Our beloved rabbi, Rabbi Ira Stone of the Mussar Institute in Philadelphia, gave us this solid and meaningful advice about Jewish parenting:

Raise healthy children who will be able to serve God and develop themselves morally without struggling with their own psychological health.  

    Rabbi Stone guided us through my Conversion and our Jewish wedding 12 years ago, teaching us a beautiful Judaism in the process.  We lost touch with Rabbi Stone for many years; in the meantime Alon and I became parents in Los Angeles.  We struggled to find our own path as parents.  Then, last year, we discovered that our parenting path paralleled the path Rabbi Stone and his wife, Annie, used to raise their own children two decades ago.  How amazing!  Could it be that Rabbi Stone’s teachings on Judaism intuitively informed our parenting choices?

    Attachment parenting is a large part of the parenting style we have in common with the Stones.  This means lots of holding, baby-wearing, infant massage, breast-feeding, co-sleeping, and responding to the needs of our babies and children.  These keep us very busy yet also strongly bonded with the new people in our home.  And amazingly, the sacrifice of personal freedom and mobility that accompanies this style of parenting, although very difficult to accept at first, has become one of the best shapers of our ability to follow a spiritual path in life!  As my yoga teachers told me when I was pregnant with my first child: “when you have a baby, her care becomes your yoga practice.”  In other words, focusing completely on another person's needs is a spiritual practice. 

    Rabbi Stone's favorite teaching is that the "other" is a stand-in for God.   With attachment parenting, the baby is the "other" so that loving and caring for the baby is a way of loving and serving God.  In a similar way, the parent becomes a stand-in for God to the baby.  Kitty, our first Nurse as new parents, taught us this concept in the context of her Christian beliefs as she encouraged us to abandon nursing schedules in order to breast-feed our newborn on demand.  She preached, "Newly born and separated from the realm of angels, your baby looks to you, her parents, for sustenance.  What will you teach this baby about her new world and therefore about God?"

      So it seems that devoting ourselves to our children serves a holy purpose:  we teach both ourselves and our children to trust, love, and ultimately to serve God.

    My trip to Israel concretized my plan to convert to Judaism.  The idea had begun during my years at the University of Pennsylvania.  Falling in love with a Jewish man enticed me to really consider the possibility.  Experiencing Israel and Shabbat filled my heart with the certainty that Judaism was my true beshert, my intended religion.

    The story of my conversion to Judaism begins with Fate 

My name: why did my Indian father name me Nishima?  I have met other Indian Nishimas— it’s a beautiful way to lengthen the nickname Nishi into a truly feminine name.  But my father had never heard the name: he says he created it.  In Hebrew, there is a concept of the highest level of the soul and it is called the Neshama.  At Penn, it seemed all the Jewish students knew about their Neshamas!  From the beginning I felt included, due to my name.
    And how did I find myself at Penn, a school that is 40-50% Jewish?  My father wanted me to attend Harvard or Princeton or Yale.  Even from the far off world of Texas, I had a gut feeling that an Ivy League New England school would be a bad fit for me.  Yet Penn held an appeal.  And when I walked onto the Philadelphia campus, I felt a perfect fit.  I believe this is no coincidence.  I was drawn to the community of my future people and their religion (as well as my future husband). 

    Encountering Judaism

In high school I read every Chaim Potok novel!  I was in love with the world he described.  Yet Jewish people were not on my radar.  I had a few Jewish peers.  One was a good friend and one told me about Penn.  But they never told me about their beliefs, their rituals and observances, their synagogues or bar mitzvahs.  Judaism was a story, not a real place to visit. 
    When I first arrived at Penn, I felt overwhelmed with alienation from the Jewish students on my freshman hall.  They all seemed to “know” each other.  They certainly did not “know” me, this strange Texan girl with a mixed ethnicity and a working knowledge of Christianity.  I gravitated to classes about Eastern religions and focused on debating my Evangelical Christian friend late into the night.  One of my best friends was a Muslim who fiercely debated his Jewish roommate.
    Yet I also met Denise that year.  She was passionately interested in me and taught me about herself too.  Culturally Jewish, she had never had a bat mitzvah.  She loved to meet people, especially people from different backgrounds.  I enjoyed her circle and her way of drawing people together.  Her Jewish friends were more open to sharing themselves.  They began to accept me and teach me about my name.
    Junior year I lived with Denise and her friend Rinny.  Rinny observed Shabbat each week, lighting candles in our apartment.  She spoke Hebrew and began to teach me some Alef Bet.  She sang melodies that touched my soul.  I loved my time with Rinny.  She introduced me to her friend Akiva, the son of Chaim Potok.  Wow, I’d found a connection with my youth!  She took me to Hillel on Friday nights and I listened to the Kabbalat Shabbat songs and the benching (prayers after the meal) from deep inside myself.  I tasted my first gefilte fish and Manishevitz wine, to the great delight of my friends.  Erev Shabbat at Hillel was a true comfort to me.
    Senior year Denise and I moved into a group house that was mostly Jewish.  One of the guys was Larry.  For some reason, Larry decided he wanted to be my friend.  Further, he wanted to teach me about Judaism.  At this point, I was comfortable with my new Jewish community but still loyal to my Hindu roots.  I had consciously rejected Christianity and considered Judaism to be pretty similar.  (My understanding of Jewish belief was limited to a few hours I had spent reading the liturgy at the end of a Yom Kippur service!)  Larry taught me a lot about Torah and attracted my mind and heart with his passion and his layered and nuanced theological beliefs.  When I shared my growing interest with Denise and Rinny, they cheered and encouraged me to find myself a “nice Jewish man” to marry (okay, we were really typical college girls).
    Denise had been on her own Jewish quest during our years together at Penn.  She had visited Israel the summer before.  Senior year she decided to prepare for a bat mitzvah.  I spent many hours in the room next door, listening to her chant her Torah and Haftorah readings and her refine her ‘drash, her words of Torah.  She asked me to open the ark during the service.  I helped her entertain her parents and her sister, who had become my East Coast family over the years.
    Denise and two other of our housemates decided to spend the next summer in Israel.  I had plans for the fall but no plans for the summer.  Why not go to Israel with them?  By the time I met Alon in May, I already had a trip to Israel planned and a conversion to Judaism pollinating in the back of my mind.  I remember telling my father, a few days before Alon kissed me for the first time, that I wanted to convert.
    Meeting Alon was yet another piece of the puzzle.  Keeping in mind both my friends’ suggestion to find a “nice Jewish man” and my own intentions to convert, I was interested in meeting him.  He was not a Hillel guy, however.  In fact, I met him through a Palestinian woman in my sculpture class.  She invited me to a party at her place that was mostly for her teacher and fellow students of a class in early Christianity.  Alon talked to me about medieval Christian liturgical music (one of his many passions) and I had to ask him again, Are you Jewish?  I told him of my plans to travel to Israel the next month and he asked me, Are you Jewish?  Our mutually wide horizons that included Judaism drew us to each other.
    Our romance was pure summer fun; six weeks later my trip to Israel had the pain of separation within it.  Even though I would be moving away to California in the fall, I did not cancel my trip in favor of a romantic and passionate summer.  I had promised Denise I would visit her in Israel and travel together to Turkey.  More important, I was in the middle of a journey into Judaism.  Before I could know my place in Alon’s life and the life of his people and tradition, I needed to complete this journey.  As much as I knew that building a life with Alon would mean learning and exploring and creating together, this part of the path was my own journey and I needed to go alone.

My friend sent me two questions that mirror each other:

1. What is the path of your heart?  How do you know you are on it?

2. What was your defining moment?

My response:  I can use my defining moment to help me recognize the path of my heart.

    The defining moment that comes to my mind is the moment I knew I needed to leave Stanford.  On the one hand, I knew I should stop my master’s program in Russian studies because of the deep exhaustion within me.  Not so profound on the surface, especially since I took a leave of absence rather than quitting.  On the other hand, I remember this moment as a deep connection to a voice that spoke to me and guided me away from one path and onto another.  The emotional weeping and the complete mental and bodily experiences of exhaustion were visceral responses to this voice and its wisdom.  All parts of me joined together for a few minutes of clarity.  In that clarity I made a decision to leave Stanford.
    Leaving Stanford was a step off the path of professionalism that I had started along when I began university.  For the last year of university, I had been flirting with the idea of becoming an artist and a yogini:  my entire being resonated with the blissful 8 hours a week I had been spending in sculpture and yoga classes.  But my upbringing and my training had placed squarely before me the path of upper middle class professionalism.  When I decided to leave Stanford a year later, I already knew the alternate path I would be taking.
    Almost 16 years later, I remain artist and yogini.
    Yet I need to stay in touch with my defining moment and the reasons I chose this path over the more well-traveled path.  After all, I am no longer simply a “starving artist” and an “ascetic yogini”.  Making and curating and selling art in the modern world have connected me with my years at the Wharton School of Business, years spent on the path of professionalism.  
    I must ask myself honestly, are you really still on the path of your heart?  Have these two paths merged?  Have you strayed onto the other path?  Or have I perhaps had another defining moment?
    I won’t take a simplified position that making money in the modern market necessarily corrupts the heart and destroys the artistic spirit.  The Gurdjieff group that I am learning from told me, in no uncertain terms, that we must strive to be successful householders who have “leisure” time and energy to devote to our spiritual work.  Affording to pay the bills, to send the children to loving, paid caregivers, to attend classes and workshops, and to travel to uplifting locations, gatherings, and communities are all soul-nourishing benefits of earning a good living.  Having the time to spend on children, family, home, spiritual community, art-making, and internal reflection are benefits of working smart rather than hard.  
    We spend a lot of time talking and thinking about creating a business that reflects the fabric of our hearts.  Our hope is that we will be able to pour our deepest selves into our ventures and receive back more of the same.
Then there is the question of scale:  what size business should I be responsible for?  Working exclusively on ketubot over the last few years has been amazing and yet also smaller than the space I feel I can and should occupy.  A small cramped home art studio and dozens of hours each week running an office have together limited my artistic growth.  At the same time, growing as an artist and a businesswoman in a slow, organic manner feels to vibe with the development of my ability to be present in the world.  And when I am quiet enough to listen, I realize that I am growing.
    Perhaps the paths are merging, slowly yet inevitably bringing together separate parts of myself-- my experiences and my skills and my ambitions and my talents.  As Alon tells me, you never truly leave behind a part of yourself.  And I remember, too, that a path by its very nature changes day to day.  I cannot look behind me for clues as to which path I am on.
    We think of “artist” and “yogini” as jobs or vocations but in many respects they are simply ways of seeing, thinking, feeling, and organizing my life.  I can run a business with artistry and with the nurturance of my own and others’ spirits in mind.  I can develop as an artist and a spiritual seeker through my responses to the daily stresses of life and work. I can remind myself that a life full of artistry and spiritual seeking will constantly shift, flow, and evolve.  Finally, I can regularly check in with the voices of my inner wisdom that my choices and goals are in tune with God’s plans for me.
    Yet, looking back over the years, I do see another defining period of my life:  the first eight months of motherhood.  
    Devoting myself to my first child seemed natural enough, given my upbringing and personal expectations.  My husband was making money.  I loved my art seriously but did not have a serious career as an artist.  I had been raised by my stay-at-home mother and assumed this to be one of my life’s jobs.  My only hopes were to make a little art, to continue my yoga practice, and to teach some yoga.
    My inner wisdom seems to speak to me through depletion. Perhaps, as they say, the “veils are thin” during periods of exhaustion, when the dream state is close at hand.  Like at Stanford, I again found my truths within the dark moments of my exhaustion-- the physical, emotional and mental exhaustion of the new mother.  When I say “dark moments”, I mean that I fell into a depression that wrecked my nights, undermined my days, and gifted me a hole in the center of my being.  When asked how I was doing, I found myself saying, “I need a nanny and I need to make art.”
    We couldn’t really afford a nanny, especially since my art tended to be hung on my own walls.  Yet I had made a few custom ketubahs earlier that year.  And so I decided to figure out how to make a business out of selling ketubahs.
     I pulled myself out of my depression by believing I could be successful at combining my artistic talent with my business training.  Garnering my energy through a new warrior-like chi gong practice, I began to take steps along that old path of professionalism.  Meanwhile, mothering my new child fulfilled the part of me that loved the laid-back artist life.  In many ways I had returned to the life I had found during my last year at university:  balancing ambitious work with quiet, connected periods.
    Almost seven years later, I remain mother (of 3), artist, yogini, and professional businesswoman. I embrace this life daily and find all parts of me engaged, active and challenged.  While it was once necessary to turn away from one path in order to follow another, today I am able to walk the entire path of my heart.

    Thank you God!