy, and their hopes for the future in order to save their lives. Give solace and continued courage to their leader and his family. Find the people in bombed buildings, in subway stations and in synagogue basements and bring hope to their souls. Bring a halt to the horrifying plans of a power-driven autocrat. Awaken the leadership of the world to our common bond of humanity and empower them to take action to stop this unjust war. Act speedily, God, because time is fast when designs are evil.
Praying for peace, Rabbi Paula Mack Drill
Two Rabbis, One Voice, Three Opinions 
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