Shani Aaron

When Shani Aron was a young child, she wanted to be a nurse:

Teaching, nursing, hairdressing, those were the career options that I thought were available for women in the mid sixties. Out of those three, I set my heart on being a nurse. When birthdays or special occasions came round, my mother, who was excited with the prospect of her little girl having a ‘professional’ career, would buy me books about nursing. I dreamt about working in a hospital.

Now close to fifty years later, Shani has recently begun work in a hospital, providing pastoral care at St Vincent’s Hospital, Melbourne and the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre. She loves the work, and feels privileged to share a sacred space with people facing life challenges. ‘You can only work in this area if you open yourself up to what it means to be vulnerable,’ she says. ‘Through facing your own vulnerability you learn to respect and appreciate other people’s vulnerability.’ Working in a multi-faith setting in a public hospital has exposed her to a wide cross section of people and the unexpected challenges they face, and has given her further insights into what gives life meaning. At the same time, she feels her own faith strengthened by these encounters as is her resolve to lead a life committed to the customs, traditions and practices of observant Jewish life.

Shani’s journey to pastoral care has included many twists and turns along the way. She is a trained teacher with a keen interest in how thought, language and meaning are interwoven. For the last fifteen years, she has been working for a company that provides chess programs in state, Catholic and independent schools. Most importantly, together with her husband of forty years, she has brought up a family of nine children, who are all young adults now, many of them busy raising their own families and active in the Jewish community. Seeing her grandchildren embrace Jewish values as they grow up has been particularly gratifying.

Working in the public sphere and raising a family, Shani has accumulated wisdom that informs her other passion; capacity building for women’s leadership in the home. She has assisted in the running of community programs to help support women who feel isolated at home, and to feel more confident in their roles as home-based faith leaders and mothers.

One of the driving forces for her passion was the message of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who believed women had a pivotal role, especially post Holocaust, in building up the value of the Jewish home and passing on Jewish tradition. ‘That message was very empowering to me as a young mother,’ she said, ‘because it meant that Jewish women were recognised for their role in establishing continuity. We weren’t just ‘mums at home’, we were recognised as key agents facilitating growth and leadership in the next generation.’ Women don’t have to be in charge of businesses or in recognised formal professions to be leaders, in her view. ‘The Jewish home is the centre of Jewish continuity,’ she says, ‘not the synagogue. So – yes a Rabbi is a man – but true leadership starts in Jewish homes.’

A combination of her strong Jewish faith, her professional skills, her community involvement and subsequent leadership, as well as her life experience as a mother of a large family, made her realise ‘I have a part to play, not only in the Jewish community, but as a Jewish woman in the wider community.’ She feels fortunate to be at a stage in life where she can ‘share wisdom gathered from my rich life experience’.

Family and background

I was born in Melbourne in 1957, one of two siblings; I have an older brother. When I was three years old my parents bought a milk bar in Carlisle Street, Balaclava. We lived on top of the milk bar for most of my formative years. My parents worked seven days a week. They had the same shop in Carlisle Street for forty-two years – they were possibly the longest running traders on the street! The type of shop it was evolved over time, from a milk bar, to a bulk food shop (a precursor to the burgeoning health food industry we know today) a mixed grocery business and one of the first retail suppliers of kosher products from Israel.

When I was growing up in the sixties, Carlisle Street didn’t look like it does today. There weren’t many Jewish men walking around with skullcaps and even fewer with beards. It wasn’t an overtly observant Jewish neighbourhood like it is today. There were lots of synagogues in surrounding suburbs but not many people went regularly, as they do now.

My father is of Ashkenazi background. He was born in Warsaw in 1923, the youngest of 6 children. When he was 3, his father, a cobbler, came to Australia in search of a better life for his family than the difficult times people were facing in pre-war Poland. His father had relatives who had migrated here some years previously and had sent word that life looked promising in this far-flung corner of the world.

My paternal grandfather left his wife and six children in 1927 and came to Australia in the hope of earning enough money to eventually bring the rest of family he left behind in Poland to Australia. Tragically, my father’s mother died suddenly when she was in her late 40s and my father was only ten. The rest of the family, my father and four of his siblings, migrated from Poland to Australia several months later in 1934. My father, as a ten year old, met up with his own father, whom he didn’t remember anymore, after a seven-year absence.

Dad grew up in Carlton, where my grandfather had a shop and many European Jewish immigrants settled. He went to school in Rathdowne Street, Carlton until he was about thirteen or fourteen, when he had to leave because his father needed him to contribute to the running of the household. This was very distressing for my father. He was a keen student and wanted to continue at school. When he was eighteen he was drafted to the Royal Australian Air Force and became a groundsman servicing flight equipment. My father didn’t serve in any combat units but spent the war years on a very isolated RAAF base, close to Katherine in the Northern Territory.

My mother has a quite different background. She was born in Burma, now known as Myanmar. My maternal grandfather was born in Iraq and my maternal grandmother was born in Penang, Malaysia. Their Jewish practice followed the Sephardic/Oriental traditions. My grandfather came to Burma for work as an engine driver when he was a young man. My grandmother was sent there when she was sixteen, essentially to look for a husband; the Jewish community in Burma was bigger than that of Penang and her family thought she would have better marriage prospects in a larger Jewish community. She married my grandfather when she was sixteen. My mother was one of six children and grew up in Burma where, together with her siblings, she attended a British school.

The family, together with many others, fled when the Japanese invaded Burma. They spent the war years in the Himalayan Mountains. They returned to Burma after the war only to find that their home had been destroyed by a direct hit from Japanese bomber planes. My grandmother decided the time had come to find a new home for her household of now young adults and the family eventually immigrated to Australia once the war was over in 1948.

My parents met at a Jewish dance in Melbourne and were married in 1954. Though both were born into Jewish families, they came from very different backgrounds and had different experiences of Judaism and Jewish culture. There was a lot of migration of Eastern European Jews and Holocaust survivors to Australia after the war. However, post World War 2, there weren’t a lot of Sephardic Jews in Melbourne. It was hard for my mother’s family adjusting to a new life in Australia because they weren’t the usual Jewish immigrants. They didn’t speak Yiddish and had a different cultural background, Jewish customs, traditions and cuisine. They were disorientated when they came here. People questioned them about their Jewish identity; they found that very isolating.

My mother received no Jewish education outside her family but the family had very strong Sephardic traditions. My grandmother was very protective of those traditions and culture in this foreign, Australian environment. Even though they had no formal Jewish education growing up in Burma, my grandmother was very strong in keeping tradition. The Sabbath and Jewish holydays were sacred and filled with much ritual.

My grandmother went to great lengths to acquire Kosher food in Burma. Living in a small town outside Rangoon, there was no Kosher meat. So my grandmother sent my grandfather away to learn how to ritually slaughter chickens according to Jewish law and traditions. ‘We need to eat,’ she told him. ‘There’s no kosher chickens here, so you need to go and learn what to do.’

My father, on the other hand, was not from a particularly observant family. They ate Kosher meat, but in terms of other observances, without a mother to set the tone in the home in a new country with a foreign environment, many traditions fell away. My father used to tell the story about hitching a ride back to Melbourne via Adelaide from the Northern Territory after the war. When he got back to Melbourne, he went straight to the family home and found there was no one there, even though it was a weekday. He thought it was strange, but it turned out it was the Day of Atonement, one of the holiest days in the Jewish calendar! His father and siblings were attending the very long synagogue services. Due to the displacement of wartime and wanting to get back to civilian life, he had lost track of the time of the year as far as Jewish holydays were concerned and it hadn’t registered with him what day it was in the Jewish calendar!

My parents’ different layers of observance influenced the extent of observance I grew up with, as did the impact of the Holocaust on the community around me. In the 1960s it was not quite as easy to live a full Jewish life (eating Kosher food etc.) as it is now. Where I went to school, at Beth Rivkah, many of my classmates were not strictly observant of Jewish practice and indeed most of the girls who came from Holocaust survivor families were not observant. Many family members of Jewish immigrant families had been murdered in concentration camps. Distress, displacement and unimaginable horror had had an impact on them and their life in a new country.

My parents enrolled my brother and me in the new Jewish schools at the time, Yeshivah and Beth Rivkah Colleges, when we were very young, in the hope of providing a Jewish education that they had missed out on. I learnt how to read Hebrew, to say the daily prayers, to study the Torah and to be familiar with ancient Jewish traditions and customs as they were practised in the modern world. Despite all this, neither my family nor those of most of my classmates, led observant Jewish lives. We were, however, becoming fluent in Jewish literacy and familiar with Jewish customs and practices.

My mother’s family was traditional, but my father was not from an observant family. There was not a strong mother figure in his family and he was alienated from his father. The impact of losing his mother together with being displaced into a foreign environment with a foreign language and culture was profound. As a young child, he would go once a week to say a prayer for his deceased mother for a year after she passed away as is the custom for an immediate family member but otherwise only went to synagogue on the High Holydays.

Reflecting on my family history, however, I can see how my maternal grandmother asserted leadership in her household, in order to keep Jewish culture and tradition alive. My late uncle used to say she was a woman ahead of her times. She knew (especially in pre war Burma) that if she wanted to keep up Jewish tradition she would have to be a leader. Growing up, I was fortunate to have a strong woman faith leader as a role model, something that I only began to appreciate many years after she passed away. She was a woman with a vision for the continuity of her family and her people.

School, Judaism and further learning

Until I was about eleven years old, though my mother faithfully lit Shabbat candles every Friday evening, my family didn’t observe all the other Sabbath laws and practices. At that point, my brother, who was two years older than me, was strongly influenced by a group of young rabbinical students – followers of the Lubavitcher Rebbe in New York – who were concerned with revitalising Jewish observance. They, together with many other young people sent to Jewish communities worldwide, were sent to Australia as part of a global program to bolster Jewish practice and observance while completing their intensive Jewish studies. During their two-year study program in Melbourne, my brother was strongly influenced by their passion and enthusiasm. He wanted to actively embrace Jewish practice and so, slowly, our family became more involved in Jewish customs and traditions. My parents were happy about this new found interest of their children. All the attention to detail wasn’t something that they had grown up with but they were generally supportive of this renewed commitment to Jewish life.

We became more observant at our own pace. There was a gladness that Jewish traditions were being revived in the family. My grandmother was very happy, even though some of the practices were a bit foreign to her and somewhat stricter. It was a gentle embrace of Jewish law, culture and tradition and my brother was respectful of the pace my parents took it on. It was a spiritual awakening in a sense – but very organic. I suppose I was the right age for that sort of awakening and after all, it was the sixties, the hotbed of much social change and spiritual awakening in the world!

It all made school more relevant for me, and the attempts to make us Jewishly literate more meaningful. I began to see that what I had been taught was a treasure to which I had access. I was also fortunate to have another strong female role model in my Hebrew language teacher in the final years of my schooling. This outstanding teacher was to become my mother-in-law several years later! She was a highly intelligent woman with a strong background in Jewish learning. She was on the examiners’ board for HSC classical Hebrew course that included the study of Biblical texts, prophets, modern writings and poetry. She spoke about the prophets as if she knew them! She was extremely learned and knew a lot more than many Jewish men and some rabbis. I learned classical Jewish texts as part of the secular Hebrew curriculum. The standards were very high but we were filled with her passion.

Many girls went straight to university after completing high school but it was also becoming acceptable for girls to take further Jewish Studies in the year after school. A few of my classmates went to Israel to do this, but this was not an option for me due to the expense involved. I was fortunate that a small school of advanced Jewish studies for women called Ohel Chana, under the auspices of The Yeshivah Centre, had opened several years earlier. I studied Jewish studies exclusively for a year and after that then I went to university.

That year of study was very important to me as I slowly integrated all the Jewish learning I had been exposed to with a value system I was developing as a young woman with a strong sense of Jewish destiny and identity. I’d done the hard work of finishing school. My parents wanted me to pursue tertiary education; they had never had that opportunity themselves. They wanted me to have a career, but they also respected the fact that I wanted to advance my Jewish learning. They were happy for me to take that ‘gap year’ – knowing that I would then go on to University and a professional career. They truly had self sacrifice, as they worked many long and hard selfless years to put us through an intensive Jewish education.

The following year I enrolled in a Bachelor of Education. By now I was set on becoming an English teacher as I was greatly influenced by some outstanding teachers I had in my final years of school, studying English and English Literature. I thought communication was the most important skill to develop. I was fascinated with language, thought and meaning and the interplay between them, and this motivated me to pursue teaching as a career.

Work, family and community

I married my husband, Raphael when I was nineteen. I completed the first year of my Bachelor of Education and then married at the beginning of my second year. I had my first child soon after that. I took my baby with me to classes, which was somewhat unusual in those days. When he was old enough to leave with a babysitter, I would hitch a ride home from the university hitching points, hoping I would get home in time for the next feed. I eventually finished my degree after the birth of my third child. Years later, when I met up with former fellow students, they would say they remembered me as I was always pregnant!

I was at home for the first few years after I finished studying. That was quite an adjustment as I had been so used to studying and having assignments to work on as my main activity away from the children. I was then offered a part time position at Yeshivah College as a Jewish studies teacher. I taught part time for a year and fell pregnant towards the end of that year. The school asked me to come back to school six weeks after having my fourth child and I just didn’t think I could manage that. I was a very devoted teacher, spending a lot of time preparing for classes and I didn’t think I could do the job properly while balancing the demands of my young family. I kept thinking about how I would feel if my son, who was the year level below that I was teaching, was being taught by someone like me! So I made the hard decision not to take the job. I really missed the teaching, but I just couldn’t do it – it wasn’t the right thing to do for my family.

I found that difficult at the time. Though my mother often stepped in to help, I didn’t have a large network of extended family to support me. I found being at home with a baby and toddler to be quite lonely and isolating. I missed social contact and the stimulation of working in education. I loved my children but raising a family was exhausting!

I had a friend who worked part time and spent most of her income on childcare and home help, because it was a bit of a sanity saver for her, allowing her to do what she loved as well as get help at home. She advised me to do the same. Looking back, that might have been a better option for me but who knows? My life followed a different path for which I am grateful.

I always wanted to go back to teaching but the longer I was out of the classroom, the less confident I felt about going back. I was hard on myself about my lack of skills. So I decided to go back to study and did a Postgraduate Diploma in Gifted Development and Education.

I loved it! They were evening classes and therefore manageable after I attended to my family. I loved the stimulation and being back at study – reading, meeting new people, doing research and assignments. It opened up a new world for me. I was meeting interesting people with new ideas about education and how children learn. But most importantly, it helped me to realise that my nine children had given me a wealth of teaching opportunities and experience even if I wasn’t in the classroom.

At the same time, I became interested in community work with a focus on women’s issues because I had felt isolated as a young mother. I wanted to find ways of connecting with other Jewish women. At some stage the women’s organisation connected to the Yeshivah centre had some voluntary positions open and no one else wanted them so I put my hand up. I thought I could help get involved in developing programs for Jewish women to support women and their families. I began encouraging women to get more actively involved in their own futures as household leaders.

We created and devised programs about parenting, managing financial affairs, marriage, creative outlets – different ways of empowering women to be more involved in their own destiny and the lives of their families. The aim was to strengthen Jewish women and their homes. I just loved being involved. There was a lot of work and we didn’t have a lot of resources. We had to create stimulating programs and events, work out venues and find speakers who didn’t need to be paid. It was a great team of women working together – we did it for a few years and then passed it on.

It was all a bit random and ad hoc, but I used my teaching background to create some infrastructure by documenting what we did. One of the things I learned through my gifted education studies was you have to document what you do. It shouldn’t be that things only get done due to the hard work of some isolated individuals. There needed to be established protocols for people to follow. I also hoped it would stop other women reinventing the wheel and wasting resources, time and energy which were always at a premium.

Leadership

I’ve always been interested in community matters, and how individuals can actively support and participate in their communities, and I wanted to learn how to lead in that space. I wanted to learn how to be an active participant, rather than waiting for someone or something to happen. Sometimes, some community groups can be a bit slow to take things up, rather than be proactive. Project Deborah, in which I was an inaugural participant, acknowledged the importance of Jewish women having a strong voice. The project encouraged women to make their voice heard as best they can because women have value to offer in any situation. I learnt not to be afraid of pushing myself forward! I learnt to say: ‘hang on a second. I’ve got something to say! You might not like to hear it but you need to hear it!’ I think I knew that anyway but having it reinforced in a safe environment with other women, drove the point home a little stronger.

When I got involved, my aim was to help women in the home feel confident and supported, to help them feel that they had control of their own destiny as leaders in their own home and community. After I stepped down from Jewish women’s organisations, about ten years ago, at a time when my own kids were grown up and I was at a different stage in life, I still saw that some young mothers were isolated. So together with my oldest married daughter who was a young mother, we started a women’s organisation that was a bit more diverse. It wasn’t connected to any synagogue or community group. We wanted to appeal to the broader Jewish community of women.

We set up a small Jewish women’s centre. We encouraged people to volunteer and had a drive where we acquired beautiful repurposed furniture and some paintings from Jewish women artists in an office space that wasn’t being fully utilised. We set up a couple of rooms that we called “Wellspring: the centre of the Jewish Woman’. We ran craft groups, discussion groups, movement classes, playgroup, market nights and music nights. We had the space for less than a year and people came from nowhere. On opening night we had over a hundred women, people from ages 18 to 80, attend. We were overwhelmed by the response.

After close to a year, the building was sold so we no longer had a venue. We held occasional events for a couple of years on life coaching, mental health issues, home organising etc. in private homes. We would have over a hundred people attending. Unfortunately, after a while, some of the organising committee had to move on to other commitments and we stopped planning events. The experience reinforced in me the need for women to be proactive and avail themselves of leadership opportunities.

Soon after this, I was involved with the older people in my family and became passionate about the needs of elderly people who don’t have a voice or anyone to advocate for them. I think I have always been sensitive to people who have been marginalised – be they the young mothers I worked with or older people. I was always doing it for my family and it worried me that others had no one to speak for them. I tried to get a group together creating programs to engage older adults in meaningful, productive and stimulating activities and set up a bit of a working committee to brainstorm ideas.

Then my life took on a different path. I was spending a lot of time in hospitals and rehab facilities supporting my father and mother and other older relatives, advocating for them and helping them adjust to difficult situations to do with loss of independence and the grief that accompanies that as well as illness. Over a period of five or six years, an aunt, an uncle, my father and my mother-in-law passed away, each one of them facing much transition and challenge.

Supporting my beloved family throughout these times opened my eyes to a world to which I hadn’t been exposed. I felt I had something to offer others and spent the good part of a year trying to find how I could build on my skills and put my experiences to good use. I attended lectures and workshops on a range of topics from dementia to doing legacy work with terminally ill people, as well as information evenings. I researched various courses and organisations trying to find the right fit.

Pastoral care, and multi-faith leadership

In 2016 I stumbled upon a course of training and clinical practice called Clinical Pastoral Education. I wasn’t sure what it was but kept trying to get more information and find people who knew about it. I remembered that there was a pastoral carer who had visited my aunt and offered my family support as my aunt transitioned into permanent residential care due to early dementia and illness. She kindly offered to meet with me and encouraged me to seriously consider the course.

In 2017, I completed two units of Clinical Pastoral Education at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, the second unit at an advanced level, which incorporated over 800 hours of supervised learning in pastoral practice as well as clinical experience. It was an incredibly immersive learning experience, with regular clinical reports to write and present based on our clinical ward rounds. I became really passionate about the work and decided that this was something I deeply wanted to pursue as part of my life’s work.

I was offered occasional casual work at Peter MacCallum once I completed the units at the end of 2017 but early in 2018, I applied for a casual position at St Vincent’s Hospital Melbourne and started work there in February 2018. I am part of an incredibly devoted and passionate team of pastoral carers. Pastoral care is not faith based and, contrary to what many people assume, it isn’t necessarily about religion. It’s a form of faith leadership – helping people to find within themselves what gives their life purpose, meaning and a sense of belonging. Often, people facing sudden illness, disease, accident or a life threatening diagnosis have to confront aspects of life that many of us take for granted. Sitting in an encounter with individuals as they comes to terms with the direction their life is taking can be awe inspiring as well as very humbling. Providing a listening presence while supporting people through this process can sometimes open doors to a different way of being in the world both for the individual, the family and for the person sharing that space with them. Working in this field is a privilege and I’m so grateful for my life experiences and the mentoring I have had that have brought me to this sacred work.

So dreams do happen, even if they take half a century to evolve…

Shani Aaron was interviewed by Dr Nikki Henningham on 14 May 2018 for the She Speaks project. PHOTO: Leigh Henningham