My good friend Rabbi Josh Gutoff wrote a lovely insightful post about Tisha B’Av over at his blog frost and clouds.

We moderns think and speak about historical time, understanding the difference between “then” and “now”; modernity itself is a product of the development of what we call history. And so the questions that we ask about an event are, “What were its causes?” “What were its effects?” and most important, “Did it really happen then?” The Rabbis, though, trafficked in sacred time, mythic time, for which the essential question was not whether something happened once, but whether it was eternally true.

In terms of understanding the literal physical destruction, the pshat of the day as it were, even if one doesn’t wish for the restoration of sacrifices, there is value in remembering and mourning. Last year at camp, I was a yahadut teacher with a class of 4th graders, most of whom had never heard of Tisha B’Av, like me at their age. I suspected that many of their parents, if they thought about it at all, didn’t observe because they don’t believe in rebuilding the physical Temple, or a return to animal sacrifice.

In order to teach about Tisha B’Av, I overturned the table and benches in our mirpeset-classroom, sat on the floor with the children, and recounted to them what my day was like on September 11th, 2001. Metaphor and symbolism would have been, if not lost on them, probably forgotten forthwith. But these children, who have grown up their whole lives hearing about “September 11th” as this great modern tragedy of which they have no memory, will not soon forget a personal story of what it is like to live in a community as it experiences a great destruction.

On the drash front, I had a conversation with a friend last night, who objects to the idea of fast days other than Yom Kippur on the grounds that they constitute a mythologizing of history which is antithetical to what he believes to be the true purpose of Judaism, that the Temple should not be viewed as a physical historical object that can or should be rebuilt, but that the Temple represents and, in fact is, per se, the unification of heaven and earth. It is entirely metaphorical, and to mourn for, and seek the rebuilding of, the physical Temple is a perversion.

I can appreciate and take this on as well. As a student of Kabbalah, it makes perfect sense to me. The day, however, does not lose its value because it is represented by most as being about a solid place and time in history. It is precisely the rabbis poetic understanding of history to which Rav Josh refers which redeems the day for one who believes as my friend does. The Rabbis, as he notes, do not engage the question of linear historical geo-political narrative to understand the destruction and its meaning. Rather, they tell stories with essential Truth in them to explain what brings about tragedy and destruction. What are the stories that they tell? Are they about the cruelty or injustice of the Roman occupation? Are they about empire building or failed revolutions? No. They are about senseless hatred between people. Sinat Chinam.

This is the essential point, this is the eternal truth, the lesson, of Tisha B’Av. In a sense, the historical destruction is a convenient event upon which to hang a day of observance which has a much more important center. It is not a coincidence that this is one of only two major 25-hour fasts in our calendar- Today should be a day of introspection, like Yom Kippur. However, while on Yom Kippur we focus on sins, primarily wrong actions, on this day we should look even deeper, into our cores, into how we think about each person we encounter.

Whether we are talking physical-literal, or transcendent-metaphorical, it is hatred that brings about destruction. Lack of love, blindness to the Other, to the Self, the I, in each individual, that makes life tragic. It is blindness to the transcendent Truths, to Martin Buber’s model of human relationship, which causes God to hide God’s face from us, leaving us broken and abandoned and starving. When it’s framed in these terms, then you have the metaphor right there in the tradition: the Temple is destroyed because of Sinat Chinam. Tisha B’Av is the day on which we remember what happens when we forget how to love. And so we fast and mourn, and we remember that we must love each other… because lack of love brings about destruction, heartbreak, unbearable pain.

Baseless hatred is the root of all human evil and destruction. Baseless hatred is the root of cruelty and suffering. Baseless hatred is a cycle that can be stopped only when a person makes a decision to stop it. Tisha B’Av is therefore not about a building that was destroyed, a ritual practice that was ended, even a land that was lost or lives that were extinguished. Tisha B’Av is, and must be, about love.

One might say that this should be a day for baseless love to counter baseless hatred. The problem with this thought is that there is no such thing as baseless love. Not for us, anyway. For us, only hatred can be baseless. We are each created in the Divine Image. Each of us owes each other love and kindness. We have every reason to love one another, and no reason to hate. Only God can give baseless love. Only God owes us nothing and gives it anyway.

This is my take, for this year, on what Tisha B’Av is meant to teach us. I wish an easy and meaningful fast to all who do so, and to everyone that all of your contemplations be fruitful.

The kids I think of as my baby cousins are the ones who, about 15 years ago I realized, didn’t know who Mr. Hooper was. At 28 and a half years old, it is getting more and more difficult to deny the fact that I am, in fact, an adult… maybe even a grownup. Any my baby cousins… well, they are clearly no longer babies. They are in high school and college and even graduated, some of them. And they now inhabit many of the same worlds of culture and media as do I. They’ve caught up with the online world I’ve watched develop through my own adolescence and young adulthood, and I’m encountering them on Facebook and Twitter, giving me a window into their lives, and them a window into mine, that was once screened from mutual view by the venetian blinds of age discrepancy. Now the blinds are open, which leaves me pondering a glaring question about my own status as a member of the first wave of the Internet Age.

We all remember when our parents and even *gasp* our grandparents started to figure out email and AIM and slowly started to trickle onto Facebook. Many of us felt threatened, invaded, even a bit disgusted at the prospect of sharing online space with the generations above us. We were embarrassed by their clumsy mass-emails, forwarded jokes, tactless comments, as they tested the waters of this new pool we’d grown up splashing about in. Even for those of us whose parents were part of the development of the technologies we used with such dexterity, it was our generation that made a culture of the internet, who made it a home. Our parents’ halting forays into this world seemed child-like to us as we are reminded of our first clumsy websites written in awkward HTML with blinking text and primitive clipart at age 13 or so.

So for my 12-year-old cousin Sam, my 18-year-old cousin Daniel, or even my 22-year-old cousin Rebecca, what is it that they see when they notice a friend request from their older cousin Gella? How do they experience my comments on their statuses and pictures? Do they have the same awkward feeling we had when Mom or Dad or Uncle Paul wanted to be our internet buddies? Do they cringe at our ability to see the pictures of where they’ve been, what they’ve done and with whom, with whom they are currently in a relationship, the sort of language they use with their friends? Are we, the former young and hip internet generation the old fogeys of this world already?

I can’t help but ponder the differences in how we developed with the internet, we and the internet growing up together like classmates, learning as we went. We who started with Bulletin Boards and IRC and Prodigy and listservs, we who remember the start of AOL, we who learned to type on Apple IIe computers in elementary school… whereas these kids today, they are coming into maturity a world in which the Internet is already grown up and established. They learned URL along with ABC. And whereas we grew up in an Internet of which our parents were largely ignorant, they are growing up in an Internet which their parents have learned to regard, to use, and to try to monitor. It’s a different world for them, but I’m troubled by the question of how different.

When I first saw my kid cousins had gotten themselves Facebook accounts, I must admit, I had mixed feelings. A combination of “Oh, isn’t that cute!” and “They’re growing up so fast!” and “I’d better watch what I say” and, I’ll confess, a measure of the same sense of invasion that I felt when Mom figured out how to create her own profile. I find myself now, somewhat pathetically, wondering if I am the embarrassment to Sam that Grandma was to me when she sent that first IM, formatted like a letter, opened and sealed with salutations “Dear Gella” and “Love Grandma.” We are not clumsy, we know what we are doing. But do we know better or not as well as the young’uns now joining our ranks?

I have no answers.

There’s a lot to write about but for now I’ll stick with what I was talking about before, which is davenning. Jeremiah asked some really good questions about what kind of work I believe davenning takes and what exactly it is that I mean by davenning in the first place.

We’re actually studying davenning in school… That is to say that we’re learning masechet berachot in Talmud and hilchot tefillah (Mishneh Torah) in Halacha. The question of what actually constitutes davenning has been the focus of much class discussion, especially, it seems, over the past couple of days. The bottom line is that, when you come down to it, as far as Torah obligation is concerned, any praise, supplication, thanks combination communication with God constitutes the fulfillment of the obligation to pray. And, according to the strictest minimal Torah obligation, as long as you do this at least once a day, you’ve done what God commands as far as prayer is concerned. In that sense, it is never appropriate to say that a person does not know how to daven

That said, we as Jews do not live by the Torah. We live by the Rabbis. Unless you are a Karaite, if you are a Jew with any sort of practice tradition, you are a Rabbinic Jew. Our Judaism is entirely based upon how the Rabbis established their interpretations of scripture, and what they established that Jews ought to do practically in order to stay in line with what they understood to be God’s will for us. If it weren’t for these rabbis and sages, there would be no Judaism.

All this is by way of saying that we have forms and structures of davenning, and these forms, one can be good at or need practice with. I’ve met many who are quick to blame these structures for their problems with communal or organized davenning, or to blame the leadership of a particular synagogue or minyan for their boredom or lack of engagement. I’ve also known several who have felt this way initially, before they actually took the time to study and unpack the davenning structure as it exists in rabbinic law, as it is practiced by Jews throughout the world. There is a flow to it, a poetry, a rationale. The structure of our prayer service is carefully crafted to make communication with God easy and meaningful. We’d all like to think that we are artistic and poetic souls, that this need for structure doesn’t apply to us. But until you sit down and learn why the rabbis set the process of prayer as they did, until you take a minute to learn something of the elegance and poetry of the language of the service, and until you make an effort to actually use the structure, and do so uncynically, with a mind open to the possibilty that structure can be a help and not a hinderance, it is little more than hubris to think that you are above the use of the siddur.

There is, of course, more to this than just laziness and hubris. My words above are largely about principles rather than people. When it comes to people, I’m sympathetic. The prayer book is hard. Learning enough Hebrew to really appreciate it is hard. It takes time and work and I know very well the feeling that it is just too much. There is a very real fear and even shame about not knowing how to do what everyone around you seems to be doing effortlessly. That is why, when my rabbinical school class, during orientation, met in the synagogue to talk about prayer, I decided to make it known to the group that I still read a lot of the siddur in English. Everytime I daven I read through a section in Hebrew that I don’t yet have down, and sometimes that means I fall behind the congregation and don’t get to sing all of the out loud parts with everyone else. And sometimes it means that I have to skip over certain psalms or piyyutim. That is ok. Though it may not seem like it, everyone knows that there is a learning curve and no one will begrudge you the time which that learning process takes. And if they do, they’ve got their own problems.

Back to the singing. Singing, as I’ve said, has always been a very importand part of my life and a very significant and joyful experience for me, whether I understood the words I was singing or not. There is something to that. However, I came to a whole new understanding of singing as prayer when I came to a point where I did understand what it was that I was singing, when they were words that I could say meaningfully in prayer, quietly, by myself. At that point, taking those words and singing them out loud with a congregation became real davenning.

More to come, on this subject and others. Meantime, may we all be sealed in the book for a good life full of blessing, joy and meaning.

And for God’s sake be nice to each other!!!

(By the way, I wrote this entire thing on my iPod. How cool is that?)

Holy updates Batman! An… um… update?

My life is made of midrash. This is how I usually look at things, midrash is kind of my obsession. What this means, basically, is that I seem to very intuitively see connections, echoes, reflections, patterns in my life that make the whole look cohesive and somewhat understandable… manageable… drashable. This may have been why, when I was a little girl, I wanted to be a writer and a poet. Now it is how I approach my rabbinical education and career.

Yeah that’s right. I’m in rabbinical school. I’m actually, finally, really, in rabbinical school.

And right now, the echoes in my midrash are pretty darn deafening.

I’m a student at JTS, the Jewish Theological Seminary. I went to Hebrew school here through junior high and high school. I live in the dorms and when I look out the window in the morning I see the courtyard where I used to toss a frisbee with my sister and friends on sunny sunday afternoons during bagel break. I’m in the place where my Judaism originated… my mother studied here for her conversion. I live in a room 4 floors below the office of my first Rabbi, who was at my naming. It is a new year. I am moving forward with new beginnings… very new things happening and a bright clean shiny future all laid out in front of me.

And what it is is my past. Nothing here is actually new. It is my whole life come together, polished, rearranged, and set before me as it was gearing up to do this whole time.

This is why my life is Midrash. Everything leads to everything else. It makes it a story. And it makes it beautiful.

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.

A couple of years ago I made a decision to work on watching my tongue. I decided to take on lashon hara as my project for the year and I became very aware of what I said and I also became very aware of what others said and what conversations I did and did not participate in. Over the course of that year or so I felt like I did a pretty darn good job. Not good enough, because of course it is never “good enough” (which doesn’t have to be a bad thing) but I felt like I made a lot of personal progress.

This year I feel that I have not done so well.

I have noticed this year an unwillingness on my part to say anything about L”H when I hear it, or even to refuse to take part. This is a big problem. It is a problem for me personally and it is a problem in the Jewish world. This is not one of those areas in which one can say “oh that’s just not so-an-so’s strong point.” Shmirat HaLashon is essential in Jewish life and especially essential for our professional body. I’m sincerely disturbed by the lack of care i have observed given to this area.

So I’m laying out a proposal. I am making a deal with myself. I want to be a rabbi. Not so that I can have the job-title “Rabbi” but because I want to achieve a certain level of mastery in Jewish learning so that I may contribute to the Jewish world and the Jewish people by helping others to live fulfilling Jewish lives, have their lives enriched by Jewish learning, and so that I may live properly as a Jew myself. Becoming a rabbi entails more than just learning though. You can get a master’s or a doctorate just learning. Being a rabbi is being a master in our tradition which is not just a learning tradition but a legal and ethical tradition as well. Study is in our tradition is optimistically considered more highly than performing mitzvot for the simple reason that study leads to mitzvot. If you study with no intention of putting into practice what you learn, then you have merited something certainly… and you might gain a title out of it… but how can it be anything but empty until you implement it in your own life?

I’m making Shmirat HaLashon my project again. And not just for a year, but for good. I was reading lessons from the Chafetz Chaim that year, and I think I might do so again… but what I might want to do, rather than reading summaries written up in English flooding my inbox, I might make it a project to read the original. Maybe set a weekly goal. I will make it my business to watch what I listen to, what conversations I participate in, and to try to steer conversations away from lashon hara when I see it rearing its ugly head. I have already incorporated a reminder into my daily tefillah. Now I am making it public.

We’ll see how this goes. Wish me strength and success.

There is a Ramah shabbaton happening this weekend in Jerusalem. The Ramah directors are all here, and they came to the Yeshiva the other day to talk to us. Rabbi Resnick was here… it was weird to see him again. It was 15 years ago that I was at Ramah Berkshires. He looks exactly the same as he did then… he doesn’t seem to have aged. I asked a question about how the educational program is set up, about the curricula etc. and was told about things that I have no recollection of from when I was there. So I asked if that was the way it had always been set up, since I didn’t remember it being like that. The fellow speaking asked when I’d been there and I said ‘93. He said “That’s way before my time.” I said “Rabbi Resnick was there…” he was sitting in the back. “‘93??” he said, “that was a looong time ago.”

There are a lot of people here who went to Ramah. One of my best friends, Alex, is a rosh eidah at Wisconsin. He started Ramah when he was 12 and never left. He talks all the time about Ramah and about how wonderful it is, how it cements a kid’s Jewish identity and reinforces what they get in day school, but in a fun social community context that teaches the kid to love Judaism and Jewish community.

I didn’t have that experience at camp. I hated Ramah. I didn’t get along with anyone there, I had no friends, everyone made fun of me. I had a counselor that I liked who got fired a couple of weeks into camp. No one was interested in the things that I was interested in, no one cared about learning. The boys were cruel. The girls were crueler. I didn’t learn to daven, I didn’t learn z’mirot, I didn’t learn to love Judaism or Jewish people. If anything the experience pushed me away from Jews, Judaism, Jewish community. I had no community in this place, the clear message I got was that I do not fit.

I have no desire to bash Ramah in general. I think it is a great concept, and that it works so well for so many of the people who go attests to its effectiveness… but it is strange to hear everyone talk about Ramah in such glowing terms when I had such an awful experience there. I mean, it was a really bad, even scarring experience. It was my transition year between elementary and junior high school, and it pretty much set the tone of my entire junior high school experience. People say how wonderful Ramah is for Jewish kids. I mention that I didn’t have a good experience and the response is, completely reasonably, “well, nothing works for everyone.” And it is absolutely true… but since I’m one of the ones for whom it didn’t work, because I know what that is like, what that experience is, of being lonely and homesick and isolated with no one seemingly willing to help, I have to think about that segment, that 1% or 2% or 5% or 7%, whatever it is, for whom Ramah is a horrible experience. I went into Ramah excited. All of my uncles and cousins had gone to Ramah and loved it. My sister went to Ramah and as far as I could tell she’d loved it. It was expected that we were all going to go to Ramah and that it would be a wonderful Judaism affirming socially fulfilling experience. I was looking forward to it… to being at camp, to sleeping in a cabin with other Jewish kids my age, to writing and receiving letters, complaining about the food, singing songs, hiking, learning to row and canoe, making bizarre crafts to bring home… everything that I’d learned that camp Ramah was about. I was prepared to have a wonderful time at camp. And I didn’t, despite my best efforts. And this experience contributed not insignificantly to a not insignificant amount of pain and isolation in my life.

So when people say about Ramah and the people for whom Ramah doesn’t work that “nothing works for eveyone,” I have to think precisely about those people who are so often dismissed as the insignificant minority that we can’t kill ourselves worrying about. That is me slipping through the cracks. That is me slipping away from shul and from USY and from Judaism. That is me getting lost. And I think that one of the biggest problems that people like me have to face is, davka, that there are not enough people in charge to think “that is me.” It’s always an experience of “that is an Other whom I do not understand or relate to” and so they have little or no incentive or inclination or ability to be there for that person, to help them though the experience, to figure out how to MAKE IT WORK for them.

So I think what this means is that I have to work at Ramah. If I can be that person to one camper, if I can be that “this is me” for one young Jewish kid lost in the crowd, then that will be a significant and worthwhile thing. For every kid that we don’t dismiss, that we can catch as they start to fall through a crack in the system, is as though we have saved Judaism in its entirety.

I went to the Yeshiva yesterday (Friday… part of the weekend here) to talk to Reb Shmuel who is one of our Roshei Yeshiva. I needed to talk to someone about some particular concerns that have been arising for me with regards to my halachic observance and my place in the Conservative Movement, and my concerns about rabbinical school. He gave me some good advice and some reassurance, let me know that what I was thinking and feeling was reasonable and not completely out of left field.

He also told me that he was very glad that I was here at the Yeshiva, that it was good to see someone who was as intelligent and serious and self-aware and articulate as I was and who was working on their Judaism and their learning like I was… and he told me that he thought I could really benefit from another year here at the Yeshiva.

Now I’ve been thinking about this pretty much since I got here. But hearing Reb Shmuel say it… well, he made it seem real, like a real option. It felt like the moment I knew for sure that I was coming here in the first place. I think it would be really unfortunate if I didn’t take advantage of the opportunity I have here to learn that much more in a serious immersion environment that isn’t geared toward a career in the rabbinate… because that is not what I want out of rabbinical school. I’m not looking for a job, I’m looking for learning. I want school, not training for a trade.

After our meeting I sat down to go over a sugya that my chevruta and I had been having particular trouble with on Thursday. After a few minutes of struggling through with the Jastrow and the Frank, who should walk in but… my chevruta!

“Harris!”

“Gella!”

“I’m so glad you’re here!”

“I’m so glad you’re here!”

“Do you want to-”

“-go over the sugya?? Yes!!”

So we sat down and wracked our brains over who was saying what to whom, what point they were trying to get across, what they meant precisely by the word “gibul” in the context of kemach and in the context of dyo… eventually one of our friends who is in the next talmud level up came over and helped us with the Rashi… which clarified things quite a bit, but not entirely. Reb Shmuel walked by a few minutes later and we asked if we could check with him if we were understanding it right. He confirmed most of our conclusions and helped us with the rest. When we were confident that we understood and thanked him he said “Go over it a few more times.” Harris and I looked at each other hesitantly for half a second and then went back over the sugya, alternating the reading and translating and clarifying/explaining three times. After the third time we looked up at each other again. After about five seconds of silence…

“We have to do this with everything.”

“Yes. Yes, we do. Three times reviewing everything we study.”

“When are we going to find time to do that?”

“I don’t know… but we have to.”

“Yes. We absolutely do.”

It was a wonderful moment. Wonderful because we came to a realization of what we needed to be doing with our learning to get the most out of it, and wonderful because we were 100% on the same page about it, because we each knew that the other was completely committed to this.

Harris is 18, and here with Nativ. He will be leaving in January for the second half of his program on a kibbutz. I don’t know what I will do without him.

We weren’t looking for it, it just popped out at us.

We were rolling the Torah in preparation for Rosh Hashannah. We were taking the Yeshiva’s sefer torah to Kibbutz Bror Chayil because they did not have a kosher scroll. We were planning to just roll to the place where we would be reading and make sure that that section was fine, because generally you do not look for mistakes in a Torah except in places where you would inevitably find them on Shabbat or Yom Tov when you would have no way of fixing them, and you assume, unless you have reason to think otherwise, that the Torah is kosher.

But when you see a big ass crease in the klaf, you can’t help but see where the roof of the dalet is separated from the leg. Hm, what to do? Well, we had an offer from Moreshet Yisrael to use on of their sifrei torah, so the first thought was to just go ahead and get it from them, but sometime between finding the problem and getting a second opinion from Reb Shmuel (which of course concurred with Reb Hillel’s) Hillel decided to run over to a safrut shop and get supplies to go ahead and fix the Torah instead.

Dude!

So I got to help fix a sefer torah. And by help, I mean that, well, I was there when we found the mistake, and I held the sefer open while Hillel fixed it, and I pointed to it several times and speculated as to whether or not the ink had dried and stuff like that. Oh, and also I yelled for people to come watch Hillel doing his safrut thing, cause I mean, how often do most of us get to see someone working on a sefer torah?

We brought the Torah home that night and rolled it back and forth a couple of times since we had time and supplies to make sure both sections were clean. We found and fixed a couple more mistakes… really minute ones which I would not have caught.

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.