My Burning Bush Moment

On Seder night, our Sages urge us to tell the redemption story as if we had lived it ourselves. This is why I regale my family – after the Hagaddah reading and our holiday feast – with the story of my own personal redemption.

My narrative, like the Haggadah, begins with a backstory about my family:

My family were Reform Jews. Ideologically, so. They called their California synagogue a “temple”. Their prayers appeared in English only. Children’s religious education, such as it was, took place not on Shabbatot, but on Sunday mornings, just like our Christian neighbors. We ate matzot on Passover and bacon-lettuce-and-tomato sandwiches on Shabbat. Accentuating our similarities with general Santa Barbara society was a major objective for my father; he was a long-time member of the local Interfaith Committee. He urged his children to invite our non-Jewish friends to join us for Seder, and to share our matzot “crackers” with our classmates at Show-and-Tell time in school.

My family was also Zionistic: when I was 19 and my best friend from Sunday school suggested that we go to an Israeli kibbutz for a six-month work-study program I jumped at the chance. Those five months in Israel were a life-altering experience in every sense of the term. The USA in general and Santa Barbara in particular never again felt like home.

Almost as soon as I returned to the States, I made plans to “return home” to Israel. Two years later, I applied to the Overseas Studies Program at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. However, weird experiences started happening to me in the months leading up to the departure date. I ignored them. I wanted to return to Israel! When the appointed time came, I said goodbye to my friends and family and flew to the embarkation point at New York’s JFK airport where I met the other program participants.

At some point, the organizers led us to a hall where a rabbi was starting a motivational speech. Halfway through and in a sentence I later felt certain that Hashem had intended for me personally, he said, “You must know who you are before coming to Israel.” I knew without any doubt that I did NOT know who I was. Furthermore, I felt it would be a desecration of Hashem’s holy name for me to set foot again in the holy land of Israel until I knew absolutely who I was. The right thing to do, I realized, was to remain in the States, so I walked back to the main departure hall to tell the organizers of my decision. They, of course, thought I was a frightened girl afraid to leave her mommy and daddy. I did not care. I was not going! While our discussion continued, the other participants returned and headed up the ramp towards the exit. The organizers said: “Okay, then, goodbye,” and left me there. Alone.

At that exact moment of aloneness, I had what much later I learned was an out-of-body experience. Suddenly I felt myself hovering next to a corner of the ceiling, tethered to my body by a silver thread. I could not hear sound, or if there was sound, I could not sense it. I do not know how long the experience lasted but when I “returned” to my body, I looked all around me. For the first time in my life, I felt absolutely and existentially alone. It was the most terrifying yet exhilarating moment of my life up to that moment. I phoned my parents. Told them I was remaining here. Asked them if they still loved me. (An important question!) I went outside. It was a summer’s day and the water sprinklers were on. There was a rainbow reflected on the grass. I could not stop looking at it. Its colors were sharper, crisper, more radiant that I had ever seen before.  My senses of hearing and touch felt heightened, too, as though I was newly born into the world.

A few days and many experiences later, I arrived back at my parents’ home. I wanted advice as to the meaning of my fantastic, otherworldly experience. I sought out the only counsel from which my gut told me I could be sure of finding an answer: The Holy Scriptures.

I opened the Tanach at random. The first sentences to reach my eyes were Proverbs: Chapter 5, verses 15-17: “Drink waters from your own cisterns, flowing water from your own well…they will be yours alone, and strangers will have no part of/with you.”

I burst out crying as I had never cried before. Finally, the truth. Hashem wanted me to be me. He wanted authenticity. No more conformity.

Thus began my relationship with Hashem and my relationship with myself.