I must admit, this will be the first Yom Kippur that I fast in Israel. Despite this, I am typing this reflection during the day which my people consider the holiest on our calendar. Typing, for many, is a transgression on this holiday, yet writing is the way I best reflect on my life, which many would agree is part and parcel of this day.
Kol Nidre, All vows and oaths and promises which I made to God and was not able to fulfill from last Yom Kippur to this, may they be annulled? Give me a break God, I am only human.
This is the message of the evening. I start off my day of repentance by reminding God of my condition. I love this part of the tradition. We except that we are flawed and remind God of our fallibilities, but like everything else in the world this concept only works in balance. If we take it too far, we can excuse egregious behavior - because we warned God that we are only human, shit happens.
Another part of this holiday is the notion that it is the greatest of rest days. Not only do we refrain from everything we don’t do on Shabbat, but we also refrain from that which gives us sustenance; food and libations. Yom Kippur is a fast day, and in Israel, more important than refraining from food is refraining from driving. Go figure.
Last night, after our final meal, my 12 year old daughter rushed to meet her classmates in a teacher organized bicycle trip around the car-less streets of Tel-Aviv; not that otherwise she would take out the family car and cruise the town. Her class was merely taking advantage of the safety of Israeli streets without Israeli drivers.
The irony of this ritual, and it really is elevated to the level of a ritual, is that it probably evolved from two very different engagements with the holiday; no driving respects the holiness of the day for all Jews - an effort at Jewish pluralism or consensus, and respecting the restfulness of the holiday - like in not driving. (By the way, there have been many Yom Kippurs in cold, rainy Chicago where not driving to shul violated the restfulness of the day for me.)
I like the former aspect of the ritual. It’s not really pluralism because it forces everyone to accept behaviors that don’t necessarily agree with their own sensibilities, but it is an effort at consensus, which is rare among my stiff-necked people. There are two interesting sidebars to this. Last night, as I walked the car-less avenues of my new/old home town, I saw a group of Arab children from Yafo (Jaffa) enjoying the safety of the situation without any connection to the ritual. I thought this was great because it supports my firm belief in context. In a Jewish country, Yom Kippur provides a source of enjoyment for everyone, whereas, even in New York City, that second (?) Jewish Mecca, they only get the day off of school but no respite from taxis barreling down the broad avenues. The other sidebar is less pleasant. It happened last year when an Arab resident of Akko (Acre) accidentally drove into a Jewish neighborhood and riots erupted among the Jewish residents, many of whom were not even observant. This was a terrible example of a lack of balance in the observance of our ritual. The value that many of us reflect on during Yom Kippur, compassion, was thrown out the window and replaced with violence and anger. Instead of being introspective and examining our own behaviors, the people of Akko and their supporters around the Jewish world became obsessed with the wrongs of the other and sought to execute justice to the exclusion of the God they would otherwise be praying to. This has left a major scar on my evaluation of the success of the Zionist endeavor.
The latter issue of creating a new Jewish way (halacha, as informal as it may be) can also be problematic. It begs the question - did creating a Jewish country where Jews can be free, as the hope of our national anthem proclaims - help or hurt Judaism? Of course, this is a problematic question. Judaism is not easily defined. Imagine bringing Moses via time machine to Israel today. What would be recognizable for him, the land or the religion he helped found? Is Judaism the religion of the Jews or a concrete, reified set of practices and beliefs which one can refer to in order to check one’s own behavior; a sort of check list or rubric from which we evaluate our Jewishness.
I just finished a wonderful book by an editor at Esquire magazine, A.J. Jacobs, called The Year of Living Biblically in which the author describes his effort to live according the the letter of the law for a year. The book is funny and challenging, but, to my surprise, it was also profound. Near the end, Mr. Jacobs addressed the issue I raise above. Is Judaism a rubric which can be measured in ritual practices and beliefs? He addresses the question with an analogy to something at work in the Christian community where “more observant” fundamentalist types will say about their “less observant” co-religionists that they are “cafeteria Christians.” In other words, they pick and choose which observances and beliefs fit their needs at any given time, and, need I add, this is a derogatory ascription. The beauty of Mr. Jacobs insights, after his year of living biblically, is that everything is cafeteria style. Just think about those moments, for example, where “Do not lie,” is in conflict with the golden rule. (The rabbis address this in a famous Mishnaic argument between Hillel and Shamai about whether you answer a bride’s question about how she looks on her wedding day with the whole truth or the answer that will make her feel good.) A former Israeli Supreme Court Justice and Talmud scholar, Menachem Elon, has the same conclusion but phrases it differently. He says that there is no distinction between scripture (kra) and drash (interpretation). In other words, when you address a text, just like a cafeteria, you make choices.
In Israel, a lot of choices have been made about Jewish life, many by default. When the founding leaders of this country established a rabbinic court to rule over all matters Jewish, they consolidated power. In the words of John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, first Baron Acton (1834–1902), "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men." I am not going so far as to call all Chief Rabbi’s of Israel “bad men,” but I fully agree that power, consolidated in the hands of the few, is corrupting, and this, I find to be the biggest contributor to the crisis in Judaism today. There is an official Judaism in the Jewish country, and everything else is “not Jewish,” according to the powers that be. And this creates a dichotomy that works bad for the Jews because the natural response is that we are either “not Jewish” or we need to redefine what Jewish is (or we ignore the question altogether.)
It was a tradition on many HaShomer HaTsa’ir kibbutzim to redefine Judaism by doing that which is furthest from tradition. Instead of fasting and praying, these new Jews would barbeque pork and feast on Yom Kippur. And if you think that this is a rare phenomenon, you are mistaken. I remember a permutation of this ritual that happened to me on Yom Kippur in 1983 while serving in the Israeli army. My base was not far from the kibbutz that housed us as part of our service and we all had families that adopted us on the kibbutz. On that particular Yom Kippur, beside many other groups of soldiers, we feasted on cakes and pastries brought to us from the kibbutz by our adopting families.
Maybe more common than this response to the hegemony of the orthodox official Jewish establishment is the non-response. This maybe best summarized in a story about Israeli soldiers who defined themselves to then Prime Minister Golda Meir as Israelis, not Jews. This led the country, at the time, into deep soul searching about Jewish identity and the relationship between Israelis and their Diaspora brothers and sisters. More recently, the Israeli author, A.B. Yehoshua stirred up the pot with similar declarations when he addressed a group of American Jews. What I found most interesting about this episode was the comment by a great Israeli journalist, Yaron London, who said that he has more in common with the Philippino and other foreign workers in this country than he does with American Jews. Mr. London explained that if a Scud missile hits the country, the foreign workers share the same risk as he does. Of course, this is true for Israeli Arabs as well, many of whom died in the recent Lebanon War, but Mr. London added that the foreign workers participate in our Israeli culture and now speak in our native tongue.
Among those that adhere to so-called “authentic” Jewish practice, that which is legitimized by the existence of a Chief Rabbinate, there is a lot of diversity, and some tolerance and pluralism, but just like anything that tries to define itself, it must also define what it is not, and this leads to an othering (a term which is not always negative). It is reasonable to declare that a person who believes in Jesus as the son of God is not Jewish, and I am clearly among those who exclude Jews for Jesus. Do I exclude Jews who barbequed pork on Yom Kippur? Absolutely not. They are struggling with their Jewishness, and while I don’t want their practice to be a generally accepted principle of our tradition, I want them to sit at our table and join the conversation. And as for the place of balance in this equation, my struggle and my resolution for this coming year is to work for a Judaism, here and abroad, where the discourse and the practice are equally valued so that we can continue our journey as Jews as a large inclusive family.
(Big Pause: I think I should stop here. I am deliberating between my responsibility to reflect on my own life and that of my community. I love that in Judaism we stand before God as individuals and as a collective. We pray, “Ashamnu,” we sinned, to God in the collective “we,” but our tradition also presents God as inscribing individuals in the Book of Life based on their individual behavior. I think now is the time to reflect on my own shtick.)
Monday, September 28, 2009
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Things I learned in school today
Today I started my orientation at the Hartman Institute. It was a great day. Here are some things that David Hartman told us about the institute he started.
I feed hungry people. Your task is to make people hungry.
This institute doesn't have the truth. It has seekers of the truth.
The task of philosophy is to undermine religious certainties.
To be an educator is to live in the gap between the reality and the dream.
I feed hungry people. Your task is to make people hungry.
This institute doesn't have the truth. It has seekers of the truth.
The task of philosophy is to undermine religious certainties.
To be an educator is to live in the gap between the reality and the dream.
Monday, September 21, 2009
Welcome 5770
There is a familiar term for many Jews in America. They are called 3 dayers for the three days that they show up in synagogue each year: two for Rosh Hashana and one for Yom Kippor. In the last two years, while working for a Reform congregation, I learned that this can be brought down to 2 days, as the Reform only celebrate the new year for a day.
As Jews we all have a unique New Year celebration. Auld Lang Syne is not the song of the day and the spirit is very contradictory to the spirit of its lyrics, “Should old acquaintances be forgotten, and never brought to mind?” Like most Jewish holidays, our memories are exercised and our in-boxes are filled with greetings from “auld” acquaintances, some of whom we wish we could forget. And we are expected to ask forgiveness and to forgive.
In Israel, unlike my Diaspora upbringing, presents are also a big part of the celebration. My sister in law took my daughters shopping for new clothes, and my son received a remote control helicopter from his uncle. What was more amazing was the second day barbeques. After two days of going to shul, on Sunday afternoon, my religious in-laws had a big barbeque. Of course there were no pigs with apples in their mouths, but, as an interesting sidebar, you may be surprised to hear that this is a popular tradition on some of the more radical kibbutzim on Yom Kippor.
Our barbeque included steak, liver, an Israeli version of a combination Polish/Italian sausage and chicken. The idea behind it is quite simple. On Shabbat you are not allowed to light a fire, but on a regular holiday you can transfer existing fire. We transferred existing fire from the holiday candles to the presoaked charcoals.
After the festive meal, which didn’t include honey cakes or a round challah, as I am used to in America, everyone did their own thing. At one table, my mother in law read Psalms, my brother in law played games on my iphone and my father in-law argued with his grandchildren who wanted to choose their own flavors from the non-dairy Neapolitan ice cream. He later told me that kids these days are spoiled. “When I was offered ice cream, I would say thank you. Kids today want to choose their own flavors. Not in my house.”
By the time the holiday was over, I was glad to be back in Tel-Aviv with my secular homeys. The noon football games were starting at 8 PM and I was hopeful that the Bears would be broadcast. Unfortunately, hope was shattered. We watched the Saints clobber the Eagles and they didn’t broadcast the 3 PM Bears game which started at 11 PM here. Fortunately, when I woke up at 4:45 AM for my morning run and swim at the beach, I checked the Internet and found out that my year started with a Bears victory over the defending world champion Pittsburgh Steelers. Thank God for little things. Shana Tova.
As Jews we all have a unique New Year celebration. Auld Lang Syne is not the song of the day and the spirit is very contradictory to the spirit of its lyrics, “Should old acquaintances be forgotten, and never brought to mind?” Like most Jewish holidays, our memories are exercised and our in-boxes are filled with greetings from “auld” acquaintances, some of whom we wish we could forget. And we are expected to ask forgiveness and to forgive.
In Israel, unlike my Diaspora upbringing, presents are also a big part of the celebration. My sister in law took my daughters shopping for new clothes, and my son received a remote control helicopter from his uncle. What was more amazing was the second day barbeques. After two days of going to shul, on Sunday afternoon, my religious in-laws had a big barbeque. Of course there were no pigs with apples in their mouths, but, as an interesting sidebar, you may be surprised to hear that this is a popular tradition on some of the more radical kibbutzim on Yom Kippor.
Our barbeque included steak, liver, an Israeli version of a combination Polish/Italian sausage and chicken. The idea behind it is quite simple. On Shabbat you are not allowed to light a fire, but on a regular holiday you can transfer existing fire. We transferred existing fire from the holiday candles to the presoaked charcoals.
After the festive meal, which didn’t include honey cakes or a round challah, as I am used to in America, everyone did their own thing. At one table, my mother in law read Psalms, my brother in law played games on my iphone and my father in-law argued with his grandchildren who wanted to choose their own flavors from the non-dairy Neapolitan ice cream. He later told me that kids these days are spoiled. “When I was offered ice cream, I would say thank you. Kids today want to choose their own flavors. Not in my house.”
By the time the holiday was over, I was glad to be back in Tel-Aviv with my secular homeys. The noon football games were starting at 8 PM and I was hopeful that the Bears would be broadcast. Unfortunately, hope was shattered. We watched the Saints clobber the Eagles and they didn’t broadcast the 3 PM Bears game which started at 11 PM here. Fortunately, when I woke up at 4:45 AM for my morning run and swim at the beach, I checked the Internet and found out that my year started with a Bears victory over the defending world champion Pittsburgh Steelers. Thank God for little things. Shana Tova.
Saturday, September 12, 2009
Relativism and the lessons of a paper cup
The other day my mother-in-law taught me a great lesson about relativism. She definitely didn’t mean to. She is a person who believes in order in the universe. She believes God has a plan and that He listens to prayer. I am ruled by doubt.
My lesson came when she very generously tried to stock us up with pots and pans and other kitchen necessities. Our shipment hasn’t come from America yet, and we don’t want to buy stuff we will be receiving in our container.
Among the things Raquel (Irit’s mom) tried to give us was a big stack of paper cups, and, despite her generosity, I rejected the cups on the grounds that it would be bad for the environment. This was when I learned my lesson. Raquel, rightfully, snapped back at me, “There has been a drought in this country for five years. Here it is better to waste a few paper cups than to waste water washing dishes.”
I know it’s not a major epiphany, but it was a great lesson for me. My environmental righteousness may have been well intended, but it was off-target for the environment I live in, thus the relativism.
The last time I learned this lesson was in a class for my doctorate called The Politics of Assessment. In the class, my teacher Terry Jo Smith, illustrated how standardized tests are inherently unfair because they demand answers that imply an absolute answer for the population. This could be true in most mathematics problems, but it is definitely not reasonable for issues of human behavior.
The example Terry gave was a question off the tests that asked what a person should do if they found a wallet; a) look for the owners information and call him to return it, b) take the money out of the wallet and leave it where it was found, c) return the wallet without the money. The first answer everyone gave was the one that was right for their personal situation in the world. As middle class students, we all said that you give back the wallet with all the money. But Terry challenged us. “What if you are a homeless student or a very poor student with unemployed parents? Would it be such a terrible thing to take the money if you really needed it?”
In essence, we all have relative values. This is why we cheer for Robin Hood or Nazi killers. I remember the uproar when the actor Will Smith said that the Nazis thought they were doing the right thing, but what was so outrageous about that? There are few things I believe about human behavior, but one is that we like to see ourselves as acting righteously. Nazis created a reality in their minds to justify their behavior. They spent a lot of resources on propaganda because they needed to make a societal shift in perceptions.
I learned from my Talmud teacher that the Israeli Supreme Court Justice, Menachem Elon said there was no difference between scripture and interpretation. In essence, even what God said in stone, written with his own finger, is relative. This is the beauty of the oral law. It provides us with a framework for interpreting God, or what we think of as the source of righteousness, because everything is ultimately relative. “Thou shalt not kill,” what about self defense. “Honor your Father and Mother,” what about those parents who abuse their kids, or, for instance, the orthodox Israeli mother who tried to starve her three year old to death.
I know relativism is hard to accept, but I think it is much healthier for us as a society to deal with creating the frameworks for interpreting what a good God would want for us than it is to waste time being dogmatic or fundamental about what we think She wants.
My lesson came when she very generously tried to stock us up with pots and pans and other kitchen necessities. Our shipment hasn’t come from America yet, and we don’t want to buy stuff we will be receiving in our container.
Among the things Raquel (Irit’s mom) tried to give us was a big stack of paper cups, and, despite her generosity, I rejected the cups on the grounds that it would be bad for the environment. This was when I learned my lesson. Raquel, rightfully, snapped back at me, “There has been a drought in this country for five years. Here it is better to waste a few paper cups than to waste water washing dishes.”
I know it’s not a major epiphany, but it was a great lesson for me. My environmental righteousness may have been well intended, but it was off-target for the environment I live in, thus the relativism.
The last time I learned this lesson was in a class for my doctorate called The Politics of Assessment. In the class, my teacher Terry Jo Smith, illustrated how standardized tests are inherently unfair because they demand answers that imply an absolute answer for the population. This could be true in most mathematics problems, but it is definitely not reasonable for issues of human behavior.
The example Terry gave was a question off the tests that asked what a person should do if they found a wallet; a) look for the owners information and call him to return it, b) take the money out of the wallet and leave it where it was found, c) return the wallet without the money. The first answer everyone gave was the one that was right for their personal situation in the world. As middle class students, we all said that you give back the wallet with all the money. But Terry challenged us. “What if you are a homeless student or a very poor student with unemployed parents? Would it be such a terrible thing to take the money if you really needed it?”
In essence, we all have relative values. This is why we cheer for Robin Hood or Nazi killers. I remember the uproar when the actor Will Smith said that the Nazis thought they were doing the right thing, but what was so outrageous about that? There are few things I believe about human behavior, but one is that we like to see ourselves as acting righteously. Nazis created a reality in their minds to justify their behavior. They spent a lot of resources on propaganda because they needed to make a societal shift in perceptions.
I learned from my Talmud teacher that the Israeli Supreme Court Justice, Menachem Elon said there was no difference between scripture and interpretation. In essence, even what God said in stone, written with his own finger, is relative. This is the beauty of the oral law. It provides us with a framework for interpreting God, or what we think of as the source of righteousness, because everything is ultimately relative. “Thou shalt not kill,” what about self defense. “Honor your Father and Mother,” what about those parents who abuse their kids, or, for instance, the orthodox Israeli mother who tried to starve her three year old to death.
I know relativism is hard to accept, but I think it is much healthier for us as a society to deal with creating the frameworks for interpreting what a good God would want for us than it is to waste time being dogmatic or fundamental about what we think She wants.
Thursday, September 10, 2009
When in Rome…
In a place where there are no people, try to be a person
– Rabbi Hillel, Mishna
There are some bad things about Israel that even the most staunch, nationalistic Jews would have to agree with me about. The one on my mind is the “I’m not a chump (Hebrew: Frier)” attitude in this country. Chump may be a bad translation. A chump is naïve, innocent and gets taken advantage of. A frier is worse. In fact it’s probably the worst thing you can be in this Jewish homeland.
A frier is someone who pays full price for anything, who drives according to the law, crosses at crosswalks only when the green man/light permits it, gives up his seat for an elderly person on a bus, believes what the government says, etcetera. In an effort to not be a frier, Israelis do whatever they can to advance themselves at the expense of most people around them without making waves.
Yesterday, when we went to check out the space where Irit was interested in opening her clinic, we were told that the guy who can show it to us will be there in 10 minutes. Irit sat in the sun and I ran an errand. Ten minutes later, when I returned, we kept waiting, for 35 minutes. Nobody called to say they were in traffic or that we should go sit down somewhere and have a coffee while we wait and that they would call when the guy is near. So we waited, until we called, and we heard that he’s almost there, which was 25 minutes before he arrived. Of course, this is not the biggest sin in the world. It’s just a sample of the many rude, inconsiderate and outright nasty things we have experienced here.
I am embarrassed to admit that at 35 minutes into our wait, I said to Irit, “When in Rome, do as the Romans.” I was trying to get her to leave and show the guy we were waiting for the same disrespect that he showed us. It took me a few minutes to cool down and then I had a mini-epiphany. The Romans had conquered this place 2000 years ago, and my role as a modern Zionist is to reclaim the land and the culture. This is not Rome, nor is it meant to be a bastion of Roman thinking. I am here to train to be a rabbi and Jewish educator and I must act in accordance with tradition. Then I remembered the quote of the great sage Rabbi Hillel, “In a place where there are no people, try to be a person.”
It was at that moment that I decided to drop my anger and discouragement with Israeli society and simply be a mensch. This is not Rome, I don’t want the influence of these meshugena statements in my life, and I am going to be a mensch, no matter how much of a frier I will appear to be. In essence, it doesn’t matter how people around me behave, I will be a mensch because that is how I believe that we should be. I can’t be a frier if I know I am doing what I think is right.
– Rabbi Hillel, Mishna
There are some bad things about Israel that even the most staunch, nationalistic Jews would have to agree with me about. The one on my mind is the “I’m not a chump (Hebrew: Frier)” attitude in this country. Chump may be a bad translation. A chump is naïve, innocent and gets taken advantage of. A frier is worse. In fact it’s probably the worst thing you can be in this Jewish homeland.
A frier is someone who pays full price for anything, who drives according to the law, crosses at crosswalks only when the green man/light permits it, gives up his seat for an elderly person on a bus, believes what the government says, etcetera. In an effort to not be a frier, Israelis do whatever they can to advance themselves at the expense of most people around them without making waves.
Yesterday, when we went to check out the space where Irit was interested in opening her clinic, we were told that the guy who can show it to us will be there in 10 minutes. Irit sat in the sun and I ran an errand. Ten minutes later, when I returned, we kept waiting, for 35 minutes. Nobody called to say they were in traffic or that we should go sit down somewhere and have a coffee while we wait and that they would call when the guy is near. So we waited, until we called, and we heard that he’s almost there, which was 25 minutes before he arrived. Of course, this is not the biggest sin in the world. It’s just a sample of the many rude, inconsiderate and outright nasty things we have experienced here.
I am embarrassed to admit that at 35 minutes into our wait, I said to Irit, “When in Rome, do as the Romans.” I was trying to get her to leave and show the guy we were waiting for the same disrespect that he showed us. It took me a few minutes to cool down and then I had a mini-epiphany. The Romans had conquered this place 2000 years ago, and my role as a modern Zionist is to reclaim the land and the culture. This is not Rome, nor is it meant to be a bastion of Roman thinking. I am here to train to be a rabbi and Jewish educator and I must act in accordance with tradition. Then I remembered the quote of the great sage Rabbi Hillel, “In a place where there are no people, try to be a person.”
It was at that moment that I decided to drop my anger and discouragement with Israeli society and simply be a mensch. This is not Rome, I don’t want the influence of these meshugena statements in my life, and I am going to be a mensch, no matter how much of a frier I will appear to be. In essence, it doesn’t matter how people around me behave, I will be a mensch because that is how I believe that we should be. I can’t be a frier if I know I am doing what I think is right.
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