thinking jewish

Episodes in Etiquette

I sit at a table in an all-too-normal Valley restaurant with two all-too-normal Valley senior citizens. What are you going to order, they ask. I decide on a salad with salmon (it was delicious), and ask what looks good for them. The man on my left announces he'll be eating the baked shrimp salad.

Mazal tov.

Yet the woman on the right is indignant. You're going to eat that in front of him? He's going to be a rabbi!

He looks right back at her and retorts, he's not eating it!

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

On the other end of the phone is a man in his forties, sitting behind a desk in the hills of Berkeley, California. He talks and helps his partner in conversation, to whom he is a mentor, a guide, a teacher, and a friend.

You know, in my day, I couldn't even count the amount of times we smoked in the sanctuary of the synagogue.

His frustration is clear and his sarcasm nonexistent.

I guess I'm not being a very good "role model..." What the hell does that even mean!?

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Amen.

In and Out

I walk through the streets of suburban Southern California, trying to appreciate the beauty around me. And then my meanderings take me to the edge of the UCSD campus, to a Eucalyptus grove.

The smell of the trees enters my nose and I'm immediately whisked away to a different world, one of a different language and different customs, one of history and my people. The rolling hills of the northern Galilee, filled with their multitude of Eucalyptus groves, hold a special mystique in my mind. The Galil is this beautiful nether-land: it is in the land of Israel, but the place that my people (and, two thousand years later, me) retreated to when the land all but pushed them out. It is the Israel outside of Israel, an alternate version of the Jewish state without the Haredim, and the pollution and the politics.

A brush with Zionism and a pull towards aliyah as I walk through the UCSD parking lot. And then reality comes crashing back at me. Where am I? Where am I going?

Outside of city life for the week, I'm given an entirely new vantage point on my life, and on what I like and what I don't. Where are all the tall buildings? Where's the fast pace of life? Where's the grime and the poverty and the suffering? They are all hidden by the bliss of suburbia. The troubles of the world make way for Starbucks and strip malls and track housing.

But where all all the Jews? Where are the hipsters and the artists and the writers and film makers? Where are the kippot and the Jew references and the pervasive feeling of Shtetl life?

I found them again, 100 miles north.

I come to Los Angeles for a break from my break, to get out of where I just found myself getting in. And as I sit at a swank sushi bar with two old friends, staring at the crab legs and eel chunks and the rest of the cacophony of treif in front of me yelling "Eat Me!" but to whom I will not give in, we talk about what it means to belong, what it means to find your place in the Jewish world. I get two more opinions on everything in my life right now, two more opinions on where I'm supposed to be, what I'm supposed to be doing, and what to make of it all.

And I remember back to earlier in the afternoon, when another old friend begins a rant about someone she worked with over the summer, and how he pushed boundaries and tried new things, and taught and argued and grew, and how frustrating he was to be with, how wrong he was, how out of place he was. How what he did was not appropriate, and was selfish and shouldn't have been taught to children.

And I chuckle to myself, because I know who he is, and I know what made him who he is; I know who made him who he is...

Then, back at the sushi table, we find that it's time to leave. So we pick up our things and I get in a car and start to drive. And my driver and I start to talk. And he encourages me to stay where I am - to find a way to be inside a movement that I feel so outside of, to force my way back into institutions which have sidelined me.

I listen to what he says, and appreciate it, with all my heart. For the first time that day, I feel inside anew - I feel a part, I feel belonging, I feel purpose.

But maybe that's not what I need right now? Maybe that's just a cover. Maybe I just don't know. And maybe, some day, I'll figure it all out.

The Role Model

"So what do you see when you look at me?
Am I the kind of person you'd like to be?
Could it be true I'm a lot like you, still trying to decide?
If I have the stuff am I strong enough to hold it together when times get tough?
I've got to know the way to go, there must be a guide."

The lulls of August give way to the impending September, filled with new beginnings and holidays and endless changes to the illusory normalcy of daily life. For almost four weeks I have pondered life and its meaning and my purpose within it all at a level of intensity like never before.

And through all the circles of the mind games I play, I continue to come back to one pressing, unchanging question - what does it mean to have the title "rabbi?" Does adulthood mean taking on the identity of one's profession and giving up, at least partially, on the selfhood one has spent the last quarter-century developing?

Or is all of this only specific to certain walks of life: those in which you are expected to be some sort of symbolic exemplar?

What does it mean to be a role model - a hero? I struggled with this very question on stage at the age of thirteen. With my peers, I sang and learned and acted a real life problem: who do we look up to in life, and why?

Everybody needs a hero, someone to look up to.
Could it be that what you need is there inside of you?

There are students who look up to me. There are former students who still seek my counsel. There are relationships that stretch and bend traditional boundaries in the name of being "real" and just living life.

The rabbis tell stories of following their teachers to the bedroom to watch even the minutia of how they had sex with their wives - a neurotic following of the most private of aspects of one's life. And yet today, we try the opposite. My private life is private, we say. We build walls between work and play. And when work takes hold in an all-encompassing manner, we are expected to drop our private being, or at least not let anyone know that it exists.

And then we become symbolic exemplars - special people that embody exactly what all others are supposed to strive for. Except then we're not. Because people strive to be normal, and then to infuse their normalcy with meaning and purpose and, most of all, fun.

So I change it all up. And I do all I can to live the most moral and ethical of lives while also being me, without any pretense that I, or anyone, is anything less than human. I don't do right all the time, at times I'm very stupid, but always striving to be ethical, always concerned with whether I should feel judged by God for my actions, always with the best interest of everyone on top.

I spend my time living my simple life, my simple Jewish life, of prayer, study and saving the world. And somewhere on the side I yearn for friendship and love, hoping that I will get back from all those to whom I give.

And then it all blows up in my face. My need to worry more about what is right, and less about what is "normal," slaps me in the face and leaves me to rot on the side of the street. And some in whom I had so much faith leave me sitting there.

But others don't. Others offer support. And others go well beyond that call. But all the while I'm left existing in a system with which I disagree. And I search for other ways to live my life and feel fulfilled and be that role model, but I find none. I look for new ideas, but come up empty handed.

So I'm left here thinking, looking, pondering for new meanings of it all. What does it mean to be me? What does it mean to live in this world in 2007? What does it mean to have a title? What does it mean when you need that title to do what you do but struggle seriously with its implications?

And what does it mean to be a role model? What does it mean to be looked up to by others? What does it mean to be a focal point of people's attention, to be learned from and followed.

"When I look around what I have found
are role models, heroes, and each is profound.
They mean what they say, live it day to day, I want to believe.
There's truth to the claim, what's behind the name,
is what goes unnoticed and not only fame.
It's the life you live it's the love you give, it's the truth you lead."
-The Role Model

Neuroses

For a brilliant exercise in "too much time on your hands," check out Ma Rabu's latest plualism thread.

Camp

Sitting at every Brooklynite's favorite camp-like bar/lounge Saturday night, I start talking with a friend of a friend who is, himself, new to the neighborhood. And then he starts telling me about his friend's friend who, after years in all sorts of lines of work, decided to open a bar. And this friend, like all good members of the human race, studied at UC Berkeley. And so, in reverence to that magical city on the Bay, this friend of my friend's friend's friend will be opening a bar in Brooklyn that takes its cue from The Albatross.

The Albatross may be the world's best bar. Cheap drinks, plenty of room to sit and a friendly staff, not to mention board games, parlor games and 25 cent, all-you-can-eat popcorn. What more could a man want?

So this friend is opening a bar. And it's going to be amazing. And, in further deference to his alma mater, he wants this bar (aptly named "Pacific Standard Time") to be a locus for Cal almuni to watch Bear football games.

Which is where our conversation gets interesting.

Because, after detailing the amazing attributes of this bar-to-be, the next words out of my friend's friend's mouth are, "Well, I don't know if you keep Shabbat, but... you get the idea."

He continued, "Even if you do though, if you happen to walk by there and then go in to watch a game, it couldn't be that bad!"

So I sit there, a little bewildered. This guy doesn't know me. He knows nothing, to say the least, about my Jewish identity and observance.

Sure enough, it was that circle of cloth sitting atop my head that gave me away, that betrayed my inner workings to this perfect stranger sitting next to me. But put aside the assumed implications in his mind of what it means when someone's wearing a yid lid, and let's dissect more fully his language.

What he said to me immediately conjured memories of something I was taught by a favorite Park Slope shit-stirrer, Douglass Rushkoff, in his book Nothing Sacred:

The questions we ask each other should assume the halakhic validity of both parties. "Try asking, 'How do you keep kosher?' or, 'What does kosher mean to you...' You'll br surprised at the kind of conversation that is opened up."

That is to say, get rid of the entire premise of the question, "Do you keep kosher." That very question assumes the possibility, and inevitability, of dispensing of millenia-old conscious Jewish decision making when it comes to eating. Rather, start by asking how your fellow keeps kosher - and be prepared for a myriad of answers.

So too would it be with Shabbat. The question is not "do you keep Shabbat" but, rather, "how do you keep Shabbat." Rushkoff teaches us not to close off the possibilities of conversation from the onset of our question-asking. Think about how much further we could go in our discussions if we only think through the way that our questions frame and limit the possibilities of answers!

And all this went down in my head in an instant of enlightenment over a few beers, in comfy chairs, next to perfect strangers, at a bar in Cobble Hill, a bar named Camp. And in that instant, that moment, I remembered why I camp is such a powerful, meaningful and important life experience - because who doesn't want to come together with other people on a given night and talk about the world? Because it opens doors to new possibilities, it allows walls of assumptions and presuppositions to be torn down, it pushes the limits and brings people together.

And it also happens to allow for a chance to eat some of the most delicious smores in town...

The Reverend

I sit in a small office, one chair facing the next. A few feet in front of me he sits, asking questions, getting to know me, allowing me to get to know him. Two individuals' lives cross paths for the first time, and now they share their past stories and try to understand what the future may bring.

He is a minister, a reverend, seven years my elder. As I sit and listen to him share with me, and then begin to offer myself back, I realize just how rare this moment is. How often do I venture outside of my self-imposed ghetto - the superficially open and pluralistic world in which I conduct my daily life? When was the last time I spoke about life and values and everything that matters with, God forbid, someone not of the tribe? And, of all people, a reverend?

And it comes time to share my story. What brings you here, he asks. I begin to talk. And so quickly I notice how much information I must explain - about the meanings of movements and organizations, the differences of various groups, the intricacies of the world I live in every day of my life, and how this has anything at all to do with me sitting in an office on the ground floor of an Upper East Side hospital.

It gets me thinking. Thinking about how we build up as so important otherwise meaningless aspects of our lives. How we come to believe that otherwise inconsequential details, unimportant barriers and trivial distinctions, are actually significant. How we frame our life around walls built out of playing cards, which can come crashing down with the smallest gust of wind.

I sit there, explaining what it means to live life on the fringe, yet begin to wonder what it all means in the first place.

In a post-modern world of fluid identities and revolving loyalties, maybe these terms and distinctions and entire systems of ways through which I have come to define my life are, actually, nothing - merely a sum total of hot air that disperses as soon as its container opens up.

Because, to Reverend David, at the end of the day I'm just a Jew. And at the beginning of the day I'm a Jew. Just one simple Jew, trying to live his otherwise simple Jewish life.

I wake up and aim to craft a daylong adventure in learning, prayer and world-fixing. I make friends, I lose some, and enjoy each day to its fullest. I change people, people change me, and the world goes on. Problems are fixed, hopes are achieved, and we come one step closer to Redemption.

It was thanks to Reverend David that I began to achieve some perspective. Perspective on what success may look like. Perspective on what it means to be you. Perspective on how to be patient and roll with the punches - how to take a step outside your life and look back in, unencumbered by other people's definitions of "correct" and "how things are supposed to be."

It let's you be free. Free like the homeless man who just spent five minutes of his time drawing a picture of this Jew typing on his computer. Free like the odd mix of people sitting across the subway car from me - the shaved-headed woman, the bearded chubby man talking about joints, the kippah-wearer dancing on the car's pole - all friends, all Jews, all challenging assumptions and standard notions of reality.

Da Chagim

Pushed Out

In a joking manner, so many times over the last few months, he turns to me and says, "Let's start a new movement." And I smile, and affirm his desires, and walk away...

Yesterday I sat at a table and reconnected, over coffee, with an old friend. We had last spoken five years back, at a camp on a farm in the hills of New York. In fact, we never did speak much. But then life got in the way, time passed, and, low and behold, we're now living in the same city and working together. Fancy that.

Tell me your story.

She too is a rabbinical student, only a few short blocks uptown from me. And, she too came from the world with which I am so familiar: NFTY, Kutz, crazy reformers with a mission...

But she took another path. She took the whole "choice through knowledge" mantra literally, and started learning. And her choices often led to regular observance in very traditional ways.

She prays regularly. She keeps kosher. She keeps Shabbat. Her life is centered around Torah, worship and acts of lovingkindness. She is a serious Jew. It just so happens that the seriousness by which she lives her Jewish life often takes an observant, ritualistic and traditional form.

Another success story? Not quite. Because as time went on she came to felt more and more ostracized within her own Reform community. You can't do that! But she did. I'm Reform, what are you? She thought her answer was the same.

And more time passed and, soon enough, she realized that as much as ideologically she was a product of Reform Judaism, the differences between her actions and those normative within the movement created a gulf that could not be crossed.

Five years later, when she received an invitation to an alumni reunion at her old camp, the place that had first set her forth on her Jewish journey, demanding that, to be part of the community, she drive and spend money on Shabbat, she knew that, though she had not left it, she was no longer part of the movement. It was no longer a union that included her.

She was, in her words, pushed out. She was told she no longer belonged. She was told there was not room for her. She was told she was something else. And she had no need to fight it.

Because, though she had connections with individuals, she had no special allegiance to an organizational umbrella. She felt no obligation to the camps and systems that had reared her. She felt allegiance to God, and the Jewish people. And the system within which she served them did not matter to her in the slightest.

But for me it does. Or it has. And I sat there, listening to her story, moved by the freedom with which she has floated through the Jewish world, jealous. In some sense of my reality, I wished I could be her. But then I felt lost.

And I got worried. Worried that allowing myself to be pushed out would mean raising a white flag, and accepting a status quo that I have spent eight years laboring to change; worried that giving up would mean abandoning so many students who have put so much faith in me; worried that giving up would mean that everything I have taught and fought for over the last two years was a lie.

My anxieties produce an image in my head of kids - kids with crazy Jewish things like strings hanging from their shirts and a passion for Jewish living unparalleled in this world - kids standing there, watching me leave, and disillusioned that the man that told them to fight had himself been defeated. I had an image in my head of adults - adults with love to share and resources to give - standing there waiting to continue to be so supportive of me but without me there to receive the help.

And I thought of that man and his urgings for revolution this summer. And I'm left wondering where to go from here.

Giving in to Gravity

I have been unequivocal over the years about my disdain for Chabad: their idolatrous reverence for Schneerson, their in-your-face attitude towards fellow Jews, their superstitious and, at times, exceedingly irrational understanding of text and tradition.

Make my point? I think so.

Nonetheless, I came across the following video this morning. Not only is it amusing, but I think it represents an enviable approach to outreach and teaching.

Bring it to them, put it on their level, and you will succeed... [Extra points for finding the error!]

Meltdown

Four months ago, on a boring Pesah afternoon, I ventured out to the vast unknown of Long Island to seek advice from a friend and mentor. Together we wandered the halls of an indentity-less suburban mall as I poured out my sould in frustration and yearning. What am I doing? Why do I care? What's the point?

There were so many questions and so few answers. On that very normal Tuesday my hopes and dreams of a Jewish future, of a Jewish now, came crashing down at the hands of a pesimistic reality. Surrounded by what can so often seem like mediocrity and apathy and ignorance, I gave up. I let it all out. I put it back inside. I left Long Island and, with it, my frustrations.

And then, three months later, I sat on the farm in Warwick, NY, wasting my way through a meeting, burning inside. I don't want to be that! Get me out of here! I left, and, over drinks with someone I thought I could trust and look up to, again, poured out my heart. I don't think I want to do this.

Yet I moved on. I found my joys and had an amazing summer. I learned, I grew, I taught and taught some more. I made friends, I built connections. I pushed and pushed and pushed and pushed, all the while loving the process but totally unclear as to how it would fit into my future life.

What am I going to do with this title? Why do I want it? Can I accomplish all that I want without it? Do I believe in it? Do I believe in the process? Do I care still?

I pick up the pieces and move on. This morning I sit in shul and, unexpectedly, get to watch as my mentor leads others in prayer in his own unique style of davening - no institutional memory or organizational rules to worry about this time. And, all in all, it's lovely, and meaningful, and nice. Tov.

But I watch how others relate to him. And I look at all the empty chairs in the dark room. And slowly I become more and more dissilusioned. I forget why I care. I miss the community that I feel like i once had. I feel confused and alone and lost.

And I walk home, down the hill that is Flatbush Avenue, past the urban decay, past the fast food chains, past the gentrified restaurants, all the while so lost in my thoughts that the forty minute stroll passes in an instant.

Why do I care about Jewishness? At times when observance seems so futile, so lonely, why do I keep up the fight? Why not just give up? And, more importantly, what am I working towards? What is missing from this picture? What will make it better?

My internal struggles compound with my present dilemnas and, at times, I am totally bewildered.

I rebel against all that is my Jewish reality. I use the phone. I throw off my kipah and head into Manhattan. I wander the aisles of K-mart and, God forbid, spend some money. The ground does not open up in front of me, I am not smitten, yet something doesn't feel right about it.

But then I think about those who inspire me. I read some blogs, I check the latest messages sent my way, I think of times of inspiration - of all night long Torah studies, of radical community building in Brooklyn, of Shabbat in the park, of minyans all over the city - and I am put back at ease.

The job, no, the life, can suck. It can be hard as hell. It can seem purposeless and futile. And it can be lonelier than anything in the world.

But even during the latest meltdown, somewhere deep inside me I know why I still do it. I know why I care. And I know the people who make it all worth it.

I cherish those memories, and move on. I start to think of what's next. The sun is going down. Time to make havdalah.