The Lilith Blog

April 27, 2009 by Mel Weiss

100 Days, 100 Nights

I’ve admitted publicly to being bad at math, but don’t worry—I know we’re not yet at President Obama’s 100-days-on-the-job date yet. But since it falls this Wednesday, I’m hoping doing just a little list-making now isn’t jumping the gun too much. We’re slogging through the Omer, still, so I’m in a day-counting kind of mood.

And despite some of the more radically partisan reads of the situation, it’s hard to deny that president Obama has been a busy, busy man. There was the closing of Guantanamo and the repeal of the global gag rule, small things like SCHIP and reversing an embarrassing rule about documenting the return of military caskets, and slightly bigger issues, like defining our mission in Afghanistan and…what was that, again? Oh, right, passing a stimulus package that FDR would have loved.

And with all that going on, Obama still had time to travel the globe and meet with a foreign public that loves him (often addressing them in their native tongues). Oh yeah, and he also held a seder and adopted a dog.

Decisive action in times of trouble can be a great comfort, and watching decisive Presidential action at such times can be pretty great, too. Regardless of your opinions vis-à-vis any of the specific policies Obama has pursued thus far, you have to marvel at the man’s inability to sit still. I don’t know whether it’s incredible drive or incredible shpilkes, and to be totally honest, I don’t much care. Here’s hoping that the next 100 days are as full of energy and ideas as the first 100.

Of course, even as some things hit their remarkable stride, other remarkable things must come to an end. Sadly, the inimitable Bea Arthur died yesterday. I’m convinced she was the second wave’s answer to Woody Allen—never mind to Archie Bunker—and she will be sorely missed. It’s pretty amazing to hear and read so many eulogizing comments that all begin, “She was the first feminist I ever saw on television…”

–Mel Weiss

The Lilith Blog

April 23, 2009 by Amy Stone

The Haggadah Dilemma

The matzahs are gone; the ongoing question remains: Has anyone found a satisfying haggadah?

For the past two years, we’ve used the slim paperback egalitarian “Family Haggadah” by Elie M. Gindi. Not great but good and plenty of room for personal input.

But the search for a better haggadah remains far more daunting than the hunt for the afikoman.

Speaking personally, the great mother-daughter generational battle for me was sparked in the 1980s with the realization that our charoset-smeared, wine-stained Union Haggadah — the Reform “Union Haggaddah Revised,” dating back to 1923 — was so sexist that even the matzah was man-made.

I less than graciously forced Aviva Cantor’s socialist-Zionist-animal rights haggadah (first published in Lilith) down the throats of my family. It was a one-time event. At the end, my father, in one of the more gracious responses to the experience, said, “This is not our style.”

And so each year I imagine the wise women of the feminist seder now in its 34th year — Esther Broner, Letty Cottin Pogrebin et al — gathered for their ever-evolving telling of the story while the rest of us page through piles of haggadot, wishing we’d gotten an earlier start on the search for haggadah satisfaction.

Any breakthroughs?

— Amy Stone

The Lilith Blog

April 21, 2009 by Modesty Blasé

Recession in a failing religious system

In my real life, I am about to lose my job. Furious networking and frantic emailing have left me little time to write anything other than job applications and embellishments on my resumé (all job offers welcome). However, I have had a lot of time to think about what the recession means for Orthodox women, and how paid employment differentiates the role of women across various segments of the Orthodox community.

In the charedi [ultra-Orthodox] community, especially in those sections where the men are in full-time learning at a yeshiva, women are childbearing and bringing home the proverbial bacon. They generally have relatively low-paid jobs such as teachers, secretaries, beauty therapists or shop assistants that provide the basic infrastructure for a community to function. Rarely are they in business (unless it’s sheitels [wigs] or housecoats) and even the recent Israeli initiatives to provide computer training and jobs found that many women were willing to take lower pay in exchange for working in an all-female work environment with flexible hours.

Men in full time learning, teaching in yeshivot or managing religious communal organizations have already started to feel the impact of the increasing numbers of American and European businessmen who can no longer afford to support these institutions across the Jewish world. Even in a good economic climate, most of these men have very few skills that would enable them to get a decent paying job outside the community. By minimizing the value of a secular education, their rabbis have failed to enable these men to provide adequately for their families and have perpetuated their dependency on the tzedakah [charity] of their neighbours (or in England, on the munificence of the welfare state).

The better-educated and savvy women in the charedi community are going to manage this recession by taking second jobs or piecemeal work, while the single working women in the charedi community with no husband or children to support are going to be the most financially secure. Is it too optimistic to think that this economic crisis will force rabbis and educators to re-evaluate the sort of life skills and training they are giving their young boys?

In the modern Orthodox community, there isn’t a minyan where a man hasn’t lost his job – bankers, lawyers, computer specialists and accountants have had their role as family provider snatched from under their tallis, leaving many of them feeling emasculated and depressed. For women, the implications of the recession are still evolving – while a few women complained that their husbands had cancelled this year’s Pesach holiday to a five-star resort at the Dead Sea, most are being much more careful about what goes in the their shopping cart. Mothers are distraught as they start cutting back on extra-curricular activities for their children – jiu-jitsu, folk guitar and tap dancing are under threat, and in a community that heavily guards the phone number of a good Polish cleaner, a few have taken to cleaning their own bathrooms and ironing their own husband’s shirts.

Many of these women are highly-educated professionals who can afford to be full time homemakers, while others are underemployed in mildly interesting jobs for a couple of days a week with their earnings reserved for little treats. After relying on their husbands for years, are these women willing to work full-time to support their families? More significantly, after so many years out of the work force, do they have the requisite skills and confidence to find the increasingly scarce jobs that are out there? When things get tough, what sort of role-modelling will these couples provide for their children? Will young girls finally realize that they need to train for careers with serious financial rewards so that they can support themselves in the future?

There is of course the other group of single, divorced or married women who are already working full time, often as the sole breadwinners in their family or as part of couple where two middling incomes are needed to create one almost decent Jewish salary that will enable them to live in the Jewish area, eat overpriced kosher food and send their kids to summer camp. For these women, it’s business as usual, juggling work and home, with the sceptre of redundancy hanging over their heads, even though fortunately, many are in teaching, nursing, local council and other public sector jobs where there is greater job security.

Rabbis in every community are tackling the economic crisis according to their community’s need – it might be facilitating introductions to potential employers, setting up a discrete emergency fund, calling for simpler simchas or providing some spiritual sustenance during these challenging times. There is much talk of lowering expectations, especially amongst children, and recognizing this crisis as a corrective for previous greed and excess (which is extremely annoying as those struggling the most are not those who created nor benefited from this excess or greed).

In what might appear to be unrelated, there is also increasing concern about the number of young people who are going “off the derech,” and rejecting the Orthodoxy of their parents. Some are motivated by the poverty of their own families and want to escape the inevitable consequences of a poor education and limited contact with the secular world. It strikes me that the fallout from the religious system is less about the big theological questions and more about overcoming deprivation. As long as desire, and not doubt, continue to fuel religious disquiet, the recession will only exacerbate the feelings of hopelessness and cynicism in a failing religious system. And if anyone tries to tell me that the recession is due to the immodest dress of women… well, I may just have to throw my sheitel to the wind.

–Modesty Blasé

Cross-posted at The Jerusalem Post blog.

The Lilith Blog

April 21, 2009 by Mel Weiss

No Good Angle

You know how sometimes a news story shows up that’s kind of like a car wreck, no matter how you look at it? So amazingly yuck that even bloggers who have been shamefully negligent of the big (and funny) news stories in the last few weeks just have to say something? Yeah. So let’s talk about California’s Rep. Jane Harman, and the small problem she’s having right now.

Harman, of CA’s 36th District, was caught on tape by an NSA wiretap, “telling a suspected Israeli agent that she would press the Justice Department to go easy on two AIPAC officers accused of espionage-related charges and that this agent pledged, in return, to use his or her influence to help Harman become head of the House intelligence committee,” according to CQ Politics. Yikes. Did you catch that? She offered assistance on espionage charges in exchange for help getting onto the House intelligence committee. There are a number of intelligence-related jokes just waiting to be made here, so why don’t we all just take a moment and think those quietly to ourselves.

Unfortunately, the story continues, as CQ’s coverage also alleges that then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales halted any investigation into Harman’s activities, because he needed her support in defending the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program. Irony alert!

I am no major AIPAC fan, but this is bad news all around. Not only does this kind of thing feed the lunatic fringe, which, in a post-Madoff world, needs little stoking to begin with, but it’s depressing as hell to see yet another manifestation of politics trumping reason, common sense, the law, and any sense of propriety. Also, the NSA was wiretapping a member of Congress. That they found something gross is almost beside the point. (Kind of like saying that any “intelligence” derived justifies waterboarding two suspects 266 times.)

So Rep. Harman, shame on you! (It should be noted that Harman is denying the allegations.) The one good thing that might come of all this would be a renewed sense of outrage in Congress that the U.S. government spied on its own citizens. It can happen to you, too—and maybe it already did! So let’s make a deal: if Congress can agree that FISA loopholes need to be shut, then maybe we won’t have to gawk at their PR train-wreck moments with such an undercurrent of self-righteousness. Who’s with me?

–Mel Weiss

The Lilith Blog

April 20, 2009 by Maya Bernstein

Why is This Night Different?

The Lilith Blog regrets that a technical fluke prevented this post from going up before Passover, as planned. We apologize for the delay and hope you enjoy Maya’s excellent writing.

My three-year-old came home from nursery school when she began learning about Passover, and, at the dinner table, asked “why do we do so many strange things at the Seder, like eat matza instead of bread?” I almost jumped out of my chair. That’s why! I wanted to shout. So that you’ll ask that very question! The very fabric of the Seder, Passover’s central ritual, is woven from questions, and, in particular, the questions of children. In fact, one could argue that the reason we celebrate Passover at all is to engage the next generation in the narrative of the Jewish people; the form of this engagement is the question. The story of the Exodus in the Bible anticipates these questions from the young, “and when your child asks you tomorrow – what is this?” and the Rabbis, over the course of Jewish history, ritualized this back and forth conversation between the generations.

The “Mah Nishtana” – the Four Questions – is traditionally recited by the youngest member of the family. My three-year-old’s been belting it out at the top of her lungs for a month now. My id would like to respond by stuffing a pie into her face, or screaming “aaaahhhh” each time her sweet lips open into the “mah” shape. Instead, I smile and praise her. For her, it’s just another song. She asked the question already, over a bowl of noodles, some time ago. Our challenge at the Seder will be to engage her so that, in addition to standing on her chair and making her grandmother and great-grandmother proud, she’ll actually ask a real question, and we’ll actually take the time to respond to her. That, after all, is the point.

The purpose of the Seder is to tell stories. Not just any stories, but our stories – the stories of our people, of our families, and our own deepest stories. And not just to anyone – but to our children, those, perhaps, before whom it is most difficult to expose ourselves. We are challenged to sit down, face to face, and talk. This, I think, is what the “Mah Nishtana” is about. “Why,” it begins, “on all other nights, do we eat leavened bread and matzah – and tonight we eat only matzah?” Matzah is bread stripped of all its protective coating, all of its layers. On most nights, and days, when we interact with our children, we do so with armour. With the shields of infinite excuses – “great question – but nice try – go brush your teeth; yeah, remind me to tell you that story some time.” The Seder night is all matzah. There are no barriers – and we respond as we are, honestly, vulnerably. We answer that question, really. We tell that story, with all its embellishments. “Why on all other nights do we eat many vegetables – and tonight we eat only marror?” Because tonight, even when the answers and the stories are bitter, we share them. “Why on all other nights do we not dip even once – and tonight we dip twice?” Because tonight we delve deeper – dipping, over and over, into ourselves, and sharing ourselves, wholly, fully. “Why on all other nights do we sometimes recline and sometimes sit straight – but tonight we all recline?” Because tonight, finally, we sit around the table together and we are present with each other. We relax. We converse. We share. We celebrate.

And, leaning back, for a moment, we remember that we are full, that we are whole, and our children, wide-eyed, lean forward, and drink us in.

–Maya Bernstein

The Lilith Blog

April 14, 2009 by admin

Jewish Women's Writing Groups

Have you seen the spring issue’s article on Jewish women’s writing groups? (You can even download the article from our homepage!)

Well, in the spirit of that article, we want to hear from you. What are your experiences–with writing groups, with other writers, as a Jewish woman who writes? Please leave your stories, anecdotes and recollections below!

The Lilith Blog

April 13, 2009 by Amy Stone

Pesach dead hand of the past

(April 8, 2009)

I am fuming. I was just in West Side Judaica (Manhattan’s Upper West Side) where a little boy was saying to his grandparents, “We need a Miriam’s Cup.”

Grandfather (60-something, could pass for a liberal-congenial-spirit): “No, we don’t.”

Moi (seething): “Yes you do.”

Grandfather: “What did Miriam do?”

Moi: “She provided the well of fresh water that kept the Jews alive in the desert.” (I was so enraged, I didn’t even mention Miriam led the women a
song of rejoicing after the crossing of the Red Sea.)

Grandfather: “That was after Passover.”

Moi: So angered, it didn’t even occur to me to say So was Elijah.

But final shot: Grandmother taking Kos Miriam selected by the little boy to the cash register, where the Orthodox male will ring up the sale.

Hag sameach.

–Amy Stone

The Lilith Blog

March 30, 2009 by Maya Bernstein

What’s For Dinner?

The baby’s got a new trick. She can turn her hands into wind-shield wipers. When it’s time for breakfast, I drop her into her high-chair and dump some cheerios and a hunk of banana on the tray while I go get the yogurt, or oatmeal. Her older sister sits at the table eagerly, awaiting the show. I approach the high-chair with trepidation. The banana and cheerios are now glistening on the floor. Mmmmmm – yogurt! I say. Go go gadget wind-shield wiper hands, she squawks, and the spoon, dripping with blueberry goop, cannot, despite my athletic dexterity, approach the holy zone of the closed mouth. Her sister giggles in delight. I persevere, placing a beloved piece of strawberry on top of the yogurt. Look, I say, strawberry! But the hands go wild, swish swish swish swish, as if the light drizzle has become a torrential downpour.

How to get (healthy) foods into the mouths of babes? My parents tell me that I was a terror; they would put on a song and dance show, involving puppets and costumes, to get bites into my mouth; as the show and the meal progressed, my mouth would get fuller and fuller, and I would perform the finale, expelling from my cheeks the entire meal.

It doesn’t seem to get any easier as they get older. My three-year-old’s latest is: “I’m hungry for candy.” And my babysitter, whose two grand-daughters are eleven and thirteen, comes in worried each morning with new stories about the dinner-table tears, and the after-dinner fights that revolve around picky eating and body-image issues.

And all of that “getting food into them” assumes that the food is on the table, prepared, diverse, colorful, delicious, piping hot, and nutritious, exactly when they’re hungry.

I asked my three year old if she likes being a kid, or if she’d rather be a grown-up. She thought for a minute and said – I want to be a grown-up, because grown-ups cook all the time.

Who knew it was going to be so hard, and so all-consuming?

Apparently, lots of people. Everyone, from the New York Times to Michelle Obama to the Mommy Bloggers, like Chef Mom, Weelicious, and Meals for Moms, to name a few, is talking about how to get healthy food into kids (and all their relatives).

Now, I love to cook. But it’s exhausting to plan meal after meal after meal. It takes so much time, and constant creative energy. And, within minutes, it’s on the floor, or smudged into their hair, or is a stain on their clean pajamas. And then it’s messy dishes and pots and left-overs, which get lost in the cavernous fridge.

Feeding one’s family is part of that never-ending up-and-down cycle of parenting, a cycle expressed by T.S Eliot, in Little Gidding of his Four Quartets – “what we call the end is often the beginning, and to make a beginning is to make an end – the end is where we start from.” Even if, last night, you cooked the most incredible dinner in the universe, which your children ate neatly and with great appetite, you’ve got to cook another one for tonight. There is no arrival; there is, simply, the journey. The show must go on.

–Maya Bernstein

The Lilith Blog

March 19, 2009 by Maya Bernstein

In Motion

The baby learned to walk – ah! The freedom of it! Tentative steps for a month, and then, seemingly suddenly, the determination palpable, the joy uncontainable, the falls inevitable, she is on the move. Most radical, I imagine, must be the change in perspective, from feet to knees, from the steady lines and right angles of carpets and table legs to the vast expanse of air and space between the objects perceived from two feet off the ground.

She looks to me like the vision of a dream my father had, when, as a grown man, he went skiing for the first time, and, after a cold day of carving wide turns on Vermont’s icy slopes, he slept soundly, dreaming of flying.

Bumbling elegance. Blocks, shoes, and her sister’s dolls, dwellers of the now-remote realm of floor, once studied scientifically, intimately, are now constant obstacles on her path, that of all-consuming movement, a-shimmer with the distant twinkling of objects on low shelves and tables, the treasures of the Promised Land.

Avivah Zornberg, in her book The Particulars of Rapture, cites an essay by Adam Phillips, from his work On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored. The essay quotes Sartre (in Being and Nothingness) who discusses someone confronted with an overhanging rock face while on a walk.

For the simple traveler, who passes over this road and whose free project is a pure aesthetic ordering of the landscape, the crag is not revealed either as scalable or not scalable; it is manifested only as beautiful or ugly.

Phillips comments:

If I am simply on a walk, the rock face is an obstacle; if I am a painter, it is not. But the absurd – the psychoanalytic – possibility…is that I may realize I am on a walk only when I perceive the cliff as an obstacle. That is to say, the only way to discover your projects is to notice – to make conscious – what you reckon are obstacles…The desire does not reveal the obstacle; the obstacle reveals the desire.

I watch the baby glide from room to room, and she is beautiful. When I am not in motion, I am the simple traveler, the painter, the mother, standing to the side, observing her journey, dreaming, as I watch her fly, of flight.

But, when I am in motion, when I’m on my walk, this baby is my crag and that crag is my obstacle, and I must determine – scalable or not scalable – in order to survive. Then must I pick her up, and tuck her under my arm, and run down the stairs, and out the door, and she, eyes-wide, knowing, and not knowing the desire for flight, and its obstacles.

–Maya Bernstein

The Lilith Blog

March 12, 2009 by Maya Bernstein

A Parent's Job Description

My mother-in-law forwarded me an email with this description of a Parent’s Job Description. I haven’t been able to find the author–-though multiple links come up when you Google “Parents + Job Description.”

I admit to laughing out loud at least once. In the spirit of Purim, which we celebrated this week, I wanted to share it with you.

JOB DESCRIPTION

TITLE

Mom, Mommy, Ma, Mo, Mama, Ema, Amma, Maman

Dad, Daddy, Pa, Pop, Papa, Abba, Ba, Baba

JOB DESCRIPTION

 Long term, team players needed, for challenging permanent work in an, often chaotic environment. Candidates must possess excellent communication and organizational skills and be willing to work variable hours, which will include evenings and weekends and frequent 24 hour shifts on call. Some overnight travel required, including trips to primitive camping sites on rainy weekends and endless sports tournaments in far away cities. Travel expenses not reimbursed. Extensive courier duties also required.

RESPONSIBILITIES

The rest of your life. Must be willing to be hated, or at least bite tongue repeatedly. Also, must possess the physical stamina of a pack mule and be able to go from zero to 60 mph in three seconds flat in case, this time, the screams from the backyard are not someone just crying wolf. Must be willing to face stimulating technical challenges, such as small gadget repair, mysteriously sluggish toilets and stuck zippers. Must screen phone calls, maintain calendars and coordinate production of multiple homework projects. Must have ability to plan and organize social gatherings for clients of all ages and mental outlooks. Must be willing to be indispensable one minute, and an embarrassment the next. Must handle assembly and product safety testing of a half million cheap, plastic toys, and battery operated devices. Must always hope for the best but be prepared for the worst. Must assume final, complete accountability for the quality of the end product. Responsibilities also include floor maintenance and janitorial work throughout the facility.

POSSIBILITY FOR ADVANCEMENT & PROMOTION

None. Your job is to remain in the same position for years, without complaining, constantly retraining and updating your skills, so that those in your charge can ultimately surpass you.

PREVIOUS EXPERIENCE

None required, unfortunately. On-the-job training offered on a continually exhausting basis.

WAGES AND COMPENSATION

Get this! You pay them! Offering them frequent raises and bonuses. A balloon payment is due when they turn 18 because of the assumption that college will help them become financially independent. When you die, you give them whatever is left. The oddest thing about this reverse-salary scheme is that you actually enjoy it and wish you could only do more.

BENEFITS

No health or dental insurance, no pension, no tuition reimbursement, no paid holidays and no stock options are offered (though this job supplies limitless opportunities for personal growth and free hugs for life if you play your cards right).

–Maya Bernstein