Broken to Whole – An Elul Story in Three Parts

Part 1: Naming What is Broken

About two years ago a young woman arrived in my life and irrevocably altered it.

CALA Demonstration

For the past two years, I have watched this young woman grow from strength to strength. She went back to school to acquire skills to help her understand and combat systemic oppression. She spends most of her energy in community activism and organizing.

She serves as secretary and grant-writer for the board of the Community Activism Law Alliance of Chicago (CALA), an award-winning organization that brings lawyers and activists together to offer free legal services to marginalized individuals and communities. CALA fights for workers, for victims of sexual and domestic violence, for immigrants of all kinds. CALA offers free workshops and free legal representation, advice, training, and pro bono support to those who are not simply underserved, but utterly isolated.

Dream Riders cheering each other on with Serafina Ha in the most amazing green pants I have ever seen.

She also brings her indefatigable spirit to her work as a community leader, filmmaker, interviewer and publicist for NAKASEC, the National Korean American Service & Education Consortium, a grassroots organization working on behalf – especially – of Asian immigrants. This past summer, NAKASEC has been sending its young people out to demonstrate, to speak, to bike for more than a month across the west coast to help make the gifts and hopes of immigrants real for those willing to hear their voices.

She listens to the stories of those who have been hurt and harmed; she imagines any way she can to help heal and free those she serves. And then she builds those ways and makes them concrete.

Part 2: On Broken Things

If you love a musical instrument you own, you do not want it baking in a car or freezing in the hold of an airplane.

I needed a guitar I could travel with – for teaching and for leading services. But the guitar I wanted was – at least for me – a rather expensive endeavor. For good reason: it was made with an inventive technology that allowed its owner to take its neck from its body and pack it up into a package so neatly that it could be placed in an overhead bin on an airplane.

I listened to the demos of guitar players far more skilled than I on and off for many months. I put aside money. Finally, I contacted James Brawner, owner and partner at Journey Instruments to think through my options. We talked about the guitars, music-making, even a bit about what we were doing with our lives.

Just a day or two before the guitar was about to arrive, James wrote me an email. He had received a note about the guitar indicating that it had suffered some small nicking on the wood near its neck. But I was leaving on a trip for which I really needed the guitar for a service I was leading. I wasn’t sure what to do – send it back? Take it anyway?

I grew up in a world of broken things. Having a newly-made guitar arrive in even a slightly damaged state triggered unhappy memories. I called James and confessed my uncertainty. He generously told me to take the guitar on the trip and pray with it. We would work it out when I got back.

I took the little guitar to ALEPH’s 2018 smicha week, where I was teaching. Then she helped me lead Kabbalat Shabbat services.

I returned from my trip and called James. I was still uncertain, still fighting the childhood memories of having things harmed and broken, of knowing harm and hurt. I could send the guitar back, James said. He could also offer me a discount if I decided to keep her.

I called James back. “James,” I said, “I want the discount.”

Part 3: Transforming Brokenness into Wholeness

I explained. I had prayed with that guitar. After all, I said, all of us have been harmed and hurt and even broken.

I wanted the discount not because I needed it, but because I wanted to give it to organizations offering hope and strength and help to those who have been harmed and hurt and broken. My little guitar wasn’t perfectly whole, but, in the end, her small hurts could be the agency of healing.

James was so delighted that he told me he would match the money he was sending to me and give it to organizations he loved.

I got the discount last week. Today I added a little money to the discount so I could round it up. Then, I sent half to CALA and half to NAKASEK.

In honor of the young woman who walked into my life two years ago in Grant Park, Chicago. In support for the work she does. In the name of those she serves.

This blog post is dedicated to Serafina Ha.

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Repurposing, Renewing, Revisioning Judaism — The Work of Our Hands

I made my first tallit out of an embroidered shawl. I shook when I put it on for the first time.

I had grown up in a world in which only men wore prayer shawls. A part of me felt as if I were transgressing.

That was eighteen years ago. And I’ve been making kippot and tallitot ever since.

I resisted turning my hobby into any kind of business. My practice was, for years, to make my work into gifts for friends and colleagues. But after repeated requests to sell my work, I eventually created Not My Brother’s Kippah and put my things up on Etsy.

I began to meet people I would otherwise never have known. I learned about their lives. I found that what I designed and cut and sewed was a wholly new way to bless – even to heal.

In the past year, three women purchased tallitot from me. One of the women had two different p’sukim she was thinking about for the atarah, the embroidered neckband of a Jewish prayer shawl. Which should she choose? “Go and sit with the verses,” I told her. “Just hold them in your heart. You’ll know which one.”

About an hour later, she wrote back to tell me that she did know, after all.

She had become, she said, her mother’s courage during her “early departure.” The verse she chose brought her mother back to her again: Al tirah ki imcha ani. Fear not, for I am with you (Isaiah 41:10).

There was a second client who wanted a tallit that would speak both to her Chinese and her Jewish heritage. I learned a life story in our correspondence – how her parents had escaped from danger, how she had learned to make her life in America, how she had, over three decades, framed every aspect of her Jewishness in the tikkun olam work she embraced.

And then there was a young Jewish-Vietnamese American woman who contacted me in December of 2017. We engaged in months of consulting and negotiation about colors, patterns, and texts. We needed fabric with a lotus pattern but had to be sure to avoid anything white – especially touching her head. White, she told me, is the color of death in Vietnamese culture. So though her kippah was made of fabric that included a creamy white, I lined it with lilac silk.

On her atarah, she wanted Genesis 18:27: “Here I venture to speak to my Lord, who am but dust and ashes” (Genesis 18:27). She knew the tale of Rabbi Simcha Bunem of Pershyscha, who carried two slips of paper in each of his pockets, one of which read: “bishvili nivra ha’olam” (for my sake the world was created) the other v’anokhi afar v’efer” (I am but dust and ashes). At her suggestion, I embroidered the two phrases on the inside corners of her tallit. To be clothed in humility and surety in perfect balance – that was her kavannah.

Once she wrote, “I’m going to pass this down to my great-grandchild with all the blessings you’ve prayed OVER it, that I’ll pray IN it.” I finished it just before her thirtieth birthday. She celebrated by leyning Pinchas in shul that weekend.

A sari tallit
Made from a sari

Recently, I decided to heal as I created in a whole new way; I began making tallitot out of gently used saris.  I want to repurpose, reuse, renew.  Each sari has its own story.  As each becomes a tallit, it binds traditions and cultures together in a wholly new way. And why not celebrate diverse worlds coming together? We could use more of that in our time.

Connections emerge, take life, become unexpected gifts.  This past month I have corresponded and talked with the mother of a boy whose bar mitzvah is a year away; I’ll be talking both with the young man and his rabbi at some point. Just this past week or so, after he bought four kippot of mine, I began corresponding with a young man in Munich, whose story becomes increasingly tender and beautiful with each email.

My life is inordinately busy with classes to teach, administrative work to accomplish, research to complete. I never have the time I would really like to have to sew as much as I long to do. And I usually think of my teaching and research and writing as the most important work I do to nourish the tribe.

Maybe it is. But I have also learned that the renewal of all we know and the discovery of all we have yet to realize about Jews and Jewish life – these are things, it turns out, that can be found in cutting, stitching, and blessing.

May the work of all our hands serve such aims.

Note: This post is in honor of my son, Erik Henning Thiede.  He had the idea for using the saris to make tallitot so that I could become a more environmentally aware fabric artist.

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