Everyday Mystics Episode 4: Face to Face
How much of who we are is shaped by the people who came before us, and how much do we get to choose? For Marika, that question has followed her from childhood conversations with her father and grandfather to unexpected encounters in her own adult life. Along the way, she discovers that Jewish identity has many faces, and that the people we love can become mirrors in which we see ourselves anew. A story about family, belonging, and the freedom to become someone our ancestors might never have imagined.
SHOW NOTES
[1] Read more about Marika and her journey on her substack.
[2] We mention a two different sources here: Genesis 33 (Jacob and Esau reuniting), Exodus 34 (Moses’s face)
[3] Emmanuel Levinas is brought up in passing. If you want to learn more about his life and work, here is a nice article on him. If you want to dig into his ontology on le visage, that philosophy first appears in his work, “Totality and Infinity” in 1961.
[4] If you’re like… wait a second… I’ve heard these names before… then, you’re right! You’ve probably listened to our Door to Door podcast, that follows the story of this family to Simon’s home in Germany.
[5] Marika talks about “Wabi Sabi Shabbat”. If you want to read a little more about Wabi Sabi, here is a nice article on it, and here is a brief sermonette by Ariel Stein on Wabi Sabi.
[6] Finding meaning and grounded identity through 23&Me (or other genetic tests) is a common experience. If this is you, you’re in good company. Here is a brief article on a similar experience.
-
MIRIAM: The Hebrew word for face is panim, which is always said in the plural, and can be used interchangeably with face, faces or facets. It’s one of those delicious Hebrew wordplay opportunities, where we can enter the conversation literally and philosophically at the same time. The rabbis of the Talmud love this game.
Like, in Genesis 33, when Jacob and Esau meet up after so much sibling suffering and there is so much bad blood between them, yet, when Esau sees his brother’s face, he runs up to Jacob and vayansekhu, he kisses his face. In the Torah script, there are little dots over that word, and the rabbis say that’s because it wasn’t intended as a kiss of longlost brotherly love, but, in fact Esau intended to bite his brother. But, in seeing his sworn enemy’s face change, Esau instead kisses him.
Or, in Exodus 34, Moses descends from Sinai after writing the commandments and we read that his face was ע֥וֹר פָּנָ֖יו his face was radiant with light. So bright and changed by the awefilled encounter with God, that his face now glowed. In midrash tanhuma, the rabbis explain that when Moses was writing the Torah a small amount of Divine ink was left on his quill and Moses touched it to his forehead, and poof! Now his face shone with the light of God.
Each story of panim, a face, with many panim faces.
The French Jewish Philosopher Emmanuel Levinas placed ethics rather than logic at the center of human thought. He taught that an encounter with the face (le visage) is not just eyes, nose, a mouth, but rather the vulnerable presence of another human being. Levinas believed that if you could step back and take in a person’s face anew, then two things could occur: 1) the revelation of mortality (a person’s recognition of their own deep vulnerabilities) and 2) the revelation and internalization of the commandment “Thou shalt not murder”. If you can see a person’s face, truly, deeply, beyond its singular physical form, there is no way one can deny their humanity, When we see another’s face, we become infinitely responsible for that person.
Like when Esau saw Jacob’s vulnerable face behind his physical face, only then did his compassion grow. Or, when Moses, after all those miracles and encounters with God, even a burning bush, remains unchanged, until, the moment he sees God’s face (Exodus 33) ascending Sinai, can he truly take in revelation, and then bring that Torah to his people.
Our mystic today, Marika, tells her story through panim, through the physical faces of her ancestors, her own face, and that of her child. And, through the panim of Jewish identity: nature, nurture or choice. Each panim folding upon itself, like an origami bird, revealing new components of the same face, and entering ever new stages of open-hearted living.
MIRIAM: Welcome to Everyday Mystics, where we believe that the story of Moses awakening to his call through a burning bush that could not be consumed, is not just a one of a kind, once upon a time story, but rather a map for our own lives. Each of us has a story or stories of untold wonder that break and shape the humans we become. We call these people, everyday mystics. In this podcast we tell stories of Jewish people who stumble across burning bushes and come away seeing Judaism differently. I’m Miriam Terlinchamp, and these are stories of the moments when the everyday becomes sacred, the familiar becomes mysterious, and Judaism becomes beautifully unbound.
MARIKA: I learned to contort myself really well, to be whatever I needed to be in any situation to ensure that everyone was okay, everyone felt okay, and that I was, you know, making everyone laugh, or I was making people smile, or I was making them feel welcomed or fill in the blank. And I got really good at that. Like it became a superpower.
MIRIAM: Marika learned this early. How to read a room. How to read the people in it. How to look at someone's face and figure out what they needed from her. And then become it. But there were two faces she studied closer than anyone else's. Her father's. And her grandfather's. Two men who were raised and identified with Jewish tradition — and somehow found completely different things inside it.
Her grandfather Simon, was a Holocaust and Concentration camp survivor. After all he had suffered and lost, it was very clear to him that Judaism was very much a choice. He chose for Jewish practice to be meaningful. He chose to make the third row on the left of the synagogue sanctuary his happy place. He chose to make his Jewish community center his second home. Living a life where Judaism, it’s practices, prayers, and people all brought him meaning and joy.
Simon’s son, Gary, Marika’s father, was raised embedded in Jewish life. He went to synagogue every week, Jewish overnight camp every summer, and was so active in his Jewish youth group he even served as a national leader. He went to college far away from home. And the role Judaism played, faded. He went to law school, a little closer to home, but still, Judaism was in the back drop. He met Jennifer, a smart, beautiful Catholic girl. They married, decided to raise their kids as neither. And the face of Jewish practice disappeared, leaving only the Jewish face of memory.
MARIKA: I remember sitting in his apartment at the Summit on Capitol Hill in Seattle, Washington, with my grandpa and my dad, Gary. And I remember them talking about just Judaism in general. And my grandpa, I remember, like in his, you know, still had a really thick German accent. And, you know, I remember him saying to my dad, like, Gary, the synagogue is, you know, a place of deep comfort. Like this is a place we visit and we connect and we reconnect and we remember. You know, it's a place of resonance, of like deep resonance. He probably didn't use the word resonance, but I remember as a kid just this like really deep sense of belonging, right, to this place. And my dad sitting there in his attorney way and in his way of questioning everything, but like really questioning it, right? Like really challenging my grandpa. And, you know, I was still young enough that I didn't fully understand the conversation intellectually. I mean I did in the way a teenager's brain might, a young teenager. But I just remember watching their faces.
MIRIAM: Their faces. That's what survived in Marika's memory. Not the arguments. Not the theology. The faces.
MARIKA: Both my grandpa Simon and my dad had like really, really particular grins. And they were unmistakably unique to them. I just remember like my grandpa's face and my dad's face and they were very similar. They had a different grin, but it was a very distinctive Strauss man grin. And I can still see it and I can feel it. And I was like sitting between them, right? Like just watching this. And what I understand now was I was watching two people who had inherited the same thing, right? But make really different choices about what to do with it. And I think somehow I inherited both relationships.
MIRIAM: From Simon: Judaism as a tether to Jewish peoplehood. From Gary: permission to choose what that tether means to her. And Gary gave Marika another kind of permission, too. Because even as a child, Marika was remarkably good at figuring out who everyone else wanted her to be.
MARIKA: I learned to contort myself really well, to be whatever I needed to be in any situation to ensure that everyone was okay, everyone felt okay. And I got really good at that. Like it became a superpower. My dad saw it. He knew. And he would say, I remember really clear conversations, even as a young girl, like just reminding me, like, hey, I don't care what you do. I don't care what you become. Just be you and be more of you. Whatever that looks like. I don't care. But that you are you and you do what makes you feel alive.
MIRIAM: Marika describes Gary's face as a "seeing face." Warm. Emphatically Curious. Always thinking, challenging, wondering. The kind of face that made hiding difficult. And Simon?
MARIKA: Well, it always starts with that grin. He had this just grin that, like unique to Grandpa Simon. You again look at him and you're like, What? How does that man have that smile? Like everything he's gone through. But he did. He had this beautiful smile that would just warm your heart. And he also had these eyes that peered deeper.
MIRIAM: Marika inherited something from both of those faces. But it took another face, decades later, for her to realize that inheritance isn't just about what we receive. It's about what we pass on.
MIRAM: Marika married in her 20s to a fabulous surfer & chef named Juan Francisco from Uruguay. He goes by the name Opai, and he’s now a labor and delivery nurse. Opai grew up in a home where the conservative catholic roots of his grandparents had been replaced by a spiritual relationship to the world. He wasn’t raised with any formal religion, yoga, healthy eating, the ocean, these were the faces of meaning. When Marika and Opai welcomed their daughter Amaya, they did not talk about religion. Until one day Amaya came home from kindergarten with a question.
MARIKA: I remember very specifically, I remember her coming home and she asked me, "Are we Christian?" And I said, like, "What is that? What does that mean to you?" And she's like, "Well it means that like there's heaven, right?" I was like, "Well what's heaven?" You know, and she's like, "Well, it's where we go after we die."
MIRIAM: Which is a pretty big conversation to have with a five-year-old. Eventually, Amaya's questions turned toward the other side of her family. Toward the people she had heard about who were no longer living, to Gary. To Simon. And then, back to her own mother, Marika.
MARIKA: She asked, so am I Jewish? You know, and, you know, why was Grandpa Gary Jewish and Grandpa Simon Jewish? Like what does that mean? And this conversation was like very specific. I remember we were sitting out in our yard, and I just felt totally unprepared and caught off guard for what maybe could be perceived as really simple questions. And of course, like in my mind, I'm like, my gosh, she's asking me like, who am I? Like where do I come from?
MIRIAM: Marika looked at her daughter and realized she knew this child. Because she'd been her. A little girl staring at the adults who came before her, trying to locate herself in a story she didn't completely understand. Am I Jewish? She used to ask that question too. Who is she kidding? She still asks herself that question.
MARIKA: I remember sitting in the yard with her and I remember thinking to myself, like I was once this little girl right here. Like I'm the adult being asked by a child, like, you know, like shit, this conversation's really moving through the generations, and I like don't have the answers still.
MIRIAM: And eventually Marika realized she didn't actually want to give Amaya answers. She wanted to give her something else.
MARIKA: What I really want Amaya to inherit is not any kind of certainty, right? Or like, you know, sort of a predetermined identity. I want her to inherit like roots. I want her to feel roots. I feel those, a tethering of sorts and I want her to inherit, you know, for me, a certain amount of freedom and permission to wonder the way again I inherited that from my dad.
MIRIAM: A tether. But an elastic one. Something strong enough to hold Amaya without becoming a rope that binds her. An unbounded, looping, many faced tether of Jewish meaning and legacy. And when Marika describes her daughter's face, something both new and familiar appears.
MARIKA: She's got these like massive eyes that like her grandpa Gary and her great grandfather Simon, you know, have. Amaya was born like with like an inquisitive face. She's watching, she's listening, she's thinking and processing. She did not inherit a simple way of existing in the world.
MIRIAM: Marika starts wondering: if identity isn't an answer you hand your child, maybe it's something you do with them. Something you experience together. Something you practice together. Something that you hold up to the light, like a prism, letting identity be plural, panim, many faced.The face of practice for marika, is Shabbat. She thinks alot about it. Not becoming observant. Not suddenly resolving the question that if she practiced Shabbat, like really practiced it, she could claim her Jewishness once and for all. And not the religious bits of Shabbat either.
But the idea of pausing just for a Friday night. Stopping. Eating. Being together. That sounded so necessary. Marika remembered the Shabbat experiences of her childhood. Her parents never hosted them, but her Aunt Nadine did. Just about every week. Marika’s favorites were the informal ones, sometimes at the house, people spilling out onto the deck. Sometimes on the grass of a waterfront park in Seattle. Paper plates. Whatever food people could bring. Too much challah. Children’s laughter. Parents animated conversations. The feeling that there was nowhere to be but here. So Marika leaned in, and decided to focus on Shabbat, borrowing a Japanese phrase for finding beauty in imperfection, Wabi Sabi Shabbat.
MARIKA: Rustic, imperfect, but just like something small, right? Like something just enough. It wasn't like, I'm all of sudden becoming religious. I still wasn't really practicing Judaism in any comprehensive way. And really to this day, Shabbat's really my primary Jewish practice. And I thought, okay, let's like start this practice where we can just stop the speed for a second, you know, and we can gather and we can eat and we can like mark time together.
MIRIAM: For the first one, Marika did something that did not come naturally to her. She kept it small. Two other families. No elaborate hosting. No matching chairs. No expectation that anybody perform.
MARIKA: I remember specifically actually the first Shabbat that we had. And I'm lucky to live in Santa Cruz, California, where like much of the year we can sit outside. And I remember it was outside. I was really intentional initially to, I only invited two families because I was tired. And I wanted to invite two families that I felt like I could just be fully me. I didn't have to host. I didn't have to be on. I remember like we were all sitting out, the kids were all just running amok and in the yard and playing and the adults just had this moment.
MIRIAM: The table itself was, appropriately, pretty wabi sabi.
MARIKA: I remember we were sitting outside around like my very imperfect outdoor table that's like hanging on by a thread 'cause it's Ikea and Ikea's great, but it's like hanging on by a thread and like we don't have any match chairs or any match anything. We're using paper plates. But I remember just looking around at everyone's faces and like seeing like this kind of relaxed, kind of laid-back face where everyone just like let go for a moment, right? Everyone was just like dropped into we're just like here in this like really simple setting where we get to just connect and no one was on. You know, no one was like turned on. Everyone was just in and dropped in.
MIRIAM: Nobody was on. Including Marika. For someone who had spent a lifetime learning to contort herself around other people's needs, that's not a small thing. She could simply be there. The kids running through the yard. Friends around a half-broken Ikea table. Paper plates. Candles. Food. Time slowing down. She watched their faces.
MARIKA: I remember going from like this feeling of like, okay, you know, you kind of like buzzing, buzzing through life and everything's going on, and then all of sudden... I'm just like dropped in. Everything's fucking okay in the world. Like, yeah. Lots — like children are dying all over the world. People don't have drinking water. You know, shit is fucked. But like right now, here in this moment, like everything's really okay. And it's actually like good. And everyone's face was like kind of vibrating in that way.
MIRIAM: It wasn't an answer to the question "Am I Jewish?" It wasn't an answer to "Is Amaya Jewish?" It was an experience of being tethered to one face of Judaism, the one that says Judaism is a deed based faith, not a creed based faith. She always liked that one. . And then, while Marika was reaching backward toward something she'd inherited, someone unexpected entered her life. And held up a new panim, a new face of identity.
MARIKA: I met a man whose name is Daniel, who has become my boyfriend.
MIRIAM: Marika is still married to Opai. Daniel is her boyfriend. That fact isn't incidental to Marika's story. Because at this point in her life, she's questioning more than religion. She's questioning all kinds of inherited categories — marriage, family, love, adulthood — asking which structures she wants to keep, which she wants to change, and which she may no longer need at all. Daniel became part of that questioning. But when it comes to Judaism, Marika is careful about how she tells this part.
MARIKA: Daniel did not bring me back to Judaism in any way, shape, or form. So that is not the story I'm going to tell here. He doesn't actually practice Judaism. And he's not someone who led me into any particular Jewish practice. I think being deeply, deeply intimate with another person can make you like really see yourself differently. And Daniel at this time in my life, meeting him midlife, he's become a mirror for me.
MIRIAM: One day Daniel and Marika were looking at the results of his 23andMe test.
MARIKA: I remember seeing his number. I think it was like 50.5% Ashkenazi Jewish. And, you know, where his lineage came from. And I was like, my gosh, yeah, those, you know, on the colored map and stuff. I was like, my gosh, that's like pretty much mine too. Like really similar. Like, whoa, this is almost eerie, right? It was like looking at our own ancestry together, you know, and sort of going, okay, yeah, like there's some serious actual crossover here and like deep connections, you know, in our families of origin and our histories. And it was like, yeah, no shit, you're a mirror in my life. Like in literal and of course more figurative ways.
MIRIAM: The point wasn't that their DNA proved something. It was what Marika saw reflected in Daniel’s face - her own… and through the panim that ran through their blood for generations.
MARIKA: This intimate relationship with Daniel, you know, has become like a really profound mirror to me in ways that I've never experienced in my life. And what I saw and still see in the mirror like really made me curious about what was behind me. It's not just like, am I Jewish enough or am I Jewish? It's what do I want to do with everything I've inherited?
MIRIAM: And then there's Daniel's face.
MARIKA: There are features in Daniel's face that remind me of my dad's. He has like a really defined jawline. He's also got those like deeply curious eyes. He is a deeply sensitive, deeply attuned man who like you can see it on his face the way he looks at you. He is like thinking, he's listening, he is dropped in with you and you feel it from his facial expressions and from his eyes. They look at you and you're like, my God, stop looking at all of the deeper layers that even I don't necessarily wanna see right now.
MIRIAM: A seeing face. Just like Gary's. And the more Marika looked into that mirror, the more she found herself turning around. Looking behind her. Back toward Gary. Back toward Simon. And wondering what those two familiar faces would make of the person she'd become.
MIRIAM: Though deceased, Marika still talks to Gary and Simon all the time. Literally.
MARIKA: I for a very long time have had very frequent conversations with my grandpa and my dad. I will both like in an out-loud voice ask my dad questions, you know, I'll ask my grandpa questions. I'll write letters to them. And so I'm like talking to my grandpa and dad all the time. It's just an anchor point for me. You know, talk about a tethering, like those conversations are very tethering for me.
MIRIAM: And lately there's a lot to catch them up on. A husband she loves. A boyfriend she loves. A daughter she loves, asking questions about God. A Jewish practice that's mostly paper plates and an old Ikea table. A life neither man could have predicted. Marika can see her dad's face when she tells him. That grin.
MARIKA: I hear my dad saying to me, like, Marika, you do not need to contort to what you think everyone else wants from you, wants for you. No one knows what's best for you, Marika, but you. And you know through your deepest knowing what is the thing, what is the path, what is the lifestyle that makes you feel most you. And so go do it. Go follow that. I don't care what it looks like.
MIRIAM: Simon is a little different. Marika imagines telling him the whole complicated story. Grandpa, I have a husband. Uh-huh. And, I also have a boyfriend. Uh-huh. And, Grandpa Simon, the boyfriend happens to be half Jewish. Marika knows exactly which part Simon would hear.
MARIKA: I think I hear — and I hear him just smiling. Like not hear. I see him, but I can hear him too. Just like this like vibrational smile. Like him just seeing me with a Jewish man. And then in the same breath being confused. "But I'm confused. You have a boyfriend and a husband, Marika? Like I don't understand. But your boyfriend's Jewish, so like mazel tov." And again, this is like grandpa in his eighties, you know, but he would just be so again like — I don't know that he'd understand it as a cosmic joke, but my grandpa would be like, "And finally, you know, the Jewish lineage prevails."
MIRIAM: There's Gary's grin. Simon's grin. Amaya' inquisitive eyes. The relaxed faces around Marika's Shabbat table. Opai’s midwiving hands. Daniel's face. In all those rotations of panim, a show of multifaceted offerings, each one with a different purpose, gift, and energy. All of them colliding into a singular face, we have yet to hear described.
And so at the end of our conversation with Marika, we asked her to close her eyes. And describe one more. Her own.
MARIKA: I see my own face as being also petite features, very warm and soft and olive toned. And worn with a lot of life and wrinkles in all the right spots that show I've lived a very full life up to now and I'm only halfway through. And also deeply seeing, deeply feeling, deeply attuned eyes to the world around me.
MIRIAM: Marika spent a lot of her life wondering if she had to stick with a singular way of being, stretching herself in ways that sometimes looked like hiding herself, so much so her own face became a blur.
When we use the term Jewish peoplehood, we tend to think of a singular face - Jew. Yisrael. As though believing in One God makes us One people, and that One is singular. Because it’s not. It’s plural the way panim is face and faces. Brightening when it encounters compassion, humanity, and curiosity. The myth of Judaism is that the braid of Jewish lineage is uniform, when it’s really made up of millions of Jewish practices, philosophies, and peoples. Galaxies of Jewish multiplicities weaving together to make this Oneness of Jewish identity.
Of course Marika isn’t Jewish enough. She’s Jewish, enough. In that, like Levinas taught, the moment she sees herself in the other, sees the shared vulnerability, she begins to feel responsible for them. She sees herself in her grandfather’s Judaism, in her father’s Judaism, in Amaya’s Judaism and Daniel’s Judaism, in her blood, in her family, and in her own backyard. How much more Jewish can you get?
MARIKA: How do I remain in relationship with where I come from while I'm becoming like someone that my ancestors couldn't have predicted? And how do I honor where I come from without becoming like trapped by it or feeling that like tight containment, but just tethered by it? How do I really truly reinvent my life without pretending that, you know, I came from nowhere?
MIRIAM: And maybe that tension, between being tethered to the past and still becoming something new is where Marika’s burning bush has been all along.
MARIKA: I don't think my burning bush is any dramatic moment. It is more like I turned around and realized like something had kind of been like burning in the background of my life for a very long time. And that bush is made up of so many pieces. It's my grandpa, it's my dad, it's all of my ancestors before them. It's Amaya and her questions. It's Shabbat, it's Daniel, it's my husband Opai, it's my questions about meaning. None of those moments alone were some kind of epiphany. You know, but together they've kind of made me look and turn around and sort of say like, okay, maybe the mystical experience, it isn't receiving an answer. It's turning around and seeing something old in a new way.
MIRIAM: Big thanks to Marika for sharing her story. Marika Strauss is a facilitator, mediator, postpartum doula, and longtime community-builder whose work has taken her around the world and, eventually, home to Santa Cruz, California. Whether she’s helping a group navigate a difficult conversation, caring for a new mother, or gathering people around her table, Marika has spent much of her life creating the conditions for people to feel seen, cared for, and a little more at home. Thank you to our generous sponsors, Barbara and Mathew z”l Loonin for making Everyday Mystics possible. Everyday Mystics is a production of the Institute for the Next Jewish Future, and part of the family of podcasts of Judaism Unbound, hosted by me, Miriam Terlinchamp, produced by Joey Taylor, sound engineering by Justin Newton, original podcast music by Ric Hordinski and art by Katie Kaestner. As always, we'd love to hear from you. Please email us at hello@judaismunbound.com if you have an Everyday Mystics story that you’d like to share.
