Buchdahl explains that Jacob’s indirect role in her becoming a cantor was a matter of geography. When she enrolled at Hebrew Union College (HUC) in 1995, her sole ambition was the rabbinate; she had internalized a mutual disdain between song leaders and cantors, viewing each side as a caricature of the other. Her required first year in Jerusalem revealed that her musical skills had plateaued while her cantorial classmates were advancing in Jewish modes and chanting.

The crisis came when HUC assigned her to the Los Angeles campus for the remaining four years. She petitioned for a transfer to be near Jacob, who was in law school in New Haven, but the administration dismissed the request, saying he was just a boyfriend. To resolve the conflict and expedite their existing marriage plans, Jacob flew to Jerusalem during his spring break and proposed; Buchdahl immediately called HUC with the news of their engagement. Because the New York campus was still full, the university offered her a year’s deferral instead.

In New York, Buchdahl applied to HUC’s School of Sacred Music per her mentor Rabbi Jacobs’s advice. Her first semester was brutal: Her voice teacher dismantled her technique, and her voice cracked during her end-of-semester practicum. Walking off the podium in tears, she was met by Cantor Benjie Ellen Schiller, a soprano who would become a crucial mentor. Cantor Schiller encouraged her when she said that kavvanah (genuine spiritual intention) can’t be taught and that she saw it in Buchdahl.

Buchdahl’s experience improved in the months following. She fell in love with chazzanut, the traditional cantorial chant; won “Most Improved Vocals” (147) two years running; and decided that she wanted both ordinations. After her second year, just days after Jacob took the bar exam, the couple married in Tacoma. Buchdahl’s childhood rabbi, Richard Rosenthal, officiated the ceremony alongside Rabbi Jacobs and Cantor Schiller, and it was held on the very spot where Buchdahl had celebrated her bat mitzvah. In reflection, Buchdahl identifies the modest, homemade reception as the best night of their young lives. As she drove away, she recognized that she was leaving Tacoma for good.

Buchdahl reflects on Shira (“song”), examining how the Torah uses the verb la’anot (“to answer”) for Miriam’s song after the crossing of the Red Sea. Buchdahl interprets Miriam’s leadership as collaborative and responsive: Rather than performing solo, Miriam gathers the women, reads the crowd’s emotion, and answers it with communal music. This model of the leader as a connector and responder, rather than a soloist, has become Buchdahl’s own ideal.

Buchdahl opens the chapter with an admission: She wanted to be a mother more than she wanted to be a rabbi. She recounts the births of her children to convey her bewildering postpartum despair.

The birth of her first child, Gabriel, went off-script. Her water broke three weeks early—during Jacob’s third consecutive all-nighter at a trial and during her rabbinical school finals. Susie Jacobs drove her into the city, and Jacob met them before falling asleep in a friend’s apartment. Hours of painful labor ended with zero dilation. Buchdahl, who had firmly refused pain medication, summoned the anesthesiologist and demanded an epidural. Once it took effect, she and Jacob chatted and played her birth playlist until she delivered Gabriel.

Gabriel was immediately beautiful to Buchdahl, but she still didn’t feel like she could call herself a mother. She felt even more like a failure when Gabriel wouldn’t latch during breastfeeding, and most nursing sessions were hours long. Realizing her despair, a night nurse whisked Gabriel to the nursery and confronted Buchdahl about how she would survive. The subsequent months of mothering Gabriel were an isolating fog: overwhelming, shapeless days during which a shower felt like an achievement. Buchdahl admits that she was resentful of Jacob’s ability to return to work and distraught when he effortlessly quieted the baby when she couldn’t.

Buchdahl now recognizes that she was experiencing postpartum depression, though the language wasn’t available to her then. What saved her was a network of women. Her mother-in-law, Carol, came immediately, stayed two weeks, took night shifts, and reinforced Buchdahl’s confidence by insisting that the mother is always right. Her mother, Sulja, arrived next, singing Korean lullabies and demonstrating how to carry Gabriel on her back in a traditional wrap. College friends supplied a year of laundry service. Her Talmud professor let her take her final exam orally over the phone. Congregants and friends visited, held the baby, and promised the fog would lift.

The first time Gabriel produced a genuine belly laugh, Buchdahl began to feel better. By the time her second and third children, Eli and Rose, arrived, she couldn’t understand what she’d found so overwhelming about motherhood the first time. In retrospect, she asserts that Gabriel—and the sisterhood—made her a mother.

Buchdahl reflects on Ruach (“wind/spirit/breath”), using a bicycle ride into a Wyoming headwind to introduce the idea of God as an unseen but felt force. She explains the metaphor to religious school students by asking whether they can see the wind and then pointing to its effects. The Hebrew word ruach, meaning both breath and spirit, connects to God’s act of breathing life into clay in Genesis. She closes by urging readers to feel that animating force at their backs—and to be it for others.

Buchdahl reflects on her and Jacob’s life in Scarsdale. Scarsdale had always felt slightly foreign to them, but WRT and Rabbi Jacobs had rooted them there. Rick accommodated Buchdahl’s request to work part-time while raising young children, the synagogue lent them money for their first home, and over the course of 12 years, the congregation became a surrogate extended family. They gave her a sense of community, belonging, and care, even while she was growing as a professional.

Buchdahl’s integration into the community began with a phone call inviting her to consider applying for the senior cantor position at Central Synagogue in Manhattan—a historic, architecturally grand congregation led by Senior Rabbi Peter Rubinstein, who had guided it through a devastating 1998 fire and years of rebuilding. Buchdahl entered the search out of career restlessness, although she felt stuck in the role of a child at WRT. However, as the process advanced and Buchdahl’s application was more seriously considered, her and Jacob’s anxieties mounted; Buchdahl had heard that Central’s two previous cantors had stayed only four years, her family would be leaving a house with a yard for a New York City apartment, and the cost of living seemed prohibitive even on their combined salaries.

When Central offered Buchdahl the job, her excitement was immediate and undeniable. Yet opposing voices multiplied: Jacob wanted to stay in Scarsdale, WRT made a generous counteroffer, and Rabbi Jacobs—who had shielded her from institutional pressures for years—cautioned that the city would offer no such protection. Buchdahl wondered if his warning was a sign that it was time to move on.

An unsure Buchdahl went to her mother for advice; Sulja suggested that the goal of life isn’t to be comfortable but to pursue one’s purpose. Still undecided, Buchdahl called the HUC dean Rabbi Aaron Panken for further advice, and he suggested a coin toss. Although skeptical, Buchdahl flipped a coin while Rabbi Panken listened; it landed heads, meaning she would stay. When Rabbi Panken congratulated her on the result, the finality of it clarified everything: She knew in her gut that she had to go.

Reflecting on Mitzvah (“commandment), Buchdahl meditates on the commandment to honor one’s parents. She argues that the Torah’s promise of a long life in return for parental respect signals that honoring parents is genuinely hard; children are wired to individuate, not replicate. Using the example of Abraham, who smashes his father’s idols before departing for an unknown land, she suggests that honoring one’s parents can mean completing a journey they began but couldn’t finish. Her own move to New York carried her far from her family in Tacoma but was an act that her parents have come to count as their success.

Buchdahl recounts her foray into life at Central Synagogue. Her first Shabbat at the ornate sanctuary caused her dread rather than excitement. At 33, she had left behind an intimate community where she had come of age, and she now faced a congregation of strangers from a pulpit that had belonged to a gifted soprano. Her own insecurity—seeded in cantorial school—whispered that she wasn’t a real singer. She had inherited a choir, a formal choral binder, and an organist, and the search committee had gently warned her about a failed “bongo experiment” from years past.

The High Holidays confirmed her fears. Buchdahl’s severe anxiety manifested as acid reflux that damaged her throat, limiting her range. She sang large portions of “Kol Nidre” an octave lower than written and quietly signaled her music director across the vast sanctuary to lower the key for all remaining pieces. After she stepped down, Cantor Emeritus Dick Botton sang with a resonant baritone that earned immediate applause. Several congregants told her afterward that the piece was better suited to a male voice.

Buchdahl built her team steadily. Her new music director, David Strickland, brought considerable talent but no synagogue experience. She added Argentine clarinetist Ivan Barenboim, whose playing approximated a human voice. Together, the three developed a layered sound that wove together ancient modes, 19th-century cantorial chant, 20th-century folk melodies, and contemporary compositions. Over time, Buchdahl introduced incremental, intentional changes, attempting to evolve rather than disrupt the synagogue’s traditions—but even her gradual approach to change unsettled some congregants, one of whom publicly accused her of replacing tradition with “happy-clappy music” (171).

In the face of such dissent, Buchdahl anchored herself in Psalm 96’s directive to “sing to God a new song” (172). She also reminded herself of  a Jerusalem synagogue that she had first visited in 1989, whose electrifying borrowing of melodies from a French monastery and Native American chant quickly settled into exact repetitions of those same tunes—vitality replaced by calcification. She resolved to keep reimagining worship. Over time, Friday-night attendance grew, and Central became a genuinely singing congregation.

Buchdahl reflects on Krechtz (“the sigh”), describing this distinctly Jewish sound—somewhere between a howl and a hiccup, raw and unpolished—as the most essential skill a cantor must master. She argues that expelling the Krechtz empties the body so that breath, and renewal, can rush back in, drawing on Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s description of sorrow as the Jewish “second soul” and Rabbi Nachman of Breslov’s teaching on the spiritual power of the sigh.

Buchdahl reflects on the challenges she faced while balancing her new cantor position and her responsibilities as a mother. Although her children flourished with dual Jewish identities at their Heschel Day School and at Central, she felt persistent guilt that she had failed to offer them a meaningful Korean identity. Her Korean language had nearly vanished, the family observed no Korean holidays, and, when asked, her children identified as Jewish rather than Korean.

An unexpected step forward in Buchdahl’s personal and vocational experiences came in January 2012 when Harvard professor Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr. filmed an episode of his PBS series Finding Your Roots in Buchdahl’s living room. Alongside Pastor Rick Warren and Muslim theologian Yasir Qadhi, Buchdahl was featured in a segment on religious leaders. Over four hours, Gates walked her through archival documents tracing her father’s Romanian Jewish family, including a birth certificate for her great-grandfather Srul Hirsch Soss, born in 1871; a ship manifest showing the family arriving at Ellis Island in 1902 and settling near what would become her own New York City neighborhood; and antisemitic newspaper clippings that explained why the Sosses had left Romania. For the first time, Buchdahl felt the weight of what it had cost her family to hold on to Judaism.

The show climaxed with the unrolling of a maternal family tree confirming a piece of long-held family lore: Buchdahl’s mother’s line traced directly to King Taejo, founder of the Joseon dynasty, and to his grandson King Sejong the Great—Korea’s most celebrated ruler, inventor of the portable sundial and musical notation system, and creator of Hangul, the phonetic Korean alphabet designed to make literacy accessible to everyone. Buchdahl shouted to her mother in the next room that she was a Jewish Korean princess.

To reconnect with her Korean roots, Buchdahl traveled through South Korea in April 2012 with 11 of her family members, visiting sites including Seoul and her mother’s home village. Sulja used the long van rides to teach the grandchildren to read Hangul, triumphantly declaring that King Sejong’s descendants would master his alphabet. The children’s relationship to Korea shifted; at the Gyeongbok Palace, they joked about their lost inheritance, and at the towering statue of King Sejong in central Seoul, they hollered, “Hey, Grandpa!”

Buchdahl reflects on Tikkun (“repair”), recounting how Japan’s centuries-long appropriation of Korean culture—including the kidnapping of master potters—informed her own mother’s practice of collecting antique Korean ceramics as an act of cultural reclamation. Buchdahl accidentally shattered one such artifact in her apartment when an automated window shade knocked it to the floor. She had it repaired by Yuko, a Japanese kintsugi artisan in Brooklyn. Yuko wrote that she would approach the restoration with grief and respect for the history between their two peoples. Three months later, the vase came back threaded with gold through its cracks. Yuko also gifted Buchdahl an antique teacup made with craft originally brought to Japan by a Korean potter, itself repaired with silver. Buchdahl placed both objects on a shelf and understood the experience as a small but cosmic tikkun—a golden repair.

Buchdahl details her journey to becoming a rabbi. In the fall of 2012, Kenny Heitner, a past president of Central Synagogue, suggested that Buchdahl position herself to succeed Senior Rabbi Peter Rubinstein. Five months later, Rabbi Rubinstein announced his plans to retire in summer 2014 after 23 years leading the congregation. The announcement shook the Jewish world.

Buchdahl respected Rabbi Rubinstein’s legacy but doubted she could replicate it. He had devoted virtually every evening to congregants; she was unwilling to sacrifice her children’s dinners and activities, and her husband had his own demanding career. When Heitner warned that declining would likely mean losing the position to someone who would hold it for two decades, Buchdahl doubted her instincts.

A private conversation with Rabbi Rubinstein deepened Buchdahl’s ambivalence. Rather than encouraging her, he questioned whether she really wanted the management and fundraising work, asked how a good mother could manage the job’s demands, and posed what he framed as a litmus test: A working mother would always feel compelled to go to the emergency room when her child was hurt. Though Buchdahl pushed back, the conversation stung. Two weeks later, she returned and told Rabbi Rubinstein directly that his hesitation seemed rooted in the fact that she was a woman and a mother. He conceded that he came from a different generation.

On March 13, 2013, Central publicly announced Rabbi Rubinstein’s retirement and Buchdahl’s candidacy. The congregation responded with both genuine support and pointed resistance: One senior congregant said the synagogue should be led by an Ashkenazi rabbi, while another questioned Buchdahl’s gravitas—which she understood as code for not looking like a 60-year-old man. Unexpectedly, much of the skepticism came from other women.

That same afternoon, Buchdahl’s daughter Rose’s school nurse called: Rose fell and severely injured her arm, requiring a parent to sign her into the emergency room. Because Jacob was on a plane to California, Buchdahl had her nanny take Rose to the pediatrician. However, the doctor required an X-ray, meaning Rose had to visit the emergency room after all. Desperate to be with her daughter, Buchdahl raced there by cab. The moment Rose saw her mother, she tearfully asked her to stay. Buchdahl did so without hesitation, privately accepting that this was her answer to her work dilemma. The X-ray showed no fracture, and Buchdahl made it to her panel discussion with political scientist Anne-Marie Slaughter in time to open by recounting the entire day, arguing that women could both hold a job and take care of their family if they accepted the inevitable mess.

After an eight-month national search process involving a written statement and two seven-hour interviews, Buchdahl received a phone call announcing her as the nominee for Rabbi Rubinstein’s replacement. At a congregational meeting, over 200 people voted in person. Buchdahl was named Central Synagogue’s 16th senior rabbi, its first woman in 175 years. Rabbi Rubinstein and his wife, Kerry, took Buchdahl and Jacob to dinner, presenting her with a silver heart necklace as a symbol of passing the community to her.

More than a decade into the role, Buchdahl reflects on her experience in the position: She has missed countless games and recitals, but she has remained protective of Shabbat dinners and long Saturday lunches with her family’s day-school crew. Her children have grown up understanding that being their mother is her most important role. When her middle child expressed interest in becoming a rabbi himself, she felt relief and pride that she hadn’t driven him away from the vocation.

Buchdahl reflects on Tisomet Lev (“attention”), describing her daughter Rose’s childhood habit of taking her face in her hands to demand her full regard. The Hebrew phrase for attention, Buchdahl explains, literally means “to place your heart” (197). She laments the modern fracturing of focus—the expectation of constant digital availability that has quietly displaced presence as a cultural value—and argues that our full attention is our most precious commodity. Our lives, she concludes, will ultimately be the sum of what we have chosen to place our hearts on.