by chaneld1621 [➚] · Thursday, September 30th, 2010
For two summers during college, I interned at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, an organization whose mission is to develop new ways of thinking about Judaism and gender via academic research and art. Their internship program is amazing, an example of a rare and genuine commitment to empowering young women’s creativity and scholarship.
614: :HBI Zine, the Institutes’s online magazine, is invested in the idea that in order for Judaism, and Jewish women, to continue to grow and flourish, there must be an intentional space for challenging conversations to happen. In the fall 2010 issue, five Jewish women non fiction authors were interviewed about their perspectives on their complicated topics. I’m going to mention one I found particularly salient here, but you should read the entire issue.
Seeking Happily Ever After began as a documentary by Kerry David and Michelle Cove, 614’s Editor in Chief, but became a book when Cove decided to further delve into the motivations and questions of single women, specifically, why do they remain single, and how they cope with, subvert and redefine the traditional constructs of happiness (husband + babies= perfection and satisfaction).
In Cove’s interview in 614, she describes the book as a place where she seeks to help women access their feelings, assert them, and understand them, unlike most books, which Cove says “assume that singles all have the exact same needs and wants.”
In a bold and refreshing statement, Cove tells us that “Marriage is not “the answer. Learning how to tap into your own needs—which shift all the time—and figure out how to fulfill them is the answer.” Instead of concentrating on men (the book seems to be geared towards hetero ladies) women could be claiming our own power, challenging ourselves in other ways, and not being afraid of what we need and want? Outstanding.
Another disclosure: I haven’t read the book. I actually have never read a book about being single, because I suspect, probably rightfully, that most of those books are about how to “fix” your singleness, and I don’t need fixing. I would read this one, though, because I’ve never heard anyone talk about being single this way. Instead of pathologizing the single woman, Cove seeks to help us connect more deeply to ourselves, and to encourage us to examine the myths that surround and impact us.
Rabbi David Teutsch once said two things about Judaism that stuck with me. ”Judaism is fundamentally counter-cultural and it is also fundamentally communitarian.” There is no holiday where I find that to be more true than during sukkot.
If you haven’t been to Sukkahfest in the past 5 years at Isabella Freedman chances are you probably know someone who has. Having just returned a few days ago as one of the organizers, I have heard two interesting bits of feedback about this popular annual retreat. First, that it is prohibitively expensive. Second, it is elitist and caters largely to Jewish professionals. Both are valid critiques. Sukkahfest is not cheap nor is it widely marketed towards a mass Jewish audience. In most cases, you have to really want to be there to go.
What is Sukkahfest in a nutshell? In short, it has become a festival for Jews who are committed to living out a full experience of the holiday in its different manifestations, especially as it relates to its ‘other’ names: Hag Ha’asif and Zman Simchateinu. Sukkot customs urge us to remember and practice two crucial aspects of our lives not easily quantifiable. The first being our vital connection to the land and that we depend on the fruits of the earth just as much today as we ever have. But just as crucial is one of the more bizarre commandments. As Pesach Stadlin said, “we’re commanded to sit in a shabby hut with our friends and be happy.” We are commanded to be happy. Counter-culturally happy, one might say, since our joy is directly linked the simplicity and impermanence of the sukkah. Essentially, we are commanded to be happy and be grateful. That is, in large part, the purpose for the sukkah and the 4 species. They are vehicles to help adjust our attitude toward the spirit of the holiday.
These are not simple mandates. Happiness cannot be bestowed upon us. True appreciation for things we take for granted cannot be ordered from a menu. One must insert themselves in an environment conducive to waking us up to these states. The tradition calls for all this to occur in a communitarian setting. Joy and appreciation should be a group experience.
With that in mind, here are five examples of how I believe Sukkahfest succeeded in changing my mind-state to bring me closer to what I define as the true intention of the holiday.
1. Singing and Praying: Whether during prayer, before, during or after meals, there was an abundance of song outside, but especially under the sukkah. Whether it was during Hallel, Havdallah, Birkat Hamazon, or someone teaching a 3-part round, the sound of dozens of Jews singing together was a constant.
2. Being outside: The Hoshanot section for one of the morning prayer options was done outdoors as an explicit affirmation of our dependence on the earth for sustenance. Being in a parade of lulavim outdoors makes me wonder if the waving the lulav was ever meant to be an indoor activity.
3. Eating: Virtually all the vegetables, cheeses and other ingredients used to make the food were grown and harvested by ADAMAH or local farms.
4. Immersing: Everyone was encouraged to eat their meals inside the sukkah and spend as much time there as possible. There was almost never a moment when the sukkah was empty.
5. Dancing: Spontaneous hassidic style circle dancing under the sukkah with over 100 people. This took the communal Sukkahfest experience to a new level. The simcha dancing in our sukkah paralleled the climax moments of a horah at traditional Jewish wedding. I was left with this continuous feeling of simply not wanting to leave the sukkah for fear of missing the next great moment.
For those five reasons and many more, Sukkahfest worked. While the above critique is valid, a counter critique could acknowledge how difficult it is to truly experience the holiday of sukkot in an urban setting without access to a real communal experience. David Teutsch might be correct to assert that Judaism is fundamentally counter-cultural and communitarian, yet I fear the gap between theory and lived practice is a big one for many Jews today. Sukkot, if we truly celebrate it, is the perfect holiday to begin to close that gap.
If retreats like Sukkahfest are financially prohibitive or overly elitist for much of today’s Jewish population, let us find alternative ways to celebrate sukkot. May we renew our commitment to experiencing the radical communal joy this holiday can bring.
by Kung Fu Jew [➚] · Wednesday, September 29th, 2010
The British catamaran Irene, the “Jewish boat to Gaza,” was diverted to Ashdod without incident and without capturing world attention as during Israel’s boarding of the Turkish Mavi Marmara. This was the second boat following the Marmara to be diverted. Predictions of a media circus failed to bear fruit.
Apparently, the global media is bored of this stunt already. Frankly, I am too. It stinks of pageantry, now that both sides now how the game is played. The boat announces their operating rules, the IDF states its intent to intercept, both sides play nice, and the Gaza blockade goes on. Which is not to say the stunt abjectly failed to raise awareness, nor that the violent prior episode was in any way preferable. (God forbid!)
Pageantry consumes the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. When I volunteered to cover a house demolition in East Jerusalem in late 2004, then too the roles were clear. The family applied for a permit, knowing they’d be denied. The Jerusalem municipality took their fee and considered their application, knowing they didn’t grant permits to Arabs as policy. The family built anyway, knowing the one-room hovel would be demolished. And indeed, the municipality sent over two dozen Border Police along with the demolitions crane, knowing the family would resist. The family called in demonstrators to help them resist, knowing their home would ultimately fall. The police removed the activists non-violently, knowing the press stink that would follow if one were harmed. The demonstration happened; the demolition happened. Everybody knew their role. Pageantry.
It’s an infuriating constant. I am enraged that the state-imposed impoverishment and economic stagnation of 1.5 million Gazans has achieved epic banality. It burns my heart that few in America seem to give a shit either way, pro or con. Unless a protest has a new, creative gimmick, it will be ignored. It’s also a crying shame that the organizers of the flotillas are harmful to and a distraction from the importance of the message. Utter predictability fosters inhumane callousness. ”Israel fatigue” turns away so many passionate, progressive and particularly young Jews. We’ve seen these headlines before. It’s the pageantry that kills us.
For their part, many analysts are now using a “painted into a corner” metaphor to dissect the impact of the settlement freeze. Israeli analyst Nahum Barnea, for instance, recently opined that,
Three politicians – Barack Obama, Benjamin Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas – painted themselves into a corner and didn’t know how to get out of it.
We all got painted into a corner on the issue of settlements, unfortunately, and where we should have concentrated was on territories and the borders of a future Israeli-Palestinian two-state solution.
It’s bewildering to me that the issue of settlements can somehow considered to be a pesky distraction to the peace process. How can talks on “territories and borders” proceed with anything resembling good faith if one side settles these disputed areas with impunity and the “honest broker” to the proceedings refuses to rein it in? How can we be expected to take such a process seriously?
We already know that one of the main reasons for Oslo’s failure was the inability to deal with the settlement issue directly. As a result, Israel took that as an opportunity to significantly expand its settlement regime during the course of the “peace process.” This has brought us to where we are today: in the wake of Oslo more than 500,000 settlers now live throughout the West Bank in settlements and small cities, with special Israeli-only highways that effectively cut Palestinian territories into individual cantons separated by military checkpoints.
Have we learned nothing from past experience? Here’s lesson #1: the settlements are not a side issue. The Israel’s settlement of the West Bank and East Jerusalem are – and have always been – a central obstacle to the peace process. Until it is made to cease and desist, I can’t see how the latest round of talks can be considered anything but a charade.
A Jewish visitor to Rebbe Nachman’s grave has been murdered by a local Ukrainian. The murder culminates a series of tense incidents between Jewish participants in the Rosh Hashana Kibbutz and ethnic Ukrainians in the city of Uman, in the Cherkasy region of Ukraine.
Here’s the sad course of events.
1. Jewish pilgrims to Uman riot after catching a Ukrainian local stealing from them.
2. A few nights later, a drunk Jewish man stabs a Ukrainian in the stomach who he accuses of stealing. The Israeli is arrested.
3. A few nights later, two drunk Ukrainian men leave a bar in Uman and proceed to murder a Jewish man by stabbing him in the heart.
4. The Israeli government convinces the Ukrainian government to send his body home without an autopsy.
So apparently Rebbe Nachman, that holy, wild, achdus and hisboydedus-baal khesed rogue, stopped dancing in his grave. The realization in the English-language press that the annual pilgrimage to the grave of the Breslover Rebbe is also a site of enormous historical, moral and ethnic weight. The relationship between the local Ukrainians and the Jews, on whose money the Ukrainians depend, is fraught with all sorts of muck. Another day in the life of the land that all but Rebbe Nachman’s followers left behind.
Once, there was a lot of treyf in my life. Cheeseburgers, the kind with bacon, that I ate with my mom at the food court in the mall. Bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwiches. Lobsters, crabs, and fried clams in the summer in Maine, butter dripping down our plastic bibs. Chicken parmigana at the Italian restaurant we went to on special occasions. Pepperoni pizza. You get the idea.
Slowly, I quit it all. I separated my dishes, I searched for heckshers, I waited between meat and milk, first six hours, then three. No one in my family kept kosher, as far as I knew, so this behavior lacked precedent. I was making moves I didn’t understand, I was working backwards.
The other day I was at the Trader Joe’s that has finally arrived in my neighborhood, and in the frozen section, there were some figs wrapped in bacon. Once, at fancy New Year’s party in college, I ate a scallop wrapped in bacon, and it was delicious. I thought, am I really never going to eat that again? Are there things that I’m prepared to never do again? Why did I even start doing this in the first place?
Some possible reasons: To be more religious than my family, thereby asserting my independence via a very strange, delayed adolescent rebellion. Because it seems/seemed wrong that I would be able to eat anything, whenever. The ability to instantly gratify myself feels gluttonous, like there should be some separation between my desire to eat and the ability. I also thought hopefully, that if I paid more attention to the timing of and the labels on what I ate, I would magically be skinny.
Together, these things made sense in the context of trying to become more observant when I was trying to become more observant. There was a community of people who ate this way, I could be part of them. It made me something.
This particular change would rattle a lot of foundations for me. It would mean I’d have to start thinking about being Jewish in a whole new way. Maybe I’d be less purposeful, less intentional. Maybe I’d grow in other ways, reach for different things,reconsider deeds and spirituality. Still, I haven’t done it. For some reason, I can’t stop separating, counting, looking.
The blog Holocaust in the Baltics, edited by the venerated Yiddish linguist and cultural activist Dovid Katz, has an interesting rundown of the recent commemorative ceremony for destroyed Lithuanian Jewish communities massacred in the Paneriai forest. The ceremony, which was attended by government officials, diplomats and a small group of local Jews, provided a peek into an oft-ignored corner of the exile. Fania Kukliansky, a well-known attorney and head of the Vilnius Jewish Community gave a speech in Lithuanian in honor of those murdered, Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky, a former Jewish partisan who is being investigated by the Lithuanian government for so-called “atrocities,” delivered an address in Yiddish about the need to learn universal lessons from the Holocaust.
Yet the blog details another, much more unusual speech by Emanuel Zingeris, a former Jewish community official turned right-wing Lithuanian nationalist politician. Holocaust in the Baltics writes:
A politically charged speech was given by Emanuelis Zingeris, a member of the Lithuanian parliament and its ruling right-wing faction, who is head of its committee on foreign affairs. Though a prominent Jewish personality, he resigned from the Jewish Community of Lithuania years ago, and has become a leading figure in Baltic nationalist circles. He continued the politicians’ tradition of saying different things to different audiences. He told the assembled crowd that he did not really consider Nazi and Soviet crimes to be equal, and that those who raised ‘suspicions’ about Ghetto escapees were making a ‘mistake’, but made no reference to his own many on-the-record pronouncements over the years in his governmental capacity as point man and ‘court Jew’ for the ‘Double Genocide movement’
Now calling someone a court Jew tells us that Zingeris is a politically powerful man that says one thing to the Jews and one thing to the Goyim. Ah, such a medieval problem!
Not really. The article provides links to Zingeris’ record of spouting “Double Genocide” ideology while sitting in the Lithuanian Parliament. The blog defines as Double Genocide Ideology as:
Attempts to utterly redefine genocide; painfully absurd accusations against aged Holocaust survivors; tacit encouragement of racist and antisemitic moods, particularly victimising today’s remnant Jewish community in this part of the world; attempts to restrict freedom of debate; state financed campaigns to persuade the European Union to accept the revisionist model, via the Prague Declaration, via a Europe-wide mixed Nazi-Soviet commemoration day, and other mechanisms.
In contemporary Lithuania, the land of our ancestors, three Jews are giving three speeches about the Holocaust. And yet, those three Jews, who delivered those speeches in three different languages (none of them Hebrew) hold radically different notions of the Jewish relationship to the Nations. Zingeris, who for a long time was on boards charged with the renovation of Vilnius’ Jewish Quarter, is now counted among those who believe there was little difference between Lithuanian suffering under the Soviets and Jewish suffering under fascist Nazi-Lithuanian collaborators. He also thinks that its appropriate to talk out of both sides of his mouth.
Yet, the Baltic boot that pins Zingeris’ neck in some ways pins us all.
As a Jewish life cycle consultant who guides couples and families toward creating meaningful ceremonies, I am presented with all sorts of creative, sometimes puzzling requests from couples planning their weddings.
One client had a particularly interesting request — a Jewish wedding ceremony that left God out of it.
Apparently, the couple in question are scientists–which Dasee informs us of as though that should explain why they’re atheists, reinforcing a dichotomy I’m far from comfortable with. The point is, the are atheists, but they both feel connected to their Jewish heritage. They want a Jewish wedding, but they want God to stay out of it.
Their request made me wonder: While adapting a Jewish life cycle event to reflect a couples’ lived values makes the event meaningful for them, does altering it by leaving God out undermine what makes it Jewish in the first place?
Maybe this an obvious question to many, but to me it seems odd. Is the presence of God in a wedding ceremony what makes it Jewish? Obviously, that can’t be the only thing that makes it Jewish. Many wedding ceremonies involving non-Jews include God. So that must not be Berkowitz’s point.
I’d argue that what makes a Jewish wedding Jewish is a commitment on the part of the two people being joined to keep a Jewish household and raise Jewish children. Of course, that can’t be the whole purpose either. Lots of groups have weddings in which it is assumed or required that the happy couple will raise children in whatever tradition that group has. What gives a Jewish wedding its Jewish character and content is treating it like a legal arrangement.
As a liberal, modernist Jew, I wouldn’t want my wedding’s legal content to be my acquisition of my wife from her family. However, the ceremony’s legal character is still important to me. I would treat it, as I think many do these days, as a mutually binding contract in which my wife and would acquire each other, so to speak.
In thinking about the content and character of Jewish wedding, God is far from my mind. In the Torah, God has nothing to say about weddings or marriage. Marriage in the Torah is a human construction. God expects us to marry, Genesis suggests, but we arrange the marriages ourselves. Unlike a ritual like prayer, where God is inherent, the wedding ceremony seems to employ God only as part of a Jewish ritual idiom. God appears not as God, but as part of our dominant idiom.
Would a Jewish wedding still be Jewish wedding without God? I think so.
by Kung Fu Jew [➚] · Tuesday, September 21st, 2010
Since the explosion of GoogleMaps mashups nearly four years ago, Israeli-Palestinian conflict nerds like me have dreamed of seeing the settlements and sundry occupation data applied in such a visual manner. Most American Jews are idiots when it comes to the basic facts about the conflict because they have a pathetic grasp of the simple geography. Forgive my blunt assertion, but even most Israelis are blithely clueless about where even the Green Line runs.
Now behold! Americans for Peace Now releases much of that database, combined with their own copious Settlement Watch research, in “Facts on the Ground” — also available as an iPhone app! Take a tour via my screencast below:
Repentance shouldn’t be about wallowing in guilt. In his sermon last night, my rabbi spoke about this at length. It’s something I’ve thought about before, and it really speaks to me.
These days I’m pretty much never at synagogue. Back when I was at school (I’m currently taking a year off), I participated in the Chavurah minyan each week, which I loved. But here, I find that praying congregation-style just doesn’t do it for me. And last night I realized for the first time that one of my personal sources of guilt on Yom Kippur comes from actually being at synagogue, precisely because I’m so rarely there. I feel guilt for not being more a part of the community. Guilt for being so unfamiliar with the liturgy. Guilt that my Hebrew is so bad. Guilt for not truly feeling that the path to repentance involves asking for permission to repent.
So, like last year at Brown, I didn’t go to services today, albeit for slightly different reasons. I’m at home, on my own. Here I can observe Yom Kippur guilt-free, thinking about ways in which I can repent for me, myself, and I. My lack of belief in G()d in the traditional sense of an entity or concept that has at least some manifest control of my life or the world leads me to understand that I repent for my own benefit, and for that of those around me. Repenting helps me become a better person. I take responsibility for my flaws, my problems, my errors, and I ask those around me to understand them, and join with me as I try to grow past them. That growth might involve additional involvement with the community. Or it might not.
This approach to observance is a source of conflict with my family, who feel strongly that going to shul is a family operation. And while I respect the desire to observe the day together, I can’t subvert my feelings on what it means for me to be a Jew to the family’s feelings on what it means to be a Jewish family. The same holds for a congregation. Yom Kippur is too important for me to follow anyone’s patterns of observance but my own. I’m sure that those patterns will continue to change, and as they do, I’ll do my best to understand and remain true to them.
by chaneld1621 [➚] · Thursday, September 16th, 2010
On Yom Kippur, I like to sit in the back of whatever room I’m in, under my tallit, not unlike a hibernating bear. I like the ambient noise, weirdly similar to the kind in coffee shops, the dimness of my little tent, and the strange, focused hum of my thoughs.
For me, 5770 was, as my mother used to say, “a doozy.” Normally, I am loathe to judge a year based on the last half of it, but really, in terms of sucking, it was pretty good at it. One response might have been to hurl myself into davening, get worked up into a sweaty Jewish lather, and then collapse, feeling cleansed, but I haven’t done that yet. Self examination is even harder when the wounds still aren’t even close to being scars.
I saw a Facebook status the other day in which someone said they were rushing to squeeze themselves through the gates before they closed. I thought about the people who have died this year and last year, and every year I’ve been alive that I’ve known about this liturgy and how seriously I’ve taken the references to being written down in the book, which, admittedly, is not very. It’s a mystery to me as to how any of us can maintain a sense of invincibility, knowing what we do about the world, but somehow, we do. The idea of really bad things happening to us is very distant until it’s right there, happening. Maybe we’re all allotted a certain amount of tragedy in our lives, and once we’re done, we’re done? Unlikely.
So I hole up in my tallit-cave and wish for clarity, for illumination. I want to be able to see myself more clearly, to know my growing edges, and to not be afraid of them. But I also want to be able to see the truck coming, or the illness, or the loss. I want what’s impossible. The liturgical sprint to the closing of the gates doesn’t make me more earnest in my davening. It makes me feel bald, quivering and exhausted (kind of like when I haven’t eaten all day). Getting through the gates is only the first step. I’m more worried about what’s on the other side.
L’kovod the aseres yamey tshuva, I present two interesting writers who converted from Judaism to Christianity. Let’s put it this way: They had to worry about a whole different kind of Tshuva:
Jacobo Fijman (1898-1970)
Poet and Madman. Born in Bessarabia, Fijman lived and died in Argentina. Spent much of his life in a state mental asylum. Surrealist poet, gnostic and anarchist. A taste:
Demencia:
el camino más alto y más desierto.
Oficio de las máscaras absurdas; pero tan humanas.
Roncan los extravíos;
tosen las muecas
y descargan sus golpes
afónicas lamentaciones.
Semblantes inflamados;
dilatación vidriosa de los ojos
en el camino más alto y más desierto.
Se erizan los cabellos del espanto.
La mucha luz alaba su inocencia…
Nicolae Steinhardt (1912–1989). Theologian and Memoirist. Underground Favorite. Revered in Romania for his Jurnalul fericirii (The Diary of Happiness; 1991), an account of his journey to orthodox Christianity during the years he spent in Communist prisons. A Taste:
Outside a bakery, an old beggar, small, discreet. I give him 3 or 4 lei. He takes off his hat, respectfully, and thanks me for a long while. Why, I don’t know – the memory of my father, the physical resemblance (small and stooping) – his gesture – so polite, the shame of being saluted by an old man for a few lei, the onslaught of images of prison in my memory, revelatory of the human condition’s wretchedness – but I burst out crying in the middle of the street, like a madman.
It’s the time of year again when we use a LOT of yahrzeit candles. What to do with the pots afterwards?
This is a post about how to jazz up yahrzeit candle jars using glass paints, wrapping paper, and ingenuity.
Save up your yahrzeit candles. After yom tov, boil a kettle of water, and pour the boiling water into the pots. This makes the wax melt and float to the top; as the water cools, the wax will harden, and you can take it all out in a nice neat lump instead of scrubbing at it for hours or getting wax caked under your fingernails.
Then wash the pots inside and out with soapy water just like for dishes. Nice clean surfaces are better for working on.
Wrapping paper jars are the easiest ever. You take out those scraps of wrapping paper that you saved because they were too pretty to throw away, you cut a strip the width of the jar, and you glue it on.
If you’re feeling extra fancy, you can glue on a strip of contrasting paper by way of trim, or some lace, or some such.
When the glue is dry, varnish the paper with a couple coats of acrylic varnish. This makes all the difference. Makes it even shinier and happier, and stops it getting scuffy.
Glass-painting pots are scrumptious too. More about that after the cut.
This trip is not just for rabbis (although rabbis are welcome).
ONLY A FEW PLACES LEFT FOR
TEN-DAY HUMAN RIGHTS TRIP TO ISRAEL & THE WEST BANK
with Rabbis for Human Rights-North America
Lead by Rabbis Ellen Lippmann and Tirzah Firestone,
RHR-NA Board Members, and
Rabbi Golan ben Chorin, 3rd Generation Israeli Scholar and Founder of Israel Spiritual Tour
October 18-27, 2010
Join Rabbis for Human Rights for this extraordinary “hands-on” tour of Israel and the West Bank.
Experience for yourself the reality of life on both sides of the Separation Barrier,
& study the critical issues that threaten Israel’s democratic foundation.
PARTICIPATE with RHR-NA and its partners in the work of fulfilling the dream of an Israel
that embodies the prophetic vision of justice, peace& dignity for every human being.
Experience history as it unfolds in East Jerusalem
Visit Bedouin Villages in the Negev
Bare witness at Palestinian checkpoints with Machsom Watch
Meet Palestinians in their Homes! Enjoy two nights of Home Hospitality in Bethlehem
Meet with Israeli & Palestinian leaders, political analysts & journalists
Tour Hebron with Israeli Soldiers of Conscience, Breaking the Silence
Daily meditation, prayer, and in-depth study on justice and peace
Celebrate Shabbat in Jerusalem with Jewish Families
Time provided to walk, shop, and visit.
Price: Land cost is $1990 includes lodging, ground transportation and guides.
10 days, 9 nights all breakfasts included plus 5 dinners and 2 lunches
Single Occupancy Supplement Available
Deadline for Payment October 4, 2010
For more information: office@rhr-na.org, or (212) 845-5201
Rabbis for Human Rights-North America
333 Seventh Avenue, 13th Flr, New York, NY 10001 • (212) 845-5201
Well, I have a hard time figuring out how they could meet the requirements (for some of them anyway), but really, who cares? It’s not like I could afford any of them anyway, or even find a place to put them. And they’re lovely.
Enjoy the Jewish equivalent of a unicorn chaser, here.
So, too, is a thicket of rules. The Talmud demands that a sukkah have at least two and a half walls, a roof that allows indwellers to see the stars and feel the rain but nevertheless stay mostly in the shade. The roof must be made of uprooted organic material—twigs or fronds, say—but no food or utensils (no chopstick thatching allowed). Mystifyingly, the rabbis of yore explicitly permitted the carcass of an elephant to be used as one of the walls. (No contestants took advantage of that option, sensing perhaps that the Department of Buildings or peta might not concur.) Neither the DOB nor the Parks Department had a problem with Kyle May and Scott Abrahams’s proposal for a cedar trunk supported on glass walls. The competition’s rabbinic consultant worried that the log might be too solid, though, and required that it be perforated.
The best entries play on a childlike desire to duck inside a mini-structure in search of fantasy. The most alluringly over-the-top, Blo Puff, by the Brooklyn-based team called Bittertang, looks like some soft, curvaceous organism that encloses a walk-in pouch saturated with the smell of eucalyptus. The most theatrically intricate and least hutlike finalist is Repetition Meets Difference, by the German architect Matthias Karch. In this multilayered helix, lengths of wood are knotted together in a system of joinery that can make any structure infinitely extendable. As a secular urban pavilion it would be an ornament, but it is also a showy riff on a holiday about humility, a tour de force of engineering where none is needed.
A friend of mine posted to her Facebook wall that she was disgusted and “deeply offended” by the September 13, 2010 TIME magazine cover story entitled “Why Israel Doesn’t Care About Peace” (which inside was titled “The Good Life and its Dangers”) A few of her friends responded with similar disgust and then they admitted they had not read the article. Now while they are free to be disguised or offended by anything, it might be worth asking the question, do Israelis care about the peace process?
Well according to an unnamed poll used in the TIME article, they do not. Just 8% of Jewish Israelis cite the conflict with the Palestinians as Israel’s most urgent problem, ranking fifth behind education, crime, national security (assume Iran on that one) and poverty. More »
My rabbi made a bold move during his d’var Torah on the first day of Rosh Hashanah services this year. After a brief word on Park 51 earlier in the service, in which he condemned the bigoted opposition in the strongest terms I could have imagined, I wasn’t expecting too much more fire and brimstone, especially on Israel-Palestine. And he looked sort of nervous to me – who wouldn’t, facing such a large crowd (this is Rosh Hashanah, mind you, so we’re talking every Jew in town) that was by and large far more conservative than you. Yet he called for an end to the Gaza blockade and asked congregants to write a letter to Netanyahu’s office urging him to fully engage in the peace talks and bring home results. Strong stuff.
Nine years after the attacks of 9/11, I want to stop and think about framing. How we frame conflicts, both in our mind and externally, has a lot to do with more concrete things like foreign policy, or the nature of the domestic discourse on an issue. 9/11 was an attack on the core of Americanism, and not only because of the physical spectacle of the WTC being leveled by a bunch of reclusive angry dudes. It represents the clash of two worldviews – an American constitutionalist perspective in which personal freedom is of the highest importance, and a religious fundamentalist one (which religion it is is completely irrelevant) in which those who think wrong, believe wrong, act wrong, are to be punished by those who know better. It’s disgusting no matter who it comes from.
In that bin Laden most likely knew what the U.S.’ response to 9/11 would be (“We have raced to Afghanistan and Iraq, and more recently to Yemen and Somalia; we have created a swollen national security apparatus; and we are so absorbed in our own fury and so oblivious to our enemy’s intentions that we inflate the building of an Islamic center in Lower Manhattan into a national debate and watch, helpless, while a minister in Florida outrages even our friends in the Islamic world by threatening to burn copies of the Koran,” says Ted Koppel), he made a masterful calculation in goading us into it. But I can’t help but think that he also gave us the greatest opportunity ever to definitively rise above the war-on-terror paradigm. It’s not too late to change course and stop trampling on the mangled remains of the constitutional freedoms (see above links, courtesy of Koppel) bin Laden sought to demonstrate the inferiority of, an effort for which we’ve done far more than he ever could have. This would take a reframing at the national level, something Obama did a bit of in his Cairo speech, but, more importantly, it would also take people of conscience standing up to bigotry at every level. Park 51 is the starkest example we’ve seen so far that this society has yet to move past the paralyzing ethos of American vs. un-American. Or, in simpler terms, a lot of people in this country are still racist.
And so, G()d’s children are still drowning. And until we end the war on terror abroad and the war on Islam at home, and until we, as my rabbi urged, truly walk in the other’s shoes and know their pain as we do our own, the water rises higher. May the memories of the 3000 innocents who died on 9/11, and the thousands more who have died since in Afghanistan, Iraq, Gaza, and more, not be forgotten.
Eight more states – DE, HI, MD, MA, NH, NY, RI, WI – have primary elections this week. (Hawaii’s is on Yom Kippur – DOHT!) Have you fallen into the trap of praying for peace and prosperity but haven’t checked your local polling location?
Rock the Mitzvote reminds you to get off your tuchas and get out there. Use their free High Holidays e-card to encourage everyone you know in these 8 states to hit the polls – let’s pray with our feet, people!
A Jewish visitor to Rebbe Nachman’s grave has been murdered by a local Ukrainian. The murder culminates a series of tense incidents between Jewish participants in the Rosh Hashana Kibbutz and ethnic Ukrainians in the city of Uman, in the Cherkasy region of Ukraine.
Jacobo Fijman (1898-1970)
Nicolae Steinhardt (1912–1989). Theologian and Memoirist. Underground Favorite. Revered in Romania for his Jurnalul fericirii (The Diary of Happiness; 1991), an account of his journey to orthodox Christianity during the years he spent in Communist prisons. A Taste:
It’s the time of year again when we use a LOT of yahrzeit candles. What to do with the pots afterwards?
Wrapping paper jars are the easiest ever. You take out those scraps of wrapping paper that you saved because they were too pretty to throw away, you cut a strip the width of the jar, and you glue it on.
Glass-painting pots are scrumptious too. More about that after the cut.
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