The Forever Letter
Elana Zaiman was a teenager when her father returned home from work and gave her a collection of letters. He had been teaching about the tradition of Jewish ethical wills at Temple Emanu-El in Providence, Rhode Island where he worked as the senior rabbi. As a challenge, he gave his daughter a bound booklet of about 18 letters from his adult education class. He asked her to figure out which letter was his. Mothers and fathers in the synagogue had written letters to their children but the letters were unsigned. She read through the booklet in the family den and solved the puzzle. In her teenage mind her father was close to perfect. What was surprising was that he had revealed what he thought were his shortcomings. What she could not have known then was the impact of reading and receiving this letter upon the remainder of her life.
Like her father, Elana Zaiman became a rabbi in the United States: the first female among at least six generations of rabbis in her family. The Jewish Theological Seminary opened the door for women to be ordained as Conservative rabbis in 1984. Zaiman applied four years later.
What makes her story unusual is that she became so intrigued by the ethical will tradition she wrote a book called The Forever Letter. She was inspired by the centuries- old tradition of the ethical will and created a new kind of letter. The “forever letter,” connects people with those they love —whether family members, teachers, friends, or siblings — as a way to deepen, heal and uplift relationships. We will explore The Forever Letter in more detail in a future post. This letter writing tradition can be for sharing while the folks you love are very much alive.
The video interview with Rabbi Elana Zaiman was conducted by Lizzie Leiman Kraiem as part of the Jewish ethical wills project hosted by the Marlene Myerson Jewish Community Centre in New York under the auspices of the Jewish Theological Seminary. We thank Rabbi Zaiman for her permission to share the video with L’chaim: The Jewish Letters Project and to the Jewish Theological Seminary.
