thinking jewish

For My Student's Sake, and Mine

Working through Hilchot Talmud Torah with one of my students this afternoon, we came across a new Hebrew word: מפרנס, usually translated as "one who is sustained." But the word was foreign to this student.

And I was not about to help him out so much as to give him the translation. We work in the Hebrew, and I like to stay there as much as possible. So I helped him figure out some cognates of the word - other derivations from the same root. Most notably, we quickly wrestled with פרנסה, meaning "sustenance."

And to him that word was foreign as well... sort of. He could not remember an English translation to define the word, but he was able to quickly call to mind a quote which I also found myself accessing.

...לפרנסה ולכלכלה

I heard it over and over again in my head.

...לפרנסה ולכלכלה

It comes from the liturgy. But where is it from? I thought and I thought and I could not come up with the answer.

So we cracked open the books, me and my student - the machzor and the siddur, this one and that one, Shacharit, Musaf, Birkat HaChodesh, every service you could imagine. A mile high of books on my kitchen table. And despite all my hunches, all his and my ideas, we could not find the source.

So I thought of my options. Did I simply make it all up? I could do an internet search, or use the multitude of databases from my computer. I could consult my teachers, or my friends. I could find it, somehow. I could.

But, thought me, why not put this blogosphere thing to the test - does it really work like it's supposed to. OK, said me.

So, do you know? What's the source? Please! Help! Please! If not for my sake, then my poor student's!

Thanks.

Shabbat Shalom

The other night, after one too many margaritas at a birthday dinner, I decided to crash for the evening on a friend's couch. I was already on the Upper West Side, the same neighborhood where I had to be early the next morning to serve as the witness to a conversion at the mikvah. So rather than stumble my way home, I crashed on the couch of a friend, and went to work the next morning unshowered, tired, hungover and wearing the same clothes as the day prior.

Coffee tasted really good that morning. The immersion in our people's cleansing waters was a beautiful sight to witness. The ride home in the subway, and anticipation of the upcoming shower was amazing and exciting.

I sat next to my boss on the 2 train during our return to Brooklyn. We talked, compared notes, and passed the long ride. He noticed my less-than-pristine condition and inquired. Having nothing to hide, I told him the story. His response was clear and telling.

"Where are your tefilin?" he said. He said it with no patronizing intent. He meant what he said.

I had woken up away from home and was now out and about. Obviosuly, I'd prayed already this morning. Where were my tefilin?

I hadn't davened shacharit, in fact. But that's not the focus of this post. Rather, I wonder what it takes to move people to a place of halakhic expectation. That is, can we achieve a level of understanding that others will wake up in the morning and lay tefilin? Can we do that without an air of holier-than-thou? Can we wonder about how someone's ability to observe, ask them about it, and have a real conversation without feeling awkward, hurting feelings or making people feel bad about what they have or haven't done?

Because I, for one, appreciated that question on that subway train. It made my prayer ethic seem so much less lonely; so communal, even though I do it in isolation. It reminded mr that I'm a part of something bigger, that there are expectations that I must live up to - a God to serve who cares about my practice and a people who I'm a part of who care as well.

This comes, at once, both totally naturally to me, yet it feels somewhat weird - weird to talk on the street about obligation, weird to look at someone and assume that they observed the mitzvah. This is, afterall, because of my background, because of the context in which I have lived most of my life - the Reform Movement.

Just this week though, the same day as that fateful subway trip, I sat at a table, over dinner, with colleagues and friends who feel similar to me. I was joined by other Jews who had grown up in the movement but had rather traditional understandings of mitzvah and obligation. Students and teachers, friends, even a former NFTY president, we sat and talked, unconvincedthat we knew what answers we saught, but certain that the status quo is far from good enough.

And though we came to no solution, no magical new way of changing the world, just being surrounded by the sense of chiyuv, of halakhic obligation in a liberal environment, felt good. It felt great.

It felt great to enter back into the intellectual debate, to rejoin that world of cerebral exercise for its own sake. To feel expected, and to expect back, gave me purpose and place.

More than just a seat at a table or on a subway car, but a comforting reminder of who I am and how and why I am on this earth, in this world.

I carry that feeling, that sense of drive and purpose, that wholeness, into this Shabbat. That completeness, that sense of shalem, will this week compliment my shalom.

Shabbat shalom!

On Gefilte Fish and Hamentashen

Some time ago, in what seems already like a long-past lifetime, I was hurt by someone I knew, someone I cared about, and who I thought cared about me. I felt betrayed and embarrassed, I was sad and angry - my being ran the gamut of expected emotions in response to this act.

And my gut told me to respond. To get back. To get even. I wanted her to feel the pain that I had felt. I wanted to bring her down to my level.

Months passed, and, just the other day, I was thinking about this again. And I got so angry again, so hurt again. I felt it all as if it were yesterday. And I decided it was time. I decided it was time for revenge. I'll show her! I thought. I formulated my plan - a morally sound way of getting even that exposed this "other" as less-than, that showed her flaws to the world and made me feel better about myself in the process. Revenge. Sweet sweet revenge.

We've been talking about revenge a lot lately.

Purim, as much as we may hate to remember this part, is all about getting even. Haman tries to kill the Jews and what do we do? We don't just bake cookies and sing songs, no, we went on a killing spree and murdered him and his sons and all of his tribe! We showed them! We got even! Surely, Purim teaches us a thing or two about the nature of revenge and our right to get even with our aggressors. Get back! Stand up! Fight!

We feel empowered. We feel strong. But do we actually feel any better about ourselves?

Many communities skip the part of the Megillah that mentions this genocidal slaughter, uncomfortable, as they should be, with the moral ramifications of this act. The story leaves us stuck in an endless war with Amalek and his descendants for the rest of history. Perhaps Purim does not provide the right answer. Maybe there's another way...

We never got even with the Egyptians. They beat us, they enslaved us, they killed us, and we just picked up and left. We packed our bags, took some gold and matza, and wandered away. No "F&^* You" on the way out. The door closed, and we moved on. We don't forget what they did to us, but we also are able to spend our time thinking about the meaning of freedom, of God's act of redemption, rather than dwelling on the evil nature of this foreign nation.

And, even though we did nothing, we sat bat and took it and just upped and left, Egypt still got their just reward. They were so brutish, so themselves angry, so short sided, that they came running after us into a sea! Their anger overcame them, they failed to think through their actions, and as a result, they all drowned.

God did not punish the Egyptians. We did not punish the Egyptians. The Egyptians punished themselves.

This particular reading of the story is, admittedly, with its holes, I know. But I want to suggest that there is a significant contrast between Israel's response to Haman and Israel's response to Egypt. That that contrast is there on purpose - there to teach us a crucial lesson. That difference allows us to celebrate freedom in one case, and be stuck hating another nation perpetually in the other.

Because revenge sucks. It feels good in the moment. It feels right and just and fitting. But it never really is. Bad people, bad nations, bad ideas, in the end bring themselves down. Let God do the judging. But we're better off just picking up and leaving, better off not spending our days focussing on what they did to us, what we then did to spite them, but, rather, where we've been able to go since, what we did in spite of them. If we spend our days hating in response to their aggression, we risk becoming no better then them. If we move on, if we remember but don't dwell, we open ourselves to a world of possibilities.

In the end, I set aside my desire to be like Purim, I looked ahead to Pesah, I decided that getting even would do me no good. It was hard - it sucked - but I set aside my revengeful plan. Someone who does bad things will be brought down by their own doing. They have to live with their own morals. I should move on. It's better for me. Better for my soul. Better for my conscience. Better in every way.

Besides, after all, gefilte fish is much healthier than hamentashen.

Gone and Returned

Back in the hills of Berkeley, I remember, the spring of my senior year, one especially windy day, as my kippah was blown off my head as I walked down the street. How funny, I thought, it will be in Jerusalem, where, on a windy day like this, the kippot will blow off everyone's head at once!

I had an image in my mind of a busy intersection. Just after the light turns green, when the crosswalk is filled with busy Jews going about their business, a gust of wind blows, and dozes of kippot go flying into the air. The Jews go wild trying to track down their kippot as they blow down the avenue. So funny! I thought.

That dream never came true. Sure, there are wind gusts now and then. Kippot fall off, they move a few feet, the end. It happened in Israel, it happens in Brooklyn. Kippot are only as stable as the hair they are attached to. On someone with hair as short as mine, that often means they are not stable at all.

But no busy intersection with Jews running after their lids. Alas.

This morning, I walked up the staircase from the Prince Street "R" subway station. Two-thirds the way up the staircase, a gust of wind hits me from behind, blowing upwards, out of the subway dungeon below. And with that gust, up, up went my kippah, into the air and away through New York's streets.

I ran up onto ground level, chasing my God-covering. It was nowhere to be seen. My eyes scanned the streets, the intersection, the cars, the people - nowhere. There, at a busy New York intersection, as diners stood and at fancy foods in Dean and Deluca, as trucks and taxis went about their stressful ways, as people shopped and talked and walked on this cool almost-Spring day, one Jew ran around franticly, looking for the cotton fabric that sits atop his head. I looked in trash cans, and behind railings, on window sills under cars, and in opposing subway staircases. Cars rushed by, people pushed through on their merry way, and my kippah was nowhere to be found.

Had it landed on the roof of a car driving off yonder? Had someone found it and taken it as their own? Was it in a storm drain or a garbage truck, or flying up to the gates of heaven itself?

I started the smile - to laugh off the absurdity of a kippah gone to the wind. I planned my new Purim costume - maybe I'll be a secular Jew - and prepared to give up. And just then, another gust of wind blew. Pedestrians took cover for the moment, everyone shielding their eyes and hair and make-up from the onslaught of oxygen, carbon and nitrogen.

The wind subsided again. I began to walk. And in my last moment of hope, I glanced back across the street, towards the very subway entrance from which my kippah had originally gone soaring. And there it was.

There, sitting on the ground all happy and round and content, like nothing had happened.

I walked back across the street one last time and picked it up. I put it back on my head, snapped on the clips a bit tighter and went on my way.

A Jew nearly lost his kippah today - nearly lost it to the winds and moving objects of New York - almost. But in the end, after minutes of worry and searching and amusement, it was found. Amazing.

It Speaks for Itself

Cha-cha-cha-cha-changin'

Yesterday, I as I enjoyed the foods and company of a Shabbat afternoon in Borough Park, I spoke with a stranger - we exchanged mindless chat, slowly getting to know the other over endless mandel bread, hamentashen and diet coke. The conversation turned to my life plans and, immediately, I was asked the question. Why are you leaving HUC?

It's not like I haven't been asked this before. In fact, I get the question nearly daily. I've answered it before admissions committees and professors, bosses and supervisors, colleagues, mentors and a therapist. The hardest group of people to answer this question to is, by far, current HUC students. Because I do not want, chas v'shalom, to, in explaining my own discontent with the institution, insult the very school where they still study. I don't want to make them uneasy, or feel a need to defend, or give an opas on the history of my life.

And I felt all these neuroses especially strongly yesterday, as I prepared to answer his question. I thought about my answer for a few milliseconds before blurting out, "Because, at the end of the day, I'm really not a Reform Jew."

Sometimes we say things which shock us even as the words come from our mouths. I'm not a Reform Jew? Of course I am! I am! I am. I am?

I fought for so many years to find acceptance within that community, to legitimize my thoughts and acts, my outlooks, my concerns, my mentality. And on paper, it worked. Yet I was miserable. Totally unhappy with myself and my life. I faced personal criticisms at every turn - He's too frum. That's not what we do. That's not the right way. Why do you care so much? - knowing in my heart of hearts that they were not true. At some point you just give up and move on. You go your own way, forge your own path, and move forward.

But there comes a point in that march forward when, finally, you need to make a break with the old. If only for the time being, to solidify and concretize the change, you need to make clear what you are not just as much as what you are. You need to end the old to start the new. And it hurts, it's a loss, it's real.

In an hour, this rainy, gloomy, Sunday morning, I will sit with two colleagues in front of three others, one after the other. Who are these three others? Converts. Gerim. Strangers, who will soon be called Jews.

Each of them has followed their own path, their own struggle through the world of people and ideas and institutions. And though each path is unique each has led them to a similar place. They are changing. They are breaking with the old - with their families, with their history, with their future.

And, if anything, reading their essays on conversion, I gain a little perspective on my own struggle. These people really are changing! They've broken with their past, they've built indescribable walls between themselves and their families! I've got it easy!

I'm not breaking with my past, just continuing on my path. It's not that I'm not Reform, it's that I am Jewish, and want to express that Jewishness in ways that my current place of learning does not allow for. Simple as that. For those that want to see it differently - as a radical break or a negation of something else, as an attempt to escape or an outburst of emotions - let them. This is not a but/or equation, rather one of "and." I am this and that. And that path is taking me to LA.

As I drink my coffee and rush off to the shul with a pool this morning, I am humbled by the true acts of courage taken by the three whom I will be honored to sit before. They come to me and my colleagues for judgement, for officiation and approval. They come to learn from us and seek guidance. But just as much I want to learn from them this spring morning. How did you have the courage? Teach me what it means to be a Jew.

To them I say yasher koach, and mazal tov.

To them I say welcome.

Reading Material

Back from the abyss of forgotten blogs, נלמד ונעשה is again filled with new material. I recommend it.

Check it out.

One of Four

When I first moved to the city, I came here with two suitcases and little else. I had a friend downtown and a rabbi uptown, plus some money in the bank. I knew not what I was getting myself into in the slightest.

I hardly knew the neighborhoods. I didn't know where the grocery stores were, or what blocks to avoid. I had no idea what a bodega was.

Day one, weary eyed from a long flight in from Israel, as I wandered through the JetBlue terminal, only passing through New York a week before my official move-in, I passed a short Jewish girl. In my exhaustion, I somewhat noticed that she was speaking to me, so I gave her the courtesy of stopping before I walked on top of her.

In fact, I knew her. She was an old friend of a friend. Ten years prior, in another life, in the days of acne and ringer tees, she'd been in love with me. But now, she told me, on that day of half-alertness, we'd be friends.

Flash forward two weeks. I was already stationed in a cave of an apartment on the Upper West Side, buying out IKEA to fill the space and learning to love Bed Bath and Beyond. I got a phone call as the week neared its end. It was that girl, inviting me for Shabbat lunch.

In that moment, something beautiful was born.

I had another friend in the city (Actually, Long Island. But he likes trains.). And that friend knew this friend. And soon I made another friend who I met sitting, somewhat cluelessly, on a chair at shul. And within a few months of moving to this crazy island, I had the three of them over for a Shabbat dinner of my own. Three musketeers plus one. The four of us.

I have a ritual at my Shabbat tables. When I was a kid, sitting back in the chair and hating having a napkin in my lap, bored out of my mind listening to adults speak about adult things, I always knew there would be a point in the meal when I would be required to share the best part of my week. Around the table we'd go, each telling a tale of happiness or triumph, something heartening or delightfully unexpected. And, somewhere in my maturing, that ritual passed on to my own table.

That first Shabbat with these new friends, I told them they were required to divulge these deep dark treasures of the week past. And it was somewhat awkward. Who is this guy? What is this? The wicked child's skepticism overcame one's impulse to be the good son on that first night. But around we went. Without sharing, they'd get no dessert.

And it stuck. And so did the friends. My own little Shabbat community. Regularly, if never else during the week, we came together for the food and the singing, the stories and the laughs, complemented with overflowing wine.

One day, the short girl made clear that she wanted a new siddur, one that she could carry with her at all times. I went to my book shelf, and took one down, and brought it to her as a present. But before offering that gift, I took a stamp from my shelf, one which reads "From the Library of David J. Singer" and imprinted those word's on the prayer book's cover. She took it. She uses it.

And time passed. Two years in fact. The changing winds of time swept these three friends off to far away places. In the blink of an eye (or the slow painful passing of seconds), this Shabbat chevra disintegrated - not for lack of want, but, rather, 6,000 miles of physical distance.

You don't expect to, but you can actually mourn community in the same way you would an real person. The absence of a dynamic, of a group, is painful and haunting. You wish for things to go back to "how they were," to a magical time of old.

Nine months heals that pain. We move on. Life continues. Things evolve.

But this morning I got an instant message from that little short girl, from number one of the four of us. She told me how she made Shabbat dinner a few days back and, in her preparation and eating, really missed what we once had. She mourned it. She longed for it. And she told me how, unbeknownst to me, I had given her a gift with those two years of Shabbat shalominess. How she had grown Jewishly at my dinner and lunch table. How my selfish need to share Shabbat with others and show off my cooking was just as much a gift to each of those I had shared it with - that she now looks forward to paying that gift forward in the years ahead.

And in our conversation she reminded me of that siddur I had given her so many months ago. And she reminded me that my name is still imprinted on the cover. She said that it's fitting - that every time she goes to shul she brings me with her.

Community is a beautiful thing. It is the basis of our Jewish experiences. It is all the more crucial for the formation of Shabbat. And time passes, and communities move on. But the caring ones, the good ones, the loving ones, the ones you look forward to being a part of every week, where you share life-changing experiences with amazing people who you love, as much as those communities may physically separate, as much as they may disappear to the point that you wonder if they ever really existed, they never actually cease to be. They stay with you, always.

The memories live on. They provide the inspiration for the day ahead. They remain imprinted on your very soul, and everywhere you go you bring their memory with you, using your experience to recreate what once was, this time with new people in new places, adding new Torah along the way. They go with you, they stick with you, imprinted on your very cover.

Just like that siddur, that prayer book that I gave a friend, one friend of four, at the end of one Shabbat dinner in the city. Those communities are with you, always.

God's Dead

There was a time when, with every passing terror attack in Israel, I felt the pull to immediate action. I had to let the world know what had happened and how awful it was. I felt personally touched by each drop of blood shed, personally insulted by the senseless hatred displayed.

But time has numbed me to the factories of death.

Mostly...

Today a terrorist walked into a yeshiva and shot dead eight students of Torah in cold blood. The words of our tradition - shattered. Our sacred texts - covered in blood. It tears at the soul to hear such news.

The ideological divide between me and that house of study on a far away hill could not be wider - Mossad HaRav Kook is the epicenter of Religious National Zionism, hardly my cup of tea. Six thousand miles is not enough space to physically demonstrate the extent to which that yeshiva and mine exist on opposite stratums of the Jewish bedrock.

But today our enemies bridged that divide for us.

I remember the times I've visited that place, how many times I've studied its Torah, shared in its learning, been a part of that world, just as I distance myself from it. I remember walking miles on a cool spring afternoon to go to a book sale there, only to walk those same miles back home lugging pound upon pound of newly-owned texts.

I wish I could do that tomorrow.

It is a sick perversion of reality that allows for such injustices to exist in this world. There is no justification, no rationale, no nothing.

The rabbis teach that God dwells in the space between two people engaged in the study of Torah.

Today a murderer killed God.

The Distance

I almost punched a woman on the train this morning.

Pulling into Grand Central Terminal on the express subway platform, I joined with all too many of my fellow passengers to exit the train and move across to the local. The doors open. I stood up. I moved towards the door. But in the crunch of too many individuals moving through too small a space, and a unexpectedly large man standing in the way of part of the door, I found myself stuck, unable to move. I paused for a moment to let a path open in front of me.

Nudge nudge. In that split-second of waiting, I feel someone pushing at me from behind. Move it mister. Move! You're just standing there! Get off the train!

I look back to the woman making the gestures. She glares at me, and again reminds of where she wants me to go. Never mind that there was an obstacle blocking my way. Never mind that this all took place in merely a fraction of a second. Never mind that she came moments away from my hand meeting her face.

The doorway frees up, and I take a step off the train. I move across the platform to the waiting local car, and enter. To my right, I here the whines of that same woman, telling her friend of the horrible person who stood in her way, who did not go where she wanted him to go. That a*&hole, she says.

My reaction in the moment of this ridiculous encounter was to stand still even firmer, to refuse to move in response to this woman's demands that I budge.

Don't tell me where I should go. Don't tell me what I should be doing? Let me guide my own path. Stop pushing!

Leaving the 68th street station only minutes later, these words reverberate through my head, and a smirk comes across my face. How true this is. How real it is.

We move through this world, especially in our youth, being told by others exactly what we should do, how we should behave, where we should be going. We seek advice and counsel, and finally make decisions on our own. But sometimes you need to just cover your ears to make all the sounds of others telling you where to go shut up. You don't want to hear it anymore. You want to make your own choices, be your own person, and go your own direction.

There is no grand plan. There is no "supposed to." Life is all a matter of choices adding up into a larger narrative. Nothing was predetermined. There is no story to live out.

But what if the Israelites had wanted to flee Egypt for Zimbabwe, rather than the Land of Israel? What if they didn't want to leave at all? Can we blame them? Would you have followed the Divinely-drawn path?

I find myself at a crossroads. So much of my life has been defined by what I was "supposed" to be, what I was "supposed" to do. I was "supposed" to come to New York, to the center of the world, to make it big. And now I'm retreating, back to Southern California, to Los Angeles of all places.

And I couldn't be happier.

Because, there, on the slopes of the Santa Monica Hills, I found a place that meets my needs, that makes me happy. I found a place that speaks to my ideas and goals and interests. And it makes no sense. It does not fit into the story line. It is a full break from the scene before.

But that's OK.

Because this is a subway car, and the doors may be open, and I want to move. But I will go my own path. No matter how much that lady behind me yells and whines and screams, I will not listen to her. I will not aquiesce. I will go the distance. I will succeed. But I will do it my way.