I’ll begin by being up front about the fact that I’m far less a bencher aficionado than I am a siddur aficionado. But I was asked if I’d review this new entrance into the bencher market and I said yes. I hope I do it justice.
You could pretty easily divide the world of benchers into two categories. On the one hand, there are totally perfunctory versions that exist as a mere vehicle for what their editors consider a fixed collection of blessings and prayers and a smattering of songs. On the other hand, there are a few benchers that are not mere vehicles for your embossed name and the date of your wedding, bris, bar mitzvah, or whatever. These are generally more liberal in their attitude toward the content and tend to contain some amount of commentary.Yedid Nefesh, a new bencher from Joshua Cahan, a rabbi coming out of the Conservative tradition, falls into the latter category.
The bencher itself has a larger page size and ends up a tad thicker than your average bencher, but not so big that it becomes useless as a highly portable collection of songs and blessings. The page size is larger to accommodate Hebrew text, translation, transliterations and a lot of original commentary from Cahan himself, which far exceeds the bits of commentary and functional instructions that normally permeate a bencher.
Most interesting to me, as a self-proclaimed cataloguer of liberal liturgies, is that the bencher proclaims itself to be egalitarian. According to the YN website, this means that “in some places additions or alternatives are provided that counter some of the gender imbalance of the traditional texts.” Unfortunately, these attempts are marred by the usual Conservative discomfort with doing that. For instance, on page 15, in the middle of the Birkat Hamazon, we get this:
…our ancestors (Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah,) Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
The parenthetical formulation repeats in the Hebrew and in the transliteration. If you want to include the mothers, fine. If not, fine. But if you’re going to do it, why leave them as some sort of parenthetical afterthought?
On the other hand, the bencher does call the section for a brit milah “For a Brit Milah or a Simchat Bat,” reflecting the increasingly common contemporary practice of having a celebration eight days after the birth a baby girl and, where appropriate, offers alternative Hebrew that correctly addresses the gender of the girl.
At the other end of gender equalizing, the bencher includes Eshet Chayil as well as an alternative for a wife to read to her husband, Ashrei Ish (Psalm 112).
The bencher also includes the order of blessings etc for Erev Shabbat in the home, all sorts of simchas, kiddush for every occasion, ushpizin, a wide selection of Shabbat songs, and a few other sections.
And then, of course, there’s Birkat Hamazon. There is the usual absurdly long version of BH as well as an abridged version. As the commentary in the bencher notes:
The Talmud does not present a fixed text for Birkat Hamazon. Rather, it describes the basic themes of the four blessings and notes key terms that must be included in each. The length of the text that developed around those themes has led scholars in many generations to compose shortened versions which pare back the text to its original components.
Though the commentary doesn’t say whose shortened BH it is presenting, the shortened version is considerably shorter. But that means it’s got less shtick, so who wants that?
In all, I like the bencher. I like how many different blessings and prayers and songs it include while remaining compact, if larger than most benchers. It’s got a great, elegant layout. If you like siddurim like Siddur Eit Ratzon, as I do, you’ll like this bencher as well.
I know many of our readers have at least some claim to celebrating tonight and tomorrow, whether as Christians or members of families with Christian heritage. But for those of us lacking in trees and carols and the like, we can join together and sing our own song for the season.
(Apologies to viewers from outside the USA, where this embedded video won’t play.)
The question I pose to you all: Why is it suddenly seemingly acceptable to use this tired old stereotype? Is it truly ironic now, or is it the same song on a different day? (I think the latter, really, but folks like Heeb have tried to make it the former for years–do they succeed? If so, what’s different about what they do and some of the nastier versions of this? If not, why not?) What’s going on in our culture that gives rise to this now? Some of it, sure, is that the people who were kids when this came around the first time are now hipster adults–but somehow, I don’t think that’s the whole story. What else is going on?
(We’ve written about this before, including this week, but the phenomenon just keeps coming, so perhaps it’s worth thinking about why in a bigger way.)
In any case, here’s the latest addition to the canon:
The Puritans who ran the Massachusetts colony were so deeply opposed to Christmas that they actually banned the holiday for a generation. When the holiday was celebrated in old New England – in the teeth of concerted opposition from both church and state – it was apt to take the form of an irreligious and increasingly violent public celebration that left citizens worried for their safety. As for the commercialism that sullies today’s holiday – the constant advertising, the frenzied buying of Christmas presents – that tradition, at least in Boston, is older and more deeply rooted than going to church that day.
…
On December 25, 1685, Boston Magistrate Samuel Sewall proudly wrote in his journal that “the Body of the People profane the Day” – that is, the town’s residents went about their work as usual – “and blessed be God no Authority yet compel them to keep it.”
…
As Mather saw it, Christmas was a holiday of pagan origins, all too often an occasion for “dancing and drunkenness, chambering and wantonness.” (Chambering was a common euphemism for fornication.) Mather summed up his analysis by quoting an eminent English bishop: “Men dishonour Christ more in the twelve days of Christmas, than in all the twelve months besides.”
Let’s chamber it up, people – it’s cold out there! Who knew so many of us were already observing such a traditional December Christmas.
In honor of today’s American minhag of going out for Chinese food, I poked around YouTube for a couple of videos about Jews in China! Also, check out another video in dlevy’s recent post about Chinese Food Day.
First, check out this video that JTA did last year, before the Olympics, about what Chinese people think of Jews.
This is about Jews from Kaifeng, the famous Jewish center of China. Everyone ignore the part where the narrator says that all religious Jews wear tzitzit.
Tomorrow afternoon commences the fourth, not third as I previously wrote, Hazon Food Conference.
Beginning tomorrow evening (local time), I will be blogging on the sessions and workshops I participate in, along with my thoughts. I will do my best to attend sessions from a diverse array of perspectives. Looking forward to seeing anyone out there who will be present or is already there!
Enjoy this video from last year’s conference featuring our own Ari Hart.
And if you’re already near Monterey, CA or feeling particularly spontaneous, it’s still not to late to register.
by Kung Fu Jew [➚] · Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009
Democracy or ethnocracy? The only democracy in the Middle East or just the easiest to swallow?
Israel offers many of the protections we expect of self-labeled Western democracies. Women can vote. The press is vibrant. There is separation of governmental powers. In some cases, Israel is ahead of the US, such as permitting openly gay soldiers. Even with the fraught contradictions of defining Jewishness and rabbinical courts’ monopoly over civil marriage matters, Israel was founded with many good principles in mind. (You know, Zionism itself aside…)
That is, until those very democratic principles come under assault. The actions of Bibi Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition have seen a slew of anti-democratic legislation — normally relagated to die in committee — that are discussed seriously, have made it through Knesset hurdles, or have come up for vote. In the battle over what a “Jewish democracy” entails, there are plenty who want the J-word at 72-point font and the d-word at 9 points.
The following are the top 2009 Knesset proposals that threaten civil rights and the brain job we need to stop them: More »
Leah Berkenwald has an interesting piece up at Jewesses with Attitude about “What’s a Coastie?”, the latest YouTube hit from the University of Wisconsin. Guess what, Coasties are out-of-state rich Jewish girls from the East Coast…
I know it was totally a surprise.
Anyway I suggest reading it along with the AP article, the Heeb quip and the Sisterhood response all embedded in the JWA post.
All of these articles and blog posts aren’t sure how to deal with the music video. Does it cross the line? Maybe. Is it anti-Semitic? I am sure the ADL would say so but the rest of the Jewish community might laugh it off.
I personally find the Heeb response to be closest to core of the “problem” if you could call it that. It notes:
“In fact, the majority of the student body, hailing from the rural Midwest, have little or no direct exposure to Jews in their upbringing and sadly, their bite-sized understanding of our culture gets boiled down to a pair of fuzzy boots and Lawng Aylind accent.”
“The article was a shocking piece of blatant racism,” Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor said of a Swedish journalist’s report that Israel was harvesting organs from Palestinians. Charges of European anti-Semitism and revived blood libels exploded. The journalist in question, Donald Bostrom, reiterated to the press that he had no specific evidence of present-day kidnappings and organ harvesting, but called for inquiries into numerous claims such happened in the 1990s.
This weekend, the Israeli Defense Forces spokesperson confirmed the rumor after an interview with a head Israeli researcher was broadcast on Israel’s Channel 2 news. From JTA:
The admission came after the release of a 2000 interview with Dr. Yehuda Hiss, who was the head of Israel’s L. Greenberg Forensic Institute in Abu Kabir, The Associated Press reported.
Hiss told an American academic in the interview, parts of which were broadcast on Israel’s Channel 2 over the weekend, that the institute used corneas from bodies, including Israeli soldiers, Palestinians and foreign workers. Channel 2′s report said that corneas, heart valves, skin and bones were used from the corpses without families’ permission.
I’m going to forgo more commentary presently, because I’m a little sick in the stomach, both from that this actually happened and because of the fuel this gives to our haters.
You might think we would be getting tired of this topic by now. But, no, we need to revisit it periodically just to forget about how many other worthwhile problems we could be addressing.
Now, technically, there really isn’t any good reason for the Orthodox to refuse to recognize Masorti conversion – like all halachic conversion, Masorti Judaism requires mikveh and milah (for males) and profession of a belief in one, unified, God. Much of the brou-ha-ha is about extra-halachic matters. But despite my opinion that the Orthodox are wrong not to recognize Masorti conversions, I still think that this is a bad idea.
Do we really want secular courts deciding who gets to be considered Jewish (or any other religion, for that matter)? I know that Europe views government interaction with religion quite differently than my government here in the USA (or in theory ought to, anyhow), and there are certainly circumstances in which it makes no sense for us to try to separate our opinions from the religious sensibilities that formed them (or not), as long as we try to be honest about where those sensibilities come from. But having a presumably secular government decide that the Orthodox have no right to exclude Masorti Jews is just a recipe for trouble.
The potential for other decisions to go awry is just too great. Now, if they want to rule that no school has a right to exclude anyone of any religion from enrolling, okay then, as long as they also grant that the school gets to insist on its curriculum without outside interference, and the enrolled student has to follow along if he (or she) enrolls.
In Israel, government participation in religious business has caused just no end of trouble. The founding fathers of the USA were more than right when they noted that a healthy religion is not going to be helped by having government promote it. Reading Steven Waldman’s book Founding Faith made me think a lot more of how religion developed in the USA — and why our secular government, with all its problems, works much better in the arena of helping religion by ignoring it than nearly any other in the world. Which is not to say that doing so hasn’t had its own problems. Certainly the idea of an agora for religious ideas has also resulted in people treating at least Judaism as if it were something one could choose in pieces, treating it as any other product, to evaluate on, say, whether it makes you happy, or is fun, rather than Judaism as something to which we might have to submit ourselves in order to make ourselves better, or our community better. Further, we need to realise that we might not be better off for choosing our community according to whom we like to hang out with, rather than being stuck with the lumpy mess that is true community. But overall, we are better off with a hands-off policy from the government.
I just saw Circumcise Me, the autobiographical one-man comedy show from Yisrael Campbell of Jerusalem (formerly Christopher Campbell of suburban Philadelphia). Born to a “manic-depressive Italian woman and a pathologically silent Irishman,” by the time he hit his twenties (I think), he was already a recovering alcoholic and drug addict living in L.A.
There, he converted to Judaism with a Reform Rabbi, Rabbi Jim, and got circumcised. Eventually, he wanted more, so he joined a Conservative shul and got circumcised again. Eventually, he moved to Jerusalem where he got a third circumcision.
If this isn’t a recipe for the most original hour and fifteen minutes of dick jokes I’ve ever seen, I don’t know what is. More »
I found this piece really interesting and inspiring. Good read if you are into: theology, progressive politics, history of religion, sci-fi, Emuna Ilish, etc…
I like this part towards the end:
The trick of being sci fi is to keep focused on the future we want, but to understand that getting there is going to be difficult.
How about this too?
The trick of being a Jew is to keep focused on the future we want, but to understand that getting there is going to be difficult.
Is Judaism inherently a progressive religion? Are you a sci-fi Jew?
Following a blizzard about 14 years ago, Yori Yanover and I considered scouring Jewish sources to place the white deluge in context. Instead, we made up this list of little known facts about snow:
Many traditional Jewish congregations refuse to count snowmen in the prayer quorum.
Medieval Jewish mystics practiced rolling in the snow to purge themselves from evil urges. They were the first snow angels.
Moses Maimonides, 12th century physician to the Egyptian Khalif, prescribed snow as a cure for the hot Cairo summers.
The elders of Safed have 36 different words for snow — but none for snow removal.
During 3 particularly cold Sinai winters, the Israelites were led by a pillar of snow.
It is forbidden to write in the snow on the Sabbath.
Following the great Jerusalem blizzard of 1900, Zionist visionary Theodor Herzl proposed the “Uganda option.”
According to some rabbinic authorities, one must wait six hours between going out in the snow and in the rain.
On snowy days, the procession of King Solomon’s immediate family was pulled by 2,800 reindeer and 1,200 huskies.
Israel’s national hockey team participated in the 1992 Winter Games, dominating both the Olympic village and concession area.
On January 9, 1896, a snowball from St. Patrick’s elementary school landed in Mrs. Manischewitz’s kitchen, inspiring her to invent matzo ball soup.
My parents are struggling to pay their mortgage, my soon-to-be wife will probably never break the six-figure income mark, and since I’ve spent my entire career working within the Jewish nonprofit sector, my savings look more like an emergency fund than a capital investment.
So what’s a broke social entrepreneur to do?
One option is to live on less, like these friends of mine do. And, I know, KRG asked how parents with a 3-year old could live as modestly as dcc suggested. But let’s look at a concrete example: A family with a preschooler, with a second baby on the way, has been living on a modest income (household income of $35,000 last year, $45,000 this year) and paid off their debts, bought a house, and are doing well.
Do I think everyone can pull this off? No. Do I think we need to be lamenting the lack of six-figure income or “upper middle class” financial mobility in order to contribute to Jewish community? No. But perhaps a solution would be to come up with a happy medium between the six-figure expectation and this model of modesty.
In just one week, hundreds of people from around the world will be gathering on the gorgeous central California coast near Monterey is learn about and discuss the roles of Jewish communities in regards to issues of food security, food justice, nutrition and environmental protection, just to name a few. Hazon is continuing what has become an annual tradition of a kosher slaughter of sustainable and locally raised animals. The first year, a goat was slaughtered; last year people enjoyed a whole slew of turkeys. This year, Hazon is stepping it up a bit and having volunteers purchase and assist in the slaughter and preparation of chickens before the conference begins.
In addition to incredible workshops and informational sessions on topics related to food, the Hazon Food Conference exhibits inclusiveness and pluralism at its best, featuring numerous minyanim to suit any affiliation, a Shabbat friendly environment (and maybe even an eruv this year!). A couple of examples of topics people will be learning about are:
Do-It-Yourself Food
Food Justice
Jewish Tradition and Food: History and Culture
Health and Nutrition
Food Systems and Sustainability
Israel: Food & Agriculture
Jewish Food Education
Fasting and the Holiday of Asara B’Tevet
This Chanukah has been quite a doozy, in terms of candles. We got two Shabbatot this Chanukah, making tonight a whopping eleven-candle evening.
As you watch your eleven candles burn low, check out the new video from The Macaroons, for their song Dreidel Bird. Billed as “JDub’s first kids band,” The Macaroons are notable in my book for making Jewish kids music that doesn’t sound obnoxious and doesn’t talk down to kids. I’ve only heard a couple of songs by them so far, but so far it seems like original, clever music. And for a video composed entirely of shots of dreidels spinning, this is a pretty cool video too!
This is a guest post by Rabbi Joshua Levine Grater of the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center.
In her book Animal Dreams, author Barbara Kingslover says, “memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.” I am thinking about that line as we celebrate Hanukkah this week and remember all of the different aspects of the past that we recall in relationship to this post-Biblical, traditionally insignificant holiday that has become a hallmark today of Jewish celebration. What we celebrate most during the Hanukkah, the miracle of the oil last eight nights when it was supposed to only last one, is actually the least historical–”not just the miracle story but even the special connection between the lights and the holiday. That connection came later, nobody knows exactly wherefrom.” (Jewish Days, Francine Klagsburn, p. 64) Interestingly, the part of the story that has the most significant historical backing, namely the Maccabees fight against their Syrian Hellenistic enemies, is not included in the canon of the Torah and presents us with some issues to reconcile. Yet, it is precisely the situation with Judah and his family that I think offers us some real lessons for how we, as American Jews, are handling life in this safe, assimilated and prosperous land we find ourselves today.
The time of the Maccabees was one of great empires, Greek leading into Roman. Oppression, but also great progress and advancement, filled the land. Many of the people that Mattithias, Judah’s father, needed to fight were other Jews who had become enthralled and immersed in Syrian-Hellenistic culture. For, as we know, many of the Jews of that time had abandoned Judaism in favor of the secular ways of their society. The gymnasium for exercise, the philosophy, the bathhouses, the culture, the dress, the mannerism — Hellenism was the hottest thing going! Judah’s family, who were actually Hasmoneans, came to be known as Maccabees, which means ‘hammer,’ as they fought not only the cruel, oppressive Antiocus IV, but also there very brothers and sisters who they felt had gone astray of God’s commandments and abandoned Torah. While it is important and spiritually fulfilling to focus on the miracle of the oil on Hanukkah, and even more historical to focus on the struggle against religious oppression that the Maccabees waged, I think it is equally, if not a bit more interesting, to approach the story from the perspective of what was happening within the organized Jewish community at the time. For, as the history tells us, this was as much a civil war as it was a war against the empire. And while the zealotry of the Maccabees did win in the immediate, their victory was short-lived, for it ushered in a century of major infighting and priestly assassinations that led to the Roman destruction of the 2nd Temple. What can we learn from this aspect of the story for today? More »
Two sharply contrasting views of the secularization of Christmas are presented by Garrison Keillor, writer and stand-up poet (that’s the only way I can think of to really describe the News from Lake Woebegon) extraordinaire, and Michael Feinstein, a Jewish musician who got involved in a tangle about what constitutes a “Jewish” celebration of Christmas.
It’s been a tumultuous Egg Foo Yung season thus far. Between the House of Representatives taking time from its busy schedule (and, as Steve Benen points out, thus facilitating a gigantic Boehner contradiction [say that one out loud!]) to pass a resolution in support of Christmas (proper political response: WTF?), and the Daily Show’s brilliant exposé of a dastardly attempt by the Obama White House to encourage religious pluralism and (gasp) découpage, the pro-Santa coalition has certainly put up quite a fuss about the War on Christmas. For G()d’s sake, they don’t put up this much fuss about the War on Terror, or the War on Drugs, or the War on Allowing The Senate to Function Normally, all of which claim farmorecasualties, but nonetheless, some interesting content has come out of the Christmas-battles from both sides.
Keillor’s commentary is a notch above the usual xenophobic rants that accompany the defense of Christmas (a phrase almost as vague as Family Values). Calling upon his extraordinary ability to take a complex, subtle, and not-easily-reconciled situation, and reduce all involved to hysterics and/or tears with the sheer power of his snarkiness (“Did one of our guys write ‘Grab your loafers, come along if you wanna, and we’ll blow that shofar for Rosh Hashanah’? No, we didn’t.”), he also makes some very good points from an intellectual standpoint: that the obsession with the Perfect Christmas (largely, but not entirely, a commercial phenomenon) has had several unexpected and bad results:
that Christmas has become secularized, losing its religious meaning
that non-Christians now diminish from the observance of “legitimate” Christians
that Silent Night has been rewritten so it doesn’t talk about G=d as much (this one’s a real shame, because that’s a beautiful song).
The secularization of Christmas is not new. From a practical standpoint, tt’s hard for me as a Jew to completely empathize, because there really isn’t an equivalent situation for me. Yes, I went through the “Why does everyone make such a big deal of Hannukah? It’s not even important!” phase, but it’s really not the same. Maybe if Simchat Torah got the Christmas treatment, we’d have a comparable situation.
Another thing that might help would be living in Israel. I’ve never been in the majority as a Jew (although I have no illusions about my majority in racial terms [I'm an upper-middle class white guy from the Northeast, just about as elite as it gets], and, okay, okay, I’ll say it; PRIVILEGE [dlevy is applauding in the wings]), and until recently, Jews hadn’t been in the majority at all anywhere for thousands of years. Christianity has been mainstream in the West for so long that something like this was bound to evolve, and I’d predict that if the State of Israel is still around in five hundred years, something similar will be happening to Judaism.
But to the question of whether the secularization of Christmas is “okay”, Feinstein makes the perfect argument: that “…the spirit of the holiday is universal”. Saying that Christians, or, as some of the more crazy defenders-of-Christmas-as-a-purely-right-wing-religious-experience would say, only “real” Christians (read: not pro-choicers, Obama-Socialists, or anyone who favors any kind of government spending [read: red scum]), should be allowed to celebrate the Christmas spirit that those same people are so desperate to define and keep pure, is like saying that only men can wear a tallit. We live in a constitutionally-enforced religiously free society, and that means that we’re also free to do what, by someone else’s definition, constitutes bastardizing religion as much as we want, whether it’s “their” religion we’re “bastardizing” or “our own”.
And that’s important. Yes, this country was founded by Christians. White male landowning Christians (PRIVILEGE PRIVILEGE PRIVILEGE. I said it again!). But in my opinion, the Bill of Rights is designed to keep religious groups from becoming so insular that they weaken society’s ability to function cohesively. If all we had were distinct and warring religious factions, we’d have to abandon representative democracy, dismantle the federal government, and let the South secede again (and if they try, this time I say let ‘em go). Which, realistically, is what a lot of the Christmas-defenders would like. We shouldn’t give it to them. Feinstein offers an eloquent argument for what is really deserving of celebration: the commonalities between us.
So yes, let’s maintain a healthy respect for others’ traditions. I’m not about to affirm that Christ is my lord and savior any more than I expected the a cappella groups performing at Brown Hillel’s Hannukah Bash to daven with us on Friday night; we need to give people their religious space, and take our own when necessary. At the same time, though, I have for many years gone caroling with Christian friends, and attended the Candlelight service at the West Cummington Congregational Church, one of my favorite religious events year-round. One year, I approached the minister there after the service, and told him that as an observant Jew, his sermons were deeply moving. And you know what he did? He bowed, and thanked me for coming.
Take Keillor’s biting wit with a couple grains of salt (and some challah), and listen to Feinstein when he says that it’s time to stop enforcing differences, and start celebrating commonalities. Then, Jesus willing, we’ll have a new year with a few less of the former, and a few more of the latter.
Yedid Nefesh, a new bencher from Joshua Cahan, a rabbi coming out of the Conservative tradition, falls into the latter category.
On the other hand, the bencher does call the section for a brit milah “For a Brit Milah or a Simchat Bat,” reflecting the increasingly common contemporary practice of having a celebration eight days after the birth a baby girl and, where appropriate, offers alternative Hebrew that correctly addresses the gender of the girl.
For several years, now, that 
The first year, a goat was slaughtered; last year people enjoyed a whole slew of turkeys. This year, Hazon is stepping it up a bit and having volunteers purchase and assist in the slaughter and preparation of chickens before the conference begins.
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