by Kung Fu Jew [➚] · Sunday, December 12th, 2010
At first it was a letter signed by 30 Israeli rabbis, primarily haredi and many in public positions, supporting a religious injunction against renting or selling property to non-Jews. The outrage perhaps was unnotable towards typical haredi extremism. Then the signatories to the letter reached 300 signers, including many more municipal rabbis on the public payroll. This has prompted calls for their resignation or firing them, and even Netanyahu to reject their call.
Now, Israeli rabbis rejecting this ruling have called on their Diaspora counterparts to support them in rejecting this abuse of Jewish texts. The New Israel Fund, the Conservative Rabbinical Assembly, Rabbis for Human Rights, and J Street‘s Rabbinical Cabinet have all circulated a joint letter that’s reached 165 signatures since Friday afternoon. Hundreds more are needed by the end of Monday, December 13 in order to present the letter Tuesday morning during the Knesset hearing on the issue.
Full text below, sign here.
UPDATED 12/14/10: The letter achieved 752 signers at press time. See Haaretz, Ynet, JTA. More signatures will be accepted through the end of the week.
UPDATED 12/15/10: The letter passed 900 signers and saw coverage in The Guardian and the Washington Post online. The RCA Orthodox rabbinical association now also calls for the “reconsideration” of the original letter.
More »
by Aryeh Cohen [➚] · Friday, December 10th, 2010
Shaul Magid has an interesting discussion of Art Green’s new book Radical Judaism together with the reviews of the book, asking the question: “What does it all mean?” Here’s the punch-line:
These three reviews illustrate three levels of anxiety Jews feel about their theological future. The anxiety is not really about Green’s proposal as much as the realization that something must be done to create a theologically-relevant Judaism and no one really knows what to do. Mirsky’s questions about “survival” and the ever-present threat of the dissolution of the particular are well-placed and Green and others need to address them seriously. Wolpe’s anxiety about syncretism and the un-Jewishness of contemporary Radical Judaism is an instantiation of what I have called the paranoia of assimilation. If Judaism cannot learn to live with this syncretism, that is, with the normalization of un-Jewishness in its Judaism, it may be doomed. In America, Jews have learned to live comfortably with non-Jews in productive and mutually respectful ways. The next step may be learning to make the borders of Judaism more permeable. Landes seems to be threatened by everything that stands outside his own imaginative “Judaism.”
But you should read the whole thing here then come back and comment.
by chaneld1621 [➚] · Friday, December 10th, 2010
originally posted at Diverge
A few weeks ago, I went to a JStreet event with John Ging, the head of the United Nation’s Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in the Gaza Strip since 2006 . He told us about some young Palestinian girls who came into his office concerned about the security situation and the threat to the UN and the work it was trying to do. “You must be brave,” they said. My cynical heart beat quickly in my ears.
Optimism for me is like math: I need to be tutored in it. I have trouble believing that things can get better, in spite of the fact that I also have to believe that it can in order to get up in the morning, often literally. I just keep wondering, how do we make it better? What are the answers? Is it to punch through the wall from the inside, or build a new structure entirely? (Both, perhaps?) How much longer and harder will it take?
Tonight I had a conversation with someone who is amazing and exhausted, like too many smart, dynamic activists I know. Some of us know the potential we hold to make change, and I think that those are the people who are in the most trouble. Potential is perhaps the most excruciating burden to have, it can make us fearful and exhilarated and so tired. It depends on energy and patience and the willingness of others to move and be moved, things we cannot control. It’s also terrifying because it requires confrontation with our priorities and limitations, and ultimately, with our mortality. We are one of a kind, whether we know it or not, and no one can do things quite like we can.
This last part is something I’ve struggled with for a long time, and continue to. Leadership saturation is really powerful, and dangerous. It happened in 2008 with Barack Obama, when people pinned all their hopes for change on him. His campaign slogan invited that hope, but when change proved slower and harder than people would like, there came a backlash. It happens to any activist when they have to admit they’ve had enough, they’re burnt out, they’re not taking care of themselves. Who will do it? Who will take on their role? The answer, I’ve been forced to admit, is no one, at least not the way I would. This doesn’t mean I have to be the one who always does it, but it does mean I have to have some faith, in spite of the petulant child/control freak inside me.
by Ari Hart [➚] · Thursday, December 9th, 2010
Bikkurim: An Incubator for New Jewish Ideas is accepting applications for 2011! Bikkurim seeks innovative, NYC-based, Jewish, non-profit projects that are in early stages of formation and organizational growth. We provide free office space, free and subsidized capacity-building consulting, small stipends, extensive networking, and a peer community of Jewish start-up initiatives. Bikkurim is a joint project of the Jewish Federations of North America and the Kaminer Family.
Download your pre-application here, and submit it by February 1, 2011. Full applications, by invitation only, will be due April 8, 2011. Finalists will be interviewed and selected by the end of June. Residency begins in July, 2011. For more information, contact Jason Leibowitz at jleibowitz@bikkurim.org or 212-284-6896.
by Justin [➚] · Thursday, December 9th, 2010
As I write this, the Hazon East Coast Food Conference, which is completely sold out, is commencing. In just two more weeks, the West Coast Food Conference will get under way and spots are still available!!! In years past I have blogged about my experiences at Hazon’s Food Conferences. Unfortunately, this year I will not be able to attend either conference as my wife and I anticipate the arrival (God willing) of our first child. I will do my best to get something on the site from participants who were able to attend each conference. If you’ve never been to a Hazon Food Conference, now is a great time to check out the one Dec 23-26 on the West Coast!
  
December 23-26, 2010
Walker Creek Ranch
Sonoma County, CA
Use the discount code “fcspecial” for $100 off!
REGISTER TODAY
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Join the thinkers and doers of the new Jewish Food Movement, where contemporary food conversations meet Jewish traditions.
The fifth annual Hazon Food Conference is the only place where farmers and rabbis, nutritionists and chefs, vegans and omnivores come together to explore the dynamic interplay of food, Jewish traditions, and contemporary life.
Don’t miss four days of lectures, discussions, do-it-yourself food workshops, joyful Shabbat celebrations, and delicious, consciously-prepared food.
Download the program schedule here.
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Find out more about the 2010 Hazon Food Conference West
  
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by guestpost [➚] · Thursday, December 9th, 2010
Jewschool is proud to publish this guest post by Nirit Moskovich, Yael Maizel and Ronit Sela, spokespersons for The Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), Israel’s largest and oldest civil rights agency. Follow their annual Human Rights March on Friday, December 10, starting 3:30 am EST on Twitter: #themarch.
It seems cynicism is our favorite pill these days, used whenever we get an allergic reaction to the latest “shtut” (ridiculous step or statement) made by our leaders and officials. How else should we react to a call for separate public buses, insisting that women sit in the back? To a legislative attempt to allow communities to discriminate against any newcomers, with the exception of “one non-Jew needed to turn on the light in my refrigerator if it goes off on Shabbat”, as elegantly put by MK David Rotem? To a racist smear-campaign against African asylum-seekers and migrant workers “who are swamping Israel and spreading deceases like HIV”, as the Interior Minister lied to the public?
Our leaders and the press are competing with each other now: Who will speak louder against “disloyal traitors”? Who will do a better job at silencing and pushing aside legitimate criticism? And who will simply stand idle while our country is losing its mind?
Xenophobia and incitement are not the sole actions of the zealous. They are part of an overall scheme by cynical leaders to solve serious problems that should be publicly debated by simply pointing a figure and saying “Look at her! She’s to blame!” This way no one looks at them and holds them accountable. Therefore any time the average “man on the street” is caught on TV cameras speaking out against Africans, voicing racial slurs against Arabs, and explaining that the whole world is against Israel because they are Antisemitic – then the politicians can be satisfied that they have done what they sought out to do. “Am Yisrael” is exactly where they wanted them to be. More »
by Reb Yudel [➚] · Wednesday, December 8th, 2010
The correct answer should be that it isn’t, because Bibi Netanyahu fired all the 50 civil servants who, in their official capacity, excommunicated any Jew who rents to a goy.
So far, however, Bibi has condemned the psak din, but has not done anything to fire the rabbis who issued it. So too, the ruling has not been countered by the chief rabbis, or by any of the rabbis who guide Netanyahu’s coalition partners. In other words, while Netanyahu may profess outrage, this does seem to be the normative halachic ruling for the State of Israel.
Would 50 Israeli civil servants be so stupid as to piss off all 6 billion goyim on the planet, including over a billion Christians? You betcha!
After all, the Israeli Orthodox establishment has gone to great lengths to alienate 5 million non-Orthodox American Jews. They’ve declared the child of one of our top theologians to not be Jewish; they’ve arrested our religious leaders for the crime of carrying a Torah in public; and they’ve decreed that Sabbath observance is the only defense against forest fires.
They’ve kicked us in the face, and the leaders of American Jewry — the Jewish Federations and the Jewish organizations — did nothing but applaud and defend the government that empowered them. There was no price to pay.
Back in 1988, the Jewish establishment had balls (I’m looking at you, Shoshana Cardin). Yitzhak Shamir was on the verge of forming a coalition with the haredim by giving in to Habad-fomented demands to ammend Who Is a Jew. A high powered delegation of American Jewish machers flew to Jerusalem… and the result was Israel’s first national unity government.
But that was then. Now, not so much noise from American Jewry. No real push-back as the Israeli Foreign Minister announced, at the UN, his plan to remove the citizenship of Israel’s non-Jewish citizens. No, nothing but applause. This disastrous coalition of Lieberman and Ovadia, of racist nationalists and racist fundamentalists, doesn’t offend the American Jewish establishment.
The question is, will American Christians be so forgiving?
The attack ad practically writes itself:
“”My opponent voted to give billions of dollars in foreign aid to a country where government supported clergymen preach hatred toward Christians….”
If AIPAC leaders care about Israel (rather than the Republican party), they might want to look up from their porn and give Bibi a call. Because this time, Bibi’s buddies are playing with fire.
by Kung Fu Jew [➚] · Monday, December 6th, 2010
The 5,000-hectare blaze near Haifa in Israel through the Carmel national forest sparked controversy inside and outside Israel this past week. Emergency funds were set up by New Israel Fund (with J Street offering a $10K matching gift), the Joint Distribution Committee, UJA-Federation of NY and the Jewish National Fund.
But nothing is simple when it comes to Israel. Correspondent for The Atlantic Jeffrey Goldberg, not known for being a stringent critic of Israel, dropped a surprising post titled “Don’t give to the Jewish National Fund.” Israel’s failure to contain the blaze shouldn’t be enabled by coddling Diaspora donors who treat Israel as a “charity case,” he says:
Israel’s per capita GDP is nearly $30,000. Israel is a rich country. The fact that it doesn’t possess adequate firefighting equipment is its own fault. [...]
My sympathy is with the people who lost their lives, their families, and those still in danger. It is not with a government that appears to be negligent. And I’m not going to contribute funds that might serve to paper-over the government’s inadequacies.
Goldberg shares the predictable outrage he receives in response alongside a JNF fundraising letter detailing all the fire trucks that donations would buy. Ouch. (Note that he donated to the UJA’s resettlement fund.)
To this, I only partly agree. (And I’m not known to agree with Goldberg often either.) I agree that most of American Jewry views Israel at a charity case. And this should stop. Diaspora dollars fund, according to professional estimates, 90% of Israel’s nonprofit sector. The country nearly lacks a philanthropic culture, instead looking to the (albeit wealthy) easily-guilted foreign relatives. The federation system provides $1 billion a year, often to quasi-governmental agencies like the JNF, to provide services governments should independently. These enable an Israeli government that already neglects social needs in favor of defense. (Or at least uses security threats to dodge pressing civil strife over internal divisions on such services.) More »
by Aryeh Cohen [➚] · Monday, December 6th, 2010
A Guest blog by Rob Kutner. Rob was a writer on The Daily Show and is currently writing for Conan on TBS
We can probably all agree Pharaoh’s vision of the seven fat/lean cows/corns is the most memorable dream about agricultural policy in history. But Pharaoh’s own recounting of the cow dream reveals one of the themes animating this week’s parsha.
In describing how the lean cows ate the fat cows (Gen. 41:21), Pharaoh adds an extra nuance not found in the original description of that dream: “v’lo noda ki va’oo el kirbenah u’mareyhen ra” – “You couldn’t tell that [the lean cows] had swallowed [the fat cows], they [still] looked bad.”
In other words, perhaps ravenous consumption doesn’t always cure what ails us.
That idea also comes at us in a different way through looking at the curious titling of the parsha. In the midst of a sea of Vav-parshiyot (Vayetze, Vayishlach, Vayesheve, and next week’s Vayigash), suggesting a continuous flow of events, Miketz (or, “on the edge/end”), suggests a radical break.
Rashi finds an analogue in “Miketz sheva shanim” (“at the end of seven years”) (Deuteronomy 15:1), when the Shmitta year would go into effect, and all debts would be cancelled.
The Shmitta was a time when all “receiving” of money stopped – another check on the notion of continuous consumption.
It’s also taught (see e.g. Rashi to Genesis 35:29) that, at this pivotal moment in the Joseph/Egypt narrative, when Pharaoh has the dream that ends up springing Joseph from prison and into Egyptian royalty, Isaac died. Quite a holiday card that year from the Jacob Family.
But in Kabbalistic terms, Isaac (with his life of acquisition and preservation) represents the Desire to Receive, whereas hospitable Abraham represents the Desire to Give – and Joseph is the kav emtzai (“middle column”) that balances the two.
However, before Joseph can come to play that pivotal role, his Desire to Receive must come to an end. The Zohar says that is the end that the word “Miketz” refers to.
And indeed, Joseph’s life can be seen as one of struggling between the desires to give and receive. As a youth, he publicly anounced his dreams of receiving adulation from others. As a servant in Potiphar’s house, he nobly refused to take his master’s wife. But after interpreting the Cupbearer’s dream, he still asked a price: Having the Cupbearer bring his case before Pharaoh.
Now, however, Joseph comes before Pharaoh and simply interprets, with no desire to receive anything – even describing his role in the process as “Biladi” (“without me”).
Joseph has finally become a person of pure giving. Even his machinations against his brothers take on this form: He sends their money back with them, literally unable to take anything. When he has them dine with him, he gives Benjamin five times the food he gives everyone else.
Paradoxically, the moment he renounces receiving is the moment Joseph begins receiving everything: freedom from captivity, career, power, wife and children, his own brothers and father back, and the opportunity to save the world (as he knew it) from starvation.
It’s a good lesson for us. Remember the place Joseph was in when he made this radical ketz: imprisoned, cast out by his family, abandoned by even the Cupbearer who’d been his one way out, two long years prior. Joseph’s response: set desire aside in full and dedicate yourself fully to giving.
How often do we feel imprisoned: in our careers, in our personal relationships, in traffic. What if we could seize hold of that moment by looking the Universe in the eye and daring to find something to give? A smile, to the jerk cutting you off in traffic; an unsolicited and undeserved compliment to your tormentor at the office; even “giving in” to a loved one with whom you’ve had a sustained argument. Begin the day with a token contribution to some kind of tzedakah, a nickel in the pushke, and end it with 5 minutes of time given to another or another’s cause. Just try it for one day, and at the very least, you’ll be reminded of your very real freedom to fashion yourself.
This isn’t turning the other cheek. It’s turning the tide of nonstop taking that our society, if not our world, seems to be built upon.
Nowhere is this more evident than in December – when the consumption parade of Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Even Further in Debt to China Tuesday, etc. beats our holiday of tiny beautiful miracles into a one-upsmanship of gift-giving.
So why not turn back the tide a little this Hanukkah? Change night 8 from a night of gifts to one of giving? Donate the intended presents to the needy or ailing. Hold a family discussion on a cause important to all, and make a plan to spend time together working on it between now and next year.
Some suggestions:
Obviously, we’ll never completely eliminate the desire to receive. It’s in part what makes us human. But by working a little harder at giving, we can make a “ketz” – an end – to desire’s crushing grip over us. And just possibly, like Joseph, a beginning of much greater things.
by Raysh Weiss [➚] · Sunday, December 5th, 2010
Image of the day:
A Jewish shopper at Balducci’s main location in Greenwich Village noticed this most unlikely display last week (three years ago, but we’re a people of history) and lodged a complaint with the management, who quickly cast the blame on a stock clerk, according to the NY Daily News.
What’s next? A blow-out deal on Manischewitz wine and kashe varnishkes for Christmas?
Attention Balducci shoppers: clean up in aisle nine!
Chanukah ham story epilogue: if you would like this image and others like it immortalized on an apron, mug, calendar, or magnet, said Balducci’s customer Nancy Kay Shapiro wants to make your dreams a reality.
by chaneld1621 [➚] · Friday, December 3rd, 2010
Cross-posted from Pursue’s blog with permission.
Putting the spin on justice!
While you’re eating those potato latkes and thinking about who inspires you, take a moment to put the spin on justice! Challenge yourself to bring light into darkness and wager on your commitment to social justice.
This weekend, join Pursue at Inside the Activists’ Studio in New York and Guilt-Free Gelt in San Francisco to spin in person! The spin is below for playing at home.
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Traditional dreidel rules:
Nun — Player gets nothing
Gimel — Player takes everything that’s in the pot
Hay — Player takes half of everything that’s in the pot
Shin — Player puts an additional token into the pot
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The Justice Spin rules:
The Justice Spin doesn’t require actual tokens or gelt – it’s an opportunity to spin the dreidel over conversation and see where you land. May it inspire you and your friends into action for 2011!
Nun — Do nothing – but don’t skip your turn! Sometimes, doing nothing can actually be doingsomething when it means taking time to rest and be healthy and to nurture your spirit in order to sustain yourself for all the important work you’ll do before next Hannukah. Take a break!
Gimel — Jackpot- you have it all! Do something BIG and make a difference in the world! Invest your time and your resources in your local community. Find the justice issue you care about, and support it.
Hay — “Hey!” Say something. Be an advocate. Write a letter to the editor of your local paper about an issue that matters to you. Contact your elected officials to describe the change you desire in your city, state, and country. Speak truth to power.
Shin — Give your gelt! Tzedakah derives from the Hebrew word for justice, rather than charity. Judaism sees donating money as a powerful and necessary act, an act of justice.
Spin away and make a change. It’s your turn!
by guestpost [➚] · Thursday, December 2nd, 2010
This is a guest post by Drew Cohen, J Street U’s staff co-organizer in Jerusalem, and in his final year of the Pardes Educators Program.
“Zion shall be redeemed with justice, and those that return to her in righteousness.” — Isaiah, 1:27
Three years ago I moved to Jerusalem. I grew up as an involved member of the Reform movement in Connecticut, spent my college and post-college years working in Jewish education in greater Boston, and married another Jewish educator with a deep commitment to Israel. I moved, in part, so that when asked what I thought about Israel, I would have an educated response. I moved to engage my Judaism more deeply. I moved to live in the place where our prophets, my religious role models, preached the Divine call for justice. And I moved because, as a Jewish educator, I realized that I could only encourage my students to develop a relationship to Israel if I myself was deeply connected to the land and its peoples.
Over the last three years I have come to feel a commitment to and responsibility for this place I could not have imagined. While that commitment has grown as a result of various factors, among them is the relationships I have built with Israelis and Palestinians working to create a more democratic future for their respective peoples, a future where a Jewish, democratic Israel can exist in peace and security, and where both Jews and Palestinians can determine their own destiny.
I now work with J Street U to engage American students studying in Israel with the diversity and vitality of the community of activists, politicians, jurists and journalists that I have come to find so inspiring. Unfortunately, these voices are too often absent from the conversation back home – a situation that serves neither the interests of the American Jewish community or of Israel itself. The many men and women working in Israel to ensure the nation lives up to the values enshrined in its declaration of independence — a nation of “freedom, justice and peace as envisioned by the prophets of Israel” – provide one of the most powerful resources available for those of us committed to an ongoing relationship between Israel and the Diaspora. More »
by Aryeh Cohen [➚] · Thursday, December 2nd, 2010
So Howard Jacobson at the New York Times has weighed in with this year’s compulsory whining about how lame Hanukkah is. The “new” twist is complaining about dreidel—and the fact that “Hasmonean” is a funny word.
Those Hasmoneans, for example …. The Maccabees are fair enough: they sound Jewish. Scottish Jewish but still Jewish. There was a sports and social club called the Maccabi round the corner from where I was brought up in North Manchester, and as a boy I imagined the Maccabees as stocky, short-legged, hairy men like the all-conquering Maccabi table tennis team. But “Hasmoneans” rang and rings no bells.
Then, to see this lameness and raise it one more unit of vapidity (there’s gotta be a scientific measure of vapidity), Marc Tracy at Tablet rags on the dreidel game
Oh, and raise your hand if you’ve ever actually made your dreidel out of clay? I thought so.
and uses the Jacobson piece as his prooftext.
Lets hear it for Jewish though and opinion (and the newspaper of record).
(Hat tip to the Seforim Blog, which had a niece piece about dreidel with, you know, history, facts and stuff… I know–boring.)
by Kol Ra'ash Gadol [➚] · Wednesday, December 1st, 2010
A short article in the Independent talks about the work of Rabbi Arik Ascherman, director and Co-founder of Rabbis for Human Rights. The organization is perhaps one of a very few which represents rabbis of all branches of Judaism, who together stand up for Human Rights in Israel.
The organization has three main focii: “human rights education, including courses in pre-army colleges; social and economic justice in Israel, which has seen it, with other Israeli groups, win a signal victory in halting the country’s draconian welfare-to-work project; and Palestinian human rights. This last includes a legal initiative which has reversed the takeover of hundreds of acres of Palestinian land by the settlements.”
Of the three, the project which RHR is perhaps most famous for is the protection of the olive harvest in Israel. Despite ostensible legal protection for olive trees in Israel – not to mention the law of the Torah which forbids attacking trees and cutting them down wantonly, even at a time of war, olive trees have been a target of settlers who also may attack Palestinians, settle illegally on Palestinian land or engage in other un-Torah-like behavior.
The inspiration came in 2002, when Noaf abu Ghabia, a Palestinian deeply committed even at the peak of the intifada to co-existence and non-violence, and with whom RHR had joined in various symbolic Jewish-Arab tree plantings, appealed for help against settlers attacking harvesters in the village of Yanoun. RHR began bringing volunteers, and three years later won a crucial High Court ruling ordering the army to protect the harvest.
While it was, as he puts it, a “high maintenance victory”, requiring a constant presence of the volunteers, Ascherman says that this year the army has – despite some exceptions – largely fulfilled the first two requirements of the ruling: protection of access to the land and of Palestinian farmers as they pick the olives. “There are farmers reaching olive trees they haven’t been able to reach for 10 and 15 years,” he says. What the army has been much less good at – so much so that RHR is close to returning to the High Court for a new order – is preventing the destruction of trees and theft of olives by the settlers.
Ascherman has a theory that the settlers’ actions are a response to the nascent peace process, which they see as an “existential threat” to their way of life. He reels off a list of villages where olives have been stolen – sometimes before the harvest – or trees poisoned or cut down. Then he takes us to perhaps the saddest sight of this year’s harvest, the scorched fields within sight of the notably hard-line settlement outpost of Havat Gilad.
Here, between 1,500 and 2,000 trees were burned two weeks ago by settlers – according to some witnesses, with troops looking on – as the “price” for the destruction by the army of two illegal buildings in the outpost earlier in the day
To learn more about RHR in North America and about Jewish values and human rights come to the RHR-NA conference on human rights this weekend Dec. 5-7th.
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