To BT's- What was the catalyst in your becoming frum?

amother

Mon, Nov 27 2006, 7:31 pm

I just read this and found it very inspiring.

Aliza Bulow reaches out to find and teach truth
By ANDREA JACOBS IJN Staff Writer

Aliza Bulow arrives bearing gifts — a Purim basket filled with containers of homemade lentil and bean soups and a fresh baked roll.
A bribe? Hardly. Bulow is fulfilling the traditional Purim mitzvah of shaloch manos.

“I don’t know why you’re doing this interview,” she says, taking a seat in the conference room.

As the photographer adjusts the light, Bulow laughs.

“When you find out you’re going to have your picture taken, it’s too late to do anything. You can’t lose weight in 24 hours. I didn’t even brush my sheitl. Is it OK?”

Bulow is a dynamic Orthodox woman whose Jewish knowledge permeates her demeanor, her language, her teaching, even her smile.

She did not attend Jewish day schools as a child, or celebrate Shabbos or Passover or Purim.

In fact, Bulow is a 13th-generation American whose ancestors came to this country from England in 1634.

None of them were Jewish.

“Our family was crowded with clergy, all Christian,” she says. “I was a lapsed Protestant, but I was definitely an American WASP.”

Her parents were passionate advocates of the civil rights movement. Bulow remembers marching with Martin Luther King, Jr., when she was “knee-high.”

When she was 11 — “I was a very difficult child,” she laughs — her rebellious nature blossomed. “Whatever I could do to oppose, I did.”

She also decided she was an atheist. “I thought the whole thing of believing in G-d was ridiculous.” She even invented a religion for non-believers with a friend.

A couple of years later, Bulow investigated Scientology, Buddhist chanting, parapsychology and psychic healing. Although she left few stones unturned, “none of it really gave me what I wanted.”

During a psychic healing workshop, Bulow had an epiphany.

“I thought maybe I did believe in G-d after all. Part of what bothered me about G-d was the Yoshke component. I realized it might be possible to separate the two and discover a G-d concept I liked.”

Her life — and faith — were about to make the most transformative leap of all.

During her freshman year at a performing arts high school in Portland, Ore., Bulow studied ballet and musical theater and sang with a jazz band. The high school was predominately black. “Out of 1,400 students there was not one Jew in school.

“But in the library of that school I found Rabbi Chaim HaLevy Donin’s book, To Be a Jew.”

Bulow lets out a sigh.

“I felt like this is it. I slid into home plate.”

She met a Conservative Jewish woman through a friend and started going to synagogue, sharing Shabbos meals, attended Sunday School, joined temple youth groups and went to adult education classes.

“By 15, Iknew I wanted to convert to Judaism,” Bulow says. “But the rabbi at my synagogue thought I was too young to make that kind of decision. So I went to a Solomon Schechter summer camp, where I learned all sorts of things, including how to keep kosher.”

One year later, the rabbi performed the conversion ceremony. Bulow then had her Bat Mitzvah.

She wanted to spend her junior year abroad in Israel. The rabbi called her in and said, “There are two ways to learn in Israel: at a religious kibbutz or a women’s yeshiva.”

Bulow was stunned to learn that there were yeshivot for women. It sounded perfect.

Unfortunately, the yeshiva in question told her that all its high school students came from day school backgrounds. Fortunately, there was a beginner’s track at the college level. Bulow was accepted and flew to Jerusalem.

“I was 16 going on 21,” she laughs.

Bulow learned a powerful lesson in Israel. A superior student who was raised in an academic environment, she suddenly found herself surrounded by young women of equal and often greater intelligence.

“I found out Iknew nothing, that I wasn’t particularly smart. And it was a shock. No more straight A’s without any effort from me.”

When she turned 18 Bulow was determined to remain in Israel, where she identified with the Mizrachi movement. A scholarship she received from Hadassah’s Young Judaea program enabled her to stay on.

After graduation, she served with the IDF in a religious unit and attended The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Then she met Ephraim Bulow, an American law student who came to Israel for a wedding.

“I told myself I would not date Americans or even men who spoke English,” Bulow says fiercely, “because I was not leaving this country. I was going to make aliyah.”

Ephraim and Aliza married in 1985. “So, it was back to the States,” she smiles.

In New York, Ephraim finished law school and Aliza pursued degrees in Hebrew language and Jewish social studies at Hunter College. She graduated the day her first daughter was born.

“Then it was a flurry of babies,” she says of her six children, who were born within seven-and-half years. “In case you’re counting,” she grins.

Bulow says she was “the pillar of the community kind of mom. Imade all the costumes, made the phone calls and stuffed envelopes for the school.”

Even when her children were little, Bulow taught and studied. Her desire for learning was an unquenchable fire she never considered putting out.

Aliza Bulow the spiritual seeker was an ideal candidate to teach Jewish women struggling to find their spiritual voice.

She began one on one and with small groups of women in living rooms. One rainy day, two women asked Bulow if she really believed in Olam Haba, the World to Come. “I realized that other women in the class were also pretty nervous about Jewish philosophy.

“So I polled the group and found out they lacked a serious understanding of basic Jewish philosophy.”

Bulow pulled out one of her favorite books, Derech Hashem, and started to teach what she calls “the mystical mechanics: how do things work in the universe? What’s the purpose of creation, the role of mankind, the point of miztvot, how does free will work? Angels. Demons. It’s all in Derech Hashem.”

Bulow joined Partners in Torah as a teacher and then telephone mentor. When she discovered there was little or no follow up for telephone mentors, she was hired by Eli Gerwertz as PIT’s study coordinator — “the telephone mentor’s mentor.”

Eventually she was delivering lectures and shiurim to large audiences.

When the Bulows moved from New York to Denver in July, 2001, Aliza was hired by The Jewish Experience.

Bulow reaches out to all Jews who are curious about their Judaism. At one time admittedly more militant in her approach, she has softened her outreach style over the years.

“In my maturation process, I have really come to see that there are so many different pathways to Judaism — so many different stops and slides along the way.

“Hopefully I’ve mellowed with age. Ino longer try to fit people into a particular hole. I work with people where they are and how they are, and help them discover their own journey.”

She makes it clear to students that she’s halachically observant. “That’s who I am. But I want to help other people assess who they are on the Jewish continuum.”

If a person is content being a liberal Jew, so is Bulow. “That’s fine. That’s them.

“But I think it’s wonderful when someone wants to take on another piece of Judaism. If they want to light candles, that’s great. If they want to light them on time, even more fabulous. Say a brucha? Terrific! If someone’s not keeping Shabbos at all, I tell them to dress up. ‘Going to the soccer game? Wear pearls.’ Judaism is not all or nothing.

“Now, that doesn’t mean I don’t have a vision of a fully observant community one day. But I don’t tell people, ‘you have to do this or that.’ I say, ‘Look how cool this is!’”

The only thing she won’t tolerate is the conscious cessation of spiritual knowledge and growth. This extends to the Orthodox as well.

“I feel my job is to inspire growth, even in the Orthodox community. You can never stop growing. I mean, that’s fine, it’s your choice. But you can’t come to me to learn anymore.”

She compares the study of Judaism to one of those intriguing gift boxes that contain smaller boxes inside.

“Everytime Iunwrap Judaism it’s always bigger. It’s bigger than you ever thought. That’s what keeps me excited.”

Bulow is considering expanding her outreach efforts in an entirely new direction — to the modern Orthodox on Denver’s East Side.
“I want to be a culture changer,” she says, “to work with the East Side community to stimulate and foster spiritual growth. I would love to be a spiritual guide; a feminine, not feminist, spiritual presence for individuals, families, kids, parents.”

Denver’s East Side is where most modern Orthodox reside.

Bulow, who lives on the West Side, leans toward what she describes as “right wing” Orthodoxy.

But she doesn’t anticipate any problems bringing the ideologies closer together.

Bulow says three areas separate modern Orthodoxy from right-wing Orthodoxy: their perspective on Israel, secular studies and rabbinic opinion.

Modern Orthodoxy sees the establishment of Israel as “miraculous, the beginning of the final redemption,” she explains.

“Right-wing Orthodoxy says it might be the final redemption, and it might not be. It’s not up us to establish the state of Israel. It’s going to be a Divine act. What is our role in the state of Israel today?” She admits she has moved from the modern Orthodox view to a post-Zionist understanding.

“But I certainly believe in the State of Israel, making aliyah, the mitzvah of living on the land. Iam somewhere in the religious Zionism camp. But I have a hard time with the word because I feel Zionism led a lot of Jews away from Judaism in Israel. They felt Jewish because they were doing the Zionist thing, but they weren’t doing Torah at all.”

The modern Orthodox view secular studies as almost co-equal in value to Torah. Right-wing Orthodoxy believes secular studies are “a necessary diversion from Torah study. You have to study something secular to get a job, support your family, have time to study.

“I’m in the middle. I don’t believe secular studies are intrinsically valuable, but they are valuable to the extent that they move you forward spiritually. If you need art to be more spiritual, then you should study art. According to Maimonides, math and science are clearly a way of discovering Hashem. It’s important to study as much as you need in order to feel like you’re a full person.”

Rabbinic opinion, or Dass Torah, is the third area of divergent thought and practice.

Adherents of modern Orthodoxy believe their rabbis are responsible for transmitting Torah and making halachic decisions. “They will ask the rabbi, is this kosher, is this treif?” Bulow says.

Right-wing Orthodoxy embraces the notion that the very act of studying Torah affects the brain “to such an extent that every thought you have is a Torah thought,” says Bulow. “You would ask the rabbi not only about whether something is kosher or treif but, ‘should Imove or not,’ ‘should Itake this job or not? They help us make life choices about non-halachic issues. This is not part of modern Orthodoxy.”

Despite these apparent differences, Bulow disdains verbal categories.

“I’m Orthodox. That’s it. I don’t have a modifying label.”

Recently, she helped a friend sign up for frumster.com, an Orthodox dating site. “They ask you to define yourself.

“I found something on there called ‘modern yeshivish.’ That’s a good fit for me.”

When Bulow recently visited her son in college, he jokingly told her that he warned everyone, “My mom is a rabbi.”

She leans her head on her hand.

“I’m not a rabbi,” she says after a split-second pause. “But there is no name for who Iam. I’m not a feminist. I don’t need a smicha.

“But it sure would be nice if there was a title other than rabbi for women who were spiritual leaders. We could be our own little group, have our own designation that says, ‘You have achieved this amount of learning.’”

Because her ancestral background precluded the presence of rabbis in her long lineage, “I don’t have men in my life who are learned in Torah,” she says. “I don’t have a father or brother or uncle who’s a rabbi.

“It’s me. I’m the one who learns, and moves forward as a woman in Judaism.”

Unable to use the title rebbetzin, Aliza Bulow invents a new word to describe herself.

“I’m a lawyertzin,” she smiles.

A modern yeshivish lawyertzin.

The possibilities are endless — and just beginning.