Kesher Talk: 09/21/2003

10 Days of Tshuvah countdown - Day 9. I am writing this ahead of time and it should post automatically on the right day. Today is the first day and and the 2nd evening of Rosh Hashanah. Since the holiday fell on Shabbat this year, we did not blow the shofar, but we will tomorrow.

I took a 6-week class this fall in liturgy and themes for the Days of Awe. One of the class days was September 11, and that night we studied - what else? - Unetaneh Tokef.

(The self-reflection exercise using Psalm 27 rolled off the bottom of the page, but you can find it here.)

UPDATE: A bit of the debate about blowing the shofar when Rosh Hashanah falls on Shabbat, via Paleojudaica.

10 Days of Tshuvah countdown - Day 10. Tonight begins Rosh Hashana, on Shabbat this year. Tonight begins the final 10 days till the judgement of Yom Kippur. Be afraid, be very afraid, says San Francisco rabbi Alan Lew.

. . . the reminder and lesson of the High Holy Days is, "We are not prepared for our lives." We have failed, time and time again. This in itself is not an encouraging or uplifting notion, but Lew points out that it is the beginning, not the conclusion, of the High Holy Days journey. Through the prayerful month of Elul, the sweetness of Rosh Hashana and the heartbreak of Yom Kippur, being unprepared is the problem. Reaching out for God and each other brings us our solution. "In this journey, as we peel away the layers of defense and delusion, we get closer and closer to the presence of God," he said.

This is real. And you are completely unprepared.

YOU ARE WALKING THROUGH THE WORLD HALF ASLEEP. It isn't just that you don't know who you are and that you don't know how or why you got here. It's worse than that; these questions never even arise. It is as if you are in a dream.

Then the walls of the great house that surrounds you crumble and fall. You tumble out onto a strange street, suddenly conscious of your estrangement and your homelessness.

A great horn sounds, calling you to remembrance, but all you can remember is how much you have forgotten. Every day for a month, you sit and try to remember who you are and where you are going. By the last week of this month, your need to know these things weighs upon you. Your prayers become urgent.

Read the rest of the excerpt from Rabbi Lew's new book This is Real and You are Completely Unprepared.

Jewish troops get ready for High Holy Days in Iraq. The rabbi leading the service, chief chaplain of the New York National Guard, has served his congregants in Afghanistan and Operation Desert Storm.

All over the world, Jews wonder what kind of sermon they will be subjected to and rabbis wonder what they are going to talk about.

An oldie but goodie in the High Holy Days humor department.

May we all - all the peoples of the earth - be inscribed for a good year.

What is it with the French? Dept. French president Chirac met with Jewish leaders, to mixed reviews. On the one hand, he agreed Iran is a big problem. On the other hand, he told them they had to keep Arafat involved. There's lots more.

A Letter to My Palestinian Friends. This almost-past month of Ellul - the season of t'shuvah, t'fillah, and tzedakah, - a letter was published in the East Jerusalem Arabic-language daily Al Quds by Avraham Berg, 8th generation Hebronite Jew and Labor Party Knesset member. Berg is a real friend, the kind who talks straight to you no matter how much it hurts. Without coddling, condescension, or equivocating, he lets his Palestinian buddies have it right between the eyes.

I don't browse Indymedia, so I don't know how their submission process works. But if you do, do me a favor and post this there. Frequently. So they can learn what supporting the Palestinians looks like when grownups do it.

Edward Said, R.I.P. I am not happy with the gloating over Edward Said's death at some of my regular blog stops, especially as the Yamim Nora'im are upon us. Leukemia is a horrible way to die. If God got pissed at the angels for rejoicing when the Egyptians were thrown into the sea, it certainly doesn't behoove us to rejoice at Said's demise. Even if he had a pernicious influence all out of proportion to his scholarship.

Damian Penny and Andrew Apostolou get it right. (Michael agrees.)

The Said stuff no one else has linked to yet:

Lots of links about Said, including the full text of the debunking of Said's Jerusalem claims: "'My Beautiful Old House' and Other Fabrications by Edward Said."

"Occidentalism," wherein Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit turn Said's career-defining thesis back on itself.

UPDATE: More Said links and analysis from Dr. Manhattan.

Steal this pie. More on the Rutgers Sharansky incident and Abe Greenhouse, who seems to be styling himself after Abbie Hoffman, or at least paying homage.

[An historian] notes the overtly ethnic subplot of the [Chicago Seven] trial, particularly the infighting between defendant Abbie Hoffman and Judge Julius Hoffman, the former representing the children of the Eastern European immigrant generation that tended toward political radicalism, and the latter representing the older, more assimilated German-Jewish establishment. During the trial Abbie Hoffman ridiculed Judge Hoffman in Yiddish as "Shande fur de Goyim" (disgrace for the gentiles) - translated by Abbie Hoffman as "Front man for the WASP power elite." Clearly Hoffman and Rubin (who spent time on a Kibbutz in Israel) had strong Jewish identifications and antipathy to the white Protestant establishment.

I wonder what Abbie would think of Abe . . .

Was the pie kosher? "Of course!" Greenhouse told the Forward.

"Well," said [Hillel director] Getraer, "I haven't seen the hechsher."

Behind the scenes. Meanwhile, sub-rosa conversations continue.

The American Jewish Congress has opened an initial discussion with a Muslim group associated with the main Islamist party in Pakistan and is considering deeper contacts. . . . "This is a knowing effort to reach out to Muslim fundamentalists," said an AJCongress source, stressing that the group had made clear to its interlocutors its strong commitment to Israel.

The move, which comes in the midst of a series of back-channel contacts between Israel and Pakistan, has drawn sharp criticism and cast a light on a simmering debate over the nature of Islamic fundamentalism. . . .

You know what they say about how to hold your enemy and your friend.

To all the Jewcy's and Heebs out there. "This Rosh Hashanah I am praying to escape the tyranny of hip," says Gary Wexler. Ameyn v'ameyn. I can't pull one or two quotes out of this - read the whole thing. Send it to your rabbis and friends on federation boards.

A Very Merry Yom Kippur! Some cute anecdotes about well-meaning but inappropriate attempts to commercialize Jewish holidays without learning about them first, such as offering fruit baskets or chirpy greeting cards for Yom Kippur or Jewish Star cookies for Pesach. My favorite:

. . . one year at Passover I received a phone call from a member of a Santa Rosa-area church who was responsible for baking matzah for a Christian seder. She asked me for a recipe. I proceeded to tell her that Jews in this country don't make matzah but buy it instead, since it wouldn't be kosher for Passover unless a rabbi were around to supervise the preparation.

"Oh," she said. "Well, could I bake plain white bread instead?"

"No!" I shouted into the receiver, taking her aback. Then I proceeded to tell her the story of Passover, its restrictions and commandments, and how we as Jews commemorate it.

"Wow!" she said. "There's more to it than I thought!"

Yup. Actually, there's no reason a Christian couldn't bake bread for Pesach, since she's not bound by Jewish law and a Christian seder isn't a Jewish seder, but it wouldn't be matzah.

UPDATE: Sometimes Jews miss the point too.

Bookmark this. Best ever dissection of the double-think of "we're just anti-Zionist, we don't have anything against Jews." Read the whole thing right now. (via Meryl)

Cool stuff. Penguins get silly.

Fun cursor animation.

This is not a cursor animation. It's a computer animation version of those paint-by-number educational TV shows.

Did you know you can use Smirnoff vodka for all sorts of household chores?

Troll alert. Andrea is the Iraq of blogs, attracting trolls like flypaper . . . .

And she sent me to Tim Blair's found verse - inspired by trolls.

If the left really believes this, no wonder they're frustrated.

Michael rolls up his sleeves and fisks Ted Rall. It's a dirty job but somebody had to do it.

New traditions in Jewish music: Joshua Nelson is known as the Jewish soul singer. And he brought a little of his soul music to Kansas City as part of this year's Jewish Arts Festival on September 14th.

Nelson is black and an observant Jew who teaches Hebrew at a Reform congregation in New Jersey. He is also the director of music for the Hopewell Baptist Church in Newark and a rising star in the traditionally Christian world of gospel music.

When Nelson comes to Kansas City later this month, he will perform Jewish music with a gospel sound - a musical form he has helped to pioneer.

Nelson, who refrains from doing songs that refer to Jesus as God, said that the response to his music has been overwhelmingly positive.

"When I first started singing at gospel concerts, I was nervous about letting people know I was Jewish," he said. "It was a big secret for a while. Then I had a publicist who said I should just tell people because they're going to find out anyway. So we let people know, and it was a very positive response. A lot of big-time ministers thought it was great."

Nelson's Jewish audiences have been just as accepting - young and old alike.

"I was down in Palm Beach (Fla.), and I was a little nervous," he said. "Some people who grew up with a certain sound of Jewish music are not always open to a different sound. If it sounds too bluesy, they'll say that's not Jewish. But they really enjoyed it. They were clapping, and they bought all of my CDs."

Holy disappearances, Batman! Does anyone know what happened to my favorite religious blog, Holy Weblog?

Synagogue for sale down South: Congregation Beth Israel in Clarksdale, Mississippi — once home to the largest Jewish congregation in the state — is up for sale:

The last Sabbath services at Beth Israel were held in May. More than 100 former congregants and their families came to pay their respects to the Reform synagogue. It was a throwback to the congregation's glory days, back when the pews were full, the Sunday school enrollment topped 100 and a rabbi was employed full time.

Now, however, active membership in the synagogue has dwindled to less than a handful, making a minyan all but unthinkable. There are no Jewish children left in town; the congregation's average age hovers around 60. A Memphis rabbi visits the community four times each year. And so, the synagogue — once filled with the clamor of children running the hallways, exuberant revelers shouting "mazel tov!" at weddings and gossip over "covered dish" dinners featuring fried chicken and kugel — stands empty, available to the highest bidder.

Or any bidder.

So far, after months on the market, there are no takers; the congregation isn't the only part of town that has fallen on hard times. Once a thriving farm town, Clarksdale's population has withered, like much of the rural South, as small-town superstars seek better opportunities in the nation's big cities. Once a hotbed of activity in the civil rights era — it is the hometown of the famed civil rights leader Aaron Henry, whom Senator Joseph Lieberman recently called "a heroic man" — Clarksdale today is best described as quiet, sleepy and downright depressed. Cotton is no longer king, downtown shops have shut down while buyers stream to the Wal-Mart on the highway and the middle class has all but abandoned the place.

Jews — who are, as they say, like everyone else, only more so — have been hit perhaps hardest of all. Their numbers have declined past the point of no return.

Wishful thinking Dept. If only.

Late-nite davening. Ebn Leader led selichot services for Kehilat Hadar Saturday night. Wow. I don't know if I could survive an entire Yom Kippur with that much intensity, but I'm tempted to join them in Jerusalem next year just to make the attempt. I also like how they are working out "grassroots halacha":

As a result of organic demand, women have received aliyot and read from the Torah at our minyan since 1992. After reviewing the halakhic sources, it was decided that not only may women be called up to the Torah, but they may also read from it, in addition to participating in other parts of the service. At the same time, we maintain the separation between men and women during prayer, in accordance with Jewish law. More recently, other halakhically-oriented minyans in Jerusalem and abroad have adopted this form.

UPDATE: Selichot senryu from Protocols. These are insider jokes but pretty amusing to those of us who participate this sort of thing. My favorite:

Translators' field day
Completely different meaning,
Hebrew v. English.

Does that mean they were using the USCJ selichot prayer book?

News of the Weird. The latest in copycat crimes.

Tin foil hat territory.

This wins the Barking Moonbat Award for most wacky conspiracy theory I've heard all year.

This is what happens when just anyone can get their hands on Flash.

"Every man looks at me as if I were a dickhead" says an Italian Renaissance ceramic plate. Really.

Kesher Talk

Saturday, September 27, 2003

Friday, September 26, 2003

Thursday, September 25, 2003

Wednesday, September 24, 2003

Tuesday, September 23, 2003

Monday, September 22, 2003

Sunday, September 21, 2003

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