Torah portions through the eyes of a parent

Rabbi Ilana Grinblat was reflecting on what she calls “sweaty Judaism” as she sat in the shady section of her Pico-Robertson backyard, which will be transformed into her family’s sukkah on the Sunday after Yom Kippur.

It’s a term she first heard Rabbi Adam Kligfeld describe in a sermon at her synagogue, Temple Beth Am, and, Grinblat said, “It really stuck with me.

“The way it connects to Sukkot is that, within a few days after Yom Kippur, the first thing we’re supposed to do is to build a sukkah, and starting a construction project is about the last thing I want to do after all that fasting and praying. I’m in general exhausted.

“But if you want to have a good year, you have to sweat for it,” she continued. “The idea of ‘sweaty Judaism’ sounds to me like passionate Judaism; you’re willing to step outside of your comfort zone, to really put your heart and soul into things and to go the extra mile.  

“That’s also how I want to be as a parent — to be unafraid of getting messy and running around with the kids and rolling around in the dirt, doing the work of mothering by myself and trying to be as present as possible.”

Grinblat explores the concept in an essay titled “Working Up a Sweat” in her new book, “Castles and Catch: Spiritual Lessons Children Teach Us” (AuthorHouse). In the piece, she goes on to write that once the High Holy Days are finished, “We read the story of … how God commanded Noah to do a major construction project — to build an ark to save him from the flood. … If Noah wanted to be free, he had to sweat for it. The same is true for us. Here’s wishing you a sweaty new year!”

This column is one of dozens that make up Grinblat’s new book, all inspired by her experiences of parenting two young children and how she related those events to the Torah portion of a particular week. First published in Jewish newspapers such as the Jewish Journal and The Forward, the columns in her book cycle through the Torah three times.

In the piece “No Regrets,” Grinblat writes about how, as the full-time rabbi of Temple Beth Shalom in Long Beach, she regretted not being able to spend more time with her infant son, Jeremy, now 11. But when she left that job after her daughter, Hannah, now 8, was born, she questioned her decision “with the same pesky emotion of regret,” she writes. “ I couldn’t win.”

The column goes on to compare her emotions to God’s regret about creating humanity, only to further regret his subsequent decision to destroy the world in the parshas about Noah and the flood. Thereafter, the Creator vowed never again to decimate the Earth: “Regret can be a catalyst for transformation, but only if it is followed by positive changes in behavior,” Grinblat writes, referencing Maimonides.

In an essay titled “Of Lice and Men,” Grinblat humorously recalls how her family was infested by the critters on the very week in which the Book of Exodus describes the plague of lice tormenting the Egyptians. “I felt like God was making fun of me, and I wasn’t amused,” she writes. “In retrospect (and only in retrospect) there is one lesson learned from this nasty experience — that our time is not our own,” adds the rabbi, who had to give up many of her work plans for that week in order to destroy the bugs. “If I intend to get work done on a given day, I am well aware that this plan may or may not come to be.”

Grinblat, 42, grew up in a “very passionate, Jewish egalitarian” household in Washington, D.C. Her father, the renowned Shoah historian Michael Berenbaum, was helping to develop the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington when she was a child, “so I don’t remember a time I didn’t know about the Shoah,” she said. “For example, my father had brought Zyklon B canisters used to kill Jews in the gas chambers back from Europe for the museum, so for a time, my bicycle was in the garage with the Zyklon B; it was not as if you could miss it.”

Grinblat went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in religious studies from Brown University, during which time she also traveled to Ecuador and Ghana to work in community development. “But ultimately, I realized that the kind of communities I wanted to develop were our own Jewish communities,” she said of her decision to become a rabbi.

Grinblat was ordained as a Conservative rabbi at the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies at American Jewish University in 2001; her son, Jeremy, was born three years later, prompting her to write sermons for her Long Beach congregation that touched on motherhood.

The result, seven years later, was her book “Blessings and Baby Steps:  The Spiritual Path of Parenthood,” which consists of the Torah lessons Grinblat learned from pregnancy through preschool.

The genesis of “Castles and Catch” came around 2011, “when my son was 5 and my daughter was 2,” she said. “My mother had died a couple of months before, and I was in this place of sorting through grief and all of the changes that had happened in my few years of motherhood. What I felt the need to do was to write through the Torah portions each week as they connected to my parenting experiences.

“When I was in the pulpit, I had always told people that the Torah portion of their event, whether a baby naming or a wedding, had a message to tell them about the particular moment, but I hadn’t really applied the premise to myself,” she said. “If the Torah portion had something to say to them, then perhaps it had something to say to me each week. Perhaps by viewing my life events through the lens of Torah, I would find guidance and healing.”

Over the period of a year, Grinblat wrote a weekly column for The Forward’s website for the full cycle of Torah readings from Genesis through Deuteronomy. She continued to pen additional reflections for publications such as the Journal and Washington Jewish Week. The essays were inspired by simply playing cards with her children, for instance, or comforting Hannah when her daughter realized that her mother would die one day.

“Overall, the writing brought me to a place of peace I had never known,” Grinblat writes in her book.

What does she hope readers will take from “Castles and Catch”? 

“A certain openness to the lessons that the children in our lives can teach us,” Grinblat said in our interview. “And also the sense of the Torah as being deeply connected to the personal events of our daily lives. … That is the central spiritual practice of Judaism, and we need to articulate it as such and to teach people how to find these sorts of connections.”