Thirty years ago(!) I was standing by Lake Michigan holding a nondescript brown paper bag. Inside was gold, otherwise known as a truly superior black and white cookie, imported from New York by my good friend Adam. I watched the Chicago skyline and broke off a piece of this delight – a perfect balance of cakey cookie with white icing that hints at lemon on one half, and rich chocolate icing on the other half, the icing just firm enough to not be messy, but soft enough to linger. It was more than just sugar or any old cookie. It was a taste of home, and I was living somewhere else.

I had just moved to Chicago, and Chicago was severely lacking on this dessert front. Black and whites are the kind of cookie you can find in any NYC deli or corner market, but, at that time, almost never in the Midwest. My friend Adam and I took turns bringing the cookies back from New York and New Jersey and would drop them at one another’s apartment buildings, leaving these nondescript brown bags with one another’s doormen as if we were making drug drops or leaving other contraband. These cakey cookies were sweet reminders of our East Coast roots, and arrived only a little squished from our flights and luggage.

Later that afternoon I arrived home, a few crumbs left in the bag. Wondering why this cookie felt so significant, I emailed a wise seminary friend asking: Why does this cookie feel so important? Because it’s normal, ordinary, he wrote back. It’s the stuff we cling to in this season when what we do is so not typical.

Aaaahh…interesting point. It was my first year doing the rabbi thing in an official, I-receive-a-fulltime-paycheck-for-this-work kind of way. I’d spent 30 years watching my father during this season. Dad would withdraw to his study for hours on a quest to write the seemingly elusive goal of a homiletic superlative. He was, to be candid, kind of cranky this time of year (Is there any rabbi who isn’t?), and we didn’t dare go try to watch tv in his study – a definite limitation as that was the family television set. So I knew the season and its stresses more than the average recently ordained rabbi, but did not yet understand the depth and demands of the time or managing its stress when out in the real world post graduate school.

That wise friend was right, his insight obvious albeit apparently not to me. Here in this time when I was pulling back to read, think and write, when I was to be searching the world and the books to find wise, universal messages, when I balanced my own crankiness with the weight of the season, I craved the ordinariness and regular-ness of old-school New York black and white cookies. Whether that dessert longing represented a desire to just be like everyone, or a search for comfort food to mitigate my seasonal stress, I couldn’t and didn’t care to parse it; it was real. That cookie, that simple cookie, delivered what I needed that first High Holy Day season as a practicing rabbi: a rush of joy and the comfort of home which I missed. As I ate it, I might have been walking in my former West Village neighborhood, into the Town Hall Deli of my home town, South Orange, NJ, or to the Bronx bakery around the corner from my grandfather’s apartment and Yankee Stadium.

I remember that year well, maybe because it marked the beginning of my career. Whatever the reason, the insight remains, ever bright as a neon sign on a dark night. I’ve marked three decades of seasonal clergy stress, continuing to navigate the yearly balancing act of prep for High Holy Days and daily life, each year with more complicating factors than that first year. First there was pregnancy. Then a baby. A baby and a husband working litigation out of town. Then two more babies. Then separation, divorce, and sad, angry kids. Solo parenting in my house. Ill childcare providers. Mourning my father. A dear friend in hospice. My mother in hospice. Mourning my mother. Terrifying events in the world, near and far.

Each year as I’ve approached Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur I’ve tried to keep my head down to read, study, think and write. I try to block out the world at the same time that I pay close attention to everything that is going on in it. My defenses are down, my skin is thinner, my emotions are on my sleeve, and pretty much any trite idiomatic description about vulnerability and raw emotion applies. During these days I am overwhelmed by the emotions and pain of the world, which, I realize, might be the consequence of my desire to deliver impactful messages – and might even make me better at doing just that. In the moment, though, I rarely have such awareness. Instead, that heightened sensitivity makes everything hurt, and makes me want to curl up and withdraw.

But sermons beckon. So, I seek control and normalcy when I fear I don’t have what to say. I make lists. I clean out the fridge. I make blueberry muffins with the season’s last berries and Rosh Hashanah cakes with farmers market Italian plums. When my kids were little, I’d check that they had tights or jackets and dress shoes that fit and line up all of their dress clothes meticulously. One year I wrote a fabulous essay about lipstick and holiday prep that I wish could have been a sermon. In short, I retreat as much as I can into a cocoon of comfort clothes and quiet, choosing what I consume and respond to while, at the same time, I face events of the world head on. I read endlessly, study text, think deeply, and edit myself harshly. That cocoon shelters me in late night writing when I worry I have nothing to say, when terrible events we don’t want to see in the world occur without warning, when I am writing eulogies instead of sermons, when I curse my parents’ deaths and the absence of wisdom-giving calm, Dad’s sharp edits, and Mom’s meltaway brisket.  

This year marks 30 years since I stood by the lake and savored that black and white cookie, 22 years of the highwire act of rabbinic parenting during High Holy Day season. For 21 years I’ve read while kids were napping and at school, written after bedtime, stopped long enough to make dinner for three small kids, and tried to hold in my seasonal angst.

This year is different. Those three small children are now taller than me and living in college dorms. Every well-meaning person I encounter asks how empty-nesting goes. The house is still, the fridge holds precisely what I left in it, the floor in the kids’ rooms is visible, and the laundry chute is empty. Maybe I am calmer with more time before me. I’m not worrying at five o’clock what protein and vegetable I’m serving up for dinner. Beyond that, I don’t know, and am not digging deep to understand. I am, though, sitting by the lake with my laptop, and am in search of a seriously good black and white cookie for dinner.