by Shaul Magid Shaul Magid is the Jay and Jeanie Schottenstein Professor of Jewish Studies at Indiana University, Kogod Senior Senior Research Fellow at the
Emily Strauss is a community organizer, and a frequent contributor to New Voices, Jewish Currents, The Forward, and Lilith magazine. For the second year in
For years now, I have searched for the melody of my masculinity in the words and poetry of women’s and non-binary folx’s songs. With this search came an implicit understanding that there was a limit the ability of men, particularly cis-men, to compose gentleness; at best, I believed, we could play out weak imitations of our siblings’ and parents’ music. The men of the hevra kadisha have taught me otherwise. Their care has shown me the possibility that men can contribute new harmonies and timbre to the ongoing composition of our people’s melody of tenderness and care for the living and for the dead.
As the Chair of our congregational Chevra Kadisha, I am often asked by the mourner who they can thank for doing the Taharah for their loved one. In response, I explain that it is a time honored tradition that we do not reveal the identities of the Taharah team for any specific Taharah. For most of us on the Chevra Kadisha, it is the anonymity that is a strong attraction to being part of this group. The idea that we would be thanked for doing this work is not only strange but creates a certain anxiety.
Serving in the Chevra Kaddisha, Jewish Funeral Practices Committee, is an important honor and part of being a Jew. Various roles are available, for various people with various needs and availability. Join now!
This year, we must think carefully about Tu BiShvat’s call. We must think about all of those in our sightlines who are being prevented from planting their roots, the ones who are being denied the most essential human experience of building something permanent, of building something that is forever.
Willingness to make the ultimate sacrifice is, indeed, a Jewish sensibility. However, it is a sensibility that is carefully limited.
For when Yosef was brought down into Egypt, he lost the memory of what it uniquely means to be a member of the Israelite people.
These two texts challenge us to pay close attention to the power dynamics involved in a hegemonic body adopting cultural products of a subordinate group. Sometimes erasure comes through restricting the minority practice of its own culture, as in Antiochus’s later persecution, which we marked on Chanukah. But sometimes erasure comes through cultural appropriation, depending on a subordinate group to create culture, and then taking it and turning it from culture to artifact, from lifeline to epitaph.
This Hanukkah, I pray to also learn from those who remind us that the impossible is possible bazman hazeh, in this, our time.
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