WHEN WE'RE BORN WE FORGET EVERYTHING

Recounting a spiritual journey.

Musician, performer, and Torah teacher Rabins grew up in a secular Jewish home, where her family revered science, but not religion. “God was nowhere in my childhood, but mystery was everywhere,” she writes in an engaging memoir about her search for her heritage, Jewish traditions, and, above all, the sacred. While a student at Barnard, she joined a study group where she learned about Judaism; her study buddy was Shira, who invited her home for the Jewish new year holidays. With Shira’s family, Rabins recalls, she felt like “an anthropologist who had traveled far to study a tribe.” In 1998, she traveled even farther: to Jerusalem, where she studied Hebrew and the Torah; she prayed three times a day, washed her hands in a ritual that required a special two-handled pourer, felt overcome with emotion at her first visit to the Wailing Wall. She chanted a challah blessing, a handwashing blessing, a blessing after the Sabbath meal. She fell in love with an American also on a quest for Jewish homecoming, a relationship that brought her back to the U.S.—and to new life challenges. Interweaving chapters about her life—coming to terms with her bisexuality, her fraught relationship with her body and complicated history with food, her delight in playing violin—Rabins offers reflections on (and lessons learned from) Biblical women: among them, sisters Rachel and Leah, the intrepid Judith, the supplicant Hannah, the prophetess Miriam, Ruth and her mother-in-law Naomi, the widow Tamar, and the powerful and dangerous Lilith. As she reimagines ancient stories through the lens of her own time, and as she grapples with the demands of Jewish law, she asks, “What does it mean to carry the past into the future?”

A thoughtful, tender memoir.