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Author Archives: admin
January 6, 2020 by admin
How Singing (Yes, Singing!) Can Create Radical Jewish Accessibility
There’s a Hasidic story about a man who lived in Poland, renowned across the country for the fervor of his prayers. So stirring was his reputation that the Baal Shem Tov decided one day to travel great lengths to see this spiritual power for himself. After making a long journey, he found a shepherd boy standing on a hilltop, holding a prayerbook and calling out letters one by one. “Bet! Reish! Vav!” he cried out, on and on, and then, “Master of the Universe, this is all I can do. You know how the prayers should be pronounced. Please, arrange the letters in the proper way.”
When I first heard this story, I recognized myself in it, and countless people I know: those of us for whom Jewish education and Jewish life has not always been accessible. Those of us filled with a hunger to express ourselves, to cry out in prayer, and to contribute, who didn’t start out knowing how to piece the letters together —metaphorically or literally. I’ve devoted my adult life and my rabbinate to creating spaces where people like me, like this fabled shepherd boy, can access Jewish tradition and thrive. Because, as this story reminds us, brilliance and creativity aren’t dependent on literacy. God receives us as we are, judging not our level of knowledge but rather the depths of our hearts. And as it turns out, one key to finding that space is through music.
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December 31, 2019 by admin
Can We Cut Off Antisemitism at its Roots?
On the antisemitic attack in Monsey:
Last night I had a dream that it was finally time to harvest the root vegetables. In the dream, they had been left too long in the ground, and they were starting to rot.
I woke up, dressed, and went outside to harvest. I wasn’t too late. The first radish, round and bright and pink, allayed my fears. I spent the morning digging up the roots, rinsing them clean, putting them into containers to store. Then I checked the news.
Hasidic Jews in New York attacked with a machete inside their Rabbi’s home on Chanukah. The ninth antisemitic attack in New York during this week. Visibly Jewish people bearing the violent brunt of the story told about all Jews: that we are the ultimate source of people’s suffering. And that by harming us, killing us, that suffering will be alleviated.
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December 31, 2019 by admin
On Christmas, and Confusion
Passing. There’s no time like the holidays for it. Passing plates. Passing on obligations and invitations. Passing by the Salvation Army jingles and tourists gawking at Macy’s holiday window displays. And passing by all the trees, wrapped up and dreaming of living rooms.
Suddenly, nothing is secular, so everything is secular. I usually don’t listen to music through headphones—music was made for orchestras and turntables and studios and theaters and speakers. But in December, I do. It’s cold, it’s lonely, and there’s a whole catalogue of carols written to address the temperature and the accompanying existential squall. And all the best songs were written by Jews, of course. So, I put in my headphones and join my ancestors and pass.
When I was in fifth grade, I wrote a report about Irving Berlin. I chose him randomly—I browsed the biography shelves after my immigrant parents, who had waited to get the internet until it became necessary, dropped me off at the library. I remember opening a book and seeing a menorah on the first page and reading something about his Russian roots. Perfect, I thought. He’s just like my dad, this’ll be easy. White Christmas meant nothing to me at the time—I didn’t see it until this year and only because I’ve been consumed by religious inversions recently.
Hanukkah wouldn’t exist without Christmas. It’s been plucked out of scriptural obscurity and magnified to give Jews something to do. Or rather, something to buy, should we not succumb to the cheerful Christmas monolith. I don’t mean to deride the monolith—I mean to define it. I mean to trace its edges and describe its shape in a way that only certain kinds of outsiders can. Jews occupy a particular intersectional niche: we are frequently able to pass and comment both from the inside and the outside on what we see.
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December 6, 2019 by admin
Lesléa Newman: What Happened When I Was Uninvited to a Yeshiva
Originally posted on the Nerdy Book Club.
I have been invited to hundreds of schools as a visiting author over the last several decades. And there are hundreds (thousands!) of schools who haven’t invited me. But I have never been uninvited to a school. Until now.
Here’s what happened: my publisher set up several days worth of school visits at a few yeshivas (Jewish day schools) in Brooklyn, the city of my birth. I was excited to discuss with students my newest picture book, Gittel’s Journey: An Ellis Island Story. Based on my own family history, the book tells how nine-year-old Gittel travels from Europe to America alone in the early 1900’s to escape pogroms and have a better life. It is a story infused with Jewish culture (Gittel’s mother gives Gittel her treasured Shabbos candlesticks to bring to the new world) and Jewish values (Gittel’s mother tells her, “This is God’s plan. God will take care of you.”) I imagined that the students might have their own family immigration stories to share and I was eager to hear them.
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November 25, 2019 by admin
Fridays with Women: Shishi Nashim
by Diana Bletter
As a muezzin called worshippers to prayer from the minaret of the main mosque on Friday morning, November 15 in the old city of Akko, in Israel’s Western Galilee, at a small theatre space within the city’s ancient stone walls psychologist Dr. Fatina Khazen was speaking to a group of about 50 women – Jewish, Muslim, Christians and Druze – about creativity.
Shishi Nashim–“Friday Women”–is the joint initiative of two grassroots organizations in Akko: the Educators Kibbutz and Akko Women’s Vision. The project is also supported by the United Jewish Israel Appeal of the United Kingdom. The two organizations have been working to spark increased community involvement and a new creativity among the city’s 50,000 residents, who are one-third Arab and two-thirds Jewish.
Mirit Sulema, a member of the Educators Kibbutz, an urban kibbutz that is part of the Dror Israel Educational Movement, said the kibbutz members, who live within the city, sponsor events for residents so that they “don’t only exist side by side in a ‘mixed city’ but feel a part of a ‘shared city’ with a sense of community.”
Akko Women’s Vision was founded in 2003 by Dr. Janan Faraj Falah, the first Druze woman to receive her Ph.D. in Israel (if not in the entire Middle East). Faraj Falah is also the 2017 winner of the Jerusalem Unity Prize, its first non-Jewish recipient. She’s a senior lecturer at the Academic College of Education in Haifa and a researcher at the University of Haifa.
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November 24, 2019 by admin
In the Image of God?
By Mica Maltzman
When I was younger, around the time of my consecration, my vision of God was simple. Questions like “Who is God?” and “Where is God?” seemed silly, because the answer was literally right in front of me every Friday night on the bimah as I sat in services. God was the man with a cap of white hair, a feathery beard, and wire-rimmed glasses known as Rabbi Reiner. But after years of feeling confident in my image of God, I was shocked when my mother informed me that our rabbi was, in fact, not the divine being that we sang to and about in every prayer.
With this revelation, I began a nearly ten year-long journey in search of what God meant to me. Coming from a family that would describe themselves as “culturally Jewish,” God has never played a pivotal role in my Jewish identity. I’ve always considered my Judaism to consist mostly of waking up at 7:30 am on Sunday mornings for religious school, dressing in whites and khakis for Shabbat at my sleep-away camp, and spending weekends interacting with other Jewish teens at NFTY events. But ever since my image of Rabbi Reiner as God was shattered, I’ve never been sure where God fit into the picture.
While my mother shocked me with this hard truth, she also handed me a clean canvas for my perception of God that left infinite directions for me to go in. The Jewish spaces I found myself in quickly filled that canvas with colors and shapes.
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November 11, 2019 by admin
Why She Needed to Create the Jews of Color Torah Academy
By Arielle Korman
In October 2018, I sat alone in the rare book room in the library at Columbia University with a dusty pink notebook that had once belonged to a 17th-century Moroccan Yeshiva student. The script was challenging to read and yet, with focus and my ever-growing knowledge of Hebrew–and access to scholars of Jewish Studies to guide me–I found myself able to engage in an encounter with his writing and watch as his thoughts and educational life emerged from the page. Education could give me the tools to ignite histories and Torah simultaneously ancient and new.
I remember a time not long ago in which I could read Hebrew, chant it, recognize words, but not understand the text before me. I remember visiting Orthodox cousins and watching them davening, a flurry of words on their tongues. In contrast, my immediate family could not speak a word of Hebrew and, for a long time, Hebrew remained a mystery language to us.
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November 1, 2019 by admin
What Jews Don’t Talk About When They Talk About Jews. And Who Does the Talking.
By Diana Bletter
The same morning that the “Judaism, Israel and Diaspora” Conference was set to begin at the International Convention Center in Jerusalem on Wednesday, October 31 – with a roster of speakers about to examine diverging definitions of Judaism, world Jewry and Jewish identity – Israeli police stopped women from bringing into the Kotel, or Western Wall, Torah scrolls to pray with at Rosh Hodesh services for the start of the Jewish month of Heshvan.
The two events happened almost simultaneously, almost as if there were two sets of people replying to the same question about who owns Judaism, who gets to authorize it, and who serves as its gatekeepers. One set of people was exploring these queries in an academic forum sponsored by Haaretz newspaper, The Jewish Agency for Israel, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Ruderman Family Foundation; the other set was comprised of more than two hundred women trying to claim the right to their own interpretation of Judaism, attempting to change the facts on the ground, in real time.
Nashot haKotel, or Women of the Wall, has worked since 1988 to enable women to be allowed to pray together (out loud) and read from a Torah scroll at the Kotel while the Western Wall Heritage Foundation, the Orthodox Israeli group recognized by the government as the Kotel’s guardians, prevented the women from practicing their vision of Judaism, saying that the women with the Torah scrolls were behaving in a “provocative and political” way.
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October 31, 2019 by admin
So You Have a Yetzer HaRa! A Training Guide for Primitive Breeds
by Jessica Jacobs
When writing about the yetzer hara, the “evil inclination,” rabbis have grappled with the exalted algebra that if God created everything, then God must have also created this inclination. Thus, even this “evil” part of us must have some essence of the divine. Through Midrash and Mishnah (the oral tradition of Jewish law and commentaries on Jewish foundational texts), rabbis traded advice on the best techniques for dealing with the yetzer hara, which have been boiled down to this convenient training guide—because who doesn’t need a little help when attempting to housebreak this pesky propensity?
Your yetzer hara is both the seed of your physical needs and desires—those urges that drive you toward pleasure and productivity—and the MiracleGro that can get those urges sprouting like kudzu, climbing, coiling, and overtaking every other part of your life, smothering everything it covers.
But as it says in the Talmud (that training guide of all training guides), how you respond to your yetzer hara is up to you: “At first, the yetzer hara—the evil inclination—is called a ‘wayfarer’, then a ‘guest’, then finally ‘master’.” Though your yetzer hara may be cute as a puppy when young, you must assert yourself early on as pack leader. A puppy who knows it can win against its human will become a dangerous dog, an owner of its owner.
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October 17, 2019 by admin
The One Thing More Useful Than Marching for Climate Change
By Victoria Gagliardo-Silver
I attended the Climate March in New York City two weeks ago, and I’ve been thinking about it often. People came out in droves to call for a more environmentally conscious world, and that should be celebrated. It should be exciting to see a mass mobilization for such an important issue. That’s why I am sad to say that I found myself severely disappointed.
I expected to be inspired to see so many people, particularly teenagers, turning out to protect the environment. I wanted to be moved by entire generations of people carrying signs and chanting. Instead, I was faced with the realization that most of the protestors were active contributors to climate change, telling themselves they were taking real action by marching and using metal straws. Almost all of the marchers had paper or cardboard signs drawn on with permanent marker. Some used carried single use water bottles. Many carried leather purses. But the real disappointment? Most of the protesters eat meat, eggs, and dairy.
What people––many of whom want to protect the environment––do not realize is that animal agriculture is one of the largest drains on the earth’s natural resources. It is both the second leading cause of ozone-depleting greenhouse gases and the first of deforestation, it wastes grain and water, it is killing for pleasure.
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