This is my story and I'm sticking to it

My story is a physical and spiritual journey spanning continents and worlds. People on the move came together to shape prayer and praxis in my life. Would I have wanted a simpler spiritual journey? Perhaps, but this is my story and I’m sticking to it. 

I was born in Michigan where my father resided and worked as an engineer. My mother worked in Washington, D.C. as a physician specializing in sexually transmitted diseases. Their relationship, arranged by an official in the Philippine Consulate, was a commuter marriage from the beginning. My father joined the US Navy decades before my mother came to Baltimore with a scholarship at Johns Hopkins University.  My mother saw a life ahead for me as a latch key kid, so like many immigrant women, she sent me “home” with my maternal grandmother.  I was but two years old. The hope was that I would grow up with a large garden to play in, surrounded by hordes of cousins, aunties, a grandmother, and a great grandmother.

The poet Rabindranath Tagore once wrote: “From your blossoming garden gather fragrant memories of the vanished flowers of a hundred years before.” And “gather” I did of fragrant memories outside my doorstep. Jasmine intertwined with bougainvillea running riot everywhere. Within my reach were baby pomegranates we called “granadillas” (little grenades). I would squeeze the fleshy seeds between my fingers, smear my mouth red, lips puckering from the stinging sourness. How did my maternal great great grandparents keep these seeds alive on the sea voyage from Spain to the Philippines? This same flowering garden hid an array of creepy, crawling life under the multitude of rocks that I loved to upturn. Chasing dragonflies and the more elegant damselflies was religious ritual. They would spiral up lazily beyond my reach, silver bodies melting into the glint of sun, melding into the blur of airplanes slipping in and out of the clouds.  I was convinced that America, my parents, and G!d lay beyond those clouds. That was my first experience of G!d, palpable longing and yearning.

Books and the performing arts unfolded new worlds beyond our garden. I used to go to bed with a book on Esther and other characters with names like Nebuchadnezzar. Propped on my legs night after night, these figures emerged in living color from the pages, stirring my heart with passion and courage.  By the time I was twelve years old, that book had frayed but I was on my way.  Guitar in hand, I started curating a program of songs to frame the prayer experience in our Wednesday Folk Mass. I played music. I sang. I danced. The magic of discovery especially at rehearsal was heady elixir.  

Schlepping me to classes and to all kinds of practice sessions was my grandmother, my ever-present champion.  She would sit stoically among fashionable mothers and nannies.  She was, however, curiously absent at Sunday Mass where all the cousins and I were herded by a religious aunt. Adults hissed that my maternal grandmother was, in fact,  “Judio” (“Jew” in Spanish).  I often wondered,  “Why the vitriol when Jews only existed in the Passion Play?”  Or so I thought.

I incurred the wrath of the nuns at school whenever I questioned dogma and hierarchy. What they could not hear was that I questioned because I was becoming a person of faith. I had cleaved my preteen life to G!d. The only difference was that the ultimate Source of the known and unknown to me did not happen be named Jesus. The G!d that my grandmother and I turned to at home was not Our Lady of Lourdes in a grotto, nor was it a statue or crucifix in the church.  My grandmother taught me to pray to G!d beyond form. She modeled asking forgiveness from those whom we had wronged, as she would like clockwork at a certain time of the year. To others, this exercise proved that she was, indeed, a sinner among the impoverished of spirit. When I looked for G!d, I heard G!d’s voice among the impoverished who were walled and willed away from our sightlines. They entered my private prayer and they marched into my song.

On one trip to the US, I finally prevailed upon my father to return to the Philippines. He returned to a country that he had left as a teenager.  The few years we had together came close to my dream of family. However, having been away for so long, he was clueless about how to navigate daily bureaucracy under military rule.  He gave up trying to figure it out and decided that I should return to my mother in the US. By that time, I had lost both my maternal great grandmother and my grandmother.  He placed me on a flight back to America saying, “I have done my duty. Now it’s your turn.”  

My seventeen-year-old self who returned to the US was a strict vegetarian and a novice meditator. Within a year, I got myself on another plane to India to study at a women’s ashram in Varanasi close to the Ganges River.  Days and nights were marked by spiritual and social philosophy, group meditation three times a day, chore rotations, periods of silence and collective meals. Upon the culmination of our studies, I was sent to teach women in different countries all over the world.  On an uncharacteristic day off in Jerusalem, I found myself sitting by the mechitzah on the women’s side of the Kotel. I closed my eyes and wept.  I couldn’t understand why.  I could feel the merciless sun bleaching the tears that had run a marathon down my cheeks. When there were no more tears to dry, I knew that I had come home.  I wanted to jettison everything and just stay in Jerusalem. But before taking another left turn, it became clear that I should return to the US to face the rupture of our lives.

To my surprise, my mother said that she had grown accustomed to living alone. Her robust life consisted of commuting from her private practice in DC to the jail where she treated female victims of sexual assault. I was on my own to chart the next course.  San Diego proved to be a healthy distance from the District of Columbia and an ideal place for me to go to college. I danced and compared religions at San Diego State University. Still haunted by my epiphany at the Kotel, I borrowed one book after another from the Judaism section of the library.  

It so happened that the Martha Graham Dance Company came to town one autumn. Sitting in the cheapest balcony seats with other dancers, my belly echoed every contraction and release from that stage.  The choreography was of women, power, and frontier. Heeding the counsel of those who had danced in the company, I wrapped up the semester and flew to New York to audition for a place in any dance school. Odd jobs and a full scholarship from the cosmetics pioneer Helena Rubinstein enabled me to study at the Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance.  I was in time and on time when her landmark choreographies for women from the 1930s were reconstructed. Each day followed a clear plan of care that I had designed for myself. Continue to eat vegetarian but schedule the carbs to fire at the right time. Meditate. Avoid intoxicants.  Manage the toll on the body with Pilates and Gyrotonic. Go to therapy. It was life in a monastery for those whom Martha called “acrobats of G!d”.

My ensemble director was Yuriko, the first Japanese-American dancer invited by Martha Graham in 1943 when America was still in the middle of World War II against Germany and Japan. She had taught dance to other Japanese-Americans In the Gila River War Relocation Center in Arizona. This concentration camp had a high number of 13,348  detainees at its peak. Unbeknown to Yuriko, I had grown up hearing horror stories of the Japanese occupation of the Philippines from my grandmother: soldiers wielding bayonets splitting sacks of rice on the family farm, kamikaze planes swooping down as her family dove flat down on the rice fields. What do I do with the hologram of those stories interposing on Yuriko’s teaching?  “That was then and this is now”, I repeated this mantra and took a deep breath whenever those thoughts would come.  Eventually, we found out that we were both American-born but spent our youth in the Far East.  Dance and theater were our physical and emotional lifeboats. Decades and worlds apart, we both returned to the US as young adults. In the dance studio and outside, she was Mentor and I was Mentee. 

In the Graham orbit, two Jewish mentors hovered around me as angels: choreographer Pearl Lang and Maestro/Conductor, Stanley Sussman. Pearl Lang was not impressed with my dance abilities for her own company but she prodded me to begin writing about my Jewish journey. Stanley Sussman took me to his synagogue. And then there was the Kirov Ballet-trained teacher, Gabriela Darvash from Jewish Transylvania. Six days a week, I climbed a four-floor walk-up to her studio. In the intermediate class alongside other modern dancers, choreographers, and gymnasts on Broadway, I found counterbalance to earthbound Graham technique. She taught me how to give full value to transitions and not just to the big gestures. Being fully present and not skimping on the in-between steps, I experienced endless time and space.  Although she was “Madame”  to many ballet dancers, she would become Savta Gabi at our Pesach table and a formidable voice of common sense in my Jewish journey. 

I met my future husband, pianist and music director Jerome Korman, at a concert in the Martha Graham School. As a young adult, Jerry had distanced himself from synagogue life and embraced music as his religion.  His father Manfred, a Kindertransport from Hamburg, was a respected school principal, supervisor, and advocate for public education. Manfred was also a many-termed President of Temple Beth-El, a holdout non-egalitarian Conservative shul in North Bellmore, NY.  Jerry’s mother Mona, a librarian heading to early retirement, invited us to many Shabbat meals, Pesach, Thanksgiving, winter and summer days at the beach. I experienced a strong family unit up close with the Kormans.  They were not, however, big admirers of spiritual seeking.  I managed to keep meditation, if not my vegetarianism, to myself.                                                                              

For many years, Jerry and I went about our performing careers without living together. When marriage and my conversion to Judaism became the obvious next step, someone from the Rabbinical Assembly directed us to Rabbi Marshall Meyer. We phoned him and  he said, “Come to the office right now.”  That same afternoon Jerry and I sat across from Rabbi Marshall in his bare office, a card table and a rotary phone. We did not know that he was a Jewish giant.  He beamed the full force of his call to action on us: “Come to services, study together, parent together when the children come, and serve the Jewish community together in the way that only you can as artists”. From that point onward, I listened to every word from his Divrei Torah as if he was talking directly to me. When I heard Rabbi Marshall speak about the desaparecidos (“the disappeared ones”) in Argentina, he brought me back to the 1,993 who disappeared during eighteen years of the Marcos regime in the Philippines. Hearing Rabbi Marshall talk about his teacher Abraham Joshua Heschel, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, and the civil rights movement, brought me back to the outskirts of Caracas where economic refugees and I carved a slice of a hill and built a one-room school.  When I witnessed Rabbi Marshall lifting up his Assistant Rabbi and Hazzan, both of whom had been his students, a botzina di’kardenuta lamp flickered alive in the deepest dark. I had seen this before. By lifting others up, one restored justice and got lifted up in the process.  His was the voice of my Jewish ashram mates in Varanasi.  His was the voice injecting the urgent language of people’s liberation into “acts of loving kindness.”

Our children Arielle and Benjamin did not get to know Rabbi Marshall Meyer because he died before they were born. But his name was often heard in our household and his physician daughter’s kindness touched us directly when Arielle was diagnosed with juvenile diabetes. Our children grew up aware that they were Jewish and Filipino-American in a shul where there was no other family like us. Jew-lo-pino-cans, that is how our children named us. We brought them to synagogue but we also made sure that they saw another world here and abroad. Our children followed us into orchestra pits, Junior Congregations, studios, Purimspiel and High Holiday rehearsals, rehearsal rooms august and makeshift, audiences more distinguished than others, through red-carpeted entrances and service exits through the kitchen, past the garbage into the cold night air. At first, they were “children of”, but soon enough they became our collaborators and partners. We flew to and from Israel to stand with family in good times and in bad times. Cousins and parents grew older together around celebration and loss.

When our children entered middle and high school, I matriculated to a Mechina program at The Academy for Jewish Religion.  Sensing something missing for me in the program, I applied to The Jewish Theological Seminary and was accepted for the next year. What I had been missing was a consistent davening community and I found that at JTS.  Guffaws and an emphatic “Ha!” greeted my withdrawal from the other program. There was no behatzlachah but rather, “you should wander from place to place to the end of your days.”  I threw myself into the work while shuttling up and down Broadway between being rabbinical student and being Eema. I developed a robust Conservative prayer practice from the back of the sanctuary.  Devotion, I took care of, wrapping myself in the protective cocoon of stolen meditations and whispered kiirtan up and down the seminary hallways. Jewish spirituality initiatives entered JTS but I continued my spiritual practice as before. There was too much talking and branding and too little meditation in Jewish meditation. It was not “the right fit.”

All throughout Rabbinical School, our family band continued to play for High Holidays until college and university ended our run.  We had been performing liturgy, South American revolutionary songs, jazz and originals.  So long as I could sing, I was fortified.  Even when a director at JTS turned down my request to take a Yiddish music unit for credit because I was not the “right fit”, I still had a place where I could sing. 

It has not been easy being in community within Jewish community.  Whenever I expressed being other-ed in Jewish spaces, people have said, “If you are so unhappy, why don’t you just leave?  Why are you always angry?” I did not quit so long as I could sing.  But once I received ordination and I started serving as a Rabbi Chaplain, the song got strangled in my throat.  Broken from facing abandonment, loss, and death day in and day out as a chaplain at a hospital, I found that the synagogue where we had raised our children was no longer “the right fit”. Without a guitar on my back announcing my reason for entering Jewish space, I was a stranger. Plucked away from the back parlor and basement of junior congregation onto the main prayer space, I was without protectzia.  The dismissal of the all-Russian Jewish maintenance staff and the hiring of janitorial help - all of whom were people of color except for a white supervisor -  sobered me more than hurt me.  I was really happy to see people who looked like me and reflected the world that I lived in.  What fun it was to speak Spanish in shul! But I was stunned. The shift of shul into corporate soul “did not fit” me.   I saw socioeconomic advantage and privilege, expediency, disposability, and loyalty as liability.  A friend echoed my sentiments, “I want an old rundown shul with a leaky roof and an old rundown Rabbi!”  

It had to be my daughter Arielle Korman who would lead me to a community where I could find renewal.  Being Hillel co-president, she received a summer ministry fellowship to serve at a shul that could not be where she grew up.  With violin on her back and on the wings of her own song, she widened the crack in the door. She returned to college; I stayed. I reunited with a proud African-American woman with whom I had once linked arms one Erev Simchat Torah in 2014.  On that evening she said, “Why aren’t you here? I am here.” Once I started attending services, Dr. Renee Hill and I spoke about holding each other up as best practice for health, happiness and wholeness in Jewish space.  I watched her claim the treasure of Torah as fully hers.  We have stood together as teachers ever since.  At Harlem Havruta with allies and co-conspirators, we have built Sukkot and Pesach tables welcoming the stranger and the estranged.  We have provided others respite from interrogation in our places of worship. We walk with other faith leaders connected through the New York City Commission of Human Rights. We found a larger umbrella of those who will no longer be denied or erased. The dream of a Jews of Color Academy has come to fruition and it is called Ammud. The shul where I daven and serve, where my daughter once led me, is Romemu, the site of my Jewish Emergent Network Rabbinic Fellowship.

Would I have wanted a simpler spiritual journey? Perhaps, but this is my story and I’m sticking to it.