Rabbi Margot Stein: I think of the Jewish phrase, u-vacharta ba-hayyim, which means "choose life". I put before you the blessing and the curse, therefore choose life. It's the first thing we should be reaching for when we're feeling stressed or in trouble, this idea of choosing life, how do I choose life in this moment. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: My guest today is Rabbi Margot Stein. Margot is a Reconstructionist rabbi. She is a marriage and family therapist. She is a dear friend and a colleague and a teacher. Margot is someone who I turned to as a real exemplar, not to put her up on a pedestal, but as someone who has demonstrated in the hardest, possible ways, in the most beautiful ways what it means to live a life of resilience, how to live through and face down some of the hardest things that life can throw at us and get up again to live, not unchanged, but open to joy and open to connection. Margot, thank you so much for being here. Rabbi Margot Stein: Thank you, Deborah, for having me today. It's really a delight to be with you. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: I wonder if you feel comfortable sharing a little bit about your personal story and what is behind the introduction that I gave to our listeners? Rabbi Margot Stein: So what's behind that is the tragedy that happened to me and, of course, so many people are dealing with difficult and challenging life circumstances. What happened to me was that my son was diagnosed with a rare form of pediatric sarcoma in 2011, and he died in 2015. So the four years really that we spent fighting for his life changed me forever, and saying goodbye to him was certainly the hardest thing I've ever had to do. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Yes. I mean, it was an honor to have opportunities to support Aryeh and you and your family when you were going through it, and always amazing to hear about the grace and the relationships that all of you centered at every step of the way. Rabbi Margot Stein: Yeah, thank you. Thank you. I think that everyone in the college and in my life was incredibly supportive. One of the difficulties was it was happening in New York. He was treated at Sloan Kettering, and so we were running back and forth frantically between Philadelphia and New York in order to manage both sides of our lives. His treatment was extremely intense. He was 20 when he was diagnosed. He was 24 when he died, and trying to save the life of someone like that is an enormous undertaking. We had incredible doctors at Sloan Kettering, and I also went to work on the computer to learn everything I could about rhabdomyosarcoma and about treatments that would be possible and other practitioners around the world who might have something else to offer. So it was an intense time of really all hands on deck trying to save the life of a young man. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: So, I mean, once a rabbi always a rabbi. It's one of the great mostly honors and sometimes challenges of the work that we've chosen and we were in school together. My sense was that, that was at the forefront of your life, except for the brief interludes when he was in remission or the cancer was under control. Did you feel the rabbinical, your rabbinical persona or your rabbinical role receded or was it, did it inform- Rabbi Margot Stein: So, of course, the public part receded. I had to spend some heart-to-heart time with dear friends, figuring out what I could and couldn't do in the rest of my life, right, and learning how to set those limits and say, "I'm sorry," to the families I was serving at the time and the students I was teaching at the time and to say, "I'm pulling back from those activities in order to concentrate on this." The rabbinic part of me was very much a part of my internal support system and how I understood my life as being somehow guided by the hand of God. If that was the case, then this too had to be guided and I had to keep praying and I had to keep listening and had to keep looking for the answers that I needed in order to know what the next step was. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: So there was continuity even as your life turned in such unexpected ways. Rabbi Margot Stein: Well, for me, there was. I mean, for me, I just, I mean, I remember my mantra was I don't want to have any regrets. So no regrets, no regrets, no regrets meant that even though I might be exhausted that I would do the thing that needed to get done, because I didn't want to regret the next day that I hadn't done it. So I really was guided by my internal sense of what I needed to do and what I would regret. Somehow that framing kept me, gave me energy, right, gave me enough strength to keep going even at times when I wanted to give up. I was never able to give up, nor did I want to give up, but I'm just saying sometimes you have to...… Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Right. Maybe your spirit, but your body just reaches the limit and …. Rabbi Margot Stein: Yeah, yeah. So this was a spiritual journey for me perhaps because of my own inner attraction to the spiritual journey and my status as a seeker of God. Also, my training as a rabbi certainly helped me to keep this on the spiritual journey and to keep my eye on the journey that was happening for my son, not just a physical being, but also as a spiritual being. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: So I'm aware, and I'd like to ask you to share with our listeners that when in the aftermath, the seeking, healing and as much wholeness as possible for Aryeh was such a consuming and also coming through for your other children and your partner and your parents, it was so consuming when he crossed over and that meant your entire family crossed over into a new reality when you were ready to look up. I'm aware of that. It's not that you turned away from the rabbinical piece, but you turned into something new. You turned into the training to become a therapist. Rabbi Margot Stein: That's true. Well, first things first, which is after Aryeh died and I spent a certain amount of time just in deep grief and mourning, the [Reconstructionist Rabbinical] College was the first place to welcome me back in to make sure I had a place to come. So I was able to come and be among our hevreh, our peers, and teach. The teaching I did in those years is incredibly powerful and dear to me, and the students- Rabbi Deborah Waxman: So you're teaching rabbinical students. Rabbi Margot Stein: Yeah. So I was at the College teaching rabbinical students. I was actually teaching music and liturgy and prayer. Having just spent four years in very intense prayer, I felt I also knew something about the internal process of connecting with prayer and so that was very, very important. Along the way, I did have a friend who was battling for the life of her daughter. I found that while she was an inspiration to me to keep going in the battle for life and for treatment, she also said I was an inspiration to her because of the strength that I brought and the creativity that I brought to the search for cure and to not taking no for an answer and standing up to authority and all the things that needed to happen. I often found in our long walks and talk together that we would be giving each other advice. Rabbi Margot Stein: One day she said to me, "My daughter and I both feel that you would be an amazing therapist," and I said, "It's so funny. You should say that because I had been thinking at one time in my life to go back to school and become a family therapist, but the time was never right." Her saying that really dropped that seed in and it began to grow. I began to see a way forward and the way forward was in fact to go back to school and become a marriage and family therapist. Council for Relationships here in Philadelphia has a clergy track. So they really do specialize in helping rabbis make the transition to becoming therapists, whether the rabbis just use that as part of their pulpit responsibilities or they transition as I did into clinical work. So that was the place for me and I started my journey by becoming a student again. It gave me a whole new approach to my grieving process and a whole new way to mourn and to grow and to deepen. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: I think I just want to share with our listeners that I saw you a couple of weeks ago, right, when you had completed your training. We're having this conversation in the time of COVID-19 when we're really masked and everything. We missed each other's full faces and smiles, but over a mask your eyes were just emitting. You were shining out light and you said, "I finished. I finished," and to me it was just to... First of all, to see anyone shine is just a blessing. I have seen you I think at the lowest of the low moments at your son's funeral and to see you shining out light with joy and excitement about what comes next. I mean, I said this to you but I keep saying it. This was such a balm to my soul, Margot, so enlivened and so excited. Rabbi Margot Stein: Yeah. Thank you, Deborah, the idea that I actually made it through and made it to graduation. Our graduation was on Zoom like everybody else's graduation this year. We did it and that I made it through this process, was just a tremendous thrill. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: That's great. Rabbi Margot Stein: So thank you for sharing that with me. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Yeah. I'm so glad to be a little part of it. So I'd love to ask, drawing from your rabbinical work, drawing from your marriage and family therapy training, drawing from your life experience, what's a framing that you would bring to offer to our listeners from all of those resources about ways to cultivate resilience? Rabbi Margot Stein: So the word I would bring up here is the word practice, right? We have to practice cultivating resilience the same way we have to practice yoga and we have to practice voice lessons and we have to practice kindness and compassion, right? We aren't innately always able to access those things. We aren't always able to just be compassionate, but we do have to practice and approximate it and approach it and dance around it and try it on and have a dress rehearsal and so forth until we really can do it. I think resilience is another one of those practices that we just have to get on our yoga mat and practice. So for me, actually, yoga was a good metaphor because I did practice yoga through my son's illness. I found that that's what got me through in a lot of ways. I had a place to go. I had something I could do. Sometimes when you're feeling really helpless, having a place to go and the thing to do is really important. Rabbi Margot Stein: So I would say we cultivate resilience by practicing resilience. We get on our mat, which is a metaphor for getting out there in life and doing something. In some cases, that's something is talking to a friend, giving yourself a quiet moment with a cup of tea. Being kind to ourselves and being compassionate towards ourselves is for everyone. A lot of us need to be reminded to do that. A lot of us are a little harder on ourselves than we are on everybody else. If I would say to you if you could treat yourself the way you would treat someone you loved, you would be a lot nicer to yourself than you are. For some reason, we think we're supposed to be hard on ourselves and then treat the people we love differently. We're actually supposed to be also kind to ourselves. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Right. The premise of this podcast really is I looked at mostly from psychology strategies for practicing, for cultivating resilience and saw how powerfully in most instances they align with all kinds of practices, all kinds of ways of being in Judaism. That's part of what led me to the conclusion that that Judaism is structured to cultivate resilience on both the individual level. Rabbi Margot Stein: Yeah, well- Rabbi Deborah Waxman: So that connection with other people, Judaism just doesn't imagine us being as solitary individuals. We imagine that we live lives together as mirrors and as supports and as accompaniers. Rabbi Margot Stein: Well, something I've heard you say is that after catastrophe or trauma that Jewish people have found pathways forward, right, to re-seed and regenerate Judaism, and that is exactly what we're doing on an individual level as well. After trauma, we're finding pathways forward to regenerate our own lives. I think of the Jewish phrase, uvacharta ba-hayyim, which means choose life. I'm thinking that we are taught, therefore choose life. I put before you the blessing and the curse, therefore choose life. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: It's at the tail end of Deuteronomy, the tail end of the Torah and Moses's recap of what's most important, this notion of choice of choosing life. Rabbi Margot Stein: Yeah. It's not really an afterthought even if it comes at the end, right? In a lot of ways, it's the first thing we should be reaching for when we're feeling stressed or in trouble. We should be reaching for this idea of choosing life, how do I choose life in this moment. Sometimes choosing life in this moment it's that simple cup of tea, and sometimes choosing life in this moment is getting out in the street and marching, and sometimes choosing life in this moment is connecting with another person in a really face-to-face way even if it's across Zoom. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: So when we talk about uvacharta ba-hayyim, I want to just say that I think you're right. It's not an afterthought. It's actually the whole point, it's what we're driving toward. I think it appears so concisely at the end of the Torah as a destination, and it's something that was not emphasized much —in my experience with Judaism, I didn't really encounter it and study it as a text and as a mandate until rabbinical school. When I was studying it and really exploring it, when we were in school together, you were singing an absolutely gorgeous setting to it. So when I'm studying it or I teach at other people, I frequently hear your voice and your English translation in my head. Can I prevail upon you to sing that? Rabbi Margot Stein: Yeah, sure, that would be fun. This setting is actually by my friend Bakol Ruben Gellar, and I've been singing it in my head, too. So here's how it goes. (singing). Rabbi Deborah Waxman: You just made me so happy. Thank you. Rabbi Margot Stein: I think it makes the point. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: It's just lovely. Margot, it's a really poignant conversation we'll be having at this moment in time. We're talking in early September and this podcast will go up in the middle of the month, but I just saw a statistic yesterday that said that young folks, who have a higher propensity for suicide than other parts of the population, an unprecedented percentage considered suicide in the summer months, this year, because of how many bad things are happening in the wider world. So when you talk about practicing and including practicing to choose life, that was the subject of another interview that I did in November of 2018 with Susan Levine, a member of our board of governors, who had tried and thank God failed to commit suicide. She says that she has to actively choose life every single day. Rabbi Margot Stein: It's just so hard sometimes to choose life, even though you know that that's what you are being asked to do, right? You're being asked by life to choose life. And the fact that we're here and that we need to live each day — I know in my own life, waking up in the morning and saying, "My son is gone, but I'm still here. What am I going to do with myself today?" Was a question that I faced many, many days. So, and I also think with the young people that it's hard for them to remember that things will get better, that sense of perspective, that yes things will get better, they will change, that sometimes you have to wait a pretty long time for things to change. It could be a year and a half, it could be four years, and things will change. In order to survive that and not give up, we need to find small baby steps of hope that we can do any given day. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Right. They are whatever works for each of us. You can turn to the resilience literature. You can turn to Jewish tradition through the lens of this podcast or Ritualwell or a rabbi, but making that choice — the small choice to take on something is one part of the bigger choice of choosing life. Rabbi Margot Stein: Right. Well, gratitude feeds into that because the choice to be grateful for something, right, the choice to see what there is to be grateful for has to do with lifting up your eyes. As they say in the Bible, she lifted up her eyes and she saw there was a well of water. So, so too, we have to lift up our eyes and see where's the well of water for us on this day. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: It's hard. Sometimes it's about the middle perspective, because there are times when I pivot away. Certain strategies that work one day, they don't work another day. God willing, I have enough of a toolkit that if this doesn't work, then the next thing might, and then the next thing might, and then the next thing might. Rabbi Margot Stein: Well, that's why your... This podcast's emphasis on building resources for people is so important because who's to say which resource is going to be the one that you need on any given day. You really need to have 20 of them at your fingertips to see which one is going to speak to you when you're feeling in some very specific, particular way. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Right. I think that's right. There's that observation that you don't really want to, you don't really want to try to find a community to mourn with at the moment someone dies. Ideally, you want to have that community in place. You don't really want it begin developing your crisis response strategies at the moment of crisis. You want to have practices. Rabbi Margot Stein: So that was what my yoga mat was for me, right? I had a yoga practice before Aryeh got sick and then all during that first year of that very intense chemotherapy that they do the first year, I was on my yoga mat. I remember my yoga teacher saying to me, "I don't know how anyone does this if they don't have practice." Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Yeah, that's right. Rabbi Margot Stein: She knew what I was going through and she was accompanying me. So yes, there was a human connection, but then there was also the practice. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: I will share with you though, my yoga practice began after my beloved sister-in-law died after a four-year battle of metastatic breast cancer. For me, I was listening really acutely while we were talking earlier, for two reasons. One is for me, there was a disruption because I have a theology that really sustains me and nourishes me, and it's not about a personal God. I was saying Kaddish for my sister-in-law for a year, and I was really angry at a God I didn't believe in. There was this confusion and there's distraction there. I started my yoga practice after she died for the most part. I guess I switched my yoga practice. I've been doing Bikram and I switched to one that was much more alignment-oriented. For me, the great gift, I mean, at a certain point I was doing yoga four times a week. The great gift is it got me out of my brain - the poses and the emphasis on alignment, and I do not have a ton of kinesthetic intelligence. The yoga got me to shut my brain off and stop my arguing with that God I didn't believe in. Rabbi Margot Stein: That's right. For one of my clients, riding his bike at top speed is how he gets to that place, right? So for each person, what works for them? I'm not saying we all have to practice yoga by any stretch, but we do have bodies and our mind /body is a connected thing. So sometimes just working the body will help the mind and we can start there. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: That's right, especially for those of us who live way too much in our brains. Rabbi Margot Stein: In our heads, yeah. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Yeah, that's right. I want to turn our conversation over to the season that we're in. When we began, we're talking about it, some of it, but I want to turn it to the Jewish season that we're in. We're entering into the High Holidays. We are in Elul. We are in the month that precedes the High Holidays. This is a preparatory period for us to be doing heshbon hanefesh, an investigation of our lives and our souls and our actions, and to do some of the repair work that might be done, that might be necessary. I wanted to hear your reflections about how you bring all of your training and your wisdom to the High Holiday season. Rabbi Margot Stein: Such an interesting question. As you're speaking, I'm so aware that Elul is a call to practice. The whole month is a time when you call it a time of heshbon hanefesh of actually taking stock of our, of the condition of our souls. We have a whole month in which to practice doing that so that when we encounter the liturgy on the high holidays, we've already been practicing. We're already in the modality of looking at ourselves. Yom Kippur is not the first moment where we say, "Oh, wait, I better check in on myself and see how I'm doing," right? We have a month to prepare and that is part of cultivating resilience right there is cultivating the practice of looking within and taking stock. So that's one thing about Elul that I think is really important. Rabbi Margot Stein: The other thing is, again, going back to these choices is making the choice to live in connection, both connection to ourselves and to our loved ones and to our wider community. Whatever that community looks like for us to be a part of it, to be in connection to claim a spot at this time of year especially as to claim a spot in that community and say, "I want to show up," and raise your hand and be part of it. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: I think that's such an important observation, Margot. I sometimes had been reflecting on what are the distinctions between spirituality and religion? I think there are a lot of different ways to make the distinction, but one is that spirituality is often a solitary journey, even if you're doing it with other people. Certainly Judaism, as a religion is, as I was saying earlier, a collective experience. Our liturgy is significantly in the third [correcting herself] in the first person plural and even at this time when we're atoning it's for *our* sins and the language is always in the collective. I just takes so much comfort in that, like, this is hard work. At the end of the day, I have to do my own accounting, but there are a lot of other people doing it also and I get so much strength from the fact that they're doing it as well. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: I certainly understand people who say, "I grew up to a certain extent where we went to the synagogue and it was about a performance and it was about just enduring along service and listening to a cantor perform," and that's not what we're talking about here. The opportunity is there to be with a group of other people who are also doing this hard and heartbreaking work and to be bolstered off by them. Rabbi Margot Stein: So I want to say something about transpersonal experience, the transpersonal psychology, which is to say that all of us go through certain experiences because we're human. That common ground of us all being human and having certain experiences includes behaviors and feelings and thoughts and spirituality. All four levels of existence are actually transpersonal, and knowing that means that we actually understand each other a lot better than we think we do. So even when we feel alone, someone else is feeling equally alone. In other words, we can be understood. It's a transpersonal experience even to feel alone or lonely. So going through it as a community awakens us to a new level of what is like to be a human among other humans. There is a comfort to me, for me in knowing that I'm one person among many going through my experience. So even when I have a devastating loss, I know that others have had devastating losses, right? So I'm not the first person to have to wake up the next morning after burying their son and figure out how live a life, right? Someone's done it before me at least and probably many, many, many, many mothers have woken up the next morning and had to live. So while my heart goes out to them and my empathy has increased, it also increases my resilience, my ability to get up and to do it myself. Rabbi Margot Stein: You said a word about theology. I wanted to just say, I think that one of my theological principles is that we are here to accompany each other, right? That is one of the reasons that we're here is to accompany each other. So this idea of connecting with your community and of going through this time together is really a fulfillment and it's a place where you can find that strength and that resilience and that ability to go forward. When you're feeling [inaudible ], this is a place to connect. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: I mean, I agree completely. I was talking... My brother, he's religious and he's very active in his synagogue, but he's not doctrinal. I remember talking to him after his wife died and saying to him, "Look at the core," I think. Why are we here? Whatever our religions, traditions, we're here to grow in wisdom. We're here to grow in love and we're here to try to make this world a somewhat better place. We're here to do justice. At the end of the day, we have to... That's what I feel like my holidays are, is this opportunity to get really clear. What are the ultimate things and what are we going to do? Rabbi Margot Stein: Yeah. I mean, how then shall I live is really the question that arises after you look at all of this and you look at the state of the world and you look at the state of our lives internally, externally. You have to say, "How then shall I live," right? It's always, you always have a choice about how you're going to live the next day, the next moment. Making that choice in the next moment is a choice to create your next piece of history, right? You're going to look back on how you're living the next moment, right? We have the power in our minds to look forward and to look back at the same time. So using that power to make the best choice, the choice that you'll want to look back on with pride is something we can do. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: To use the image of the high holidays to write yourself into the book of life and to write that chapter, to write it. Rabbi Margot Stein: Yeah, you get to write it. We actually co-create our reality. We co-create it. We have the pen and it's in our hand. This idea that we are either victims or passive participants in our own lives is just not the way that I see it. I really see that, yes, we have choices and that means that we make active decisions over and over again to write the trajectory of our own lives. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: It's so beautiful. We have to wind down. I know that you along with your beloved friends and partners have recorded a piece, a setting that you wrote to an excerpt from Psalm 27, which is the Psalm that we sing all through Elul and through the high holiday season. For an extended 40-day period, we sing this to bolster, one of the practices I think is to bolster ourselves. I thought we'll end the podcast I think so listeners will hear it at the end, but let's unpack it really quickly. Let's wind down your teaching on Lulay. Rabbi Margot Stein: So Lulay is the last two lines of Psalm 27, and the Psalm exhorts us to trust in God and have courage. So the line that I use in the English part is trust that your heart will be strong. So this is really a moment of Elul through the High Holidays and through Sukkot, where the practice is to trust that our hearts can handle whatever arises, right? Our hearts have the strength that we need, and so I repeat that line, trust that your heart will be strong. So I feel that Lulay is a call to connect with what is eternal and then to put our faith and our trust in our own strength, right, in our own ability to face our lives. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: So beautiful. Margot, thank you so much for this really rich and lovely conversation. I wanted to thank you, and to point our listeners to some resources, they'll be in the show notes. If you want to hear more of Margot's beautiful music, you can go to this website MIRAJ Trio. You can also find many pieces on ritualwell.org, one of the websites of the Reconstructionist movement. If you are interested in exploring a therapeutic relationship with Margot, she practices through the Middleton Center in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. Since everything is online, including therapy these days, she can work with folks in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, according to licensing. So you could find her if you want to have your own conversations with Margot. We'll also be posting other resources for the high holidays, including a link to Lulay and other High Holiday music on reconstructingjudaism.org on the High Holiday page, and Ritualwell has a rich collection of High Holiday resources as well. Love to ask you to subscribe and rate and review on Apple podcasts or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: I am Rabbi Deborah Waxman, and you've been listening to Hashivenu: Jewish Teachings on Resilience. Rabbi Margot Stein: (singing)