This high holiday season was new for me in many ways. It was my first away from my family, it was the first time I fasted without drinking water, and it was also the first time I didn’t go to services during the day on Yom Kippur. This last one, and a related concept I’ve been thinking about a lot recently, are what I want to talk about here.
As anyone who’s done it knows, praying is not a simple concept. It’s a big category within the religion (as in it encompasses a lot of practices and ideas), and there are a myriad of opinions about every single aspect of it. When, how, where, and why you should do it, and so on.
Like many Jews, I’ve always had a complicated relationship to prayer. I was raised religious, but without much connection to a synagogue. Although very nice, the shul in our town never excited us that much (I think I’ve talked about my struggles with this a bit in a previous post), and I’ve looked for other options for a long time. More »
To those of you who were worried that I was unhealthily smug, worry not. My day of davening at Hadar was the most humbling prayer experience of my life. Many have complained, mostly in the comments here, that this High Holiday Sampler Plate Adventure series has been rather smug. I’ve often been accused of smugness and I won’t go so far as to deny it.
First, let me apologize to anyone who was actually looking forward to my reflections on watching Kol Nidrei live streaming at Jewish TV Network. I couldn’t get it to work right, so I just went to bed frustrated. I was gonna live-tweet it and everything. But alas.
Uv’chen, I’ve been hearing about Kehilat Hadar since I moved into this part of the world and I’ve been told for a couple years now that I need to check it out. I dunno if Yom Kipur was the best day to make my first trip to Hadar or not, but I had a great time. And by a great time, I mean a deeply reflective time.
In recent years, I’ve had Conservative, Reform and Reconstructionist prayer experiences, not to mention post-, non-, anti-, and multi- denominational ones. Hadar is the closest I’ve ever come to Orthodox. Despite the deeply various backgrounds of the people who come to Hadar, the founders and the feel is certainly as close as you can get to Orthodox while remaining egalitarian.
Which is to say that I can’t remember the last time I spent about 50% of Jewish service as confused and lost as I was for most of yesterday. I’m normally someone who prides himself on his facility with the sidur. Even the machzor, which I don’t know as well as the daily or Shabat sidur, has never been hard for me to navigate. So normally, when things in a service don’t got just the way I want them to, I’m frustrated or annoyed or exasperated.
I was certainly frustrated yesterday, but in a good way. I felt challenged yesterday by a lack of knowledge. And when it comes to gaps I discover in my liturgical knowledge, my instinct is always to fill the gaps. Mostly, I was humbled. Yes, you read that right. I said I was humbled. There were tunes I’d never heard before, sung loudly and raucously with clapping, dancing and podium-pounding. It was an attitude I’d never encountered before on Yom Kipur. There was excitement, but the proceedings still managed to remain as somber as I ordinarily think of Yom Kipur as being. These nearly joyous outbursts of song nicely paralleled Rabbi Shai Held‘s sermon, easily the highlight of the day, in which he spoke of a bizarre Talmudic verse which calls Tu B’Av and Yom Kipur the most joyous days of the Jewish year.
Aside from the new (to me) tunes, this was my first encounter with an entire congregation that prostrates itself during the Avodah service! Not to mention the part of the service when everyone at Hadar lays flat on the floor, face down. That one was new to me, so if anyone wants to leave a comment with an explanation, it’s much appreciated.
Yesterday was an endurance test. I arrived at 8:50 a.m. and shacharit has started five minutes earlier. Finally, at 7:30 p.m., about eleven hours later, we wrapped up Ne’ilah. (That’s eleven hours of davening, with only a one-hour break, for those keeping score at home.) Yes, I thought! Now I can go eat. Without skipping a beat, they launched right into Ma’ariv. I briefly entertained the idea of sticking around, but my grumbling stomach and aching head said otherwise. Luckily, Hadar was handing out candy, juice boxes and water bottles on the way out!
I’ve never felt so truly reached by the liturgy of the day, so I’m glad of Hadar’s part in helping the fast and the davening do their intended work on me.
I’ll now move on to a few thoughts about Hadar as a community. Keep in mind that I’ve never been on an ordinary Shabat, so I don’t know what Hadar is normally like.
I’ve heard the charge leveled at Hadar that it is elitist or cliquey. I suppose I can see that from this limited experience, but it is not as if I arrived not knowing anyone in the room. Within the cavernous, packed church multi-purpose room we occupied for the day, I spotted about five bloggers I know (including a few Jewschoolers, including our BZ and Jen Taylor Friedman). I also spotted Tamar Fox, who gave me my first break blogging anywhere other than my own blog, sitting directly in front of me. My boss, a former coworker and about a half-dozen of our volunteers were there too. I ran into a few other friends as well, some of them Yeshivat Hadar alumni and some current Hadar students. So I felt comfortable because of all the familiar, friendly faces, but I can see how others would not have the same experience.
All in all, a good gmar chatimah, I think. Hoping yours was good too.
This is the fourth post in a series on Social Justice Showtunes. The series starts here with a post about the 1937 Broadway musical Pins and Needles and continues here with a post about the 1932 song “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” and here with a post about South Pacific’s “Carefully Taught.”
Many of the best musicals had their origins in earlier theatrical works, from Oklahoma! (based on Lynn Riggs’ Green Grow the Lilacs) to The Fantasticks (based on Edmund Rostand’s Les Romantiques) to West Side Story (based on William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet). Today’s entry comes from the musical version of Clifford Odets’ 1937 play Golden Boy. The original told the story of an Italian-American kid in the Depression who dreams of a career as a concert violinist, seeing a career in boxing as his only way out of the lower class.
For the musical version, Odets was recruited to adapt his own play on the strength of the new lead – multimedia sensation Sammy Davis, Jr. In the musical update, the hero’s struggle was given an added dimension in the form of an interracial love affair — still illegal in many states, and mirroring Davis’s own real-life marriage to May Britt. Odets was at a low point in his career, suffering from the blacklist and nearly broke, so despite his ambivalence towards musical theater, he was happy to be working and thrilled to have Sammy Davis, Jr. signed on.
The show was fully integrated, and it featured a kiss between the lovers, which caused quite a stir during the show’s tryouts. Davis and the rest of the company reported receiving death threats for the involvement in the show, but it was ultimately successful.
This song comes about halfway through the second act, when (SPOILER ALERT!) the lovers have broken up. Soon after the show’s opening, Martin Luther King, Jr. attended the show and admired its message, citing this song as his favorite.
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In his recent autobiography, Put on a Happy Face, Strouse recalled the difficulties involved in putting on this production and working with a star of Davis’s caliber. For instance, Davis’s contract gave him approval over every single song in the score, quite an unusual agreement for a Broadway production. Since Davis was performing a blockbuster club act in Vegas at the time, this meant lots of flying back and forth between New York and Vegas for the songwriters who had to audition new songs for the star at three in the morning following his “midnight matinees.”
Sammy’s only previous Broadway outing had been Mr. Wonderful, which was essentially Sammy’s club act placed within the slightest of stories. So being part of a collaborative process for the good of the dramatic work as a whole must have been new to him. Strouse wrote:
Lee and I didn’t write the pop-style, Sammy Cahn-Jimmy Van Heusen songs that Sammy could metamorphose into jazz-sounding phrases, and Sammy wouldn’t/couldn’t/didn’t want to sing our versions of “black.”
Strouse explains at great length in his book that much of the tension between himself and Davis really revolved around Davis’ desire to swing the score in opposition to the composer’s desire to hear the score sung as written. Because jazz singing was still so closely associated with being black, Strouse fretted that his musical proclivities were being misinterpreted. He wrote:
Lee and I had wanted to write a musical true to the pain, hopes, and culture of African Americans. So, naturally, everyone involved in the writing was white and Jewish–except for Sammy, who was only Jewish… Race relations played out behind the scenes as well as on the stage. For example, if I was drinking a Coke, Sammy liked to take a sip from the same glass. He confided in me that it was really a test to see whether I liked black people. He never told me whether I passed.
Strouse and Davis eventually bonded when they traveled to Selma together for the famous march. But knowing now the way that Strouse perceived what was going on behind the scenes, it’s hard to imagine the moment when he and Lee Adams first presented this song to Davis, asking him to sing lines like “I ain’t your slave no more.”
If you’re interested in learning about a Jewish organization working on fostering a Jewish community that brings together all Jews, whether they look like Charles Strouse or Sammy Davis, Jr., check out Be’chol Lashon. As they put it in their vision statement,
Imagine a new global Judaism that transcends differences in geography, ethnicity, class, race, ritual practice, and beliefs. Discussions about “who-is-a-real-Jew” will be replaced with celebration of the rich, multi-dimensional character of the Jewish people.
Through writing I have committed many a wrong, but unlike those whose faces I see, I will likely never know the vast majority of people who I wronged via this blog. God cannot forgive these sins, only those whom I have wronged. If I can commit sin through the web, then surely I can also repent through it.
For the wrongs against others through hardness of heart, by not posting stories I didn’t like
without knowledge, of those who I knew personally and those I did not
with the utterances of my lips, and my fingertips
in public, where thousands of people read
through harsh speech, against those who simply disagreed with me
by deceit, for willfully withholding or ignoring information to press a point
through wronging a neighbor, by picking fights with others, their blogs, or their organizations
through insincere confession, by writing something not because it is important, but to get acclaim
willfully and carelessly, by writing sloppily and poorly without caring
by showing contempt for teachers and forebears, and not respecting those who came before me
by misusing (the) power of wide readership
through foolish speech and impure lips, by condemning things I have also done
against those who know and those who don’t even have internet.
For the wrongs I have committed against others through denial and false promise, by saying I would post things when I didn’t, or posting things when I said I wouldn’t
through evil talk, by slandering individuals and painting whole peoples with one brush
through scorning, and hypocritically treating others how I hate to be treated
in commercial dealings, by not declaring conflicts of interest, and by biting the advertisers that support us
through haughtiness, by meeting people not to befriend them, but to use their story for a post
with prying eyes, and nosy intentions, by using but not attributing others’ material
with idle chatter, by exaggerating stories or trumping charges
and with brazenness, treating myself and us as more important than I and we are.
For wrongs I have committed against others by being judgmental, evaluating every event, conversation, experience and person as bloggable or not bloggable
entrapping a neighbor, by writing posts just to agitate them
by holding a begrudging eye, and criticizing the form and not the content of someone’s comment
with obstinacy, by refusing to acknowledge when I’m wrong, by not posting corrections, or correcting posts only under duress
by rushing to do harm, and eagerly posting news damaging to individuals or groups
by gossip-mongering, and not fact checking
by vain oath-taking, by speaking for our blog and others without their permission
through baseless hatred, condemning people instead of their ideas
by not extending a hand to causes that needed press but I didn’t care enough
through confusing the purpose of this blog and my ambitions for myself.
For all these sins and more, forgive me, pardon me, accept my atonement. I am sorry, in the waning hours of this season, for all the feelings I have hurt online.
And for all those who hurt me through the words they wrote, or failed to write, on blogs and Twitter and Facebook and others, I do not hold a grudge. I forgive you and release you, so that we can all begin a new year fresh and clean and whole and living.
G’mar chatima tova, may you be inscribed for goodness.
Rabbi Elyashiv of the Lithuanian stream of ultra-Orthodoxy has ruled that it is best not to wear Crocs shoes on Yom Kippur even though they are not made out of leather and, therefore, would seemingly be permissible for the holiday. His reasoning behind the ruling is that they are too comfortable, and thus don’t provide the level of suffering one should feel on the holiday.
Do with this what you will. (Haven’t Crocs’ 15 minutes expired, even in Israel?)
So I’ve been reading the script (downloadable here) to the film Inglourious Basterds. And it’s pretty over-the-top insane.
Not that you wouldn’t expect that from a movie that’s (a) by Quentin Tarantino, (b) about Jews, and (c) borderline sadophiliac in its embrace of violence. But there are some moments, excised from the final film, that tell the story as…well, as a much different story.
In this scene, Donny Donowitz, the “Bear Jew,” has just bought himself a baseball bat. (Proprietor: “You gettin’ your little brother a present before you ship out?” Donny: “No.” Stony silence, as they both realize its significance.) Donny then pays a visit to a tiny little old Jewish lady in an apartment building who invites him in for tea:
Donny: Mrs. Himmelstein, do you have any loved ones over in Europe who you’re concerned for? Mrs. Himmelstein: What compels you, young man, to ask a stranger such a personal question? Donny: Because I’m going to Europe. And I’m gonna make it right. Mrs. Himmelstein: And just how do you intend to do that, Joshua?
He holds up his [baseball] bat.
Donny: With this. Mrs. Himmelstein: And what exactly do you intend to do with that toy? Donny: I’m gonna beat every Nazi I find to death with it….I’m going through the neighborhood. If you have any loved ones in Europe, whose safety you fear for, I’d like you to write their name on my bat.
I’d assume that part of the reason this scene was cut is because the scene that introduces the Basterds unit — post-battle, where the soldiers are interrogating Nazi prisoners and collecting scalps — flows with such brutal elegance. But also, the scenes that feature the Brookline Jewish community would probably take the movie away from being the squarely violent war film that Tarantino intended to make and cast it more as a Holocaust-era character piece.
In Jordana Horn’s excellent interview with Tarantino, both acknowledge (correctly, I think) that Basterds wasn’t a Holocaust film. But, when looking at Tarantino’s original visions for the film — some reports suggest that his original script, which clocked in at over 270 pages and 5 1/2 hours of shooting time — the final product could have been any of several types of film.
(One final note: Ostensibly, Tarantino’s original concept was to make the film entirely about Shoshana, the Jewish girl whose family was killed in front of her, in which she makes a list of Nazis responsible and extracts vengeance. That apparently turned into his last film, Kill Bill. I do wish Basterds was more like Kill Bill in its embrace of the hero — nearly all the Jews die, and all the women die in particularly horrific circumstances — but I understand how both women’s deaths were called for by the storytelling ethic. Which doesn’t make their portrayal any less anti-woman.)
To enter, answer the following question in blog or video format.
QUESTION:
What keeps you hopeful and/or invested in a two-state solution for the future of Israel and Palestine?
Please choose one of the following as a lens or a focus for your blog/vlog:
A – Social Justice within Israel
B – What it means to be pro-Israel in modern America
C – Jewish values and Israel activism
Round 1: Jewschool editors will choose the top 10 entries (8 blog format, 2 video format)
by Kung Fu Jew [➚] · Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009
Joseph Dana and Max Blumenthal did it first, but Al-Jazeera repeats the experiment, exposing the misperceptions of Obama’s race and religion among Jerusalem-goers. Compare the two side by side here on Dana’s blog.
Although most modern Jews have abandoned the practice of Kapores, in some parts of the community, it is still common. I’m not sure what the Masorti movement thinks it will accomplish by joining with the SPCA -Tel Aviv, ince the parts of the community that are practicing kapores aren’t the parts likely to care what the masorti movement does, but all in all, it can’t hurt.
In the story from which I took this post’s name ( an adapted tale based on the original story by Sholom Aleichem) the author in fact points out that the practice of taking a chicken (male for men, female for women) swinging it over one’s head to “catch” one’s sins, and then slaughtering it, is not exactly halacha ( Jewish law). And while in general one ought not to depend on fiction for accurate portrayals of Jewish law, in this case, it happens to be correct. Not only is “Where is it written?” a good response, but where it is written, the rabbis aren’t too happy with it, considering it (Like many folk customs which have become embedded in Jewish practice) akin to idolatry, or at lest very improper.
And reasonably so, while it might be a midat chesed (act of mercy) to buy a chicken which one will then donate to the poor to eat (although that does raise some questions about how that came about… really? We’re giving our sins to the poor to eat? Hmmm. I hear a sin eater story in here somewhere for those of us familiar with that southern custom), the problems with the ritual as a whole are numerous. For now, let’s set aside the problem of tzaar ba’alei chaim – the requirement not to be cruel to animals (in this case, by packing them in itty bitty crates sitting around in the sun all day until it’s time for them to be grabbed and swung around by the feet) and concentrate on the symbolism of the custom itself.
While there seems to be some kind of yearning for authenticity as played by certain elements of the Jewish community which favor dress styles not native to Israel, but rather early modern Europe, I’ve never been able to fathom why people attach their sentiments to these kinds of customs (including within the community, but without it as well). There’s somehow a sense that it looks or feels more authentic – but how could it be? If Judaism and our peoplehood is based upon our connection to God through God’s commandments, as the Torah tells us, then one couldn’t possibly repent by swinging a chicken around.
I far prefer the formulation of the Talmud (Brachot 17a) (See the bottom of the post) which likens the fat that one loses during a fast to the fat offered as a sacrifice in the times when the Temple stood. That makes far more sense to me.
Most importantly, if w are repenting, we cannot hope to shed our sins elsewhere without the ful act of teshuvah that goes with it. Whether we are speaking of ourselves as individuals, our individual communities, or Israel as a whole, our own sins cannot be displaced by any symbolic act, whether we’re talking about swinging a chicken or saying that the other party involved has done bad things and so they have to repent first. NO, we are responsible for the sins of ourselves, and the sins of our people. If we wish for peace, we have to act first to recognize and admit our sins; to make reparation to those whom we’ve harmed; to confess to God – because in doing so, we humble ourselves and take into our hearts that our acts, whether accidental or intentional, whether preemptive or retaliatory, were wrong; and then to not do it again when the opportunity presents itself.
Stop building settlements, stop demolishing homes, stop blaming others for acts over which we have agency. Goldstone isn’t our enemy, and taking on against him, as the Rabbinical Assembly has just, entirely ridiculously, done, will not bring peace.
As long as we treat acts for which we need to repent as thought they were public relations bloopers which can be addressed if we only change our spin, there will not be kaparah, atonement, no matter how long we fast on Yom Kippur, no matter how many chickens we swing. We have to do the work ourselves.
(From the Yom Kippur Haftarah Isaiah 58:2-7)
They ask Me for the right way,
They are eager for the nearness of God:
3 “Why, when we fasted, did You not see?
When we starved our bodies, did You pay no heed?”
Because on your fast day
You see to your business
And oppress all your laborers!
4 Because you fast in strife and contention,
And you strike with a wicked fist!
your fasting today is not such
As to make your voice heard on high.
5 Is such the fast I desire,
A day for men to starve their bodies?
Is it bowing the head like a bulrush
And lying in sackcloth and ashes?
Do you call that a fast,
A day when the Lord is favorable?
6 No, this is the fast I desire:
To unlock the fetters of wickedness,
And untie the cords of the yoke
To let the oppressed go free;
To break off every yoke.
7 It is to share your bread with the hungry,
And to take the wretched poor into your home;
When you see the naked, to clothe him,
And not to ignore your own kin.
When R. Shesheth kept a fast, on concluding his prayer he added the following: Sovereign of the Universe, Thou knowest full well that in the time when the Temple was standing, if a man sinned he used to bring a sacrifice, and though all that was offered of it was its fat and blood, atonement was made for him therewith. Now I have kept a fast and my fat and blood have diminished. May it be Thy will to account my fat and blood which have been diminished as if I had offered them before Thee on the altar, and do Thou favour me.. (Brachot 17a)
Barbra Streisand is selling off her stuff. You could own a piece of the legend. Better yet, proceeds benefit her foundation, which supports a bunch of progressive causes including environmental and economic policy groups.
Days of Awesome is a livejournal community for fanfiction themed around the Yamim Noraim. I once introduced Bible superstar Marc Brettler to fanfic to explain a theory I had about Shir HaShirim, so I have a soft spot in my heart for the overlap between Jewish Studies and fandom.
And speaking of said overlap, there’s also In the Beginning, a Hebrew Bible fanworks fest, coming soon to an internet near you. This one challenges fanfic writers to write “fanfic” about the Hebrew Bible… or, what others might call midrash. Pieces will be published beginning October 2nd, but until then the site gives some background to the project.
I meant to post this before Rosh Hashannah, but apparently StorahTelling held services in a winery? Maybe this makes more sense for those of you who live in New York. If this piques your interest, they’ll be back for Yom Kippur – more info here.
My facebook feed before the holidays was abuzz with discussions of this article from The Forward, decrying the lack of family-friendly policies in the Jewish professional world.
My twitter feed, on the other hand, was abuzz with folks retweeting Judith Rosenbaum’s consideration of What Patrick Swayze (z”l) did for Jewish women over at the Jewish Women’s Archive Jewesses with Attitude blog.
The New Shul is currently installing their new senior rabbi, and former assistant rabbi, Dan Ain. Being a congregation that revels in throwing off every vestige of what you might expect something with Shul in the name to be, they knew that they couldn’t simply have a luncheon and guest speaker and say, “Poof! Rabbi Dan has been installed.”
So they were attracted to the idea of a week-long art installation as the home of an ongoing installation festivity for Dan, who is currently installed behind the bar at the House of Awe and Repentence Cafe through Saturday, Sept. 26 every day from noon-8pm. Except for Thursday. That’s his day off. The Cafe is located on Manhattan in an otherwise vacant storefront at 13 E. 8th Street, somewhere between Broadway and the general NYU area.
Being as atypical as they can at every turn–and sometimes trying too hard–The New Shul appreciates Dan, a JTS grad who was once threatened with being ordained, but not given membership in the rabbinical assembly. As you might imagine, he quaked in his boots. He also ran intro trouble with the authorities at JTS repeatedly when he consistently refused the wear a kipah on the grounds that his female classmates didn’t have to wear one. Dan was behind the bar when I arrived, wearing white t-shirt with small, black text that said “Rabbi Dan.”
The High Holidays changed forever, for me, a few years ago when i prayed the neilah service with a friend and mentor who was fighting cancer. Stefan had taken me on to work at the ACLU while I was in high school and helped me think more systematically about the fight for justice.
When Stefan would learn that something awful and unjust had happened, rather than saying something snarky and cynical, he’d go to work. For instance:
Seth Kreimer got the call around 8 p.m. on a Friday night.
It was Stefan Presser, longtime legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania.
Federal air marshals had just arrested and detained Bob Rajcoomar, a retired Army physician and naturalized U.S. citizen of ethnic Asian Indian descent, because they did not “like the way he looked” during a flight from Atlanta to Philadelphia. Rajcoomar was held in a police cell at the airport for several hours and then released without being charged.
“We’ve got to do something about this,” Presser told Kreimer, a Penn law professor and Mt. Airy resident.
The two worked through the weekend, eventually filing a lawsuit in federal court against the Transportation Security Administration that accused the agency of racial profiling. The case ended in a landmark settlement that required TSA to pay $50,000 in damages to Rajcoomar and reform its policies and training procedures, in addition to making its director issue a written apology.
Stefan was always full of energy and had a wonderful artful ability to frame issues with moral clarity. He didn’t have that energy anymore when we sat together for neilah. Still in the prime of life, he had a grim prognosis. His cancer was bad enough that he could no longer litigate and had recently stopped working for the ACLU. Even though he could no longer do those things, he was committed to his causes. He mentored and taught young lawyers and law students through the anti-death penalty clinic he had founded. A few months after Rosh Hashanah his physical limitations grew so many that he could no longer teach.
The neilah liturgy, like much of the High Holiday liturgy, talks about gates closing and we plead to be included in the book of life. This had always been a vague metaphor for me, but here I was, signing the plaintive melodies with a teacher whose gates were literally closing and for whom one more year of being inscribed in the book of life would be miraculous and unlikely. He was courageous; I was not. Seeing him ask for another year made me question whether I was worthy of one, what I had done the previous year, and what I would do if by some (natural or supernatural) fluke I was given another year to live. Every year as I move towards the High Holidays, I try to refocus and try to break myself down and do honest repentance. Every year I have trouble, and every year Stefan helps me figure it out. This year was no different. As I sat in Rosh Hashanah shacharit services, I thought about Stefan and how doing just work doesn’t get one another year. It just makes the the years we live ones imbued with meaning and fulfillment. This coming shabbat, I will return to the synagogue where Stefan and I used to pray and, along with others who he mentored, we will talk about his legacy. It couldn’t come at a more appropriate moment. This shabbat is his yartzeit. He nearly made it to the next neilah.
[some of this text comes from a similar piece I posted in 2007]
This is the third post in a series on Social Justice Showtunes. The series starts here with a post about the 1937 Broadway musical Pins and Needles and continues here with a post about the 1932 song “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?”
Today’s entry to the series is probably the most well-known of the songs we’ll be examining. “Carefully Taught” was introduced in 1949, when South Pacific premiered on Broadway. Based on James Michener’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Tales of the South Pacific, Rodgers & Hammerstein’s show addressed racial intolerance head-on, which went on to win its own Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1950.
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Buy the CD!
(Performed by William Tabbert, from the Original Cast Recording.)
As a stand-alone number, the song is a strong message against racism in general, and against unquestioningly accepting the values of one’s parents more specifically. Although there wasn’t a great deal of public backlash against the song, Michener recalled that the authors had faced some pressure to drop this song from the show, but, in Michener’s words, “This number represented why they had wanted to do the play and even if it meant failure of the production it was going to stay in… Courage and determination such as this counts for something in art.”
The show holds a special place in the history of the American musical, and a special fascination for fans of the form. The show represented a big step forward in Rodgers & Hammerstein’s creation of the musical-drama (as opposed to musical comedy), and Josh Logan’s direction was produced one of the first stage plays to adopt cinematic scene transitions. The show has been filmed twice (once for cinemas, once for television), and an all-star concert was also captured for PBS. The show has become a permanent feature of the high school and community theater circuits, and in the 1999-2000 season (the 50th anniversary of the show’s premiere), I must have seen a half-dozen productions around Los Angeles.
Today, South Pacific is once again running on Broadway, in a smash-hit revival at Lincoln Center. This summer, I saw the show live again for the first time in about ten years. In context, the song is sung by a young lieutenant who has fallen in love with a native Polynesian girl. He’s singing to a older French planter whose love affair with a young nurse has fallen apart over the nurse’s disgust at discovering her planter has previously been married to a Polynesian woman.
I attended the show with a dear friend of mine, who happens to be Jewish and biracial, and her parents. Her parents were swept away by the show, but my friend was left with a bad taste in her mouth. You see, for all Lt. Cable’s protestations of his love for Liat, the Polynesian girl, all we’ve seen of their relationship has been strictly physical. They don’t even speak a common language. My friend, unable (or unwilling) to be swept up in the romantic idea of the white air force office rescuing the native girl from her arranged marriage to a wealthy, elderly planter, could only see a naive young girl being rescued from one kind of concubinage only to enter a different kind of love-slavery. (It doesn’t help that both relationships — the one with Cable and the one with the planter — are orchestrated by Liat’s wily mother, Bloody Mary.)
Honestly, I was sort of split on the issue – I hadn’t considered it in that light before. I was also very sleepy the night we saw the show, so I jumped at the chance to catch a matinée later in the summer, this time with my parents and brother. Again, I found the show to be a little long for my taste — director Bartlet Sher has restored a song cut from the original production and added some extra lines here and there (in part to emphasize the young nurse heroine’s racist upbringing), and if you ask me, a two-and-a-half hour show doesn’t need any lengthening. But aside from the length, I couldn’t get my friend’s criticism out of my head, and this time I could only see the relationship between Cable and Liat as exploitative (albeit exploitative in both directions).
And yet, it’s hard to deny the impact the story had on its original audiences, and that it still has on audiences today. The song itself still resonates, and artists continue to record it sixty years after its debut. One of my colleagues in the world of Jewish education keeps the lyrics framed on his office wall alongside quotes from great rabbis as a reminder of the full range of our responsibilities as educators.
As we enter the new year together, I hope we can all think about the ways we teach the next generation and renew our commitment to creating a future free from hate and fear.
If you’re interested in learning about a Jewish organization working on creating a Jewish community free from hate and fear, check out The Jewish Multiracial Network. To quote from their mission statement:
The mission of the Jewish Multiracial Network is to build a community of Jews of color and multiracial Jewish families for mutual support, learning, and empowerment. Through education and advocacy, we seek to enrich Jewish communal life by incorporating our diverse racial and ethnic heritages.
They’re doing important work. Check out their website for information on upcoming events and the resources they have to offer, and consider how you may help make your own Jewish community more inclusive of all Jews.
For more information about the Jewish influences on, and activities of Rodgers & Hammerstein, check out Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical by Andrea Most, which also features an entire chapter on “Carefully Taught.”
I traded in last night’s chazanut for some gospel this morning. I do percussion for a gospel choir here at Drew. Our director, Mark Miller, is pretty well-known as a composer, organist and choir director in his slice of America. A brother-sister rabbinic team, Rabbis Leah Berkowitz and Perry Berkowitz, two of the frumpiest-looking Jews you could ever hope to find, hold a full set of High Holidays services every year in a Unitarian church on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, featuring periodic bouts of fantastic gospel music. Joshua Nelson, increasingly well-known proponent of “Kosher gospel music” was also on hand for several songs.
The Rabbis Berkowitz, it seems, are far from frumpy. The folks that turn out for these services, however, need some work. The service operates in a loose and free-form sort of liturgical not-quite-structure. A sort of meditative, stream-of-conscious, never-ending narrative springs forth from the rabbis throughout the whole service in topics of alertness, repentance, joy, music and the liturgy itself. The machzor, if you could call it that, is an 8-page packet of 11×17 paper with bits of a variety of machzors grafted on.
Normally, I’m not one who tolerates highly-abbreviated or flippant liturgy, but with these two rabbis, it works. Maybe it works for me on RH, for reasons I mentioned earlier in this series: I don’t like this holiday and I don’t get it. Maybe their non-stop sermon, dribbled as it was all throughout the service gave me enough to think about that I was able to get something out of this service.
The music, of course, was beyond good. Everyone seemed to know that in the congregation, but many seemed unsure of how proper this was. And if it was proper, they didn’t know quite how to respond. Many clapped hesitantly or awkwardly, while others peered over their reading glasses in disbelief. But no one could deny it was good.
The downside: It was four hours long! When I finally escaped the building at 2 p.m., I was so hungry for lunch, I thought Yom Kipur might already be upon us!
The musical highlights: Hearing Mark, whom I know as a gospel pianist, playing along to Rabbi Perry’s perfectly chazan-y Avinu Malkeinu; and Joshua Nelson and his singers belting out Hinei Mah Tov to the tune of When the Saints Come Marching In.
The rabbinic highlights: Rabbi Leah’s shouted stream of wrongs in the world, punctuated by Rabbi Perry’s spastic shofar blasts. Not to mention watching the two jump all over the bimah ecstatically waving tambourines around with such gusto that, as Four Weddings and a Funeral put it, “I feared lives would be lost.” These are two energetic rabbis. The congregation should take a few pages out of their machzor.
I thought about beginning my adventure somewhere new, but all adventures begin somewhere similar. So I headed down to my usual haunt for davening, Chavurat Lamdeinu.
A note on CL before I get into it: CL is an oddity in the indie minyan world. It’s in suburban New Jersey and its members–who have many of the same complaints about synagogue life that the twenty- and thirty-somethings that are mainstays of the indie minyan world–are all generally at least 25 years older than me. There are a few exceptions to that demographic generalization, but it’s mostly true. The group is what’s left of a library minyan at suburban NJ Refrom synagogue, though it may outwardly appear quite close to Conservative in style. Our Rabbi was ordained at HUC, though her connection to Reform is tenuous these days. Our usual shaliach tzibur is a convert and a current JTS cantorial student. He is freakishly talented and I normally have no complaints about his leadership style on ordinary Shabat mornings. He generally wears a polo shirt and jeans to services, and that’s pretty much the level of dress that everyone in the Chavurah adheres to.
All of the above is why I love CL and why I go there every Shabat. But on Rosh Hashanah, a lot of that flies out the window. Instead of usual 10-20 chaverim, we grow to 30-50 for RH and Yom Kipur. Everyone–except for me, but including the other Shabat regulars–gets dressed up. And the type of accessible, but beautifully led melodies fly out the window, exchanged for all manner of off-the-wall chazanut that no one knows and no one can sing along with.
And this is the problem that always drives me away from my own community–wherever that may currently be–during the High Holidays. People I don’t know come out of the woodwork. In an attempt to impress them, the leaders trot out all manner of stuff that is far beyond the weekly norm. The result is that the non-regulars are uncomfortable because they’re not used to being in shul at all. Meanwhile, the regulars are uncomfortable too because of all the weird different shit going on!
Tomorrow, this series continues with what is sure to be a bizarre day of RH with gospel music in a Unitarian church. We’ll see how that goes.
I don’t like Rosh Hashanah and I don’t like Yom Kipur. There are things I like about them–repentance (see Tshuvot!), shofars (see Where have all the shofarot gone? and Why I used a bullhorn last night) and pomegranates–but I have to admit that I’ve never been satisfied with either, no matter where I’ve been and no matter what my age.
So this year, I’m not going to go the same place twice during the season of repentance.
Though elements of each of these years of RH and YK have been fine, I’ve never been satisfied with the overall experience. Whether it has to do with where I go or with my willingness or unwillingness to repent remains to be seen.
I’ll begin tonight with Erev RH services at Chavurat Lamdeinu, my usual place of davening these days.
Tomorrow morning, I’ll be at a Unitarian Church where a certain gospel music composer I happen to know will be helping to lead a service that will incorporate a number of gospel tunes. As far as I can tell, this service is not listed anywhere online. If you’re interested in going, it’s at All Souls Unitarian Church between on Lexington between 79th and 80th at 10:30 a.m. Let me know if you’re gonna bet there so I can we can say hi.
If the gospel crowd isn’t doing a tashlich thing, I’ll head over to the Brooklyn Bridge or something else equally iconic and do tashlich.
On Sunday, I’ll kick off my ten days of repentance by heading into Manhattan for The New Shul‘s “The House of Awe and Repentance Cafe“, part of their new senior rabbi‘s season of installation festivities. It promises to be an art installation involving a variety of media and exploring the concept of repentance. Or something. We’ll see.
And, finally, for Yom Kipur day, I’ll skew more traditional than my norm for a change. As noted, I’ve skewed to the left before when I tried out the Reconstructionist shul, but I’ve never tried something more traditional than what I’m used to. To that end, I’ll be heading back in to Manhattan for Kehilat Hadar‘s traditional-egal take on YK. As one fellow refugee of the Reform mainstream recently told me, “I like Hadar for YK because that’s the one time in the year when I want to feel as frum as possible.” Yeah. We’ll see how I feel about that when I’m still standing around in services trying not listen to my stomach.
Expect posts throughout this season of renewal and repentance chronicling my High Holidays Sampler Plate Adventure.
by Shalom Rav [➚] · Thursday, September 17th, 2009
The Rabbinical Assembly distributed this letter today to its members, asking its rabbis to read the piece below in lieu of the Shofar service on Rosh Hashanah. (The shofar is traditionally not sounded when RH falls on Shabbat, as it does this year.)
Friends,
On this Rosh Hashanah our brothers and sisters in Israel face the threat of a nuclear Iran – a threat to Israel’s very existence.
Today, we Jews around the world also confront the anti-Semitism and anti-Israel sentiment of the Goldstone report which blames Israel disproportionately for the tragic loss of human life incurred in Operation Cast Lead, which took place last winter in Gaza. This unbalanced United Nations sponsored report portends serious consequences for Israel and the Jewish people.
On this holy day, which is not only Rosh Hashanah, but also Shabbat, the Shofar is silent in the face of this spurious report, the world is far too silent.
Today the state of Israel needs us to be the kol shofar, the voice of the shofar!
We ask you to write to our governmental leaders and call upon them to condemn the Goldstone report and to confront the threat of a nuclear Iran.
While the shofar is silent today, all Conservative rabbis, cantors and congregations have been asked to sing Hatikvah at this moment in the service.
We rise in solidarity with our brothers and sisters in Israel.
What troubles me most about this suggestion is how profoundly it flies in the face of the very meaning of the festival itself. On Rosh Hashanah, we affirm Malchuyot – God’s sovereignty over the universe. Rosh Hashanah is the only time of the year that Jews are commanded to bow all the way to the ground and pledge our allegiance to God and God alone. We acknowledge that our ultimate fealty lies with a Power beyond ourselves, beyond any mortal ruler, any government, any earthly power.
Beyond the political arguments over such a statement, it strikes me as something approaching idolatry.
I’m curious to know your reactions, particularly in regard to its religious implications.
A few weeks ago I was in a Barnes and Noble bookstore to get my sister a birthday-good-luck-in-med-school-have-fun-in-Chicago present when I passed the “Judaica” table, piled high with books about the Holocaust, Israel and a few by community-labeled self-haters (and great American authors) like Roth and Chabon. I stopped and said to my wife, “Even Barnes and Nobel has nailed the watered down Jewish community experience pushed by a vast majority of the organized Jewish world.” (Or something to that effect.)
We have Israel. We have the Holocaust. And we have people who disagree with the mainstream and therefore should be shunned. But thankfully we have great leaders who don’t buy into that reality…
A week before my trip to the bookstore, I read an interview of Charles Bronfman, the omnipotent Jewish philanthropist, in Ha’artez outlining that the lack of peace in the Middle East (not the-birthright-of-visiting-Israel-thing he heralded as the panacea for the past 10 years) as the reason young Jews aren’t connected to Israel and Jewish communal life. Respectfully, Mr. Bronfman, that isn’t it.
Since the beginning of time the Jewish community has been dynamic, complicated and multifaceted. We have come a long way within the modern Jewish to arrived at catch phrase Judaism. The unbearable “Love Is Real” campaign perpetrated in early part of this decade and the ubiquitous “you aren’t the leaders of tomorrow, you are the leaders of today” phrase jammed down every NFTYite’s throat in the late 90s jump to mind. Marketing is key to gathering people from the hinterlands but content is king when it is time to get them to stick around after we put away the oneg cookies.
Want to know why none of these catch phrases or free programs worked? They have no follow-through, no meaning and no responsibility. What are you required to do upon return from a Taglit-Birthright Israel trip? Nothing. You are obligated to do nothing. Some people do get involved but where is the widespread Jewish community engagement? What happens to NFTYites (and other youth group kids) when they leave high school? Nothing. They can go to Hillel or take part in Jewish student groups, but they don’t have to “feel Jewish.”
Could this have something to do with the fact that everything in the Jewish world was handed to them with no strings attached?
Like a doting grandparent, the Jewish community has bestowed as many gifts as possible onto the younger generation so that they in turn will bestow gifts onto the next generation; L’dor v’dor Halleluyah, from generation to generation we will continue this pattern of present giving that has created a strong Jewish identity over the past fifty years…
We need a different model but not a new model. We actually need to listen to the dreams of the youth and learn from the visions of older, wiser leaders. We cannot rely on kids to be in charge of the community just like we cannot leave innovation up to the old guard. I am excited to follow a wiser, more experienced community member; now would be the time for that older, wiser leader to actually take the lead and not just talk about changing the institutions. The younger generation is still a group of dreamers and that is a job we must embrace. We also have visions for the future, so we must take part in our community now in order shape it into something more substantial than the buzz word of the week.
The reality is we are the same Jewish community we have always been, so please stop trying to sell us a one-size-fits-all Jewish experience. Real leadership is not about sales, it is about engagement and knowing who you are leading. So let me introduce the next generation to you without the help of Survey Monkey, PhDs who you don’t listen to anyway or the Jewish entrepreneurial class:
We get married and have kids later. We want to see and hear the diversity of our entire community represented in our institutions. We don’t believe the Jews are going to be killed off systematically. (Call it naive or complacent, but there is no real threat to the Jewish people that will not be met without unbelievable force, both diplomatically and militarily.) We do not have an “us versus them” mentality, and we do not all see Israel the same way. We want to be held responsible for aspects of community life, not blamed for not being involved with them.
It is all right to enjoy Roth and be a Zionist. You can be a Reform Jew and vote Republican. You don’t have to love the State of Israel to be a good Jew. You should be able to do these things and think these thoughts as a Jew without fear of being ostracized. There is more to our community than being Jewish “in the age of Eminem.”
Free trips and challenge grants will not keep a majority of us involved in the community; that is short sighted. What will keep us around is a welcoming, relevant and nurturing place that feels like we can impact its future. For we have dreams and you have visions – it is about time to align them for the benefit of the Jewish people.
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And, finally, for Yom Kipur day, I’ll skew more traditional than my norm for a change. As noted, I’ve skewed to the left before when I tried out the Reconstructionist shul, but I’ve never tried something more traditional than what I’m used to. To that end, I’ll be heading back in to Manhattan for 
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