Sometime before I came to Israel, I took on the custom of covering my head at, pretty much, all times. Sometimes I wear a kippah, sometimes a scarf wrapped in such a way that I hope it is obvious that what I am covering is the top of my head and not my hair. I have been doing this for about two years now.

The wearing of a kippah is a custom, not a law. It has been elevated in Orthodox communities to the status of law, but this is a relatively recent phenomenon. In the Talmud it says that Rabbi Huna, son of Rabbi Yehoshua, never walked more than 4 cubits without covering his head. There is also a story of Rav Nachman Bar Isaac whose mother was told by a stargazer that he was destined to become a thief, so she instructed him to always cover his head so that the fear of heaven should be instilled in him… and indeed one time the scarf that covered his head fell off, and he was seized by the urge to steal, and stole some dates from the tree under which he was sitting.

The custom of piety took on the status of law for some simply because it became ubiquitous among Jews at certain times, and ubiquitous customs in Judaism have this tendency to become laws. But there is nothing in the Torah or in the Talmud which suggests that everyone, all men, or even really anyone is legally bound by this custom.

So why do I do it?

There are a few reasons. Just as custom has a habit of becoming law in Judaism, there is a strong injunction in Jewish custom that one is to follow the custom of one’s father. In my father’s family, the custom is that one will cover his or her head when he or she is in a religious institution, saying or responding to a bracha, or studying classical Jewish texts. So I began covering my head at all times so that when I engaged in any of these activities, which were becoming much more frequent, I would be ready and not have to go fishing for a head covering. Also, putting on a headcovering when you begin to study and taking it off again when you finish, I feel, is more conspicuous than simply having the covering on by default, and not wishing to draw more attention to myself than is necessary is one motivation. That was my rationale.

Here’s a story.

One day I was on the subway on the way to work. This was a few years ago when I was still working in retail. I had a hat that I had bought at The Falcon Ridge Folk Festival. It was a green brimless cloth hat, one might call it a skullcap or a beanie. I used it at times as a kippah, when I was in shul or when I was studying, and when I bought it I thought “this would make a good kippah.” But when I wore it, I didn’t always think of it as a kippah. It was a hat. There was nothing particularly Jewish about it, it was sold to me by a non-Jew who almost certainly didn’t think of it as a kippah, and a lot of people who were at the festival that year bought similar hats and wore them without making any sort of religious statement. That day, I was wearing this hat because it was cool out. I was going to take it off when I got to work.

So there I am on the subway minding my own business, not really looking at anything or anyone in particular. Suddenly I hear a loud, not so friendly voice:

“Look! A woman rabbi!”

I look up and there is an Orthodox man with a black hat staring down at me. I regard him in bewilderment, saying nothing. He turns to the man next to him, also a black-hat Orthodox man and begins speaking, to him, but clearly for my benefit, about how ridiculous these Reform Jews are who think that women can be rabbis. “There’s no such thing as a woman rabbi!” He declares loudly as though his companion needed convincing. He continues on about Reform Jews pervert Judaism, serve lobster at bar mitzvahs, don’t know anything about anything, “and look… they think that women can be rabbis!” He continues this tirade for the entire 40 minute train ride, and I say nothing until he disappears the stop before mine.

At this point I take a deep breath and let it out.

I get off at the next stop, Union Square, and exit the train station. As I emerge from the stairwell to the street, I see the man. I had thought he’d gotten off the train at the previous stop and I have no idea how he is there. He spots me and points directly at me. “YOU!” He yells at me, “you’re a woman rabbi!” It sounds so much like a declaration, a proclamation. I’m not entirely certain what his purpose is… is he asking? Is he asserting?

Regardless, he needs to be set straight. I walk calmly up to him.

“I’m not a rabbi,” I say to him softly. “But I will be. Because of people like you.” And I walk off toward my store.

Were I put in the same situation again now, I don’t know that I would have given the same answer. Because the truth is I am not doing this for him or for people like him. I’m not doing this to rebel, to be anti-anything, to make a statement.

On the other hand, wearing a kippah is a statement, regardless of my intention. It is a statement because it is out of the ordinary for a woman to do so. For me to wear a kippah is to go against the grain which necessarily calls attention to me and necessarily makes a statement to those who take notice. The same is true for wearing tzitzit. And this is at least part of why when I am not in the Yeshiva, I tuck my tzitzit in and I wear something on my head which is not immediately recognizable as a kippah.

This is a constant struggle for me. Part of me dislikes the idea of making a statement at all. It feels as though my practice loses something the minute it becomes about making a statement. Like with hagbah… the second it stops being about the congregation and becomes about me, it becomes meaningless. At the same time, since I have no control over how people read the symbol, the only way that I can prevent it from being read as a statement is to be in hiding about it, which is problematic for a number of reasons. It is beneficial for me and for women like me for such symbols being visible on women to become more mainstream, and hiding the symbols prevents that from happening. It also does little to encourage other women to explore ideological full egalitarianism, and perpetuates the status quo sense of isolation and loneliness.

My general rule is that I wear the “potentially gender problematic” symbols visibly in contexts where there is hope of the people who see them receiving the potential challenge to their world view in a productive and useful way. That means that I will wear tzitzit out and sometimes a kippah-style kippah at The Yeshiva, at Masorti/Conservative and progressive congregations, in the English tutoring program I do with 4th 5th and 6th graders at the Reform shul, and at my choir. On the street or in an Orthodox congregation, I keep myself closeted until I have reason to out myself.

Not too long ago I accompanied my friend Rachel, an Israeli woman from my choir, to a shabbaton called “Shabbat Shetach,” a Jews in the Woods sort of event, though decidedly less crunchy, and consisting almost entirely of nominally Orthodox young Jews. After some internal debate, I made a decision to cover my head with a kippah rather than with a scarf, and to wear my tzitzit out. This was supposed to be a friendly environment where people get to know each other and bonds form between people. If I was going to be myself anywhere, it was here. My garb elicited many questions, about myself, about Conservative Judaism, about my Yeshiva… all productive, all constructive. The determining factor is how likely it is in any given context that I will be dismissed out of hand versus how likely it is that someone will come to me, genuinely curious, ask me “why,” and then care enough to hear the answer.

So I’ve been here at The Yeshiva for about a year. I’m going home for a couple of weeks in June and I’m starting to really worry about what it will be like in the “outside world.”

Here’s the thing about the Yeshiva/Outside world dynamic: a couple of weeks ago, there was a young woman who came to check out the Yeshiva because she was thinking of studying here in the summer. She ended up studying with me in the 2nd level talmud class. As we went through a sugya about certain mitzvot potentially superseding Shabbat, and I tried to explain what was going on, she kept asking me what the relevance was. Why do we care what Rabbi Eliezer thought about shaking a lulav on shabbat, especially since that’s not what we do anyway? And why would he think that you could when everyone else thought otherwise? And why do we care? How can this matter if it’s not about saving someone’s life or about the community or the sorts of things that are, you know, really important? Why would something as trivial as shaking a lulav supersede Shabbat? And what’s so important about Shabbat anyway??

These are the sorts of questions I can hear people asking all the time in the “outside world.” And they are reasonable questions. Why does any of this matter to people who live in a real world with a surrounding culture that tells them what is important and where those things don’t, on the surface, seem to bear any similarity to the sorts of things we get so embroiled in at Yeshiva? And what troubled me was that I didn’t know how to answer those questions. I knew, deeply, structurally, why these things were important… at least why I thought they were important. But I didn’t know how to communicate any of it because it is built on the entirety of my learning, on the way that the structure, the deep structure of the tradition and the text are put together, how things fit, how reasons and symbols grow out of each other and build our practice. It is built on my understanding of what I have just begun to have a bit of understanding of after a year of intense study. How can you communicate that to a person impatient for answers, for meaning, for relevance?? It’s perfectly relevant for my life, but only because I found reason to tie my life to this tradition and to the study of it, and in order to do that I made a conscious decision to try my best to release as many of my preconceptions about what is “important” or “relevant” as I could before trying to learn, because I knew that if I held to them I would blind myself to what the Yeshiva could give me. I’m just not sure how to translate that. I’m not sure how to communicate to someone why they shouldn’t marry a non-Jew. I don’t know how to communicate to someone why they should come to shul or keep kosher. I don’t know how to communicate to someone that they shouldn’t drive or go shopping on shabbat. If I can’t learn how to communicate such things, then I’m going to have some significant difficulties in a relatively short while.

I talked to Reb Shmuel about this and he told me he thought was the way to address my concern about losing my sense of how to communicate what I’ve gained in Yeshiva to the Jewish “outside world” was not, chas v’shalom, to withdraw from Yeshiva but davka to go even deeper and learn more, and God willing that will give me more security in my learning and more of a sense of how to transmit, how to share my learning. I hope so. So like Shimon Bar Yochai (lehavdil) I go back into the cave for another 12 months.

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.

Since I started talking about this project I’m working on, a lot of people are pointing me toward the independent minyanim and the Havurah movement and other post-denominational resources.
I have nothing against “post-denominationalism,” the Havurah movement, et al. I’m quite fond of a number of independent minyanim and I am not placing myself in competition with them. But I do feel that the Synagogue culture needs to change, and I believe that Conservative Judaism as a movement has a lot to offer, and that the independent young 20-30-somethings that tend to split off collectively have a lot to offer in turn to The Movement, as an educated laity.

In the face of all of the complaints that The Movement isn’t filling the needs of my demographic, or that my demographic is falling away from the movement, or that the movement is losing its way, my thought is always a desperate “DO SOMETHING!” When turned in on myself, it was “Just wait till I get back from Israel, just wait until I get to rabbinical school, just wait till I’m finished with rabbinical school…” and then two nights ago I realized… Why Am I Waiting?

So here are the beginnings of an initiative to revitalize The Conservative Movement: Nogah Chadash. This is not meant to be a new movement, or a shul. This is meant to be a resource for people who are serious about Judaism and about Jewish learning, for the already committed and for the wanting to become committed and serious Jews. This is a project of Outreach and Education on a level beyond your childhood Talmud Torah. This is for people who want to explore why we do what we do, how we do it, and how we relate to each other and to our practice. It is an effort to invest in each other so that we may in turn become strong enough to invest in others.

All things be ready if our minds be so. Let’s get cracking.

When I went to Israel on birthright, one of th ethings that struck me was the Israeli Palestinians… you never hear about them here. They don’t exist in the media. Well, Michael J. Totten went to Israel and discovered Israel’s secret.

One Israeli in five is an Arab. They aren’t Israeli Jews. Nor are they the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza. They were born and raised in Israel. They carry Israeli passports. They have full rights of citizenship. They vote in Israeli elections, and they field their own candidates in Israel’s parliament, the Knesset. They don’t clamor for a state of their own, nor do most of them wish to join a Palestinian state once it is born. They hardly - ever - have anything to do with the terrorism campaigns waged by Yasser Arafat’s Fatah, Islamic Jihad, or Hamas.

Yes, that’s right. Arabs with rights. Citizens of a Jewish state. Not refugees, not terrorists. Israeli citizens who are Muslim and Arab.

Which brings up another point:

Allison Kaplan Sommer introduced me to a friend of hers who moved to Israel from South Africa because he could not stomach the wretched apartheid regime. I can’t print his name because he’s a wire agency reporter who is forever banned from having opinions.

“There is discrimination here,” he said. “You’d have to be a fool to say there wasn’t. But it’s not entrenched in law or ideology. There is no law that says the Israeli Arab or Muslim is a second-class citizen. It’s true that they suffer social discrimination. But it isn’t legal.”

I couldn’t resist the following question: “What do you think about the accusation in the West that Israel is an apartheid state?” I said.

“It makes smoke come out of my ears!” he said. “The only way the analogy holds truth is within the context of a one-state Israeli solution. But the Israeli mainstream has reconciled itself to a Palestinian state…The Israeli government recently voted for an Affirmative Action program for Israeli Arabs in the civil service. This would have been unthinkable in South Africa.”

This guy isn’t one to put up with apartheid. He was repeatedly arrested in his native South Africa for demonstrating against the racist policies of the then-white government. He proudly wears the scars on his arm where unleashed government Dobermans bit him in 1977.

I think that says it all. Read the whole thing. I’ve always loved Michael’s writing and his photoblogging is awesome.

I ventured out of my apartment today despite my sore back to buy some kosher chicken thighs from the Shop Rite on Ave I. Not the best thing for my back, but it alleviated some of the cabin fever I’ve been experiencing and I also ended up with quite a tasty meal and confidence that I can indeed make cholent.

The Coney Island-bound F was skipping several stops today including Ave I, Bay Parkway and Ave P, and proceeding straight on to Kings Highway. The conductor announced that there was no Coney Island-bound service to these stations and for these stations one would have to transfer at Kings Highway for the Manhattan-bound train for the bypassed stops.

I was reading a book and when I looked up the train was pulling into a station, and a woman looking very distressed was asking another woman, in broken English with a thick slavic accent, what she was to do. The other woman tried to explain briefly and then walked away. The poor woman stepped out onto the platform and looked around, clearly still bewildered.

I walked up to her and she said to me “Excuse me… Avenue P… Wait here?”
“No,” I said, looking her in the eye and pointing to the opposite platform. “We go to the other side.”
“Avenue P? Not here?”
“No, the other side. Come, I’ll show you. I go to Avenue I.” I began to lead her to the exit where one transfers to the opposite platform and she suddenly stopped, looking more distressed than before.”
“Other side? Is Manhattan!”
I smiled and pointing north said “Yes, back toward Manhattan, Avenue P, and Avenue I.” She suddenly seemed to understand and followed me, looking very relieved. We got to the other platform and I said “And here we wait.”
“Thank you, thank you. Thank you very much,” she said to me. I replied, as I do, “no problem” and leaned against a beam to continue my book.
We got on the train and ended up next to each other.
“Cold,” she said “here is cold.”
“Yes, it’s a cold day,” I agreed.
“In Manhattan, no, here cold.”
“You think so? You think it’s warmer in Manhattan?”
She shrugged. “A little. Warmer yes.” She pointed out the window to the low apartment buildings and houses of Brooklyn. “Is no buildings.”
“Ah, yes…” I said. “The buildings… they block the wind.”
And there was a pause. It could have ended there.
“Are you from Russia?” I asked.
“Eh? No… Ukraine.”
“Ah, Ukraine… I don’t speak Ukrainian.”
“You speak Russian?”
“No, no… I wish I did!”
“Ah… I speak Russian… Ukraine, Russia, now…” she put her hands close together “neighbor.”
“Yes, very close. How long have you lived in America?”
“Four year.”
“Four years? Very nice. You have family here?”
“No… my grandson, he come… four weeks… no four months… school in emmm… computers. He visit summer, and then, he go home.”
“How old?”
“How old? Twenty-One!”

Then it was her stop. I said goodbye, and wished her a very good day and she thanked me again and went on her way. I returned to reading Tevye’s Daughters by Sholom Aleichem and felt a little bit like I may have done a good thing.

Here’s the deal. I’m moving. So I don’t exist. There will be content soon, I promise. And it will be about category confusion. And it will be good.

So sayeth Azadi.

Ok, comments are enabled now. Soon you will need to be registered in order to comment, but for now its completely open. So party while you can. Or something.

Hopefully I’ll have some inner calm and mental peace to actually fill this space with interesting and thought provoking shit… at some point in the near future. In the meantime, exciting news is that Jason FINALLY has his own blog! Check out EyeDreamAwake.com and prepare to be blown away. Sometime in the near future (no pressure Yasha).

I once had a blog called Beyond The Near. Now I’m trying it again. Welcome to phase two.