Tales of the Unbound Episode 6: You Do Not Have To Do This Alone
In episode 6 of "Tales of the Unbound," Miriam Terlinchamp reflects on her journey into the rabbinate, beginning with childhood memories and learning about holiness in unlikely places. She recalls pivotal moments that challenged her faith and understanding of Judaism's role in life's hardships. Despite initial reluctance, Miriam embraces her calling as a rabbi, drawn back to it even after attempting to avoid it. She finds purpose in connecting with individuals like Ari and Josh from Monroe Correctional, guiding them through conversions and discovering a deeper, more inclusive Judaism beyond traditional boundaries. Miriam's narrative explores themes of belonging, grief, and the evolving nature of spiritual identity.
[1] “There are no words” is a poem Miriam wrote on January 6, 2021.
[2] “You are Not Alone” by Ric Hordinski; you can watch this gorgeous rendition here.
[3] Psalm 23, we used the same translation here as we did in Ari’s episode, which is the poetic and non-gendered translation by Rabbi Richard Levy. But, Miriam was reading from the JPS translation of Psalm 23 at the time, which you can find here.
[4] Miriam mentions the funeral and shiva minyan. Typically, in a traditional Jewish burial, the funeral is followed by seven days of mourning, marked by “minyanim” services in your home to share in the grief. Learn more about the content and role of shiva minyanim here.
[5] She also mentions Kugel. Yum! Here are some favorite savory, and sweet recipes and seven other variations. Kugel is a diverse dish with many options!
[6] This episode mentions Jonah's story —his call to speak truth in Nineveh and his avoidance of that call. It’s worth reading if you haven’t done so in a while; you can find it here or watch a 4-minute animated version here!
[7] When Miriam says there is no hierarchy in Jewish practice and that none is more Jewish than the other… that’s just her opinion. And, Judaism Unbounds! But it isn’t necessarily a mainstream understanding of Jewish organizational practice.
[8] Miriam off-handedly drops the line that she made movies with her congregation. Just so we’re on the same page, that’s … very out of the box. Most synagogues are not creating movies about Jewish organizational theory. Interested? There are close to 60 different videos, but here are a few links to our favorites: The way we’ve always done it demon, The Little Table, Be Someone Else, Our Vision, “The Musical.”
[9] Miriam uses the word tribe a lot in this episode, which makes us think of this awesome movie by Tiffany Shlain, “The Tribe.” Trust us, it will be the best 18 minutes you’ll have all week!
[10] We can’t get enough of Benay’s crash theory up in this house! Watch it over and over, we do. Here’s the long version.
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MIRIAM: Welcome to Tales of the Unbound. I am Miriam Terlinchamp, and this is episode 6 of a seven-episode series about a journey of Jewish conversion within a prison. If this is your first time listening, don’t spoil it for yourself! Go listen to the first episode to best engage with the story. For those who’ve been with us for the whole story, I’m so glad you’re here.
[MUSIC]
The rabbi must have words when there are no words.
In the moment when the siren still rings in your ear
Or when standing at the lip of a grave
Or as the newborn baby screams his way into the world
Or,
speaking of the world
When our world
all comes crashing down
and all that’s left are the wounds
there needs to be words.
Not to heal
But to name the pain
which in turn breaks the silence
unleashing a floodgate.
So,
when we sit
knees on the floor
palms open to the heavens
We wait for words
that are supposed to open a door
Letting us grieve
Rage
Rejoice
Remember.
But the rabbi
Is oh so human
Just as broken and betrayed as the rest of us
And her words
These words
We all know
are just trying their best
to hold you in her arms
to quiet your breath
and tell you two truths:
Nothing will be ok
And you will not have to do this alone.
This is Tales of the Unbound, Episode 6, “You will not have to do this alone.”
[MUSIC]--> “You are not alone” Ric Hordinksi
MIRIAM: When I was little, my sister and I loved to play hide and seek in the synagogue. It was one of those buildings that started small-ish, and grew over the years, like twisting building blocks telling the story of expansion, which made for a perfect setting for the game. There was the chapel, virtually vacant except for the morning minyan regulars, whose coffee, old tallisim and aftershave hung in the air. There was a cold kitchen storage room where the fortunate hiders in the game might find leftover desserts from the Shabbat oneg. If you were bold enough, on the bima, the holy stage for the worship service, there was a trap door that allowed you to crawl beneath it. And then there was the hiding spot where no one would ever look for you. The place, only I was daring or petulant or nonchalant enough to hide in, the walk-in ark that held the Torahs.
I’d wait there, sitting on the maroon carpet, surrounded by the gauzy white curtains behind the thick brass gates, the light from the stained glass windows making the silver crowns sparkle. Now, only in hindsight, I realize that this is how I learned that holiness is not something untouchable, separate from our humanity, or hidden.
Even though I had been taught:
Do not touch the Torah.
You’ll damage the scrolls.
You’ll smudge the ink.
And implicitly, you are not holy enough.
I would. And I did.
Because being proximate is how holiness becomes internalized.
Hebrew came easily to me. The trop, the way we chant Torah, the liturgy of the synagogue always felt like it was of me. I was raised in a bilingual home, and the synagogue was my second language. Being good at synagogue, that’s what I called it, made others suggest that I’d make a good rabbi, which I thought was a terrible idea.
Part of it was that my mother served as the Executive Director of our synagogue for 35 years. It’s where we’d do homework after school, work in our first jobs, and learn the ropes of what it takes to support the back end of a religious institution. I stuffed envelopes, answered phones, tutored in Hebrew, organized the mail room, and watched how, on the holiest days, my mom’s worry was about air conditioning, police, and tickets. I understood the backend of Jewish organizational life, and it was not particularly fun. Of course, it wasn’t all work and no meaning. I met my best friends through the synagogue. The clergy were kind to me. And it always felt like another home.
When I was 15, my friend Ellen became very sick. We were young, and so the words that most people had for her were encouragement. Kindness. Uplift. They brought her books, stuffed animals, and even a new puppy named Lucky. But the rabbi didn’t do those things. He sat with Ellen, and they talked about all the hard things. And then Ellen and I would talk about them. I learned about dying. Through her eyes. And through the lens of our tradition. The words of the synagogue prayer service worked for me at that time. They promised me that others had been through this type of struggle before. That God works miracles, and maybe the do-gooders were right. And I got to hear from my rabbi's lips the Torah, which told stories of heartache, loss, and the presence of God.
Ellen went into remission.
I went for a short stint to summer camp.
On the day I got home, still in rumpled clothes and tangled hair, the phone rang.
It was Ellen’s mom,
Come now, she said.
So, we did.
Ellen died 5 hours later.
The rabbi placed a Tanach, a bible in my hand, bookmarked at psalms.
And invited me to read.
מִזְמוֹר לְדָוִד: יְהוָה רֹעִי, לֹא אֶחְסָר
Adonai my shepherd; I lack for nothing
And then all the adults left the room to talk about what’s next
But I was still reading,
בִּנְאוֹת דֶּשֶׁא, יַרְבִּיצֵנִי; עַל-מֵי מְנֻחוֹת יְנַהֲלֵנִי נַפְשִׁי יְשׁוֹבֵב
In meadows thick with grass You lay me down,Across streams serene You guide me.
My life You restore,
I started to think …This is a bunch of bullshit. These prayers won’t bring her back.
There is no justice. No words. In the days that followed, the comfort of the words eased me some. But more the people that flowed through the house for the funeral and the shiva minyan, their presence reminded me of the one truism that made sense:
[MUSIC] You are not alone.
The power wasn’t in the magic of words. The power was in the presence of the people who came together to say those words along with you. In your grief. In your rage. In your broken-hearted-loneliness, the people sang:
[MUSIC] You are not alone
In English. In Hebrew. In kugel and bagels. And standing room only davening, praying. Not because anything would change from the words, but so we could be together, crying out in unison about the great suffering we endure as humans who love other humans.
I learned that the container of religion – the liturgy, the rituals, the holy scrolls themselves, were and continue to be precious to me, but the death of a child, my friend Ellen, released me from believing that Judaism held all the answers. And since it was just as imperfect as me, then we’d be good companions.
Life continued.
I graduated High School and went to college. Judaism was like an undercurrent for me.
I’d go to services and leave before the communal dinner. I was uninterested in the religious identity of those I dated or spent time with, but I maintained a daily personal prayer practice. I kept kosher. I worked in synagogues and tutored b’nai mitzvah kids to help support myself in school. I majored in Philosophy of Religion and Studio Art, and for my honors thesis in both disciplines, I focused on Judaism. And yet, I was totally uninterested in the rabbinate.
I thought it was impractical. And a hard life. I had qualms about what it would mean to not agree with the denominational party lines. So I ran from it.
You can’t run from your calling.
We are all Jonah, in some way, avoiding Nineveh, but eventually, the call will come for you no matter what you do or how far you run.
But 20-something Miriam thought she could outrun it.
I traveled across the seas to art school in London. I loved every single second of it.
The grueling hours of non-stop painting. The obsession over pigments and glue and proper canvas wrappings. All of the little things felt so big.
At the semester mark, my painting – a classical figure – was up for assessment. As the teacher graded the work, he used a brush dipped in black oil paint to mark the imperfect places. By the end – the figure was a mess of black lines. I looked at my teacher. Then at my classmates. And I said: Bullshit. Not the art critique. He was right about all that.
It was me. I was the one full of it. If I was going to spend this much energy on something, it should be doing what I’ve been called to do. I am an artist. And I have many different mediums, painting is just one. But Torah, too, was a medium that I had set aside. It was time to stop running. Nineveh, or in my case, the rabbinate, was waiting. I snatched my painting off the easel, tucked it under my arm, and headed out into the street.
The funny thing about having a calling is it doesn’t just happen one time. Sort of like love at first sight. You fall in love. You say yes. And then, if you are reallllllly lucky
You get to keep falling in love and keep saying yes for the rest of your life. It’s not a one-time unchanging thing – it’s a thread that you hold-that stretches behind you, connecting to those who came before you. And reaches in front of you, mapping your course forward.
We teach across all organized iterations of Judaism that our power resides in our lineage. Broken bits of Torah that link us across time, passed from one generation to the next, from rabbi to rabbi, and Jew to Jew. That lens of lineage as power has great meaning. Our love for citations and knowing how our new idea connects back to ancient wisdom isn’t about fact-checking to vet authenticity or because all truth is old truth. We value ancient wisdom to connect and remind us that we aren’t alone. We are part of a people and have carried this Torah, in its ever-evolving truth, with us across time.
[MUSIC]
There is no hierarchy in Jewish religious practice - Orthodox, Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist, Renewal, Anarchist, Jewish witches, Home-Based-Mothers-Making-Shabbos, Non-Dualist Jews, Atheists and Philosophers, Cooks, and Prisoners… none of it is more Jewish than the other. There is no singular Judaism to convert into or to conform to except the one where you experience awakened belonging.
Awakened belonging. That’s what I felt when Ellen died. Awakened to the truth of the world, and that I belonged to a people.
When Josh called, I had been serving as a congregational rabbi for 13 years.
There, I was blessed to serve with people who rejoice in creating a space of belonging.
We made movies. Sold our building. Eliminated obstructive financial models.
We pulled the Torah out and unrolled it around the Temple, used the parchment as a chuppah above children’s heads, and gathered all the kids in the school and the adults on Shabbos morning around the Torah on Saturdays as I read from the scroll.
Hold the handle for me, I’d ask.
Do you see this crown on this letter?
Touch the parchment, isn’t it soft?
This is ours.
And we can trust each other to hold, learn, and touch the Torah without creating a fence around it. The Torah is a holy, precious thing for all of us to enjoy. It was 13 years of using my title, my access, and my privilege to share all the best hiding places. Trying my best to model that all of this beauty belongs to all of us.
But Josh and Ari, were calling from Nineveh. From the wilderness. From prison, where the gates were closed to them.
ARI: I was like, oh, this is a pretty cool podcast. And looking for someone who might be able to do a conversion, I typed in conversion under the search function on the podcast, and your name and a couple others came up, and I listened to them, and I was like, wow, Josh, this lady seems amazing, you have to listen to this, and he's like, oh my God, yeah, she's awesome, and it's great. I loved how you guys had talked about not doing gatekeeping and all these other things. Things that, you know, were barriers to people from the outside and how the OG conversion of saying a few minor mates vote and some of the greater mates vote, but mentioning that choose help the poor and all that. It was like, Oh my gosh, like we have to get a hold of her and we sent an email and I was like man I don't know if this is gonna work or not, but we'll see if she writes back and here we are.
MIRIAM: I listened to their stories. How hard Ari and Josh had searched for belonging.
And then they told me about Amy.
Wait.
Amy?
I had heard of Amy. She belonged to my home synagogue. The place where I’d learned Torah. And about brokenness.And about awakened belonging. I found that many people from my hometown were volunteering and supporting Josh, Ari, and the rest of the Jewish people at Monroe Correctional. Josh didn’t know that when he called.
JOSH: I get goosebumps just sitting here talking about it because you were going to be coming to Seattle and you were going to be visiting family here. And this is a place that you had roots in, that you've got memories in, and that you've got a connection to. And on a vacation, you were willing to come in to do a conversion and not just one but two and so as we were talking about this and you were so on board it was truly a beautiful and enlightening moment as that process unfolded. When I think about the conversion, I have to think about everything at that moment and reflect on the total experience of what was being denied to us, which was now an opportunity.
MIRIAM: That’s the funny thing about tribes; everywhere you go, your people are there.
After the big conversion day, my partner was waiting in our rental car for me. I knew already that something very big had shifted. So, I said- before we start – I’ve got to record this! Because when Josh and Ari emerged from the mikvah,
I, too, was converted.
[LIVE AUDIO] :I mean the whole time these guys are baring their hearts. So you hear the announcements going Right and the slamming of doors and it isn't loud in the way of jail is loud, right? like there's there was a calmness in our space except for the presence of mirrors and announcements and everyone's very aware where their body is in relationship to other people's bodies and All of that. And, um, so the guys came in together, so I was like, okay, so we're doing a joint beit din, which I've never done before. And I thought, well, like, when in Rome? And, it was interesting because I think a big part of it for me, I feel like this was really the first unbound thing I've actually done of like, does the podcast actually do anything in the world that affects a collective? And I thought there were three different sort of audiences in this moment. One was the people experiencing the ritual. One was also, like, the chaplains who had been holding space for seven years when he spoke. And then it was the community of other guys who've, who've, Created their own tribe, but I thought a lot about like, Who is this moment for and who is it changing and what happens with it?
MIRIAM: I felt like one of the Israelites in the book of Exodus. That moment, right after the sea parts, and they’re standing on the shore looking out at the desert. Which looked dry, devoid of life, and dispersed from the collective. And then, stepping closer, like the Israelites who chose to move forward into the wilderness -found manna. rest. and one another.
In Monroe, with Ari, Josh, Marvin, and Amy, I reached the end of my participation in rabbinical Judaism and emerged into wilderness Judaism. I thought of Benay Lappe’s crash theory:
BENAY: All human beings share the same big questions of life. Why am I alive? What happens after we die? Where do I belong? Every tradition comes into being to answer those basic questions and it does so by means of a master story. If you're Jewish, that's called Torah. And as long as your master story is working for you, you aren't even aware that you have questions. You don't walk around asking, Where do I belong? You know. But, every story will ultimately and inevitably crash. There are three possible responses to any crash Option one. You deny the crash and you revert to your master story, and you hide there and you build a wall around that story. Option two. You reject your master story and you jump off into a new story. In Option 3, you take the crash, and you use it to understand your master story, to figure out what works and what doesn't work and to retell that story to answer those questions. Who am I? Where do I belong?
MIRIAM: These are the questions of the wilderness. The ones that continue to call us both to our ancient sources and to our expansive future. The next era of Judaism needs crash rabbis, crash lay leaders, crash guides. Some of us are born to wilderness. And others, like me, convert into it.
On that same trip out west, I visited my childhood synagogue. I went inside the sanctuary and stood on the bima , where I noticed a thin gold cord holding a sign that linked the doors of the ark. It read: “Do not open the gates. Alarm will sound.”
And I thought, Oh, honey. The gates are open. The alarms are sounding.
And the wilderness is waiting- the wilderness, the place where there is no hiding,
only seeking.
[MUSIC]
The rabbi must have words when there are no words.
In the moment when the siren still rings in your ear
Or when standing at the lip of a grave
Or as the newborn baby screams his way into the world
Or,
speaking of the world
When our world
all comes crashing down
and all that’s left are the wounds
there needs to be words.
Not to heal
But to name the pain
which in turn breaks the silence
unleashing a floodgate.
So,
when we sit
knees on the floor
palms open to the heavens
We wait for words
that are supposed to open a door
Letting us grieve
Rage
Rejoice
Remember.
But the rabbi
Is oh so human
Just as broken and betrayed as the rest of us
And her words
These words
We all know
are just trying their best
to hold you in her arms
to quiet your breath
and tell you two truths:
Nothing will be ok
And you will not have to do this alone.
[MUSIC]
MIRIAM: Thanks for listening. Tales of the Unbound is a production of the Institute for the Next Jewish Future and part of the family of podcasts of Judaism Unbound. Tales of the Unbound was created and written by me, Miriam Terlinchamp, produced and edited by Joey Taylor, original music by Ric Hordinski, and art by Katie Kaestner-Frenchman.
Thank you to Amy and Marvin and all those who serve the Jewish people. A big shout out to Ari, Josh, all the Jewish folks in Monroe Correctional, and all the people everywhere trying their best to do good time.
Special thanks to DOC at Monroe Correctional who allowed access to Ari and Josh. Check the show notes to find out ways you can get involved to support those who are incarcerated and for behind-the-scenes content. We'd love to hear from you, so you can email us at miriam@judaismunbound.com or find us at: www.judaismunbound.com/tales.
Stay tuned for our next and final episode!
MIRIAM: Thanks for listening. This has been Tales of the Unbound.
