Introduction

First - I am doing something weird here. I am not posting the newest one first, so the dates mean very little. I want them in a certain order. If you want my latest posts, you can hit the label "Latest" for the last three or four posts. Or, I will always have them here.

For you who are here to figure out why I am now Jewish, I have developed an “elevator pitch”. You can read it and skip the whole blog if you want! Here it is:

Judaism, for me, is a way to live my values – justice, kindness, helping the poor, and seeking balance – within a community that shows up for one another. Its practices help me to shape who I want to be and can become: Shabbat turns my over-active working brain off for a day; tikkun olam (repairing the world) continues the work I’ve done all my life; giving tzedakah (helping those in need) has always been a moral imperative; the middot (character traits) leads me to try to find balance in areas that I am a bit much or improve where there is a bit too little;  Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur calls for every Jew to reflect, make amends to those we have wronged, and asks us to work to do better in the year ahead. I don’t believe in a Biblical God – but neither do most Reform Jews. What matters is not belief, but action – and a willingness to wrestle with big questions. I wanted to be part of a people who know how to hold on to what matters – and even in the face of many centuries of soul-crushing adversity – still laugh, still love, and still live fully. And eat! It's a community that I am proud to join.

For the rest of you, this blog begins with my moral and ethical development. Later, it turns to why that path led me to Judaism – and why it took me so long to get there. And then it’s about Judaism itself – the things I love, and the things I laugh about.

There will be a list of contents on the right side. Read it all, read what interests you – or, hey, just read the elevator pitch above.

I’ve always been a bit of an iconoclast and a bit of an outsider. That said, I had social skills, so I never had problems making friends. But I was always a little different from my peers – an atheist at five, a “baby dyke” from the get-go, and politically against the tide of my conservative environment growing up. Because I didn’t believe in God, that cut me off from a lot of the traditional paths to community. My parents found theirs in their United Methodist church. And it was a lovely group of people. My parents always helped those in need; they were great role models. Dad worked tirelessly in Habitat for Humanity after retirement, and I often joined him. But they were a Christian missionary group, and eventually I decided I couldn’t stomach that anymore.

From a young age, I cared about justice. In high school, I joined anti-war protests in my hometown of Fairfield, home to Travis Air Force Base, where soldiers shipped out to Vietnam. The group I worked with – the Revolutionary Union – wanted to end the war, but they also wanted a Marxist-Leninist revolution. While I did consider myself a communist at the time, I didn’t like their version at all. I wanted the non-existent democratic communism. They were also humorless, which I considered a fatal flaw.

In college, I jumped headlong into the New Left, feminist movements, and anti-war efforts. We were passionate, committed, and sure of ourselves. Over time, though, I noticed something I didn’t like: our conviction made it too easy to demonize “the other side.” When you start to believe you’re the good guys, it becomes dangerously easy to stop seeing the humanity of the so-called bad guys. I began to pull back, realizing that some of the harm in the world is caused not by malice, but by that very certainty. I’ve kept that lesson close ever since: passion without empathy can do damage.

I found this particularly true in the feminist movement. While I consider myself a passionate feminist, I historically had many critiques of the movement. This is not the place to hash those out – I’ve written about that elsewhere, like here – but the point is, I wasn’t finding a home there anymore.

Over the decades, I kept looking for a group that balanced idealism with self-awareness. I tried the Democratic Party, secular humanists, skeptics’ groups, and service organizations. Each time, something didn’t wholly fit. Sometimes the mission was right but the culture wasn’t. Sometimes the culture was great but the focus was missing.

The truth is, I’m a mix of traits that doesn’t land neatly anywhere. I’m socially progressive but fiscally conservative – willing to pay taxes to help others, but also convinced that money is often badly spent. I believe in regulation, but also that overregulation is real. I think most people, one-on-one, are basically kind, no matter their politics – but groups can turn ugly fast.

Looking back, I can see the thread that connects it all: I’ve always been searching for a moral and ethical community that works toward a better society without losing sight of our shared humanity. I want people who will argue, compromise, and try to understand each other – even across deep differences. And I’ve learned something else along the way: if you want to improve the world, you have to do it without turning other people into villains in your head. Progress has to come with context, compassion, and forgiveness – for ourselves, and for others. Otherwise, you’re just feeding the same divisions you claim to fight.  That’s been my compass for decades.

Next up: How I found the perfect practice for wrestling with the human condition and, slowly, becoming a better version of myself.

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.

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.