The Lilith Blog

December 2, 2008 by admin

You're Invited to View My Photos!!!

I’m invited to view your photos!!!
But maybe, just maybe, I couldn’t care less?
Your swaddled new infant, in pink cap or blue cap
In mom’s arms, then dad’s arms, then still, fast asleep.
I’ve seen it before, far too many times over
First smile! First bottle! First eyes open wide—
Well I can’t be wide-eyed! Your blah blah baby bores me.
I can’t ooh and ahh when you cry “He adores me.”
So thanks for the photos, and sorry to Snap-
Fish around for another to view the whole slide show.
Though I’m sad to miss out on what Baby just did now,
Delete! To the trash! He’s a garbage pail kid now.
The phone rings. It’s you: “Did you look at my beauty?”
I grimace. I pause. I squeal: “Oh what a cutie!”

–Chavatzelet Herzliya

The Lilith Blog

November 18, 2008 by admin

Entry #6: On Gratitude

Needless to say, it’s been a long time since I’ve written. The fall months have swirled up and overhead, dried leaves rushing away from me, ungraspable. These months have been a whirlwind of academic rigor in my doctorate program, while the real conquest has been unspoken for. These months my mother has slipped quietly into doctor’s office, the obligatory testings. They count her blood cells and tap out her heartbeat, make sure one is multiplying slowly enough while another beats quick-tempo enough. I remember years ago now, when the doctor explained to us why my mother was subject to constant echocardiograms. Chemotherapy isn’t localized but attacks the whole body, depressing the heart, he had said. At the time, I swore my heart slowed too, depressed by the news. I pictured her strong beating heart then like a tired dog. I pictured the heart that had once brought life to mine. Back then I asked myself the most universal question—how do we cut out those damaging pieces in our life while protecting and not forsaking those most essential life-giving parts? Back then it was a funny puzzle for us to work out, how to keep the best parts of her.

These months we walk unsaddled by the immediate fears that cancer brings. These months there is no screech in the record player, we glide through the hum drum of busy daily monotony, in a premature victory.

It’s funny how quickly gratitude melts into the unchecked privilege of the daily grind. It’s unchecked because we just go, just do. We just fall into our deadlines, our paychecks, our minutiae of life stressors. We just consume, our daily meals our daily news, we are consumed. And through this I try so hard to ask mindfully, what is gratitude, how do I engage my thankfulness? Do I think of cancer often and daily, do I hum a silent morning ohm for motherhood and life? Do I let myself drive full throttle through the streets of daily life, full engagement as the ultimate act of gratefulness? How shall I be grateful for my hushed non-newsy existence these past months, for my mother prattling off Thanksgiving recipes and movies I ought to see and the blessed nag she has honed and crafted in her elder years? I still await the answer.

–I. Kramer

The Lilith Blog

November 11, 2008 by admin

Election

Last Tuesday, as I flipped between channels, I was endlessly enthused by the number of people over 65 giving live interviews on television, and the number of people of all ages invoking their parents and grandparents.

Seeing older people acting as crucial sources of perspective in an election year, not as cute and endearing characters led onto camera or into stump speech anecdotes just to win our hearts over, was moving, orienting, and a joy.

Americans lending their life experience included veterans of the Civil Rights Movement, the average citizen who remembers the time before the Voting Rights Act, and the average citizen who remembers someone who remembered it. One station’s anchor reported (spontaneously, it seemed) on his phone call with his mother just after the race was called. A famed presidential historian was on air – and described her grandmother’s childhood. The 67-year-old Congressman John Lewis from Georgia, a leader of the Civil Rights Movement, was, as always, a fount of stirring comments, but equally stirring to me were the leading questions of his interviewers: “I was just gonna ask,” one interrupted, “who it makes you think of, what are some of the names, what are some of the faces flying through your head right now?” It was the hugest night of the last four years, and it wasn’t the History Channel, but he was being invited to reminisce freely, the value of listening to him self-evident.

The names and faces flying through his head were Martin Luther King, President Johnson, President Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, the “countless individuals that stood in those unmovable lines in Selma,” and those young people who gave their lives for the cause.

Before Tuesday, I had never calculated that my parents were 16 years old when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated – I had never integrated the timeline of Civil Rights history with the timeline of my family history…to figure out when it was that, as my father proudly reports, my immigrant grandmother passionately encouraged him to join the movement.

Last night I heard a lecture by Kenyan-born author Ngugi wa Thiong’o. He said he remembered two things when the race was called last Tuesday. First, he imagined the first African captured and taken to America, and second, he remembered the story of an African-American man who, when Obama won the Democratic nomination, ran to the graveyard of his parents and grandparents. He had not expected or planned to do that, Ngugi recalled, but when the moment came, he just “wanted to be with them.”

In a way, I think we’ve all “run to the graveyard of our parents and grandparents” with this news in our hearts – in honor of them, in honor of those buried around them; out of elation, gratitude, and nostalgia; with questions; for information, confrontation, and celebration; to be sobered, to be reminded, to be made grateful, to relate the news, to receive a blessing, to herald a new day, to recall the old days – just to spend time with the soil in which they were buried.

As Jews, we know that history is always relevant, reliving it an imperative, and as women, we can be confident that the stories less aired have just as much to teach. Maybe we, as a nation, are too scared to take the long (and wide) view sometimes, but a shared, popular, primetime willingness and excitement to do so is one of the many phenomena of this election that I hope sticks around through January and beyond.

–Anna Schnur-Fishman

The Lilith Blog

November 10, 2008 by admin

Out with "the Sarah Palin," in with "the Marie Antoinette?"

The new hair of Orthodox married women?

The most recent garment-related decree of Rabbi Yosef Sholom Elyashiv, of modesty courts fame, has given us a great new marketing idea for Orthodox women’s fashions. In a recent talk, R. Elyashiv announced that contemporary sheitels, as wigs worn by married Orthodox women are often called, are not an acceptable way to cover one’s hair in accordance with the tradition for married women. A woman who wears one, R. Elyashiv said, is considered as if she is going bareheaded, reports Yeshiva World News. Given that wearing sheitels — often pricey, designer models — is common practice amongst married women in many Orthodox communities, this pronouncement is a big deal.

It’s not the concept of wearing a wig that R. Elyashiv considers problematic, though (indeed, a Talmudic discussion deems them acceptable as a form of head covering); rather, it’s that today’s wigs, “contemporary” sheitels, look too much like real hair.
(Rabbi Elyashiv’s talk (in Yiddish) can be viewed online here. )

Not everyone agrees with the controversial ruling. Hirhurim’s Gil Student, for one, explains some of the relevant halacha and why he disagrees with R. Elyashiv. For once, though, we can see R. Elyashiv’s point — that “covering” your real hair with even nicer looking hair misses the point of the matter — and we appreciate that in this instance he blames both women and their husbands equally for allowing the offending practice (after all, one reason the Gemara says wigs are okay is because they make women more attractive to their husbands.)

But sheitel-machers and wearers need not fear. In forbidding only “contemporary” sheitels, R. Elyashiv has left open a huge and untapped niche in the sheitel industry, and we smell a huge opportunity here for the fashion-forward Orthodox woman: vintage and vintage-style sheitels.

If “contemporary” is the problem, go for old. If real-looking is the problem, go for over-the-top. No one said sheitels can’t be pretty or interesting, just that they can’t look to much like your real hair. (I’m reminded that an unmarried friend once suggested she might cover her hair with a clown wig when she gets married. One wonders if that would pass muster…)

R. Elyashiv did not specify when exactly the “contemporary period” of sheitel-making began, but we figure if you stick to pre-Victorian styles, you can’t go wrong. And looking to high fashion from previous centuries and other countries would be a great source of inspiration. After all, Marie Antoinette was a style icon of 18th century French fashion, and she had some of the biggest wigs around. (“Let them eat sponge cake!”) By comparison, the Sarah Palin wig that made a splash last month is plain and school-marmish. Even with the matching Kawasaki 704 glasses.

Come to think of it, men wore wigs back then, too. Maybe we could start thinking about replacing kippot with, say, an English barrister’s wig. It wouldn’t look any more out of place than a streimel.

–Rebecca Honig Friedman

The Lilith Blog

November 6, 2008 by admin

Black Dogs

Today I was surrounded by eight ferocious dogs and saved by the power of Torah.

I was jogging, as I often do, near Ramat Rachel, a kibbutz hotel near the southern part of Jerusalem that overlooks Bethlehem and the Judeaen hills. Usually when I run that route, I go no further than the giant statue of the matriarch Rachel who stands tall and proud with two little children clinging to the hem of her skirt. The base of the statue bears an inscription from the book of Jeremiah: “And the children shall return to their borders” (31:16), part of the prophecy about a future time when Joseph’s sons will be restored to their land. At this point, I pause for a moment to read these words about returning, and then turn around and head back north.

This is generally a route I run on Friday mornings, when I can listen to Reshet Moreshet, the frum radio station that broadcasts songs about that week’s parsha from 8-9am. I time my runs accordingly, ending at about 9am at the shuk, where I buy fresh challot for Shabbat and take the bus home. I run with several items in my back pocket: shopping list, bus pass, house key, some money, MP3 player, and a folded-up Xerox of my leyning for that Shabbat, which I review when I ride the bus back.

This week I am training for a race, so I decided to run on Monday as well. As usual, I headed to Ramat Rachel. Instead of Reshet Moreshet (which broadcasts in the mornings only on Fridays) I listened to a daf yomi shiur about how land and moveable property are acquired. Inspired perhaps by all the talk of vast expanses of land for sale, I decided to run a bit further and head into the fields behind the hotel, which contain 200 olive trees planted in concentric rows. Part of me knew I was being a little daring in running in a deserted field near an Arab neighborhood, but I was engrossed in my shiur and light on my feet, and I threw caution to the wind.

I ran to the edge of the olive grove and looked out over Har Choma until I could run no further, and then I turned around. Off in the distance I saw a dog looking at me suspiciously, but I continued onwards down the dirt path. When next I was aware of what was going on, there were several dogs in the distance all barking to one another and looking angrily in my direction. The dogs came closer. They barked louder. They came closer still, and barked louder still. Soon I was surrounded by eight dogs at waist level, all barking angrily and running alongside me.

Terrified, I remember thinking that it was most important that I not show the dogs that I was scared. I thought about a scene in the most recent Maisie Dobbs novel I read, in which the beloved British postwar sleuth thinks she is alone in an abandoned barn when all of a sudden a threatening dog rears its head. Maisie, through intense powers of concentration, manages to calm her whole body so that the dog, convinced that she is not afraid, backs off. If only I can stay calm like Maisie, I thought, I’ll be OK. Then my thoughts drifted to more frightful literary canines, the terrifying black dogs of Ian McEwan’s eponymous novel. I thought of June Tremaine’s encounter with those savage bloodthirsty beasts in the French countryside in the months after World War II, and I shivered as I always do when I think of that nightmarish scene. Unlike Maisie, I had no way of calming myself down; unlike June, I did not have a knife in my pocket. My literary imagination could distract me for only so long; how was I going to ward off the very real dogs that were surrounding me there and then in that very moment?

The Kiddushin shiur was still playing in my ears; just as I had not thought to stop running, I also did not think to turn off my MP3 or take off my headphones. *If someone hands over ten animals all tied with one halter and says “acquire this,” are all of the animals acquired? *(Kiddushin 27b). Dear me. Given the subject of today’s daf, I was not likely to forget myself any time soon.

The next thing I knew, a verse was running through my mind: “A beloved doe, a graceful mountain goat” (Proverbs 5:19). Surrounded as I was by dogs, I was not sure why I was suddenly beset by words about does and goats. And then I realized: This was the verse that Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi used to quote when people would ask him how he could draw so close to lepers. “Do you not worry that you will get sick?” they would ask. “A loving doe, a graceful mountain goat,” Ben Levi would respond. “If Torah graces those who learn it, will it not also protect me?” (Ketubot 77b). I recited Ben Levi’s words to myself again and again: “If Torah graces those who learn it, will it not also protect me?”

Somehow inside me I sensed that with the shiur playing in my ears, I would come out of this situation OK. I thought about King David who learned that he was destined to die on the Sabbath and therefore spent every Sabbath studying Torah; so long as he was learning, the Angel of Death was unable to overcome him (Shabbat 30b). I thought about the Gemara in Sotah which interprets the verse: “When you walk it will guide you” (Proverbs 6:23) to mean that Torah protects us wherever we walk in this world (21a). Is Torah not a tree of life to those who cling fast to it? The olive trees around me swayed in the breeze, as if nodding in agreement.

Just as I was running out of sugyot about the protective power of Torah, I came to the main road at the edge of the field and saw a truck in the
distance. I did not want to cry out lest I provoke the dogs, but I began waving my hands wildly in the air, and the truck turned in my direction. The dogs, seeing the approaching truck, immediately dispersed, their barks growing fainter and their heads hanging low in defeat. I thanked the driver for rescuing me, but I knew the true source of my salvation.

My heart slowed to its normal exercise pace as I made my way back down towards Derech Chevron. Next time I jog, I hope to find a running partner (or should I say a chevruta?). And graceful mountain goat notwithstanding, next time I’m sticking to the main road.

–Chavatzelet Herzliya

The Lilith Blog

October 16, 2008 by admin

Holiday Season

Last week my father remembered an Orthodox classmate from law school who got an interview at a prestigious Baltimore firm that had no Jewish partners or employees. “How’d it go?,” my father asked.

“I had to tell them about September,” he said.

This came up in a discussion, provoked by a lecture in my Ethnic Studies class, of whether or not retention of ethnic markers important to one’s self-image could get in the way of surviving and thriving in the U.S.A. I was arguing that it could; for example, in a job interview – what if you’re wearing clothes of your home country, giving the unintentional suggestion that you won’t relate to American clientele? What if you eat kosher or halal, and you have to tell a potential employer even before you meet that you can’t be taken out to lunch in any of the usual places?

When I left dayschool for public school, I was inducted into the annual chagrin of inevitable first interactions with new teachers: “Hi, you don’t know my name yet, I’m going to be missing many more days than appear as holidays on the school calendar, and it’s really hard for me to make up the work during this time, especially on those holidays for which it’s imperative that I reunite with the rest of the family in New Jersey.”
In general, I boil a pot of Righteous September Indignation and leave it to simmer all season. Giving a test on Yom Kippur is against school rules! I can’t attend class until 8pm because the “night before” Rosh Hashana is Rosh Hashana!

It didn’t occur to me until this summer – when I was in China, dodging pork, of course – that part of my wide-sweeping indignation stemmed from a personal resistance to coming out as “religious” to people I barely knew. My discomfort with that, I think, stems from a basic disconnect between how I see my Jewish observance (completely normal) and how someone else conceivably could (utterly wacko). In high school, I explored this middle territory in mischief – telling a gym teacher, when I’d forgotten my sweatpants, that a Jewish holiday required skirt-wearing, and so forth – but the motivation for this joking around was a sincere uncertainty. (As, I find, is usually the case.) Am I “religious”? Do I get to decide that, or do others judge it? It’s not a tag with particularly positive associations among my friends and teachers and at this liberal school. No wonder I get all tied up in knots trying to explain it to strangers.

In China, a combination of things – announcing daily, “I do not eat pork, I cannot, my religion”; occasionally professing to be Muslim for simplicity’s sake (Islam being common where I lived); and being in a position of scrutinizing, constantly, another culture’s idiosyncratic, centuries-old traditions – opened my eyes, ta da!, to the fact that other people might think of me as religious. Ergo as weird as other religious people. And that they might be right.

This was huge for me. While I’ve spent, in sum, probably a years’ worth of hours drinking in the spectacle of the weirdest religious elements of my tradition – “In eighth grade, I had an entire test on what to do if a mouse brings leavened products into your house during Passover, ha ha ha,” etc. – I had actually failed to process what it all looked like from the outside…partly because I lacked perspective, and partly because it would have hurt to imagine non-Jews and less observant Jews seeing my observance as weird.

Complicated, eh? What do you think?

–Anna Schnur-Fishman

The Lilith Blog

October 2, 2008 by admin

The Holy One, Blessed be S/He?: Cracking the Tetragrammaton

Here’s some food for thought as you ponder your relationship with God over the next week and a half of High Holiday atonement: what if God is neither a He nor a She nor an It, but a S/He?

Rabbi Mark Sameth, a pulpit rabbi in Pleasantville, NY and Biblical-linguistic sleuth on the side, believes he has cracked the code to the pronunciation — and meaning — of the inscrutable name of God known as the Tetragrammaton. And what it means, he contends, is “He-She.” As an article about Sameth’s findings in the Lower Hudson Journal puts it:

God thus becomes a dual-gendered deity, bringing together all the male and female energy in the universe, the yin and the yang that have divided the sexes from Adam and Eve to Homer and Marge.
“This is the kind of God I believe in, the kind of God that makes sense to me, in a language that speaks very, very deeply to human aspirations and striving,” Sameth said. “How could God be male and not female?”

Now lest you think that Sameth is some Bible-Code-nut, take heed that his findings were recently published in the CCAR (Central Conference of American Rabbis) Journal, the Reform movement’s foremost theological publication, in a paper called “Who Is He? He Is She: The Secret Four-Letter Name of God.”

Sameth cracked the secret by, get this, reading backwards. If you look at the four letters of the tetragrammaton, in Hebrew, “yud – hey – vav – hey,” and read them backwards, you get the sounds “hu,” meaning “he” in English, and “he,” meaning “she” in English. Sameth explains it thusly in his CCAR piece:

…this unpronounceable Name Yud Hay Vov Hay has, in fact, always been unpronounceable for the simple reason that it is written in reverse.
The explicit Name of God is not Yud Hay Vov Hay but rather it is Hay Vov Hay Yud vocalized with a shuruk and a chirik; its two syllables become the sound equivalents of the Hebrew words hu and hi, which would be rendered in English as He-She.
Counter to everything all of us, except our Jewish mystics, have grown up believing, the God of the Torah is not a “he.” HaShem, the Tetragrammaton, Shem Ha-Meforash, the explicit, ineffable, four letter Name of God is the conflation of the Hebrew pronouns for “he” and “she.”

Sameth’s reading, then, gives us a conception of a God that is not only hermaphroditic but also dyslexic. How inclusive! (OK, cheap shot.)

The obvious technical problem with Sameth’s reading is that there’s a missing letter “aleph” at the end of each of those words. Still, one could easily explain that away by saying that the “aleph” is merely a placeholder and is not necessary when the word is attached to its counterpart. To back up his reading, Sameth presents evidence from the Torah and the mystical/Kabbalistic tradition for conceiving of God as male and female. Perhaps the most basic and compelling support he presents is the story of Creation of Adam:

…Zachar un’keiva bara otam. Male and female God created them.
The text seems to be saying (and the rabbis understood it this way) that the earth-creature—the Adam—was created by God as an inter-sexed being; it, we are told, is male and female. … What the rabbis were less willing to discuss openly was the extent to which this dual-sexed earth creature—created b’tzelem Elohim, in the image of God—is, in its balanced, conflated gendering, the image of God.

To support the backwards reading of God’s name, Sameth presents a litany of what amounts to circumstantial yet compelling evidence, clues in Biblical literature that encourage such a reading — clues that become clear only after the backwards reading has been discovered:

And we realize now that the secret was almost revealed by the author of the Sefer Raziel, where, as one of twelve permutations of the four letters, the Tetragrammaton appears in reverse. We realize now that the secret was almost revealed by the thirteenth-century Torah commentator Rabbeinu Bachya, who makes note of every four-word cluster in the Torah whose rashei teivot, or initial letters, spell out the Tetragrammaton in reverse. … That the ineffable Name is pronounced in the opposite direction from which it is written enables us to make sense of our abbreviation of the four-letter Name as Hay chipchick, rather than Yud chipchick. That the ineffable Name is pronounced in the opposite direction from which it is written enables us to make sense of the Talmud’s statement in Masechet Shabbat that “Hay Vov is the Name of the Holy One Blessed be He.” That the ineffable Name is pronounced in the opposite direction from which it is written allows us to make sense of the Talmud’s statement in Masechet Kiddushin: “Not the way I am written am I pronounced.” That the ineffable Name is pronounced in the opposite direction from which it is written enables us to make sense of the Psalmist’s kavannah, spiritual intention: shiviti YHVH l’negdi, “I have equalized the four-letter Name of God [not l’fanai, before me, but l’negdi] opposite me.” Indeed, this was the very verse about which the thirteenth- century Castilian kabbalist Joseph Gikatilla wrote that the “whole secret is hinted at” therein.

None of it proves anything in particular, but he certainly makes an interesting case.

I’m both surprised and not surprised that this particular news story hasn’t gotten much press in the Jewish media. On the one hand, the claim of figuring out the Tetragrammaton is a huge theological story (Sameth is adamant, by the way, that he is not advocating anyone actually pronounce the name or read Torah differently based on his findings). The key to God’s name? That’s HUGE! But on the other hand, we don’t tend to go in much for the nuances of theology. Whether I conceive of God as male or female, neither or both, will it make me any less hungry when I’m fasting on Yom Kippur? Probably not.

But who knows? I actually find Sameth’s argument confusing. Insomuch as we conceive of God in anthropomorphic terms, it makes sense that S/He is both male and female. Yet I’ve always tried, in my adult life, to think of God as outside of the realm of sex and gender (superhuman, if you will).

However, the crux of what Sameth is trying to get across with his theory of the He-She God is a challenge to the archetype of male-centered religion, which is what much of organized religion has been over the last thousands of years or so, and, Sameth tells me, is still how many people think of religion today. The He-She God concept — as rooted in the most sacred name of God, His/Her essence if you will, allows people who have always been turned off by what they might have conceived of as a male-dominated religious tradition and a male-centered view of God, to connect with God in a different way. And it allows us, also, to conceive of ourselves, as created in the image of God, as neither wholly male nor wholly female but a bit of each. It creates a view of gender and sexuality that is much more open and fluid. Sameth puts it thusly:

What the mystics called “the secret of one” is the inner unification of the sometimes competing, sometimes complementing masculine and feminine energies that reside within each of us, regardless whether we are male or female. The Torah presents us with earthly role models in that regard: androgynous “he” matriarchs, and nursing kings. And yet, an act that draws those energies together with proper spiritual intention has consequences, according to our mystics, beyond the earthly realm. Such an act is called an act l’shem yichud, an act for the sake of God’s unification. For God, according to our tradition, is and at the same time is not Her/Himself yet One.

Rabbi Mark Sameth’s article appears in the Summer 2008 issue of the CCAR Journal, which can be purchased through the CCAR. The LoHud.com article about Sameth’s theory is no longer available for free online viewing, but it is posted in its entirety, along with some interesting commentary, on the Failed Messiah blog.

–Rebecca Honig Friedman

The Lilith Blog

September 29, 2008 by admin

Entry#5: Turning 60

That Tuesday I awoke early before the sunrise and walked myself like an eager, panting dog along the quiet sidewalk, strung against the hues of pale golden light. In the gray I contemplated, in the amber I celebrated: her life. I met her in mid-town Manhattan on the morning of her 60th birthday. Would I have done it differently if the situation had been otherwise? Maybe. Can I imagine it otherwise? The luxury of unacknowledged health? No.

I was glad to rise early, to take her to breakfast, to soak her in alongside the challah French toast, to take her in, scooped in to my spinach and goat cheese omelet. It was one of those moments where the conversation is so well-intended and genuine, where both parties are trying hard out of love despite their obvious difference. I want to bubble-wrap those moments, I want to press and hang those moments as reminders for all the drab, conflictual ones in between.

Perhaps it was also fulfilling for self-congratulatory reasons. She made me feel good about myself, proud of the woman I had become, proud that I had my priorities in line to her, proud even that I was coming to her as a young woman who has finally found love.

I knew she was trying- this love not what she had imagined for her nice Jewish girl, this love not the wood-framed coffee table she imagined to see in her own living room. She hadn’t gotten used to the texture and color, the height and shape, but this morning breakfast, my omelet, her challah, she seemed to say I will, I do, and I’m proud.

This weekend marked the 60th Birthday family celebration, too: The kids (under 30) pitched in to buy her a pink Beachcruiser bicycle, replete with Beagle-doggie basket and pink streamers (oy). Her sister surprised her by flying in from across the country. We had t-shirts made with her face on it (embrace garishness, I say) for a family breast cancer walk (postponed due to the bagels and lox weighting down all stomachs beforehand). Most of all, this weekend she made an (erev erev) Rosh Hashanah speech, proclaiming a New Year of health and love for all of us, of personal growth (deleted: engagement & childbearing pressures to those aged 32 and under).

I know every birthday won’t be so fanciful and bright. I know I could say more terrible things. But for now, the energy glows in ways it hasn’t in the two years passed. Beneath the shadow of illness and frailty, there is so much life.

–I. Kramer

The Lilith Blog

September 24, 2008 by admin

Great Jewish Feminist Ideas

As part of the celebration of Lilith’s 100th issue, our fall issue has a list of 100 great feminist ideas. Check out the issue and leave your own ideas below!

Feel free to leave any other questions, comments or thoughts on the fall issue, too!

The Lilith Blog

September 19, 2008 by admin

Ten Ways in Which the "Selichot Season" Concert of the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra Differs From a Concert Anywhere Else in the World

1. The concert begins when a world-famous clarinetist enters from the back row playing Yerushalayim Shel Zahav (Jerusalem of Gold), encouraging the audience to sing along.

2. In between musical pieces the aforementioned clarinetist uses his instrument to blast a Tekia, Shvarim, Truah, Tekia, sounding even better than a real shofar! (Could’ve fooled me.)

3. Three cell phones go off during the slow, quiet mandolin solo, destroying the audience’s rapt concentration.

4. Each time the conductor speaks (which is often), someone from the back row yells out “Lo shomim” (we can’t hear!!); and then someone from the front cries out, “Az lo tishmeu” (so you won’t hear!!).

5. The conductor announces that does not plan to pay the pieces in the program – as far as he is concerned, the program notes are entirely incidental.

6. In between movements, half of the audience claps, and the other half hisses at the clappers for this apparently egregious violation of concert etiquette.

7. The pianist inserts a few bars of Hatikva into the cadenza of Haydn’s piano concerto, and the audience members remain unfazed.

8. The clarinetist stamps his feet and begins dancing with wild Hasidic-like gestures during his solo.

9. The address of the theater, which happens (aptly) to be “5 Chopin St.,” is spelled “5 Shop-in St.” on the concert program. Shop in, stop in, drop in, and hear some music while you’re at it!

10. When the mandolin soloist is introduced, the conductor says that “not only is he the best mandolin player in the world – he is also single!”

–Chavazelet Herzliya