I love words. I love when a word exactly captures the moment, the feeling. How it precisely describes something that you experienced but didn’t know exactly how to express. It’s like a warm bath or a deeply satisfying meal.
And beyond that- a collection of words. A deeply insightful phrase, thought-provoking and uplifting. A quote to remember.
I started collecting quotes when I was 16 years old. (1972) I’m 68 now, as I write these words, (2024), and there are 472 quotes in my collection. At this precise moment.
That’s not really that many over the course of 52 years. I guess I am fairly discriminating. Sometimes years can go by and the collection lays dormant. In other years there is a great harvest of quotes.
These are not necessarily famous quotes, things you’ll often hear referenced. For the most part, they simply represent words that I read that made me stop for a moment to meditate and bask in their impact. And quotes I enjoy reading and re-reading and quoting myself!
These quotes represent the evolution of my thinking over the course of 52 years. I look forward to pondering what it is that made me find each one meaningful enough to save.
My Life in Quotes- #1
"Good," I said, "Because in a society where not one man in ten thousand begins to understand the ways in which women are second-class citizens, we have to rely for company on the men who are at least not hypocrites."- Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook.
The Golden Notebook was written in 1962, at the beginning of what historians call “The Second Wave” of feminism in the U.S. I was a child, oblivious in my snug cocoon in Brooklyn, NY. By 1967 I already knew that I wanted to be a rabbi, though Sally Priesand, was not ordained as the first female American rabbi until 1972. I must have read this book in high school, and been touched by her reference to the general obliviousness, and insensitivity to womens’ struggle, to the myriad of challenges women faced in our culture. And still face.
In 1976 we didn’t use the word “allies” in the same way that we do today. Yet Lessing clearly refers to men who were willing to consider standing with women and calling out, recognizing, our exclusion.
I entered rabbinical school in 1976, and in 1981 discovered, along with my female colleagues that there was very much a glass ceiling for women who longed to serve the Jewish community.
In 1978, I joined the U.S. Army as a Chaplain Candidate, and encountered another glass ceiling upon graduation in 1981. Ultimately, I went on to serve for 38 years as the first female rabbi in the U.S. military, achieving the rank of Colonel and graduating from the U.S. Army War College. But not without lots of heartache and negotiation.
Looking back, I think that Lessing was right. “We have to rely for company on the men who are at least not hypocrites.”
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