Hello everyone from sabbatical-land!
It is amazing to me that I am only one week in as of today, as I have done a lot in a single week. But, then again, that is ME.
I attended services last Friday night at Shir Hama’alot. I was particularly excited to see their remodel of their building, as I have not been in the building since it was complete. Their sanctuary is absolutely gorgeous. I had a lot of fun observing my friend and colleague Rabbi Bryan Zive lead alongside Rabbis Steinberg and DePaolo. Their junior choir sang beautifully in the service, and it was really cool how they have screens embedded in the back wall of the bimah area to project elements of the service.
On Saturday, I headed to Palm Springs with my boyfriend Michael and reconnected with my good friend Doug, who I had not seen in several years. He graciously hosted us over the weekend, and I stayed there for the duration of the week, while attending the midwinter cantorial retreat. It was my first time back at the retreat in what I think was about five years. I immersed myself in prayer, professional development workshops (including an incredibly interesting presentation by a psychologist on his own experience as a South African native indoctrinated into the racist beliefs of apartheid, and how this has become a major focus of his work today), and I got to hear a handful (or more!) of really great new music, that I look forward to using in the future.
Prior to the retreat beginning, Michael and I attended two documentaries in the Palm Springs Int’l Film Festival. The first was a biopic about the music producer David Foster, and was incredibly insightful and also made us sway and tap our toes. It was really interesting to see the “behind the music” stories on Foster working with notable artists such as Whitney Houston, Celine Dion, Michael Buble, Josh Groban, and so many others, and how he had shaped their music and their careers. On Sunday, we saw another documentary called Oliver Sacks: His Own Life. In preparation for this, I had been listening to the audiobook of Sacks’ Musicophilia over the past week. Sacks was an erudite neurologist who attracted patients with the most complex issues of the mind/brain. His book was incredibly intellectual, and if I even picked up on half of it, I really still immersed myself in his wisdom. The documentary was a fascinating portrait of this man who passed away in 2015. It shed light on his own personal story, how he got so invested in his work, and the path his life took as one who initially struggled with balancing his homosexuality and family’s response to his eventual success and fame as a brilliant mind. Sacks was the one who did the research behind what eventually turned into the film Awakenings, and his most known book is The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat.
After the retreat ended this morning with a really lovely service with lots of modern music, I attended my third documentary of the week (I have discovered in the past week that I really love documentaries — something that I likely knew, but hadn’t fully put my finger on), I saw a film called Rewind. I was drawn to this film because it was described as a retrospective on the director/subject’s struggle after being sexually abused in his childhood, and a call out for the power of advocacy. With all of my work over the past year and a half with CASA, this film was just a natural fit. As the film progressed, I recognized the last name of the family mentioned, but wasn’t sure at first why. I soon figured out that there was a connection to a former cantor at Temple Emanu-El of NYC. This film was incredibly produced and the story was immensely powerful. I found the whole of it quite disturbing — which I would have found no matter what the connections were, but knowing that a cantor and Temple Emanu-El played a large role in this story was even more disturbing to me. This is a film that I will be thinking about long after having seen it, and I was rather disturbed by how Temple Emanu-El had handled the situation. Many of the elements of this story had played out during the years that I was a cantorial student at HUC in NY. This film will likely be available on TV in May, and you can learn more about it here.
I had last attended a film festival back in April, when really on a whim, I attended a handful of films at the Newport Beach film festival. I found it such a delightful experience. There is the ability to see films that are rather exclusive or have yet to be released (while some are also using the platform of the festival to perhaps search for a distributor). Often at these festivals, the director and actors (for fictional movies) will be in attendance, so it offers a really special experience to be able to hear directly from them about their vision and experience in creating the film and then, hence, being on the journey with the film as it is brought to audiences. I highly recommend attending a festival, if you have never done so. Whether a film buff or not, you will get something special out of the experience.