The 60-year-old Shimberg family flag, folded seven years ago and hung by the author for the Fourth of July this year.

The setting new moon of Tamuz, the Jewish month that began this week, just after sunset and accompanied by several visible planets. A treat for a LUNA-tic! Rabbi’s photo from her home in St. Petersburg, Florida.

I am a rabbi, and I am aching to work in my field. At 60, many people in my demographic are retiring. However, I listened to my calling later in life and am just on the threshold of stepping into a second decade of rabbinic service. I have no interest in retirement. I have so much to offer and am heavy with unshared spiritual nourishment. Although the occasional barista fantasy comes over me each time I am at one of the many fabulous and locally owned and operated coffee and tea shops around St. Pete, I am deeply committed to my rabbinistry. For ten months, I have relied on a narrative that, in following my husband to a new location for his important and meaningful work, I needed to take time to learn how my calling would coalesce with meaningful paid work for me. My patience is wearing thin as I search.

My beloved and I returned to our home to find our lobby decked out in full “Christmas spirit,” including a crèche/nativity scene along with a Christmas tree, Christmas wreaths, garland, and a variety of nutcrackers holding down the fort. The next day, I was expecting my Bat Mitzvah student for a lesson and I didn’t want her to experience this exclusively Christmas greeting in the lobby of her rabbi’s building. I asked if the crèche might be removed to focus on the less religious aspects of Christmas decorating. I was told that this wasn’t possible and no changes would be made, save for the addition of a menorah from a resident who wasn’t yet back from Thanksgiving travels. A small menorah appeared the next day in one of our lobby windows. It was small, but it was a start.

Since October 7th, I have struggled to find meaning in each Jewish holiday that has arrived. Even as I have fulfilled my obligations as a rabbi, each holiday, has held diminished light this year. My colleagues and I have wrestled, just as so many of you have wrestled, with finding a way to fit our typically joy-filled perennial holidays into a year of conflict and confusion.

The seders that will be hosted throughout the diasporic Jewish world on Monday and Tuesday nights, and the festival week that follows, will certainly be diminished this year by a deep and aching sense of loss, sadness, pain, frustration, anger, fear, and existential angst as we continue to watch the events unfolding in Israel, Gaza, the West Bank and other parts of the Middle East. 

A river runner, ecologist, and educator, Ellen’s search for spiritual meaning and ethical guidance led her back to her Jewish roots, realizing that Jewish wisdom and literature have deeply ecological resonance. It became her life’s work and legacy to remind us, a diasporic people who have dwelled primarily in urban settings since before the Industrial Revolution, that we are a people of the land, an agrarian people who still mark time by the cycle of the seasons, the harvests, plantings, offerings and necessary resting.

I have been doing some study in preparation for a course I will be offering for students who have approached me recently with great  enthusiasm about either becoming Jews or learning more about how to do Jewish. I am always so honored to be asked to serve in this capacity and am so grateful for the wonder and thirst of these students that matches and occasionally even exceeds my own.