We’ve had some tumultuous changes over at the home synagogue this summer. The rabbi of 20+ years departed after months of drama worthy of its own reality show (“The Real Meshuggenehs of Savannah“?) and the congregation is finally peeking its collective head out to choose a new spiritual leader.

Not that agreeing on a new rabbi to represent a Reform population made up of Savannah natives, big city transplants, interfaith families with young children, retirees with grown children, Jews by choice, Jewish atheists, those whose priority is preserving an almost 300 year history, those for whom progress is a main concern as well as various and sundry other misfits and upstarts will be a quick hora in the park.

In the meantime, we have an official “interim rabbi” overseeing the situation. He’s one cool cat, IMHO. Every year he travels to a new city where a congregation is in flux, where he uses his superpowers to help calm, collect and crystalize a new vision for a group of Jews who always have several more opinions than there are people. There are only a handful of trained interim rabbis in the Reform movement, and I have to wonder what kind of special ops ninja knowledge it must take to be prepared to mediate a stand-off between an old-timer who doesn’t want any Hebrew transliteration in the Saturday service and the hippie mom pushing for gender-neutral prayerbooks (*ahem.) I kind of pictured a guy with a tallis tied around his neck like a cape and some magical golem dust that will render everyone a little drowsy.

But it turns out, our transitional rabbi uses a meditation cushion and balloon animals as his weapons of choice. Rabbi Darryl Crystal has been at Mickve Israel for a few months and already there have been so many positive changes. The old timers like him because he’s a good listener, understands the need of preserving history and is well-educated in Torah. Us younger folks dig him because he groks the need for change, is well-versed in contemporary philosophy and is into yoga. Little Yenta Girl completely adores him because he twisted her up a balloon monkey at the last potluck Shabbat.

Though he’ll only be in Savannah until next summer, we’re all hoping this new sense of enlightenment, unity and cooperation will turn into an era. One of the most fascinating ideas Rabbi Crystal has brought to the table is the concept of Jewish meditation, which probably sounds like some kind of farkokte New Age mishegoss to the old-timers but is simply the practice of quiet mindfulness from a Jewish perspective. While Buddhist monks may have made sitting in silence most famous, focusing our prayers and traditions into cultivating a sense of gratitude and awe fits right into living a modern Jewish life. Rabbi Crystal has studied with perhaps the most remouned “JewBu” of them all, Sylvia Boorstein, author of That’s Funny, You Don’t Look Buddhist (I know, it totally cracks me up, too!)

Anyhoo, yesterday’s Jewel of Elul was by Alison Laichter, the executive director of the Jewish Meditation Center in Brooklyn, and it activated this idea that incorporating these practices into congregational worship could be especially valuable as we roll into the High Holy Days. I particularly liked her definition of Jewish meditation as tikkun olam (repairing the world) “from the inside out.”

Do you think Rabbi Crystal can handle the uproar if I lobby to change out the wooden pews for those round little floor cushions?

The Jewish calendar has a funny way of corresponding to what we need in real life: The lights of Chanukah in the dead of winter, the wild abandon of Purim just as spring comes around, the curious lack of important holidays during the lazy days of summer.

This week we’ve entered into the month of Elul, a time of reflection and quiet repentance before we ramp up the soul searching during Rosh Hashanah (the New Year) and Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement), collectively known as The Days of Awe. It’s a transitional time when the year is at once winding down and revving up; school has begun and the hideous heat has finally broken. It’s a time to look back on the year and muse on what we can do better and what we want to create in the next—in a gentle way, without the finger-wagging of “Man, I really was a douche and should hide in a hole for all of 5772.” I say this as a personal reminder to hold myself in as much kindness as I believe God holds us.

Three days into Elul I already I feel like life is operating at a new level, one that will require more vigilance, compassion and responsibility. My dad’s brain aneurysm last week was a hard slap of a lesson that little else matters beyond keeping our relationships with our loved ones clean and clear. I’m so grateful for the time I was able to spend at his side during the most acute phase with my mother, who is such a tremendous teacher in presence and patience. Likewise for the moments with my brother (who is clearly not only a very good doctor but a real, deep-down mensch) and his wife-to-be, who already feels like the sister I’ve always wanted. Through this crisis the distance created by geography and years was sucked away, perfectly captured the evening we left the hospital to grab some dinner during the nurses’ shift change, and my bro put his arms around all of us and called “his girls.”

Of course I must shout out props and “huzzahs” to my dear El Yenta Man, who dealt with peanut butter sandwiches and itchy scalps and hungry snakes and the needy pug and laundry while attending to his clients and own parents while I was gone all with good humor. The kids rose to the occasion by exhibiting never-before seen abilities to wake, dress and feed themselves and complete their chores without constant reminding, so I suppose Elul is having an effect on all of us.

This week Dad is stable, his motion and speech getting a little better each day. We don’t know yet what the new “normal” will be and are taking each day as it comes. Thank you to the many, many friends and friendly strangers who have expressed wishes and prayers for him—I believe they’re working, so keep ’em coming! I know so many of you are going through similar circumstances with your loved ones; I send back prayers to you for equanimity, grace and good news.

Elul has also brought a new level for me professionally: The day after I returned from Arizona, I reported for duty at the Community Editor for Connect Savannah, what I’ve always considered the best rag in town. I started my writing career in the mid-90s at the Pacific Sun, the oldest alternative newsweekly in the country, and stepping in line with my unapologetic liberals and Rob Brezny’s Free Will Astrology feels a lot coming home (Well, it’ll feel more like home once I truss up my desk with some family photos and New Agey-girly things that will surely incur snickers from the all-male editorial staff.) My first pieces will drop in the September 16 College Issue.

From my perch, Elul is at once contemplative and exhilarating, and always inspiring. Speaking of inspiration, those fabulous foxys at Craig N Co have once again launched The Jewels of Elul—a daily bite of wisdom from quite an array of people; some rabbis, some rock stars, some everyday folks just trying to widen the ray of light from above as we move into another year. I’ll delve more deeply into the Jewels next week, but in the meantime, sign up to receive them in your inbox for the next few weeks (you don’t have to Jewish; many of the contributors aren’t) and download the free music sampler (which ROCKS.)

An earnest Shabbat Shalom to all. Remember to be kind to yourself.

There is no color palette like an Arizona sunset, all cantelopes and indigos and lilacs.

There’s more to the view from the foot of my father’s hospital bed. There are tangles of tubes running from my dad to blinking machines. Men and women in scrubs and sneakers rush by occasionally. A bottle of hand lotion and a thrice-read newspaper clutter the counter. I’ve been sitting here for four days straight, watching the sun make its way across the sky, over the buildings, out past the western mountains as it sets the horizon aglow before it dips down into darkness for another day.

No matter if this majesty is the result of five million car motors spewing carbon monoxide towards the heavens, I will not allow such a view to be diminished. Even from a window in the intensive care unit, this daily spectacle is a reminder that life is larger and more mysterious than we can possibly imagine.

Monday morning my dad woke up with a terrible headache and asked my mother to call 911. A vessel in his head burst, and he walked downstairs with the EMTs before he lost consciousness. The neurosurgeon told us later that 50% of people don’t even make it to the hospital. The beeping of the monitors, the rhythm of his breathing through the oxygen mask and the occasional flush of the biohazard disposal have become a strange, new symphony, the sound of human brilliance and God’s grace.

So thank God for airplanes, spewing tons of carbon monoxide so that I could cross an entire continent in a few hours.

Thank God for my brother, who as a doctor knows the right questions to ask and what all the blinking lights and numbers mean.

Thank God for my mother, whose steel-solid optimism and faith has not wavered for a second.

Thank God for my future sister-in-law for her sweetness and support.

Thank God for my husband, who has managed to care for the kids, the dog, the chickens and his business all week and still text me hilarious and encouraging endearments.

Thank God for Jen and Kelly and Sue and Julia and the rest of the nurses and aides and tech whose names I never caught who perform marvelous and amazing tasks with compassion and calm.

Thank God for the friends who are helping and praying and standing fast.

Thank God, Thank God, Thank God.

When a loved one’s life hangs in balance, there isn’t much else to do but pray and wait. As this week comes to a close, we’re heading to synagogue to make our Misheberachs official.

Right now we don’t know what the future holds for Dad. God willing many more sunsets like this one.

There is no color palette like an Arizona sunset, all cantelopes and indigos and lilacs.

There’s more to the view from the foot of my father’s hospital bed. There are tangles of tubes running from my dad to blinking machines. Men and women in scrubs and sneakers rush by occasionally. A bottle of hand lotion and a thrice-read newspaper clutter the counter. I’ve been sitting here for four days straight, watching the sun make its way across the sky, over the buildings, out past the western mountains as it sets the horizon aglow before it dips down into darkness for another day.

No matter if this majesty is the result of five million car motors spewing carbon monoxide towards the heavens, I will not allow such a view to be diminished. Even from a window in the intensive care unit, this daily spectacle is a reminder that life is larger and more mysterious than we can possibly imagine.

Monday morning my dad woke up with a terrible headache and asked my mother to call 911. A vessel in his head burst, and he walked downstairs with the EMTs before he lost consciousness. The neurosurgeon told us later that 50% of people don’t even make it to the hospital. The beeping of the monitors, the rhythm of his breathing through the oxygen mask and the occasional flush of the biohazard disposal have become a strange, new symphony, the sound of human brilliance and God’s grace.

So thank God for airplanes, spewing tons of carbon monoxide so that I could cross an entire continent in a few hours.

Thank God for my brother, who as a doctor knows the right questions to ask and what all the blinking lights and numbers mean.

Thank God for my mother, whose steel-solid optimism and faith has not wavered for a second.

Thank God for my future sister-in-law for her sweetness and support.

Thank God for my husband, who has managed to care for the kids, the dog, the chickens and his business all week and still text me hilarious and encouraging endearments.

Thank God for Jen and Kelly and Sue and Julia and the rest of the nurses and aides and tech whose names I never caught who perform marvelous and amazing tasks with compassion and calm.

Thank God for the many, many friends who are helping and praying and standing fast.

Thank God, Thank God, Thank God.

When a loved one’s life hangs in balance, there isn’t much else to do but pray and wait. As this week comes to a close, we’re heading to synagogue to make our Misheberachs official.

Right now we don’t know what the future holds for Dad. God willing many more sunsets like this one.

The notion of “homeschool” always confounds me.

There’s home, where you sleep and eat and watch t.v. in your underpants. And there’s school, where you spend daytime hours with people born in the same year as you, torturing each other with complex social hierarchies that change by the minute and occasionally learning things like the Pythagorean Theorem and forgetting them right after the test. Putting the two together sounds like a terrible idea, like okra chip sock-flavored ice cream.

Yesterday’s Forward article by Kate Fridkis about her experience as a Jewish homeschooler amongst fundamental Christians got me thinking about this again, and all I have to say is that her mother must have possessed superpowers or a very large cupboard full of Xanax.

Of course, there are plenty of families that make it work, and I am in awe of them.

While many families choose to homeschool for religious reasons, but two favorites that I know choose it out of convenience and for its freedom on their time. Their children are well-mannered and intelligent, doing their academic work on laptops whenever they choose and pursuing other interests. One or both parents work from home while everyone goes about their day peacefully and productively. They make it look really easy, organic and fun. I find this fascinating and amazing. And totally unrealistic.

First off, my children are smarter than me. And they know it. Establishing myself as a person of authoritarian superiority in their minds would require a personality transplant. Secondly, my chosen vocation requires that I sit at my computer for hours, uninterrupted by questions about how to remove a crayon from a dog nostril. Thirdly, the house stays much cleaner when they’re eating paste in a classroom with their peers. Furthermore, school classrooms enjoy keeping gerbils and other rodents in cages, and that is just not going to happen here.

Mostly, our family truly enjoys and benefits from a community that grows out of a school where many parents volunteer in the classroom, spend Saturdays planting flowers along the front walkway and hang out after school comparing notes on life and watching the children climb in the giant oak tree in the park across the street, swearing one day we’ll climb it ourselves. It’s not perfect (yo, SCCPSS, maybe one day you’ll fix the plumbing in the upstairs boy’s bathroom before the mold carries a urinal down the hall?) but it feels like home.

When we first moved to Savannah, I had the gut-shredding experience of finding a spot in first grade for my son in the Chatham County School System, which ranks 128 out of 164 in the state of Georgia. This city—as does our country—blazes with a vast socio-economic gap that among other iniquities, has translated in a tendency for the wealthy people those who can to send their children to various secular and religious private schools, leaving the public school system for those unable or unwilling to spend thousands of dollars in tuition and/or naively committed to the democratic notion of providing education for all through our taxes.

Here public schools operate as a “magnet system” that allows parents choose a school for a particular “specialty,” be it traditional academics, alternative curriculum, performing arts or science. This sounds fine in theory but basically creates a neurotic climate of competition and dysfunction as families who care scramble to get into the “good” schools even though it may mean their kids are on a schoolbus for three hours a day. There are lotteries and waiting lists and letters of recommendation and bitter disappointments. It’s like “Toddlers and Tiaras” with No. 2 pencils and stone-faced administrators with helmet hair.

Already reeling from the culture shock of moving to the South from the insulated liberal nest of Northern California, I melted into a lump of hippie despair when informed that my son was 79th on the waiting list for the highly-coveted public Montessori I had carefully researched the previous spring. (More on Maria Montessori’s educational philosophy here.) I dutifully visited the school we were “zoned” for but left after the office assistant greeted me with four missing teeth and six “ain’t”s in five minutes. For three weeks I shlepped my 6 year-old and 2 year-old from school to school in the hell of August, shopping for another magnet that didn’t feel like a daycare run by the devil.

During this period, I considered homeschooling him. He is a bright, curious person with a flair for language and music. I imagined creating a classroom area off the kitchen with some blackboard paint where I would cheerfully teach him addition and subtraction and a place to blow up stuff with a chemistry set. He would complete lessons online quietly while his sister napped and I wrote the world’s greatest novel. We would take incredible field trips to the beach and wear pajamas on rainy days. I would explain in gentle tones the cycles of the weather and continents of the globe. We would play games to memorize all the state capitals and parts of flowers.

Sounds fabulous, right? But then he had a huge meltdown in the grocery store about choosing a juicebox flavor right as his sister ate a stray M&M off the floor in the meat aisle and my adrenals started prickling and I was overwhelmed with the urge to clear a spot on the juice shelf so I could sit down and weep. I realized we would be together all the time, EVERY DAY, and I would have to generate lessons constantly to stay ahead of their amazing electric brains. The more I thought about it, the more terrified I got.

Fortunately, the Montessori called the next morning with a first grade miracle spot. My kid would get the education I wanted for him (and four years, later his sister) with all kinds of cool materials and encouragement to follow his interests and guidance from trained professionals who know how to redirect a broken pencil tantrum into a teaching moment.

It was humbling to admit that I was not prepared to be the sole provider of my children’s education. People go to school to learn how to teach; I arrived into motherhood barely equipped, armed only with a loving heart and the Internet. I admire so very much the parents with courage and wherewithal to figure it out and do it. Maybe it’s because for the most part, Jewish culture values educational institutions and group study; more likely it’s just me. I wish I had the patience and compassion and desire and faith to homeschool my kids. But I don’t.

And I forgive myself for it. They learn so much at home with us—how to garden, cook, care for chickens, communicate their needs using English instead of Whinese, play music and just plain play. I feel pretty good about biking the 11 blocks to the brick schoolhouse 181 days a year, pointing out the magnolia trees and reminding everyone to look both ways. I loved school, and my kids do, too. It’s been a lovely summer, full of bike rides and fishing and waterfalls and teaching moments.

But I’m damn ready to have the house back.

How wonderfully fortuitous to find this “Mountain Jew” t-shirt from ShalomShirts.com just as we’re off to retrieve Yenta boy from camp in North Carolina. A month in the mountains is a long time—I wonder if he’ll come back with a beard?

Speaking of Mountain Jews, I recently received a link to an Examiner.com article that claims there is evidence that Sephardic Jews were the first people to settle in the Southern Highlands of what is now western North Carolina. There’s good background on the expulsion of Jews from Spain and Portugal in the late 1400s and throughout the 1500s, and the author, Richard Thornton, makes an interesting case for some historical re-examination.

Thornton has published two more articles describing stone inscriptions that he says prove an ancient Jewish presence in North Georgia and Western Carolina: First, near Brasstown Bald Mountain, the name “Liube” with the date 1715 is carved on one of the Track Rock Gap petroglyph boulders. While the soapstone petroglyphs are believed to have been created by Native Americans, Thornton claims that the name Liube is specifically a Jewish girl’s name, and was perhaps added by a young lady looking to add her own tag to the ancient graffiti already there. (I haven’t been able to confirm the name “Liube” as Jewish, though—anyone?)

A couple of hours north in the Smoky Mountains off the Cherohala Parkway, another rock inscription holds mystery for Thornton: He writes that the phrase “PREDARMSCASADA SEP 15, 1615” means “Prayer we will give, married” with the date in Ladino, the Spanish-Hebrew dialect used by Sephardic Jews, and was carved in commemoration of the wedding of a nice Jewish couple. (No evidence of a broken glass or weepy mother-in-law, however.)

While Thornton’s articles are fascinating, they haven’t been corroborated by archeological sources—no effort has ever been made to examine the remains of a Spanish village near Dukes Creek. I’ve long been captivated by the theory that Portuguese and Iberian Jews running from the Spanish Inquisition ended up in the Appalachians and beyond as early as the 1600s, subsisting off the land and avoiding contact with Cherokee and other settlers. There’s speculation that the mixed-race group of mountain people known as “Melungeons” are descendants from such Sephardim; legends abound that Melungeons spoke a form of Spanish that could have been Ladino and lit candles on Friday evenings. Even if it all turns out to be a wackadoodle bubbemintza, it would be amazing to see more research before these sites are destroyed by weather and tourism.

I may try to convince El Yenta Man to take a detour while we’re tooling around the Blue Ridge Parkway in the Absurdivan so I can do a lil’ amateur yenta sleuthing.

I’d kinda been waiting around for some confirmation on the rumors, but since no one’s denied them in the last few weeks, I may as well let y’all know that Natalie Portman and her thousand-footed husband, Benjamin Millepied, have named their baby Aleph.

Aleph. Not, as Life in Israel points out, Alf.

For all you Hebrew school dropouts and never-beens, “Aleph” may sound like “Alex” pronounced with a mouthful of socks. However, “Aleph” is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet (also known as the aleph-bet—isn’t that fun?)

So basically this is the same thing as naming the child “A”. Which is kind of cool, especially if Nat and Ben actually meant this as a tribute to Fonzie (“Ayyyyyy…”)

Or maybe the motive is more esoteric than that. In the mystical practice of Kabbalah, the letter Aleph also corresponds to the number 1 as well as the primordial number that contains all the rest, so perhaps the proud parents are encouraging leadership qualities in the young one.

In any case, most of you know that I am the last person to judge weirdo kid names. All I know is that a bris has NOT been confirmed. Would it be considered ironically hipster of the Portman-Millepieds to give their kid a Jewish name and not invite a mohel? Or simply confusing?

Chew that one over at the Shabbos table and get back to me. Shabbat Shalom!

Oh, Amy.

You sexy, filthy thing. You charmed us with your old-school bebop style and sailor-swearing Cockney chatter. You repulsed us with your hideous heroin-skinny limbs and helpless alcoholic pathos. You introduced us to Mr. Donny Hathaway and the term “fuckery.” You were hard-core and brittle as an old bubbe‘s bones; you made the nervous breakdowns of pop tarts like Britney and Demi Lovato look like toddler tantrums.

Most of all, you held us captive, our mouths hanging open, our toes tapping no matter how old or self-righteous, with that voice—that soulful, husky voice that reached deep down and brought heaven and hell together, funneled forth from a 90-pound songbird teetering on F*@# me stilettos.

You were never a nice Jewish girl. Too many tattoos. So much public barfing. But watching you tearfully hugging Mama Winehouse with an armful of Grammy awards, we felt the pride for one of our own. We concentrated on the music, not the shanda. That’s why “Rehab” could pop up ironically in bar mitzvah DJ rotation. No longer.

In terms of creating your own legend, you couldn’t have picked a better time to self-combust: All the great ones died at 27. Jimi, Janis, Jim, Kurt—they all killed themselves through whiskey and needles and pills and playing with guns. Whatever your special recipe for destruction was, you join the pantheon of those who couldn’t handle the fame and fortune and artistic pressure, those who possessed heart-breaking talent but no sense of self-preservation. Welcome to the club.

Though many have recently reveled in the schadenfreude of your stage stumbles and wicked hot messiness, so many of us were rooting for your salvation. To hear that sober album. To maybe watch you marry a nebbishy Jewish businessman who adored you and see the tabloids scurry over how you got fat when you had babies. To cheer when you appeared svelte and mature in 2018 to release a smokin’ comeback that knocked us out all over again.

Instead, for generations to come, your songs will resonate with and be downloaded by every disenfranchised global youth with a penchant for jazz and weed. Your addictions will serve as a morality tale. You will be the poster icon for the ultimate Bad Girl. Whatever you believed came after death—if you ever thought about it at all—you’ll achieve immortality, at least in this current cycle of human civilization. It is in our sick world, I suppose, the zenith of artistic achievement. So congratulations.

We only wish we could have heard more.