Why did she resign?
She had a near-death experience--- not the "bright white light & Jesus" kind, but the "honey, I don't seem to be able to hold things" kind. Took months to get a diagnosis, and a plate in her neck to fix it- a disc had vanished at C-5, and without surgery? Death, or quadraplegia. She's OK now, but her once astounding singing voice ( soprano, alto, tenor, and bass-- rare in man or woman ) never came back after the surgery.
The induction into the Temple's Sisterhood is another interesting story... while it seemed to come out of the blue, after many years of service, here's what really happened...
She was in Wal-Mart one day, when a cry of distress arose from behind a display, she zips around it to see what the problem was, and lo! there is one of the Temple's few young women ( it is a small, and mostly older, congregation ) at her wit's end with her new baby.
She had just recently given birth, and was having a general-purpose "bad day," the screaming baby being only part of it, but she needed someone to hold her baby for a moment while she collected herself.
We don't ( can't ) have children, but Miss E is one of those rare people who seems to exert a nearly-mystical calming effect on small children, animals, and old folks, and when she took the baby, it settled right down...
( On the other hand, it may have been pure shock- Momma was short and dark, Miss E is a six-foot, blonde, eagle-faced Aryan superwoman-- 100% German, and looks it... )
And the next week, the Sisterhood called her, and asked "would you like to join?"
And since I'm throwing out more personal information than usual, I might as well add this: That surgery I mentioned was supposed to take less than an hour, but complications arose, and it went well over three hours- and since I have some medical training and am well aware of all the things that can go wrong, it was not a happy time.
Father Bob Reese, who she had worked for over ten years, was kind enough to keep me company during that time, and among the many things we discussed was how much her work at the Temple meant to her, how she liked the Rabbis and the congregation, and how much she had learned about her own religion by studying Judaism.
And he said something to me that has stuck with me to this day- perhaps because I agree with it so strongly-- he said,
"You know, I don't think it ( the differences between Christianity and Judaism ) makes a bit of difference- to God."