Tikkum Olam:
"Repair of the World" - Rabbi Patricia Phylo
Patty Phylo-bioethicist, and rabbi for the Rohnert Park Temple
congregation-was interviewed at Sebastopol's Happy Panda Cafe by North Coast
X-Press staffers Kenny Kollerer, Michael Bobier, and Gordon Williams.
Kenny: You are a bioethicist.What is that?
Patty: A bioethicist is a person who works within the medical community
but whose specialty is ethics. When a problem comes up between a patient
and family and the medical community whether to continue treatment or discontinue
treatment or how to move ahead, then it comes before the ethics panel. I
know quite a bit about medicine and certain things patients go through.
That was part of my training. The other part is when an experimental drug
comes into this area or one of the doctors wants to try it, particularly
with a lot of the AIDS drugs before they have any sort of FDA approval,
they have to come before the screening committee to make sure that there
are safeguards for the people who are trying it out. I just make sure that
people are fully aware and that there's no hidden cost to them. If a person
is HIV positive but not sick yet, a lot of these drugs work very well as
a preventative to keep them from getting sick.
K: How did a female rabbi come to be?
P: The first one in the whole world was ordained about 25 years ago. It
was the Reform Movement. I'm Reconstructionist. Reconstructionists from
the beginning always believed in the spiritual equality of women. It has
always been there, but tradition has taken on the power of law. If you go
into some of those Orthodox synagogues-particularly in the large cities
that have a strong intellectual contingent-you'll find that the women are
doing exactly the same as the men. So in some ways we have to reassess whether
women are treated as second class, or if it becomes a women's consciousness
religious group and a men's consciousness religious group if they're both
equally educated.
Michael: I saw something like this. Last year my father passed away, and
there were women in the Minyon. Instead of ten men it was ten people.
P: Ten adults. There! They counted the women.
K: Orthodox, Conservative and Reform, but Reconstructionist I don't know.
P: The Reconstructionist seminary is just outside Philadelphia. The Reconstructionist
movement was started by an Orthodox rabbi who taught at the conservative
seminary.
He had four daughters and his daughter was the first bat mitzvah in the
world. B-A-T, 'daughter of the mitzvah'; bar mitzvah for a boy. His position
was one of spiritual equality between the sexes and he took a very scientific,
logical approach to miracles and said that miracles were perhaps -like the
parting of the Red Sea-people's attempt to explain the miraculousness of
what they went through. It became mythologized in some way. Perhaps it was
a low tide or something scientific was there to explain it, but we needed
to elevate it and make it a really positive and powerful experience, so
it became like the George Washington and Cherry Tree idea. We also consider,
as Reconstructionists, Judaism to be an evolving religious civilization,
so it doesn't have to be simply a religion. It could be the dance, the song,
the cuisine, the language, the laws, the folk tales and all of that.
M: Or condescending Yiddish like my family-judgmental Yiddish?
P: Or Latino. If you can step outside your bad experience of it-what's nice
aboutYiddish is that the language itself has some interesting takes for
us today in that Yiddish is almost a lost language, a lost culture. It has
a really positive way of relating to the human body. You call a young boy
( with great endearment) a schmeckala. Schmeckala means 'little penis.'
And we relate to our bodies in a very easy sort of home grown kind of way.
It's very healthy. You were probably called a schmeckala, you know.
Gordon: In Mandarin my wife always calls my son Sha Sho Ko, which is 'small
penis.'
P: An endearment! It's not meant to be a put down.
K: So Reconstructionism starts in Philadelphia?
P: I attended the seminary in Philadelphia and did most of my training through
the conservative movement and finished off in Berkeley with a heavy dose
of both the Talmud and mysticism-a lot of meditation and spiritual growth
practices that have not been part of mainstream Judaism in America for a
long time. We got caught up in being scientific and logical and being like
the neighbors and so we lost that fire that keeps us alive. That's the fire
we're trying to re-ignite.
K: All right, how would somebody go about joining this temple?
P: Well, they don't need to join right away. [Laughter. You have to imagine
the rabbi's laugh; we can't describe it; but often in this interview it
was our pleasure to hear it.]
Money and financial support really has nothing to do with it. We meet in
the Rohnert Park Community Center and we're there the first and third Friday
of every month. We do all the holidays, usually there. We have a religious
school which includes classes for adults as well. We have a medical mynian
for people who are in any part of the healing professions: acupuncturists,
veterinarians, dentists, cardiac surgeons-we have the whole range, so people
who are involved in healing will be able to heal themselves. So it's a support
group for healing, prayer and meditation.
K: There are some other things the temple is doing for the community, are
there not?
P: We provide a lot of support for the homeless and the hungry by constantly
instilling in our congregation, from little tiny kids all the way up, that
it's their responsibility to improve the world. Tikkum Olam, 'repair of
the world.' We're not going to get paradise, we're not going to get a better
society until we all work together and bring up the person who is the weakest
and who is most in need. So I can't just write a check and sit back and
expect you to go out and do the work. We try to teach our children on many
different levels from kindness to animals, to understanding the food they
eat, to recycling, to helping each other out, to tutoring other kids, to
bringing food to help feed the hungry and the poor, to going out and babysitting
in the shelters so that parents who are homeless can go out for job interviews.
We try to put them right there, square on the line, understanding that it's
their responsibility. So kids learn to feed their pets before they sit down
to feed themselves, to help out their parents. They learn about making peace
in the household first, then they learn about making peace among classmates,
the kids who are picked on, the kids who are bullies, so they learn how
to relate. We teach them some of the ancient sources that come with it,
so that they are really connected to their heritage as well as right on
the front line of today's society and the world they're going to inherit.
We have our responsibility to our kids, that's part of our rebuilding the
world and fixing the world-to make our kids responsible, caring humanitarians.
If you come to our religious services you'll see that as we go through the
prayer service, I explain where those prayers come from; I explain why we're
doing it.
At every event we always have baskets there for food donations and clothing
and blankets, and all of that goes to COTS, the Community of the Shelterless,
as support for the family shelter, except for all the kosher food. The kosher
food is separated out for what's called the kosher cupboard. We're the only
one in all of northern California that has food supplies for people who
keep kosher. If anyone needs that, they come and they get food from us.
It's all done anonymously; it's meant to not make them feel bad; no one
knows who gets the food.
We're also really involved with hospice and working with people who are
dying and people who are bereaved.
K: Right, but what can you do for the dying?
P: Oh, a lot. In the best of all possible worlds, death is very natural
and can be perhaps the most enlightening, the highest spiritual experience
we ever encounter. If symptoms are held in control . . . you're not suffering;
you have the chance to be consciously aware of this transition you're going
through, and the connections are really there. My job is not to lead them
through, but to accompany them, to show them respect, to help them clarify
those connections.
M: Aren't the Jews the only religious organization that doesn't believe
in an afterlife?
P: Not necessarily. We say we do not know. We do know we die, and we know
that people who have had near-death experiences have come back and seem
to intimate that there's something there, but what happens to it, we don't
know. It could be part of the most elemental law of physics or it could
be heaven with clouds and angels with harps. Those are the two extremes.
We don't really know. So we say, "Who knows?".
M: Is there anyone who does know?
P: In terms of an afterlife, my position, and I think Judaism as a whole,
says that we run the whole gamut: from there is an afterlife [but] we don't
know what that is, to there is no afterlife, to we shrug our shoulders and
say we don't know.
I love Judaism. But I'm also willing to be in it and wrestle with it
and not say that it's perfect, but say that it's really a spiritual religious
smorgasbord, and there's many different interpretations that you can choose
from. A lot of people tend to think of it as paternalistic or patriarchal
or racist-the Jews are the chosen people. There isn't one single statement
about what Judaism is. I think we just have to get inside and wrestle with
it
