April 6, 2018 | 21 Nisan 5778
Photograph by Tim Painter
Oh Lord Prepare Me to be a Sanctuary
by Deborah Siegel

In March 2017, you receive the results from a biopsy you’d been dreading ever since the women of your family started getting diagnosed. Breast cancer. The doctor breaking the news is compassionate, poetic. “Looks like you caught it early. This will be a hiccup on the road.”

You can only write about the experience in second person.

Cards pour in, irreverent and loving. “F-cancer,” they say. “You kick ass.” “Sending you sunshine.” “Healing vibes.”

One friend gives you a card with a drawing of an outsized little girl standing on the head of a flattened creature. Inside, it says “What if Red Riding Hood befriended the wolf?”

You try befriending the wolf.

The wolf is a jerk.

Chemo kills off different capacities in you each week. It feels like practice for dying — or rather, practice for a death that doesn’t come quick. It’s an exercise in accepting that your body is not under your control. Brain work feels just as taxing as physical activity. You learn to conserve strength. You do a morning visualization, imagining a shield of protection, permeable in one direction. You enroll in an eight-week mindfulness-based stress reduction course and meditate as if your life depends on it.

You meet with your rabbi and talk about the way serious illness lifts the veil.

Your cantor and your friend Randi sing you “Oh Lord Prepare Me” on Randi’s porch.

Your son, daily, gives you healing hugs. Your daughter massages your head.

You keep working. Your mother rearranges her life, again, to help you manage yours.

Your husband tells you you’re no different from before, or from everybody else; you’re just…now…aware.

For distraction, you whiz through Netflix and Amazon Prime video. You travel through period pieces, because Masterpiece Theatre calms. As chemo wears on, you go darker: “Dear White People.” “Gypsy.” “The Americans, Season 5.”

Your dreams are filled with loss. One night you dream they surgically removed your arms. Another, you dream one of your two kittens is gone. One Saturday, you witness a group of happy tanned people on bikes, living their Saturdays to the fullest while all you can do is walk slowly by the lake. You burst into tears.

Strangers offer sympathy. A thickly accented Eastern European woman walking by the lake wishes you good luck. The tech helping you prep for an MRI says she’ll pray for you. You don’t receive these offers well.

But over time, you learn to receive. Friends send gifts. Lotions, potions, pajamas, soft blankets, scarves, hats, online writing courses, and money to pay for the skylight repair. Candles and teas with honey and journals and books. One—who has been through this herself, twice—sends a silver linked bracelet, with charms between links etched with words: courage, love, trust. Another gives you a necklace of purple beads she made. Another sends you a Happiness Stone on a red string. You father brings you a lamp from Carmel, made of shells, and a barrette “for when your hair returns, which it will.”

Friends leave goodies at your door. A bag filled with mini chocolate chip cookies, banana bread, and a grapefruit. Dark green smoothies and ginger beer. Full on meals. Your family has never been so well fed.

You prepare mentally for radiation. You try practicing gratitude for the radiation machine but find it’s better to just bring an eye pillow and close your eyes.

With the end of treatment in sight, you turn giddy with the idea of getting life back.

But this, too, has been life.

You go to the mikveh with your rabbi and husband, to mark the transition and honor the “journey.” From the other side of the shutters, your rabbi shares a midrash about how when the tablets with the 10 Commandments were placed in the ark, two sets were included: the broken ones went in too.

What mends, you wonder, and what remains? What of the experience will fade, in addition to your scars? When the body feels better, it forgets discomfort. You want desperately to make something of this experience, without it making you.

At Rosh Hashanah services, your father wraps you in his father’s tallis. He says, “We’ll share this one from here.”

If you knew you’d live until 95, would there be relief, or is the not-knowing what gives our days meaning?

Maybe life is lived in depth and width. Maybe the length matters less. 

Maybe you have to die a little in order to live.

But you are greedy, now, for life.

A friend invites you to her family’s horse ranch near Gurnee. “Oh girl, you must celebrate with dancing white horses. Really, it’s the only way.”

You celebrate with dancing white horses. It’s the only way.

You pose for a photo on Beth Emet’s front stoop, smiling with your friends from the synagogue wrapped in a circle around you. The community has nourished you. It’s for a poster for the Capital Campaign. More than a building.

It is a sanctuary. Pure and holy. Tried and true.
Deborah Siegel is the author of two books and a pair of boy/girl twins, and the founder of the public voice consultancy, Girl Meets Voice Inc. She's also co-founder of SheWrites.com , Senior Facilitator with The OpEd Project, and a Visiting Scholar in Gender and Sexuality Studies at Northwestern University. Her writing has appeared in venues including The Washington Post , The Guardian , CNN.com , The Forward , Kveller , Slate , The Huffington Post , The American Prospect, Ms., More, Psychology Today, and TriQuarterly . She has been featured on The Today Show, at TEDx, and in the New York Times . She is currently working on a series of essays about the way we raise girls and boys. A lover of all things lake, she’s an ex-New Yorker who bailed on academia but never fully left. Visit her at www.deborahsiegelphd.com (author site) and at www.girlmeetsvoice.com (coaching site).
If you’d like to share your thoughts with the congregation on what sanctuary means to you - a time in which you felt like a sanctuary dwelled within you, or how we can extend sanctuary to those who need it, feel free to reach out to Ellen Blum Barish and David Barish
In Exodus 25:8, God says to Moses, “Create for me a sanctuary, and I will dwell among them.” These words set the building of the Tabernacle into motion. But the verse’s ending has an interesting grammatical anomaly. Instead of telling the Israelites to create a sanctuary so God can dwell within it, the wording suggests that the dwelling may be amon g the people, or within them, suggesting that God can live within us rather than exclusively in a physical sanctuary. This year at Beth Emet we’ll explore the multiples meanings of sanctuary—as physical space to gather as a community for prayer, as spiritual space where we feel safe and whole, and as an attitude that is welcoming and accepting of everyone.

This weekly e-mail project, curated by David and Ellen Barish, allows congregants to express themselves in any of a variety of media: speechmaking, poetry, essay, story, photography, film, paint, sculpture, printmaking, textile, sound or music. If you'd like to contribute, please email Ellen and/or David .

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