Karen Engel's Ordination Speech

The speaker reflects on the miracles that have brought her to this point in her life. She shares her journey of becoming a rabbi, starting with her desire to learn more about her religion and her struggles with understanding and feeling accepted in the Jewish community. Despite facing challenges such as breast cancer and moving to different countries, she remains grateful for the healthcare and opportunities she has been given. She learns important lessons about humility and empathy from the people she meets along the way. The speaker emphasizes the importance of both science and faith in her journey and expresses gratitude for the miracles that have occurred in her life. Phew, to stand here before you today really feels like a bit of a miracle. I know that you're all thinking that I'm referring to the Israel-Gaza war, or the political craziness in the German-Jewish world of the last few months, that despite all the turmoil and all the fighting, Levi and I can still celebrate. That's very true. But to tell you the truth, I'm really thinking of a different kind of miracle. And what are miracles, anyway? The Bible recounts the 42 encampments of the Israelites as they wandered through the desert after the exodus from Egypt. And in each one of these places, says the 15th century Rabbi Yitzhak Arama, God performed a specific kindness for the Israelites, usually in the form of a miracle. I'm not going to tell you all 42 miracles that enabled me to reach this point today, but I thought I would tell you about a few of them, and what I have learned from them. First, though, let me tell you that I never planned to become a rabbi. I simply wanted to learn more about my religion. I grew up as a secular Jew, but while working and living in Austria, I wanted my children to be Jewish. So we started to attend synagogue, and like so many others, I was totally lost. I didn't understand Hebrew, the Siddur meant nothing to me, and there were a lot of men telling me things I couldn't do. Like say, Kaddish, for my husband who had died young of melanoma, or my father who died a few years later. After working as a radio journalist for many years, I was running a Jewish cultural center in southern Austria. I was even the first woman on the board of the Jewish community in Graz. But like everyone else in that community, I was pretty religiously ignorant. By 2016, my children had left home for college and for work, and I said, wow, now is my chance to do what I've wanted to do for years, and that is to attend Paideia, the Institute for Jewish Studies in Stockholm, that offered a one-year master's level program in Jewish studies. I gave up my teaching job, canceled the lease on our family's apartment, and started moving all our furniture, belongings, and basically 57 years of accumulated stuff into storage. Since I was moving to a new country, I also did the necessary routine medical checkups, one does before embarking on a major trip. And lo and behold, a routine blood test revealed that the breast cancer my oncologist had declared cured just months ago had come back, and as later tests revealed, had metastasized throughout my whole skeleton. My kids were in different countries, and my entire life at that moment was in half-packed storage boxes. I realized I had two choices. I could stay in Graz, Austria, with a familiar medical system and a network of friends, but be depressed and think about cancer the whole time. Or I could do what I wanted to do, study Jewish texts and see what happens. So I took a deep breath, and without knowing a soul there, flew to Stockholm. A few days after arriving in Stockholm, the pathology report on my blood samples arrived. I opened this ominous report while sitting on a park bench in central Stockholm. The verdict was a triple negative, hard-to-treat cancer. With this diagnosis, Dr. Google gave me an average life expectancy of two years. I was terrified. But one should not put too much trust into Dr. Google, and I would suggest the same goes for Rabbi Google. As I sat on the park bench trying to digest this information, I got into a conversation with a stranger sitting next to me, because sometimes, when you find yourself in limbo, your heart opens, your defenses fall away, and anything goes, because you have nothing to lose. This guy, I think he was a homeless vagrant, very charmingly offered to give me a tour of the area, and I said, sure. So he led me up the hill of Södermalm, past the central Stockholm mosque, almost across the street from the Katarina church. We marveled about the Muslims and the Christians, praying side by side. And then we reached a place called Mosebacke, Moses' Hill, and from this outlook, you could see all of Stockholm below. Maybe not the land of milk and honey, but the island of the old city and the lakes and waterways of Stockholm. It was breathtakingly beautiful. It was my promised land. We know that Moses did not make it to his promised land, and I wasn't sure I was going to make it either, but miracle of miracles, I did. You're probably expecting me now to say that thanks to prayer and God's graces, I'm still here. But remember, I'm a modern, rational, very much in this world, Jewish woman. There are things I cannot control or explain that I attribute to the realm of the divine. Studying prayer and studying Torah was great for my mental health, but I definitely thank science and modern medicine for my physical well-being. Studying the parasha, halakha, the shulchan aruch, Rashi, Maimonides, Hasidic thought, Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, and more than 3,000 years of Jewish literature was intellectually invigorating. But what was keeping me alive were drugs like hapetetibaini, denusamab, abemasikvib, letrozole, and many others. In so many ways, though, I was super lucky. Besides the truly excellent health care that Sweden provides, I had subletted a small apartment, about a 30-minute bike ride from the Paideia Institute in the center of Stockholm, and the bicycle path took me right past the Karolinska Hospital, so I could schedule my appointments on my way to and back from Paideia. You could even bicycle in the snowy winter, because the bicycle paths were groomed, and in Sweden you can even get winter tires for your bicycle. I was kind of proud of myself, the oldest student in my class, bicycling around Stockholm to school and hospital, walking up the three flights of stairs to my classes, and one day I kind of chided this 20-year-old who was opting for the elevator. And one of my colleagues took me aside and said, Karen, Ezra has to take the elevator because he has a severe case of Crohn's disease. I was so ashamed. I realized that I had been so preoccupied with my own issues that I had become arrogant and self-centered, thinking I'm the only one with challenges and everyone else is the model of good health and fortune. Here was a young man, decades younger than me, a passionate artist, musician, Torah scholar, and his girlfriend was one of the nicest and most beautiful Swedish women I had ever met, living life to the fullest, despite a major disability. Ezra was a miracle too, and besides Talmud, Halakha, Jewish history, etc., I learned a lot that year from watching Ezra. I loved the year at Paideia so much that I decided I wanted to keep studying, so I came to Berlin. Not like a lot of people because Berlin is hip and post-modern and culturally edgy, but because Berlin has an institute of Jewish theology, and in Sweden I had learned about the new Zacharias-Fraenkel College through the wonderful Sandra Aniszewicz-Beyer, without whom the Zacharias-Fraenkel College would not be what it is today. I had this great little apartment near the Charlottenburg Castle, very close to here. Moving to Berlin meant, of course, also moving my health care here, finding new doctors, taking more MRIs and CT scans, and one day one of those scans indicated that the cancer had traveled to my liver. For two weeks I went dreading the next round of cancer treatments, possible surgery, and all that would come. But then a follow-up exam showed that the radiologist had made a mistake. What he thought was cancer was simply a benign bruise on my liver that had been there for years. I was so relieved that I went home and took a really hot bath with candles around the bathtub. This bath was so hot that I soon got out, walked to the bedroom, closed the door, and passed out on the bed. The next morning I woke to an annoying building alarm sound, got up, and when I opened the bedroom door, my whole apartment was enveloped in smoke. The candles, which I had failed to blow out, had burned through what was not a metal but an acrylic bathtub. There was still a little fire burning along the bathtub rim. I had basically burned out the bathroom. Water was leaking through the apartment below me, and there was smoke and soot everywhere. I put out the fire, called the fire department, went out onto the balcony to escape the smoke, and called Rabbi Nils Ederberg to say I wasn't going to make it to class that morning. I was supposed to do a presentation about Marcia Falk's Book of Blessings, and the book was full of soot. Then I called my friend Brian, now Rabbi Brian Doyle in Brussels, and I said, Brian, can you come over? I need a hug, and he did. He came over, gave me a bear hug, and then looked over the damage. The previously white-tiled bathroom walls with vintage tiles were covered in thick black soot. The bathtub fixtures had melted, the floor was leaking, soot covered every centimeter of what had been an artsy, bohemian apartment adorned with carpets, wall hangings, wood furniture, books, records, and plants. And Brian said, ah, Karen, no big deal. I've seen worse. You've got this. And I did. I didn't need a lecture on negligence. I knew I was 100% guilty. As Jews, we feel comfortable, unfortunately, in seeing ourselves as victims, but it's a terrible feeling knowing you are the perpetrator, to know that I could have been a criminal arsonist. But it was Brian's hug that gave me the strength to face the damage. And again, in all that soot and dirty water, was a miracle that the fumes of the fire hadn't killed me. I had been shown some divine kindness. For the next year, I moved 11 times in Berlin, from Airbnb to Sublet, to Sublet, while renovating an apartment, dealing with chemo, living out of two suitcases and a backpack of books. I was studying at the time for the Hebraicum, trying to memorize thousands, well, or hundreds of vocabulary words, and learning to conjugate between nifal and pl, pual and hifil. And while my translations of biblical Hebrew into concise and correct German were not brilliant, through some miracle of miracles, some divine kindness, and some hard work on the side, I passed. That was just the beginning. By now, all of you have heard of the Yom Kippur attack on the synagogue in Halle. But today, after October 7th, and all that has transpired since, the synagogue attack five years ago seems so long ago. We were so shocked then, but today, it feels sadly commonplace. I was there as part of a project organized by BASE Berlin, now Hillel Berlin, an organization of Jewish outreach and community building, run by the dynamic and charismatic rabbis Rebecca Blady and Jeremy Horowitz. Before the attack on the synagogue, a beautiful symbiosis was happening inside, in an ad hoc service with all sorts of Jews from different backgrounds and religious practices, Orthodox and liberal, Russians and Germans and Americans, young and old, reviving and remembering and singing and creating Judaism. Someone tried to destroy that, but failed, because of yet another miracle, a very sturdy wooden door. It's easy to remember the violence, but what I carry with me inside is experience of creation in that Yom Kippur service. Due to the hard work of Hillel, the goodwill of the people of Halle, the open-mindedness of the yeshiva-trained Chazan, we were building something new. It's that kind of Judaism I still am committed to. Then came COVID, and then later, towards the end of the pandemic, my brother died unexpectedly in California. I was faced with organizing a memorial service and a funeral for a man I deeply loved, but who in so many ways was so different from me, and definitely not aligned with institutional Judaism. A rabbi may be expected to do things a certain way, but luckily, I wasn't a rabbi yet. Rabbi Geza Ederber gave me some much appreciated advice, so I could stay true to the wishes and the personality of someone whom I loved, and creatively used Jewish values to do so. After the pandemic, I was supposed to go to Israel for a study year, but that was postponed once again due to a change in chemotherapy that my body had trouble adjusting to. But eventually, I did go to Jerusalem, and had the amazing experience not only of studying at the conservative yeshiva, but of also rooming with the Bible scholar and Midrash artist Joe Milgram, the widow of the renowned Leviticus scholar Jacob Milgram. Joe, in her mid-90s, and still writing poetry, learning Yiddish, studying, and making Midrash, showed me many more miracles. If I listed every obstacle to becoming a rabbi in Germany, it would be easy to get to the number 42. The Baal Shem Tov, the father of the Hasidic movement, is quoted as saying that every individual Jew in each generation has to take a 42-step journey from birth to death. All human beings have to know where they come from and where they are going. By counting those steps, we keep a kind of diary, a gratitude journal. When we talk about miracles, we shouldn't be thinking about magic, but about taking notice of those special moments in which our lives have been given gifts, maybe something as simple as a hug or a plain wooden door. After this whole journey, I'm still not sure I understand the Siddur, or much of the Talmud, or many things, but as Douglas Adams wrote in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the ultimate answer to life, the universe, and everything, is 42.