Different Slants

Robert M. Katzman’s Amazing Story: www.differentslants.com/?p=355

© May 1, 2011

Introduction to: A Rabbi Can’t Mend A Broken Heart

This new poem was inspired by, and written expressly for Rabbi Debra Nesselson.

Watching her blossom over the last year from being a relatively quiet figure heard from the bimah only occasionally, to becoming the voice and face of B’nai Torah Congregation to the world, has fascinated me. She is her own fairy-tale.

Today, Friday June 10, 2011 Debra Nesselson becomes a Rabbi for the rest of her life.

Her choosing to leave behind a career as a lawyer after spending seven years to become that, to spending another eight years transforming herself into a Rabbi so she could understand the law in a far more fundamental way, means Debra has spent fifteen years to get to where she is today.

More than a quarter of her entire life.

How many people would ever consider doing such a thing? Very few. Maybe we didn’t know what we had in our new Rabbi before today, but we certainly do now.

Here’s my poem to celebrate her new role in this important Jewish institution. If anyone deserves a poem to contemplate their lives, it’s Debra Nesselson. 

(First Note (2011):Because of convoluted and mysterious Temple politics, Rabbi Nesselson left our temple two months later. Not all things make sense, but what I wrote about rabbis remains what I believe. I still respect and care about Debra Nesselson.

(Second Note (2014): After a continuing tumultuous period of Temple politics over philosophy, and a merry-go-round of different rabbis, the sixty-year-old temple closed almost exactly three years after I first posted this poem. A tragedy.  This note was amended on September 24th, 2014, just before the beginning of the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, 5775.  I remain friends with and infinitely respect Rabbi Nesselson.)

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Robert M. Katzman’s Amazing Story: www.differentslants.com/?p=355

Originally published on © October, 2008 I was a very obscure writer. Now only slightly obscure, and hopeful

(#1 of 4 chapters, all here this time. 21 rich pages or 15,775 words. Don’t be shy. Take a chance on me)

Bendith Duw ar Bobl Cymru a`u plismyn gwaraidd!!!
(God bless the Welsh People and their civilized policemen!!!)

My original motivation to travel to Britain for the first and only time, in 2001, was to investigate Notting Hill.

Notting Hill was long famous, even before the warm-hearted film of the same name with Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts, for its incredibly congested, unbroken mass of bargain-seeking and perspiring humanity crushed within its mile long length, as the best flea market in Europe.

While I did find beautiful ceramics, overflowing tables of eccentric flotsam and jetsam, and the original 1964 Beatles periodicals I was actually seeking, as well as a priced-to-sell full suit of medieval English armor for mounted combat or jousting, the memory I find that lingers longest are my three unplanned days in Wales.

The distance from London to Cardiff, the capitol of Wales, was slightly less than driving from Chicago to Madison, Wisconsin. Interesting places are much closer together in Great Britain than in the States. The approximate size of the former homeland of the world wide British Empire is about the same size as Illinois and Indiana, together.

Britannia…small, but mighty!
(Read on …)