When I restarted this blog, it was with the intention that I would speak truthfully about what it’s like not only to b an independent musician, but to be an independent musician who’s a 60-year-old woman with multiple medical issues and limited resources, trying to make it in the world as best she can.
It’s damned hard to function in the Jewish musical world, as I’ve chosen to do, when you are also older, low-income and medically challenged. When you don’t come from the deeply-rooted, materially comfortable world of the Jewish establishment, and yet you choose to try and bring your music to that world.
I’ve been, to my surprise, modestly successful, in that my songs are sung in synagogues from coast to coast and that, when I’m well enough, I’ve managed to eke out a tiny living as a touring artist and educator. I’m not materially comfortable, though I do have a roof over my head and food on the table. But in order to have those things I rely on Medicaid and food stamps (aka SNAP). I could never earn enough money to pay for better health insurance to cover all of my stuff, so I keep my income low enough to qualify to get what I need, and live without higher-quality healthcare. I get the basics — medical care, referrals to specialists; no mental health counseling or vision, and I don’t complain because I don’t have to pay premiums. If the healthcare system is going to make my life harder, I at least get to game it in such a way as to not work myself to death. Sorry, not sorry.
A decade ago, I entered perimenopause without warning, without even knowing I had entered it. I struggle without knowing that I was struggling. Between the brain fog, episodes of fatigue and wild mood swings, I had no idea what was happening. I just knew that I was unhappier than I’d been in years and didn’t know why. I attended a Shabbat service at the synagogue where I worked as a musician and teacher n order to say Kaddish on my mother’s yahrtzeit, only to find myself repulsed by the ostentatious wealth and privilege on display. I said Kaddish, snuck out early to sneak some of the fancy buffet into a ziploc bag for that night’s dinner, and went home. That night, I stared at my plate of bagel piled stupidly high with lox and got really angry at the state of affairs, and wrote a scathing blog post about it. I felt truly alone and isolated in the Jewish world and had no one to talk with about it, so I blurted out my pain and hit “post”.
A few days later, I was called in to speak with the rabbi, who had seen the post and was furious.
I had overstepped, I showed a lack of judgment and I had bitten the hands that fed me. I shamed the synagogue and reflected badly on my employer and my work. And I was in so much pain that I numbly nodded and said little.
I was “allowed” to keep my job — in hindsight, I suspect because they had no one else to hire in my place at the time — and ordered to get some help. I was also told that my employers had been watching me for some time, which led me to wonder why they hadn’t said anything at the time they first noticed. I had no agency to do anything else about the situation, so I walked like a zombie through the hardest year of my life, pretending for the students that it was all fine. At the end of the year they lined up at my desk to tell me their B’nei Mitzvah dates and made me promise that I’d attend each one — a promise I could not keep because I knew I’d be let go and made persona non grata at the end of the year.
It was the last time I would ever work regularly on contract for a synagogue. After that, I was an independent, a total freelancer, reliant on my own hustle to find gigs. It was hard, exhausting work that sometimes paid off, sometimes not.
To this day, on the rare occasions that rabbi and I bump into each other in town, he turns on his heel and walks away quickly, avoiding me. It’s been a decade, and my presence still bothers him. I’ve gotten far enough past it, and gotten enough help and insight along the way, that I don’t worry about it anymore. Along the way, I was diagnosed with depression, anxiety, and quite recently, with ADHD. I am on a waiting list for help with the ADHD and might see someone in 3-4 months’ time. In the meantime I’m reading up on it and trying to be gentle with myself. If I had been twenty years younger, I might worry about it more; but at sixty I feel like I’m the downslope of whatever career I may have left, and with the help of a loving, supportive spouse, family and close friends, a great deal of the pressure is off.
If that sounds like the coward’s way out, Sue me. I feel like my life has been hard enough that I’ve earned some time to breathe a little. The current events have taken a LOT out of me, and I am exhausted.
I think it’s also been an interesting time for me to ponder my place in Jewish communal life, which feels greatly in question in some ways. A lot of that is owing to my mobile, disconnected childhood, the pile of medical issues that have influenced my thinking and actions along the way, and recent events in Israel and Gaza which are forcing a lot of people to take sides and wave flags. As a career isolationist, flag-waving has always been difficult for me. Choosing sides has been almost impossible for me, especially when it comes to deciding that one group of people has a greater right to exist than another group.
As someone who has spent a lot of time on the social margins, it is impossible for me to ignore the feelings and experiences of anyone else who’s been marginalized in some way.
Which is why the current events in the Middle East have made me feel marginalized again, and unsure of where I want to stand. I know where I am expected to stand, but that’s quite different. Whatever I do or say publicly now has the potential to derail the small gains I’ve made since the pandemic. I don’t yet know how I feel about that, and I am hoping to find some help in processing that. Not just medical help, but perhaps social and communal help as well. I’m not sure what that will look like yet, nor what the outcome will look like. I just know that at this point in my life, I’m not willing to be someone other than who I really am, because I believe that the place I stand in, a place of sire for universal peace, is the right place for me to be. If that compromises my Jewish identity or my Jewish belonging, so be it. I can’t be anyone other than myself.
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