Learning Trust from Jenny Conrad, by Rena Leinberger

Over the course of the Days of Awe, different members of our community taught us about people in their lives who embody certain middot, or character traits. As part of our communal study of Musar, or character development, we are focusing on trust, or ביטחון this month. These are the words that Rena Leinberger shared about her friend, Jenny Conrad.                          --- Rabbi Brent Chaim Spodek

I’d like to tell you a little about my longtime friend, Jenny Conrad.

From her, I’ve learned that interpersonal trust and a larger trust in the world operate independently, but seem attuned by the same habits of character and action.

Jenny is, among other things, an incredible poet. She can - and has - made a grocery list read as poetry. I’ll follow her lead and try start this off by framing this as a list (not poetic) and expand from there.

Jenny has shown me that trust maintains an ability to do three things at the same time: 

First:

• Maintain a clear-eyed view of the often dim potentials for the world.

• Acknowledge the futility of planning.

Second:

• Craft actions that work to create meaning.

• Act as if the future will not become an item in category #1 (i.e futile, possess dim potential)

Third:

• Celebrate grand wreckage in all its beautiful absurdity.

• Cultivate necessary detours as both nothing and everything.

So, this is a bit of a surprise to me that I’m standing here. I say this because I struggle a great deal with trust.

As an example of my possible lack of observational ability in this area: A little over a year ago, I was sitting in what looked suspiciously like a sharing circle, and everyone was asked to name their favorite Bible character.  The only person that came to my mind was Job’s wife, who suggests that he shouldn’t trust but instead just curse God and die. At the time, she seemed to be the only reasonable character in the whole book.

Shortly after I walked out of that room, it occurred to me that the sharing circle might not be the issue in this anecdote. Instinctively, I did what I almost always do in these sorts of situations. I called my longtime friend, Jenny Conrad. I can’t say that sorting out empathy for a God-cursing passive death-wish is a common topic of conversation. But she’s perceptive, so this didn’t seem at all unexpected to Jenny.

I don’t even remember when it happened. Jenny is consistent. Steady. Reliable. She is endlessly and effortlessly present. At some point, without realizing it, I came to trust that she is present the way that I trust there is air in the room.

In every way, Jenny lives as a poet: she looks keenly at the troublesome circumstances of living and instead of just settling into or around them somewhere, she tilts situations and finds a way to infuse a slightly different narrative.  I see it as an act of unwarranted optimism to craft meaning from chaos; to trust that it can always be found even if it’s waiting just out of view. She writes poems with titles like “Poem in Which Everything Again Becomes Possible”. In another poem, zoo animals escape, and the menagerie gallops along a boardwalk and beach full of startled people sunning themselves. Only the few people who stop scrambling for hats and sunscreen are able to fully take in the immensity of what is happening right in front of them. It suspends everything wrong that went into making that moment possible, and expands the moments of absorbing what-is. It creates spaces to imagine futures for the animals, however unlikely.

Jenny approaches every conversation with this same sense of wide-souled, intellectually fierce and intensely observed, if heartbreaking, perception.

Jenny and I talked about many things that day last year, and we haven’t really stopped that conversation. Of course, the parable of Job’s wife was a way to tell her I had spent too long near an abyss and I didn’t know how to find my way back. She heard the stark silence reverberating across a life upended – and threatened. We talked about wrestling with ruptures that divide life into a before | and | after; seismic shifts that unravel the moral ordering of things; pain that is enough to unmoor the sense of self relating to others.

Jenny listened to all my rage at an incomprehensibly unjust and violent world, and the depths of my fears and intense suffering during the worst years of a medical crisis.  She was willing not just to sit with, but to embrace, the uncertainties and ugly places that have landed in my life.  She knows all the dark corners of my soul – and loves me anyway.

But it’s the kind of love that won’t just sit with the ugly places. It insists on then showing me things like a picture of an unfortunate spelling error on a grocery store sign, piles of absurd quantities of feathers she has been collecting from unexpected locations without knowing why, or asking an insightful question that propels me toward a better place of thinking and acting. Sometimes it’s just in the trying, and finding humor. Once, she told me of a long string of small, improbable indignities that had piled up throughout her day. She ended the recount with a deadpan, “To sum it up, the only possible moral of this story is to never leave the house after dark on a Tuesday.”

Trusting a friend is easier when I’m trusting someone will show up for brunch. Or will return something I’ve loaned. Jenny shows me how to be a person worthy of trust where it matters most: with the deepest ways of being vulnerable; of being human.

Those are holy moments. I’m starting to realize I should never think of it like air. Unless I think of it as how maybe, in these moments, the air somewhere in the space between us touches the divine presence, or the divine presence touches us.