You Can’t Take the Sky from Me

For quite some time now, I have felt distant from my synagogue, to the point that, over the summer, I pretty much stopped going there. I used to be at the synagogue two or three times a week; it used to be a place where I felt so good, it was as if I could touch the sky. It used to help me feel I was moving toward becoming my best self. Then it stopped feeling that way.

It didn’t happen all at once. No, it happened over time, through a series of events: Someone saying something exceptionally mean to me, someone promising to do one thing and then doing the opposite, false accusations, betrayals. It all added up.

Rabbi Lezak described it as me channeling God’s light all these years, and now it was as if my God-channeling arteries had become clogged. Indeed, for months, I have been trying head-on to tackle those clogs, trying to identify and eliminate them. And for months, this approach hasn’t been working. At all. It’s just kept getting steadily worse.

Finally, at the beginning of Elul, I started a month-long spiritual writing practice through an online course given by the author “>Religious and Reform Facebook page, and follow me on