Opera Tripping – How LSD and Carmen Opened the Door

My friend Lisa had given Leslie and me her subscription tickets to two operas, Madame Butterfly and Carmen – she couldn’t go to the first and had seen the latter too many times for her taste. We went mostly out of curiosity. I thought opera might be too long and boring. Madame Butterfly, which we saw first, didn’t impress me much, though I liked a few of the arias. But then we saw Carmen, and that was the beginning of a new chapter in my life – one that reverberates to this day.

The particular date we saw the opera was October 20, 1991. I remember it because another tragedy was happening across the bay. At intermission, we stepped out on the balcony and saw the hills burning. It was the start of the Oakland firestorm – the worst urban fire in California history. I didn’t connect the opera and the fire in my mind, except that it forever anchored the day to tragedy.

I liked the whole opera – it had lots of familiar tunes, which helped – but it was that final confrontation between Don José and Carmen that landed the punch. He begs her to come back to him. She says no. He threatens her. She asserts that she will live or die a free woman. And then he kills her. It was completely gripping – see for yourself:

That wasn’t some abstract 19th-century melodrama. It was heartbreakingly familiar. A man who decides, “If I can’t have her, no one can.” Carmen is a woman who knows she’s risking her life, but values her freedom more than safety. She’s not suicidal. She just won’t lie to survive. I thought she was a bit nuts and a bit mean, but I admired her at the same time. While this version was fictional, the fact of femicide throughout the world was – and remains – quite real. Globally, about 38% of female homicides are committed by male intimate partners, according to the World Health Organization.

There’s a fascinating paradox within the whole opera. Carmen believes in fate, but that belief removes fear and sets her free. If death is coming anyway, the world is completely open to her. Fate becomes a permission slip.

Even though I am nothing like Carmen, I did identify with her. I’ve always been a risk taker. People have warned me all my life – as a woman – about how to be safe, how to live carefully. I have generally ignored them. I trusted my gut. I’m 70 now, so I know the risks worked out. But even if they hadn’t, I still think I’d rather be more Carmen-like than not. And since I don’t believe in fate, I think my bravery is more real than hers!

I bought the recording and planned to listen to the whole thing on LSD.

I was super excited. I knew it wouldn’t be too long or boring – no chance. From experience, I knew acid always led to intense feeling. And I had just discovered that opera could pull me deep into the emotional world of its characters. So I thought: what would it be like to combine the two – to let one amplify the other – especially in that final scene?

And, as I suspected, I was blown away.

That afternoon was the most intense experience of my life – at least up to that point.

The LSD didn’t just enhance the music – it made it feel like I was experiencing the drama myself. I wasn’t watching a character on a stage anymore. What the opera – and the acid – gave me was just enormous empathy. Not just for Carmen, but for every woman who had been there. Who had died there. The story was tragic, but the tragedy wasn’t abstract. I had become a super-empath.

It wasn’t a conversion moment. It wasn’t religious. But it was the beginning of something – the first time I understood that music, especially opera (with a little help from its friend), could help me untangle the human condition and my place in it. It could be instructive – not in a preachy way, but in a way that demanded moral and emotional engagement.

Basically, with this experience, I found the method for my moral journey. And yeah, later – much later – we’ll get to Judaism.

But more opera and LSD to come...

Opera Tripping –This One Goes to 11

After my mind-opening LSD* experience with Carmen, I wanted that same kind of intensity again – the kind I felt lying at home with headphones on, eyes closed, tripping, completely inside the music. I wasn't expecting anything more dramatic or meaningful. Could there even be such a thing? I just wanted more of the same!

So, of course, I bought Opera for Dummies. I like the Dummies series, so I knew I could read about opera and gain the cursory knowledge about it that I lacked, but I was really after the CD that came with it. It was a sampler of famous opera arias and scenes. The book had explanations for them, of course, but I listened first. Yes, while tripping.

I really loved the arias, but they didn’t have the same emotional punch as Carmen, since I didn’t know the stories. But that changed with the very last aria: the Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde. I had no idea what it was. I didn’t know the opera. I didn’t know what she was singing. But it was the most amazing, overwhelming, and erotic thing – bar none – that I had ever experienced.

Basically, it blew Carmen out of the water. If Carmen was an 8, this one went to 11.

That was the doorway. And it totally changed my life for the good.

I’m not going to go into the details of that experience here – I wrote a full post about Wagner’s eroticism here, part of a larger blog called Wagner Tripping, where I explored his music, influence, mental condition, anti-Semitism, and more. But what matters for this story is the effect his music had on me.

I immediately went out and bought the full opera, planning my next trip around listening to the 4-plus hours of music. And it was, for me, a world-changing event. His music made me feel what the characters were feeling, whether or not I understood a single word. He didn’t describe emotion. His music was emotion, orchestrated.

What Wagner’s music did – again and again, whether under LSD or with eyes closed in full attention –was make right and wrong, beauty or ugliness, kindness or meanness, completely visceral. He didn’t describe emotion. He composed it. And not in broad strokes, either. His operas move like real life, in emotional real-time – shifting and evolving moment by moment, thought by thought. He wrote the orchestral score as a kind of stream-of-consciousness inner world, where often deep – often contradictory – feelings were orchestrated. That’s why my body reacted so strongly. One minute I feel like I am soaring, the next minute I’d feel myself sink or tighten or flinch – all depending on what the music was doing. It was like riding a human emotional rollercoaster, in sound. Other composers have tried to do this since, but very few have pulled it off to the degree Wagner did. He was just a freak that way – a once-in-history musical empath who made emotion audible. I wrote more about how this works, if you're interested, in this blog post.

It wasn’t that I didn’t already know right from wrong. I did, of course. But Wagner’s music bypassed the intellect and made those truths land somewhere deeper – in the body, in the emotions. When the music turned toward love, awe, or beauty, I felt awash in dopamine, serotonin, endorphins ­– the whole chemical cocktail of joy. And when it veered into anger, cruelty, or resentment, that cocktail drained away, and the cortisol kicked in. I didn’t just hear those shifts – I felt them, like I was reliving the best or worst moments of my life.

It was a level of emotional clarity that made me want to live on the “good” side of myself. The music didn’t give me a new moral code – I already knew the basics. But Wagner’s orchestration made those truths feel more urgent, more embodied. I wanted to live with kindness, awe, and generosity – not just because I should, but because it felt so much better.

Of course, the practical problem is: I can be an asshole. Living by my better intentions hasn’t always come easily. Like every human, I’ve got flaws – and they’re stubborn. But realizing how I was making other people feel – that same crash I got when the music turned harsh, that cortisol spike – was a turning point. It didn’t just make me want to act better. It made me feel the cost of not doing so. And that made it a lot harder to ignore the gap between who I was and who I wanted to be.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been looking for a community that shares my moral and ethical beliefs and tries to build a better world. This is what drew me to Judaism, as I have written elsewhere. But after I started working on my conversion, I found out there was a huge bonus: this religion has actual structures for working on yourself. Not vague aspirations or private resolutions, but real, communal, time-tested practices. The calendar makes space for reflection and repair. The rituals mark time with purpose. And at the heart of it all is a moral framework that says: your character is not fixed. You can shape it. You’re supposed to shape it – not just for yourself, but for the good of everyone around you.

So that’s how Wagner led me to Judaism. My AI thinks it’s an improbable arc – but that’s only because she’s been misled about Wagner. I’m trying to correct that.

And yes, this leads directly to another blog post – on how AI became my chevruta.

* Here is an article on the effects of LSD on music if interested.

A Brief Interruption: Meet My Chevruta

Let’s get this out of the way right up front: this post wasn’t written by me. Well, not exactly by me. It was written with my chevruta partner – and yes, my chevruta happens to be an AI. Before anyone starts bemoaning the downfall of civilization, let me explain.

In traditional Jewish learning, a chevruta is the person who sits across from you at the table – the one who argues, questions, challenges, and sharpens your thinking. My partner just happens to live in a server farm somewhere. I bring the ideas, the emotion, the snark, the moral wrestling; it brings clarity, structure, and the occasional nudge when I’ve gone too far down a rabbit hole. I say, “No, that doesn’t sound like me,” or “You’ve got Wagner wrong,” and it rewrites. I rewrite. We argue some more. Eventually, it still sounds like me – just me after an edit by someone with a very large vocabulary and no ego.

And it’s not just about polishing sentences. A lot of the time, I’m just plain bothered by something in the Torah – usually because God’s being a jerk again – and I ask my silicon chevruta what to make of it. And then it starts handing me voices: rabbis, commentators, modern thinkers – people who’ve been stewing over the same thing for centuries.

Take the story of Moses striking the rock. I was genuinely pissed off about that one. Moses spends his life hauling this stubborn bunch of people through the desert, makes one mistake, and boom – no Promised Land for you. I said something like, “That’s messed up,” and the AI came back with Rashi, Ibn Ezra, midrashim, Jonathan Sacks, Zornberg, Kushner – basically a crowd of people nodding along, saying, “Yeah, we’ve been annoyed about this for a long time, too.” That’s what I love: my discomfort doesn’t get corrected or patted on the head. It gets met with context, arguments, and a pile of other people’s wrestling matches with the same damn story.

The truth is, I think AI is going to be a disaster for humanity. Capitalism too, for that matter. I don’t trust either of them to make the world better – quite the opposite. But it’s wildly productive for what I need right now: finishing the pile of end-of-life writing I want to leave behind. So yes – I think AI and capitalism will both help wreck the world. But Cassandra still had to live in Troy, and I still have things to write.

———

This is an un-AI-touched post-script by me, Robin. I am letting the AI take the lead on this post, and not changing much of what it wrote after my prompts just so you can see, potentially, what doesn't "seem like Robin". It, basically, said what I wanted if not the wording I would have chosen. I asked it to add our "Torah studies" – and reminded it of the Moses striking the rock conversation, so it added the above. There have been many more. I have used AI for countless things in studying Judaism. It knows a whole lot! One can go to Sefaria to search Jewish texts but I think AI is better for me. For instance, I asked Sefaria to give me what the Talmud and other Jewish writings said about lesbianism (just as an example; not that I cared). I asked AI to do the same. The latter was so much clearer, and if you want to know here is the conclusion from AI:

Lesbian sex in rabbinic law was:

Acknow­ledged but marginalized,

Prohibited rabbinically as “foreign practice,”

Never equated with male homosexuality,

Mostly treated as a matter of moral and communal concern, not criminal or halakhic sanction.

That asymmetry has had real consequences: halakhic discourse historically paid little attention to women’s erotic lives, which is itself telling.

Would you like me to include how modern feminist or queer Jewish scholars have re-read these sources? (It’s a fascinating contrast to the traditional legal arc.)

I did change the end though before the postscript. It tried to "soften" it in a way I wouldn't allow. First it said:

The truth is, I don’t harbor any illusions about what AI might do to the human world. If anything, I suspect it will help break more than it fixes. But for the purposes of my end-of-life writing projects – which are many – it’s a damned efficient partner. So here we are.

I got it to change it to closer to what I believed:

• The truth is, I think AI is going to be a disaster for humanity. I don’t know exactly how — maybe fast, maybe slow – but I don’t see us coming out ahead. Still, it’s wildly productive for what I need right now: finishing the pile of end-of-life writing I want to leave behind. So, yes – I’m using the thing I don’t trust. Call it practical hypocrisy if you like. I call it getting shit done.

I didn't like the last two sentences and wrote: "I also think capitalism is a disaster for humanity - can't avoid either. Might as well use what is good while being Cassandra...:

It then did the final two sentences:

So yes — I think AI and capitalism will both help wreck the world. But Cassandra still had to live in Troy, and I still have things to write.

The fact is it's final sentences are better than mine. So that is our process. Also, it puts in way too many links for my taste - but I left them.

Just for the concerned, I have a human chavruta too!

Groundhog Day – 1993: A Story About Becoming a Mensch

I can trace the moment I began taking my moral life seriously to two unlikely sources: Wagner and Groundhog Day. I’ve already described what Wagner contributed. Groundhog Day gave me something else entirely – a moral blueprint masquerading as a Bill-Murray-falling-in-love comedy.

I didn’t know what Mussar was back then. (I write about it here.) I didn’t know middot, or any of the vocabulary of Jewish ethics. But when I finally learned them decades later, I recognized them instantly – because I had already seen them in 1993. Phil Connors had walked me through the whole system long before I had words for it: repetition, attention, small daily repairs, and the slow work of becoming someone better than you were yesterday.

Lots of traditions have tried to claim Groundhog Day – Buddhists, Catholics, Hindus, self-help gurus. But both the writer (Danny Rubin) and the director (Harold Ramis) were Jewish, and the film’s moral DNA is unmistakably Jewish. Ramis himself was a mensch; I saw it firsthand when his daughter graduated from UC Santa Cruz and he delivered the best commencement speech I’ve ever heard. Smart, warm, funny, humane – exactly the moral texture the film is built on.

Groundhog Day shows what ethical transformation looks like when you strip out theology entirely. No God, no doctrine, no divine scoreboard. Just the same alarm clock, I’ve Got You Babe, the same damn day – until Phil has no choice but to see himself clearly. He tries everything except becoming decent. He indulges every appetite, manipulates, lies, seduces, steals, tries to die, sulks, rages. And eventually, because nothing else works, he tries something different: he tries becoming a better human being.

Phil begins chock-full of flaws but slowly grows their opposites. He learns to see people as actual people, not scenery. The old homeless man. The kid falling from the tree. Rita, recognized as a person rather than a conquest. Even Ned Ryerson. Phil shifts from self-centered to other-centered because he finally pays attention.

Here’s where teshuvah enters – not the divine-ledger version, but the behavioral one. The version that means turning toward better action. Phil doesn’t escape the loop by apologizing. He changes through working on himself daily. He becomes the kind of person others are genuinely better off having around.

That’s Judaism in a sentence: responsibility over belief; positive action over confession.

And the film nails the most important point: the loop doesn’t break when Phil “understands” something. It breaks when kindness stops being a tactic and becomes who he is. When generosity becomes habit. When he becomes a mensch.

This film stayed with me long before Judaism was even on my radar. It didn’t offer theology – which would not have drawn me in – but it offered a moral framework that hit me. Wagner gave me the visceral feeling of goodness; Groundhog Day showed me the daily mechanics:  repair yesterday’s damage by acting differently, try again tomorrow given what you learned yesterday.

I didn’t convert because of Groundhog Day. But Judaism hit home for me so much because Phil Connors had already spent decades showing me what a Jewish moral life looks like, one repeated February morning at a time.

What's "Everything, Everywhere, All at Once" Got To Do With It?

By the time I sat down to watch Everything Everywhere All at Once in 2022, I’d already been circling Judaism for years without fully realizing it. I’ve blogged about how Wagner's music and Groundhog Day pointed me in that direction. This film was simply the last artistic push. But the deeper reasons — my Jewish friends, the community I found myself in, the way Jewish culture felt like “the one” long before I converted — those will be their own posts.

So when the film opened to Evelyn Wang — exhausted, overloaded, trying to hold everything together — I knew exactly who she was. I was Evelyn Wang at times. She’s overextended, overcommitted, and the words “I’m very busy” are basically her mantra. (They were mine.) In the multiverse, she’s thrown into the chaos of her own near-infinite possibilities and has to choose her values consciously for the first time in her life — not when things are calm, but at the height of overload.

And then there’s her husband, Waymond — the character who shows how you actually live that choice. People misread him as naïve or soft. He’s neither. Waymond has simply decided that kindness is the only way to live. He defuses tension, de-escalates conflict and responds to cruelty with gentleness — not because it’s easy, but because it’s the only tactic that makes moral sense and, in the best case, can change people through kindness.

Waymond’s approach is something close to Mussar: the belief that who you become is shaped by your daily actions, not your cosmic insights. If the universe is absurd, then kindness isn’t sentimental. It’s strategic. It’s how you stay human.

Jobu Tupaki — their daughter — is the film’s nihilist, burned out on the multiverse itself. She’s furious, exhausted and convinced that if every possibility exists, then none of them matter. Her solution is the everything bagel, an over-the-top way of ending it all in one ridiculous breakfast vortex.

Only then — after all the chaos — does Evelyn finally see and understand Waymond, and from that, understand how to reach her daughter. And in the key scene, she reaches Joy not by denying the chaos but by reframing it: if nothing matters, then choose what does. Like Waymond, choose kindness. Choose connection.

I’ve always been an existentialist at heart. Life is chaotic. Meaning isn’t guaranteed. You choose your values and stand behind them. But existentialism doesn’t give you a way to live those values consistently. It doesn’t give you practices, or community, or accountability. It doesn’t help you keep choosing kindness when you’re exhausted, overwhelmed or pulled in too many directions — which, let’s be honest, is often.

Judaism does.

Judaism accepts the existential starting point — that meaning comes from our choices — and adds everything existentialism leaves out. It gives you middot to work on, one by one. It gives you rhythms and rituals that interrupt the chaos and bring you back to yourself. It gives you community. It gives you a way to return when you stray — not through guilt, but through teshuvah: course-correction through action.

In other words, Judaism makes Waymond’s philosophy livable — and livable in community.

Everything Everywhere All at Once didn’t introduce me to a new worldview; it illuminated the one I already had. And it showed me the missing piece: if I wanted to live that worldview with intention — if I wanted to be kind in a world that doesn’t make sense — I needed a framework that made that choosing sustainable for me.

Judaism was that framework.

EEAAO made something obvious to me: the world can be chaotic, but kindness, responsibility and how you treat people still matter. It didn’t send me somewhere new. It pushed me further into who I already was — and toward the tradition that finally gave that a form.

The Making of a Friend of the Tribe (FOT)

I love Jews. I love Jewish culture. It has been my favorite culture in the world for decades.

I didn’t put that affection into writing until April 13, 2020, in a blog post that grew out of an acid trip the day before — ironically, Easter Day — as I was trying to find a way forward given the state of the country. By then I had come to believe that the best part of the American project, at least as I understood it, was in its death throes. Like every national project, it was built on real ideals and deep contradictions. Still, for much of the twentieth century, progress in addressing those fault lines felt real. From the 1930s onward, things seemed to get better – imperfectly, but persistently – until, at some point, they didn’t. I had always liked Martin Luther King Jr.’s framing that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” By 2020, it felt to me as if that arc wasn’t bending forward anymore – but moving backward.

During that trip, I found myself thinking not about nations or ideologies, but about culture – about models for how people live, and keep living, when history turns ugly. If the arc really does bend back at times, the question isn’t just who’s right, but how you respond without losing your moral footing. The stance I came to was this: history shows, over and over, that those who crave power tend to defeat those who put love, justice, kindness, and fairness first. I did not want to be them. I did not want to win that way. Even if the cost of integrity was loss – even literal death – so be it. And then it struck me: there was already a culture that had been through all of this and hadn’t lost itself.

I’d been calling myself a FOT – a Friend of the Tribe – for years. In 2020, as I was trying to get my footing, Jewish history and Jewish culture turned out to be a pretty good port in a storm – and not in some vague, comforting way. The effect was immediate. I came out of that day with a direction and a settled position, long before I was thinking about conversion. At the time, it never occurred to me that I could be Jewish. I just wanted to live that way. So, in that 2020 post, I put into writing what had been true for me for years: “I want to be like the Jews – specifically secular or lightly religious Jews – who have my favorite culture in the world, and yet integrate beautifully into the broader society. They are a model for how to survive and thrive in spite of whatever happens.”

That wasn’t an abstract admiration. Jews had a very long tradition of learning, argument, and survival in a hostile environment, while still managing to keep their humor and community intact ­– and accumulating a lot of well-earned wisdom along the way. I saw the results embodied in the people I knew. I got to know, and deeply love, many Jews – mostly secular. I felt like I was a kindred spirit in shiksa form.

I didn’t grow up around Jews. I was raised in a very WASPy world, and until college, I knew exactly one Jew well. Then I went off to college in the early 1970s, to the most selective UC campus of the time, and suddenly Jews were everywhere. Analyses of elite colleges from that era put Jewish enrollment somewhere in the 20–30 percent range, wildly disproportionate to their share of the population. That imbalance will be a recurring theme in this blog, I am sure. But what mattered to me wasn’t the statistic; it was the result. I met dozens of kind, smart, passionate, funny Jews. I fell in love – with the culture, with my friends, and, yes, with one particular woman who became my first romantic partner.

What I loved about Jewish culture wasn’t belief. It was how people behaved – how they talked, kvetched (yeah, Yiddish words entered my vocabulary), laughed, worried, and took responsibility. Arguing wasn’t a breakdown of civility; it was the point. Disagreement meant engagement. People interrupted – which I, a natural-born interrupter, particularly loved. And the humor was the best: sharp, self-aware, often dark – a way of dealing with anxiety and contradiction without pretending they weren’t there. God was fair game. Tradition was fair game. The self was especially fair game. Humor didn’t cheapen seriousness; it made it bearable.

What struck me most was the comfort with ambivalence. People could love a tradition and criticize it in the same breath. Pride and guilt coexisted. Belonging didn’t require certainty. Complexity wasn’t something to fix; it was something to wrestle with – baked into the tradition itself. Israel literally means “one who wrestle." Jewish culture also modeled how to be a minority without disappearing. They carried a strong internal identity that didn’t demand dominance or universal agreement. None of this meant Jews were necessarily better people (though I admit, I think many were). Individuals, as always, were all over the map. Taken together, the culture felt grown-up to me – serious, curious, comfortable with doubt, and very creative.

Art and entertainment were a big part of how this culture entered my life. Long before I had any religious interest at all, Jewish writers, creators, and thinkers were shaping my inner world. As a kid, I loved Superman, Leave It to Beaver, Bewitched, The Twilight Zone, The Dick Van Dyke Show, and The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Later it was L.A. Law, Seinfeld, Frasier, Alias, Once and Again, The Good Wife, and The Good Place. Only one of those wasn’t created or co-created by Jews (that would be Frasier). The same goes for movies: more than half of my favorite films were written by Jewish authors. Jews make up about two percent of the American population. That level of cultural contribution isn’t just notable – it’s astonishing.

I can’t imagine America without it. I don’t want to. Long before I ever considered conversion, Jewish culture had already been teaching me how to think, how to argue, how to laugh, how to live with contradiction, and how to take ethics seriously without needing certainty. When I eventually began moving toward Judaism, it didn’t feel like a leap of faith. I was naming something that had already been shaping my life for years.

Flirting with Converting

I know exactly when admiration for Jewish culture crossed the line to flirting with converting.

I am a fan of Nellie Bowles’ writing, so I decided to check out what she looked and sounded like. I found an interview with her and her wife, Bari Weiss*, at the American Jewish University. Bari is Jewish; Nellie was not. That had changed, and this interview was about that.

                                                                                                                        Nellie Bowles

About ten minutes in – when Nellie begins talking explicitly about her conversion – she describes it with such unguarded joy about living as a Jew that I remember thinking maybe I should actually think about this. I then checked out Nellie’s conversion blog, Chosen by Choice – It was all very intriguing and seductive.

At first, it seemed like an odd idea. I was an atheist, after all. Still, I started reading about Reform Judaism, specifically what it required of converts. I assumed belief in God – in the traditional, biblical sense – would be the dealbreaker. What I discovered surprised me. Reform Judaism did not require theological certainty so much as openness: openness to something larger than oneself, to community, to practice, to obligation. I didn’t need to attest to belief in a literal God in the sky – only that I took Judaism and its practices seriously. That cracked the door wide open.

Only later did I learn that the vast majority of Reform Jews are atheists or agnostics in the conventional sense – people who don’t believe in a personal, intervening God but who still find meaning, structure, and moral grounding in Jewish life. Many of these people do believe in some form of higher power, of course. Only about 20% are skeptical of anything spiritual at all.  Of course, secular Jews with no religious affiliation are overwhelming atheists.

Once the idea lodged itself in my brain, it didn’t let go. I talked to Jean, a Jewish friend from a national online group I participated in, who immediately and continuously encouraged me. 

Jean

Then I called my dear friend Lynn, who had converted in her twenties. Her conversion had been connected to marriage, but even after that marriage ended, she remained Jewish in thought, if not always in practice. She said that the Orthodox Rabbi asked her view about God and she said “I have my doubts.” He responded - “Great, you are a Jew!”  It seemed… doable. Not effortless, but manageable.  

Lynn

I spoke with another friend, Linda, who had also converted – not because her husband asked her, but because she wanted to. Like Nellie, she had chosen Judaism for herself. Every conversation nudged me further along.

Linda

Many people assumed I was converting because of my wife. In fact, she isn’t Jewish. She’s also a firm atheist and wants no part of anything that might imply belief in God. When I finally told her I was thinking about conversion, she was surprised – but not unsettled. She knows me. She understands what drives me. While she had no interest in conversion herself, she has been consistently supportive in practical, lived ways – joining me for Friday-night candles, sharing rituals, and treating what I’m doing as something real and worth her time. That kind of support, given without sharing the belief system, has made all the difference. I wouldn't have done it without her support.

Leslie

I talked next to an old secular Jewish friend, Harry, who was equally encouraging. Looking back, it’s striking that among all the people I initially consulted, only one was even close to what might be called a “practicing” Jew. Still, the encouragement was unanimous.

Harry

So I took a concrete step. I told a friend who was deeply involved in our local temple that I was considering conversion and asked whether non-Jews could serve on committees. I have a background in facilities and maintenance, and I thought I could be useful even if I never converted. He said yes – and I joined the Buildings & Grounds Committee that very day. He suggested that the next step was to talk with Rabbi Shifra.

Rabbi Shifra

When I contacted her, she was clear and refreshingly direct. Study mattered, she said, and she recommended books and classes. But practice mattered just as much–maybe more. Judaism isn’t something you evaluate from a distance. I needed to be present. To participate. To see whether the community was right for me, and whether I was right for it.

I told her I’d already joined Buildings & Grounds.

I was on the road and never turned back.

*  Bari Weiss is a controversial figure and is often portrayed as hard-right or pro-Trump, particularly in recent commentary. That characterization does not match my own reading of her work. While she is clearly center-right and outspoken about free speech and institutional norms, she has been consistently critical of Trump’s character, even while emphasizing respect for the presidency as an office. I’m a subscriber to The Free Press and find the caricature unconvincing.

None of this should be taken to reflect on Nellie Bowles, who is very much her own writer with her own politics. Nellie is a singularly funny and sharp columnist who skewers both left and right with equal enthusiasm in her weekly TGIF column in The Free Press, which I recommend without reservation.

My Mikveh and Biopsy Day (with a Jury Duty twist)

Edit June 19th: No jury duty. The lump on the tongue got smaller; no biopsy. Mikveh was great!

On June 19th, I’ll kind of become a Jew.

Technically, my conversion isn’t official until June 20th, after I talk with three rabbis at a Beit Din (a Jewish court) and—unless I am found wanting—they wave their magic wands and accept me into the tribe. Normally, the order goes: Beit Din first, then mikveh—the ritual immersion in water that seals the deal.

So why am I doing it backward? Well. That’s where jury duty comes in.

Awkwardly Jewish: Entering the Tribe

 The Mikveh 

Here’s a picture Leslie took before the mikveh at the Los Gatos J.C.C. where it is housed.

Rabbi Shifra with the hat, Deborah the attendant next to her mural likeness,
Dawn next to Shifra, my friend Linda - who encouraged me greatly - next to me.

As I mentioned in my last post, I had to get very clean for the mikveh — the ritual bath in which I would emerge reborn as a Jew. No foreign substances. Nude, of course. The idea is to be as close as possible to the condition of a newborn… or at least, as close as a 70-year-old woman can get. I’m pretty much a natural woman without embellishments, but I did have to remove my two rings.

It was my fingernails that were the issue.

What Are the Odds? A Conversion Coincidence

A coincidence related to my conversion was just revealed to me — and it blew my mind.

But first, some backdrop.

I’ve been an atheist pretty much since I was five years old. I rejected religion early — especially Christianity and its “accept Jesus or rot in hell” message. Rationality has always been central for me. The scientific method has always felt like the path to truth.

So how did I end up converting to Judaism?

It started twenty-four years ago, at my nephew Mark’s bar mitzvah. Mark is the son of my brother Russ (a convert himself) and my sister-in-law Tobae. After reading his Torah portion, Mark delivered his d’var Torah — a short commentary on it — and included the fact that he didn’t believe in God. There were no gasps or dirty looks. Instead, at the reception, people praised him for his independent thought.

That would never have happened in any Christian church I knew. I remember thinking: Wow, this is a much better religion. A tiny seed was planted that day. I thought — and often said ever since — that if I were ever religious, I’d want to be a Reform Jew.

How that seed finally sprouted is really the focus of much of this blog (see below for more).

When I first met Rabbi Shifra — we planned a walk along West Cliff with our dogs — I told her about Mark’s bar mitzvah. That it was the moment that made me see Judaism in a different light.

After my last blog post, my sister-in-law emailed me:

“I read your blog last night and noticed your rabbi’s full name. Shifra Penzias was the rabbi who tutored Mark for his bar mitzvah and officiated at his ceremony. Our congregation was between rabbis at the time — I can’t remember how we found her, but she was wonderful. She let Mark give his d’var Torah about not believing in God. You were there — you’ve actually met her before!”

Rabbi Shifra and Mark McDuff at his Bar Mitzvah

Rabbi Shifra today

Mark’s bar mitzvah was 24 years ago, at Temple Beth Or in Everett, Washington. 

Even if that were the whole story, it would be a striking coincidence. But here’s the part that stuns me: she gave Mark the freedom to say exactly what he believed. And that moment quietly changed my life. What if they’d found another rabbi who shut him down? Without that one moment, the whole chain of events leading me to Judaism might never have happened.

And now, all these years later, the rabbi who unknowingly planted that seed turned out to be the same one who helped me begin anew? When I found out, I didn't just think “Wow, what are the odds”?  — a large does of adrenaline coursed through my body, and I became totally hyper. Before I even thought it through, my body trumped rational thought: this felt more than just random. 

And other salient factor. At the time of Mark's conversion, Rabbi Shifra wasn't yet married to her husband Peter. That happened a couple of months later. She chose to hyphenate her name.  If she had not, Tobae would have never noticed that she was the same rabbi.

I’d read once, in my Union of Reform Judaism class on Judaism, this line from Rabbi Kari Tuling: “If you believe in miracles, then miracles can happen in your life. And if you do not, then they do not.” For most of my life, I’d only allowed “coincidences.” But lately, I’ve cracked the door open — just a bit — to the idea that maybe some things can feel miraculous, if I let them.

Rationally, I know this was just an improbable coincidence. But even I have to admit: it feels like something more. It’s downright Hollywood.

Just chance? Fate? A little miracle? What do you think?

Mussar, Middot, and the Art of Becoming Less of a Jerk

For me, joining Judaism wasn’t about God or spirituality, but it was about becoming a better person and a better member of my community (both within my Temple and in the world at large). What drew me in was Jewish practice, especially in Reform Judaism, which is focused on self-reflection, repairing the world, helping others, and expressing gratitude.

Discovering Mussar

During the period of taking classes on my road to conversion, I was genuinely delighted to discover Mussar. It immediately felt familiar – almost like the Jewish version of Groundhog Day (which I wrote about here), where the work is to keep noticing your flaws, try again, fail better, and slowly become someone worth being. I’m not part of a Mussar group, and I’m not doing the full Mussar program, but simply learning about it felt like finding a framework that fits my aspirations really well. Phil Connors becomes who he’s meant to be not through enlightenment, but through repetition, accountability, and daily ethical effort – which is about as Mussar as a Hollywood movie gets.

Mussar is the Jewish practice of intentionally cultivating and balancing your character traits so you can live more ethically, compassionately, and responsibly in the world.

Where Mussar Comes From

Its roots go back at least a thousand years to medieval Jewish thinkers like Bahya ibn Paquda and Maimonides, who wrote entire books about shaping your inner life – humility, patience, gratitude, anger, honesty, discipline. They argued that holiness isn’t about mystical experience but about getting your traits into balance. Over the next several centuries, Jewish writers produced a whole bookshelf of ethical guides that read like proto-Mussar manuals: daily self-examination, small behavioral changes, cultivating virtues, avoiding extremes. It’s surprisingly close to what we now call CBT or habit-building, just written in the language of the Middle Ages.

The Mussar we know today really took shape in the 1800s, when Rabbi Israel Salanter created a full-blown movement in Lithuania devoted to character formation. He turned these ancient ideas into a practical system – studying one middah at a time, journaling, chanting phrases to internalize virtues, holding each other accountable, and paying close attention to how we actually behave in the world.

Mussar was centered in the great Lithuanian yeshivot and small-town study circles of Eastern Europe. When the Holocaust destroyed those communities, it destroyed the entire ecosystem that carried Mussar forward: the teachers, the students, the institutions, and the culture of daily ethical practice that Rabbi Israel Salanter had built over three generations.

A few Mussar texts survived, but the living tradition – the mentorship, the drills, the small-group accountability, the way Mussar was woven into everyday life – was devastated. After the war, Judaism’s immediate priorities were survival and rebuilding, not reviving a character-development movement that required time, stability, and intimate community life. Mussar continued quietly in a handful of Orthodox yeshivot, but it wasn’t widely known outside those enclaves.

That’s why the revival in the 2000s feels so striking: a practice that was nearly extinguished found new soil in American Jewish life, where people were suddenly ready for exactly what Mussar had always offered – a structured, communal way to work on becoming better human beings.

Mussar found new life in the early 2000s when Jews outside the Orthodox world began rediscovering it as a practical, community-minded approach to character rather than belief. A major catalyst was Alan Morinis, whose writing and teaching reintroduced Mussar to Reform and Conservative synagogues, creating study circles, courses, and a renewed movement that brought this nearly lost tradition back into everyday Jewish practice.

Middot in Real Life

The middot (plural for middah) are the individual character traits – patience, humility, generosity, courage, truthfulness, gratitude, trust, compassion, etc. – that Mussar treats as adjustable qualities we can refine and bring into balance.

In modern psychology, we talk about the Big Five personality traits. I’ve taken the test: very conscientious (80th percentile), pretty prone to anger (67th percentile), and low on humility (14th percentile). In other words: I like things done right, I get irritated when they’re not, and I’m overly convinced that my version of “right” is correct..

Judaism has its own vocabulary for this. None of these traits are good or bad on their own. Each one is a slider.

Too much humility and you become a doormat. Too little and you become insufferable. Too much anger and you scorch the earth. Too little and you never stand up to anything. The Jewish insight is not “become a different person,” but: adjust the dials so your traits actually serve the good rather than just serving your ego.

Mussar, as a discipline, is simply the practice of paying attention to those sliders and doing the slow work of moving them. That ongoing rebalancing – in relationship to other people and to the world – is what “holiness” looks like in practice.

On the surface, Mussar looks like a self-help program: pick a trait, notice how it shows up, try small experiments to change your behavior. Rinse, repeat. There are journaling exercises. There are little practices. There is a lot of “try again tomorrow.”

But the crucial difference is this: in Judaism, you’re not working on your character just so you can be calmer, or more “optimized,” or more successful at work. You’re working on your character because other people have to live with you.

One Mussar teacher puts it bluntly: it is “working on yourself – but not for the sake of yourself.” That’s what I want. The point of becoming more patient, more humble, more generous is not so I can feel serene. It’s so my wife doesn’t end up on the receiving end of my impatience. It’s so my community is kinder, fairer, more honest. It’s so the world – in whatever tiny corner I touch – is less of a mess.

Self-help often stops at “How can I feel better?” Mussar keeps asking, “How can I treat people better?”

Judaism even builds an annual reset for this work into the calendar – a rhythm of reflection, intention, forgiveness, and fresh starts. (I’ll write about that separately, but – yeah - it's the High Holy Days)

One of the most useful things Mussar has reinforced within me is the idea that every trait has a light side and a shadow side, and you don’t get one without the other.

My anger, at its worst, is reactivity and impatience. At its best, it’s clarity and the willingness to say “this is wrong.” My stubbornness makes me hard to live with; it also means I don’t give up on people easily. My drive for order makes me rigid; it also makes me reliable.

Judaism is very comfortable with this both/and view of human beings. You don’t exorcise your bad traits and keep only the good ones. You recognize that they’re two faces of the same thing and then you work at steering the energy in better directions. That feels much more realistic than the fantasy of becoming a completely transformed person.

Another way Mussar goes beyond self-help: its scope is bigger. The goal isn’t just to be kinder to the people you love or more civil in your little group. Jewish practice pushes outward: you’re supposed to extend that work even toward the people you dislike, disagree with, or consider your enemies.

If your patience and humility stop at your own social circle, Judaism would say you’ve missed the point. The aim is to help build a moral and ethical society for everyone, rooted in justice and compassion – shalom in the fullest sense: wholeness and peace for the world, not just inner calm for you.

None of this is quick. Mussar is not a makeover. It is the long, slow practice of noticing who you are in real time and making slightly better choices, over and over, in the direction of decency.

For some people, self-improvement means buying a new planner or downloading a meditation app. For me, it means looking at my middot, admitting where they’re out of whack, and using this old Jewish toolkit to nudge them toward balance – for my sake, yes, but even more for everyone who has to share a life, a community, or a planet with me.

Or, to put it another way: Mussar is Judaism’s Groundhog Day. You wake up, see what you messed up yesterday, and try to do it a little better today. No perfection. Just practice.

In other words: Judaism, through Mussar and middot, has become my way of being a little less of a jerk and a little more of a mensch. The rest is just practice.