The Lilith Blog

November 3, 2008 by Mel Weiss

Erev Erev Election Day, or, I Have No Fingernails Left

So, yeah, the fate of our nation will be decided in about 50 hours from now, but let’s not talk about that, okay? Oh, I know there’s plenty of other stuff to talk about—I’ve spent a lot of time in the last week checking and rechecking such inanities as the technical definition of a graduated income tax—(don’t look now, but you might be living in a socialist state), but mostly I’ve been fretting, worrying, gnashing my teeth and the like—not just over the election, which is nausea-inducing enough, but over this fun fact, which surfaced amidst the ludicrous newscycle we’ve been living for months: in the annual press freedom report by Reporters Without Borders, the United States came in 36th, a spot we proudly share with Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cape Verde, South Africa, Spain and Taiwan. And guess what? We climbed up twelve places to get there. That twelve point bump comes mostly from the release of an Al Jazeera cameraman from Guantanamo, where he never stood trial for any crime. The low rating comes mostly from other journalists in Guantanamo and the arrests, detentions and the like plaguing journalists at both the RNC and DNC this year. (Other people I’ve spoken to have also wondered what role corporate media’s complete consumption of most news outlets might have factored in; I’m not sure.)

This is the second most not-cool thing that could happen right now. (Look at how I’m not talking about the other thing, conveniently not endangering anyone’s non-profit status!) It’s one thing for members of relatively fringe political views to expound on how equality is “a European value, and not an American value.” ( Go know, as my mother would say.) It’s quite another to have an independent third party tell us for sure that we’re not living with a truly free and unfettered press. First-amendment freedoms are among those that have defined America from the beginning, the ones always as treasured as our economic capabilities, and apparently, just as fragile.

(For the record, Israel came in at 46, while American-owned territories clock in at 119, “Israel (extra-terrestrial)” at 149, and the Territories made it to 163. So are Martians in Israel receiving a better quality of news than Palestinians in the West Bank? An interesting possibility.)

So, whether you spend Wednesday in a joyous stupor and in a state of despair, I urge you to keep some of Molly Ivins’ words of wisdom in mind: things can always get worse and often do, and since these may very well work out to be the Good Old Days, you best enjoy them while you can. Since you can all still read Molly Ivins without fear of government reprisals, I’d say go do that, and support your local and independent news sources while you’re at it.

And, of course, please vote. Please.

–Mel Weiss

The Lilith Blog

October 27, 2008 by Mel Weiss

Autumnal Holidays and Ballot Initiatives

My girlfriend is that rare combination of pessimism with the occasional flash of hardcore optimism, and a dash of superstition thrown in for good measure. (Actually, that’s probably why everyone assumes she’s Jewish when they meet her.) We’re not discussing national election polling data right now, but as a Golden State native, she is still gloomy about California’s Prop 8, which would amend the state constitution to outlaw same-sex marriage. It’s been polling pretty well, although far less well than a similar proposition several years ago. (I’m worried about her state’s Prop 4, which requires parental notification and a state-mandated waiting period in the event of abortion. I don’t know, but when it’s the Knights of Columbus versus American Academy of Pediatrics and American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, I tend to go with the people who went to med school. But that’s because I’m an elitist, I guess.)

My point here is not to induce gloom—although given that Prop 4 has a lead in the polls, by all means, feel that, too—but to point out that the choice between presidential candidates is not the only one you’re going to have to make on November 4th. There are going to be 153 ballot measures this election, which is nearly double the number there were in 2006. And most of these are, you know, fairly big deals. Nebraska’s going to vote on affirmative action. Oregon’s going to vote on mandatory minimums. And, of course, South Dakota’s going to make another attempt at banning abortion, Roe v. Wade be damned.

So, what’s Jewish about all this? Let’s suppose for a minute that there are two main seasons of holidays in the Jewish calendar—the spring cycle of Pesach-Shavuot, and the fall cycle of Rosh Hashana-Yom Kippur-Sukkot-Hoshana Raba-Shemini Atzeret-Simchat Torah (whew!). I love them both, and I really do think they provide essential counterbalances to one another. The spring cycle, though, celebrates a phenomenon in which things were done for the Jews—God freed us from slavery and gave us the Torah. The fall season is a lot more about human fragility and agency—we must ask for forgiveness, contemplate our place in the Book of Life, sit in a hut to remind us of our own temporality, and celebrate that we read the entire Torah another time. These are both vital aspects of life, but it makes a certain thematic sense to me that we vote in the fall, after contemplating our own morality, our culpability, our vulnerability and our joy in the law. I hope it raises our sensitivities a little bit.

Thus I make to you here not just an impassioned plea that, come the 4th, you vote for the candidate of your choice, but that you take the next week to make sure you know what else will appear on your ballot, and what you think about it. If you couldn’t get wifi in your sukkah, do your research now.

–Mel Weiss

The Lilith Blog

October 27, 2008 by Modesty Blasé

The Gym

If it is desirable to eat and sleep in a sukkah, should one also use the treadmill in a sukkah?

It’s chol hamoed, I’m at the gym and judging by the number of men and women sweating off those extra kugel calories, it’s clear that Jews are not obligated to exercise inside a sukkah.

The housewives’ preferred gym in Golders Green is situated in a busy shopping strip, sandwiched between a popular adult education centre and an even more popular kosher restaurant. It has a few advantages over the other more glamorous and cleaner gyms within a short driving distance: fat women are especially welcome, there is a women’s only gym room and the swimming pool has hours reserved exclusively for women.

Interestingly, the most glamorous are the young newly married religious women. They turn up in ankle-length skirts hiding their sweatpants which, if you look carefully, are peeking out just where their skirts meet their trainers. Their workout T-shirts are covered by the bulky sweatshirts worn by anorexics and they cover their hair with demure snoods, although occasionally, a brightly coloured scarf can be seen. They arrive at the gym carrying very little save for their car keys, membership card, mobile phone and a bottle of water. They enter the gym and disrobe in the womens’ changing rooms – emerging as svelte nymphettes in slinky figure-hugging leotards.

Adorned with expensive diamonds, they look sexy on the treadmill in bodies yet to be ravaged by pregnancy and childbirth. The only thing that gives them away is the shmutter on their head An occasional intellectual reads a book while on the stationary bike, but I have yet to see anyone daven while running on the treadmill. Often they come in pairs, but if not, they all seem to recognise each other and enjoy a schmooze and a whinge. The complaints are long: the mother in law, the teacher and the cleaner. The rumours are short: suspected divorces, potential engagements and in these financial times, people about to lose their jobs or their businesses. The schadenfreude is delicious.

Then there are the older women who have a completely different approach. They arrive fully dressed in their day clothes, sensible shoes and sheitel, shlepping a travel bag which I am sure has sandwiches inside. They go into one of the private cubicles of the changing area to put on their baggy tracksuit pants and extra large t shirt. They take off their sheitel and slip on a scarf or snood. Their sheitel is discreetly packed away in a private locker – although I have on rare occasions, noticed a sheitel hanging loosely from a clothes peg, inadvertently placed next to hanging hijab. As long as they don’t mix up their headgear when they leave, everyone is happy.

What strikes me is that the frum women dominate the space in the gym – and I don’t necessarily mean physically. Golders Green is actually a very multicultural area, and there are an assortment of women at the gym, however, none seem to claim ownership of the public space in the same way that the frum women do. Having colonised the running machines, they pant loudly and then speak even more loudly about their personal issues and the community with little regard for other women who may be there. These women may have very large physical spaces in their own homes, but may have very little emotional or mental space in which to manoeuvre. Ironically, the womens’ gym room is quite a claustrophobic physical space, but somehow acts to liberate these women emotionally.

Let’s not forget the single frum women who come to the gym. Despite the lack of a hair covering, you can still tell them apart. They are anxious
around the married women, and eager to perform because they never know if it could lead to an introduction to a suitable husband. After all, if you still look good while you’re schvitzing, then it’s easier to sell you as a hot date to a prospective yeshiva bocher.

The gym is also the best place to catch up on all the television that you can’t watch because you can’t have a television in your house or your children won’t get into the school of your choice. While some schools ask intrusive questions about your family life, I have yet to hear of a school that ask if you watch TV in the gym. Unfortunately, Desperate Housewives is only on after the gym closes, so there must be a secret TV in Golders Green where all these women are gathering to find out the latest on Lynette’s cancer, Katherine’s violent ex-husband and Bree’s flirtation with the pastor. I know there must be a secret TV, because all these women know exactly what is happening on Wisteria Lane.

And let’s not forget the men in the gym. While it is a mitzvah to look after our bodies, the men must be asking themselves if the mitzvah is worth the trouble when so many sins are committed along the way? There is no separate men’s gym, so they must avert their eyes from the women jogging, stretching and sweating all around them. Heads down and they can’t see what they are doing; heads up and there’s a lot of sinning. Buxom bouncing women make it hard to concentrate on the shiurim on their iPod and while the loud pulsating music may be conducive to upping your speed, it is usually very suggestive and certainly not very frum.

In the coming weeks, as winter sets in and Shabbat ends early, the gym will be the place to go to on a Saturday night. It’s a routine I’ve enjoyed for many years. But my favourite time to go the gym is just before I go to the mikvah – a vigorous workout, a 5 minute walk to the mikvah, a refreshing shower, a quick dip, a short drive home and some more exercise. The question remains: which uses up more calories?

–Modesty Blasé
Cross-posted to The Jerusalem Post blog

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 7, 2008 by Mel Weiss

The Devil’s in the Details, So We Better Be, Too

Okay, I know it’s probably a bad idea for me to write about the election in the U.S. right now, because I’m still a resident of freak-out-loss-of-perspective-ville, but this is a legitimate feminist comment on political media. Lisa Belkin’s piece in the Times magazine this weekend posited that when we talk about Sarah Palin, we’re really talking about our own feelings about women and the work-life balance in America. Still. Since Lisa Belkin also heralded news of the “Opt-out Revolution” and scrabbling youth in the city pulling in only $60,000 a year, I retain some residual skepticism. I must admit, I thought her column had some serious merit, although it feels like she hasn’t watched the news for two weeks.

I would, in fact, say that Sarah Palin got a twinge of my feminist sympathies in the first few days. It was cheap and intellectually dishonest for people for people to talk about how she has young children—as though that were the real problem they had with her. (It was even lamer if that was the problem they had with her.) And it was ridiculous that not enough people stepped up to say, Screw that—her positions are polarizing enough! You can know whether you’re for or against Sarah Palin’s positions without considering her mothering skills.

But, hey, lots of stuff has happened since then, and SNL has been doing a great job of documenting how ridiculous the whole process has been. And Queen Latifah, channeling Gwen Ifill, made a great point: we set the bar so low that now, Palin is perceived as jumping over it. Aside from my political concerns of the first degree (like how wonderfully tolerated I feel, and did I really want to get married, use tap water, or have a bank account in the next eight years, anyway?), I felt myself facing a feminist conundrum. Had we set the bar so low because she was a woman? Were we still, a la Lisa Belkin, using Sarah Palin as a symbol instead of recognizing that she, specifically, might one day soon (ptu ptu ptu) be in Dick Cheney’s office? Were we stuck in some Yom-Kippur-induced malaise, so weighted with our own sins that we couldn’t keep our hopes too high about our politicians’ abilities?

To be honest, I don’t think so. I think it is the habit of the twenty-four hour news cycle to harp on some issues, and certainly has a history of downplaying a candidate’s intelligence. (Seven years and eleven months ago, Molly Ivins was ranting about how stupid the media portrayed Bush to be—it masked the real problems, which hasn’t had so much an intelligence theme—more like reckless endangerment. For fun, imagine the columns Molly would write about Sarah Palin.) So let me say this right now, and set the record straight: although there may be some women who like Sarah Palin just because she is a woman, most of us are no longer judging her by her gender. Although some people have said stupid things about the relationship between her motherhood and her job, and she’s been useful for restarting a national conversation on work-life issues, the vast majority of us have moved on. The devil’s in the details, folks. There may have been some sexist assumptions about her abilities, but most concerns have never been sexist. Gender got a lot of play in this election, but to be honest, I think its role is waning. Let’s talk about Palin the politician for a while, and we can come back to all that symbolic stuff in a bit.

Agree? Disagree? Talk back below!

–Mel Weiss

The Lilith Blog

October 2, 2008 by Modesty Blasé

What Will My Tombstone Say?

I have been thinking about my tombstone. Every year, during these days surrounding Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur I get a little nervous. The words in the machzor make it clear that between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur one’s fate for the following year is determined. It’s only the method that is yet to be decided. Today, I am healthy, but who knows about tomorrow? Be Prepared: it’s the Girl Guide in me. I’d also like to save Mr. Blasé the effort and anyway, his punctuation is terrible.

I could opt for the standard phrases: devoted mother, dedicated wife, cherished daughter, beloved mother, selfless sister (but I feel a tombstone is not a place for alliteration) blah blah. But this is not a time for accolades, and I just don’t like the fact that these benign phrases are all about me in relationship to others. These descriptions, albeit worthy – are not about me as a person, but rather acknowledge events in my life that offered me a mortgage, school fees and the same person to grow old with.

I have been working on a few options:

She had an edge. Too short and too obscure. What’s the point of being remembered for the edge when any recollections of my sarcasm would be out of context?

Her cynicism belied her sentimentality. True, but would anyone really believe it?

Multi-tasker extraordinaire. Isn’t every woman? Hardly anything unique.

She wanted to make a difference but was never sure she did. I’d like to be remembered for my altruistic streak even though it was never fully realised. I just don’t want to sound too self-righteous.

Kind to misfits and loyal to her friends. Pots of soup across Hendon and Golders Green attest to this.

Her instinct never let her down. This instinct led me to marry the wonderful Mr. Blasé, so that is surely worth a mention.

She tried her best. What happens when our best is just not enough?

Lots of people annoyed her. And why did I waste so much time trying to placate them?

The Holocaust walked in front of her. Challenged to name my primary identity: British, Jewish, woman – I always chose child of Holocaust survivors.

She was grateful when everyone she loved woke up in the morning. It’s true.

Modest, inside and out. Can there be a greater tribute for a Jewish woman?

It’s not really about the tombstone, it’s about the legacy. What will be worth remembering? How do we construct a memory that reflects a person’s life when that life is fractured, complex and filled with it’s own memories. I have thought about this a lot in recent years. Holocaust survivors are dying around me and there are no adequate words for their tombstones. Young mothers in our community are dying of breast cancer and their children are barely old enough to read the words engraved above their mother’s grave.

Naturally, during Yizkor on Yom Kippur, I will be thinking of the deceased who are close to me, but I know I will also be wondering if I will be here next year to mourn them.

–Modesty Blasé

Cross-posted to the Jerusalem Post blog.

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 Mel Weiss

Livni Rocks the Vote, Just Barely

Man, miss a week of blogging and you miss Tzipi Livni getting elected by 431 votes. Of course, there’s been plenty going on since then, what with the U.S. presidential debates and, oh yeah, Wall Street crashing and this clip looping endlessly through my brain, especially as we stare the High Holidays in the face.

Personally, I think there are a number of really solid reasons to like Tzipi Livni. For starters, she’s relatively new-school. One of the most shocking things about Israeli political history is the relatively short list of names you’ll have to learn. Livni’s certainly establishment enough—she’s been in the Knesset for almost ten years—but she not one of the big names from years gone by. She won’t carry nearly as much baggage, plus it’s just nice to have a breath of fresh air. She’s dovish, anti-settlement and believes that change can be accomplished, so she’s going to have quite a battle trying to pull a government together.

(One of the worst lines of recent news was Bibi Netanyahu’s response to a question about Likud joining a Livni-led Kadima coalition. Politics aside, I’m sorry, the guy just reminds me of a used-car salesman, and smarmy remarks like “It would be like joining the board of Lehman Brothers right now” just rub me the wrong way.)

Not that it matters as much in Israel, where it seems you’re generally determined fit to lead before your skill area is sharply defined, but Livni’s worked in law, in the Agricultural ministry, Immigration ministry, and has had a number of jobs within government. She’s seen a variety of issues up close. There’s strong evidence to suggest she’s quite intelligent.

Until the deadline on her mandate expires, we should appreciate her. She’s here, there’s no evidence she’s been pocketing any envelopes of cash, and she wants to take a big step towards peace. For the future, I wish her well and hope she manages to pull that whole coalition shtick off.

But in the interim, she’s a useful symbol because of that tiny margin. 431 votes. A reminder of the power of democracy and the power of a single vote. One that made me want to text all my friends to ask Are you registered? And if you’re not, can you change that, um, immediately?

And while we’re working on rocking the vote over here—the best of luck to you, Tzipi Livni, in pulling together a coalition and getting on with the good work.

–Mel Weiss

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!