Culture, Global, Identity, Religion

I Yid it Myself

Deliberate faith and faith led unconsciously are not equally valued in Jewish tradition, said best by the parable of the little boy who couldn’t even read the Yom Kippur prayers on an eve of God’s severe judgment over his village. “I do not know which prayers to say, Lord, so here, I give you the whole book!” The boy’s sincere effort annuls Heaven’s decree above the practiced prayers of the town’s learned men. This is the point I make.
Kung Fu Jew’s SukkahThese thoughts come from putting up my Sukkah last week. Twice. I walked a couple blocks to “Sukkah Depot” in Crown Heights and surveyed the typical Lubavitch pre-holiday bustle. Sukkah kits of all varieties were selling like hot cakes. But it seemed to me that buying a kit was the easy way out — did Moses have a kit? Surely the wandering Israelites MADE kits but it sure as hell wasn’t PVC piping and water-proof tent fabric. I opted for the wood planks.
And boy did I pay like hell for my spiritual presumption. There were only six planks remaining (remember a cube has more than six edges). Each of them were different sizes. The only friend around to help me carry them six blocks was the shortest human being I know. (Thanks again, Rachel.) The screws I purchased stripped with infuriating ease. I build the roof first, not thinking that I couldn’t screw on the legs without help — which I promptly conscripted my dinner guests to do, while I finished cooking. It started falling over twice during dinner until we ultimately went inside after eating, leaving it to collapse into pieces.
The holiday is all about temporary shelter, right? And if any sukkah made me feel scarely protected, this one was it. To make a longer story short, I put it back up, by myself, with structural improvements. It looks even better than before, with additions of scavenged sheets, bailing twine, and foliage. It’s downright beautiful. And the company and food I had filling it — particularly because I kashered the whole kitchen in order to host a couple all-kosher friends — made it even more beautiful.
But the point is, I did it myself. There is definite love of God in the sweat that built that sukkah — a total original, never to be reproduced the same way again. I Yid it myself. Building from a kit just ain’t the same. The rest of my Jewish life is similar — from my approach to prayer, kashrut, and holidays.
Some years – and some lifetimes – that’s more true than others. My family has always done Jewish tradition our own way — given our limits. Our limits were often our (un)familiarity of Jewish laws, the presence or absence of kosher grocery, the type(s) of Jewish communities and families nearby, and even our willpower to figure it out when the answers weren’t apparent. As the kid of an Army soldier, we were frequently stationed around the U.S. in places were Jewish amenities were slim or absent. I fondly look back on the boxes of Pesach food shipped to us annually by our relatives in LA or driving many hours to a synagogue for Rosh Hashanah. Sometimes it was quite frustrating.
In essence, we Yid it ourselves. And to this day, I wrestle quite extensively with Jewish communities who do Jewishly with ease, because I am led to suspect they are asleep at the wheel. I get suspicious that they take it for granted. And quite frequently I get angry at New York City in particular.
For Jews who want an immersion Jewish life such as can be found in New York City, I bear them no dislike. Hell, I’m living here for the time being. But I personally do not feel fulfilled in a Judaism that is lived accidentally, through osmosis, because that’s just what you do in a place with so many Jews. With all the sukkahs around my own neighborhood and the kits available, I still had to do it the hard way. Too much of a sense of ease rankles me, quite simply. It comes from looking around the backyard in Nebraska thinking, “NOW what are we going to build a sukkah with?” And it comes from borrowing rooms in churches and covering up the Jesus paintings and pulling the collapsible aron kodesh out of the car trunk. I swear, the Diaspora-Israel divide is fading away because the major cities aren’t really an exile. Welcome to New York City, the new Jerusalem.
I don’t anticipate sending my kids to Jewish day school partly because they would enter a world in which Judaism was the norm. (Never mind the expense if you want to have a family larger than one point five/) And Judaism is not, after all, the norm. We’re half a percent of the world. To slip into lifestyle where Judaism is not in constant friction with living a modern life is a mental mistake which I feel is stealing the beauty of discovery, of struggle, and of really earning, so to speak, one’s connection with God, peoplehood, spirituality, whatever, you name It what you will. We buy individually-wrapped, pre-sorted commodities and we’ve extended a similar ethic, unconsciously perhaps, to our faith. One size does not fit all and it does not come in a box, and there’s a shit ton of assembly required.
I am aware of how simply I am painting this. I am aware that most folks I know, perhaps especially those who grew up in day schools or observant households, are struggling in the creation of their own Jewish life. Which is why they’re such a delight to me. I am delighted by those with a bone to pick, a revolution to be had, a norm to break up — it makes living in a Jewish haven still a challenge. While I look to the “hybrid” vs. “authentic” Jewish culture wars as evidence that more Jews are “Jewing it themselves,” to mangle a catchphrase coined by Mobius, or the advent of the Havurah movement, YCT, and HC, I am not convinced it’s the mainstream.
And the mainstream be damned. I don’t need kosher butchers to eat meat “fit” (kosher, literally) for Jewish consumption, mile-high synagogue cathedrals to pray in community, or day schools to raise my kids with enough tradition to make their own halakhic decisions. At the end of my life, I’ll have earned every prayer and every story of rickety sukkot fairly. I’ll have reinvented Torah and defined realms outside of denominational practice.
I am one of the defiant Diaspora-by-pride Jews and I’ll Jew it my way — in fact, I already Yid.

23 thoughts on “I Yid it Myself

  1. Outstanding! Truly outstanding! I wanted to try to build one myself but the wife said “NO WAY”. I guess it had something to do with the fact that we have no yard to build it on but i thought the top of the apartment car port would have done just fine. Oh well maybe next year!

  2. I understand your annoyance at off-the-shelf, got-it-made, NYC Judaism. In the interest of full disclosure, I’m an Indians fan. I am also a Jew who made aliya 37 years ago. This is the place for you, Yid, where the country you toil for, fight for and get exasperated about is your country and still a work in progress after almost 60 years. You can come here and help make it happen in spite of the guys from without and within who are trying to bring it down. I know a few hilltops where they’d love to have a guy like you around.

  3. To slip into lifestyle where Judaism is not in constant friction with living a modern life is a mental mistake which I feel is stealing the beauty of discovery, of struggle, and of really earning, so to speak, one’s connection with God, peoplehood, spirituality, whatever, you name It what you will.
    Well-said.
    . I don’t need kosher butchers to eat meat “fit” (kosher, literally) for Jewish consumption, mile-high synagogue cathedrals to pray in community, or day schools to raise my kids with enough tradition to make their own halakhic decisions. At the end of my life, I’ll have earned every prayer and every story of rickety sukkot fairly. I’ll have reinvented Torah and defined realms outside of denominational practice.
    This small-town Diaspora Jew says: Yasher koach to that!

  4. There are just as many JewKits in Israel as there are in NYC, for sukkahs or for other holidays. (And how does wanting a challenge become “start a settlement”?)

  5. “This is the place for you, Yid, where the country you toil for, fight for and get exasperated about is your country and still a work in progress after almost 60 years.”
    Toiling for a country that’s a work in progress sounds good to me. I feel like I’d probably concentrate in other areas than the ones you’re suggesting, Yehoshua. I guess the question is, is Israel supposed to be a home-land for the Yidden or just a house-land? A house you struggle with in order to build new rooms, change the electric, install the windows — but a home isn’t a home until it’s a place of dignity and wholeness where one can feel at peace and welcome friends & strangers.

  6. It’s the simplest sukkahs that really make me feel this holiday season in my sappy Jewish heart…. the rickety kind with an exposed frame and walls of jerry-rigged fabrics that blow in the wind. Other than your sukkah, KFJ, this year I really enjoyed a sukkah built down here in DC by my friend Toby, a simple contraption of plastic pipes and tapestries *set up on the ledge outside his bedroom window!*
    But that’s just esthetics and I wonder how much the up-talking of “Jewing It Yourself” comes just because some people just like to do things the hard, individual way. Ideally, the Torah’s rules assume they are to be followed by a whole country of people working together: if all the Israelites in Canaan were meant to keep kosher, that sounds like it’s describing the food scene in Jerusalem or NYC a lot more than the life of a rural Jew with nowhere to go out to eat. So I think maybe all the meaning and effort we find in the *troubles* of doing Jewish things are just a function of trying to live Torah in a place it wasn’t written for, and that the intended meanings and messages of these mitsvot (whether food taboos, or seasonal rhythms, etc.) is something I haven’t gotten a handle on yet.

  7. I never felt connected to community in New York. I mean *really* connected, like – you are the people I depend on – you guys NEED me for a minyan – I am supporting my neighbor when I shop at such and so’s store or eat at the kosher deli. Here in San Francisco, I am part of a crucial interdependent network. We are fragile, and it feels great. (And Mickey Heimlich has the best sukkah on either coast, hands down…ya gotta see it.)

  8. NYC Judaism? Making aliya? Huh? No, this is about the humanity that emerges from the struggle of preserving Jewishness in a non-Jewish society. This is about the humanity of living in an intensely pluralistic society, the humanity of struggling with and managing the tension between secular and religious, minority and majority, chosenness and pluralism. Making aliya is completely missing the point. Jewish culture has always been defined and conditioned by the fact of Jews being a minority and will continue to be defined and conditioned that way. Trying to convince diaspora Jews that their “homeland” is Israel is pointless, dishonest, and slightly embarrassing. Long live the diaspora!

  9. Aaron– I agree with you that trying to convince the Diaspora Jews that their homeland is Israel is pointless. But trying to convince Israel-centered Jews that it’s all about the Diaspora is equally so.
    Judaism’s been a minority culture for a really long time, but before that, there were the days of having both an Israel based community and a Diaspora (think Talmud). And before that Judaism wasn’t even a minority culture. So let’s be careful with “always has been and always will be” statements.
    As for me, I like it both ways. And the most do-it-yourself sukkah I’ve ever made involved a Jerusalem roof, a table top, lots of duct tape, a midnight raid on a brushpile, and the whole thing falling down in a storm and having to be rebuilt. As KFJ points out, it’s not a clear dichotomy.

  10. Oh my gosh! I love it! I’m so glad you did it! But, I live in such a small town I didn’t even know there were kits!!!!!! We have 6 families here, 2 put up Sukkahs and we ate with them but they have informed us that it is our turn next year. So, any advise? From everyone?

  11. I’m actually a little surprised.
    Where are the day school defenders? Where are the delighters in those New York City / Philly / Boston hubs of Jewish life who just can’t imagine it any other way? (Ha, asleep at the wheel? to continue an extended metaphor.) We already heard from the live-in-Israel team.
    I love all us rural Jews at heart who came out of the woodwork, but surely somebody can make a passionate appeal for Jewish community?

  12. I was accused offline of claiming that a Jewish practice of struggle is the only authentic Jewish experience. I thought it was clear that I make no such claims — I merely claim that striving may be the only one of many authentic Jewish experiences which is fully living up to our potential and ultimately is the most rewarding one.

  13. —Candie ·– The Succah Gemara is full of tips and ideas for a range of wackily shaped, yet still authentic Succahs. I had some good success this year on a fire escape succah that involved alot of wires to hold the whole thing up, which included lassoing down a distant laundry pole to provide counter tension. The sucker stayed together even in the Montreal rain!
    I’ve found that, if you’re a guest by a busy Jew’s house, even a secular one usually appreciates if you build a succah on their somewhere, provided that you do ask first, of course. Most people I know are too oveerworked to even consider making one for themselves, even if they wouldn’t mind ducking into one now and again.

  14. ok, that succah in that picture is totally not kosher, it’s “lovude”, and yeah, i’m sure moses had a home depot down the block to pick up all the succah parts so conveniently as you did. hey, but that succah still looks like fun.

  15. The back wall is the fence, the ceiling and side walls are weaved bailing twine holding sheets in place. I’m told the walls need to not wave more than a foot in either direction, thus the weaving.

  16. i’m sorry i didn’t mean this in rude way. the problem with succah, is that 3 of the walls are a bit (3 tfochim) too high from the ground.

  17. A defender of day schools emerges: Having grown up secular, in the rural CT diaspora, I hear your joy in defining for yourself, and struggling to do it yourself, without the assist of a strong community. But I maintain that the essence of Judaism…the reason we need a minyan for so many things, is that it is not important to say “I Yid it myself”, rather to say “We Yid it together”. That’s the message that I hope to pass to my children, so that wherever they wander, they can find a place for themselves with other Jews.

  18. The schach actually seems not to be there at all – the leaves we see are tacked to the frame on the outside and hanging down.
    That would probably invalidate the sukkah.

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