Major Transitions

Are you wondering why I haven't written? (Probably not. You're probably not terribly surprised.)

Well, I'm in the middle of a major transition as you can tell by the title. My husband and I are moving out of Vancouver, probably to NY.

I had an unexpectedly positive phone call yesterday about a job in a frum Jewish school and yet I'm wary. No amount of wariness will stop me from taking a decent job unless there is a very good reason not to. (Like them not paying me.) Part of the wariness is just that it makes this move feel so real. Another is something else.

This morning I got an email from a publication that wants to reprint my article Now She Could Fill My Heart. They simply want me to change the word "Shekhinah" to something like "divine sense of healing." The editor went so far as to say that using the word Shekhinah would be "somewhat  irreverent towards HaKadosh Baruch Hu."

So I feel a little shaky. Entering a very frum community in NY and reading this... (though there is no relationship other than my receiving both simultaneously... a challenge from Hashem?) how will this challenge my own relationship with Judaism? I've never lived before in a place where I wasn't a miniscule minority. My strength in Judaism has always been about persistenly believing what I do in the face of a non-Jewish world. I've never lived in a place before where my relationship with Hashem could be so directly questioned as a result of living in a JEWISH world.





(Finally, I should add that the area of NY that I refer to above is spoken of as a place where Orthodox Jews both modern and ultra-Orthodox live side-by-side quite comfortably with their children playing together. I always have unfounded fears before I go to a new place, but I'm going to honor them and be honest about them. The real place I'm talking about is a different than the one I imagine, but the one I imagine is real to me right now and worth exploring.)