Identity and A Fascinating Seminar Moment

I just got back from first year seminar, where we did one of those "introduce yourself and share your journey and/or your thoughts about your rabbinate" sorts of things. So someone started, and he was a PK (preacher's kid), and that set off a chain of PK stories and the tensions involved with that. And I was sitting there, feeling a little resentful, and a bit like my experience was just totally out of place, as someone who isn't a PK, who didn't grow up in the Conservative movement, who didn't grow up in an observant home or at a day school, and who doesn't want to be a pulpit rabbi.

The thing is, when I started to talk, I talked about not wanting a pulpit, and not being the pulpit sort of person, and that why I was doing this was how much I love text, and just can't quite imagine doing something that wasn't involved with text and ritual and the like- and I got caught up with that, and I never even mentioned how I'd grown up, how or when I'd encountered halakha or observant Judaism. After I finished talking, a couple of more people's stories down the line, I had that realization, and that's so much who I usually see myself as, as a Jew. I was almost thinking about asking if I could add something to what I said about myself, because in retrospect, it felt like such a major thing to leave out, and what a biased view of myself I must have given. I didn't do it. And along with last shabbos' lunch, well, it's giving me a very different way of looking at myself, as someone who is really coming from inside the tradition as well as being a BT coming in from outside. That's a new one for me, and I'm really not sure what I do with that, now. But it's a transition of some sort.

Identity and A Fascinating Seminar Moment

I just got back from first year seminar, where we did one of those "introduce yourself and share your journey and/or your thoughts about your rabbinate" sorts of things. So someone started, and he was a PK (preacher's kid), and that set off a chain of PK stories and the tensions involved with that. And I was sitting there, feeling a little resentful, and a bit like my experience was just totally out of place, as someone who isn't a PK, who didn't grow up in the Conservative movement, who didn't grow up in an observant home or at a day school, and who doesn't want to be a pulpit rabbi.

The thing is, when I started to talk, I talked about not wanting a pulpit, and not being the pulpit sort of person, and that why I was doing this was how much I love text, and just can't quite imagine doing something that wasn't involved with text and ritual and the like- and I got caught up with that, and I never even mentioned how I'd grown up, how or when I'd encountered halakha or observant Judaism. After I finished talking, a couple of more people's stories down the line, I had that realization, and that's so much who I usually see myself as, as a Jew. I was almost thinking about asking if I could add something to what I said about myself, because in retrospect, it felt like such a major thing to leave out, and what a biased view of myself I must have given. I didn't do it. And along with last shabbos' lunch, well, it's giving me a very different way of looking at myself, as someone who is really coming from inside the tradition as well as being a BT coming in from outside. That's a new one for me, and I'm really not sure what I do with that, now. But it's a transition of some sort.