The Ethiopian holiday of Sigd has been formally added to the list of Israeli state holidays. Sigd falls on the 29th of Cheshvan and is observed by fasting, reciting psalms, and “prayers for the rebuilding of the Temple and giving thanks for the right to return to the Holy Land.” The fast is broken midday with dancing, food and celebration and a “seder of sorts.” It commemorates the acceptance of Torah and parallels the holiday of Shavuot, falling on the 50th day after Yom Kippur as Shavuot does after Pesach. According to Wikipedia,
however the Kessim have also maintained a tradition of the holiday arising some time in the 15th Century CE as a result of the persecution of Christian Amhara kings. The Kessim retreated into the wilderness in order to appeal to God for His mercy. Additionally they sought to unify the Beta-Israel and prevent them from abandoning the Haymanot (laws and traditions of Beta Israel) under persecution. So they looked toward the Book of Nehemiah and were inspired by Ezra’s bringing of the “book of the law of Moses” before the assembly of Israel after it had been lost to them due to Babylonian exile. Traditionally in commemoration of the appeals made by the Kessim and consequent mass gathering, the Beta Israel would make pilgrimages to Midraro, Hoharoa, or Wusta Tsegai (possibly marking locations of resting places from Christian persecution) every year to reaffirm themselves as a religious community.
According to YNet, all sorts of folks backed the motion - maybe they were all relieved to vote for something pleasant and positive for a change, or perhaps just to find something they could agree abuot- brought before the House by Knesset Member Uri Ariel (National Union-National Religious Party) and widely backed by Shas, Meretz, Labor and Likud. Whee!
The motion passed its Knesset readings, effectively becoming a holiday by law. Its main ceremony will be funded by the Prime Minister’s Office; the holiday’s history, traditions and ceremonies will be included in the educational system’s curriculum and going to work during the holiday will be optional.
So, can someone give me a tutorial? I think this sounds like a great new holiday, and it’s about time that the Beta Israel got to contribute a holiday to the rest of the Jewish community.
Nice photo exhibit from Arutz Sheva (image above taken from there) and to balance it, a little article from NACOEJ, with a nice image of Beta Israel women at the Sigd
Here’s my new big project, and it’s hard not to just blurt out how psyched I am. This Wednesday, June 25, I’ll be hosting the first Jewish Open Mic at Tea Lounge in Park Slope (the big one, at 837 Union St.). Come at 7:30. (It’s also my birthday, and my anniversary of becoming a vegetarian, so I might be even more jumpy than usual.)
Bring poems, songs, stories, or whatever you’ve got — just don’t make it longer than 1 sheet of paper, or 3 minutes. I’ll be doing a set of my own to kick things off, and then everyone in the universe will be jumping into the world’s most spectacular Jewish variety show.
It’s free, and the stage open to anyone (What makes it Jewish? Pretty much just that the dude running it has horns coming out of his head…but it’s open to anyone, and you can do 3 minutes’ worth of pretty much anything). There are going to be some sort-of-celebrity guests, and anything can happen, and all I can say is you’re going to want to be there when it does. 7:30 pm start. Get there early or register on Facebook if you want to sign up. It’s presented by Shemspeed, Mimaamakim, the letter Q, and whoever else loves good art in the world.
This past weekend, Be’chol Lashon (In Every Tongue), a project of the Institute for Jewish and Community Research sponsored a conference in San Francisco of Jews and Jewish identified ethnic groups from around the world. Many of these groups are not formally Jewish, the descendants of anusim and xuetas. Some are Jews officially, although not always accepted with open arms by the so-called “mainstream,” such as the Ethiopian Jews, or the Abayudaya. And then there are the Jewish communites whose faces and color don’t fall within the stereotypes of what a Jew looks like - as if there was any such thing: the Jews of India, Jews who are of color who converted, or whose parents did.
“The Jewish community keeps talking about the crisis of intermarriage and the crisis of declining numbers, but meanwhile you’ve got people with Jewish heritage, spiritual seekers, Jewish communities of historical significance, and the Jewish community is doing nothing to help them,†says Gary Tobin, the institute’s president and a longtime advocate of greater openness to those outside the Ashkenazi mainstream.
According to institute research, at least 20 percent of American Jews are racially and ethnically diverse. But old stereotypes about what “real Jews†look like persist, Tobin says.
“Instead of worrying about people being ‘lost’ to intermarriage,” he wonders, “why aren’t we extending our ideological borders to include all these people who are so interested in joining us?â€
Personally, I think it would be completely fabulous if the descendants of the anusim made a formal return, and the Ibo and Lemba formally converted. Welcome! Join the party!
And of course, for those that are us, we should move mountains to bring them close and help them.
Safed’s Chief Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu wrote in an article … “it turns out that Olmert is more corrupt than we thought.”
“So what shall we do? Elect another prime minister without faith? Another one without credibility? Another one without values?…when will we wake up and realize that we need a prime minister with a kippa?”
“We need a prime minister who acts based on genuine faith and values.
Um. Hey, I’m a rabbi myself, and I even occasionally wear a kippah (rather than a hat), but I’m just not quite sure this would solve the problem. Especially since I’m pretty sure that Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu wasn’t promoting say, Rabbi Andy Sacks, or R. David Golinkin, as a solution to the problem.
I dunno. I could be wrong. PM Sacks, has a kind of a nice ring to it….
Yeah, okay. A PM with a kippah. That would definitely solve all our problems. No more corruption. (Anyone want to do a quick google on rabbi, Israel, corruption charges?)
Day 6 Yesod of Chesed JTA reports on a “new” “trend” (goodness, how many scare quotes do I need for this post?). Once again, the Jewish press gets on the bandwagon a little late., since Moishe house has been doing this for a while now. But what is new and interesting bout these new kvutzot is that they are affiliated with the Zionist youth movements, Habonim-Dror and Hashomer Hatzair (there appear to be three of these altogether currently, one with Habonim Dror and two with Hashomer Hatzair, two in NY and one in Toronto).
Setting up these collectives in North America represents an overhaul of the Zionist youth movement ideal. Whereas in the past these movements functioned more or less like farm teams, preparing young American Jews to settle in Israel, aliyah is no longer the goal.
“Judaism has always been a global reality,†says Jane Manwelyan, 25, of Kvutzat Orev. “Zionism is the collective potential of the Jewish people. Israel is just one of the physical representations of that, certainly not the only one.â€
Rather than a physical destination, Israel “is central to our idea of Jewish peoplehood,†says Gil Browdy, 25, of the Habonim kvutza.
He notes that the Israeli kibbutz movement still isn’t sure what to make of the North American upstarts.
“It’s a tension,†Beran acknowledges.
But these young urban pioneers wanted to stay at home, to help revitalize Jewish life in the Diaspora, become involved in community-based activism and build good lives for themselves based on the values with which they grew up, even after they age out of their youth movements.
Since I’ve been scolded lately for drinking the hateorade, I’ll just say that I like it. I think that it’s a fine idea, I’m glad that Moishe house isn’t the only ones doing it, and I hope the idea spreads, not only to sinlge 20somethings, but I can’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be a good idea for a way to revitalize Jewish communities of all ages, mixed ages, and with or without kids. Oh wait, someone’s done that too (I know the article doesn’t say so, but although being Jewish is by no means required, there are quite a few Jews living there).
Week one, Day 7
Malchut of Chesed
Rabbi Jill Jacobs, over on Jspot, opines that the seder table seems to have gotten rather cluttered. She notes the dozens of emails calling her attention to the various political agendas that yell “me, me” at pesach and offer an assortment of candles, glasses, fruit, and so on to add to those items part of our regular ritual/ More »
A short video clip from this past weekend’s first-ever Limmud Southeast:
A little self-promotion: This is part of the “Moses in a Megachurch” speech about a Jewish journalist who spent a year immersed in Christianity. For the complete speech, please see http://myjesusyear.com/limmud2008.mov — And to pre-order your copy of the book, please visit http://myjesusyear.com.
There were many times when we worried that one move too far into the mainstream, one step beyond the very traditional bounds of the Orthodox world, could bring a ban on a certain very tall Hasid. We took a lot of questions to the Bet Din at 770 and respected the answers they gave, but always, always, I had this concern. Seems in another part of “the Jewish music jungle” (Thanks frumhouse, i love that term), just such a ban has been decreed. Does anyone care? Will anyone follow it? I just find this too intriguing not to share…
Have you heard of The Big Event? If so, for the love of Hashem, write a comment and chime in. I love how the Ultra-Orthodox world can randomly swing into Madison Square Garden and it flies totally under the radar of the rest of the Jewish world. Apparently, it is/was a concert planned for March 9th featuring frum music favorites headlined by Lipa Shmeltzer. Lipa really is a King. A wedding singer and simcha entertainer, he gained prominence with his lighthearted rewrites of secular tunes as newly Kosherfied hits in both Yiddish and English. He performed at a friend’s wedding and while his “Yo Ya” was good, he really got me with version of Melanie C’s “I turn to you.” Apparently you can make it Jewish simply by adding “Hashem” before the phrase. ANYWAYS…
I’ll let the frum bloggers explain from here: Frumhouse:Basically, the current king of the Jewish music jungle, Lipa Schmeltzer, has been deemed too wild by certain factions of the orthodox community. Furthermore, these factions believe that current Jewish music has become goyified (my word, not theirs). Songs that stem from non-Jewish melodies, even if the words and taam have been changed to elevate their kiddusha, are deemed inappropriate for kosher Jewish entertainment.
This concert and future Jewish music concerts have been banned by a group of about 35 rabbanim. They also prohibit people from hiring any performer who participates in the Big Event Concert.
Lipa speaks out: I have recently started learning Bichavrusa with a leading Rosh Yeshiva, and I promised him that I will never sing any songs which were composed by non-Jews. Being true to my word, I have sang at more then a dozen Chasuna’s since I made that decision - and I have not sang “Yiddenâ€, “Abi-Mileibtâ€, or “Numa†(Rabbi Nachman M’uman) or any other song that is questionable as to its origin.
The really ironic thing to me about this is many Hasidic niggunim, and most Jewish music in general, doesn’t come from exclusively Jewish sources. We are a people with a tradition of song as a vital form of expression in our lives. But with the exception of Torah cantillation as a system of musical notation and musical modes of prayer, as a Diaspora people our appropriation of the culture of our various host communities is inevitable. What makes Klezmer more Jewish than pop songs about Hanukkah? What makes pining for Hashem to the tune of a French Revolutionary War March more Kosher than pining to Hashem to the tune of an ex-Spice Girl?
After years of trying to attract foreign [read: Asian] workers to Israel, the country seems to be reversing policy… at least when it comes to Asian restaurants. Today’s Ha’aretzreports that in an attempt to create more jobs for native Israelis, Israel’s government plans to decrease the number of work permits it issues to Asian chefs by about 50% next year and then stop issuing the permits altogether the following year. In response, Asian restaurants across Israel have declared a “spring roll strike,” to be followed by sushi and noodle strikes in coming weeks. Israeli Ministry of Industry, Trade, and Labor lawyer Shoshana Strauss was quoted in Ha’aretz with the brilliant line, “Everyone can make Chinese food it’s not impossible to learn.”
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. On a purely culinary level this is absurd. Israel’s Asian food already tends toward the awful. So awful, in fact, that senior Chinese Embassy official Xuan Chan broke with diplomatic protocol a few years ago and publicly called Israeli Chinese restaurants “disgusting.” (Thai, Chinese, and to a lesser extent Japanese food in Israel seems to mean sauteed meat and veggies or noodles with either a fluorescent pink or yellow sugary sauce dumped on top. Sushi is definitely better, but could be better.) If Asian chefs are currently cooking in Israel’s Asian restaurants– which I’m skeptical about, at least in half of the Asian places I’ve been to– they’re cooking to perceived local tastes, not to Asian standards. I’m doubtful that Israeli chefs would do better. I’m also somewhat skeptical that there are 900 (the number of Asian chef permits currently issued by the government) Israelis who’d be thrilled to jump into an Asian cooking job retraining program, should the government dream one up, which is also highly unlikely, but who knows.
Anyone else want to comment on Israeli labor policy vis-a-vis foreign and Palestinian workers?
Asian restaurants across the country went on a one-day spring roll strike on Tuesday in protest over government plans to rid kitchens of foreign chefs, and said sushi and noodles would be the next items off the menu.
The restaurants are angry at the state’s plans to purge Japanese, Chinese and Thai eateries of Asian cooks and replace them with Israelis as part of a broader program to cut the number of foreigners working in Israel.
The Ethnic Restaurant Organization said the country’s 300 Asian restaurants refused to serve spring or egg rolls - among their most popular dishes - on Tuesday, and planned a follow-up strike in two weeks for sushi and noodles.
“Today there is no egg roll and in two weeks time there will be no sushi and noodles,” Arnon Volosky, head of the organization, told Reuters.
All over the blogosphere , just in case you’ve missed it: the ForwardFailed Messiah, the London Jewish Chronicle (and others), are talking about the new Jewish burqa (actually it’s hijab, but let’s not be overly technical).
Apparently, a small contingent of ultra-Orthodox women Ramat Beit Shemesh, near Jerusalem, started this, and it has now spread to other communities.
I have to say, I’d label this post as humor, except - it’s just not funny. It ’s sick, and unsurprising, and perfectly in line with the general increasing of controls on women, and the associated ideas that women are a contaminating force. It is in fact, the logical outcome of years of shameful perversion of halakha .
Miriam Shaviv of the Chronicle states pretty clearly - and persuasively- why she thinks this has happened:
And yet, the “frumka†is the logical extension of two clear trends in the frum world.
Firstly, standards of modesty are becoming increasingly stringent and require increasing effort to follow. A CD recording by a top rabbi from Lakewood, New Jersey, for example, reportedly asks women not to swing their arms while they walk and not to allow their daughters to wear colourful banana-clips in their hair. Women know that if they wear skin-coloured stockings, they must include a seam so it is clear they are not bare-legged. Schoolgirls do not wear shiny shoes that could “reflect their underwearâ€.
Paradoxically, the Orthodox world’s attempt to create a generation in which physicality is minimized has resulted in a generation obsessed with looks, clothes and sex.
Secondly, tznius, or modesty, has long moved from being about modest clothing to being about keeping women, and images of women, away from men.
Open a Charedi newspaper, and there are either no images of women, or they are blacked out. In the past few years, several women have been beaten up in Jerusalem because they would not move to the back of the bus in Charedi neighbourhoods; a top rabbi in Bnai Brak asked women to leave before the end of shul so they did not mingle with men following davening; that same town has a street with separate sides for men and women; separate shopping hours are not unknown.
Just last week, a sheitel shop in New York was boycotted for refusing to remove headshots of women wearing wigs from its window.
I also recommend reading the comments over at Failed Messiah, which are quite interesting.
The New Republic reviews two novels by, and a biography of, French Holocaust victim Irène Némirovsky. Not the usual paean, this review notes what others seem to have missed, that Némirovsky was perhaps the apex (or nadir) of the self-hating Jew - a phrase I never use, because it’s almost always wrong, but in this case actually does seem completely appropriate.
Some snippets:
In David Golder, an appalling book by any standard, Némirovsky spins an entire novel from that stereotype…In the hands of Edith Wharton or Ford Madox Ford, these characters might have acquired some complexity–perhaps a redeeming quality, or just a kind word at some point to someone. But Némirovsky’s portrayals are relentlessly one- sided…”
and
It has been painful to watch Némirovsky’s contemporary defenders tying themselves into knots to explain this racist travesty of a novel. In his introduction to the British edition of David Golder, Patrick Marnham sets the context with his first sentence–”Irene Némirovskydied in Auschwitz in 1942″–and argues that “Men like Golder existed, and no doubt still exist. They had come a very long way, just how long we discover in the novel’s devastating climax.” He makes the book sound like merely a Continental version of William Dean Howells. And what does it mean to say that David Golder is true to life? To which part of life, exactly–the harshness of the arriviste’s lot, or the Jew’s love of money?
The Times Online offers this very funny summary of George Steiner’s My Unwritten Books. It didn’t make me want to read Steiner, but I did enjoy the review. More »
I. Youth culture contains the germ of the European ideal, writes Tommi Laitio: but more needs to be done at the public level to cultivate the conditions in which it can thrive.
II. Interwar European literature represented the US as the quintessence of unbridled modernity that prefigured the destruction of Europe. Jesper Gulddal surveys the uncharted territory of literary anti-americanism.
III. An Interview with Cheb Abid, an artist based in the Negev.
IV. The Meshketians, a population of about 20,000 people, were deported from the Republic of Georgia by Soviet authorities in 1944. This past year, the Georgian government began to discuss their repatriation.
V. And finally, the Caucaz News Service reports on a Jewish community in the process of rebirth, in the Krasnaya Sloboda mountains of northeastern Azerbaijan.
Anyone else read that article in the Times recently by Natalie Angier? You know, the one where a neurophysicist teaches everyone at a symposium the steps to the Jewish hora and, OMG! Angier realizes how much fun it is to dance when, say… you know the steps. I know, I know, you don’t have to a brain surgeon (or neurophysicist) to know that participation in one’s own culture is actually enjoyable when you know the steps. Nonetheless, I’m applying for a grant to prove just that. But don’t hold your breath for my findings to be published in the Journal of Totally Fucking Obvious Things Jews Pretend Not To Know.
Anyway, that reminds me- there’s an amazing Yiddish dance party tonight, starting at 6:30, where, in conjunction with the big Yiddish dance symposium happening this afternoon, there will be something like 5 (million) Yiddish dance teachers leading and teaching Yiddish dances, along with a hot klezmer band.
It’s going to be held at the Ukrainian East Village Restaurant in the East Village 140 Second Ave. (between 8th and 9th Streets) Admission: $10.
(After the jump, find out why I’m changing my name to Old Dirty Jewess)Â
Okay, so this new magazine just came out. It’s called Jewish Living.
Over here at Jewschool we had a little debate about the magazine, because we got a press release about its launch from the publisher. And frankly, the release makes most of us cringe. Noteable quotables from it:
For the first time ever, a smart, stylish and thoroughly modern magazine will celebrate Jewish home, family and cultural life. *Jewish Living* takes the focus off of religion and places it squarely on the cultural. And in doing so, it seeks to acknowledge and enrich the changing lives of modern Jewish women and their families.
Er… wait, modern Jewish women don’t want to get all bogged down in stuff like religion and politics, so let’s give them recipes?
The concept came to Zimerman, a former senior creative advertising executive at Foote Cone Belding, one wintry Toronto afternoon while making what would prove to be a life-changing stop by a newsstand. “There was an abundance of red and green magazine covers touting the joys of Christmas. I thought ‘Where are all the dreidels? Where are the latkes?’” said Zimerman. “It wasn’t the first time I felt like the only boy without a Christmas tree, but it was certainly the first time I decided to do something about it.”
Wait, the magazine is in response to being jealous that there isn’t a bunch of Chanukah crap all over North American consumer outlets to the same degree there is Christmas crap?
Relocating to New York with his family, including wife and *Jewish Living* Creative Director Carol Moskot, Zimerman designed the magazine to offer inspirational style ideas and practical, how-to information on a wide range of topics. *Jewish Living* aims to make each day more meaningful, functional and beautiful for its targeted demographic of affluent and influential readers…. Headquartered in New York City, *Jewish Living* targets a well-educated urban professional woman between the ages of 25-54 with a median household income of over $125,000.
Ohhhhh, it’s about living a beautiful rich mildly Jewish life without being bogged down with religion or politics. I get it. How narrow-minded and ridiculous!
Or at least, that was the general take on the press release.
That’s the trick, of course; as soon as something becomes big enough for the mainstream — even the alternative mainstream — it’s lost its edge. This is what’s pathetic about the Jewish institutional world’s belated attempt to jump on the cool-Jew bandwagon: all that effort, and the ive-minutes-behind-the-times style, just makes them look even lamer. What’s more, cool has always had a rebellious, undermining quality. Take away the edge and what’s left is MC Hammer: sanitized hip-hop for white suburban kids. Likewise the attempt to co-opt superficial design elements of “Jewish cool†without its underlying critique of established Jewish categories, assumptions, and sacred cows. Again, it’ll fool some people —
but it can’t be actually cool.
Over at Nextbook, one woman’s musings about the role of The Jewish Catalog (the first, need you ask?) in her life and on her parents’ shelf.
I like the way she describes the ubiquitous nature of The Jewish Catalog.
““On the ‘hip’ level,†she told me recently, “we were probably down in the negative range.â€
But some things were, perhaps, unavoidable then, like inane news about Lindsay Lohan is today. By the time I was born in 1975, our house was punctuated with little emblems of the era; these shone for me like beacons. Despite my parents’ heavy Neil Diamond predilection, for instance, some Joan Baez and Simon and Garfunkel albums seemed to have fallen from a planet of fairies into our living room. My parents had chunky macramé plant hangers and trippy Marimekko hangings on the wall. And on their bookshelf was an oversized red volume called The Jewish Catalog.
The Jewish Catalog, a 320-page tome first published in 1973, was not necessarily a hippie artifact. But it had a profound effect on me growing up that I associated with hippie culture, subtly signaling that Judaism, like life, was a sort of groovy pursuit to be embarked upon however you wished.”
I had a similarly surprising experience while searching through my bubbie’s shelves a few years ago for a siddur; I found two copies of Gates of Repentance with High Holiday tickets from 1973 and, you guessed it, an original copy of The Jewish Catalog. My bubbie was even farther from the world of happy hippies and their handmade kippot; she was the one yelling at my mother to be in by 11pm when she was in college and at my father to cut his hair and get a job.
About integrating past experience with Judaism with a do-it-yourself spirit:
“Most of their friends had copies of The Jewish Catalog, and for my mother, it was a user-friendly guide to a Jewish life she had never actually lived. Suddenly making Shabbat dinners, she mined it for recipes and information on the order of blessings. Celebrating holidays other than Passover and Rosh Hashanah, she consulted it for instructions on how to, say, decorate a sukkah. For my yeshiva-educated father, who was well acquainted with much of the information contained in the Catalog, it was meaningful in a different way. Like many kids who grew up Orthodox in the generation following the Holocaust, he’d grown up thinking Judaism was a strict, dour affair, but the catalog was evidence to him that in fact it could be fun. Together, my parents used it to help craft an earnest, positive Jewish household. And when I discovered it on their bookshelf, The Jewish Catalog let me believe that somewhere out there beyond the cut lawns and latticework sidewalks of suburban Chicago was an even greater Jewish fantasy world where everyone really did sit around crocheting yarmulkes and sewing needlepoint challah covers, and they looked really happy doing it. Jews looking happy being Jewish. Amazing.”
What will our generation of thinkers and innovators’ contribution to this spirit be? Will it be a book? Will it be havurot that last? Will it be our blogs? And can this maybe move from fantasy to reality (or has it already done so)?
This comes courtesy of my friend Alisha, who is awesome. And which goes to show you, those kiruv organizations — and those insistent concert promoters — have something; more people do look at fliers on the ground than fliers that are handed out:
Yesterday I was walking to the supermarket, when I saw a guy selling books on a blanket on the sidewalk. Normally, I would walk by, but I decided to stop for a moment. And I’m glad I did. One of the first things I saw was a tiny book with ‘Zohar’ written in Hebrew letter on the front cover. The guy wanted 30 RMB (about 4 USD) for it and was not willing to budge on the price. I asked him how he came to be in possession of such a book, because I know that they are not exactly allowed here. His only response was ‘I own a book shop, these books come from there.’ As if that answered my question. After I bought it, I read the introductions in English and saw that the book was originally part of something called the Zohar project, which intended to distribute copies of this small book for free. It seems that this book has had a very interesting life before it came to my home.
I’m not sure that this story has a purpose, but feel free to share it with others.
(Side note from matthue: does anyone have a photo of the mock-vodka ad posters all over Crown Heights? They say “Drink Responsibly” in Absolut-text, and, beneath it: “It’s the Chassidish thing to do.” Kol ha’kavod to whoever’s watching out for their brothers and sisters.
As of this Friday, St. Louis area folks can check it out at the Bruno David Gallery. Or, if you haven’t yet, take some time to watch the videos on YouTube and MySpace- how surprised are you that many commentators take these women as the real thing?
I’m realizing that sometimes it’s hard to negotiate my desire to live fully in the mainstream (Jewish) America while also dedicating my life to the Jewish tradition. Maybe some dear readers have known this for ages, but as a self-described baalat teshuvah, I only became observant and Jewishly learning about six years ago. I have these various visions of myself, and I want to say, “Yeah, totally, let’s go to that punk show on whatever night, Friday is fine, I’m not some looney religious person” which is partly a past voice, and also I want to say, “Hey, I’m going to be hosting a post-havdalah new moon drum circle in my house and chanting some prayers and melodies, let me know if you’re coming early so I can leave the door open so you don’t have to buzz up before Shabbat ends…”
For example, not so sure about finding someone on JDate in Boston. With all appreciation and awe for Ruby-K and General Anna, and with thanks to my mother for recently purchasing a three month subscription to JDate for me and then checking in with me incessantly about it (”So… meet anyone new lately?”), I’m just not sure this is going to be a goldmine for me looking for the specific subset of Jewish man who digs religion, intelligent women, feminism, humor, and fruitiness. (Ugh, this is starting to sound like my profile… Hey, if you fit the above description you can leave me a message here and you don’t even have to pay a membership fee!) It’s the religion part I’m thinking about tonight.
Some examples of philosophical/theological disconnect from my JDate tonight: More »
There were many times when we worried that one move too far into the mainstream, one step beyond the very traditional bounds of the Orthodox world, could bring a ban on a certain very tall Hasid. We took a lot of questions to the Bet Din at 770 and respected the answers they gave, but always, always, I had this concern. Seems in another part of “the Jewish music jungle” (Thanks 
