thinking jewish

Fair + Tax = FairTax

I'm not usually one to care much about Republican Debates, especially not in this field of candidates, but while catching up on the news this morning, I was struck by one issue that was dealt with at full-force last night: the FairTax.

Almost two years ago now, I read the book "FairTax" which, more than anything, is a manifesto by its authors demanding serious change in the way we collect and raise taxes in America. The authors suggest getting rid of the income tax and the IRS entirely and replacing it with a consumption based tax similar to sales tax.

At first glance, this seems odd, if not annoying. Then, when you look at the actual numbers, you get mad. FairTax means something close to a 25% sales tax on every purchase! That's criminal! It will make us all poor and destitute!

Well, maybe not.

Look at the figures, or read the book, and you begin to really understand what is currently going on with our money and taxes, and how the FairTax not only makes our tax code infinitely simpler, but it actually is more fair, and CHEAPER, while collecting the same amount of money (if not more) for the government.

Here are the figures:

• Right now, we all pay income taxes and payroll taxes and SS taxes, etc. etc. etc. Business also pay corporate taxes. The system to calculate these taxes costs the economy billions of dollars and individuals hundreds if not thousands of dollars each year. The system is no fair, places a disproportionate burden on the poor, and has HUGE loopholes.
• The FairTax system gets rid of all of this, and, instead, places a $.23 tax on every dollar spent on new goods and services.
• Without the corporate taxes that are currently in place, prices are expected, over the long-run, to fall almost 20%. This means that the change in prices of goods and services pre- and post-FairTax are nearly unchanged.
• The tax is collected in the same painless, easy way that sales taxes are currently collected.
• To ensure that the poor are not burdened by the tax, every American family is sent a pre-bate each month equal to the amount of FairTax that would be spent by their size family on goods and services up to the point of poverty. That means that the poor are essentially paying no taxes, and everyone else only pay taxes to the extent that they choose to spend disposable income.

I could go on, and on, but I won't. Read the book. Go to the website. Learn about it for yourself. Then, start lobbying our Democratic friends to support this common-sense, progressive, liberal change in our political system as well!

Facts on the Ground

So the underground movement which everyone knows about but everyone wants to ignore and no one is willing to make a cumulative assessment about has finally gained the publicity it needs to hit the ground running: the New York Times wrote about it - on the front page of the National section at that! Now it must be true.

Young Jews in their twenties and early thirties, empowered by Day School educations in the eighties and nineties are increasingly venting their frustration with institutionalized synagogues that seem closed to change, innovation and common sense by taking matters into their own hands. They're creating minyanim that are committed to an intact liturgy, centered around aesthetically beautiful (often musical) prayer, framed by halakhic understanding.

In college they (we) learned what leadership was the hard way. "You want to pray on Shabbat?" our Hillel directors asked us. "Great, then lead the minyan."

We were the experts. The power was in our hands. Money was not an issue. When we needed guidance, we knew who to seek. And everyone else stood back and applauded our efforts: our successes and our failures.

So now, like the hilltop youth of Israel a generation ago, Jews are again taking the Jewish future into their own hands, using the models that they know so well to help them - the internet, a living room, and good food - creating facts on the ground that recreate reality from the ground up.

In so many ways, this is also what we are doing with Brooklyn Jews. Our focus is more on learning and social gathering, but our rallying cry is the same: meet our community on their level, in or outside of the synagogue building; don't allow limiting assumptions; keep trying new things.

Now's the time to read the article. You can find it here.

Now's the time to think for some answers. Now's the time to challenge the status-quo. Now's the time to think outside of the box.

Thoughts?

Helping Hand

In the loud and noisy hubbub of the Machane Yehuda market on a Friday morning, it was only by a chance of fate that I saw the cell phone fall to the ground with a small sound of splat as it hit the pavement. I bent down and picked up the Zach Morris-style brick of a cell phone.

Great. Now what?

"I saw who it fell from," a voice echos through the tunnels of my ear drum. "There! The man in the black hat!"

With information about as helpful as being told to look for the Jew, I sprinted off towards the unfortunate owner who had now, unknowingly, dropped his unfortunate attempt at a cell phone.

Success. Adoni, ani choshev sh'ze shelcha... With a look of confusion, the man takes his phone and thanks me. We wish each other Shabbat shalom and are on our separate ways.

Fast forward, er, rewind, to the night before, Thanksgiving dinner, as sit in a Jerusalem living room full of colleagues I have now just met for the first time. And one, is frustrated. He is not satisfied with the religious environment amongst his classmates. Many of them aren't.

But he can't figure out what to do. He doesn't know what the next step is - how can he affect change, how can he get something new started. Something like, say, mincha.

Bing! A light goes off in my head. I flash back, three years ago, when I sat and talked with a teacher, a mentor, about my own frustrations, and she gave me the gift of a simple idea. You want to pray with your classmates? Round them up, promise to be quick and to the point, and do it! Don't hold back!

So we did it. And with that, HUC's seven-minute (daily) mincha was born. It wasn't revolutionary. We did not change worlds. But it was a statement. It was a success. And it was so simple.

So I, in a pay-it-forward moment, passed on the idea to my newly met colleague. And he ate it up. Of course! he said. It seemed too easy. So obvious. But never thought of.

We'll see what happens.

In these moments of unexpected interaction, it seems we have the power to tip the scales of our reality forward, towards something better, towards something easier, something nicer, something not what is today.

And, so often, all that holds us back is fear: fear of trying something new, fear of thinking outside of the box, fear of running after the unknown, of interacting with a complete stranger.

But, if we can overcome that fear - and we always can - we have the power to change worlds.

Dancing in the Kitchen

Erev Shabbat, I find myself in a random apartment on a hill of the Holy City, surrounded by others, my peers, filling the space that is, normally, some one's home. Psalm after psalm we sing through, welcoming Shabbat in a wholey "traditional" manner. Minus the guitar, minus the egalitarianism, minus the shoeless feet.

A sign, posted on the door of the apartment, asks us to take off our shoes. My partner in Shabbat welcoming is annoyed. I can't believe that. They're so, ew!

Fast forward a few days, past the melted havdalah wick, past the Sunday of actual work. Past meetings and encounters and two days of living in a foreign, yet so-much-like-home, land. I spend hours upon hours just taking in the sights and smells and sounds of this place - I have no goal other than to "not do." In the hours when I'm not fulfilling my job's responsibilities from that free land on the other side of the world, when I'm not meeting with old teachers and mentors and friends who have been gone for far too long, I'm thinking. Thinking about this place, thinking about my life. Thinking about everything around me and how to make meaning of it all.

I walk down Rechov Rothchild in Tel Aviv, I sit in Cafe Hillel in Jerusalem's German Colony. I drive through the country in a taxi-van. I talk, and I eat, and, most importantly, I listen.

This place is insane. Isn't it so beautiful. That's what it means to make aliyah. This is just what I needed. I love it here. Welcome to Israel! Isn't this fun. Enjoy. You're welcome. Please! Please. I can't believe they said that. It's such a lie. In fifty year's we'll look back and cry.

And then, welcome the depressing...

Israel is doomed to fail. I hate this place. I feel like the Movement sold me a bunch of lies. What am I supposed to do?

And yet, amongst all the hate and hurt and frustration, there remains a naive optimism, a hope, tikva, have you. I try to make sense of it all and, in a flash, I realize the problem. We live in a perpetual state of fantasy.

The ideas, the streets, the people, the language, the religion, it all intersects in an explosion criss-crossing the absurd, the hopeful, the fake, and the too real. I can't walk down the sidewalks of Tel Aviv without thinking Herzl, and Pinsker, and the United Nations. I sit in a cafe in Rechavia and think Six Day War, German Enlightenment, and Eliezer Ben Yehuda.

But the pastry I eat tastes so good. The espresso infuses my veins, wakes me up, and makes the day so much more real. It forces me to peal away the facade of fantasy that is influencing every moment of my thought. And then, what am I left with?

Not with ideals, not with goals, not with movements, and not with large forces. It leaves me, a twenty-five year old Jew, plopped down in a city built on sand dunes, in a bar, with a friend from so many years ago.

But I can't face the reality. I can't exist in the shallow nothingness of a normal night out. Because, as I leave the bar, I look at all these faces and I think, "I'm surrounded by my people! These are the ones I'm devoting my life to serving! And here they are, all drinking beer, and talking. That one, with the dread locks, and this one with the short blond hair."

Fast forward to this morning. I sit in a coffee shop, at a table, full from breakfast, with a teacher, a mentor, a sage. And I ask why she taught me lies, why she told me it would all be OK, when, in fact, it might not be. "Isn't that the role of a good teacher?" she said to me, "To teach her students of a world of fantasy of what could, of what should be, rather than the world that is? That is what will inspire them to change things! That is what will get them to change the world!"

And that moment of sublime intuition reminds me of that night, so many long days ago, in an apartment, on a hill, in the City of God, the City of Gold. Where, surrounded by strangers united in a goal, I sat near a corner and watched as a girl, a student, an American, a Jew danced and moved and sang and welcomed Shabbat while barefoot, in the kitchen. There she stood, there she moved, as she transcended the reality of the moment to create, in some weird way, the fantasy she wanted to see exist. She did it. Shabbat came, it was beautiful, the Messiah was that much closer, at that moment, than ever before. She made it real. Her act brought us all redemption.

Now it's our turn.

Ami

I walk the allies of the crowded shuk on a Friday morning. They yell at me to buy their peppers, and their pita, and their olives. An Ethiopian woman keeps me safe. An Iraqi wants me to eat fish this Shabbat.

Over at the famous bakery, a young New Yorker yaps at the man behind the counter when she notices chocolate oozing from her box of goodies.

"Can you close it?" she demands.

The man looks at another behind the counter and asks, "Eh, ma ze closit?"

Down at the mall, we go in search of perfect fitted sheets. We pick them out, and the saleswoman encourages us to buy one more thing to be eligible for a sale special. "Asiti lecha balegan, aval ze k'dai!" she says. "I made a mess for you, but it's recommended!"

And everywhere I go, "Shabbat shalom! Shabbat shalom! Shabbat shalom!"

The minutes are passing, and the sun is ready to set. The city is quite, waiting for the alarm to sound.

These are my people, and this is my town. And I hate so much of it, but could not love other parts more.

I spend a week here, mostly meeting up with teachers and friends, sitting in coffee shops writing essays - a working vacation, I call it. Hardly a vacation at home.

There's too much to study, too much to take in. Too much to learn. So much indeed.

But these are my people, and this is my town. It's almost Shabbat, the bride is calling.

Shabbat shalom! Shabbat shalom! Shabbat shalom!

Shabbat shalom.

Lo Hablo Espanol

A tough guy, sitting two rows ahead of me, has a skinny beard outlining his face, and a diamond stud in his left ear. He wears athletic pants, a white undershirt, and a beanie on his head. Shortly after the flight attendants begin serving a meal (lunch? breakfast? dinner? who knows) he begins a bondage act. Leather, wound tightly, a weird sex fantasy in front of everyone on the plane.

But no. They're tefilin. And I, somewhere off the eastern coast of Spain, am heading towards that place where Jews pretend to be normal, where the language I read in Torah also buys me porn DVDs, the place I called home before I'd ever lived there.

This is my fourth trip in two years; two years since I payed Jerusalem city taxes and argued with bureaucracy for a living. But this is the first time I go without an agenda. I have no busload of forty partying college students to look after. No bus to ride from border to border of this small country in ten short days. No photo moments, no schedules, no obscene wake up hours. And, thank God, no hiking up Masada.

I go to escape, for the first time, the craziness of the last four months of my life. I go there to see the people I love after nearly half a year. I go to shore up support from old teachers. I go there to nourish my soul.

And I feel a little bad about it. Iberia Airlines does not observe Shabbat (why not!?), so when they change their flight schedule, arriving Friday night in Tel Aviv only means a cheaper landing fee. They put me on the only other flight they could, one which left New York Wednesday night. So, a trip that was meant to be all fun without missing any work responsibilities meant missing a night of teaching. Damn. Two steps forward, one step back.

I'm getting there. Slowly.

Life has a way of smoothing out the messy bumps. Through time, dialogue and process, the madness works itself out. But it takes work, and commitment. Which is what brings me to this plain, next to this man with overly large elbows gnawing at my gut.

In a few hours I will touch down in the land of my fathers. I go to rediscover myself. I go to breath. I go to smile. I go to set things right.

I can't wait. Amen v'amen.

Quote of the Day

"So many Goyim, developed such a sudden enthusiasm for Judaism that had I been a Mohel instead of a chaplain, I believe that fighting on the New Guinea front would have ceased for a couple of weeks."

Military Chaplain, Rabbi Eugene Sack, later to be rabbi of Congregation Beth Elohim, speaking to the attempts by servicemen to commandeer his Passover supplies of wine during the holiday in New Guinea.

We Are Family

Recently, on Kid Nation, the citizens of Bonanza City came to realize that their souls were malnourished, living in a city devoid of religion. So the town council set the task of making them decide how to incorporate their traditions and beliefs into their town: might they each go about their own particular ways, or should they all come together for a religious service, adding their own individual traditions together into a universalist celebration?

Tough decisions, let alone for children.

Well, Alex, being the brilliant 9-year-old that he is, sets out to take a survey of Bonanza City, interested in seeing the religious make-up of the town. There are Christians, Atheists, Hindus, and, of course, Jews.

Now, notice the content of the Jewish part of his survey:

Zach: "I'm Jewish"

Alex: "What kind? Orthodox or Progressive?"

Interesting...

At the shul yesterday, I was amazed by my surroundings. Here, in the heart of a Classical Reform Temple, Reform in the way God wanted it, one with soaring windows and awesome architecture, where the rabbis were once called "Reverend Doctor" and the pews are straighter and harder than, well, something straight and hard. Here, in this of all synagogues, you have a child celebrating his Bar Mitzvah, and a minyan of synagogue members, and across the street fifty families, children and their parents, celebrating Shabbat through serious learning and creative prayer, and, back across the street, fifty some-odd twenty and thirty-somethings davening Shacharit, to the tune of Carlebach and Yemenite chants from a siddur published by the (Conservative) Rabbinical Assembly, reading the entire weekly parasha, and listening to a drash by none other than Jonathan Safran Froer.

And sure, there are those who don't get what's going on there, why and how all these different groups of differing ideologies coexist in one Shabbat and in one (well, two) building(s) without the world exploding. But it marks something beautiful, something bigger, something so twenty-first century.

There are those who argue the end of movementalism in America, that denominational titles are unhelpful, at best, to describing and actualizing one's Jewish identity and that most Jews do not actually identify with one over the other. They say that this generation doesn't need to decide between the convenient boxes of "Reform" or "Conservative," that we're all made up of a lot of grey and little black or white.

Ideologically, they argue that, really, the only meaningful distinction between Jews is whether or not they are Orthodox, that the only true division between Jews is that one. This seems to be what our friend, nine year-old Alex, believed of the Jewish world to which he does not belong.

Maybe it works, but I'm not sold. We still argue over many other serious matters: like who wrote Torah, and the authority of tradition, and whether there's even such a thing as halakha any longer.

Fine.

But we can disagree over all those things, fight, argue and battle 'till the end of days over whether one path is better for the Jewish now and the Jewish future than another and, even as we do so, even as we disagree so fundamentally on many things, we can still exist together. There's no reason we need to divorce each other, live in different houses and pretend they are there, and we're here, and we have so much not in common.

Because, really, we have so much in common. Together we can build so much more, accomplish such higher goals. We can open the door of options and growth potential and teach the rest of the world to come join us in the grey, not to stay comfortable in the facade of black and white.

And all this, we learn from Alex, the short Asian kid with one large tooth who is a fine citizen in his own right. Bonanza City should be proud.

Red Lentil Stew

I walk onto the subway and am overwhelmed by the black. Black here, black there, black everywhere. Hats, pants, jackets and shoes. Like I've boarded in Borough Park, instead of Park Slope.

There's one empty seat, so I take it, next to a man shuckling in his seat as he studies this week's parasha. Fine. It's not like he's contagious or smelly; just a Jew with whom I disagree, someone from a world apart, but not alien entirely.

He sits there with his Chabad-produced sefer, and I with my Manhattan-printed New Yorker, and the minutes pass as we ride through the underground to our own destinations.

Out of nowhere, he speaks up.

"Can I ask you what you think?" he says.

"Sure, but I'm getting off at the next stop."

"I'm reading here, about Esav and Ya'akov. But I just can't get it. And Esav, it seems, is just born bad..."

"Yeah..."

"I mean, he worships idols and doesn't respect learning. He's brute. He was born to go down this path. He has no choice. It doesn't seem fair!"

He does have no choice. Esav, we read this week, and the commentators remind us, was fated to be the bad son, the less-loved, the one without the birthright. He was not devoted to God or learning. He was violent. He was stereotypically not Jewish.

He was destined, by birth, to be stuck for so many years going down the wrong path. Only so many years later, when he reconciles with Jacob, does he prove himself capable of good ways. He has to have his birthright stolen to be able to prove himself as a person.

It's not fair.

Or, maybe we're looking at it through the wrong lens. We are encouraged to side with Jacob. He is, after all, our forefather - Esav is not.

But think about it. Esav is the one with a troubled life. He's the one who struggles with a bad lot. He's the one who is cheated and yet is able to forgive! He's the one capable of change, capable of growth, and capable of, in the end, realizing that just because he was born with a certain fate does not mean that he must stick with it!

This Shabbat, I'm siding with Esav! Screw the man! Be more open, like Esav, to changing yourself, to allowing for things to not be as they are supposed to, or once seemed so fixed in becoming. Deal with the lot you're given. Leave your home, then come back again. And, for God's sake, eat red lentils!

As our subway train pulled into Atlantic Terminal, my neighbor was still stuck in the nonsensical nature of this parasha. Why is it like this, he begged me to answer.

"I don't know, my friend. But it sure makes the story interesting. Shabbat shalom!"

Shabbat shalom indeed.

In Other News...

As they say in Thailand,
Baruch HaShem this didn't happen to me!