Journey Through Soul

Hi - this is the first post I shared on Substack, it’s a first on my LZL Coaching blog as well and I wanted to give some context to who I am, my “why” and my purpose. Like you, I see myself through the lens of my life experience, my connections, reflections from others’ perspectives of me, and my deep soul connection to my identity. Sometimes those aspects are aligned, but often they aren’t. We often see ourselves only through one lens - our role at the moment. That limited view can blind us to our inner identity, that piece of us that is connected to God, our Higher Power, the universe, or whatever the word is that you choose to define that transcendent spiritual power outside of you.

For me, it’s God. I was raised in a conservative Jewish family in the 60s, 70s and 80s. I learned about God and didn’t question it. For me it was easy. I was a child. I listened to my parents and the community they raised me in. We felt our Jewish identity strongly and were passionate about Zionism and Israel. I learned to sing with joy and passion in my synagogue’s Cantor’s choir. We called it Chazzanim Club. Chazzan is the Hebrew word for cantor. It was our church choir. I couldn’t wait until I was old enough to join. I found connection and voice through Jewish music. Not only prayer music, but also Jewish and Israeli folk music. It resonated with my soul and made me happy. I liked the way it felt to sing.

I learned my Jewish story at home and through history. As a young child, 6 or 7 years old, I sat with my father and watched a Holocaust documentary. It was terrifying and personal. Those pictures of starving people in the ghetto, the newsreels of piles of bodies, those had been people. My people. It could have been me. Somehow, during that time I came to the conclusion that I had a choice. I could reject Jewish identity and try to blend in or I could embrace it with all its joys and food, and holiday celebrations and especially community. When I learned that in the time of the Nazis, it didn’t matter if you were outwardly Jewish or if you grandparent was Jewish and everyone in the next generations had converted and engaged in a different religious practice, the Nazis saw you as Jewish and you would find yourself in the same ghetto, the same concentration camp, in the same forest or ravine, in the same gas chamber.

If that was the case, then I would love my Jewish identity. I would eat candy apples to celebrate Simchat Torah. I would sit in services on the High Holidays being wrapped in the music even when I didn’t understand the Hebrew - I would read the English and try to make sense of how the ancient words connected to me. I found my soul in my Jewish identity, despite the underlying antisemitism that was out and about in the 70s and 80s. It was not aggressive in the same way it has been these last two years since October 7, it was simply present - it was there. A swastika on a synagogue was not unusual. A swastika scratched into a bathroom stall - it happened. But angry marches against Jews, that happened in Skokie - or maybe it petitioned to happen, and was guaranteed the right to happen by the US Supreme Court, but it actually didn’t happen after all. For the most part, Jews were safe. To be Jewish in America had its risks but also was a world of opportunity never experienced anywhere before.

My soul was Jewish and American. I saw myself as part of the fabric of the American tapestry. I was a woman growing up in America with opportunities my mom didn’t have. I went to college and law school. I worked in a big NY law firm and lived in Manhattan. I earned my own income and married my college boyfriend. I had friends and colleagues.

I also had challenges. Not because I was Jewish - but because I was a woman. As one of three sisters, I never perceived being female to be a negative. We were powerful and smart. We did well in school. So what if my male guidance counselor didn’t encourage me to take Calculus, I was good at math, but I didn’t really need it, did I? I was ranked in the top 5% of my high school class of 500, but I wasn’t encouraged to apply to Ivy League schools or to seek scholarships. I knew my parents could only afford state schools. That was fine. I didn’t resent that because I still had opportunities at excellent state schools. But what if I had been encouraged by educators to look beyond limits? What if I asked questions instead of accepting the limitations that seemed set in stone? I didn’t look beyond my small understanding of what was possible because I accepted that bigger wasn’t available to me and the educators in my world, the men, didn’t encourage me to ask different questions.

I was really good at school. I made friends, chose a major that aligned with my passion, theater, acting and musical theater, and took courses in literature and drama. My science and math requirements were satisfied primarily by my AP credits. I did dabble in pyschology. But I didn’t seek out direction when I was in university because I wanted to plot my own path. What I did pursue were Jewish education courses. History, Hebrew, Holocaust education. I was encouraged to take those classed because of scholarships offered by my synagogue. It was a great incentive and continued to help me refine and define my Jewish identity. I didn’t keep kosher or eat in the kosher kitchen. I didn’t keep Shabbat, but I knew in my soul I was a proud Jewish woman. It just was.

Then my theater major work began in earnest and my classes and performances took over my identity. It was a wonderful empowering space for me, creating characters through music and the words of brilliant lyricists and playwrights. I read Faulkner and felt the lyricism of his writing about people who were so different from me. It was fascinating because I saw myself in them despite the differences. That is why great literature resonates with so many, it unmasks the humanity that connects us all.

I met the boy who would become my husband. He was my first “real” boyfriend. And my identity shifted again. My Jewish soul, and theater soul, took a back seat to the girlfriend role. I was learning about new things, meeting different people, wanting to connect to the things he connected with. I didn’t lose myself so much as grow differently. I wanted to find my person and when I met J he was that person despite differences in how we approached life, friends and commitment. I fell in love.

After college, we moved to New York City. I had one set of roommates, and he had another. We lived separately but in the same neighborhood. I went to law school, he went to business school, and we created a life with a new rhythm. Both of us were striving to become the best of ourselves. It was fun, exciting, challenging. When we were didn’t have so much money and lots of student loans, we found ways to live life and appreciate every experience we had. We grew up in the City. I believed we were on the same path, the same journey.

We had blips - he had questions about being with the girl he met in college. He said it out loud. We would have difficult conversations about it, but I didn’t want to believe that he didn’t want me. We broke up and got back together. I believed we were meant to be, and then he asked me to marry him. That was my dream. I felt my identity change again. I was no longer a girlfriend, I was a woman in relationship with the power of a forever future together. For me, everything changed. And so when I was choosing a topic for my law review note, I wrote an article advocating for same-sex marriage. It was 1990. I felt so changed in a positive way by having the right to marry, I believed that all people who loved each other should have that same right. I found legal language to support that proposition despite the fact that the words were embedded in the dissents and not the law. Nearly 20 years later, the law caught up with my note, and now my children can’t imagine a world without gay marriage.

Back to my journey, through life and roles. When I got a job in a major NY law firm out of law school, I was so proud. My parents were proud. I worked crazy hours, but in the beginning I loved it. I was part of something. It was enough to make me ignore the sexual harassment. Some of it was subtle, a sexual note about me written on a placeholder I had left in the library, an up and down look from a partner in an elevator. Whispered gossip about working with this male partner or that one. It was challenging when that gossip was about an attorney I wanted to work with based on his practice area. I was scooped up by another partner. We worked on a large bankruptcy litigation together. People noticed that he seemed to favor me. I got great assignments, but I also got extra attention. Attention that was not wanted. Phone calls to my parents’ home during Thanksgiving break. Comments about working me so hard because he loved me. I took it in a paternal way. But then, I had to. I was already married and didn’t even want to consider there was some other way to view it. After all, his children were my age.

I found myself wrapped up in a sexual harassment investigation that I didn’t initiate because someone had observed a partner being inappropriate with me. From my end, I figured I would find my own way to deal with him. But I didn’t have that opportunity. It became an internal investigation. I was only 26 or 27, a new lawyer. I didn’t want this to define me. I continued to work at that firm for another 2 or 3 years, but left when the partner who had scooped me up started preventing me from working with other partners and then called me a wench during a meeting with a client. He thought it was a funny joke. I told him it was not. That was my signal to leave. It was so disappointing to have to change firms in order to escape the harassment. The next firm was different, less personal, less fraternal. But they harassed in a different way - overworking their employees. When I was pregnant and the partner in charge required me to work until 3 am and fax him a brief that he didn’t read til the next day, I knew I had traded one difficult situation for another. But when I came back after my maternity leave, they allowed me to work part time. A huge benefit. That is until I was at a lunch with a partner who decided to complain about hiring female associates at all because you train them and then they leave when they have kids. I was there in the room, and I just had my first child. It was astonishing how tone deaf he was. He said to me, look, I have 4 kids and I didn’t leave work. I looked at him and said, yeah - that’s because you have a wife. That left him speechless. A few months later, I left to stay home with my 1 year old. I never looked back. I didn’t want to go back to practice law that way and I didn’t know any other way to practice.

Being subject to those indignities challenged me deep in my soul. I didn’t know how to fight it, so I removed myself from the situation. It caused challenges in my marriage because my husband felt more pressure at work, even though we agreed this is what we wanted. He had told me at the beginning of our relationship that he wanted his kids to have a mom at home since his mom had worked when he was a child. I thought we were on the same page. Especially because he was in the financial services industry in NYC and he was making a great living. We could survive and thrive on his income. I felt like my role was to be at home with our children. We had a daughter. We moved out of the City to a big house in NJ, had another daughter, and then our son was diagnosed with diabetes. I didn’t feel I could go back to work, and frankly I didn’t want to. I was building our life, our friend network, our community in the suburbs, and I needed to be there for our son and our girls.

During that time, I became deeply involved in Jewish communal work. The non-profit leadership roles I undertook filled my soul. I felt purpose and meaning and saw myself changing the world. I felt like I had returned to my true identity. I hadn’t realized that I had missed it, but as Sarah Hurwitz writes, “it was there all along.” I used my advocacy skills to become a public speaker, I created programs, planned events, found myself on the board and then the executive committee, making decisions for the 120k Jews who lived in our area. I became a member of the National Young Leadership Cabinet, and then dug deep into Torah study, the Jewish bible. I learned about Judaism in a way that had been inaccessible to me as a child and young adult. And I used that learning to educate others about leadership lessons from the Torah, life instruction from our book of Instruction, phrases that seemed merely commercials, I learned came from the Torah (like “Man cannot live on bread alone.”)

I reconnected to my relationship with Israel. For me, Israel was a special place. I had visited three times from my bat mitzvah through college. And then no visits for nearly 20 years. I didn’t realize my connection to the place was about to be supercharged. The second Intifada began in the summer of 2000. Suicide bombings were happening all over Israel in places as full of people as Times Square. I felt my people at risk. As the Matzav, the situation, quieted, I needed to go there. I led a women’s mission to Israel in January 2005. All of a sudden, I was back as an adult. I had a physical yearning to connect. I breathed differently when I was there. I connected not just to the land, but to the incredible people I met who have become my family. Israel reignited that Jewish soul that had been asleep during the 90s. Since that time, I have been back to Israel over 20 times visiting places and people. Creating programs and community. Learning and speaking. Growing and igniting my soul.

October 7 was personal. People I know were murdered that day. Others were trapped in safe rooms for 18 hours and had to leave their homes for nearly a year. At least one person connected to me through my daughter is still a hostage. He is only 24 years old. Every single Israeli, and Jew, has been personally impacted by the situation. I am challenged by the government’s response to the war, but not by the people’s resilience and commitment to their Israeli values and identity. The unity after October 7 is challenged by the disunity in the sectarianism in the population. And it’s a Jewish story. It touches my soul. I am tormented daily. I pray for our hostages and I pray that the war will end. No more death and destruction. That has to be the line in the sand. For Hamas especially.

It hurts my soul. But what lifts my soul is that life continues. I have visited Israel twice since October 7 to attend weddings. I know that babies are coming. Israelis are people, Jews are humans. We are part of the story of the world in so many ways. My soul wants us to live in peace. We pray for peace in our Jewish practice every day, three times a day, using different words and different prayers. The words of peace touch my soul.

In my work as a divorce coach, I support my clients to find peace in their hearts. To reconnect to their souls. Their stories have created them. And their stories may define them. My role is to help them reinterpret the stories to shift from focusing on what happened to them, to ask questions about what happens next. I help them get curious. I ask them questions. Questions they may not have thought they were allowed to ask. Questions they may never have considered. Because divorce is not one size fits all. Every family is unique and every family has its own requirements and needs. I allow my clients the opportunity to share what they believe they need and want, and help them ask questions about their expectations. In this way, I allow them to reunite with their souls. This is strategy with soul. Concrete steps, and opening up to new awareness. Both/And.

I will share more about my journey through soul and how to open your heart and your journey as I build this Substack platform.

Thank you for being part of my story.