Rabbi Raquel Writes A Sermon
Note: This is based on the television show Transparent. Also, I'm probably not going to be doing any more fanfiction writing, at least for a while. Thanks if you've read and/or reviewed my writing. What else…I've been wanting for a while to come out as bisexual and as having Asperger's syndrome. So this is me doing that.
Rabbi Raquel drummed her OPI Red nails on her kitchen table. She was finding it dreadfully difficult to write her sermon today. She thought perhaps she would focus on women' s history, as it was March, America's women's history month. Perhaps she could write about Regina Jonas, the first woman ordained as a rabbi, and Sally Priesand, the first American woman ordained as a rabbi. She thought this seemed a fine and productive idea, but for some reason her thoughts kept drifting.
She wondered how much longer she would get to serve as a rabbi before ageism led her superiors (not to mention her congregation) to encourage her and perhaps even force her to retire. Life seemed to be passing her by so quickly these days. She had heard a person's life seemed to go by quicker the older they were, as each year that passed was a smaller percentage of the life they had lived (that is, if a person was four, a year was a fourth of their life and seemed to go on for ages, but if a person was forty, a year was a mere tenth of their life and seemed to pass much quicker.) Yet she had also heard the more encouraging theory that life seemed to go by quicker as age increased only because older people became more set in their ways and had fewer novel experiences, on average, than younger people did. That suggested one could make life seem to slow down simply by doing more new things. Still, Raquel liked much of her routine, and was not really much for the typical "bucket list" ideas such as going skydiving, or worse yet writing a novel. G-d knew writing a sermon was difficult enough.
She wrote a paragraph each about Regina Jonas and Sally Priesand, then reapplied her red lipstick as she pondered. She enjoyed writing and delivering sermons-after all, she would not have become a rabbi if she did not. But it just seemed to come to her less naturally these days. Still, that made it all the more rewarding when she succeeded.
She wrote a paragraph about the week's Torah portion, tying it in to Jonas's and Priesand's experiences. She wrote about how Jonas had been murdered in the Holocaust, and how Priesand had been part of the first all-women team of rabbi and cantor in any congregation. She finished with a caution not to either despair due to the horrors of history, or to grow smugly complacent with the idea that history would forever progress toward a more just future, as if that were somehow foreordained, as if there had not been plenty of new backsliding and injustice just within her own lifetime, to say nothing of the lifetimes of the congregation members, many of whom were older than her. Edna Cohen was even a Holocaust survivor herself, G-d bless her. But they all could, she wrote and thought, band together and help make the future a better place, give it novel forms of protest and equality.
She finished up her sermon and placed it aside, thinking over her life, which somehow seemed to grow longer as she remembered it. Perhaps she'd try kimchi for the first time today. After all, could all the Koreans in the world really be wrong?