While I’m restoring my iPod in an attempt to get it to be less annoying, I may as well write something.

There are some great things going on at my shul. Great people with great projects and great innovations and the like. All of the people in charge, I believe, are wonderful and well-intentioned and doing really good things that could be real positive contributions to the synagogue.

And I’m worried.

I’m worried about what I’m hearing from other congregants. I’m worried about certain attitudes I feel brewing around these innovations, approvals and disapprovals and divisions and personality cults etc.

So I’m going to discuss principles rather than people, because I’ve not yet had conversations with the people involved, and I’m trying not to engage in Lashon HaRa here.

I love to sing. I mean I really, really love to sing. There is very little else in this world that makes me happier. Singing is up there with Really Good Learning and sex on my enjoyment meter. So I can easily see why people call the experience of singing “spiritual.” And indeed, I do find that singing and harmonizing and clapping and dancing can enhance my davenning experience.

But there is a difference between a singing experience and a davenning experience. I might feel the same visceral thrill singing Eddie From Ohio or Great Big Sea songs with my friends as I do singing Havu L’Adonai at Kabbalat Shabbat. The difference is in the content. The difference is the singing as the experience itself, versus the singing as an extra set of wings to elevate the davenning.

Getting the content, folks, takes work. I’m really sorry, but there’s no getting around that.

Now, the problem arises when you’ve got two minyanim, one which is, shall we say, “traditional” in the sense that it follows more or less a certain established pattern, shaliach tzibbur, a standard nusach, a sanctuary of a certain size with immobile pews, etc. The second is, shall we say, “neo-Chassidische” in the sense that it intentionally utilizes a smaller, less formal-appearing space, leadership is shared (people stand around the sha”tz and kind of co-sha”tz together), upbeat catchy niggunim are used to encourage harmonizing, hand-clapping and the like, etc.

It is not the existence of these two minyanim that is the problem. On the contrary, I think it is wonderful. When I was living in Jerusalem over the past two years I loved the fact that I had the option to go to a relatively standard traditional Conservative service, a Chassidische Carlebach service, a quasi-egal Carlebach-y service, a standard Orthodox service, a young hip non-denominational egal niggun-heavy service, etc. you get the idea. Options are good. Having the ability, the resources, to switch things up is good. Exposing yourself to different davenning experiences is good. Being able to pray effectively in different communal models is good.

Competition, however, is very very bad.

I wish to reiterate, it seems to me that it is not the leaders who are fostering the competitive attitude I am sensing. It is those who make presumptive statements about one service or the other’s lack of “authenticity” or “neshama” or “kavannah.” It seems to always boil down to something political, something that becomes personal, something that is insulting or imposing or lacking…

Personally, I think there needs to be some re-education going on here. We need to start talking about what it means to daven in a community, as part of a community. Perhaps we need to back it up further and teach people what it means to daven, period.

Davenning is less about you and your experience than you think it is. I think someone needs to be brave enough to say that out loud to our population of middle class American Conservative Jews.

Every Thursday during the school year, Reb Shmuel our Rosh Yeshiva has a sicha. Sicha means conversation. He starts with some thoughts of his own on some point of relevance to religious life… truthfulness, faith, tefilah, humor, study, it can be anything really. He shares with is his thoughts, looks at his watch, and says “your turn.” And we have a conversation.

This past Thursday was the last day of Yeshiva for the year. Reb Shmuel in his sicha talked about the sichot we have had over the course of the past year. Usually I remember what Reb Shmuel says in his sichot. Reb Shmuel is a very smart and a very wise man. This sicha I actually don’t remember very much of. What I remember is the reactions to it, some of which I found disappointing. Someone asked if Reb Shmuel had a vision for a structured way of implementing the values he attempts to communicate in his sichot into the Yeshiva throughout the year. I found this disappointing because the sorts of values that he talks about in his sichot are largely personal values that one must implement personally, not through a program prescribed by an institution. I felt that this person, along with others who expressed similar sentiments about the lack of structured implementation, missed the entire point of the sichot over the course of the year, and probably largely missed the point of Yeshiva as well.

Someone else asked “Where is God in all of this?”

Reb Shmuel said a bit about how he doesn’t like so much to talk about God in God terms because it often feels as though when people start to talk about God, they are talking about something that doesn’t mean anything, using a language that doesn’t mean anything. He said that nevertheless, bli neder, he would try to come up with a sicha about God perhaps for the coming year, since people seemed to want to talk about it.

I raised my hand.

Reb Shmuel talks about God all the time. All of his sichot are about God. See, I take his sichot very seriously. I listen and I try to assimilate and incorporate the things that he talks about into my daily life, and into my outlook. Some of his sichot are very concrete, very tachlis, like this is how you daven properly, this is how you build a kosher sukkah, this is how you hold a lulav. Some of them are more conceptual, more abstract, like about the nature of truth and truthfulness, or faith and faithfulness. They are all about how we live our lives, and they are all about God.

I remember a few months ago I was having a conversation with someone here at the Yeshiva. It was a conversation about personal conduct, about doing right by other people. And God came up in the conversation. We talked about God, matter of factly, comfortably, unselfconsciously. And I remember, after the fact, realizing that that was the first time I had ever been able to talk about God in that way… to talk about God without making disclaimers, without defining terms, without specifying what kind of God we are talking about here… God was just there in the conversation, perfectly at home.

Another time, I was having a conversation with another Yeshiva friend, one of those deep intense conversations that I tend to have with people, and he asked me the question “Do you ever just… talk to God?” The question seemed a little odd to me, but I couldn’t quite pinpoint why. I thought about it and gave him an answer about the times in my prayers when I explicitly include personal thoughts, supplication, etc. like tachanun and the end of the Amidah, but it didn’t seem like the right answer. I remember thinking about it the next day and trying to write about it… and I realized why the question had seemed so odd… it was because I don’t need to think in terms of “talking to God.” I have come to a point in my life where God is a constant presence.

In Shaiya’s medieval philosophy class we talked a little bit the other day about first order and second order theologies. Basically, second-order theology involves the questions of what we mean when we talk about God, what kind of God we do or don’t, can or cannot believe in, what it does and doesn’t mean to worship, etc. Academic discourse about God belongs in this category. First order theology is the realm of faith, worship and practice. My whole life, since the age of 7 or so, has been about second-order theology. This is where The Conservative Movement especially puts a great deal of emphasis. This year, as I mentioned way back last July, I made a decision to take a step back from second-order analysis of my Judaism and my theology and just work on practice. Now theology and philosophy and halachic theory have all slowly been reasserting themselves into my consciousness over the course of the year, and that is fine. But what I’ve been amazed to discover is that through the living of this life, thorough choosing to open myself to what text and practice has to teach me, I have, somewhere along the way, developed a first-order theology. God is in my life now in a way that I would not have thought possible for an overly-analytical type like myself. God is there when I wake up and thank God for returning my soul to me after sleep. God is there when I pray three times a day. God is there when I study. God is there as I work hard to live according to the standards of ethical personal conduct that our tradition mandates. God is there when, in my imperfection, I do things wrong and seek the rachamim that enables me to pick myself up and try again, to always strive to do better next time. And God is in the community that we create here with communal prayer and study, sharing shabbatot and holidays. God is there in the family that we become.

These are the things that Reb Shmuel’s sichot are about. How we live and think and practice Jewishly. And these are the things that bring God into our lives.

After the sicha ended, after I had expressed these thoughts, Reb Shmuel called me over and told me that he has never felt so appreciated in all of his life. And it made us both smile.

Hevel wasn’t really there.

Please don’t misunderstand, I’m not trying to make excuses. I did what I did, what was was as it had to be. Agency was mine, I bear the punishment and the mark of it, and God is the True Judge.

But in the beginning was a word. And another. And another. And thus was the world created– with stories. And we, whose lives were the first lives and whose births were the first births, our lives were made of the stuff of stories. I was born to be Man.
Hevel was born to die.

I would sometimes prod him to see if he would dissolve into vapor at my touch. You have to understand, it wouldn’t have seemed so odd. In those times, things were as they were and we, the first three, were discovering a newly created world. We were each so different from each other, would it be so odd to have a man who was flesh and a man who was not? Well he was solid enough– solid enough to bleed, solid enough to kill– but though, as it turned out, he could be killed, he did not truly live. Hevel was not Named. Hevel did not speak. I was given to Mother Chava to be Man after Father Adam. Hevel was addded. Added to be My Brother.

To see what I would do.

My suspicions about my brother came to a head when we brought the offerings before The Lord. It was given to me to till the soil, to toil for our bread. This was the charge of The Lord to Father Adam and passed to me. How then could I not offer before The Lord that which is our sustenance? How would I not offer the choicest of what we were given by The Lord to feed and maintain us? Hevel was the keeper of a flock, something he silently took upon himself without our knowing why. As we learned, from the flock we could take wool for clothes and milk for cheese, but we knew nothing of flesh. How then would I have thought to bring flesh as an offering? For that matter, how would he?

And yet, thus he did. My offering lay before the Lord, and there was an uneasy silence. And I watched as he silently took a lamb of the flock. I watched as he took his knife in hand. I watched as he did the unthinkable.

The blood flowed forth from the neck of the animal, life drained such as I’d never seen, poured out at the base of the altar. The body, the lamb that was no longer a lamb, he offered by fire. This he did without a word, without a moment of hesitation, as though he had recieved instruction. As he did this inconceivable thing, I gazed at him, first in confusion, then in horror.

But when the smoke began to rise, and when the flesh began to sizzle, and the fat began to melt, that was when I understood. The aroma of roasting meat filled my nostrils as I looked at my grain offering, and knew suddenly that it was lacking. What I had to offer from my own, from myself, from who I was, from my experience, could not live up to what Hevel seemed to just know, seemed to have embedded in his very being directly from God. A perfect knowledge, a perfect understanding. My understanding was imperfect. My sacrifice was imperfect.

I was imperfect.

It wasn’t reasonable. It didn’t make sense. Who was he? What was he? He was silent. Insubstantial. He had no desire, no will, no purpose, no identity. He had no anger and no joy. No longing and no satisfaction. He was inert. He was futility, vanity embodied.

He was perfect.

God spoke to me then, as I sat hunched by the altars of our offerings, Hevel walking silently back toward his flock. The weight of my confusion was nearly too heavy to bear. What could this mean, to be so flawed and to be taunted by this vision of perfection? What did it mean to have my sacrifice rebuffed by God who had given no instruction, and yet have him, my brother, somehow just know?

“Will It Not Be That If You Do Well…”

Do well? What is it to “do well?” What can that even mean? How could it be that I should do well in the eyes of my God when my brother is His vision of perfection?

“Sin Crouches At The Opening, Its Desire Shall Be For You, And You Shall Rule Over It.”

And thus my fate. God is telling me my future. Like Father to Mother, I will be tied for all time to sin… it will be my bride. Because I am in an impossible situation.

This is a set-up.

I stood and began to walk toward the flock. I had to try to understand. And Hevel… Hevel knew. He had to. He knew about the flock, about the lamb, he knew about the blood, the flesh, about fire and flesh, the smoke, the pleasing odor– he knew what it meant to Do Well. It was all he ever did.

And thus I took Hevel into my field. I would talk to him, I thought. Ask him, beg him, plead with him to tell me how to do right in the eyes of God. This angel of a brother of mine, who knew the heart of The Lord, who knew the secrets of the smoke of the altar– he would give me those secrets. And maybe, maybe then, we could live together in perfect praise of the Lord, both of us doing Well in his eyes, with no sin to tempt and taunt, and no need to master it.

But it was not meant to be. And now I think that it never was. Because God is telling this story with my life, creating His Just-So world. Only God’s world is not “just so.” It can’t be. And like Mother and Father before me, I will take the fall so that God can have his complicated and conflicted world, full of turmoil and desire and anger, full of sorrow and pain, full of love and joy and comfort, full of sin, and of mercy, and redemption.

Hevel’s silence was maddening. I spoke to him softly, timidly at first. I spoke to him as a friend, a fellow man, relating from shared experience, new people in a new world. He was silent. I spoke to him then as a brother, with love, the love of a brother born of the same womb by the same seed, the love that I longed to feel from him. He was silent. I spoke then with anger, my voice strengthening, my face reddening, with jealousy as I felt he jealously guarded the secret to being God’s favorite. He was silent. My voice faltered and I spoke with baffelment, almost with awe. Who are you? I asked flatly. What are you? He was silent.

Finally, despair. I didn’t have a brother. I saw this Hevel for what it really was. Inert. Stagnant. Dead. This was the antithesis of everything that would drive God’s creation. If Hevel was Man, then man was dead at birth.

Hardly knowing what I did, I picked up a rock that seemed to appear from nowhere at my feet. It fit my hand as though made for this purpose. I raised it high as Hevel, this brother-thing given me to see what I would do, gazed blankly, serenely into my eyes, not a word, not a flinch, not a move. “Lord,” I whispered, “forgive me for doing your will.” And I brought my hand down.

The blood flowed more freely than I imagined it would, pouring out among the stalks, soaking into the soil, feeding the produce of the land given me to till. God’s perfect creature, this thing that had never lived, lay dead before me, life drained as I’d seen only once before.

As I sank to my knees before the body, the brother that was no longer a brother, I heard the whisper of God, a voice of sorrow, of pity, mocking me: “Where Is Your Brother Hevel?”

Where is he? Where was he ever? I wasn’t given a brother, and yet I was. This lifeless shell before me, how different was it really from when it was animated? He never spoke. He never felt. He never loved. He never loved me.

Was it given to me to guard this creature that belonged to no one but God? You, God, know much better than I where your puppet my brother is. For my part, I know not.

Even as I spoke the words, as they left my mouth, I knew what they meant. I was speaking the future of my offspring, of humanity. My question would ring throughout the ages. I, through my words, through my actions, was creating the story, creating humanity, creating the world. Yet, not me. In those early days, our lives were the stuff of stories. We were not people, we were the words, the hands of God.

And so I need you to understand. I’m not trying to make excuses. I did what I did, what was was as it had to be. Agency was mine, I bear the punishment and the mark of it, and God is the True Judge.

But in the beginning, the words were people, and the people words. And thus was the world created– with our lives and our actions. I was not destroyed for my crime, but protected, guarded, ensured that my seed would be sown, that my crime would live in the heart of every man, that the world would move, driven by the engine of my imperfection, so that man might strive. Driven by my anger, my sorrow, my pain, so that there may be in this world love, joy, comfort.

And thus was the world created in mercy.

And thus was born Redemption.

So, raise your pinky if you know what hagbah is.

For the rest of you:

Hagbah is when, after reading the Torah, the open scroll is lifted and turned so that the congregation can see the writing in the scroll.

This is hagbah.

When I was a kid, my dad would comment on the hagbah. He would say what the magbiah did right or wrong, what a good hagbah is supposed to look like, how many columns of text it is proper to show, etc. My father put into my mind that there was such a thing as a good hagbah, a well-done hagbah. He taught me to appreciate a good hagbah.

There’s a fellow here this year, a wonderful person named Alex who has become a very good friend of mine… he does a positively beautiful hagbah. He has impeccable form, graceful, unwavering, the words that come to mind when I see Alex do hagbah are “good lines!” Everyone sees it, even people who don’t know so much about what is a really well and properly done hagbah can appreciate that Alex’s hagbah is just beautiful.

Hagbah is traditionally a male honor. Well, traditionally all Torah-related honors are male honors. Hagbah remains overwhelmingly in the male sphere even in egalitarian communities.

Why? Because a Torah scroll is heavy.

On Rosh Hashannah of this year, I did hagbah for the first time.

It was something I’d long wanted to do but had no confidence that I could. I mean, I don’t think I’d ever seen a woman do it, generally I’d only seen strong men doing it, and heard many untried men express apprehension at the prospect of lifting that heavy book from far below its center of gravity, spread out with the threat of a 40-day fast hanging over the heads of the congregation should he falter.

Oh yeah… if you drop a Torah, everyone who witnesses the drop has to fast for 40 days. There are ways to be lenient about it, but it’s still a damn scary thought for the one doing the lifting.

But anyway, at the service that a group of us from the Yeshiva were leading at a chiloni (secular) Brazilian kibbutz, Reb Hillel beckoned that I should come forward for hagbah. Startled, I hesitated. He reassured me that I could do it, and briefly instructed me in the proper technique. I grasped the handles. I took a deep breath, bent my knees, and stood up.

Since then I do hagbah not infrequently at the Yeshiva. I am the only woman who does so. Alex does it more often than anyone. In egalitarian circles generally by default hagbah goes to a man and galilah (the rolling, tying and dressing of the scroll after hagbah) goes to a woman. I am one of the gabbaim at the Yeshiva, so I would like to be able to reverse that model when I can but it isn’t easy. I managed to convince one of the cantorial students (a class of 6 women this year) that she could do it, and I gave galilah to Alex. I like to give galilah to Alex when someone uncertain or doing it for the first time has hagbah, so that he’s on-hand for support in various ways. It felt so good to see Annelise lift that Torah.

It took some doing to convince them (and it is difficult to do so gracefully since honors like aliyot, hagbah and galilah are not something you ask for but which are given by the gabbai or rabbi [when the rabbi is also the gabbai]) but I recently became a regular magbihah at the synagogue next door where I daven when Yeshiva is not in session. The first time I did hagbah there was the first time many of those folks had ever seen a woman do the lift. Yesterday, we read from two scrolls. I had the first hagbah and Alex had the second. After services Alex and I hugged (as we always do when parting company) and one of the congregants asked, laughing, if there was a post-hagbah hug tradition.

My friend Nadav, an older (older = early 50s) Sabra (Sabra = native Israeli) who was so very pleased the first time he saw me do hagbah, pulled me aside and told me that I’d made him very happy. Why? Because I did the lift so gracefully, with no shaking or shuddering or wavering or dramatics, so smoothly and gracefully… and that I’d done it with the second heaviest Torah scroll in the shul… and with most of the wight on the left side, no less!

The heaviest was the one that Alex lifted.

It’s hard to describe what its like to do hagbah as a woman, or to see a woman doing hagbah. The word that comes immediately to mind is “empowering” but I tend to dislike those sorts of cliche feminist words. Cliches in general are bad. Feminism is good, but it’s important to keep perspective here. I’m not sure that Jewish practice should be used as a tool for empowerment in that way, especially personal empowerment. It’s not supposed to be about you but about the community. I guess that is really the point… getting up there and hearing murmurs of astonishment that *gasp* a woman is lifting the Torah(!) is not about people being impressed with me. If it were then I would have no interest in getting Annelise or any other woman to take hagbah… rather it is about broadening the community’s perspective, challenging assumptions which, in the egalitarian model anyway, need to be challenged. For those of us who feel themselves obligated in time-bound mitzvot and participate fully in public Jewish life, no area of that system of practice should be assumed by default to be out of bounds. Women can be physically strong too. And hagbah really has more to do with physics than with strength. Women can be rabbis, sure. That one seems so obvious to so many people. Women can and (in some circumstances, some women) should put on tefillin. That one seems so much less obvious to folks. That women can/should do hagbah… well, that’s just right out for so many people, when there is no reason that it should be.

This is the thing about feminism in Judaism altogether, really. I’ve heard far too many people shy away from or react negatively to being called feminists, especially in connection with Judaism, because their perception of feminism is of overlying “female empowerment” on our tradition… images of angry women putting on tefillin in front of old men and saying “whatcha gonna do about it?” come to mind. To my mind that’s not Judaism done right, and furthermore that’s not feminism done right. The kavanah (intention) cannot be about my empowerment. If empowerment comes about from the experience then bully for me, but once it becomes about me rather than being about the the connection of the kahal (congregation) to the Torah, then egalitarianism and feminism lose their meaning and their relevance.

My friend Jessica suggested a nice little drash on “v’zot haTorah” when a woman is doing hagbah… she remarked on the gendered form “zot,” meaning “this” in the feminine. I was confused. Zot is referring to the Torah which is feminine, I told her. No, no, I understand that, she said, but so is the woman doing hagbah. She is also zot. The whole scenario is zot. Zot haTorah. This too is Torah. For the egalitarian community, it is the very fact that this *is* something that we do and that we believe is permissible, women participating… it is Torah. Just like the rest of it. Pshita. Simple. And yet… so significant. The most powerful feminist statement to me is being able to not think twice about these things.

So yes. I am a woman. I hagbah. And you* can too.

*assuming a Jewish audience for this particular statement

Wednesday we went on a field trip to a museum on the border between East and West Jerusalem, formerly the border between Israel and Jordan. It is called Museum on the Seam in English, מוזיאון על התפר in Hebrew. It calls itself a socio-political art museum. We haven’t had a whole lot of discussion about how we all felt about it. It’s kind of difficult to describe on the whole, but the current exhibition is called Bare Life. From the website:

Bare Life is the third in a series of exhibitions on themes of human rights that we are presenting at the Museum. This exhibition aims to touch upon the increasingly unraveling seam between deviant states and normative states, and to point resolutely at the place where the temporary emergency situation turns into a legitimized ongoing situation that in the end leads to a paranoia of suspicion and to the use of violence to re-establish public order.

A couple of people have talked to me about liking or not liking the museum, liking or not liking the art, liking or not liking the message. I found myself unable or unwilling to express or admit to, even to myself, a solid opinion on the content. I was very aware, as I wandered though the exhibits, of an analytical aloofness that completely overtook me. I found myself not judging the art or its message, but merely decoding, dissecting, pulling out from each image the message that the artist and/or curator seemed to be putting forth and… doing nothing with it. I thought a great deal about the manipulative nature of art, and the resultant roles of responsibility of the artist and viewer. Art by its nature, tends to elicit emotional reactions in people. It is visceral. Political art seeks to bypass reason and go for the jugular, to reach the opinionated part of the mind without the messiness of the critical faculties getting in the way, slowing it up, blocking it out. I hate when people use the word “powerful” with regards to most things, but especially with art. In certain contexts at least, the “power” to which people refer is a combination of the artist’s skill at manipulation of the audience and the audience’s ability or willingness to be manipulated. It is the meeting place of the speaker’s strength and the receiver’s weakness.

There are times when I do not mind, or when I even like to be manipulated. There are certain media, certain contexts, in which I want a feeling to be elicited from me. But I resent it when it is overt, and moreso when it seeks to persuade in a context which should be subject to critical examination rather than emotional reactionism.

Here’s something that’s been troubling me a little bit lately…

I am here to work on practice. On practical Judaism skills, as it were. I’m here to gain fluency where I am missing it. I’m here to get myself accustomed to practices and halachot that came as pre-rejected in my family when I came into this world. I do not fault anyone for the situation I find myself in with regards to my Jewish education and/or practice… I think that the way I grew up in Judaism was more or less the way it had to be and I am where I am and it will all be good.

Here’s the thing… I’ve recently had people start to try to challenge me and my practice on philosophical and theological grounds. Not in a hostile manner, mind you… innocently and in a well-meaning fashion, engaging in the sorts of conversation that I am usually eager to take part in. I find myself now, however, asking to be excused from such discussions. I don’t want to have my inconsistencies pointed out to me right now. Right now I’m trying things on, testing things out, learning and taking on practice as I find it. For once in my life, I’m trying to not think too hard.

This goes against everything that anyone including myself knows about me. I am always the first to challenge myself and to insist on knowing why I am doing something before I do it. Theology is my thing. I’ve been working the theology and philosophy angle of my religion my whole life. Why now am I making a conscious effort to turn down (not off) that part of my brain? Will my friends and teachers think less of me for this? The new people I’m meeting?

I get the sense that a lot of these folks are accustomed to people who never bother to think through their practice and just do either what they’ve been taught or what they feel like doing. I have stock answers ready for why I do certain unusual things (like wearing tzitziot) but I’m not ready to talk about why I’m making an effort to observe the three weeks and the nine days leading up to Tisha B’Av, a day commemorating the destruction of a Temple I was raised not to mourn for. I’ve been thinking hard about this stuff for as long as I’ve been able to think. Right now is the time to learn how to do Judaism rather than just thinking about Judaism.

I’ve moved in with a fellow who is formerly Chareidi, still largely Orthopractic, as we say, strongly egalitarian minded and who teaches here at The Yeshiva. He has Orthodox smicha (meaning he is an Orthodox ordained rabbi) and he is a wonderful resource and living with him makes it very easy for me to learn and take on observances that I would not be able to otherwise. I talked to him last night about this and he thinks that it is not a bad thing at all, that he thinks that it is important to have the traditional groundwork before you go smashing the system and breaking the rules. While he agrees with the documentary hypothesis and believes in biblical criticism, he would not want to teach it to his kids without first teaching them Tanakh in the traditional manner.

I talked this morning with my friend Josh who is a Conservative rabbi. He also thinks that I’m doing an ok thing in terms of my exploration of practice… though his initial response was “You realize that your “not thinking too hard” is probably more self-reflective than what most folks do when they’re trying to think about what they’re doing”

That made me smile.

I’ve been noticing lately that I simply can’t seem to get myself as worked up about halachic details as I seemed ready to not too long ago. I can’t whip myself into an anxious frenzy over the Conservative movement and especially the lay population and its current inconsistencies.

I think that part of the reason for this is that I have been observing others going through similar crises and, from the outside, it is much easier to see them for what they are: unpragmatic and impractical.

Halacha is important. Halachic consistency is even important. But the bottom line is that I do not believe that the whole of halacha was given at Sinai from the mouth of God. Neither do most of the leaders of The Conservative Movement. As such, I’ve stopped expecting halacha to be either perfect or consistent because those expectations run counter to my theology. The fact is that halacha is not a science, though it may clothe itself at times in vaguely scientific language. Halachic reasoning is an art, based in logic, but also in forensics. Rhetoric. It is an art of persuasion.

It has been troubling me lately that some of the people with whom I’ve been having discussions about Conservative halacha seem too ready to be unpersuaded. They seem too much to want perfect scientific consistency, and it seems at times, to even greater an extent than some of the Talmudic sages might have. There has always been an extent to which those making the laws have done basically what suited them and their community, what made the most practical sense, balanced with the stuff that doesn’t make sense on the surface of it, which is of course not a reason in itself to get rid of something. It would be nice if the rabbis who make up the law body of The Conservative Movement were more persuasive, but there has to be a point at which the reader is willing to be persuaded. The fact is that anyone can decide at anytime to be persuaded or unpersuaded by anything, depending on their disposition. I’m not suggesting that one should suspend their senses of logic and reason and give the rabbis a pass. Rather I am suggesting that the absolutely rigorous application of strict logic may be misplaced in this instance. Halachic logic simply is not strict logic. It is a body of religious law. It is a part of a larger mythological structure upon which we choose to try to base our lives… but ultimately, it is the other way around. The structure is, in fact, based upon our lives. It is a system, a very elaborate and mostly well thought out system set in place to uphold certain values. There does come a time however when we need to step back and look fundamentally at the values which we are trying to uphold, and make sure that everything matches up to reality as we understand it in historical context.

An email, sent off-list to someone on a Conservative Jewish mailing list regarding the legitimization of homosexuality and homosexual relations in Conservative Judaism. Person in question expresses dismay at the position I seem to be taking on-list, of arguing from a position of “no-choice” with regards to sexual orientation/attraction.
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I agree with you 100%. But I do not know how to argue the position that I hold in my heart and mind… trying to do so always gets me in trouble debate-wise. As an aside, I myself am bisexual, and am not too enthusiastic about the day that may come when I fall in love with a woman and want to spend the rest of my life with her, but run into difficulty because of being out as bisexual and unwilling to dishonestly declare myself as having come out as a “lesbian” in order to plead “lack of choice.” As I have stated previously, I am not a halachic scholar and feel more than a little underqualified to argue halacha with folks here, most of whom are quite a bit older than I am and more studied. I’m not entirely convinced that there is a strictly halachic way to legitimize same-sex relations the way I would like to see them legitimized, without a radical reinterpretation of the root text (which I am willing to do, but can understand the reluctance of many Conservative Jews, and certainly of the Law Committee, to do so).

Another big part of the problem is the defining of the homosexual/non-heterosexual experience. Many gay folks of the strictly homosexual persuasion are perfectly content to argue, and to argue loudly, for lack of choice, even arguing from genetics (for which there is no scientific evidence as yet) and as such this has become largely the accepted premise in pro-gay circles. As someone who feels attraction for people on an individual and personal basis largely regardless of gender, I cannot accept this premise. I am willing to take a person at their word that they are incapable of feeling attraction for a certain sex, but obviously none of us knows what truly goes on in the hearts and minds of others. What I do feel to be a truth, though, is that a person’s orientation is more than just a simple choice. This is what I find to be so insulting about the kashrut analogy… I have a deep appreciation for the practice of kashrut and keep kosher myself… but I have known my whole life that it was a fairly simple matter to choose kashrut. The choosing may have deep ramifications for a person’s personality and identity and how they relate to themselves and the world around them… personally I believe that this is the primary reason for keeping kashrut, but we can discuss this later… but it is a simple choice.

Relationships are not as simple, and who one finds themselves attracted to or in love with is a much deeper and more complex matter. It used to be that relationships were sanctioned primarily as business deals, and that the sexual proclivities or love interests of the people involved were not of as great consequence in the initiation of the transaction as we now consider them to be (interestingly enough, I don’t hear anyone arguing that we should go back to match-making to solve these problems of love and attraction wreaking havoc with our halachic system). In our earliest history, where men had the choice to take multiple partners whereas only the woman was under significant sexual sanction, it was not, I imagine, considered problematic since the person of primary importance in the scenario had options for sexual satisfaction beyond the confines of a single life-partner, the need for true love and compatibility between married partners was less paramount than it must be in our largely monogamous paradigm.

Now that we largely accept a world view in which love and attraction and compatibility are considered primary in the choosing of a life-partner, matters of who one can enter into such a relationship with bear reexamination. The reexamination itself is not without precedent, since we have in our history the rabbinic banning of polygamy (something else that no one seems to be advocating the reinitiation of, interestingly enough… might solve some problems) but of course we all know that it is rabbinically easier to go from less restrictive to more restrictive… though the opposite is also not without precedent. The biggest problem is, I suppose, that darned slippery slope argument in which I have refused to engage. As I think I have stated before, each of the other sexual prohibitions which we uphold in Judaism have multiple halachic and extra-halachic reasons for maintaining them, and I see no way in which this will change anytime in the foreseeable future… but the fact that I cannot foresee the future does not mean much for a halachic argument… it is true that the same has been, and still could be said for homosexual relations.

The plain and painful truth is that I simply do not know how to argue it.

And honestly, this is part of why I want to go to rabbinical school… because I want to learn enough to frame my positions legitimately within the Jewish context.

In response to my thoughts on God and Buddha, my friend Getzel saw fit to remind me that while in Judaism we tend to think in terms of 1 (unity of God and of things in general), “Buddhism” tends to frame things in terms of 0, of nothingness. This reminded me of a thought I had several years ago, probably after reading The Mystery Of The Aleph by Amir Aczel followed immediately by Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea by Charles Seife. The thought that I had was that, metaphysically, the concepts of 1, 0 and ∞ are closely related, and may even mean the same thing.

I had set the thought aside years ago (this was, I think, sometime toward the end of high school, or the beginning of college), in order to think about other matters that may have seemed more practical at the time. When Getzel brought it back to the surface, I set it aside again, but knew that I couldn’t just leave it alone. When I had some silence I was going to think about it, there was no getting around it.

Well, what is Shabbat for except thinking? (Also, you know, praising God and naming babies and eating lox and drinking rye… but you know what I mean.) So, over Shabbat I did some thinking about this. Here is an approximate reconstruction of the thought process.

I started with honey. Why honey? Because nothing can live in honey. This is why it is an excellent preservative, and why it never goes bad. I was thinking of unity. What is unified? What is truly One? Something, and the absence of anything else. So honey just came to mind. Okay, so postulate a completely unified universe, a universe of honey. That is One.

Except, Honey is not really unified. See, honey has a molecular structure. Honey can be broken down. Anything, anything, at least anything of which we have knowledge, can be broken down. I should note that A photon cannot, to our knowledge be broken down, but a photon can also not be proven to have an independent existence of its own, thank you quantum mechanics. The current standard model holds quarks, leptons, and gauge bosons to be elementary particles, but the standard model is of course in flux, as science always must be.

So what is unified? What is truly One? The answer is Nothing. Nothing. Zero.

0 is the only true 1.

Okay, so we’ve got 0 and 1. Where does ∞ fit? Lets come back to the concept of unity. Unity, the absence of anything else. The state of being without separation. True unity, cosmic unity, therefore, must be infinite. Why? Because if it stops, it is separated. If it ends, the ending is a separation from… something. Anything. Or nothing. But it is a boundary which necessarily implies the existence of an outside of the boundary. And we’re no longer talking true unity.

Ein. Ein Sof. Ein Sof Ohr.

Does this actually mean anything? I don’t know. Is there any practical application to this line of thought? I don’t know. Does it fascinate me? Oh dear God yes. What do you do with this sort of thinking? What do you do when this is the sort of thing that you think about at night, then when you come to a point where something makes sense in a way you hadn’t thought of before, you smile to yourself and can finally fall asleep? And when you feel like you’ve gotten somewhere with a line of thought like this, what do you do with it? Who do you talk to about it?

This is why I majored in philosophy alongside Jewish studies. And this is why I ultimately dropped my philosophy major. All the philosophy students wanted to do was find a philosopher from the past to blow their mind and with whom they could decide they agreed and go around declaring “I Am A Kantian!” No one wanted to have their own thoughts, or find out who had had similar thoughts to theirs in the past for the sake of furthering or refining their ideas. I went into philosophy because I felt alone and I left because I felt alone.

shrug C’est La Vie, I suppose. Someday I hope to somehow put all this stuff in my brain together in a way that… creates something useful.

At JTS a couple of weeks ago I met this really great guy A. with whom I have a feeling I’ll be spending a lot of time in the not-too-distant future, and with whom I think I might end up working on a lot of future projects. I was wearing an orange scarf that day that my friend Kathleen bought for me a few years ago from a Tibetan shop in New Hampshire. It has Sanskrit writing along the edges and a Buddha in the middle. A. saw it and got excited. “Oh, don’t tell me, don’t tell me I’m not the only one!” I let him down a little bit by telling him that the scarf was a gift from a friend and that I didn’t actually know what the Sanskrit said, but promised that there was to be a lot of talking about Buddha and Buddhism in our future.

Last night before going to sleep I picked up a copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance that I’d picked up this past spring after Sakura Matsuri for $2 from some guys selling used books from a table just off St. Marks. It’s a book that people have been telling me to read for over a decade. I’m only up to chapter 5, but something struck me very early on in the narrative, and that was the use of Buddha as interchangeable with “God” and in association with “The Godhead”

I’ve encountered several different understandings of Buddha. Many of them include a worship of something divine, something, something called Buddha which is another word for what is also called, say, Jesus, or Jehovah, or Krishna, or Allah. Often this conception of Buddha is accompanied by statues and/or pictures of “Buddha” in the form of a man, and sacrifices placed before said image, bowing before said image, etc.

Someone once tried to tell me that idolatry was not actually idolatry because the statue was not the God itself but just a tangible image of the actual god, merely a representative of a deity and not the deity itself. I tried to explain to this person that that was exactly what idolatry is.

I once heard an old man argue vociferously that Buddhism could not possibly be compatible with Judaism because he’s seen Buddhists and they bow down to statues and you cannot be Jewish and bow down to statues. It is true that you cannot be a Jewish Jew who practices Judaism if you bow down to statues. But it is incorrect that this is what Buddhism is.

Buddha is not a person. Buddha is not a god. Buddha is not a noun. It is an adjective. It is a state of being. Buddha means awake. The only understanding of Buddhism that I can accept as in any way “real” is that which says “If you meet the Buddha on the road, you must kill it” and “If you say that you are a Buddhist, you are not.” Buddha is not a name for God.

And yet… it is.

See, here’s how it works… God, our God, the Jewish God, is a verb. Buddha is an adjective. And you are the noun. Simple. Yod Hey Vav Hey. You. I. I am. I God Buddha. I am Awake.

So what else is there?

This understanding of Buddhism has no place for statues and images and incense and sacrifices. Not that I have anything against incense… incense is very nice for things like calming rattled nerves and setting moods and the like… not the point. Striving to become Buddha is the point of what is called “Buddhism.” In that sense, my Judaism is Buddhism. In that sense, I am a “Buddhist.” And I am as far from an idolater as you can get.