The Dec. 20 vote came after what the president of the organization, Rabbi Barry Gelman of Houston, told The Jewish Week was a “wonderfully healthy and passionate discussion.”
This is the liberal orthodox group co-founded by R. Avi Weiss of Riverdale, where Rabbah Sara Hurwitz gained fame. Glad to hear that there was neither a rubber stamp nor a hasty thumbs down, but a vigorous debate. Judaism always should be both vigours and a debate, a wrestling with God and the law. In this respect, IRF demonstrates how it is similar to its Conservative cousins- not in that it would consider women as members, but that it would engage in thoughtful debate of the subject.
In yesterday’s NYT, Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize winning economist and voice of conscience, stated very clearly the current divide in American politics.
One side of American politics considers the modern welfare state — a private-enterprise economy, but one in which society’s winners are taxed to pay for a social safety net — morally superior to the capitalism red in tooth and claw we had before the New Deal. It’s only right, this side believes, for the affluent to help the less fortunate.
The other side believes that people have a right to keep what they earn, and that taxing them to support others, no matter how needy, amounts to theft. That’s what lies behind the modern right’s fondness for violent rhetoric: many activists on the right really do see taxes and regulation as tyrannical impositions on their liberty.
Unfortunately, this is a very old debate, and its not only between Democrats and Republicans. This is the argument of the Sodomites who, according to the prophet Ezekiel, hoarded their resources and refused to allow outsiders in. The Rabbis saw Sodom as the epitome of small minded, harmful greed—greed that eventually leads to its own destruction.
Since the New Deal was passed, when America seemed to recognize its responsibility to its needy citizens as part of its political obligations, the forces of ownership and greed have been pushing back. The politics of Sodom have been gaining ground. Todays “radical” policies, as Krugman points out, are policies that Republicans proposed three decades ago. It is time then, it seems to me, for a primer on the politics of Sodom.
In Pirkei Avot the rabbis said (5:10):
There are four [character] types:
One who says “What is mine is mine, and what is yours is yours”…this is the character of Sodom.
“What is mine is yours, and what is yours is mine,” this is an ignorant person.
“What is mine is yours, and what is yours is yours,” this is a righteous person
“What is mine is mine, and what is yours is mine,” this is an evil person.
Why is the one who says “What is mine is mine, and what is yours is yours” a Sodomite? The Bible supplies the answer. The prophet Ezekiel (16:49) describes Sodom as follows: “Only this was the sin of your sister Sodom: arrogance! She and her daughters had plenty of bread and untroubled tranquility, yet she did not support the poor and the needy.” Sodom was punished for hoarding rather than distributing her resources. For the Sages, the apparently legal justification that ownership is the ultimate basis for the distribution of resources was insidious. That is, according to the Rabbis, there is more to collective life than asserting that what is mine is mine.
By prohibiting not only field work (Exodus 34:21), but also housework (Exodus 35:3), the Torah creates a gender-egalitarian model of rest. In other words, what the Torah sees as male work and what the Torah sees as female work are both forbidden on Shabbat.
Further, by prohibiting employers or slave-owners from having their employees or slaves work on Shabbat (Deuteronomy 5:13-14), the Torah creates a labor law. “Shabbat creates social egalitarianism for the day,” Friedman said.
One participant added, anticipating Friedman’s next point: “Rest is the context in which human equality can occur.”
Friedman again: “Shabbat is an opportunity to break out of the social status and group” they’re usually in. It counteracts the social disenfranchisement we experienced in Egypt. “Hewing too close to the text leads to things like the Shabbos Goy. It’s prohibited! It makes me vomit to see Hispanic workers on Shabbat serving at a Bar Mitzvah.”
So that’s cool. There was a little more the session, but I had to run to a shift at the check-in desk.
For those of you in the DC area: The community is joining together on Tuesday, January 18, 2011, at 7 pm, at the Religious Action Center, 2027 Massachusetts Avenue NW, Washington DC, to sing the songs of Debbie Friedman z”l and remember her far-reaching legacy. Please spread the word to your friends and communities. You can RSVP at the Facebook event page.
For those of you who aren’t in the DC area: What’s been going on in your area?
I spoke about this topic with Debbie enough times to know that she wasn’t interested in this aspect of her private life being discussed in print.
I knew about it, other writers knew about it, and respected her privacy. There was enough to write about her — and Shlomo Carlebach, for that matter — without getting into what they did or whom they called when they were lonely.
Did some closeted Jews feel that closeted lesbians would benefit from her talking about sex?
And it continues from there. Regardless of whether you think Friedman herself should have been out or not–and outed or not–there are a couple of problems here. First, this rehashes the whole notion that being out and queer (as @itsdlevy noted on Twitter this morning) is all about what happens between the sheets (as opposed to, say, what happens under the chuppah, what happens when one brings a date to events, what happens at daycare pick-up, and so forth.) This isn’t (‘just?’) about “bedroom stuff.” It’s about life stuff. And though Marks seems to cast the story as one in which Friedman herself framed the issue as about sex, I’m not so sure I consider him a reliable witness.
But more than that, Mark appears to be making the analogy between Friedman’s (or anyone’s) non-het sexuality and the sexual abuse that Shlomo Carlebach is said to have perpetrated.
Being gay is like sexually assaulting your congregants and followers? Really?
(And if you want to talk open secrets, from Blustain’s Lilith article, linked above: “We do know that certain segments of the progressive Jewish world, until the day Rabbi Carlebach died, distanced themselves from him because they were aware of reports of his sexual behavior. Leaders at ALEPH, and its sister organization, a retreat center called Elat Chayyim, told Lilith that during Rabbi Carlebach’s life they refused to invite him to teach under their auspices or sit on their boards.”)
I take umbrage at the idea that sexual assault and harassment is about “call[ing someone] when.. lonely.” I take umbrage at the idea that the perpetuation of sexual assault and harassment is something that should not be discussed. I take umbrage at the even merest implication that being queer and perpetuating sexual harassment and assault are even remotely analogous.
If you want to argue that Friedman had a right to privacy about her life, you can argue that. But do not bring in this disgusting analogy, and do not imply that sexual abuse should ever be left a private matter.
Proceeds from the show will benefit the medical expenses incurred by Golem’s drummer, Tim Monaghan, who was clobbered and left comatose in a stairwell after a December party.
This time the band is supported by the Environmental Encroachment Magic Circus Band,whose ‘Burning Man’ style antics include dressing in various steam-punk and and fuzzy bunny costumes. Should be fun. If you’re located anywhere between the Hudson and MIssissippi Rivers, consider attending.
This morning Simon Greer, head of Jewish FundS for Justice, delivered 10,000 signatures and a giant pink slip to Fox News’ corporate headquarters in New York calling for Glenn Beck to be fired. Beck reneged on a pledge against twisting Holocaust history to his political ends, which was originally personally signed and sent to Greer after JFSJ brought fourteen representatives of Jewish organizations to meet with Beck’s superiours..
When Beck then ran a series called “The Puppet Master,” charging Jewish mega-philanthropist George Soros with complicity with killing other Jews during the Holocaust (despite the fact that he was a child at the time). The ADL’s Abe Foxman stepped in to condemn the language: “For a political commentator or entertainer to have the audacity to say, there’s a Jewish boy sending Jews to death camps, that’s horrific. It’s totally off limits and over the top.” (Then of course Foxman demurred and backtracked because Beck says nice things about Israel.) Of course, this was all an excuse to demonize Soros as one of the largest funders of progressive causes in America and around the world. Which is, obviously, Beck’s real target: social justice.
At today’s impromptu press conference outside the offices of News Corp., Greer and company brought the 10,000 names and unveiled Beck’s top ten most disturbing quotes of 2010 (below). Video of the press conference to come. More »
(x-posted to to KFAR) This week, representatives from Jewish cultural institutions from around the world convened in New York for the annual ‘Schmooze Conference” of the International Jewish Presenters Association. Other commitments prevented my attendance, but I was fortunate to speak at the first one a few years back.
Its a wonderful concept, and it seems to have some practical benefits beyond collegiality. As with his other projects and contributions, I applaud Michael Dorf for bringing this idea to fruition. The greater opportunity, however, is for this Association to be more than an Annual Conference for the American Jewish community.
We know all the research and findings over the last decade about the impact of Jewish arts and culture and their role as a portal to Jewish identity. IJPA has an opportunity to be the voice of the providers of these portals and advocate for the artists and member presenters who are expanding notions of Jewish expression. With the arrival of Mp3 players and digital videos and music distribution, there is unprecedented opportunity to engage untold numbers of Jews, young and old. The passing of Debbie Friedman this week, with her innumerable musical contributions to Jewish life, underscores this.
Religious Zionist Rabbi Dov Lior says that women shouldn’t use non-Jewish sperm in IVF because it leads to “barbaric offspring.” Also, children of single mothers will become “criminals.”
Yesterday, I was at Makom Hadash for the first time. Makom Hadash is a shared office in New York City, operated by Jewish environmental organization Hazon. It also currently houses GLBTetc organization Nehirim, Jewish learning conference of awesomeness Limmud NY and probably some other groups.
The office is not finished yet, but here are the plans, which I perused while I was poking around:
Notice the bike next to it. One of Hazon’s big programs is a series of annual bike rides. So it was nice to see a couple bikes laying around the office, not to mention a clear attention to sustainability in the office kitchen area.
But it gets better. In the final plan, there will be an office bike rack!
It’s gonna be a pretty cool office when they finish it. And the point is that it’s great to see an organization’s values reflected in its offices. I was thinking about this while I was at home in Austin over break, when I discovered that the synagogue where I grew up currently has no recycling. Which is even more troubling than it would be on its own, given that the congregation makes a lot of noise about environmentalism. More »
I’ll admit it- there was a time when my younger self was not into Debbie Friedman, ZL. Growing up in a Conservative minyan in a Reform shul, and being the youngest by a generation in said minyan, I mostly thought her stuff was kinda weak. English? Who sings prayers in English? Non-Jews do, that’s who.
I didn’t see what Momma K saw in her, using her music in her Sunday school class. I didn’t see how a song about a latke going bad b/c it wasn’t being fried quickly enough was going to do anything to help my fellow Sunday School students (most of whom were jerks who were not interested in being there or, as far as I could tell, being jewish) actually get into the history, the tradition and the faith of our people.
Of course, it’s easy to see now how wrong I was then. How many loved ones, friends, teachers, how many yids are moved by her voluminous catalog of songs? Friends and acquaintances are sponsoring memorial singalongs across the country, another noted how quiet facebook was during the funeral ceremony. This is the fourth post that’s referencing her on Jewschool in the last few days. How many melodies of hers have I sung and not even known it?
And that’s a question I pose to you, readers. What are your favorite melodies of hers? Let me go one step further. I’ve decided to stay home in the county of rulers instead of joining so many of our friends at an amazing LimmudNY weekend. A friend and neighbor is hosting a singalong service on Friday. Full singalong. What are melodies we could use in a full hebrew liturgy service?
At 30,000 feet, I have a Will Shortz crossword puzzle and an inferiority complex (in addition to the one caused by the puzzle).
I am gone for the next ten days staffing a Taglit-Birthright Israel bus full of American college students as we cross the country. This is my third such trip, and I am spoiled. I have yet to have anything but a fantastic tour guide, someone smart, politically nuanced, in sync with the group, and an excellent listener. (I probably just jinxed myself. Do Jews believe in that sort of thing?)
I’m good at this. That is not where my inferiority complex lies. It’s in the part of my brain that was focused too much on a pair of young women behind us as we boarded the plane. They both wore jeans, boots and dark jackets, and carried small backpacks with blankets rolled up and tucked into the side compartments. They looked like college educated radicals, the sort you would find at Oberlin or Brown. It’s hard to say what exactly made me think this about them, but it was something that I recognized. I started imagining their trip-a sherut from Tel Aviv to Damascus Gate, and then a ride into a Palestinian village or refugee camp.
I have no proof of any of this, of course. The lights on the plane are off to woo us into sleep, and I don’t know where they might be sitting. If I did, I doubt I would talk to them, I’m not actually the sort of person to initiate conversation with strangers, it’s too much of a pressure cooker. Besides-and this is where I start to feel my complex-it’s totally obvious that I’m with Birthright. Even if they didn’t see me walking around with a clipboard and a name tag amid 40 students, I wouldn’t be able to hide it from them for very long. And then, what would they say? Maybe nothing, but it’s what I’d know they were thinking that would be the worst part. Right wing, Arab hater, Zionist (okay, yes, that’s true), anti peace, Islamophobic… I know this is what they’re thinking because I’ve thought it, maybe not about Birthright (because in my experience, when it’s done well, it’s amazing), but about the American Jewish community and about Israel.
The problem with the way we’ve shrunk down this debate, and the way I’m performing the dichotomy in my own crazy day dream, is that the complicated parts have been erased. Explaining that I’m on this trip because I believe I can show students what’s dysfuntional and beautiful and revolutionary and ridiculous about this country is an exhausting prospect , because its layers can so infrequently be exposed with integrity and articulateness.
Maybe it’s the air up here, but I can’t stop thinking about this one particular street corner in Jerusalem/my favorite cafe in Rehavia/the moment last summer when I stood waiting for the sherut to take me to the airport, and although I knew I had to leave, that I could never live in Israel, the thought of taking my feet off that ground made me heartsick, enough so that I quietly sobbed my way out of the city.
We all want to be seen, in one way or another. I need my whole self to be seen, especially the part that struggles, the one that needs to feel safe and the one that wonders at the expense of whom. I need to be able to talk about that feeling of not being able to stay and not being able to leave. It’s not just about the complexities of the political situation, it’s about the complexities of the people living those complexities. We’ve erased each other’s humanity, created boogeymen, and by that, I don’t just mean out of Israelis and Palestinians. I’m thinking about those two women somewhere on this night flight, about whom I am weaving tales.
When I heard that Debbie Friedman had passed away, I was sitting in a conference room at the San Francisco Federation, participating in a board meeting for Keshet, a nonprofit organization working for the full inclusion of GLBT Jews in Jewish Life. I learned of Debbie’s passing via a message posted on Twitter by a lesbian Jewish educator with whom I used to work. The news hit our meeting hard. We stopped for a moment of silence. After all, she was one of us.
Sadly, Debbie Friedman was not a member of the Keshet board of directors. She was, however, a lesbian Jew. But reading the press asking for healing prayers during her recent illness, or the overwhelming displays of grief and affection in both the Jewish and mainstream press since her passing, you’d never know it.
I didn’t know Debbie personally. But like most liberal Jews my age who have been even the slightest bit involved with organized Judaism, I’ve been touched by her melodies. Most of those songs came to me second- or third-hand, learned at summer camp and USY events from song-leaders and enthusiastic youth leaders who taught their friends to sing “Not By Might” or her havdalah niggun as though they were as old and as central to Judaism as the Torah itself. Although I eventually became familiar with Debbie Friedman’s name, I still prefer to hear her songs shouted by enthusiastic teenagers over her considerably more polished renditions. And it wasn’t until I reached graduate school that I learned that the havdalah melody I had been singing since the fifth grade came from her wellspring of melody.
I didn’t know Debbie personally. But as someone who’s been a leader in the Jewish GLBT world for a number of years, I’ve heard persistent stories about her life as a lesbian. It seems that Debbie’s sexuality was an open secret; everybody knew about it, but no one spoke of it. This made me angry. Was she ashamed? Did she fear for her career? From all accounts, Debbie was incredibly humble – is it possible that she didn’t realize how central and beloved she was to not only her Reform Movement, but to contemporary American Judaism as a whole? I can’t imagine a single synagogue refusing to sing her prayer for healing because the love of her life was a woman, but maybe Debbie could.
I don’t bear any ill-will towards Debbie for staying in the closet. But her life in the closet was double-barreled tragedy: how sad that Debbie could not live her life with wholeness, and how sad that so many queer kids were deprived such an important role model. How ironic that the tyranny of the closet overpowered the woman whose songs let us let go for a moment of what the world might think of us, just long enough to shout “Nutter butter peanut butter” or sway with our arms around our friends and not worry if we looked gay.
My friends who knew Debbie tell me that she had a life-partner. I don’t know her partner’s name, because all the press around Debbie’s illness and passing only asked for prayers and comfort on behalf of Debbie’s sister, family and friends. I hope this did not add to the unbearable pain and loss her partner must be experiencing now, but how could it not?
My friends who knew Debbie tell me that she struggled against the closet, that as recently as this year she expressed a desire to come out and a loss as to how to do so. It saddens me to think of her life ending, prematurely, with this business left unfinished. I hope whoever becomes the guardian of her legacy will follow through on this wish of Debbie’s, so that her life can be a blessing to future generations of GLBT Jews, and to all Jews.
Sure enough, barely 48 hours after the shooting of Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and others, the Jewish media picked up on her Jewish roots. Now, little else will likely matter in the timeline of events.
It will be lost on most Jews, I predict, that this paragon of Jewish involvement — a leader within her Jewish community, a representative of Jews to America and beyond — was a proud, patrilineal, intermarried Jew who found Judaism late.
Giffords was the daughter of a Christian Scientist mother father and a Jewish father mother, raised in both faiths, as reported by JTA. She married astronaut Mark Kelly — not Jewish, as far as reports say — in a ceremony with two canopies, a huppah and Naval swords. She attended services at a local Reform synagogue. Apparently she came to her faith later in life, taking up mainstream Jewish causes in the Arizona legislature.
The community will, I predict, renew the claims of anti-Semitism without realizing that most of the Jewish world frowns on the very substance of her life. The Jewish community expends much energy discussing the dangers of non-Jewish influences on young Jews. Special condemnation is expended even in liberal circles on dual-religion households. Plenty recommendations are aimed against the very choices Giffords and her parents made. Yet it’s clear that Jewish values triumphed in both her outlook and her later-life affiliation. Genetics, as we mixed Jews know, convey no values — loving parents do. Seeking purity (read: kosher) in culture, faith, community and love leads directly to racism, xenophobia, paranoia.
While the headlines in Israel already ran “Jewish congresswoman shooter favorited Mein Kampf” and the-world-hates-Jews mantra rings again, it’s already forgotten that Giffords would be a second-class citizen in Israel. This woman who spoke so highly of Jewish women, wouldn’t have the right get a divorce in Israel. “In my family, if you want to get something done you take it to the Jewish women relatives,” she told JTA in 2006. “Jewish women, by and large, know how to get things done.”
Giffords represented successive generations of blending Jewish life with the surrounding world: a worldy Jew, not a ghettoed Jew. She may have championed Jewish causes in her legislative agenda, but by all glowing accounts was fiercely for justice, fairness and equality for all. Including illegal immigrants.
She was Jewish enough to be killed for her Jewishness, if indeed that is the case. (Which seems unlikely to be the primary cause, but that’s not stopping the Jewish-Israeli media, it appears.) And she’s Jewish enough for the Jewish community to own a side-show of the media circus. Jewish enough to be our martyr, it seems, but not Jewish enough to be treated equally in life.
I, for one, see in Giffords the kind of Jewish choices and identity they’ll see tons more of: intermarried and mixed in heritage, uniquely Jewish, universally human. Like myself, like 50% of Jews under 25 today. More and more, we will be your leaders, your country’s leaders, and your faces to the world. We will make you proud of our accomplishments, even as we defy the protocols of Jewish continuity. If only the Jewish community would treat us with as much honor in life as in martyrdom.
[Editor's note: subsequent editing confused sources. According to JTA, her father is Jewish, her mother is Christian Scientist.]
Debbie Friedman‘s memory is a blessing. Beyond the hundreds of songs she composed, she was a pioneer of an entire genre of Jewish religious music (sometimes known as “American nusach”) that has revolutionized American Jewish prayer. My memories of Debbie are too numerous to put in a comment, so I’m putting some of them in a new post.
Everything I know about songleading I learned from Debbie Friedman. She could lead a group in song (whether she was performing a concert or leading a service) with her little finger. I had the opportunity to study songleading with her at Hava Nashira for four years. At my first Hava Nashira in 1997, in Debbie’s songleading workshop, it was my turn to get up and teach a song to the group, and then be critiqued by the group. After I finished, the first thing Debbie said was “You need to take off your clothes. Get naked.” After I got over the shock, it became clear that she was speaking figuratively; she meant that when we lead a group in song or prayer, we need to shed our inhibitions. And she was right; I have taken her advice to heart ever since then (as well as laughed many times about the time Debbie Friedman told me to take off my clothes).
In some ways she was a larger-than-life figure. She composed hundreds of songs without knowing how to read music; if you asked her for the chords to a song, she would say that she didn’t know the names of the chords, but she would play it so you could watch and write them down (“…and then it’s this one with the two fingers over here…”). There was the time at NFTY Convention 1997 when she broke a string during “Miriam’s Song”, and the backup musicians kept on going while she removed the broken string, put on a new one, wound it, tuned it, and came back in for a triumphant final chorus. And then there was the time at Hava Nashira when the power was out on Shabbat morning. Before services began, Debbie taught her new melody for Yotzeir Or (“creator of light”). When we got to that point in the service, we sang Debbie’s Yotzeir Or… and all the lights went back on!
Yet despite her larger-than-life celebrity, Debbie Friedman never sought out the spotlight. Her goal was always (as she wrote in the liner notes to Sing Unto God back in 1972) “the importance of community involvement in worship”. Debbie was at Limmud NY in 2006, where I was leading the Shabbat team. We had asked Debbie to lead havdalah for the conference. Then, on Shabbat afternoon, she told me that she was having second thoughts, and didn’t think it would be appropriate for her to do it. She felt that she was already famous, and that Limmud should be an opportunity for a new generation to take the reins, and that it would be a step backwards for her to lead it. My thought as a program organizer was that this would have been a good conversation to have several weeks before, but now that it was a few hours before havdalah, it was too late to rethink the plan for an 800-person program. But Debbie persisted, and tried to encourage me, of all people, to do it. To be clear, she was Debbie Friedman, and I was (and still am) a nobody, but I was one of her students and she was encouraging me to take off my clothes. In the end, Debbie led havdalah after all, and it was amazing of course, but what made it amazing was the way she brought the whole room together in song.
So Debbie Friedman has passed away. JTA has an article and the URJ has issued a statement. Her passing has been really sad for me and thousands of others. I will write a longer post in the coming days but I thought I would invite those of you who were touched by her music and dedication to the Jewish people share your Remembering Debbie stories in the comments here as well as on Twitter with the Hash Tag #rememberingdebbie.
Here is mine: Once in the late 1990s Debbie preformed at House of the Book at the then Brandeis-Bardin Institute and she told us that Jews can’t clap on 2 and 4 and proceed to prove it to us. It was funny. It was sad. It was classic Debbie Friedman.
The second time I landed in prison the situation was more complicated. I wouldn’t be able to rely on the Shministim to help – the group had more or less disbanded. In any case, I hadn’t refused to serve in the Occupied Territories; I’d made the decision not to serve at all. The whole premise of refusing was the sacred right to say ‘no’ to injustice. Every day, all around me, were my fellow soldiers, part of that great occupation beast ruling cruelly over the Palestinians as a foreign power. The olive drab clothes I had to put on every day felt like a sickening, constricting uniform of hypocrisy. My own. What was I doing in the army?
After a few days in one cell, they transferred me to a tent compound. The next morning we were informed that prisoners would be sent on work teams to various locations around the large based that houses the military prison. I asked one of the guards if I could speak to him in private. I said: I’m here because I refuse to serve in the army. I will refuse to serve on any work team you assign me to. You can count on me to say no for just about anything you ask, with the exception of keeping my bunk tidy. However, I have no interest in causing a scene or surprising the guards – hence my pulling you aside.
He took it in for a moment. And said he’d let the officer know.
The next day, I was ordered into the office of the officer in charge of our compound. He tried to persuade me to behave. He said, no one cares what you do. There are no demonstrators outside the walls, nothing is in the newspapers, no one will hear about this. You’ll just incur more severe punishment. Why bother? More »
Please take a moment and sing her songs, think of her contribution to modern Jewish life and how we all would not be here talking on this blog and fighting about important progressive issues if it weren’t for people liker her throughout history.
She now needs us to provide her the healing and support she has always provided us.
Thank you.
Update: There will be a healing service for Debbie Friedman at the JCC of Manhattan and it will be streamed online so people unable to attend in person can watch online.
JTA reports that last month, the 140 member International Rabbinic Fellowship narrowly voted down admitting women to its ranks as either full or limited members.
While snow once again blankets NYC, it has failed to restrain the fearsome 
(x-posted to to 
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