Let's make a committee...

I read this joke. A bunch of Hadassah women were in a bus crash and ended up, accidentally, in Hell. The gatekeeper up in Heaven called down there and said "Hey, you got some Hadassah ladies by mistake!" But the Devil replied "Don't take them! They've only been here two days and already they formed a committee and raised the money for air conditioning!"

And yes, I do recognize that we Jews do not actually believe in Hell, but the joke still makes a good point!

Jewish people really DO get how to work together; whatever has made the culture that productive is good, good good.

For a year, I was president of a Hadassah chapter here in Bloomington. During that year, our family went to Israel for three weeks and I took a bus, with my daughter Amalia, up to the Ein Karem campus of Hadassah Hospital. It's pretty impressive to see Jews and Arabs sharing the same hospital room, pretty impressive to see the kind of care and the kind of research that are happening there -- supported by money raised by Hadassah.

The feeling I get when visiting the websites for federation and uja is that they are very comprehensive; they include religious content but the main emphasis is on Jews working together to make the world a better place -- making committees to get stuff done. A huge emphasis on tzedakah -- again, working togehter, realizing that one has an obligation to help.

I've never lived in a town where I had a Jewish community center, but I wish I had.

Chabad

After reading that article, I feel even more respect for Rabbi Yehoshua and Zlata than I did before. I've always thought they were wonderful people; part of my very good first impression of them was that the rabbi was so very different from the Chabad rabbi who preceded him. The other rabbi made a point to call a woman rabbi "Mrs." rather than "Rabbi."

I mean, live in the real world, already. I may not want Bush to be president but he IS whether I like it or not.

Well, Rabbi Yehoshua made it a point, at a Lag B'Omer picnic co-sponsored by Beth Shalom and Chabad House several years ago, to refer to Mira as "Rabbi." That made a lot of fans for him.

I would have gone to the Chabad ceremonies on Sunday if I hadn't been sick.

Even though I don't share many practices or beliefs with the Chabad movement, I have to say that I admire Yehoshua and Zlata -- they really live their beliefs.

And it's strange, but a few years ago, here's my very-loose-Jewishly husband asking Rabbi Yehoshua to pray for his dad when his dad had a quadruple bypass while on a business trip in Iowa. As if, somehow, those Orthodox prayers counted just a little bit more...

Reflections on Modern Orthodox Judaism

Oh, gosh, here I was feeling all admiring of the Orthodox website. I mean, it's well-done, very comprehensive, broad in ways that surprise me (a job search site connected with the Orhtodox movement -- now that's networking!) but then I clicked on "Mourner's Kaddish" in the "Judaism 101" section and saw the instruction that this prayer must be said by a "quorum of ten adult male Jews." I forgot that I am not even eligible to be a member of a minyan in Orthodox Judaism!

I should have remembered that when I saw, reading an article on the website, the names of couples listed, for example, as "Mr. and Mrs. Jordan Shifriss." Ooooh, the HT, by policy, had stopped referring to married people like that even before I came there 11 years ago! (A policy that I am more than happy to enforce, of course!)

There is a lot of Yiddish or Hebrew on the OU website which assumes that one just understands it, I guess. Like, what does “Kol Yisrael Areivim Ze Ba Ze” mean? It's in the section where they are talking about "changing the face of North American Judaism."

We have really good friends of our family who are Modern Orthodox, and so reading this section was really interesting. I printed out the Berman article so I can talk to them about it when we (hopefully) go see them in Pittsburgh for a long weekend sometime soon.

At the same time while I respect ppeople who can immerse themselves so fully in their beliefs and live by very strict rules, I have to say that some Orthodox behavior I do find offensive. For example, a few months ago my husband was in Israel, where most of his family lives. One branch of the family became very strictly Orthodox a few years ago. He went to stay, in Jerusalem, with his cousin and his wife for an overnight. But the cousin had to leave early in the morning so Jordie had to get up really early and leave, because he could not have been alone in the apartment with his cousin's wife. That, to me, is insulting and demeaning. I don't mean that the cousin and his wife meant any offense -- only the rule which they are required to obey.

One of the most delightful things about my working life, I think, is the opportunity to develop good friendships with men. I see several of the men in the newsroom of the HT as brothers that I didn't have. I wouldn't think anything of going to lunch with one of them or telling them about a problem of mine, etc. To see every interaction between a man and a woman as potentially sexual is limiting and insulting.

Reflections on my own Jewish identity

Wow, I really AM Reform, because I'm reading everybody's blogs and responding to them on Shabbat! Life is full of compromises. I took our daughter Abby and three of her friends to the North-South football game and dropped them off tonight, but not till we had lit the candles and said the blessings (we blessed pizza instead of challah tonight, but, hey, it's still bread!)

My Shabbat deal with myself is that I only do what I enjoy on Shabbat. I ran into a friend at Lowe's once on a Saturday morning and she said "I'm not shomer Shabbos!" and I agreed "Obviously I'm not either!"

I've been thinking a lot about what someone said in class the other day -- that a person who converts should have to learn Hebrew. I talked about this whole issue with one of my best friends, Rabbi Sue (from Hillel) when we took an exercise walk the other night. I thought that perhaps if I had had to learn Hebrew, and if my instruction in Judaism had been a lot more intensive, perhaps I would have felt at home in Judaism much sooner. Earning my place with knowledge might have made the first few years more comfortable. But then again, the Hebrew thing might have kept me from converting at all. In any case, Sue said "Conversion is the start of your journey in Judaism, not the end." I really appreciated that, and in my case, it is so true.

My own feeling of belonging, my own feeling of being a Jew, has come much more from engaging in service, not from knowledge of Torah or Hebrew. I think it is a cop-out to have a lot of book knowledge, but not feel obligated to do service.

In a way, I see this as people valuing the "male model" more than the female. In our synagogue, I'd bet that just about everybody who volunteers to take food to the sick is a female. Why don't males feel obligated to do this service? To me, it is just as holy as sitting around a table discussing Torah.

In our synagogue, knowledge is very valued (obviously, in a university town, Beth Shalom is full of professors and professional people). But people who don't have Hebrew can also feel comfortable. Everybody knows I'm a convert, and I don't have Hebrew. But I'm vice-president of the board there. Last year, just after Abby's bat mitzvah service ended, Alvin Rosenfeld (former head of Jewish Studies at IU) came up to me and said very kindly "You can't realize it (because I don't have Hebrew, he meant) but Abby read beautifully." I think that moment was one of the happiest moments of my life. (I wished my mother-in-law Shoshana, may her memory be for a blessing, were still alive to have heard that.)

Back when Amalia did her bat mitzvah, we didn't yet belong to the synagogue, and Amalia did not learn how to chant Torah. She memorized and used transliteration. But she did a huge amount of service -- she took the training at Middle Way House to be a volunteer and she went there every week that year. She also studied history and ethics with Jordan (her dad). But, later, at IU, she took Hebrew as her language and she felt great about that.

Adam did service work and he was able to do the Hebrew for his bar mitzvah by studying with Jordan. I hope he takes Hebrew as his language. To me, one of the neatest parts about his bar mitzvah was that, since Jordie's mom was very ill, Jordie and Adam flew to New Jersey a few weeks before the bar mitzvah and Adam did his Torah portion for his grandparents. Then we also had a speaker phone on the bima so they could listen during the actual service.

I'm glad that our children have knowledge that I do not have. What I wanted for them from their Jewish education was a sense of belonging. In earlier years, when we talked about being members of the synagogue or not, I used to say that I wanted them to own their Judaism; to be able to walk into a synagogue and never feel like a stranger, or feel stupid or disconnected. And I feel we have given them that.

Even more than the Hebrew and the knowledge of how to do a Torah reading, how to chant the blessings for an aliyah, etc. -- one thing the kids really get, I think, is that once you have passed your bar or bat mitzvah, you can't just think of yourself. Amalia is always taking care of other people and when she comes home to visit, she jumps right in with whatever there is to be done. Adam is the kind of man who would go to shovel snow for some old people (although, probably, not his own sidewalk!) He is tremendously kind to his friends. And Abby, too, really gets the service part. When I was chairing a welcome-back brunch at synagogue recently, she came early on Sunday morning to help. I was able to say to her "Just go out to the hall and greet people and have them do nametags." Later it occurred to me that not all 14-year-olds would do that.

I think that, in Judaism, one has to earn one's place to feel a sense of Jewish identity. Whether it's doing the learning and service connected with a bar mitzvah or whether it's standing in the synagogue kitchen peeling a hundred hard-boiled eggs for a community meal, or whether it's getting a call at work that there has been a death in the community: "Can you come tonight?" or whether it's manning a voter registration table or organizing an effort to call congress people about Darfur -- that kind of service is, to me, what it's all about in being a Jew. I'm glad for the other parts and I'm glad my children have them -- but the heart of it, to me, is the decisions a person makes in everyday life. That part of Judaism feels rich and fulfilling to me.

Conservative Judaism

There is certainly a perception that being a Conservative Jew is, somehow, more Jewish than being a Reform Jew. For instance, when I converted 25 years ago, I did it in a Conservative mikvah in Chicago, instead of the Reform one in Indianapolis. This was because my husband's parents thought it would count more in Israel. (Of course, it really wouldn't.)

To me, what the Shma readings reflect is that there is a lot of uncertainty about what a Conservative Jew is. Does a Conservative Jew have to follow the law? Or can they really interpret for themselves? And there is confusion about whether a woman should be a rabbi, or whether gays have equal rights within the movement.

The one thing they agree is important is that Jews see belonging to a Jewish group as vital, interesting -- something that helps them live their everyday lives in a better way and engages their imaginations.


I like what one letter-writer said -- that the movement would have to create a more persuasive reason for Jews to be Conservative in coming generations -- because only the past generation found a reason in the "nostalgic baggage" they carried.

I think being a Conservative Jew might be a comfortable compromise for someone from an Orthodox background -- a way to feel really Jewish without having to actually be as strict as the Orthodox.