194. The Real Blessing

Rabbi Hillary Chorny shares a beautiful essay about embracing her Jewishness, raising her daughter, and the blessings she finds in life. 

Transcripts may not appear in their final version and are subject to change.

I’m Nora McInerny, and this is it’s going to be okay, a podcast/group project.

Today’s okay thing comes from a listener named Hillary, a rabbi. It’s beautiful.

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I learn to play the piano as vertical blinds click recklessly against one another down the length of the room and a quiet suburban breeze kisses my neck. My piano teacher lives just down the street, at the curve in the road a third of the way between my house and my elementary school. Her place is at the top of an unforgivingly steep driveway, the Everest of its incline a daunting climb at 3:05 PM on a Tuesday. When I am younger, I walk the hill hand in hand with my dad, who manages the extra-curricular circuit which, at the time, probably includes Hebrew school and soccer, at least in the fall. 

I start taking piano lessons just as I’m beginning to notice that other people’s homes are different than my own. I know, of course, that other people have pets and we do not. My piano teacher and her husband keep large rescue greyhounds with bells on their collars that are sweet and inquisitive and mostly deaf. (We will eventually get a pet rat named “Squirmy” and then a fish and, ultimately, several cats — but not for quite some time.)

Other differences are both smaller and more important. At the piano teacher’s house, they have translucent orange sugary juice in their fridge, and this is a foreign and intimidating treat. So is the Nintendo, and I feel a sense of exploitative elation each time I go four rounds of Donkey Kong rather than do my homework while I wait for the lesson before mine to finish. There is an elaborate display at Christmastime that fills the whole house with smells I hadn’t known before: Pine. Gingerbread. These are new and foreboding. And at first the feeling is that the smells don’t belong to me. Later I will know subcutaneously that it is I who don’t belong. I ask about the new dollhouse and — another first — have a nativity scene explained to me. Our recital will be in a church and now I understand that I am the foreign object.

I go over to friends’ houses for sleepovers and experience the adventure of excavating someone else’s pantry. The line between thrill and dread thins around age six when the host parents are the ones who direct me, with a tone I don’t recognize, that I probably shouldn’t be taking the ham and pineapple pizza and there are at least four boxes of plain cheese so I shouldn’t worry. It doesn’t matter to them that at the time my family doesn’t keep kosher. I can sleep on their floor, watch movies until the break of dawn, even ride along to the rodeo with a dear childhood friend whose family were, quote, “Serious Horse People”. But their boundaries are fading into permanence. I make the slow and prickly discovery that I am a resident, but not a citizen, of my suburban environs.

By my eighth grade trip to Washington, D.C. I am a curious and hopeful ugly duckling, searching each new city for signs that she might be my motherland. I feel an axial ping in New York City. The bagel shops and accents and unreasonable temperature changes across the indoor/outdoor April landscape. At twelve years old there is already a sense of preordination, a knowing that, later, I’ll live on the east coast for eight years. The night before we fly home to California, we have balcony seats to The Lion King on Broadway and I wear a floor-length purple crushed velvet dress borrowed from an older cousin and the night is transcendent. My neck still hurts from hours of craned attention as we descend back into San Diego, sinking into mundanity. I write in my diary, “We flew home today” and sign off with a question mark.

Blessed shall you be in the city and blessed shall you be in the country.

I will later come to love and understand the poetic nature of verses like this by their academic categorization, the lumping-in term “merism”. Blessed shall you be wherever you go, from alpha to omega, from Big Bear to Boston. May you find yourself, in other words, in the beating heart of a Jewish city center. May you be surrounded by the conveniences, protection, and unbounded support of local community. May you live close-ish to a kosher butcher, and may your neighbors know a word or two of Yiddish, and may your local Target carry a decent supply of Hanukkah wrapping paper. This is what I long for in the melancholic moments of prepubescence when everyone feels “other” but doesn’t quite know how to tell others how other-ish they feel. I ache to be understood and I long for proximity to the known.

By the time I return from D.C., there are no more piano lessons. They last seven years, all the way up until bat mitzvah lessons take that prime extracurricular slot. I promise myself that if and when I have a child, I will gift them with the opportunity to learn piano starting at age five, too.

Then I have two children, and I see that the older one has an ear that is so accurate that I’m as certain as I am about anything else in her future (which is to say that as a parent I am constantly making informed and well-intentioned guesses) that her first instrument should be piano. But my promised timeline intersects perfectly with this pandemic and she’s begging me to set up a keyboard at our kitchen table just so we might begin the long-awaited piano lessons. I demure. She insists, saying that we might find someone, anyone, who will give instruction over an iPad and of course we can, and we do. And this is how I find myself blocking out 30 minutes on a weekly basis to stand over my four-year-old’s shoulder, juggling a screen in one hand and turning pages with the other, because of course she hasn’t quite turned five yet but what on earth else do we have to do with our hours all summer?

I am struck by the intimacy of overseeing these lessons. My role is Skilled Nurse, facilitating what cannot be done without a music-knowledgeable adult on the other end of the line watching and guiding. I return patiently to the fundamentals of music, terms and concepts that I have taken for granted for decades now. My child is a sponge. A wiggly, attention-poor, sometimes whiny, impeccably on-pitch sponge of a student. I wonder if this is the part of her that is most like me, insatiably eager to master a slice of music theory and produce more and then more and then more with her fingers and her voice. This is how it begins, for all of us music lovers, I suppose.

But I also listen as her teacher, who comes from within our own Jewish community, speaks to my little day school student inside a cozy and familiar frame of reference. My daughter of two clergy, who has only ever known Pico-Robertson as home, who is literally playing piano on the same table where three days later we will hide challah rolls under a cover and make a Shabbat meal. She knows nothing but this, all this, the piano and Shabbat and her Very Jewish piano teacher and she need only navigate these 1400 square feet and the campus where we go to school and synagogue. We drive by the synagogue where I serve as clergy a few days ago on a rare family errand, just for the sake of getting in the car, and she calls out to no one in particular, “Oh, we just passed the house.” Her house. Her other house.

I am standing in Jerusalem, once, on the other side of a free-standing gilded fence in the Church of the Holy Sepulcre in the Christian Quarter on a hot day in late springtime listening to a lecture. The marble floor gleams. I fall in love with this church and everything in it, and I will return many times to recapture the mood: an incandescent hum and hovering incense. This is the omphalos, our guide explains loudly because everything in that room is loud. It is Greek for “navel,” where the medieval Christians designated the center of the universe. Except that just a bit up the hill underneath the Dome of the Rock, that, too, is a candidate for the center of the universe. As is Delphi in Greece. And so on and so forth, so many places contending to be the belly button of the earth.

As I listen to my daughter’s piano teacher explain Middle C, I think about the navel of her universe and her tiny orbit, made infinitesimally smaller by this awful scourge of COVID, and think how she has yet to comb through someone else’s cupboard only to go ask them what, pray tell, might Clamato juice be. If it’s a blessing, according to Rav, to live in the heart of city, connected to a synagogue, we are the embodiment of that. Why, then, does that blessing feel threadbare?

There is a reward in the steps.

There is a reward in the steps one has to take to reach the place where they will go about doing a mitzvah. You would think the prime real estate is next door to the shul. But the real beauty, the bounty, the reward is in the journey you take every time you set out intentionally from the place you call home to find, once again, the place you call community and the place where you call upon God.

The reward is in the steps. Where is there to step these days? With no journey, no space, no distance to traverse, who will teach her about sugary juice, and the smell of pine, and nativity scenes? How old will she be the first time someone offers her a slice of pepperoni pizza, the real stuff? I arrive at my Judaic confidence after nearly two decades of navigating step after step after precarious step in the secular city. I show her Valentine’s Day episodes of her favorite shows and we visit cities around the world virtually and with vicarious detail we bake and listen and wonder what other parts and peoples in the world might have to offer if we left our four walls. If we could leave our four walls.

Here is a theory about homes, specifically homes with swimming pools: they will forever skip a generation. If you grow up in a house with a swimming pool and witness the holy nightmare of burden it is (admittedly on your parents) to take care of the upkeep on a pool, you are most likely going to purchase a home without a pool. Your children, in turn, will be raised without a pool and grow up feeling bereft of that experience — “I wish we’d grown up with a pool!” — and choose, when they’re old enough and if they’re able, to purchase a home with a pool. And so the cycle continues. This is an instructive metaphor for the tidal pull of the urban/suburban swing of Jewish settlement: wherever I was raised, I will try to raise my children somewhere better. Somewhere, perhaps, closer to the navel of the universe. Which might be anywhere.

I return to the merism: Blessed will you be in your city and blessed will you be in your field. Blessed will you be, everywhere and anywhere you go. The real blessing is, or would be, if only there were no such thing as living in the right place or the wrong place: that any place you call home will be a blessing.