Ok, so I have something Jewish to write about. Or, you know, semi-Jewish. Or not Jewish… Jewish related. Depending on how you define what is or is not “Jewish.” I’m talking about the Clinton-Mezvinsky wedding. This was the subject of a d’var Torah I gave last week at my shul. Before I begin, let me reiterate the basics of how I think about and practice my religion:

I am Jewish. I hold by The Conservative Movement of Judaism, as I understand it, because it it what makes sense to me. I also happen to have been raised in this Movement, but my practice and philosophy have changed since I was a child and are currently quite different from that of my parents. I believe that Jewish law, halacha, is binding upon each individual Jew. I believe that a Jew, halachically speaking, is someone whose mother is halachically Jewish at the time of their birth, or who undergoes a kosher conversion. I believe that, since it is against Jewish law for a Jew to marry a non-Jew, it is obligatory upon Jews not to do so, and not to facilitate such an occurrence.

I also believe that we are commanded to love all Jews, even those who do not uphold or adhere to the law. Further, I believe that we are commanded to love all people, and that to be a “Light Unto The Nations,” a “Holy Nation,” a “Nation of Priests” necessarily entails our living and demonstrating three principles above all: Love God. Love your neighbor. Pursue justice.

So now, we come to a question of humility. Humility is a Jewish value. It is high praise indeed to be referred to in Judaism as a humble person. It is said that even God practices humility (nice midrash, Breishit Rabbah 1:12 that I learned from my Rav, Shmuel Lewis). Humility, I believe, is an essential quality in anyone who hopes to work with people in a religious capacity. In the field of “doing God’s work,” one must always be cognizant of where ego creeps in and blinds us to the needs of our employers, God, and the People. I try to remind myself daily of how little I know, and that I must remain teachable. I must remember that my job is to trust in God and God’s will for me and for the world, and to remember that I do not have all of the answers.

On the one hand, my humility in my religion very often means trusting in the Tradition, setting aside my personal biases in favor of the Law and the Text and the Rabbis, learning and DOING what I can, while being patient about understanding. The commandments are not contingent upon my being satisfied with their reasons, and often I must first do the practice in order for the Truth to come to me, to realize where the value lies in something that might initially seem distasteful to me… realizing why I should adhere to a law that is particularly inconvenient, why the seemingly ridiculous minutiae of Shabbat observance makes sense, what makes texts which, on the surface, are contradictory, fit together with a little Midrash and why that process is good, and how it can be understood as The Word Of God… my holding by the binding nature of Jewish law is an exercise in humility for me. It is my challenge to the comfortable easy “well this is how I feel and this is what I want” attitude which is so seductive in our society. It is acknowledging that God has a will that supersedes my own, that what *feels* right is not always what *is* right, that sometimes you cannot understand until you get down to the *doing.*

Of course, the other side of this coin is that everything I stated above constitutes a belief system… a belief system to which I strongly adhere. On the inside, it is a practice of humility. From the outside though, it may seem like an arrogant certainty. I am studying to be a rabbi. A rabbi is a teacher. In order to teach something, you must have something to teach. We no longer have prophets, it is the rabbis who carry the prophetic message to the people. I have been already blessed with the opportunity to do more study of Judaism and Jewish law than your average Conservative Jew can even dream of… and I’ve only been at it seriously for 3 years, and I have another 5 to go at least before, God willing, I am ordained. I have some knowledge… I know some things that they don’t.

Marc Mezvinsky, a Jew, has married Chelsea Clinton, a non-Jew. They were married in an interfaith ceremony where clergy from two different religions, a Reform rabbi and a Methodist minister, co-officiated. This is something that Jewish law forbids. For a person who doesn’t believe that Jewish law is binding, they’re likely not going to care about that… though even the Reform Movement’s main Rabbinic body, the CCAR, advises their clergy not to co-officiate with non-Jewish clergy in performing marriages. For someone like me, who does believe that Jewish law is binding, I have to look at this marriage, and I have to say that it is forbidden, I believe, by God’s law for us, the Children of Israel, the Jews.

So. Love God. Love your neighbor. Pursue justice. Above all. Do I condemn Jews who do not adhere to Jewish law? Nobody is a perfect adherent to Jewish law, even the most observant. Nobody knows everything about Jewish law. Not everybody has been given sufficient reason in their life to believe that Jewish law is binding. This is reality. This is understanding that other people live different lives. This is knowing that I don’t walk in other people’s shoes, have their experiences, fully understand their thought processes.

This is not me congratulating myself on how tolerant and accepting and open-minded I am… this is rather something of which I have to constantly remind myself. When you take the time to study very intensely in Yeshiva, and then you come back to the real world, it is very easy to be become very intolerant. I know I was after my first year of study. When I first stepped into the Beit Midrash of The Yeshiva, one of my earliest lessons was one of humility: the realization of just how little I knew, and how much there was to learn. Stepping out after a year and coming back to visit home and my community, that humility was flipped on its head. Here I was, only a year of study, knowing that if I studied nonstop for the rest of my life I would still not know all there was to know, even all I wanted to know about my religion. And here I was suddenly thrown back into an environment where the people around me didn’t have even that… and didn’t care. Not only didn’t they have the learning, not only didn’t they know, they had NO IDEA even what it was they didn’t know. And it didn’t even matter to them. It tore me apart inside. I didn’t know how to handle this new reality, how to live in such a community after spending a year with a learning community, a group of people who learned and grew Jewishly alongside me, who helped each other along in coming to understand the vast richness of our tradition. Suddenly I was in a barren soulless wasteland. How was I to cope?

I have since calmed down. I have come to be gentler with others and with myself, trying to teach wherever the opportunity arises for me to do so, if it is wanted and welcomed. I have worked hard to get better at accepting people where they are and celebrating what they, what we have rather than lamenting what they, and I, do not. All that said, I am not willing to do or say certain things.

I am not willing to disregard Jewish law, to say that it is unimportant, ever.
I am not willing to say that I think someone is living in accordance with Jewish law when I truly believe that they are not, based on my learning.
I am not willing to perform an action that I believe to be in violation of Jewish law for the sake of pluralism.
I am not willing to say directly that it is ok for a Jewish person to violate Jewish law. What I will say is that Jewish observance is a journey that we all travel at our own pace according to our own abilities. The best any of us can do is to be as honest with ourselves and with God as we possibly can, and to try our best to do what we hear as God’s will. If we live with honesty and integrity, we are on a path of holiness, and God always loves us no matter what.

There are multiple legitimate interpretations of halacha, and what one person may hold as halachic another may hold as a violation. That is nothing new. That is one thing. Sometimes, some people, for some reason, are compelled to violate halacha. Sometimes it is out of ignorance, sometimes it is out of a personal necessity. That is another thing. It’s not for me to judge them morally. I do not believe it makes someone a “bad Jew.” I do not believe that it makes God love any of us any less. But it doesn’t mean that the halacha is in accordance with whatever they do. It doesn’t mean that the halacha goes away.

I have my understanding of what my religion dictates. That understanding is not my own invention. It is based on the learning I have been blessed to receive from many wonderful teachers, who in turn learned from their teachers, and so on back until God only knows how long ago. I work very hard at using the language of humility when speaking of my religion, but I also have to take a stand at some point and admit that there is a limit to the boundaries of Judaism. In many ways Judaism is about boundaries, about distinctions. Many call this exclusivism, tribalism, elitism. Arrogance. That may be true in some ways, to some people, and in the way some Jews practice and speak of the faith and the peoplehood. Personally, I believe it is about something else… about having the humility to admit that you don’t understand everything, that those who came before had wisdom worth listening to, and that we do dishonor to ourselves and to our predecessors by forgetting who we are and where we came from.

Sometimes I feel as though my even having any sort of belief or boundary is grounds to be accused of arrogance and small-mindedness. But if (future) clergy can’t have beliefs and faith and principles, then where have we gotten ourselves to?

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.

This is a post I started writing years ago. It is again relevant to my current theological work, so I’m going to try to finish it.

After I wrote about 1, 0, ∞ in response to something Getzel said about Buddhism, I was talking to Jason and he said, basically:

“Yeah that’s great. Only that’s not what one means.”

How upsetting.

“What are you talking about?”

“Oh, you’ve got it right with zero and infinity. But one doesn’t fit.”

“But… sure it does…” but I was scrambling to figure out how I could prove this.

“No, because one implies other. It implies a distinction from something else. It’s not all encompassing unity, its unity of something in the face of something else.”

Then he had to go. And I was left to ponder whether I’d made a horrible (in my mind) mistake and should give up amateur philosophizing altogether and go be a farmer somewhere.

Today I read something that brought me back to the question and gives me new confidence that I might be in someway not incorrect about my understanding of the essential sameness of One, Zero and Infinity. I was reading the 4th installment of a series of lessons on daily prayers, Pray and Mean It written by Cantor Jack Chomsky of Congregation Tifereth Israel of Columbus Ohio. This installment was on the Aleinu prayer in which we, before leaving our prayer service and going out into the world, acknowledge our obligation and renew our commitment to pay homage to HaKadosh Boruch Hu, give thanks for and acknowledgment to our special relationship with The Creator, and express a hope that one day all peoples will be united in acknowledgment of The One True God. Lots of people have moral issues with the content of this prayer. I am not one of them… and I am not going to go into that right now. But the last line, which has always struck me as extraordinarily significant, struck me particularly sharply on this occasion:

“Bayom HaHu Yihieh Adonai Echad uShemo Echad”

“On that day, God will be One and God’s Name will be One.”

In this vision, on the day when everyone unites together in praise of Adonai, then the words that we say in the Shema, that God is One, will actually be true. In True Unity, when everything, everything is united, you have a ONE that is not as distinct from another. The true Echad, the ONEness of God is the ONEness of everything, ein od… there is nothing else.

To my mind, this is evokes Spinoza. As I understand it, Spinoza’s vision of God was the unity of everything, the universe itself as a unified conscious entity. This is God. Of course, Spinoza is condemned by many in the Jewish world as a pantheist and therefore an atheist. If everything is God, then nothing is God. This objection is similar to Jason’s desire to distinguish 1 from 0 and ∞, which is perhaps the root of a deep problem people have with theology. There is a strong desire to separate God from not-God, to be able to hold up God and point and identify “This, and not that, is God.” This is reflected in attitudes of both theists and non-theists alike. For theists, they are comforted by the idea of God as a discrete being. For non-theists, they are comforted by the notion that all theists are invested in this idea of a discrete being, Whose existence they can easily deny. The imaginary invisible friend named God which may just as well be the Our Noodly Master, The Flying Spaghetti Monster.

My view is a bit different from Spinoza’s, or at least differently focused. I’m less concerned with the entirety of the natural world or universe, and more concerned with the conscious aspect, the self-regarding existence part. The macro-scale principle of Being contemplating Itself, of which I believe we, as humans, are a microcosmic reflection. My sense is that the experience which we call God originates in something akin to the unification of all consciousness of SELF, which is comprised of the collective consciousness of humanity and something beyond that, some larger intentionality, pattern-maker, dot-connector, that is the consciousness of the universe.

There is a more detailed and fleshed out version of this theological vision in the works, which also includes insights into the practical elements of religion and prayer, and why this theology isn’t necessarily cold, intellectual and emotionless when approached properly… but this is not the space for it. Not yet.

Coming back to 1, to unity, this 1 doesn’t have to be distinct from, in the face of, anything else. You could try to say that it is the conscious as distinct from the non-conscious, but the distinction is irrelevant. What the 1 here signifies, rather than a demarkation, is the melding of seemingly distinct elements into a unified whole… a whole that is infinite, and at the same time empty and clear. It is SELF and it is lack of self. Boundaryless connection, radical honesty, self seeing self with nothing in the way.

This is actually going somewhere, don’t worry.

I’ve been wanting to post about this here for a while… might as well use the momentum.

I remember a Saturday afternoon in Jerusalem last year spent with my friend Paul (Yankele) from Yeshiva. We sat in the living room of some classmates and talked for hours. The subject of much of the conversation was how much we had come to like Shabbat.

Here’s the thing about Shabbat for a halachically observant Jew… it comes. And you have to let go of everything. You simply have to. It is required. You put down your phone, you put away your money, you put on nice clothes, light candles, walk to shul, and you can’t worry. Whatever you might be worried about, there’s nothing that you can do about it for the next 25 hours. All you can do for right now is look around you, breathe in and breathe out, praise God, eat, rest, laugh, hug, talk, study… Shabbat forces you to take a break. It gives you an excuse to be with people, to not stray too far. You have to be where you are. Shabbat forces you to appreciate the world as it is at this moment.

On Shabbat, we don’t change things. It is not our place. This is the day we let go and leave everything up to Not Us.

There are a lot of laws of Shabbat observance, mostly about what one is not allowed to do. There is a set of laws about what is called muktze, dealing with the category of things that one is not allowed to touch or handle on Shabbat. You are not supposed to handle anything on Shabbat that doesn’t have a legitimate Shabbat use. You are also not supposed to pick any plants, anything attached to the ground. You are not supposed to write. You are not supposed to engage in commerce or touch money, or even discuss commerce. Though there is some debate about this, most accept that you are not supposed to use electricity on Shabbat. You are not supposed to make fire or cook.

A lot of people have a problem with these laws. They see these laws, they see the whole thing, as unnecessarily restrictive, bothersome and annoying, and not conducive to what they regard as “rest,” which they equate with enjoyment. I didn’t get it either until about the middle of my first year in Yeshiva. I was walking to shul Friday evening. It was not yet Shabbat but I had davened Mincha already and lit my candles and consciously accepted shabbat early. I was walking down Derech Beit Lechem and all of Jerusalem smelled like honeysuckle. I love honeysuckle. I love the smell, and the flowers are beautiful, and they remind me of the happy parts of my childhood. As I passed a honeysuckle bush, I had an urge to pick one. But I couldn’t. Because it was Shabbat (for me) already and you don’t pick things on shabbat. And so I stepped back, and I looked. And it was so beautiful.

And suddenly everything was so beautiful. I stepped back and I saw a vision of the world on Shabbat… a world where you don’t touch the pictures. You don’t mess with it, you just live in it. That is what Shabbat is. It’s the day on which you just live, and you don’t touch the things that you don’t need to just live. Why touch them if they are just going to take you out of the space? Why carry your phone if it will just tempt you to try to control things? Why carry money if it will lead you to do business, or to even think about business, and worry about how much you can or cannot acquire? It is healthy, I would say even necessary, to have a day where you let go of the desire to control the world, to make marks and changes, to have an impact. Six days out of the week you have for that. One day, you can just let it go. One day you can reassess your place in the grand scheme and realize that the world won’t end if you don’t have your cellphone.

Shabbat is about acceptance. And that is rest in a very true sense.

So here I am.

What does that mean?

Remember when I was 15 (maybe you don’t, but I do) and I first had that crazy thought that maybe I wanted to go to rabbinical school? Remember how the second I began to show an interest in Judaism, people started to assume, without my saying anything, that I was headed for rabbinical school? Remember how I came to a realization then that this was precisely what was creating the oft-lamented gap between the laity and the rabbinate, that as soon as a young person shows interest they are pushed towards the rabbinate? Remember how much it pissed me off, and how as a result I became adamant that I would not go to rabbinical school, that I would start a counter-trend and remain part of the laity? Remember how that idea failed?

So here I am. In rabbinical school. Failure. Loser. Clergy (to be).

Part of the problem.

Well, I figured out where the other people like me are. Those people around my age who decided that they wanted active and authentic Jewish lives, were ideologically pretty much in line with the Conservative Movement, but frustrated with the lack of like-mindedness of the Jews In The Pews. The ones that succeeded in not going to rabbinical school.

They’re post-denominational. Gosh darn it.

What frustrates me so immensely about post-denominationalism is that this demographic of people, this group of engaged active Jews interested in practice and prayer, these are exactly the people most needed by the Conservative Movement. What is their reason for not wanting to be a part of the Conservative Movement? Not wanting to go to Conservative shuls? They don’t want to be there because the other people like them aren’t there. Where are they? At the post-denominational minyan. Why? Because that’s where they all are.

They seem to see no need to put in the work to revitalize the Movement that fosters the institutions that sustain them. They see the old guard, the leftovers of the suburban age of Conservative Judaism (which I think/hope is ending) and they jump ship thinking that even if they could change something, it’s not their responsibility to do so.

It’s mine. And sometimes I feel very very alone.

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?)

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.

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.

This is inspired by something Jen wrote about celebrating chanukkah (the post itself is friendslocked, but she’s worth reading in general cause she’s made of awesome).

It’s wonderful being in Israel during Chanukkah and seeing the chanukkiot in the windows and outside the doors here. It’s wonderful to see people lighting big chanukkiot with oil (instead of candles) which doesn’t go out after only half an hour. It’s wonderful to come to shul in the morning and to sing hallel, and on Sunday morning to see the shul’s chanukkiah (which uses big candles) still burning from before havdalah the night before. And it’s wonderful that there’s no gaudy Christmas stuff to compete, so the holiday is its own thing. No one gives presents here. Chanukkah gets to be precisely what it is, a festival of lights, a festival of the Jewish people, something that belongs to us, that we had first, that doesn’t look like a cheap knockoff of the other guy’s birthday party.

The following are things that have occurred to me in the past couple of years:

Sukkah decorating should be for us what Christmas tree decorating is for them. We’ve got that activity in our tradition… and our “Christmas tree” thing is cooler than a Christmas tree because not only is it lovely and fragrant (depending on what you use for schach) but you get to frikkin LIVE in it! Do they get to live in their Christmas tree? I think not! And no, I’m not saying that we should copy the Christians with decorating the sukkah like how they decorate Christmas trees… dwelling in a sukkah is a mitzvah, a commandment. Decorating the sukkah is hiddur mitzvah, beautifying the mitzvah. This is BUILT IN to OUR religion. I’m saying we should OWN it, and realize how much we are NOT lacking.

For Chanukkah, here is no reason we shouldn’t have lights. It’s a festival of lights. Banu Choshech LeGaresh for Pete’s sake! There’s nothing about having lights that is inherently Christmas, and if anyone asks, well, we had the frikkin idea first, ya know? Well, not first, but at least before THEY did. Not that it’s a competition… as Jen put it, it’s “about the primal winter scream (help, where is the sun going?! we are hungry! come back, sun!! argh!!!)” and almost every culture has that. See, we’ve always known about Seasonal Affective Disorder. We banish the darkness with little oil lights or candles, because it fits with the story, and because that’s what used to be available for making light. A chanukkiah used to be a significant increase in how much light there was in the house. I see no reason why, in this day and age, we shouldn’t also have twinkly lights to ward off the SAD, without losing our “Jewish Cred” as Jen puts it.

As for the Maccabee cultural isolationism thingy… I’m genuinely torn about that one. This is a holiday of mixed messages and multiple lessons. (The short version: under Greco-Syrian Hellenistic rule, the Israelites began to assimilate, sometimes by force, sometimes under cultural pressure, sometimes by choice. The Maccabees/Chashmonaim [Hasmoneans] who were descended from priestly line fought a war against the Greco-Syrians AND the assimilationist Israelites, regained national sovereignty, kicked out the pagans, and cleansed and rededicated the Temple so that our religious worship could resume.) On the one hand, what did the Chashmonaim do as soon as they won their war against Hellenism and assimilation? They did the most Greek thing they could do and declared a holiday! That’s not something Jews did… we observed the festivals assigned us by God. Greeks declared holidays for military victories. And the Rabbis were extremely disturbed by this so they came up with the oil story. Which brings it into the primal scream realm very nicely and all works out well in the end. But more to the point, we would a) not be here, and b) not be celebrating this holiday or c) doing a lot of the stuff that we do as Jews (including Talmud) were is not for Hellenistic influence.

On the other hand, nor would we be here if we allowed the assimilationist tendency to overrun us, if we allowed ourselves to stop circumcising and gave in to the pressure to worship other gods/adopt other religious practices, even just for show. Which brings us to the Christmas tree/Chanukkah bush thing. The tree may not be so Christian, but neither is it Jewish. It is true that over the course of our history we have assimilated many pagan elements into our religion as have the Christians, but the tree is not one of them. I understand having positive cultural associations with the tree that one might feel like they want to bring into their celebration of Chanukkah… I have those associations too, from Christmas at my Catholic grandparents’ home… but it was always clear to us as children that, while the tree is lovely, it is not ours. I think that it is important to make that distinction. I think that it’s good to consider what will bring us closer to the holistic spirit of what we are celebrating at Chanukkah (I see it as primordial scream, with a healthy dose of maintaining and celebrating our other-ness) which means not shying away from neutral light-bearing sort of stuff, but davka NOT adopting the stuff that has nothing to do with us, that is just jealously copying the neighbors.

Sura Choshech Halah Shchor. Sura Mipnei HaOr.

I’ve heard it said before that Yom Kippur should be joyous.

Rosh Hashannah is Yom HaDin, the Day of Judgment, not Yom Kippur. The month of Tishrei which leads up to Rosh Hashannah we focus on Cheshbon Nefesh, an accounting of our souls, and we do teshuvah, repentance and atonement, between ourselves and our fellows, ourselves and God, and ourselves and… ourselves. The 10 days between Rosh Hashannah and Yom Kippur, the cheshbon nefesh gets kicked into high gear, because on Rosh Hashannah, it is said, it is written, and on Yom Kippur it is sealed who will merit what for the coming year. By the time we reach Yom Kippur, we have done all of the work. On Yom Kippur we fast, but not mournfully. We dress in white and we spend the whole day praying as though we had nothing better to do. On Yom Kippur we don’t bathe or eat or drink or take care of our personal needs. On the one hand, the command is to afflict our souls. We fast in contrition. On the other hand, on this day we stand before God like angels. And we know that we will be forgiven, because God has given us this day for repentance, for atonement, and for forgiveness. Year after year we stand before God and are forgiven, pardoned, and absolved.

As my teacher Shaiya is fond of saying, Ashkenazi Jews, that is, Jews from Eastern Europe, on Yom Kippur weep and wail and cry “We have sinned! We have sinned!” Sephardi Jews, descended from the Jews of medieval Spain, on Yom Kippur sing and dance because “Hey, isn’t this the same judge who let us off last year?”

The month of Tirshrei, Rosh Hashannah and Yom Kippur have never been easy for me. The past ten years have been especially difficult for me at this time of year. For personal reasons, the work of cheshbon nefesh and all the talk of forgiveness has weighed on me horribly, and I’ve never been able to feel good about Yom Kippur. Besides which, I’ve never been in a space on Yom Kippur where I felt I had a chevre, a group of like-minded individuals who take all of this as seriously as I do.

This year, a lot happened in Elul. I had a lot thrown at me, I’d been hurt emotionally, and as a result a lot of stuff got hashed out and thrashed out and worked out. And on Yom Kippur I davenned at The Leader Minyan. I’d never been before, but my good friend David was going there, and Shaiya was as well, and I felt the need to try something new.

I walked over with my new friend Josh, who lives up the street from me. I met him at his apartment at 7:15, we waited for a couple of other people, picked some people up along the way, and found our way to the Zionist Youth Farm where they were holding services. At some point I asked Josh what time they start. He laughed and said “about an hour and a half ago.” We got there in time for Borchu, around 7:50.

The first time the congregation broke into singing and dancing, I was conflicted. I had spoken to David the night before about toying with the idea of having a joyful Yom Kippur this year. Elul had been so hard. David suggested that I had to. I had to have a joyful Yom Kippur. I told him I wasn’t sure if I could. And when I saw the women begin to dance, I hesitated. I wanted so badly to join them, but something held me back.

The day continued. The singing became more spirited and more intense. As we started to feel the fast, little containers of eucalyptus oil and powder were passed around for smelling. At some point a piyyut, a liturgical poem, was sung that people started clapping to. It got me clapping. Clapping and swaying. I looked up and saw dancing again. I saw that David was dancing over on the men’s side. A circle formed on the women’s side. And I remembered something that David had said to me the night before as we were finishing up dinner alone at his place before we headed out to Kol Nidrei. He said “Gella, you will be inscribed for a good year. There is no way that you could not be. If you’re not inscribed for a good year, then I don’t want any part of this.”

For the first time in my life, I stood before The Lord on Yom Kippur, and was not alone.

I tied my tallit around my neck so that it wouldn’t fall from my shoulders. I climbed over chairs. I grabbed the hands of two women, and I danced. I closed my eyes and I danced and I sang.

Someone had my back. Someone argued for me. I had support. I had solidarity. I had someone standing behind me saying “if she goes, I go.”

And I knew, then I knew, I was being forgiven. Released. How can you not dance?

There was no break between mussaf and mincha. I’d been nervous about that, but now I was glad of it. I didn’t want to stop praying. Even at the end, when we’d davenned neila, the last service of the day, the locking of the gates of heaven, and we’d already gone a half hour over the end of the fast, I still didn’t want it to end. In that last amidah I’s held my hands out to God in thanks and praise and love and marveled that every year, every year, we get to stand before our God and every year God forgives us our iniquities and gives us the chance to do better next time. God was suddenly a father. A good and loving father who cares and cradles and looks upon us with kindness. I, in turn, loved everyone and everything. After ma’ariv we broke the fast with water juice and cake. I just had a little water, and immediately went to find my friends and hug them, because that is what nourishes me.