The Lilith Blog

March 9, 2010 by admin

Sacred Female, Sacred You

Whitewashed, faded walls. Oddly set stones. Paintings on cave walls. Figurines of busty women with hamentasch loincloths. However many religious layers exist beneath the particular spot of ground you’re standing on, it seems the original overlay, the first human footprint as any archaeologist can identify, suggests a religious structure that deified women. Or, at least, there was a religion honoring the duality between men and women as equally powerful, equally sacred.

Many years ago, I saw a one-woman film, grainy in my memory. A series of monologues, I vividly remember the act where she portrayed the grief of women at the time of Abraham; rushing to hide their precious figurines, saying goodbye to their sacred objects. In that flash of a moment, everything I learned in Shabbaton got re-written—those evil idols were goddess statues, that sinful polytheism expressed sacred regard for Gaia.

I am currently reading The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley. This hefty book, a feminist rendering of the King Arthur legend, is housed in the youth section of the Marshall Public Library in Pocatello, Idaho. A few hundred pages in by now, I am relieved I can keep up—due in part to my obsession with the film King Arthur, starring Clive Owen as Arturius, and Keira Knightley as the most bad-ass Guinevere ever. The historical eras in The Mists of Avalon and King Arthur play out on common soil, not so many years apart. Hadrian’s Wall. Saxon invaders. The mix of early, early Christianity with the native religious belief systems.

What Christianity did to the role of women and the goddess-concept on the Isle of Britain and elsewhere, Judaism did to the role of women and the goddess-concept a few thousand years earlier around the land of milk and honey. And my guess, while I haven’t done the specific research, is that other modern-day religions did the same thing in the regions where they spread and eventually gained dominance. This suppression of female power was calculated, deceptive, and often bloody, and this one-down position of women eventually became the norm. Bye bye, goddess-lady. Hello, domestic violence shelters.

Diving into a book like The Mists of Avalon or learning about the status of women during the time of Xerxes’s empire, I am reminded of the natural power that resides within myself. It is not in any woman’s spiritual or emotional DNA to be “lesser-than,” but the rubble of over 5700 years of carefully written history separates us from that knowledge.

The only power women need to recover from the legends of our spirit mothers is not power over the mist revealing a secret island (it’s a relevant metaphor, however), but the power over what we individually believe about our selves. Do we like our selves? Do we see our selves as sacred and holy? Do we think our selves are generally pretty awesome and worthy of respect and deference? Before I began the process of reclaiming that vital and necessary power, I’m pretty sure I handed it over sometime in the 6th grade. To boys. To girls. To my parents, to my employers.

It’s not particularly extreme or bold to explore some basics of pre Judeo-Christian religious history. Very little of this history is factually disputed; it’s simply not advertised. And it’s not radical to be confident, assertive, and self-assured–it’s simply the way we all used to be. Best of all, I have come to discover that it’s possible to take company with the sacred female as I define Her, and enjoy the rich customs of Judaism at the same time.

–Nancy Goodman

The Lilith Blog

March 5, 2010 by Susan Weidman Schneider

Our Bodies–As We See Them, and As Others Do

This season has seen a crazy explosion of outdated and limiting images of women, often specifically Jewish women. Is it the recession? Does economic anxiety cause people to unleash these thoughts?

In its December issue, Details magazine, that laddie mag for men in a state of arrested development, ran a feature entitled “The Rise of the Hot Jewish Girl.” It touted the joys of Jewish women’s bodies—as if there were one single body type for everyone who identifies as a Jew. “Big natural boobs” were among the lusted-after characteristics all Jewish women are thought to possess, and the Details website (not to drive any traffic there, dear reader) lists Queen Esther, Theda Bara, Betty Boop and La Stresiand as part of our sexual (and embodied) inheritance. In fact, it’s an old trope. In literature, Jewish women for centuries have been viewed the other—seen by non-Jews as exotic, desirable, or dangerous. Sometimes all three at once. You can imagine where this is all going, without even reading the article, which fetishizes Jewish women’s bodies in a way that harks back centuries. Old bias in new clothing. Or no clothing.

Oh…and the illustration for the magazine piece featured the bare back and scantily-pantied bum of a headless, limbless torso, a Jewish star tattooed above the panty line.

I am not making this stuff up, I swear. And there’s more.

The past few months have seen nasty characterizations I thought we’d washed out of the culture 20 years ago. It’s an appropriate time, what with the new decade and all, to take a look at the parallels between then and now.

Then: Jewish women (I’m talking 1980s here) were characterized as JAPs (no insult intended towards Asians; as you’re well aware, reader, the sobriquet Jewish American Princess is the root of this acronym). The JAP was in those days reviled in cartoons, books, greeting cards and everyday teen talk and adult slang. A Jewish female too young to be a Jewish Mother (though she might indeed be a mother) and immature enough to be completely preoccupied with herself, she was characterized as demanding. Materialistic. Spoiled. Never mind that she’s not that different from a lot of other well-educated middle-class females. This stereotypical Jewish woman is blamed for wanting to marry a doctor, blamed if she wants to become a doctor. Too passive, and also too aggressive. Not much room to maneuver there.

Now: the stereotype has been reborn, but in different clothing. Literally. You’ll discover in the Voices section of this issue that “Coasties” are Jewish women from New York or LA, reviled on YouTube and on their Midwestern campus for dressing alike in popular brands and spending too much of “Daddy’s money.” (Please, please make sure to note the assumption that all spending money comes from fathers, not mothers.)

And also now: the New York Observer, an otherwise respected, often reliably hip weekly newspaper, publishes a straightfaced report about “cheetahs”—sexually assertive and desperately marriage-deprived New York women in their late 20s or 30s who are described as taking routine advantage of drunken men, having sex with them and then not even having the decency to leave before morning. Women—Jewish women at least—have in the past been reviled by comedians and disgruntled lovers for being frigid or uninterested in sex. Here, women are reviled for acting too boldly on their desires. Not much room to maneuver here either. The cheetah is posited as the “younger niece” of the cougar, that predatory woman who pursues men younger that she is. Please pause here to note that the animal imagery for women has shifted. Women used to suffer poultrification—we were called chicks, mother hens, old birds. But no one is afraid of poultry. But these big cats, at least in real life and not just as metaphors, are fearsome: cheetahs, cougars, jaguars. What’s coming next?

Lilith offers, as usual, an antidote to these demented and actually rather scary projections about Jewish women’s bodies, motives and desires. Taking you in entirely different directions, in these pages Lilith looks in a nuanced way at what some Jewish women think—and experience—about their bodies and their relationships. From breast cancer and gender dysmorphia and cutting to the holiness of how we feed ourselves, and how we care for the body when life has departed.

As all of us––Lilith readers and writers alike––strive to tell the truth, and hear the truth, about Jewish women’s lives, here’s a toast to a decade of continued development. L’Chaim. Happy 2010.

–Susan Weidman Schneider

The Lilith Blog

March 3, 2010 by Maya Bernstein

Say “Cheese”

Virginia Heffernan, in her piece Framing Childhood in this week’s New York Times Magazine, writes, with only a hint of sarcasm, that “we form families in the Internet age so we can produce, distribute, and display digital photos of ourselves.” I am here to admit, that at least from where I’m sitting, she speaks the truth. From the “marching orders,” which “come immediately, with the newborn photo, [and] must be e-mailed to friends before a baby has left the maternity ward,” the business of parenting is intertwined with the business of photo-taking, sharing, tweeting, Facebooking, and, shouting from the rooftops – look what I’ve done!

I justify the obsession by reminding myself that our closest family members live hundreds of miles away. I am doing a great service, I think, when, in the middle of a game, instead of playing along, I jump up and run for the camera. I am conquering lands and oceans, bringing my children into the homes of the people who love them most.

For ultimately, this obsession with keeping records of our children, and sharing them with anyone who will gaze smilingly along with us, is connected to the overflowing human desire to be in relationship. And, like all of today’s technology, the act of taking a photograph creates the illusion of being in relationship. When we take out our cameras, we think we are saying to our children, our extended families, and our friends: you are important to us. It’s analogous to “friending” someone, or tweeting at someone. What we’re forgetting, though, is that when we pulled the i-phone out of our back pockets, our kids were in the middle of a game, engrossed in real relationship, and we interrupted them, or, worse, extracted ourselves from being in real life relationship with them to duck into the role of observer. We’re engaged, but not too engaged.

Because relationships are hard, and technology is easy. It is harder to be an active member than to be an observer, aloof, behind the camera, manipulating the images, choosing what to show and to whom and when. And parenting is one of the messiest relationships of them all. It is infinitely harder to be a parent than to showcase our children. It is harder to be a good child than to send cute pictures to the grandparents.
My family came to visit this weekend. From the moment they arrived, cameras and camera-phones were clicking, as if, somehow, those ephemeral pauses, cloaked in hugs and smiles, could help bridge the gap of distance, and delay time, keeping us close together a little while longer. Interestingly, the frequency of the prevalence of the cameras diminished over the course of their visit. Eventually, we all got too busy being together. Eating. Going to the park. And laughing, spontaneously, when things happened so fast that we forgot to record them. And when I look back at the time we spent, those fleeting moments which cannot be shared over the internet on Kodak Gallery or Snapfish, are the ones that will stick forever, messy, joyous, and gone, guaranteeing we’ll need to come back for more.

–Maya Bernstein

The Lilith Blog

February 24, 2010 by admin

Culture Smash

This past Sunday Temple Emanuel celebrated Purim with a Megillah reading, followed by a performance by the KlezMormons. The KlezMormons are an ensemble from Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, and their performance Sunday was the first time they played to a Jewish audience.

My husband, John O’Connell, is the city editor of the Idaho State Journal in Pocatello, Idaho. He covered the Purim event, and wrote about it as well as I could!

The headline “Crossing Cultures” is significant for a few reasons. From a Jewish perspective, we are constantly crossing cultures in Southeastern Idaho, or perhaps more specifically, the local cultures are constantly crossing with us. Look at how interesting we are, look at how close to Jesus we are. Look at us celebrate our holidays. That’s how it feels to me sometimes. I’m sure every synagogue has some element of the curiosity-seeker-with-mysterious-agenda, but growing up at Temple Emanuel in Chicago, I sure never noticed it.

Pocatello is a largely transient area. People come and go from the university, the semiconductor plant, the hospital, the Idaho National Laboratory. There have always been Jews in Pocatello, but wild west Judaism hasn’t changed much since the days of the ‘Frisco Kid. So, Temple Emanuel in Pocatello’s membership ebbs and flows—and right now it ebbs. With our only child congregant barely 3 months old (and who looked so cute in her pea pod costume), we are happy to open the doors to the community during our festive holidays—especially the child-oriented ones. Our Purim festivities included dancing, fabulous music, as many hamentaschen cookies one could eat, and a satisfying full-house. And since many of the attendees aren’t the drinking type, that left more of my husband’s homebrew “Haman’s Hangover” and a large jar of Slivovitz for the rest of us.

Several years ago, John did extensive research for a piece exploring the alleged regional Mormon “divide” and followed missionaries around, hung out in high school cafeterias, and partied with the “Excommunicated Mormon Drinking Team” at the annual beer festival in Idaho Falls. While the multi-part series was fascinating, informative, and very well balanced, the paper ultimately decided not to run it—go figure. If nothing else, that decision does reflect a cautious and mysterious religious dynamic in this region that isn’t present in many other parts of the country.

My relationship with John, a recovering Catholic, has been a cultural experience in and of itself. While I never knew it before marrying a properly raised Catholic boy, there is much truth to the statement that Jews invented guilt but Catholics perfected it. While more inclined to run Atheist or Pantheist than I, it was he who pushed for a Jewish wedding, and he who curses at Pharaoh the loudest at our Temple seder. We are both more inclined to find Adonai on a ski run or in a garden bed than in front of a podium, and I’m sure our Jewish-Catholic cultural dynamics will play out throughout the length of our relationship. Perhaps someday he’ll see that having a loud family screaming match followed by a visit to a Chinese food buffet really is the best way to resolve family issues. Until then, John loves my culinary experiments with matzo balls, latkes, and hamentaschen, and while he laughs at the suggestion, I’m happy to sit with him through midnight mass any time he wants.

–Nancy Goodman

The Lilith Blog

February 15, 2010 by admin

Desert archaeology in Idaho

I have a long-lost camp alum on Facebook who lives in Tel Aviv and keeps taunting us about how he’s at the beach enjoying the sunshine. But, I love snow. And now that we’ve miraculously got a few precious inches of snow here in the Snake River valley, it’s possible ski season can be revived and the aquifers will fill so we can water things and play on boats this summer. We will happily accept any snow shipped in from the Mid-Atlantic.

I was 17 when I went on my Israel tour, too young to fully appreciate the natural and historic landscape where it’s fun-in-the-sun all year long. I was psyched about the trips to the Shuq, and the nights on Ben Yehudah street. I do remember wading through rivers and ancient aqueducts, but it’s only been in the last decade or so that I’ve really developed a sense of and appreciation for “place.”

I’ve often compared my local and regional summer landscape to that of Israel—hot and dry, with crags, mountains, rivers, and lots and lots of nothingness. Deserts, come to find out, are different from each other—and here the vast, desolate open spaces are comprised of sagebrush, Juniper trees, and basalt rock. And new-moon nights on the Arco Desert reveal stars as bright as I saw them so many years ago somewhere in the Negev.

I am even inspired to make my home landscape similar to that of Israel, and am actively seeking information about the Kalanit flower (Anemone coronaria), a protected flower in Israel. While I know picking this flower is illegal, I wonder if there are seeds/rhizomes/bulbs/dry-roots available anywhere. I would appreciate any information so I can start Kalanit flowers indoors and plant it as an annual!

Besides my attempts to create a xeric landscape of Biblical proportions, one of the many things I enjoy about my Idaho desert experience is being a lay-archaeologist. While no Western Wall or Mount Olive, The city of Pocatello has it’s own unique background and mythology. For example, there has been a common legend that tunnels leading to opium dens snaked underneath Old Town. This story was mostly debunked when renovation of Main Street revealed massive underground boulders stretched beneath the road’s surface, delaying finished construction so long that many Old Town businesses nearly went under.

Another colorful bit of Pocatello history is the presence of the Civilian Conservation Corps during the (first) Depression era. Evidence of the CCC and other New Deal projects are laced through such places as Yellowstone National Park, the Oregon coast, and the hillsides surrounding Pocatello, Idaho. Now-faint ridges dug into the hills by the CCC were cut to help slow water run-off into the Portneuf River, which before the city stretch was encased in cement and chain-link fencing, had the tendency to flood.

My home property abuts such ridged hillsides, and I find evidence of the CCC and friends everywhere. A garden rototiller dug up (my best guess) government-issue tin cans, and a metal detector revealed a metal box-top stamped with the image of a Chinese palace. Further back is a small set of concrete steps and masoned rock walls, overgrown with sagebrush and tall grasses.

Mother Earth absorbs all of us and our history sooner or later, and while I may never climb Masada again, I am happy to explore what lies beneath the rocks in my backyard. I am as spiritually attached to this place as I am anywhere; and when I catch the alpen glow off Scout Mountain, it is a sacred feeling indeed.

–Nancy Goodman

The Lilith Blog

February 9, 2010 by Maya Bernstein

If I Only Had a Luge

The winter Olympics are approaching. Hooray! Something to watch on TV besides reality shows. I’m a product of the TV of the 80s. Fraggle Rock, Growing Pains, and MacGyver. Now, that’s TV. And the Olympics were always occasion for a good hot cup of cocoa, and wide-eyed dreams. Who knows, my eager ten year old self would think, unaware that even then I was too old and past my prime, that could be me one day.

In his interview with Deborah Solomon in this week’s New York Times Magazine, Vancouver-based author Douglas Coupland, speculates about his path in life. He says: “My question about luging is, How do you get into the luge community to begin with? Is it one day like, ‘Mom, Dad, I really want to luge.’ And your parents are like: ‘O.K., I’ll quit my job. We’ll move to an Alpine community.’” And he concludes: “I could have been an Olympian if only my parents had bought me a luge.”

Ah. I should have known. Of course it’s our parents’ fault! Well, once we’re on the subject, if only my parents had nurtured my innate desires and abilities, I would definitely have been an Olympic swimmer. Or an actress. Or, perhaps, a concert pianist. Though yes, they bought me a piano, gave me swim lessons, and attended my school plays, they did not, negligent folk that they are, uproot our family and move to Vail. So as not to appear ungrateful, to their credit, I will concede that they did buy me a Golden Retriever, and, now, as a mother living in close quarters with messy kids, there is no way in the world I would ever consider living with a dog.

How much responsibility do parents have, especially in today’s highly specialized and competitive world, to notice and nudge their children towards a specific path in life? How do you nurture the innate talents of each child? Can you do that while attempting to also convey a system of shared values? And while providing them with the space and freedom to have a healthy childhood?

My husband, his brothers, and their wives (including me) are all in Jewish education. My mother, her sister, and her brother, her brother-in-law, her niece, nephew-in-law, daughter, son-in-law, and his mother, are all doctors. Is this good or bad? Or neutral? What does it mean? Maybe it is good to help carve your children’s career paths. Too much choice is overwhelming, and can leave you stranded, frozen, unable to choose. But how do we know if we are nurturing innate passions, or less-than-gently pushing our kids towards our own desires? And this begs the broader question: how much can parents be blamed, or credited, for the choices of their children?

Questions to ponder while watching young, lithe creatures, who have dedicated their childhoods to achieving one specific dream, fly through the air. Whose parents bought them a luge.

–Maya Bernstein

The Lilith Blog

February 8, 2010 by admin

Nancy Goodman

Soon after my move to Pocatello, Idaho from Chicago, Illinois, a “fallen Mormon” boyfriend who knew more about Judaism than I did inspired me to visit the nearest Barnes and Noble to stock up on Jewish reference materials. In the past, my sister Sara had been my Jewish reference material being a Jewish educator, but it was time to build up my own library.

Barely a few years out of graduate school at the time, my religious library consisted mainly of many feminist spirituality books and guides. Books like “Living Wicca,” and “The Once and Future Goddess” fueled my graduate school-era pagan phase, many tenets of which I still embrace (as well as I embrace any organized religious structure) today.

Other than that, I had my Gates of Prayer and the Book of Mormon, a copy of which, as a pious and ethical person, I stole from a hotel room in Salt Lake City. For residents of the Gate City area, the nearest Barnes and Noble is 50 miles away in Idaho Falls—a stretch of I-15 that in winter, is often covered in fun-for-the-entire-family black ice. Aside from the Book of Mormon replacing the King James Bible in hotel rooms across the Mormon Corridor, the Barnes and Noble in Idaho Falls reveals another subtle difference in this part of the country. In many of the urban big-box booksellers, the Judaica book section can span an entire row, and the books on the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (LDS–Mormons) are mixed into the smaller world religion categories. Here, the opposite is true—and alongside the many shelves of LDS books, I was happy to find my essential “The Jewish Book of Why,” and a book that strongly resonated with me called “Generation J,” by Lisa Schiffman.

Schiffman defines Generation J as third-generation American Jews—Jews whose grandparents were born elsewhere and immigrated to the US. She describes this generation of Jews as often lost, rejecting Jewish rituals for similar ones in other cultures, or abandoning religion altogether. One paragraph has always struck me in particular:

“We were a generation of Jews who grew up with television, with Barbie, with rhinoplasty as a way of life. Assimilation wasn’t something we strove for; it was the condition into which we were born…When we used the word schlepp, it sounded American. Being Jewish was an activity: Today I’ll be Jewish. Tomorrow I’ll play Tennis. In secret, we sometimes wondered if being Jewish was even necessary. We could resist that part of ourselves, couldn’t we? To us, anything was possible.”

Schiffman charts her course as a Jewish wayfinder through intermarriage, through keeping kosher, through conversations with JUBU’s, (Jewish Buddhists) through participating in Mikvah. As a Jewish wayfinder myself, I followed her course in some respects, taking some time to explore my own Jewishness. I kept kosher for a while much to the amusement of my local friends, who liked to bait me with bacon and cheese-wrapped freshly hunted moose-kabobs and such. How many Jewish laws does that one meal break? After a short time, I began dating a Jewish man living in Montana, and I considered that my replacement Jewish activity. Then I married a non-Jew who insisted on a Jewish wedding, and I got married under a chuppah after all.

I feel “Generation J” gave me permission to explore my own unique sense of Jewish identity, and it has been as invaluable a resource as any book on Judaica I have read. “Call us a bunch of searchers, call us post-Holocaust Jews, call us Generation J,” Schiffman says. Ain’t that the truth—at least for me.

–Nancy Goodman

The Lilith Blog

February 1, 2010 by Amy Stone

Responding to Haiti

Yes, everyone seems to be jumping on the disaster bandwagon. You’d have to be living in a cave to escape the media debate over Israel’s rapid response setting up and staffing an Israeli army hospital in Port-au-Prince. My synagogue is having a (kosher) bake sale to encourage kids to get involved, and Thursday night (Jan. 28) a Yiddish concert was held to help that unluckiest of nations.

If the benefit got people to give who wouldn’t have given otherwise and if a large percentage of the money raised went to an effective
charity, then nice going.

But not so nice when charities rush to a disaster site just to get face time.

I don’t know if this applies to the list of Jewish charities getting involved in helping Haiti, but I would sure check out the most effective way to contribute.

Charity Navigator, one of the main charity watchdogs, makes a fine place to start. (Although nothing is ever simple. Starting next year, Charity Navigator will be replacing the traditional approach of measuring the ratio of money a charity spends on administration and money spent on programs with actually measuring the charity’s effectiveness. But, alas, when it comes to Haiti we can’t wait.)

The one Jewish organization that gets top Haiti billing from Charity Navigator is American Jewish World Service. For one thing, AJWS has been working with local partners on the ground in Haiti for years with programs that make sense.

The AJWS earthquake relief efforts are being carried out by their local partners, and their long-term projects – when world concern has turned to the next crisis – are just what the country desperately needs. The projects include agricultural development with training for women’s peasant organizations.

AJWS President Ruth Messinger is impressive. Back when I was working for Women’s American ORT, I got to see her response to disaster fund-raising projects up close. Our organizations were among the dozen or so Jewish organizations that would set up special campaigns to raise money responding to specific crises. Ruth was the one executive who would come with carefully researched projects that could be immediately implemented and would make a difference. And many of these were for women.

Back to Haiti.

Even without a horrific earthquake, Haiti desperately needs help now and into the future. In the coming year or two or 10, Charity Navigator can be expected to evaluate just how effective American Jewish World Service and all the competing philanthropic programs are. Meanwhile, if you want to give money through a Jewish organization, AJWS seems a worthy channel.

–Amy Stone.

The Lilith Blog

January 27, 2010 by Maya Bernstein

Fertile Chaos

When I was pregnant with my first daughter, I became prey to the endless array of children’s gear, clothing, and toys marketed to parents as if they would be negligent if they did not purchase it. One evening, while watching Saturday Night Live and realizing that the commercials, marketed at young parents like myself who were too tired to go out on a Saturday night, and too lazy to find a babysitter, were for Barbie Dolls and Transformers (has nothing changed???) , I took a stance, and made a definitive decision that I would never let “kids’ stuff” take over my house. Kids don’t need much, I told the magazines as I flipped through them, trying hard not to fold down the corners of pages with cute stuff I liked.

Another kid, ten dolls, a hundred books, and a billion Lego pieces later, I am often unable to find the living room carpet because of all the toys. Some were gifts, some were bought in moments of weakness at the toy store across the street on rainy days, and many were hand-me-downs, but, there’s no two ways about it; our house is bursting with kids’ stuff. And worse – it is bursting with stuff that refuses to be contained or maintained in any semblance of order.

So it is with little choice that I wage constant war. I am the general of a one-woman army fighting against a tireless team that wickedly employs the best of guerilla warfare. They’re good. They go after the tiny stuff. The Thumbelina-sized pieces of the Russian dolls. The little orange spoons from the tea-set. The littlest boot from the wooden doll’s dress-up doll. And their hiding spots are inspired. In the bowels beneath beds and cribs, inside the deep crevices between the pillows of the couch, in minuscule bags placed inside larger bags placed within boxes wrapped in blankets. How they test me!

After bed-time, I transform. If only I knew how to sew, I’d make myself a costume. Just call me “Super-Finder.” Or “Stuff-Buster.” Anyway, my days end under couches and tables, ear to the floor, on the war-path, obsessed with finding each toy and placing it in its proper location. I go through boxes and bags of toys, looking for missing pieces from other sets. Each night, I attempt to impose order, and each morning, they’re back at it, seemingly innocent, strewing chaos in their wake.

Is this the nature of mother and children? For them to be pushing, constantly, against whatever boundaries we have erected to define our lives? For them to endlessly challenge the structures we have imposed, until, one evening, in the midst of the chaos, exhausted, we lay ourselves down, and begin to question those very boundaries and structures? What would happen if, one evening, and perhaps the following, I left the mess? If I allowed chaos to sink its claws deeper into my skin? If I relinquished some control, and then some more, handing it over to them, so that, one day, I would have no choice but to say – it is beyond me, I cannot find it, I cannot reach it, and you must search for it yourself?

Children have a way of spreading into our corners, hiding little pieces in our deepest places. And when, on those weary evenings, we search ourselves, we often find that which we didn’t know belonged, and, in the process of striving to maintain our inner home, our very rooms expand.

–Maya Bernstein

The Lilith Blog

January 26, 2010 by admin

Digital Judaica

While there aren’t many Jews living in the hilly, sagebrush and juniper desert of Southeastern Idaho, something happened a few years ago that changed the way I was Jewish forever, and I really can no longer say I’m isolated from the greater Jewish community. That happening was Facebook.

Within six months of Facebook opening the gates to the non-college community, I had reconnected with probably 95% of my Jewish pals from the Olin Sang Ruby Union Institute Camp, Hebrew school, and the Chicago ‘burbs. One of my earliest observations of this unprecedented social access was “Jews love Facebook—and I am no exception.” Last year, I wrote a column in the Idaho State Journal on the subject of Facebook, if you’d like to learn more about my obsession with this social networking site.

So, take the “2 degrees of Jewish separation,” digitalize it in a format where we can post embarrassing summer camp photos for all to see, and there is Schmoozapalooza on-tap, any time of day or night. Merely a decade ago, our past was the stuff of old photographs and wisps of memory, as life filled in around us. Now, our past is at our fingertips, and it’s dizzying for me to ponder how that will resonate through humankind in the future.

For now, it’s a constant time-warp, seeing how people’s lives have unfolded over the last decades, one status update and sliver of new information at a time. And with every round of home page Shabbat Shaloms, holiday greetings, and celebratory mazal tovs, my inner Jewish life, on my own terms, grows richer and more complex.

As part of my feminist (also on my own terms) streak, I enjoy the opportunity that Facebook has provided to reconnect with the many Jewish (and non-Jewish, of course) girls and women of my past. As I look back on my emotional development, there was clearly a long period of time when my insecure quest for boyfriendship shadowed out other potentially-fulfilling social relationships. It’s not that I have any deep regrets—I love my memories, I love where life has taken me. I am simply overjoyed that the digital era lets me connect with the amazing women of my past, now that I can fully appreciate them. It has been such a deep blessing.

Facebook has also allowed me to peek into the windows of Jewish motherhood. I never intended to be single until I was 35 and lose my job ten seconds before I got married at age 37, so while I still ponder the question “to breed or not to breed,” I currently can only appreciate motherhood-by-proxy. And what Facebook motherhood-by-proxy it is. Challah recipes, parental groans about Sunday school, sending the next generation of kids down Lac La Belle Drive. I am excited that, should motherhood in some form be my destiny, I will be able to swim in a vast digital lake of deep Jewish female wisdom—until these women who have gone through diaper-changing before me stop responding to my neurotic rookie questions.

I am reminded of a Doors lyric when I think of those earlier days in my teens and 20’s, before the Jewish hippies became rabbis and Jewish partiers became professionals, scholars, and parents. “I love the friends I have gathered together on this thin raft,” Morrison recites. Sometimes this digital feast of friends is empowering, sometimes it’s inspiring, sometimes it’s amusing, and sometimes it’s intimidating.

And it’s always so fun to be a participant. Thanks to Facebook, the raft can be as vast and as sturdy as I want it to be.

–Nancy Goodman