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April 30, 2012

Amendment One: Vote Against

At Pesach, I hold an orange aloft and ask: “Why is this on the seder plate?”

Inevitably, someone will say that a man once said that a woman belongs on the bimah about as much as an orange on the seder plate. The response? Jewish communities began adding an orange to the seder plate.

That’s not how it happened.

It was scholar and feminist Susannah Heschel who presented the orange as a new Pesach symbol—as a symbol of the fruitfulness we gain when lesbians and gay men are accepted, welcomed and valued as contributing and active members of Jewish life. The orange is about the freedom we must offer every member of our community.

Because we must offer that freedom, I am praying (really) that the citizens of North Carolina reject Amendment One.

For thirty years I have met with GLBT students who struggle with the bitter reality that they are condemned and despised. I met with suicidal students who had tried every method they could find to become “normal,” students who would have done anything to be like the majority that rejected them.

Twenty years ago, when my son was born, I resolved to make it clear that whoever he turned out to be, whether he wanted to spend his life with a man or a woman, he could count on unqualified love and acceptance from me.

If parents can’t offer that much, they shouldn’t be parents.

Today I find people living in the state I love prepared to make a hash of hard-won legal protections domestic partners have earned in past decades – whether straight or homosexual. Parents could lose custody rights to their children. Domestic violence protection could be withdrawn from unmarried couples.

Does anyone want to increase the ability of one human to brutalize another?

Just imagine that you can no longer visit a beloved partner in the hospital, make decisions if your partner is incapacitated, dispose of his or her remains. What kind of world – what kind of people would prevent anyone from helping a loved one in illness or death?

The present legal state of affairs restricts marriage to one man and one woman. We should be working to overturn the existing law, not struggling against additional discriminatory amendments.

Our Torah has nothing to say against the love of two women. What it says about homosexuality is frequently read out of historical context and—as my students at UNCC discover—learning more deeply about that context can alter the reading significantly.

“You shall love your neighbor (your friend, your associate) as yourself” (Lev. 19:18). When a non-Jew asked Rabbi Hillel to tell him the very essence of Torah, Hillel alluded, Talmud tells us, to this very verse: If you wouldn’t want someone to do something to you, he explained, then don’t do it to someone else.

Jews know what it is to live with constraints on their movements, on their free expression, on their very lives. Heterosexual Jews ought to know that it is wrong – just plain wrong – to refuse GLBT citizens access to ceremonies, rituals, and rights that they enjoy.

Oranges belong on the seder plate and GLBT citizens belong in our communities and in our state – with the same rights as any other human being.

April 12, 2012April 13, 2012

A Plague Upon My House

It began harmlessly enough.

An itsy-bitsy inchworm planted itself on my sleeve. It crawled up my arm to get a good look at me and decide whether any part of my human self was edible.

I disappointed my little friend, however. Apparently, I was not carrying the sort of inchworm that is carnivorous. (Some members of the species do enjoy dining on meat. They live in Hawaii.)

All my life, the sight of an inchworm has called to mind the idyllic scene and the innocuous, unforgettable tune delivered in the movie Hans Christian Anderson. In the film, Danny Kaye (born David Daniel Kaminski in Brooklyn to Ukrainian Jewish immigrants) plays the famous Danish fairy tale author. Jewish boys play Aryan boys more often than you might imagine.

In the scene that comes inevitably to my mind, David Daniel Kaminski sings sweetly at marigolds (and worms) in the company of a young boy who looks with adoration at all three.

I placed the inchworm on our porch, entered our humble home, and sang:

Inchworm, Inchworm,
Measuring the marigolds,
Seems to me you’d stop and see
How beautiful they are.

I had no idea.

Just days later, I noted that there were a good many inchworms about the trees and house. A mere forty-eight hours later, there was no part of yard, gardens, car or home that was not covered in their stringy detritus. We couldn’t go out the house or into it without carrying the critters with us. We found them in our hair, in our collars, down our backs, underneath our pant cuffs.

My office window was so bedecked in strings and webs it looked like Halloween had taken up residence in my nicely modest Jewish home as a belated April Fool’s joke. The only thing missing were the skeletons issuing battery-powered screams.

According to the all-purpose Wikipedia article on inchworms, the creatures “hide from predators by fading into the background or resembling twigs.”

Ha. These guys were taking over the world. Narf.

As the next two days passed, hundreds of inchworms gave way to thousands and ten thousands. It reminded me of plague of frogs which begins, according to Torah, with the appearance of one single amphibian. (Yes, I know the English translations gloss over this fact, but after God commands Aaron to haul the frogs out of the water in Ex. 8:1 only one frog actually appears in 8:2. Rabbis have had a wonderful time trying to explain the appearance of the singular beast for many centuries.)

It was my last cleaning and cooking day before Pesach was to begin. We were having guests for first night seder. I imagined my friends entering our abode covered in inchworm weavings. Even Elijah would not have set one mystical foot on our deck.

My husband, Ralf, and I began cleaning.

There was no place free of the inchworms. Thousands of the beasties were crawling about the door frames, the soffits, the windows, the deck flooring and fencing, the patio chairs…

For the next three hours we used a hose and a hard bristle brush to clean off the doors, the narrow front patio, and the deck. After a while, the sludge of dead or dying inchworms grew to almost three inches high. The task had the same appeal as cleaning a dormitory toilet – on the men’s side.

As we hosed and brushed and hosed again, I alternated between the guilt that rises whenever a creature of nature dies and the horror of the muck, the grunge and the gross before me. Predictably, the guilt subsided under the weight of the horror.

Over the years, I have come to see Pesach as my annual attempt at liberation from some piece of the muck and the grunge and the unwanted stuff I have accumulated and carried around with me.

Like the inchworms, the ick that we carry around is resistant. Like the inchworm, it sneaks up on us. They are persistent, those old hurts, the old patterns, the way we shlep stuff from dysfunctional systems that can mark an infant’s soul within days of its arrival on this earth.

The Hebrew for Egypt is mitzrayim. It means “the narrow space.” We all want to be free of narrow spaces, the tight constraints of past patterns and old pains.

I brushed and hosed in the bright spring sunshine, mourning the new leaves the inchworms had so merrily consumed on all the variously beautiful trees around my little home. I resolved to band them, to protect them next fall, so that they could freely unfold in spring.

I asked myself: What could I leave behind me?

For most of my adult life I have worked between ten and fourteen hour days. I have known what it is to balance six part-time jobs to make some excuse for a living. Even now, I have two and a half jobs. One is supposed to be full time and the two others part time, but the hours I put in each week, as I recently measured, come to at least thirty for just one of my part-time jobs. I have been plagued by a never-ending list of tasks scrawled in the middle of the night, collected during the day.

I want to stop working like this.

I want to go outside and take in the sweet clarity of a Carolina spring. I want to have time to rest in my husband’s arms and in my friends’ good company. I want. I want.

The inchworms are gone. Those that survived our onslaught are busy turning into moths, I suppose. I know that despite all my efforts, there are many days in my future which will start around 8 am and end at midnight.

But the longing I feel is not as easily ignored or dismissed as it once was. I feel some fierce desire, some insistence rising. I feel a certainty; I must leave this narrow space.

Check in with me in a year. I’ll let you know if the inchworms came back.

March 8, 2012April 13, 2012

Esther 1, God 0

I say fie. Fie on all those commentaries trying so hard to find God in the Book of Esther.

We don’t need to spill more ink or exercise more electrons on insisting that God’s absence is really presence. We don’t need to find God in order to justify the time we spend on this book, or on the hilarious holiday that makes it required reading.

Instead, we could delve into a text that is so cleverly designed, so beautifully comic, and so deeply meaningful (without God’s presence) that there is plenty of reason to love it, no matter where we find ourselves on the continuum we call history.

This book is edgy, funny, and truthful. Read it carefully and you will have to rethink who you are. Jewish or not.

Let us imagine reading Esther as one would read Lysistrata.

If we did, we’d have a very good laugh at all the sex in the story. The king, presumably the royal manifestation of virility, can’t say no to anything. Ahaseurus is everyone’s fool. Or tool.

His own is symbolic, and ribaldly so, a golden scepter that he publicly extends. Esther saves her own life by touching its tip (5:2).

Haman has a bigger one, in a manner of speaking. Consider the stake Haman sets up to peg Mordecai upon, one he erects on the advice of his wife, Zeresh (5:14). It’s a very large stake, some seven stories high. (What was she dreaming of, nights?)

Real power is handed over to Haman, and after Haman’s downfall, Esther. Mordecai wins the jackpot in the final chapter. Of course that chapter is a later addition, probably because some ancient Jewish dudes didn’t like the idea of ending the book with a woman holding all the cards. Too bad, since much of the book is all about women holding all the cards.

Then there’s the drinking and the feasting and the drinking.

The killing, too.

To our shock, it would seem that the Jews go on a killing spree in Chapter 9 (though many commentaries insist that the first episode had to be defensive in nature). Esther, our heroine, asks permission for the killing to continue. From a death toll of 510, the story tells us, we advance to one just under one hundred and fifty times higher; by the end of the second day the Jews have killed 75,810 Persians.

Of course, this text is not a history. Of course, this text is a burlesque. Literary conventions as old as writing itself tell stories of the impotent becoming omnipotent. The comedy is cathartic, obviously over the top, clearly part and parcel with the genre: Exaggeration and hyperbole are integral to carnival. The hyperbole in Esther begins in its first verses – in a revelry that lasts six drunken months.

Still, the audience must feel some discomfort. No wonder we would rather ignore the sex, the drugs (alcohol), and the violence in favor of twisting and turning the text to find God somewhere, anywhere. The text uses the word “king” multitudinous times? It must be referring to the real king, the King Above. The name “Esther” comes from a Hebrew root, or “shoresh” that suggests hiddenness – the very name of the book suggests God’s hidden presence!

What if Esther is simply confronting us with the hard reality? Human beings are capable of anything, no matter who they are. Jews can become aggressors, while Persians are, for fear, “Jewing” (8:16). Jews are behaving like Persians and Persians are behaving like Jews. We can all know what it is to feel impotent. We can all be dishonorable, drunken, and loutish.

We could all even kill.

I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.

Irony, like comedy, demands that we abandon every category. Everything we think we know about the Other and ourselves must be discarded if we are to learn from our laughter (and our tears).

Maybe the lesson we need in what it means to be human should come from other humans, not God. Maybe God wouldn’t find us so very funny.

February 25, 2012

Incantations and Incarnations

It is overwhelming. There is so much labor, so much instruction, so very much to do. Every sentence is another job; every verse another obligation. It is hard to read; difficult to approach.

We are in the midst of Torah portions that describe it all: the Tabernacle, its furnishings, the priests’ clothing, investiture. What’s more, we will read it a second time at the end of the book of Exodus. Why? In part because eyleh shemot, these words are – so often – words of magic and power.

Give it time and give it sound. Read the texts of Parsha Terumah and Parsha Tetzaveh aloud and you can hear what’s going on: One incantation follows another. Like any incantation, these have formulas: “They shall make…,” “they shall take…,” “there shall be…” The ark, overlaid with gold inside and out. The menorah, with all its botanical markers. The ephod woven of gold, sky-blue, dark red, and crimson. The belt stitched in gold, sky-blue, dark red and crimson.

The incantations are palpable. They evoke the physical. There is a surfeit of doing, creating, forming, making. The scent of blood and incense, the sound of tiny bells, the sight of gems and precious metals – these passages are rich with imagery, with action. The Israelites sew, hammer, engrave. Rabbenu Moshe immerses his elder brother; slaughters animals, daubs blood on the bodies of his brother and nephews.

It’s all part of a beautiful magic spell. We must use these colors, those stones, this fine metal, that sort of cloth. Everything is specified; everything is defined. And it all comes with meaning, with light, with nefesh (life). Aaron will put his hands on our sacrifice and carry our names on his heart.

God guarantees results. Do these things and I will make my Presence felt. There I will meet with you. There I will speak with you. I will sanctify; I will consecrate; I will abide. I, the Lord, your God. And through it all, it is not in the sanctuary, but in the people where God hopes to abide. Chapter 25: 8: “Let them make Me a sanctuary that I may dwell among them.” Or, one could translate, “that I may dwell within them.”

The work was, after all, holy work. Each small step in this human version of creation is part of a great and holy song. Can we imagine the cherubim stitched into the curtain? Who knows what the ephod looked like? Who can explain the significance of each stone as it once must have been?

No matter. The incantation is enough.

Who among us has not followed ornate procedures of our own to evoke power? Who has not walked ever so carefully over the cracks in the sidewalk, counted to mysterious numbers and back again, engaged in private rituals, spoken secret phrases? We are all magicians, conjuring divinity of some kind. Many of us hope that our incantations will grant us God’s counsel, God’s presence.

We conjure each day because we need more power than we have. We deal with the mundane, the ordinary. There are simple aggravations: How can I finish the list of tasks? There is deep, terrible pain. My mother’s Alzheimer’s is getting worse; she can’t sing Yiddish with me any more.

An incantation would be nice. A magic spell, to evoke the comfort, the content, the peace we long for.

The Israelites worked with sacred intentions. As we can, or must. Making the beds, finishing the project, cutting a deal. When we do our many labors with all the skills and wisdom of our hearts, we create an incantation, a magical connection to something beyond ourselves.

The Ba’al Shem Tov says: “One flutter of an eyelash for God’s sake makes the creation of the whole world worthwhile.”

There is an incantation in the work of our lives. We are all dressing the priests, making the offering, lighting the eternal flame. We do these things trusting that our work, whatever it may be, will be as holy as our intent.

No matter who we are and what we believe, this magic is worth doing.

February 21, 2012February 21, 2012

Visioning the Godly in True Blue

Studying Torah begins and ends with a sweet realization: These texts reveal new truths at each reading. The ancient authors of Torah knew that creating multiple possible realities was the very purpose of storytelling.

Last week, our congregational Torah study group occupied itself with Parsha Mishpatim, which includes the famed Book of the Covenant. The Book of the Covenant, so scholars, likely began as a separate law code which was later integrated into a larger narrative composed by several different writers.

Personally, I think we’d be better off naming our writers “schools,” since the respective strands of text were themselves subject to internal revision before they were all redacted and re-redacted in later centuries. But scholars are notoriously wedded to their terminology. Hence, they call them the J,E,P, and D-writers, nodding in the general direction of a fifth R-writer for “redactor.” In this case, the E-writer (I’d say E-school) is given credit for assimilating the Book of the Covenant into the E-narrative in Torah.

Has everyone fallen asleep?

Please don’t. The fact that ancient Israelites wrote and retained different versions of certain stories (Genesis 1 and Genesis 2-3 are the paradigmatic example) is proof positive that there was no one authoritative account for all Israelites even in the old days. Some of Torah even “corrects” other parts. Example? Just check out the way the pashal lamb is, according to Exodus 12:9, to be roasted. The same pashal lamb is to be boiled, according to Deuteronomy 16:7. Chronicles 35:13 offers an ingenious resolution to the apparent dichotomy: The lamb should be roasted after being boiled. The Chronicler was bothered by discrepancies in the two earlier accounts and reconciled them with a brand-new recipe.

Our ancient forbears preserved variant traditions even when they contradicted each other. That fact grants us the right to our multiple interpretations: Torah is a flowing, changing, living thing because both then and now the people of that book understood their narratives, their law codes, and their ideas to be subject to change.

That, I believe, is a very good thing. It has all sorts of wonderful implications. We can (and have) put women in the rabbinate. We can (and have) included GLBT Jews as members of our clergy. We can…

Well. The study group spent some quality time looking at the laws of the Book of the Covenant. We discussed how the law code aimed to protect property, land, and justice. Ancient Israelites were warned not to accede to a majority opinion rather than tell the truth. If required to give testimony, they were reminded neither to favor the wealthy nor the poor. There’s a lot in Parsha Mishpatim that can make Jewish folk proud of their ancestors.

There’s a lot to struggle with, too, just as ancient Israelites must have done. Take the literal possibilities of “an eye for an eye” (Ex. 21: 23-4). There is no example in Tanakh of this law being applied, which strongly suggests that our ancestors didn’t take this passage literally even way back then. Still, my Torah study group sadly noted the ways Exodus 22:17, “You shall not allow a witch to live” was used in later centuries to justify persecution and murder on a grand scale – in some time periods, against Jews.

At the end of our time together, I asked everyone to look again at the final passage of the parsha. Moses, the text tells us, ascends the mountain together with Aaron and his two sons, and seventy elders. There they see the God of Israel, under whose feet is the likeness of a lapis lazuli stone surface, the very image of the sky in clarity and purity. Miraculously, God did not raise God’s hand against the all-too-human beings who dared appear where divinity could be seen. Instead, the Torah tells us: “They beheld God and they ate and drank” (Exodus 24:11).

Most English translations of this passage do not do the Hebrew justice. The verb used here for “seeing” is formed from the root chet-zayin-hey. Khazah does not mean, simply, “see.” It implies visioning. A khozeh is a seer. A khazon is a vision. Those who were on that mountain visioned God, envisioned God, or had a vision of God.

Afterwards, they ate and drank.

I asked our study group to recall a time when they experienced Godness of some sort, to re-imagine a moment of divinity so powerful it simultaneously commandeered and sustained everything around them, including themselves.

We are mere mortals, despite (or perhaps because) of our dreams. Must visionary experience inevitably give way to the everyday realm of assiyah, of doing? Must we eat and drink to remind ourselves of our mortality after an encounter with immortality, after entering the realm of atzilut?

Or did those who beheld God take in the vision by drinking in the experience, by nourishing themselves with the divine so that they could be changed utterly, body and soul?

God’s feet, the text says, rested on a foundation of sapphire. Sapir recalls, for the Hebrew reader, a word made of the same essential letters: Samech-pey-reish is a root used for “counting,” “relating,” and “writing.” A sofer is a scribe. A sefer is written text, a book. The linguistic presence of these near homonyms in my mind made me ask the others: Was God standing on our story, on the narratives we have revered and struggled with for centuries? The Tanakh is, after all, the foundation on which we build and rebuild our understanding of Godness.

So we ended our discussion where we began: The Book of the Covenant, the law, the Torah, the Tanakh – it is sourced in many voices, many readings, many possibilities. What is godly stands, in significant measure, on that fact.

February 13, 2012February 13, 2012

To be… to live…

Just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy.
Abraham Joshua Heschel

It happened at the first service I attended after my father’s death. I sang along with the others and heard my dad – instantly, singing harmony.

I don’t know how to explain that musical memory. By rights, I shouldn’t have it. I grew up in a mostly secular Jewish home with rare and brief bouts of synagogue attendance. I had about three months of Hebrew school, all told, and my bat mitzvah was potchked (Yiddish for “pasted,” “fiddled,” the product of messing around) together at the last moment. I was given a tape from the rabbi singing my haftarah portion and accompanying blessings without the slightest hint of inspiration or joy. After I memorized it, we had a perfunctory service in the basement of a local elementary school. The temple was then under construction. I have no real memory of where the congregation was meeting otherwise (surely not that dank and terrible basement?) because we almost never went to services.

So why, to this day, can I hear my father singing certain prayers alongside me in that oh-so Ashkenazi accent with every kamatz the dialectical offspring of a marriage between “ah” and “oh”?

And why is it that prayer comes naturally to me as long as I am singing? Other avenues have been known to fail me.

When did I make that unspoken agreement with the Presence-Sweetness-Mystery that as long as I could sing I was oh-so-surely at God’s service, especially when I often think that making God a noun is about the deadliest thing we humans can do to religion?

I don’t understand it, really. I don’t know why I feel healed and whole when our congregation’s lay cantor, Angela Hodges, magically spins harmony over and under any melody I sing. I don’t know how my husband, Ralf’s, percussion becomes the heartbeat of the earth itself in all its manifold variations at every service. I do not know what is coursing through my feet and hands. I can’t explain why music and Hebrew and the two intertwining makes me feel like the world is clean and clear whether the prayer is joyous, plaintive, or thankful.

To be truthful, the sound of prayer is in most every song I sing. It’s something about longing and joy, I suppose.

It made no sense, I suppose, but I feared the effects of my recent thyroid surgery on my voice more than I feared a cancer diagnosis.

My history is riddled with relatives who battled cancer. My father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. My aunt survived premenopausal breast cancer and thyroid cancer and lived until her nineties. My sister, Suzie, died young after a virulent premenopausal breast cancer exploded in her right breast and ripped through her body in less than a year.

Cancer took Suzie’s own extraordinary capacity to find a harmony to any melody I sang away so violently that I thought I’d never know what it was to sing together like that with anyone ever again.

To sing – and to dance – is to be. That has been true for me as long as I can remember. To be, Rabbi Abraham Heschel wrote, is a blessing. Just to live is holy.

I can’t imagine how I would live without singing. If living is holy, then singing is one of the sweetest manifestations of holiness I know.

My surgeon took great care to spare the nerves to my vocal chords. He is proud that he was able to protect my voice so beautifully. There appears to be no change in timbre or quality.

Today he told me, “I was just glad to hear there was no cancer.”

He reminded me, of course, what was important. I do know what mattered most. I do.

Still, I hope to be forgiven for my gratitude for the chance for a future in which I can sing all my prayers in my own voice. I will sing my thanks for life itself. I will sing my hopes for a world that is clean and clear.

I will sing, for that is my own holy blessing.

February 5, 2012

Jewish Renewal, II

Maybe a bunch of Jews are longing for sweet and crazy-joyful celebration of who they are and what they do (and what God might have to do with all that). Or perhaps lots of people just find red boots fascinating. Another possibility? Jewish Renewal readers are out there just waiting to see something more about their own movement available on the world-wide web.

My posting on Jewish Renewal’s red boots produced more reader comments and more subscriptions to this blog than any other I’ve written – including the one on male lactation in the Talmud.

I mused about this some as I heard my Inbox bing and bing and bing again with comments and subscriptions and suchlike. Clearly, I had hardly begun nourishing the longing out there for Stuff on Jewish Renewal. I like to cook, after all, and I know that a good meal includes more than the main course.

My favorite dessert is dark chocolate mousse. I make it frequently. So, for a little textual dessert…

Jewish Renewal is an evening of Shefa Gold chants. One verse becomes the rich exploration of soul, of the Holy Breath that sustains our lives. Rabbi Shefa’s melodies and harmonies become mantras to live by; their beautiful repetition engraves them on the heart. Her Torah commentaries stretch the spirit. In them, she gives her readers the right to honor their own knowledge, their inner Torah, and to see it revealed in texts written thousands of years ago.

Jewish Renewal celebrates spontaneity, an in-the-moment approach to prayer as well as attention and intention to our deep roots and history. Spontaneity: At Temple Or Olam’s Shabbat services I will happily sing in rhyme about the folks walking through the door, the children dancing in our midst, or matriarch Ruth Kingberg’s loving hugs. Whatever is happening is a happening thing.

Here are the deep roots of Jewish tradition: We know that our relationships and friendships are about godding the world toward a meshiachzeit we long for, a time of real and lasting peace.

I like to sing about that, too, and my liturgy gives me age-old ways to do just that.

Jewish Renewal is the way our mashpi’ahs (spiritual directors) begin reflecting, considering, and even crafting healing rituals when they identify yearning for shleimut, wholeness. It is the way Rabbi Burt Jacobson brings us to Baal Shem Tov text study by beginning with meditation. It is the way we soak ourselves in the richness of tradition and Torah, the liturgical year and the practice of Shabbat.

It is the kippot on my congregation’s welcome table at every service.

I began making kippot years ago, and started mostly with pretty head coverings for all the girls of our congregation. I love to sew as I love to cook. Pink and purple and blue, beaded and braided and trimmed – I added some every year. I began finding little animal appliqués and made kippot for our toddlers. Ducks, alligators, donkeys, giraffes. I started making some for my colleagues and friendswith rich colors, with sparkles and beads and flowers.

I’d sewn blessings into each one.

God knows, we need blessings. We are wounded and small in so many ways, cut off from our own richly attired texts and traditions

How do we connect with a language we don’t understand but still use to sing our prayers? How do we find meaning in all the acts that seemed inexplicable to us in our youth? In what ways can we nourish our Judaism while enriching the world?

By renewing our understanding, our connections, our love of who we are, where we have been, and where we must go to make this world the one we hope and long for. We of Jewish Renewal can and long to do just that among fellow Jews and Muslims and Christians and Buddhists and agnostics and atheists and all the rest of humanity who are in pursuit of that thing we call a better world, a world renewed.

Keyn y’hi ratzon. May it be so.

January 28, 2012

Can You Teach Jewish Humor, And If So, Why Not?

It wasn’t my idea, I admit. A colleague of mine at UNC-Charlotte overheard me bemoaning the task of teaching our department’s Judaism course. Said colleague occasionally has to teach the general course on Christianity. He sympathized.

For one thing, he and I fully agree: There is no such thing as either Christianity or Judaism — not the way we are wont to believe, anyway — until about the fourth century CE. More about that later.

For another, no matter how you shake it, either topic is unwieldy, difficult, and a pedagogic pain. Do you teach festivals? Liturgy? Scriptures? Great thinkers? Which history do you emphasize? Whose?

“Why don’t you choose a particular theme?” Mr. Colleague suggested. “How about Jewish humor?”

“Mel Brooks,” I said.

“Woody Allen!” he added.

“Moshe Waldocks,” I rejoined happily.

“Who?”

“The co-editor of The Big Book of Jewish Humor,” I said. “Funny guy.”

“Ah,” Mr. Colleague said.

I was excited. I collected jokes to tell at the beginning of each class. I practiced them at home. I invited my students to tell Jewish jokes. I assigned Mel Brooks and Woody Allen, stories and films, and The Year of Living Biblically. I thought we’d have a blast.

Not.

It was awful. I’d tell a joke with perfect timing. My students stared at me uncomprehendingly. They did not understand why Mel Brooks made fun of Adolf Hitler. They did not understand jokes about blood libel or pogroms. Actually, most had never heard of a pogrom.

I’ve been wondering ever since about my failed attempt at finding an entertaining way to teach Judaism. I’ve mused while bemused. Why were they so lost, so unsure why the material was funny? After all, Annie Hall was a great hit. There just aren’t enough Jews in These United States of America to explain the profits Woody Allen has raked in over the years. In despair, I began wondering how my students would have reacted to a series of “why did the chicken cross the road” jokes. Maybe, I thought, they are so oppressed by our lousy economy and the debt they are racking up in pursuit of an education that there’s nothing they would find funny these days.

Segue – though not, actually.

A few weeks ago, I was sitting in my surgeon’s office, getting bad news. The lumps on my thyroid we’d been watching for more than a year had apparently demonstrated significant get up and go. One had grown by twenty-five percent. I had tried to avoid the knife, but it seemed pretty clear to my surgeon that my bumpy thyroid was going to have to go.

My surgeon is a Really Nice Guy who is, as locals say in Concord, North Carolina, “from around here.” He is tall, fit, and clean-cut. He is thoroughly pleasant, has a lovely and light southern accent, and is a wonderful listener.

He reminds me very much of an older version of Chip Hilton, the beautifully moral figure of the adolescent boy novels I read as a young girl. (I was a tomboy in my youth. I read all of my older brother’s Chip Hilton novels. Touchdown Pass, Fourth Down Showdown, Strike Three.)

“So,” I said, “how long will it take me to recover after you slit my throat?”

“Barbara!” he said.

“Sorry,” I said, “it’s my heritage talking.”

I thought it was funny. I doubt my surgeon agreed. Like my students, he looked at me with a mixture of shock and confusion.

How do I explain this to happy, white, and – let’s face it – mostly Christian Americans? Jews are schlepping around a lot of ugly history in which Jews were oppressed, suppressed, and repressed. These facts of our lives were, in many respects, the least of our worries in the old country.

One way to deal with persistent powerlessness is to devalue power. If I pretend the knife is a joke, I can conquer fear. If Mel Brooks can make fun of Hitler, he (and we) can understand how to live after the Shoah which decimated our people.

I needed to teach misery first, I decided. Then I could teach Jewish humor.

So this semester, my students are learning a lot about European Jewish history. Oppression, suppression, and repression figure in that history. Then they will read The Dance of Genghis Cohn, a novel in which a Jewish man is executed by a Nazi. The Jewish fellow, a third-rate comedian by the name of Cohn, becomes a dybbuk and merrily haunts his executioner. The Nazi learns, in the process, various Yiddish expressions, how to cook kosher meals, and how to observe Jewish holidays. It’s hilarious.

Jewish humor is, as Cohn says, a “way of screaming.”

Or coping. Or understanding.

This time, around, I hope my students will get it.

Here’s why. Maybe if we all got it, future generations of Jews will happily content themselves with lighter forms of humor.

And they’ll want to know, too: Why did the chicken cross the road?

January 21, 2012January 21, 2012

Jewish Renewal’s Red Boots

What is Jewish Renewal?

It’s a question I get as soon as folks realize that my rabbinic identity doesn’t fit in the usual boxes. I am neither a Conservative, Reform, nor a Reconstructionist rabbi.

I was ordained almost exactly a year ago, by ALEPH, the Alliance for Jewish Renewal. My congregation is affiliated with Jewish Renewal.

Jewish Renewal is not a denomination. We like to say that we are post-denominational. Renewal rabbis, cantors, and rabbinic pastors work in all sorts of settings and in all sorts of shuls, from Conservative to Reform to Reconstructionist to independent (like mine).

What is Jewish Renewal?

It’s so very hard to describe something that ranges from starshine to sunshine, something that sparkles and sings and calls on the deepest spaces and places of the soul while making you laugh with recognition.

That, I wish I could say, is Jewish Renewal.

Instead, I typically offer an academic summary: Jewish Renewal seeks the deep knowledge of Chassidic tradition and strives to reconnect that tradition with contemporary Jewish practice. Jewish Renewal understands halakha, Jewish law, as a constantly evolving creation to help establish the most humane and ethical of life practices.

Jewish Renewal will joyfully embrace music, meditation, chant, yoga, and storytelling in the practice of Judaism. Jewish Renewal reads Torah as our deepest challenge and our most precious gift.

Or I say: Jewish Renewal is about learning the why and not just the how. It’s about plumbing the very depths of why so that we can hear our private and godly voices of truth.

I know, I know. Get concrete. Offer an example.

Early in January, I was attending the annual Ohalah conference, which brings together Renewal rabbis, cantors, and rabbinic pastors from diverse parts of the world.

When we pray together, there is a joy and an intimacy that belies and transcends the conference hotel rooms.

We sit in circles or get up to move and dance. We pray all at once together or in the spontaneous creation of a kind of complicated twenty-part madrigal. It’s awesome, actually.

As are the Velveteen Rabbi’s red boots. They are the example you need to understand Jewish Renewal.

Here’s how I came to understand that fact.

I was attending a Shacharit service. Rabbi Hanna Tiferet Siegel was leading our prayers – softly, gently. Rabbi Hanna Tiferet specializes in making a safe space for those who show up to daven with her. It is never about her; it’s all about our collective, kind intentions. It’s lovely.

As we davened, I looked across the room. Chaplain David Daniel Klipper was singing and tapping his foot. If he’d had a drum, he would have been playing. The Velveteen Rabbi, a.k.a. Rachel Barenblat, with whom I was smicha’d (ordained) last year as a rabbi and this year as a mashpi’ah, a spiritual director, is smiling at me.

I smile back. I look again.

It’s the boots. The red boots. The red boots with laces.

Rabbi Rachel’s red boots are a bright, energetic statement. They are beautiful and carefree, much like the mood in the room. They are a strong, rich red. They look solid and soft at the same time. Walking in them, I imagine, must make Rabbi Rachel feel strong and purposeful, ready and wide open for life itself.

Later, after davening, I am standing by Rabbi Rachel in the food line for breakfast when a rabbinic student comes up to admire her boots.

“They must be a bear to take off, though,” the student says.

Rabbi Rachel smiles.

“They zip!” she says brightly.

Over my oatmeal and scrambled eggs, I think about the way in which ideas and traditions and texts are laced together in our conference sessions, our classes, our prayers. Rabbi Laura Duhan Kaplan pulls together Emmanuel Levinas, Franz Rosenzweig, and the spine of a snake. Rabbi Elliot Ginsburg puns on the Hebrew er, for awakening, to “err” so that he can walk us through a look at snoozing and waking on a consciousness level.

How do we modulate our awareness, he asks, holding the ordinary and the holy, the flowing and the parched periods of life, the knowledge of presence and absence in one container?

I think about the five years of Renewal classes and conferences and the intimate and wide-ranging davening. I think about the way Renewal taught me that Judaism was not represented by large buildings and grand sanctuaries. Judaism is not a complicated form I could never grasp, a list of rules I could never master.

I could learn why. I could reach for the depth to be had in each letter of each word. Olam means “world” and “universe” and “eternal.” And it means “hidden” and “secret.” When I address God by saying Ruach ha’Olam, “Breath of the universe,” I take in the knowledge that however one thinks of the divine, there is something magical in the way that breath moves us, sustains us and keeps the whole world alive.

Breathing is life is divine is eternal is a mystery.

Ideas, texts, tradition – Jewish understanding laced together in a sweet web of life so clearly that I could unpack the teaching as easily as I could unzip a boot.

I learned these things in Jewish Renewal, from teachers whose hearts are rich and deep and playful. Like Rabbi Rachel’s boots: Red, soft, solid and joyful.

This is now my foundation; I walk in Jewish Renewal’s ways.

December 20, 2011

A Holly Jolly… Hanukkah?

I made a terrible mistake last week in my Hebrew Bible class.

The course is actually called “Old Testament/Hebrew Bible.” “Old Testament” comes first because most of our students have never heard of the “Hebrew Bible.” The latter is a respectable academic effort to avoid sectarian bias in naming biblical scriptures. Calling the Jewish scriptures the “Old Testament” assumes said scriptures existed only to give rise to the New Testament. For Jews, this is a pretty perilous proposition. It makes them grind their teeth.

Jews call their texts the Tanakh, an acronym for Torah-Neviim-Ketuvim. The Torah includes the Five Books of Moishe. These, in turn, are also known as the Chumash, Hebrew for “five” and/or the Pentateuch, which is Greek for the same. Neviim is Hebrew for “prophets” and Ketuvim is Hebrew for “writings.” The former includes prophetic texts and histories like Joshua, Judges, and Kings. The latter includes, among other writings, Psalms, Proverbs, the books of Esther and Ruth, Lamentations, and Job.

Academic types call all this stuff of ancient times the Hebrew Bible because the vast majority of the texts are written in Hebrew. A very small portion is written in Aramaic, which can look and act like Hebrew, but isn’t. The name “Hebrew Bible” is neutral. It makes no sectarian statement. It has no religious connotations.

Religious connotations, as I tell my students, are inadmissible in a secular classroom. “This class,” my syllabus reads, “assumes a scholarly attitude to religious beliefs and texts. We will look at religion scientifically as a historical phenomenon. We are not here to talk about personal beliefs, or to make moral judgments about the text. This is not the setting to deal with our own views on God or spirituality; the setting for that is a nice, comfy chair with some good coffee, and maybe a Danish.”

Or a bialy.

But, hey, I was in a silly mood last week. It was our last day. The students were about to take a final exam in which, among other things, they would have to explain intertextuality at work in Numbers 22 and Genesis 22. (That meant comparing the seer Balaam, who converses with his donkey, to Abraham, who doesn’t seem able to talk to his own son.)

I decided to let down my hair.

“Let’s sing some Christmas carols while we wait for everyone to get here,” I suggested brightly. “How about ‘Winter Wonderland’?”

You would have thought I had announced that the final was going to cover Sumerian hymns, insist on intimate knowledge of Ugaritic, and test knowledge of ancient Persian governance. There was a loud and raucous outcry. There was an “Occupy UNC-Charlotte” spirit adrift in the room. The peasants were revolting.

“Whoa,” I said. “Wassup? I was just trying to bring a little seasonable cheer into the room.”

I teach many students who have to work their way through college. A good many informed me in no uncertain terms that they had been forced to listen to Christmas carols since Halloween as they bagged motley plastic goods. They were mortally, thoroughly sick of “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” and “Little Drummer Boy.”

Some may have heard “Silver Bells” as many as fifty times in less than six weeks.

They threatened to gag, upchuck, or make rude noises if I so much as jingled a bell or decked the hall.

I demurred, of course. The room assigned for Old Testament/Hebrew Bible last semester is already dark and dank. It has no windows. The artificial light, as Shakespeare would have said, sucketh. We had studied in a version of Sheol all semester long, the gray and wretched place everyone lands after death according to Hebrew Bible. It doesn’t matter if you were naughty or nice in life – that’s where you go when you kick off. It’s like a nursing home with tenure.

Had said students done as threatened, the next group to trudge in would be met with gory smells and sights unbecoming to the student body. Any of them.

Sadly, I handed them their final exams. I watched them stress and worry, gnash their brows and furrow their teeth.

I mightily resisted the temptation to cheer them up by dreaming about a white Christmas – a song written by a Jew, by the by. I did not conjure up the image of old Frosty, who could have been Jewish. (He reminds me a lot of my Uncle Max – incessantly cheerful, that man and oy, the shnoz). I most certainly did not think of Scrooge. He evokes terrible associations and clichés about, well, Jews.

Instead, very softly – very softly indeed, I hummed a song that could not possibly offend anyone.

“I have a little dreidel. I made it out of clay…”

P.S. Chag sameach to clay-handling readers!

P.P.S. A list of my Top Ten Christmas Songs Written or Composed by Jews is provided for general edification below, as is a link to explanatory materials.

Silver Bells
Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire
Winter Wonderland
I’ll be Home for Christmas
Let it Snow
White Christmas
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer
It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year
A Holly Jolly Christmas
Sleigh Ride

http://www.interfaithfamily.com/arts_and_entertainment/popular_culture/The_Jews_Who_Wrote_Christmas_Songs.shtml