thinking jewish

What I Like

Probably the most rewarding educational experience I've had since leaving the hills of Berkeley and beginning this Jewish endeavor came in the form of a class on liturgy taught by a former American living in Jerusalem.

Not all of my classmates liked the teacher. In fact, many could not stand her. But not me.

She set high standards and expected us to meet them. She imagined what could be and then did what she needed to make it what is. She challenged conventional notions of how things are simply by deciding that they would no longer be that way.

I cannot under estimate the affect she had on me.

But, over the last few weeks, I have become somewhat self-concious of the way that some of what I write in this space might be taken. I've begun to realize how others may read my desires to "stir the pot" of today's status quo more as ceaseless whining by a guy who can't get his way.

Certainly this isn't the case. I know how the world works and how things are and just how much careful dedicated wrk it will take to bridge the gap of how things are to how they might be. All the soapbox preaching that I do is while standing on the ground, hand in hand with those to whom I speak. All complaints come with the caveat that, sure, I don't know that I could really do things much better.

I spend my life working to change things; I am, by nature, a fixer.
But that also doesn't mean that there isn't good already to be prpud of. So, this fall eve, I give you a list of the good, of the things I like.

Here goes nothing...

• I like the wealth of Jewish history literature that is published in this country. There is no area of our past that is left withpit attention. The opportunities yo study are endless.

• I like the way that the Upper West Side's B'nai Jeshurun brings music into its davening. It's complex, liturgically respectful and absolutely beautiful.

• I like the Galilee. I think it is the moet beautiful place in the world. There is no place I'd rather hike, pray, or spend a Shabbat.

• I like the blogosphere, and specifically the chain of Jewish blogs of which I am a part. This is the wave of the future. An amazingly productive way to publish and hash through thoughts and ideas, as long as we continue to harness it correctly.

• I like Ha'avodah Shebalev. It represents the best (the fullest, most well-thought through, most intellectually vgorous) of liberal liturgical traditions out there. Period.

• I like Shabbats in Central Park, and seriously miss them from my routine now that I live in Brooklyn.

I like lots of things, just how they are. But that doesn't mean they can't be better. It doesn't mean we shouldn't raise the bar even higher to seek perfection. We never reach that, but it must be our goal. Otherwise, the messianic era has already arrived, or bringing Messiah is completely out of our hands.

I believe neither. Time to get back to work.

Pro Israel, Pro Earth

Despite, or maybe because of, four years of activism at my alma mater where, it seemed, you couldn't get me to shut up about Israel, for the last while I've been much more reluctant, especially in this space, to vocalize my opinions about the State. Not because I don't care, and not because I lack opinions. Not because I don't spend hours each day following the news and reading Op-Eds.

But, mostly, I reached a point of being jaded. I was fed up with arguing, fed up with defending what I knew to be true. And, more than that, I was fed up with the situation. I came to a realization that it's not going away for a very, very long time.

And so, despite years of rallying the lone voice of pro-Israel, liberal support, despite months in the state itself protesting on the streets of Jerusalem and in front of the Knesset for a hard decision that had to be made about Gaza, despite public speaking and photo-ops and letters to the editor that fill a drawer, my voice on the subject faded to but a whisper.

I guess, subconsciously, I began to pretend that everyone shared my view. I knew better. Not everyone, especially them religious amongst us, is willing to see the Jews relinquish control over some of the most important Jewish sites in the world, to see to the evacuation of 200,000 people in the name of something that might, I repeat, might, bring peace. People differ in opinion. They don't like the wall that I like. They like the settlements that I don't.

Fine.

But sometimes there's news that strikes me as just so ridiculous, so absurd, that I can think of nothing else to do but yell at the top of my lungs. Come on!

It appears that, finally, the Olmert government has decided to do something tangible about the fact that rockets continue to fly across the border between Israel and Gaza. This has been going on for years. The only thing that has ever been done in response is either military incursions that have resulted in dead bodies and angry terrorists, or limited border closures that resulted in no dead bodies, but angry terrorists, starving people, and an angry public opinion.

Fine, despite the clear moral right, Israel should not respond militarily to these rockets - it's just not possible to accomplish anything. And full blockades of all Gaza's imports is an unnecessary form of collective punishment. It may make you feel good, but that's about it.

So here comes the latest idea that, really, just makes you (well, me) feel good, but actually seems to make sense. Block off the oil.

You could argue (and I believe, should) that Israel has an ethical obligation to do all it can to ensure that Gazans are fed and have water to drink - they are people, and Israel is, relatively, rich.

But there is no moral obligation on Israel's part to make life in Gaza easy. And that's just what this does.

No end to rockets? Fine. Walk to school.

It's certainly not collective punishment - no country has a legal responsibility to let goods pass through its borders! That is a gift, one which will no longer be giving.

And, most importantly of all, this is a time of focussed attention on global warming. Oil leads to carbon dioxide and carbon dioxide leads to global heating.

So, I say, let's take one from the Gazan notebook and stop using petroleum. The Earth, and God, and certainly our children, will thank us for it later.

Camp

I bring my plate of dinner to the nearest table, sit down and introduce myself. The woman across from me looks up, introduces herself and says, immediately, with a look of confusion on her face: "Are you old enough to be marrying them?"

She refers, of course, to the bride and groom, the very reason why this group of 100 are here for a weekend, huddled inside away from the rain, in an old house on a ranch in the Catskills.

We pulled up just in time for Shabbat, a retreat of sorts, with each of us in our own cabin, a schedule of activities to fill the day.

It's just like camp, only not.

My time is filled with interactions amusing enough that they merit writing about, interesting enough that they merit introspection.

I talk with the bride's brother, visiting from his year long stint in Japan. Next for him is a six month program of studying in Yeshiva, he tells me. Nice!

This was the guy, they worried so many months ago, who was being coerced into an abhorrent Jewish lifestyle by an AISH-like program that just "wanted him to be Orthodox." I joined in the criticism and worry at the time, "they just brainwash people!" I thought.

I remember their affect on my sister, so many years ago... But, it seems, she turned out alright afterall. Her Jewish life is more committed and well thought through than ever!

And same with this brother. He wants to commit himself to more study! Sure, I find the beliefs and certain practices of these neo-Orthodox organizations to be troubling, totally out of line from my understanding of the world, but maybe they aren't all bad, I begin to think.

So then why the immediate reaction of negtivity to their work? Maybe it's fear. I, we, fear them for their success. They get people caring and excited and yearning for more, only not in liberal settings - not caring in the way we want, we need, them to.

We fear them because they are, it seems, better than us, and they change people in ways we don't want them to be changed.

And then I make the connection. For two years I spent my summers teaching, inspiring and larning with young adults, who took their newfound passion for Judaism and Jewish life back with them to the far corners of the US, only to have their home communities complain back to us about what we'd done.

And, rather than stand up for what's good and right, to yell that our work is good and holy, the bosses backed off and said to tone it down.

Because they were scared, just like we all are, of that which is different, and, even more so, of that which poses a threat to us. We blind ourselves to the greatness of others' actions because we see it threatening our own.

Damn. Let's fix that, k?

Another Quote for the Books

I sit at a desk in an office, in a chair in front of a computer, and mindlessly pass time instead of getting the work I should be doing, done. It's no secret. My boss reads these pages.

Roll with the punches.

And then I come upon some writings of old - letters and rants and conversations from an exceedingly difficult period nearly three months ago. Has it been that long? I find explanations and rekindle old emotions.

I do what I can to escape today's rain, to escape this week's fires, to escape this week's hospital visits.

And, in the cacophony of voices since silent, I come upon a quote in response to this summer's Jewish Week article. I am still, weekly, reminded of what an impact that one article made - of the vast circles in which it stirred conversation, of how it pushed people to think and to challenge everything they thought they knew about Jewishness and liberalism and observance.

A reaction blog-post at The Forward has this to say:

Personal autonomy means being able to make choices about observance — and nonobservance. But being Jewish means wrestling with a tradition, a difficult and challenging tradition, one that we did not necessarily choose and certainly one that was not tailor-made for our personal preferences or contemporary convenience. And so autonomy, in a Jewish context, shouldn’t be understood as license to simply ignore or blithely strip away the parts of our tradition that are inconvenient (as the Reform movement’s rationalizing forefathers did as they wrote much of Judaism’s ritual and halachic richness out of their tradition). Even when we choose not to observe traditions, aren’t we still obligated to grapple with them?

How right he is. That's what I think, and have thought, for so long. What about you?

So I keep the fire burning, keep pushing the thought wheel around in circles, trying to make sense of it all. I keep asking the questions, making the connections, trying to move forward in this shaky and confusing world.

As they say, "Don't let the light go out. It's lasted for so many years."

Amen, v'amen.

Heschelian Wisdom

Everyone's favorite Brit and Rabbi, Michael Marmur, writes in the Jerusalem Post's "BlogCentral" about denominationalism, it's problems, and its reality in Israel.

Check it out here.

Most moving, I find, is his opening paragraph, which discusses the following incident in the life of Abraham Joshua Heschel:

"It is told of the great thinker, writer and activist Abraham Joshua Heschel (who died in 1972), that he was once asked whether he was an Orthodox Jew, a Conservative Jew, or a Reform Jew. There was some logic to the question: ordained as a teenager in Warsaw in an Ultra-Orthodox context, he had gone on to receive rabbinic ordination at the Liberal Seminary in Berlin, and was associated for most of his career with the flagship institution of Conservative Judaism. Heschel's reply was resonant: "I do not regard myself as a noun in search of an adjective."

Enjoy.

This is Where Ideas Come to Die

She sits there, looking at me with a blank stare, and then finally answers.

"I can't sit around all day studying everything there is to know about Shabbat and then make educated choices about what I believe is right. In the end we all just conform to the community's standards!"

In two sentences, the woman on the other end of the room said so much. She said that she is unobservant and, for the most part, has little interest in changing that. She said she belongs to a non-observant community, and is fine with that. She's OK with the status quo. She's OK with how things are. She's OK with what is.

Given, she's the student here, and I'm the teacher. She chooses to come learn with, or from, me each week. It just so happens that this week and last and next and maybe five more we're discussing Shabbat, but so quickly the conversations are hitting walls, being rerouted by mental fences.

Because as much as these students can talk about what's "nice" or what is "supposed to be," they are unable, literally unable, and maybe also unwilling to see Shabbat as an experience, a time, a castle, that actually exists today, in Brooklyn, on their streets, in their lives. When they speak about Shabbat "happening," it is always either in reference to Israel or the Orthodox world.

Out here in Liberal land, their speech patterns lead one to believe, we are practicing an experiment in convenience and inauthenticity. And we don't really care, nor should we. We're Americans, after all. And in America, we don't have Shabbat, we have the weekend.

So it's here, in a nicely carpeted study on the streets of Brooklyn, where Reform theology dies. We gave the people the power to make educated decisions for themselves. But the reality is they don't want to. RamBam was right, and so was Kravitz, and so was Streisand. We can be smart and intellectual and philosophize about the true nature of God and life and the world.

But people are people, and people need law.

And without the conviction or the ability to formulate how we are going to wake up and act Jewish and save the world each day, I find myself hating the very community I try to serve. Because Judaism is about a passion, about drive - about a need to see the world differently.

It is!

All we need is an army of fighters, people willing to show the way, to inspire the masses to see the beauty, to see God, to see the history of our people, our stories and the wide body of laws and customs that have come together over the millenia to help us make meaning.

Time to move on. Time to start another day. Time to go out there and change the world.

Come on baby. Light my fire.

Quote of the Day

"Jews embracing Jewish ritual practice are not abandoning commitments to the world. Strikingly, many of the same Jews who are laying t’fillin, building sukkot and observing Shabbat in more traditionally halachic ways are also the same ones who are volunteering in Honduras, raising consciousness about Darfur and working to save our environment. Today we are blessed with numerous examples of communities where the commitment to Jewish ritual is practiced side-by-side with an equally strong commitment to the world at large. Some of the most dynamic prayer communities drawing hundreds of young people in urban areas across the country are experiencing success precisely because of their emphasis in both ritual and ethics, unapologetically embracing Jewish life and applying that same commitment to the world at large."

-Rabbi Leon Morris, Eilu v'Eilu

Break Time

At the hospital, the rooms at either end of each hall hold the isolation patients. Before you can go in, you must wear a mask. The mask protects the patient from things that will kill them - they have limited immune systems and lack the ability to heal if they get sick. The mask holds in all your germs, it creates a buffer between you and the outside world.

You are fine, but you wear a mask to protect others. The first line of defense hangs from your ears and gets in the way of the meaningful contact you want to have with the other people in the room.

Those type of connections can be incredibly difficult to make happen, even without the masks.

Today I walked into the room of a kid - twenty two years old - who has spent the last year and a half of his life battling cancer. And he sits there, in his bed, eating sausages and cheese; I think to myself "Treif!" but for this Catholic, it is nothing more than the first food he's been able to stomach all day.

Because, coming from his arm is a tube, a tube hooked up to a tall machine that is pumping chemicals into his bloodstream. And he sits there and takes it.

And so I knock on the door and invite myself in. I try to make conversation, but all the while wonder who the hell I am to think I can help this kid. He's my peer, he's not my patient! I'm more nervous than he is, I'm the more scared of this pair.

They call me a chaplain? What are they thinking?

And then I remember the surgical masks, and that 3,000 miles away surgical masks are being worn for another reason. Fires burn out of control, and slowly make their approach towards my family's homes. There, the surgical masks keep the evils out, rather than in. The smoke is enough to suffocate, the fear enough to create panic.

So it all comes together to form the crux of an utterly difficult day. I leave work early, hop on the train, and head home. I try to clear my mind, get news from the home front, and speak to friends.

I sign online and am immediately inundated with messages of religious epiphanies, burning desires to change the world, and frustrations with organizations that run our lives. I try to offer advice, but realize just how tired I am.

So I end the conversations, steer them to the more benign doings of day to day life, and take a break. A break for the day, a Shabbat on Monday. Cause I need it. But just today.

There's too much work to do to break for any longer.

Post-Shabbos Wisdom

"Still, the Reform movement, like many movements of our time, is afflicted by the forces of apathy, mediocrity, sheer laziness and the numbing of the collective soul so that many remain completely unmoved, or worse uninterested in Israel’s compelling narrative and unassuming of their responsibility towards the Jewish collective in both the Diaspora and in the Jewish state."

- Aaron Press Taylor

Do-Over

I sit in the back of an old Upper East Side diner. In front of me is a hal-empty cup of stale coffee, a few crumbs of dropped corn bread.

"I hope I never taught you that our community actually lives up to the ideals it preaches," the man sitting across from me says with a tone of sympathy, mixed with the slightest bit of remorse.

He, of all people, knows this game all too well. He knows what it feels like to be stabbed in the back, to, overnight become a leper of the community, to feel so sad and dissolusioned because the gap between our aspirations and actual situations is too wide.

So I sit in the booth, and listen to his stories. I hear his struggle, his story, and am myself redeemed.

Life goes on. Things fall apart, but people are there to put them back together. And in putting things back together, they end up being improved beyond what once seemed like mere fantasy.

That's the part of it all that involves our insatiable need for change - a constant struggle for improvement, for near-perfection. This I've learned from the best. Walking around each day I do all I can to be a maverick, to be an instigator and an inspiration, a motivator and a mover.

I can't help it; I will never be happy in any other role.

Sometimes it leaves to deep pain and disilussionment, feelings of loneliness and ineptitude. But the world is to broken to accept anything less; there are too many others ready for a fight.

The coffee is getting cold, it's now time to go on my way. "You ever see 'City Slickers?'" my breakfast partner asks. I haven't.

But I soon learn what I've missed. It involves a man, transplanted to the desert, pulled out of an unhappy marriage and suddenly able to start again from scratch.

"The best part in the film is the advce this man gets," my partner tells me. "How many times do we get to start over in Ife?" He paraphrases the scene to me. "It's a blessing! Be happy, enjoy it - you're lucky!"

He's right. Do-over's never happen in real life. And then they do. And as hard as it can sometimes be to see them as such, they're almost always a gift.

The hard part is just figuring out what to do with your unexpected present.