Transitions

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The sun came out. I can not believe it's taken until July for me to feel like switching off my electric blanket at night. But anyway, I was lucky enough to spend the two sunniest days so far this year celebrating things.

Sunday, my dear friend RabbiHugenholtz was ordained as a rabbi, and yesterday, my first cohort of doctors whom I've taught personally graduated, and are now qualified to practise medicine on real human beings. There's something almost mystical about a ceremony that takes an ordinary person and transforms them into Somebody whose role commands respect. Well, in the end, not really an ordinary person, both the new rabbis and the new doctors have undergone five years of rigorous and taxing training, and even before that had to be pretty special already to be accepted onto their vocational courses. But there's still a moment when they cross the threshold from being someone who happens to have completed lots of education, to being a Professional with real power over people's lives. The fact that one of the transitions was explicitly religious and the other wasn't is almost irrelevant here; in many ways, a Doctor is a more hallowed role than a Rabbi. It's not symbolic power that was conferred on them, it's literally life and death, it's the right to do things to members of the public that would be serious crimes if anyone who hadn't passed through that transition did them.

The ordination was just lovely. I've been friends with RabbiHugenholtz since fairly early in her long, arduous journey to this point (though not since the beginning, her life circumstances have meant that it took her several years to even get to the point which most people would recognize as the start of the process.) And yes, rabbinical training is always hard, it's meant to be hard, but some of the stuff that she had to deal with went way beyond the normal level of hard. I'm really proud of the small role I played in helping her to get through that, not very much, just sometimes spending hours on the phone listening to her while she talked herself out of giving up when anyone less than super-humanly stubborn would have quit.

And of course, there's the community side of the equation. Every time I attend a big London Progressive event I remember just how much I'm missing out on by living in the provinces. So many people there I knew from my younger days when I was much more directly involved in the communal side Progressive Judaism. I feel like an exile who occasionally meets a traveller bringing some news of home, in some ways. The service was the best of what Progressive liturgy can be, concise, every word meaningful, with both an appropriate sense of gravitas and the real joy you get with hundreds of people who know all the tunes and really get into the spirit. I wasn't sure about having a cantor, I kind of associate that with a very stuffy Victorian style of service which is essentially an operatic performance by a talented singer. But Cantor Heller was just amazing; she has a heart-breakingly beautiful voice but she was using it to lead the congregation rather than to put on a performance.

And Dr Clenman's ordination address was a tour de force; that woman has one of the sharpest minds I've ever encountered. She started out by telling jokes at the new rabbis' expense; quite biting jokes, she wasn't pulling punches at all. Effective rhetoric, yes, it certainly got the congregation on side through laughing together, but also it felt like part of the transition. It would be completely unethical to publicly mock your students like that, but as of five minutes ago, these people are not her students any more, they're colleagues. And she preached on the story of R' Zera; the obvious connection was that he travelled from Babylon to Israel to study Torah, and all three of the newly ordained rabbis have travelled all over, Israel, the US and Europe, in order to get to the point where they are today.

But Clenman's drash was far more nuanced than that. She spoke about how R' Zera fasted for a hundred days so his Babylonian learning wouldn't interfere with his Palestinian learning, and how he fasted for a second hundred days so that his immediate superior wouldn't die and leave him with a bunch of administrative responsibilities. And for a third hundred days so that he would be free of the fires of Gehinnom (approximately similar to Hell, but it's theologically complicated). And in order to test his spiritual purity he would go into lit ovens once a month and show that he was safe from the flames. Except that one day he wasn't, he got burned, and after that he was always known as "skinny-burnt-legs". Clenman drew a very nice message, that you can't be so spiritual and perfect that you don't get confused by all the different cultures you have to negotiate, you can't be so spiritual and perfect that you eschew community responsibility or somehow think you can control community politics. And you can't be so spiritual and perfect that you avoid pain and suffering; if you try, you won't get a high title, you won't be regarded as a saint, you'll be no more than a joke. One of the things I really liked about Clenman's talk was that she made it very clear that she's talking about real pain, not some metaphorical, uplifting, spiritual sort of pain. Actual illness and loss, the actual misery of making mistakes that cause other people to suffer.

After the service it was very hot and very noisy, so I didn't quite get to introduce jack to several of the people who have been important in my life. Also R' Shulman, who gave the closing blessing, is visibly seriously ill, something I hadn't realized as I've been out of the loop. I also remembered that the last time I attended an ordination service, twenty years ago, it was for my bat mitzvah teacher R' Miri James, who like RabbiHugenholtz was about 8 months pregnant at the time. RabbiHugenholtz has a community job over here, so she's going to be living in the same country as me again from the autumn; hopefully I will get to spend time with her and her husband and the imminently arriving baby. So yes, more transitions to come.

The doctors' graduation was a lot of fun too. I am really glad I got to walk in the procession and sit on the stage in the chapel, helping to represent the medical school staff. It's actually the first time I've worn my academic robes since my own graduation, and it did somehow feel like I've finally come to the position that my PhD was meant to prepare me for: I am An Academic, perhaps more in that moment than a lot of the rest of the time. I must say that my current institution is much better than the place that actually awarded my PhD at doing ceremonies in a way that's dignified without being faux-archaic, the choreography and what I can only call liturgy were excellent. At one point the whole cohort of doctors had to read a rather bowdlerized version of the Hippocratic Oath in unison, which was really powerful even though the language of the "affirmation" is badly in need of a poet, not a committee of bureaucrats.

I don't know if one day, someone's life will be saved because I carefully drilled some poor second year student on, say, cancer genetics or insulin signalling. Probably not directly; if they hadn't learned a particular thing from me they'd have learned it at some point, otherwise they wouldn't have been able to get through those final exams which entitled them to be at yesterday's graduation. I spotted a few students whom I comforted and encouraged when they were in tears because they had failed an exam, told them that they still had a future, and maybe that made more difference. There was one new doctor whom four years ago I was worried about because he was a frightened little rabbit, he could barely speak in front of a group of more than a couple of people. When I saw him all self-assured in his suit and his hired-for-the-day doctor's gown, I said, oh, hello, good to see you again, doctor! and he grinned all over his face.

The way the chapel is organized, the staff processed out through one entrance and the new doctors through the other. And for a couple of minutes we stood around chatting at opposite ends of the marquee outside the building. Then one of the new graduates stepped out across the gap to chat to a teacher she got on well with, and that was the transition complete: you could see the ripples of realizing that those people over there are our colleagues now. That was a truly lovely moment.

I didn't in the end manage to organize a hair-fall in my academic colours; I've had a really busy several weeks when I wasn't keeping up with high priority stuff, so I couldn't take time out for low priority cool ideas. But I managed to collar the senior guy from Ede & Ravenscroft and asked him about colour standards. He confirmed what many of you advised, that there is no universal code you can use to match dyes. We had an interesting conversation, and he ended up lending me my hire hood until next year, so I can physically take it into fabric shops and get the colours matched as closely as possible. Which was a really nice gesture; I don't suppose he's really supposed to do that, lend out the hoods beyond the official three-day hire period. So hopefully next time I do this I shall stand out as the academic with the multi-coloured blue hair, and not the bare-headed academic.

Comments

[kaberett]

Tears of joy: I bear witness.

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Thank you so much for commenting to say so. I know this post kind of turned into "what I did on my weekend" but it was really quite emotionally significant for me and I really appreciate your acknowledging that.