I’ve always been something of a post-modernist, fascinated particularly with the ways in which form and content intersect, interact, support and destabilize each other. Blame it on an early obsession with Stephen Sondheim from an early age. (Yes, folks, that link is a peek into dlevy’s early high school adventures on the internet. But I digress.)
With that in mind, I find it particularly delightful to encounter parshat Vayechi during the week that our secular calendar advances a page. You see, the content of this week’s Torah reading involves Jacob putting his affairs in order at the end of his life, bestowing blessings on his sons (but not his daughter) and two grandsons (you can guess whose progeny they are) before shuffling off this mortal coil. But the form — oh, the form! First we’ll notice that this is the final nugget of Sefer Bereshit (aka Genesis, not the Peter Gabriel/Phil Collins band), the first book of the Torah. When this story ends, we get a flash forward to everybody’s favorite Easter Passover story, The Ten CommandmentsSefer Shemot (aka The Book of Exodus, no not the Leon Uris one). That’s a new book – same scroll, but with a nice big, clear differentiation in the text. Plus, we divide our reading up so that we don’t get into that story until next week. And in case anyone wasn’t sure, we’ll all leap to our feet on Saturday morning and sing “חזק חזק ונתחזק” to punctuate the end of our current book. So between the end of the patriarchal era (ha! as if!), the end of the book of Genesis, and the rhythm of our Torah reading that keeps us from reading the next chapter until (at the very least) later on in the afternoon, we’ve got a nice, tidy ending to our story. More »
No. It isn’t a joke…but it might be soon. Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, public relations guru relationship expert and Kosher sex marketer, is running for office because he doesn’t like that he lives in a free country.
Now that isn’t completely fair to the good rabbi. Rabbi Boteach is mad that his next door neighbor is the Libyan ambassador to the United Nations.
JTA Reports:
In an opinion piece published Thursday by JTA, Boteach said he was outraged that Libya’s U.N. ambassador, Abdurrahman Mohamed Shalgham, was permitted to take up residence in Englewood, N.J. The rabbi, best known for his book “Kosher Sex” and counseling the late pop star Michael Jackson, said that having the diplomat as his next-door neighbor has him angry enough to launch a career in politics.
“For the first time in my life, I find myself contemplating a run for elective office. The reason is simple: The Talmud declares, ‘In a place where there are no men stand up and become one,’” Boteach wrote in his JTA Op-Ed. “If Gadhafi’s envoy remains my next-door neighbor with the tacit blessing of my elected leaders, I will do my best to unseat them by every legal means necessary.”
This summer, Boteach played a lead role in the successful campaign to keep Libyan leader Muammar Gadhafi from staying at the Libyan-owned property in Englewood during the U.N. General Assembly. But Shalgham recently moved to the property, according to a report in the New Jersey Jewish Standard. Read More
Please take the time to snicker under your breath. Done? Great. Let us take a look at his platform. More »
We’ve beenreporting about the contest to name the planets Uranus and Neptune in Hebrew, as part of the International Year of Astronomy.
As ADDeRabbi reports, the winners were announced today at a ceremony at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. (As a finalist, I was invited to the ceremony, but was unable to attend since I was in the wrong country.) And the winners are…. “Oron” for Uranus, and “Rahav” for Neptune! Mazal tov (as it were) to ADDeRabbi, who was one of the entrants who submitted Rahav! My submission, Shahak (for Uranus) had to settle for runner-up; I suspect that Meretz stuffed the ballot box.
I guess this is a follow-up of sorts to KFJ’s recent post here at Jewschool, Shooting the Jewish Press.
Today’s JTA Daily Briefing included the following language, which you had to scroll through to get to their actual content:
Noah would be disappointed.
We hoped for a flood, we got a shpritz. To the hundreds who’ve donated to JTA, we pledge to put your generous gifts to good use. To those who haven’t yet — yours, too. Please donate now.
Excuse us for not recognizing your right to exist.
To top it all off, they included this insane graphic:
Last week, a discussion was organized at Yeshiva University in NYC called “Being Gay In The Orthodox World: A Conversation with Members of the YU Community.” The event, which took place on December 22, was sponsored by the YU Tolerance Club and the Wurzweiler School of Social Work. It was an open event; people from the YU and Stern communities were invited to attend, as were members of the Jewish communities at large. (I received several invitations to go but was unable to make it.) Many of you found out about it on twitter; our most popular tweet, which more of you clicked through than any other, was a link to The Curious Jew‘s transcript of the panel discussion, which Chana posted within a couple hours of the event’s conclusion. This transcript has been as close to hearing about it as those of us who weren’t there could get, since Rabbi Yosef Blau said in his opening remarks:
What we WILL be doing is addressing the pain and the conflict that is caused by someone being gay in the Orthodox world. Our four panelists, one present student and three alumni of Yeshiva, will be speaking about their own lives and experiences. I would ask you not to take pictures of them and not to record to respect privacy. Recordings have an unfortunate tendency to enable someone to take out a snippet and then use it for various and sundry purposes.
Each speaker then went through his own personal story of being gay in the Orthodox world. Dr. Pelcovitz, a psychologist on faculty at YU, presented a psychological/Orthodox perspective; he made sure to emphasise that there is a difference between “feeling” and “doing” gay, and said that “nobody has the right to judge a feeling,” regardless of halakhic understanding. Questions were then taken from the audience of 800 people, and the event ended more or less on time.
But, of course, it didn’t actually end there. More »
There is a debate in Israel about foreigners owning Israeli newspapers, because Sheldon Adelson is printing a free Likud rag that’s destablized their news industry. Instead of getting into that debate, I’m gonna pull a Dick Cheney and shoot the guy standing next to me: the American Jewish press.
I was on an AJPA conference call in early 2009 along with Mobius, Shamirpower, Zeek’s Jo Ellen, the 23-year-old New Voices staff and a bunch of adult, Jewish newspaper editors and publishers. The point was to ask us why young people don’t read Jewish papers. For context, I ran New Voices magazine a few years ago, worked as press officer of Hazon, now co-publish Jewschool, and maintain an interest in this field. So I had a few things to say.
I (and we) said to these alter kakers three main things:
Meet us where we are — on social media and the web.
But even if you do, shitty content is still shitty content. You have boring, uninteresting, irrelevant things to say to our demographic.
If you want young people to read, then have young people write! And not about your boring crap, but stuff that isn’t relevant to your existing readers.
Before 1948, both the Jewish and the Arab populations of Jerusalem were scattered throughout the city. At the end of the War of Independence, when the city was partitioned into Israeli West Jerusalem and Jordanian East Jerusalem, a major population redistribution took place. The Jews in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City and the Arabs throughout West Jerusalem had to leave for the other side. As the old Arab neighborhoods in West Jerusalem were filled in with new Jewish residents, the municipality gave the neighborhoods new Hebrew names in an attempt to erase their history. So Talbiyeh became Komemiyut, Katamon became Gonen, and Baka became Geulim. Was this attempt successful? Yes, in the sense that the current residents of the old Arab mansions of Talbiyeh are still primarily Jewish. But in a linguistic sense, no: No one has heard of Komemiyut, Gonen, or Geulim, and everyone still uses the Arabic names (or Greek, in the case of Katamon).
And now history repeats itself. If you’ve been to Jerusalem in the last couple years, you’ve seen Rechov Yafo and other major streets all torn up for the construction of the new Jerusalem Light Rail, which runs through both West and “East” (actually north) Jerusalem. Now, as the project nears completion, and the engineering challenges of constructing new transportation infrastructure in an ancient and hilly city have all been met, the city faces what may prove to be a greater challenge: naming the stations. More »
Editor’s note: The following guest post is by Rabbi Matt Carl. Rabbi Carl serves Congregation Mt Sinai in Brooklyn Heights and teaches and writes independently. His work and projects can be found at www.rabbimoshe.net.
My first Hazon Food Conference was a wonderful experience. Unable to make it due to scheduling for the last three, I was excited to participate this year, especially since my synagogue will be host to Hazon’s Avodah-AJWS CSA in Brooklyn. This year, I believe for the first time, the conference was held over a weekend that included Asara B’Tevet, a “minor fast” day. Yesterday was a strange experience, as the Food Conference ended with a very different relationship to food than it had the first three days.
I came to the conference with my own opinions and practices about the minor fasts. As a spiritual and contemplative practice, I am a big supporter of fasting on these days. As a Zionist and a realist, I question the practice in this era. That being said, I was quite interested to learn about the fasts from the perspectives of those teaching workshops at the conference. As Shabbat was ending, Rabbi Seth Mandel (the OU‘s head of shechita), Rabbi Ahud Sela (of Conservative congregation Temple Sinai in Los Angeles) and Julie Wolk (founding co-director of Wilderness Torah) presented a panel conversation on fasting, moderated by Dorothy Richman. Julie spoke of her experience on a vision quest and Rabbi Sela of his experience doing a “fast for Darfur,” while Rabbi Mandel spoke more generally of the role of fasting in Jewish spiritual life. Yesterday, during the fast, Rabbi Steve Greenberg taught “The Hunger Artist: Fasting as Body Cleansing” with Biblical, Rabbinic and contemporary texts on the experience, meaning and purpose of fasting. More »
Editor’s note: The following is a guest post from Yoni Stadlin, founding director of Eden Village Camp. Many of you celebrated at this summer’s Bereishit Festival or you may have justheard of them through the grapevine. As we look toward our next Jewish holiday of Tu Bishvat, we invite you to hear Stadlin’s inspiring story. Oh yeah, and thanks to three huge Jewish organizations for investing millions in such an awesome project!
My name is Yoni Stadlin, and I am a redwood-tree-sitter. Redwoods are the tallest trees in the world, can grow up to 300 feet tall, and can live for two thousand years! I lived aloft in redwood trees for two months of my life. Tree-sitters are people who live up in trees that are slated to be cut down, on the wager that no one would cut down a tree with a person in it.
Tree-sitting has been effective in protecting huge groves and helping change many policies, but many of these ancient beauties have been logged nonetheless. Ninety-five percent of coastal redwoods in the northwest U.S. have been logged for making things like decks, playgrounds and tools. The practice of clear-cutting – leaving no trees standing – has turned huge, lush, vibrant and ancient redwood forests into eroded wastelands, destroying habitats, contaminating water, and massively increasing our species’ footprint on this planet.
Imagine, people in trees! One person, name Julia Butterfly, lived aloft for two and a half years on a suspended platform in a tree named Luna. Imagine where you were two and a half years ago, and imagine being held by a gigantic tree from then until now. Imagine seeing no doors, not one building, road or florescent light, and your feet never touching the ground. This is what I did for two months, and I loved it. More »
As readers might remember, dlevy and I like to cook. And we’re all about the organic, free-range food in our kosher kitchen. Okay, so one of us is all about the organic and free-range, and the other likes food that’s, well, gross. Sugary, deep-fried, processed, in a can? That’s dlevy’s idea of delicious. My influence can only go so far.
For what it’s worth, only one of us plucked and kashered free-range, local, nearly-organic chicken this year, and it wasn’t TWJ. Enjoying deep-fried, sugary goodness and caring about the planet and what goes into our body don’t have to be mutually exclusive.
But we were thinking: While others who care about Jewish food are affirming their views, and giving themselves pats on the back, at the Hazon Food Conference in California, what can we do from Jamaica Plain, MA? And then dlevy found his inspiration: Organic Batter Blaster! On many a grocery shopping trip, dlevy has lusted over this product, while I’ve laughed and mocked. The only thing stopping him from purchasing it in the past was the lack of hecksher. (Un)fortunately, that is no longer a hindrance as Organic Batter Blaster is now OU certified.
The short version: Segulah! DC’s newest independent minyan, with “full-liturgy, energizing, songful, and participant-led egalitarian davening in a warm and welcoming neighborhood community”. Shabbat morning services this week, January 2, 2010, 9:30 am, Shabbat Vayechi, Reamer Chapel at Tifereth Israel Congregation, 16th & Juniper St (7701 16th St NW; enter off Juniper), Washington DC, two-table potluck to follow at a nearby home. All ages are welcome. RSVP to segulahminyan at gmail or on Facebook, and/or join the email list.
The longer version:
All the way in the northernmost reaches of our nation’s capital, in the very last alphabet, is the neighborhood of Shepherd Park, and just over the Maryland line is the unincorporated urban area of downtown Silver Spring (home of NOAA, the American Film Institute, and the Discovery Channel). (The picture at right shows the north boundary stone marking the border between DC and Maryland.) This multistate (or one state and one something else) neighborhood is more affordable than central DC but more walking- and transit-friendly than the burbs, and therefore it’s no surprise that it contains one of the most diverse and fastest-growing Jewish scenes in the Washington area.
The Jewish epicenter of the neighborhood is upper 16th Street, or “Sheish Esrei Elyon”, where a single two-block stretch contains three congregations that are exceptional in different ways: Fabrangen is a historic first-wave havurah that started in 1971, born out of the activism of that time, and continues to this day. Ohev Sholom is an Orthodox synagogue that has reached out to the LGBT community. Tifereth Israel is home to JuggleK, a kashrut certification that certifies both conventional kashrut standards and ethical standards, whose first and only client is a vegan soup subscription service. Other Jewish highlights of the neighborhood include Moishe House Silver Spring, the offices of KOL Foods, and the former synagogue building that is now the Ethiopian Evangelical Church.
Segulah is the latest addition to this constellation, and meets in various locations on both sides of the state line. In addition to its other meanings, “Segulah” means “purple”, a reference to the Purple Line (pictured above) that will one day link Silver Spring to the other loose ends of the Washington Metro (and which Jews United For Justice is working on making fair). Attention New York: we challenge the Second Avenue Subway to a race!
In addition to being purple, Segulah is also a treasure! And we’ll be meeting this Shabbat to complete the book of Genesis, share song-filled prayer, and eat lunch. Details are at the top of this post. See you there!
Shabbat at the Hazon Food Conference is an exceptional experiment in pluralism. I wish I had the time to comment on it, but perhaps that will be saved for reflections tomorrow evening once I’m back home. For now, I will report on the sessions I sat in on today. The first involved a private meeting with current and future rabbis (and the occasional educator) and Nigel Savage, the director of Hazon and a true visionary. The second session, titled “The Vegetable Monologues,” after “The Vagina Monologues,” focused on the stories of three Jewish, female farmers. Before Havdallah, I attended a session of the status of Genetically Modified Organisms in Halakhah put on by Zelig Golden, an environmental lawyer with the Center for Food Safety and Rabbi David Seidenberg. More »
Brazil has set aside a day to honor Jewish immigrants to the country.
Brazilian Vice President Jose Alencar signed a measure setting March 18 as Jewish Immigration Day. The date coincides with the re-inauguration date in 2002 of the Brazilian synagogue Kahal Zur Israel, the oldest synagogue in the Americas.
“It was not easy to choose a date among many that represent the influence and the contribution of the Jewish community to the development of our country,” said Marcelo Itagiba, the Jewish congressman who had proposed the bill…
Brazil has some 120,000 Jews, the second largest Jewish population in Latin America after Argentina.
The second day of the 2009 Hazon Food Conference is another GORGEOUS, sunny California day. This morning I was able to attend two sessions. The first was focusing on kosher slaughter, specifically regarding the chickens which were slaughtered and prepped by volunteers at the conference a few days ago. The next session I attended was focused on how, as individuals and communities, we can better situate ourselves in the fight against hunger. More »
It is hard to imagine a more embarrassing situation in which to find an exclusive ultra-Orthodox organization – a group that was a standard-bearer in the fight against “breaches in the wall of conversion” and “the penetration of complete gentiles into the vineyard of Israel.”
These breaches pale into insignificance in comparison with the accusations against the man who heads the organization itself: according to the claims, Rabbi Leib Tropper of Rockland County abandoned the apparently stringent Halakhic standards of his Haredi organization and established a conversion process based on his most private impulses.
A report in the New York Post earlier this week revealed a sensational story about “a prominent Orthodox rabbi has been caught on tape discussing his apparent love affair with a shiksa he was converting to Judaism.”
The woman involved is 32-year-old Shannon Orand of Houston, who still seeks to convert from Christianity to Judaism. The bulk of the report deals with embarrassing comments that the rabbi made during a phone call, during which he was recorded demanding the woman perform a number of sexual services for himself and his friends in exchange for granting her a conversion certificate.
…
Rabbi Tropper’s stated goal in founding the Eternal Jewish Family was to “fortify the walls of conversion,” amid an ideological debate between the Haredi and national camps in Israel. …As such, the doors of senior Haredi officals were thrown open to him…. because of his efforts and comments against conversions by the Conversion Authority, against the “infiltration” of gentiles into the people of Israel.
It is so wonderful to be on the idyllic central California coast with 630+ people all interested in discussing the relationship between issues of food justice, nutrition, and the environment, and how it relates to the Jewish community. The participants here represent 5 countries, 29 states in the US, come from all sorts of backgrounds and identities, and are all here to forge community for the next three days.
The breathtaking drive from Los Angeles to Monterey distracted me to the point that I was not able to make it to the conference center in time for the afternoon sessions that kicked off the conference, so below is a write-up of this evening’s events.
As this is a Jewish food conference, we were treated this Christmas Eve to Chinese food and movies. While there were amazing movies to choose from, I chose to go with a documentary on the Jewish community of Petaluma, CA called “A Home on the Range,” which was directed and produced by Bonnie Burt and Judy Montell. More »
Over at The Forward, Jay Michaelson has a great column on The Myth of Authenticity. As I read it, his basic point is to crack apart any sense of an essential transhistorical Judaism in favor of an outlook that sees Judaism and Jewish culture (like all cultures) as always hybrid. This means that Jewish culture is ours to construct (with recourse to the dizzying variety of historical Jewish forms as well). As Michaelson puts it,
No, Biblical Israelites are not the real Jews. Neither are Hasidim, 20th-century modernists, neurotic New York psychoanalysts, Moroccan saints, angst-ridden intellectuals, High Reformers or anyone else. Real Jews are all of the above — and the rest of us who take Jewishness seriously, in one form or another. Real Jews speak with Southern accents, keep one day of yomtov (the holiday), hike in the wilderness, eat shrimp, intermarry, become ba’alei teshuvah, do karate, are bisexual, are neoconservative. Real Jews are the ones who make Judaism real for themselves.
So Jewschoolers, are we ready for this brave new world where meaning trumps authenticity? I know I am, and I would love to see the mainstream Jewish community wake up to the power of arguments like Michaelson’s.
by Raysh Weiss [➚] · Thursday, December 24th, 2009
Parashat Va’Yigash recounts the story of Joseph’s reunion with his father Jacob and his eleven brothers in Egypt. At the very beginning of this week’s Torah portion, Judah, the fourth son of Jacob and Leah, appeals to Joseph for mercy after Benjamin has been unjustly accused of having stolen a wine goblet from Joseph’s house. When Joseph announces his intention to hold Benjamin in captivity as a penalty and to release the other brothers, Judah explains with dramatic flourish that retaining Benjamin in Egypt and not returning him to his father Jacob would literally kill the ageing patriarch. Shortly thereafter, Joseph commands everyone in his house, save his brethren, to leave the room. It is then that Joseph tearfully reveals his true identity to his dumbstruck brothers. He then supplies his brothers with ample food and cattle before sending them back on their way to Israel, requesting that they return to him in Egypt with Jacob. After hearing the shocking news that Joseph is still alive, Jacob agrees to go down to Egypt with the brothers to see Joseph “before I die.”
While this portion is packed with emotion-laden content and dramatic revelations, I would like to focus on a brief but very bizarre exchange between Jacob and Pharaoh upon Jacob’s arrival in Egypt. Within the grand sweep of the narrative, this curious moment is somehow lost, but the implications of Jacob’s statements here provide key insights into understanding the entire story:
Pharaoh asked Jacob, “How many are the years of your life?” And Jacob answered Pharaoh, “The years of my sojourn [on earth] are one hundred and thirty. Few and hard have been the years of my life, nor do they come up to the span of my fathers during their sojourns.” (Gen. 47:8-9)
With that in mind, I find it particularly delightful to encounter parshat Vayechi during the week that our secular calendar advances a page. You see, the content of this week’s Torah reading involves Jacob putting his affairs in order at the end of his life, bestowing blessings on his sons (but not his daughter) and two grandsons (you can guess whose progeny they are) before shuffling off this mortal coil. But the form — oh, the form! First we’ll notice that this is the final nugget of Sefer Bereshit (aka Genesis, not the Peter Gabriel/Phil Collins band), the first book of the Torah. When this story ends, we get a flash forward to everybody’s favorite 
The event, which took place on December 22, was sponsored by the 
Editor’s note: The following is a guest post from Yoni Stadlin, founding director of 
Tree-sitting has been effective in protecting huge groves and helping change many policies, but many of these ancient beauties have been logged nonetheless. Ninety-five percent of coastal redwoods in the northwest U.S. have been logged for making things like decks, playgrounds and tools. The practice of clear-cutting – leaving no trees standing – has turned huge, lush, vibrant and ancient redwood forests into eroded wastelands, destroying habitats, contaminating water, and massively increasing our species’ footprint on this planet.
, but please don’t blame him for this video.
Shabbat at the Hazon Food Conference is an exceptional experiment in pluralism. I wish I had the time to comment on it, but perhaps that will be saved for reflections tomorrow evening once I’m back home. For now, I will report on the sessions I sat in on today. The first involved a private meeting with current and future rabbis (and the occasional educator) and Nigel Savage, the director of Hazon and a true visionary. The second session, titled “The Vegetable Monologues,” after “The Vagina Monologues,” focused on the stories of three Jewish, female farmers. Before Havdallah, I attended a session of the status of Genetically Modified Organisms in Halakhah put on by 
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