The End That Becomes a Beginning
On retiring from Darchei Noam
By Tina Grimberg
In every end there is a beginning…
I am reminded of my mother sitting in a yellow armchair, knitting. The arms of the chair were torn by our cat, who claimed it in our absence with her sharp nails. A ball of yarn rested on the floor. The thread disappeared steadily into my mother’s hands as she worked, shaping a hat. My cat and I would sit and watch the ball of green yarn slowly diminish, becoming something more.
Without yarn, there is no hat. Without my mother’s hands—her patient, practiced, almost magical hands—the yarn remains only potential. A ball of yarn on its own is useless, full of possibility but of no comfort to anyone. And a hat without yarn is only an idea. Without that finished hat, I would have been very cold in the Ukrainian winters.
My mother’s hands are using two magic wands: two knitting needles that touched each other—and from that connection, something extraordinary emerged. Magic is what happens when disparate parts come together to form a whole, when fragments are woven into something that did not exist before.
A new creation. A new beginning.
After twenty-four years of service to Darchei Noam Community, I feel that the ball of yarn has come to its end. In the hands of a fine craftsperson…the yarn, the pattern, woven together by magic wands…
It has been twenty-four years of privilege: to learn, to laugh and to cry together, to pray and to hope.
For twenty-four years, I woke each day as a mother, a wife, and a Rabbi. Given the chance, I would do it all over again.
Fortunate is the one who can say goodbye while knowing one has been woven into the fabric of a community—into the texture of Jewish life, into the story of our people. As written in the Piut, a poem for High Holiday prayer: ”Like a clay shaped in the hands of a potter…, like yarn passing through the fingers of a weaver....
My service filled my heart with joy and shaped my soul.
But this is not the end. Not at all. It is a portal to my new adventure. While winter turns into spring and daffodils insist on their rightful place in my garden, I will put my winter hat away, I choose new patterns, bold colors, attach one piece to another and at first from disconnected threads I will make something new.
Like an archaeologist who interprets something ancient for new times,
Like a historian with a new insight on the past events…
Like a lover of a good word, looks for another,
Like a soul, looking for another to converse (commune)
I offer you an open door to my new, vital and virtual home…: