Simchat Torah count-up - Day 4 - Erev Sukkot. Sukkot -
Zeman Simchateinu, the season of our joy - begins on Shabbat this year. I have my choice of Shabbat services and dinners in sukkahs here in Manhattan. But I have all week to perform the mitzvah of eating in
as many sukkahs as I can get to. This house has no roof. There are a few twigs and branches on top, but you can see the stars and feel the wind through them. And the walls of this house don't go all the way around it either. Yet as you sit in this house eating the bounty of the earth, you feel a deep sense of security and joy. Here in this mere idea of a house, you finally feel as if you are home. The journey is over.
Read the rest of the excerpt from Rabbi Alan Lew's new book
This is Real and You are Completely Unprepared.More on Sukkot.
Arafat Death Watch. Meryl is on the case. Start
here and scroll up. I predict he won't die till 2004. Unfortunately. If it's really cancer he could linger for months.
UPDATE: One month,
says Roger Simon.
Rutgers Inspires. Tonight was
the kick-off event for the
"Israel Inspires" weekend at Rutgers U.
A crowd numbering into the thousands gathered at Rutgers University Thursday night for a pro-Israel rally that drew New Jersey's governor and two U.S. Senators to the student-organized event. A much smaller crowd of pro-Palestinians gathered across the street. Separated by a barricade and a fence, the counter-ralliers chanted their support for the Palestinians and exchanged taunts with some Israeli supporters.
60 Rutgers professors also felt compelled to challenge the pro-Israel rally, although their reasons didn't hold up under scrutiny:
. . . Eisenzweig said he is Israeli and a Zionist, but the main reason for the initiation of the statement is because he feels Hillel almost exclusively promoted right-wing Israeli policy.
Hillel, however, has a different point of view. Andrew Getraer, Hillel's executive director, said the organization has no right-wing agenda, and in the past, it has hosted events with groups like Seeds of Peace, which brings together Arab and Israeli young adults. . . . speakers include Myron Aronoff, a University political science, Jewish studies and anthropology professor, who Getraer said, does not follow a right-wing ideology and June Walker, president of Hadassah, the largest Jewish organization in America, which supports hospitals in Israel and hospitals and schools worldwide.
Of course, for most of these folks, believing Israel has a right to exist as the homeland of the Jewish people is automatically a "right-wing" view.
For those who haven't been following this story, this weekend is the culmination of months of activism on both sides.
The Rutgers chapter of NJ Solidarity [part of the International Solidarity Movement, a pro-Palestinian group which supports suicide bombings] began planning a national conference of pro-Palestine activists last spring. The proposed event immediately drew hundreds of protest letters from pro-Israel activists who opposed having the conference on a public university campus. The dispute went to McGreevey, who eventually said he disagreed with NJ Solidarity's politics but would allow the conference on free-speech grounds.
However, NJ Solidarity ran into trouble in August when an internal dispute over ideology forced the national Solidarity organization to pull out of the Rutgers conference and plan a rival conference at Ohio State University in November. The Rutgers group went ahead with its own pro-Palestine conference and ran into more problems last month when university officials kicked the event off campus after the student group failed to meet planning deadlines. Yesterday, the group announced it had booked the Ramada Inn in North Brunswick for the meeting.
While NJ Solidarity was struggling to plan its conference, campus pro-Israel activists began planning their own events to counter -- and upstage -- the pro-Palestine meeting and protest recent anti-Semitic incidents on campus.
Last month, a pro-Palestine student activist was arrested after he threw a pie in the face of an Israeli dignitary [Natan Sharansky] attending a Hillel dinner on campus. A few days later, an unidentified vandal spray-painted swastikas in front of the Hillel building and a nearby Jewish fraternity house.
Tonight's Israel rally and the weekend conference will be an important step in helping Jewish students feel secure on their own campus, organizers said.
Thus are foiled the minions of
Charlotte Kates and her pathetic troup of revolutionary wannabees. Bwahahahahaha . . . .
(many links courtesy
LGF comments)
Simchat Torah count-up - Day 3. Last night I went with a group from one of my shuls to
the heart of frum Brooklyn to buy our
ritual implements for the holiday: strolling down the street on a warm October evening, perusing table after table of etrogs and lulavs, comparing prices, checking each for its
beauty and
adherence to halachic standards.One of the things I love about Judaism is that it's visceral. Jewish practice is full of tangible objects that are either from the natural world or crafted by human hands: kiddush cups, seder plates, hanukkiahs, yads, challah covers, wool tallisim, calligraphed skeepskin parchment scrolls, ram's horns, etrogs, willow branches, bread crumbs, roasted eggs . . . . Eretz Yisrael is "the land of milk and honey." And not only is it visceral, but pleasurable as well - we are supposed to make our observance of the commandments as beautiful as possible, within our means, sanctifying Jewish artistic expression in the service of God.
Sukkot and Pesach deploy the greatest concentration of ritual objects (at opposite poles of the year - fall and spring -
they are both harvest festivals). But almost all of the ritual objects for Sukkot are perishable (that's the point). At this time of year, everyone has advice on how to keep the four species fresh as long as possible, especially the fragile willow. After all, they have to last through seven mornings of being carried around the shul and shook.
Am Yisrael Chai. Cafe Hillel in Jerusalem - site of
a horrific suicide bombing one month ago -
reopened today.
Why Jews No Longer Support a United Europe: According to David Meyer, chief rabbi at the Brighton and Hove New Synagogue and formerly a rabbi in Brussels, writes in the September 25
Wall Street Journal Europe that he feels Jews have an interest in a Europe of many nations, not a unified euro-blob:
More and more, we European Jews are beginning to think we may have been foolish. This reconsideration is not due to the fact that our love has been unrequited -- though no one can deny the European Union's bias toward Palestinians -- but because we've suddenly remembered that a Europe of separate nations has prevented our destruction.
.... Slowly, I began to understand that the notion of a unified Europe does indeed run contrary to the fundamental teaching of Jewish history.
During the last 2,000 years, the Jews have survived in Europe not because of its unity but because of its lack of it. When expelled from one country, say England in the 13th century or Spain in the 15th, to take only two examples, we could take refuge in another and start all over again. During the Crusades, when mobs ransacked Jewish ghettos, the situation was similar. Always we had another, European, place to go to. During the Inquisition, for example, Holland and some of the Italians states took us in.
This is not, as anti-Semites would put it, "divide and rule." It is more that division has allowed us to exist. Incidentally, those countries that took us in flourished for it. Spinoza and David Ricardo were Iberia's loss and the gains of the Netherlands and Britain.
With Hitler, however, we saw what it was like to have unity and be trapped in a place where one vision and one policy rules over such a large geographical area.
To be sure, today's Europe and its integration process cannot be compared to the tragedy of the past. So I understand if some may think this hyperbole. But the French-led "Old Europe," which believes that it should counterbalance to the U.S., is infecting the continent with anti-American and anti-Jewish prejudices. Under the unified foreign policy that many in Europe want, and have written into the new constitution, a decision made in Brussels would apply throughout the realm. "Feeling out of place," could apply to the whole continent.
I am not entirely pessimistic. In today's Europe, at least I can still choose -- as I have done by settling in Britain -- to live in the "New Europe." This New Europe is looking for a convergence of interest and values with the U.S., adding to Western power rather then undermining it. In Britain, I feel, for the time being, a certain sense of belonging, of being part of it. So like our ancestors, I have managed to "escape" within Europe to a place where I can still be a Jew. But if we ever have a united Europe, where would I go?
Upcoming event in Washington, D.C. pits Jewish Democrats against Jewish Republicans:
Jewish Young Adults Ages 22 to 39,
On October 22nd....
"Jewish Voting: Where Are We Going in the Diaspora?"
Please join NJDC's Executive Director, Ira Forman, as he debates his
counterpart, Matthew Brookes, head of the Republican Jewish Coalition,
on one of the hottest political topics currently being discussed:
whether members of the Jewish faith are leaving their Democratic Party
routes and joining the GOP. The event will also feature expert analysis
from noted political authority Dr. David Lublin of American University.
The event will be chaired by Dan Werner, Chairman of McNeil - Lehrer
Productions. A reception will follow.
The event will be held at 7:30pm in the Freed Youth Wing of Washington
Hebrew Congregation. There is no charge to attend this event, but RSVPs
are greatly appreciated, so please respond to this e-mail if you would
like to attend.
Washington Hebrew Congregation
3935 Macomb Street, NW
Washington, DC 20016
(202) 362-7100
www.whctemple.org
Temple Mount denial Dept. More historical revisionism about the Temple Mount, this time from
Time. This is as bad as Holocaust denial - it's distortion and erasure of historical fact in support of a political agenda. Please write correction letters.
Some links about the current Temple Mount archeological destruction by the Muslim authority which has control of the Mount. Several weeks ago,
part of an inner wall collapsed, weakened in part because of unrestrained excavation.
A good fisking of a scare story from a Muslim news source about attempts by Jews to visit the their holiest site. A view of the Temple Mount destruction from Biblical archeologists.
Moshe Dayan recalls how the Mount ended up under the control of the WAQF after the '67 war, and
the Israeli rabbinate's discussion of the halachic issues raised by Jews walking on the Mount.
Jews in odd places: India:
The Forward chronicles one of the last
Cochin Jews, on island of Cochin in the southern Indian state of Kerala. "I feel like an endangered species, like a rhinoceros in a zoo," Joseph Hallegua told the paper.
Cochin's "once-thriving Jewish community has become microscopic. The island's Jewish area has become a tourist attraction, complete with palm trees and a picturesque coastline. People like Hallegua live out their days under the curious gaze of voyeuristic visitors. When Hallegua says his community is dying, he isn't kidding. Only 14 Jewish residents remain, most in or approaching their 70s."
Cochin's Jewish community
can be traced back to traders in King Solomon's fleet some 2,000 years ago. Numbers grew in the fourth century, when thousands of Jews arrived in India and the community was granted privileges by the Hindu rulers. But in the 1500s, the Moors, contemptuous of the Jews' success in the booming spice trade, burned Jewish houses and synagogues and forced Kerala's Jews onto Cochin, where they sought protection under the island's Hindu raja, or leader.
In 1567 Jew Town was built, and the following year, the synagogue. Jews endured harsh rule under the Portuguese, after which the British provided the community much needed protection. When British rule over India ended in 1947, Cochin's Jews maintained a high social status and comprised several hundred families.
But then Israel was founded, and most Jews started making aliyah.
Jews in Schwarzenegger's hometown poo-poo Nazi allegations:
Jews in Arnold Schwarzenegger's Austrian hometown said Monday that allegations the movie star-turned-California gubernatorial candidate ever professed admiration for Adolf Hitler are ludicrous. "It's just election propaganda," said Feridoun Djavid, a leading member of Graz's Jewish community.
Others gathering in the community center between Yom Kippur prayer services told The Associated Press they are convinced that Schwarzenegger's opposition to anti-Semitism has always been firm and genuine.
Schwarzenegger, the front-runner in Tuesday's California recall election, struggled last week to counter allegations he once expressed admiration for Hitler's rise to power from humble beginnings.
Schwarzenegger, a Republican who became a U.S. citizen in 1984, has said he did not remember making the remarks during the 1975 filming of "Pumping Iron," the bodybuilding documentary that launched his film career. He also called the Nazi leader a "disgusting villain."
Over the years, Schwarzenegger has given generously to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Holocaust memorial group, and he even paid to have it investigate his father's past.
Last year, the center determined that his father, Gustav, was a volunteer member of Hitler's notorious brown-shirted Nazi storm troopers.
The president of the Jewish community in Graz -- the southern Austrian city where Schwarzenegger began his bodybuilding career as a teen -- said community members find the allegation of Schwarzenegger's admiration for Hitler ridiculous.
"No one took it seriously," Gerald Sonnenschein said while leading a reporter through the building that houses a modern, glass-domed synagogue on the banks of the Mur River.
"I know that he has always been pro-Jewish. He personally wrote me to congratulate me on becoming president" three years ago. "And he said he would visit the synagogue on his next visit to Graz."
Sonnenschein also said Schwarzenegger asked the community to send him a book it published about the Jewish history of Graz, located just a few miles from Schwarzenegger's boyhood home in the village of Thal.
On Saturday, Schwarzenegger's former trainer, Kurt Marnul, said the former bodybuilder was "filled with rage against the Nazi regime" and participated at least twice in organized disruptions of neo-Nazi gatherings in Graz during the 1960s.
Many from this area view Schwarzenegger as a humanitarian. They cite not only his support for the Simon Wiesenthal Center but also his work promoting the Special Olympics and his donations to a church in his home village.
"He is a very decent person," said 79-year-old Berthold Kaufmann, adding that allegations of anti-Semitism were nothing but "slander."
"And that is the general opinion here."
Simchat Torah count-up - Day 1. It is traditional to put the first nail in the sukkah right after the end of the final Yom Kippur service.
. . . you find yourself building a house; a curious house, an incomplete house, a house that suggests the idea of a house without actually being one. This house has no roof. There are a few twigs and branches on top, but you can see the stars and feel the wind through them. And the walls of this house don't go all the way around it either.
Read the rest of the excerpt from Rabbi Alan Lew's new book
This is Real and You are Completely Unprepared.
Naomi Chana has some
Jewish history Barbie action figures for you.We are obviously missing an opportunity here. For better familiarity with the less-frequently-televised portions of the Hebrew Bible, we could have Sotah Barbie (complete with ashes; High Priest Alan sold separately) and Barbie as Jael in the Book of Judges (complete with tent peg; Ken as Barak and Midge as Deborah also available).* Then there's the Second Temple, and Cast-off Foreign Wife Barbie (add Samaritan Kelly and some random kids from one of the family playsets), plus Queen Esther Barbie for the nifty clothing sets (poor Midge gets stuck as Vashti in that one). Barbie would be a natural as Queen Salome Alexandra, easily the most successful of the Hasmonean monarchs and a stellar example of the Barbie (tm) motto of my youth, "We girls can do anything."
It only gets better from there.
10 Days of Tshuvah countdown - Day 0. This is real. and you are completely unprepared.
You wear a shroud and, like a dead person, you neither eat nor drink nor fornicate. You summon the desperate strength of life's last moments. A great wall of speech is hurled against your heart again and again; a fist beats against the wall of your heart relentlessly until you are brokenhearted and confess to your great crime. You are a human being, guilty of every crime imaginable. Your heart is cracking through its shell to be reborn. Then a chill grips you. The gate between heaven and earth has suddenly begun to close. The multitude has swollen. It is almost as if the great hall has magically expanded to include an infinity of desperate souls. This is your last chance. Everyone has run out of time. Every heart has broken. The gate clangs shut, the great horn sounds one last time. You feel curiously lighthearted and clean.
Read the rest of the excerpt from Rabbi Alan Lew's new book
This is Real and You are Completely Unprepared.(Psst - don't tell anyone, but the gate isn't locked till
Hoshana Rabbah.)
An
Al Cheyt. This was written a year ago - unfortunately some of
those to whom it speaks won't be in shul.
Yom Kippur is one of the four times a year that the
Yizkor memorial service for relatives and martyrs is observed - more about Yizkor
here.Sometime in the afternoon we read
the funky story of Jonah. Jonah is one of those smug self-righteous social activists whose identity is threatened when things actually do get better. He's also a kvetch and a Peter Pan, and although God gets pretty fed up with him, he really is a prophet. Jonah can also be read as a metaphor for our unexamined loyalties to our old behavior patterns. If you think religious scriptures are simplistic, read Jonah.
UPDATE: Via
Protocols: how the "self-affliction" demanded on Yom Kippur is
different from asceticism. Also via Protocols,
everything you need to know about Yom Kippur.
French comedy. Is it just me, or does anyone else find
this hilarious? Read it in Monty Python or Peter Sellers voices and you'll see what I mean.
10 Days of Tshuvah countdown - Day 0 - Kol Nidre. This is real. And you are completely unprepared.
Then, just when you think you can't tolerate this one moment more, you are called to gather with a multitude in a great hall. A court has convened high up on the altar in the front of the hall. Make way! Make way! the judges of the court proclaim, for everyone must be included in the proceeding. No one, not even the usual outcasts, may be excluded. You are told that you are in possession of a great power, the power of speech, and that you will certainly abuse it -you are already forgiven for having abused it in the past - but in the end it will save you.
For the next twenty-four hours you rehearse your own death. You wear a shroud and, like a dead person, you neither eat nor drink nor fornicate. You summon the desperate strength of life's last moments. A great wall of speech is hurled against your heart again and again; a fist beats against the wall of your heart relentlessly until you are brokenhearted and confess to your great crime. You are a human being, guilty of every crime imaginable. Your heart is cracking through its shell to be reborn.
Read the rest of the excerpt from Rabbi Alan Lew's new book
This is Real and You are Completely Unprepared. I googled "kol nidre" looking for something that expressed the essence - as I have been trying to do with my
Pintele Yid recommendations - of how Jews experience this cornerstone of the Jewish yearly cycle. Most search results were dry historical explanations of this complex piece of liturgy, or antisemitic distortions of it. Finally, 3 pages in, I found - how about that? - another piece by Rabbi Lew:
. . . .way back in 1970, my first year in California, I was about as distant from Judaism as it was possible to be. How distant? It was Erev Yom Kippur and I had no idea that it was. But the TV was on in the living room of my house in Gualala, California, and I just happened to be walking through the room when a news broadcast caught my attention. They were doing a feature about Yom Kippur. Someone was playing Kol Nidre on a cello. It went through me like a knife. That melody struck a deep chord. It went all the way in. It went straight to my soul.
When we recite the Kol Nidre, God calls out to the soul, in a voice the soul recognizes instantly because it is the soul’s own cry. You may have come here for other reasons. You may not have come here because you knew your soul needed to hear this. Nevertheless, here you are, sitting in your body and suddenly your soul hears this music and it gives a jump, and it startles you to feel this. [sings:] KOL NIDRE. V’ESAREI. Your soul is hearing its name called out, and its name is . . . pain - grief - shame - humiliation - loss - failure - death, or at least, that is its first name. That is the name the first few notes of the Kol Nidre calls out.
. . . But the thing about the Kol Nidre is that it starts at this moment of heartbreak. This moment is the ground of its being. And it comes on so suddenly, so abruptly. There is no buildup whatsoever. It’s the very first thing that happens. It happens even before we have a chance to sit down. No, excuse me; there is something that happens first. But if you came in even fifteen seconds late you may have missed it. Before we recite the Kol Nidre, we convene a Beit Din, a rabbinical court—these people standing on the Bima with the Torahs—and they give us permission to pray "Im (with) Ha-avaryonim." But what does this mean? Who are the avaryonim and why does a court need to convene in order to give us permission to pray with them?
. . . Rabbi Shimon the Pious . . . said in the Talmud that a public fast in which sinners do not participate is not a true fast. Avar, after all, is a word for transgression. So perhaps the Avaryonim are the transgressors, and the Beit Din is giving us permission to pray with them. In other words, it is giving us permission to pray with ourselves. We are all avaryonim. We are all imperfect. We are all sinners. So perhaps the Beit Din is saying, you don’t have to be perfect to participate in this service, and that’s a good thing, because none of us is.
But I think this word suggests an even deeper reality that all of us share. Not only are we all imperfect. We are all impermanent. In its simplest meaning, Avar means to pass. We are the avaryonim. We are the ones who pass, the one’s who are just passing through, every one of us.
So anything by
Rabbi Alan Lew is my Pintele Yid pick for the Yamim Noraim, and, of course: read the whole thing.
Jews aren't going for "Cruz" in the California recall election: Why not? Political journalist Bill Boyarsky tells
The Jewish Week that the recall is essentially "
a non-Jewish election."
OK, but outside of Israel, when is there anything that could be dubbed a "Jewish election"?
Boyarsky laments that Jews in California have become "dogmatically entrenched on the subject of Israel," but have be gun to splinter "on such issues as affirmative action, public education and the merits of the neo-conservative ideology...". Noew, they "follow a more upper-middle-class set of self-interests."
Huh... so now Jews are like ordinary Americans rather than a hermetically sealed voting bloc. How terrible.
Rabbi Leonard Beerman, a leading liberal activist in L.A., seems to agree, at least with the outcome of the race. “I know a few people who are supporting Arianna [Huffington],” he said, “but most Jews I meet at synagogue, parties and political functions are going to vote no on the recall. They don’t like Gray Davis, but he seems better than the field opposing him.” Only a handful of diehard Democrats, the rabbi says, are backing Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante.
This has proved disappointing to a number of the city’s Jewish leaders who were hoping Bustamante would provide a rallying point for Jews. One of their plans for the future turns on a Jewish-Latino nexus: Jewish money, organization and political know-how combined with the large number of the city’s Latino voters. But Bustamante has turned out to be a weak political leader with little charisma, and he has failed to galvanize many Democrats in the Jewish community.
And has failed to galvanize anyone in any other community, even the Latino one. If Bustamante becomes Governor (presuming the Davis is actually recalled, which remains in doubt), it wil only be because of the split vote between McClintock and Schwarzenegger. And don't be surprised if, after all of the attempts to paint Arnold as a mysoginist or a Nazi, a lot of Jews vote for him this Tuesday.
10 Days of Tshuvah countdown - Day 1. The etymology of
"scapegoat."Would you declare yourself as a Jew if doing so might put your life in danger?
In March 1977, I found myself among the more than 100 men and women held hostage by an armed band of Hanafi Muslims at the B’nai B’rith Building in Washington, D.C., where I then worked.
Throughout the 39-hour duration of the siege, we were a literally captive audience to the anti-Jewish ravings of the leader of this Black Muslim splinter group. Early on, our captors divided us by gender: women were ordered to one side of the large conference room into which we had been herded, the men instructed to go to the other. To me, as to anyone familiar with the Holocaust, it seemed a good bet that the next division would be by religion. Unable to free myself from that thought, I did a quick mental calculation. My name didn’t “sound” Jewish, nor did I “look” Jewish. If such a selection were made, perhaps I could pass as a gentile.
But the idea didn’t sit well. I was a Jew, and if this was to be my fate as a Jew, I decided, so be it.
As it happened, our captors never asked about our individual religious faiths, or divided us in this way. After a little less than two days, we were freed. Yet I had made my choice, within.
The idea of the Jewish people as "chosen by God" is a complex theological concept often misinterpreted and oversimplified, but
. . . we do the choosing; we’re Jews because we’ve decided to belong to the Jewish community. It’s a commitment that feels renewed, within me, every Jewish New Year. And it is a choice that I have made quite consciously in every decade of my adult life.
Meanwhile, a Jew by choice
struggles with his anger as Yom Kippur approaches.
Incredible but true!! Wow,
Meryl, did you see this?
A humane unbiased news story about Israel from Reuters. The attack, just before the Yom Kippur fast day, targeted a prosperous business co-owned by Christian Arab and Jewish families and frequented by Arabs and Jews for its Middle Eastern cuisine.
Even the emergency workers and ambulance crews who rushed to the scene were a mix of Jews and Arabs.
"This was a microcosm of Haifa, how we live and work in harmony despite our differences," Mayor Yona Yahav said as bodies were pulled from the shattered dining room. "Terrorists want to provoke us to hate each other but that won't happen." [emphasis mine - ed.]
See, they don't care if they massacre their own. I guess they think those Arabs who live and work with Jews in Haifa are "collaborators." (via
LGF comments)
Meanwhile . . .
