Jews Don’t Do Monestaries

For your reading pleasure, here’s the midrash I just spent the morning writing about. Moral of the story: Spiritual practice does not include neglecting your family and/or those who need you. Tending to them is a spiritual practice in and of itself (note when our hero finally gets to talk to God). Being considerate to your family means not only taking care of the big things, but thinking about the small things, like not surprising people or catching them off-guard. And so forth.

R. Haninia b. Hakinai and R. Shinmon b. Yohai went to study Torah with R. Akiva in Bene Barak, and they were there 12 years. R. Shimon b. Yohai used to send (home for news) and knew what was happening at his home. R. Haninia did not send home and did not know what was happening at his home. His wife sent him (word), and said to him, “Your daughter has matured. Come and marry her off.” (R. Haninia did not tell R. Akiva about this.) Even so, [the situation] became clear to R. Akiva by means of holy spirit, and he said to them [his students], “Anyone who has a mature daughter, he should go and marry her off.” [R. Haninia] understood what he said. He rose, took leave and went. He wanted to enter his house, but he found that it had been turned in a different direction. What happened? He went and sat at the water-drawing-place of the women. He heard the voice of the girls saying, “Daugher of Hanina, fill your vessel and go.” What did he do? He went after her until she entered into his house. He entered after her suddenly, and the moment his wife saw her, her soul departed. He said before God, “Master of the Universe, this poor one, this is the reward for the one who waited thirteen years for me? That very moment, her soul returned to her body. R. Shimon ben Yochai said, there are four things that the Holy One, Blessed Be He hates, and I don’t like them either: when he holds the male member while urinating, when he performs conjugal duties while naked, when he discusses issues between himself and his wife publicly, and the one who enteres his house suddenly. One does not need to say, into the house of his friend (because, how much more so does this apply than even for his own house!) Rav said: Do not enter a city suddenly, and do not enter a house suddenly, (and if) your daughter has matured, (get her married, even if you have to) liberate your slave and give her to him. R. Yochanan went to ask after R. Hanina he would knock at the door, according to (the pasok), “And his sound will be heard (when he enters)” (Shemot 28:35) (Vayikra Rabba 21:8. Versions of this story also can be found in Ketubot 62b and Bereishit Rabba 95).

Dear Jerusalem Cinematheque,

how is it that you show all these unbelievable, amazing movies so much of the time, but then whenever there’s a date/time that’s convenient for me, it’s like, the documentary of a marganalized political refugee from Zmcei%vrvrnceistan crawling his way up the side of a mountain with his teeth? Or the moving tale of a hairless cat during WW II told from the perspective of a small German-speaking donkey who, though finding resistence from within, must learn to cope with the everyday tragedies all around? Come ON! We want ENTERTAINMENT!!! En-ter-tain-ment.

Therefore, please do feel free to show the South Park movie, but, like, just not on a Friday night. MMMKay? Thanks.

Love,
me

how to kasher a lightsaber

Thanks to this post that I wrote in JewSchool this morning, there is now a halakhic discussion starting up in the comments section about how, exactly, one might kasher a lightsaber for Pesach. Is it a cli rishon? Is it considered a knife? What if it cuts something spicy, what then? In any case, check here and contribute your own psok, if you have one.

um, has anybody tried to send me anything?

I know some of my friends and family folk read this blog sometimes, so–well, Friday, I got a second notice on a package waiting for me at the Post Office (you’ll note here that I never actually received a first notice) and, when I got there, the new, shiny, I-guess-we-live-in-the-future package delivery robot/automated machine informed me that the thing had been sent back some several days earlier. Sent back before the second notice was delivered, mind you. Fantastic. And, since I wasn’t expecting anything, I’m of course dying of curiosity to know what it was and from who. So someone out there is getting a long-distance (I assume) return to sender. If it was you, please speak up!!

Right now, sitting on my couch trying to read through the applications for the Dartmouth Summer Institute on gender in Judaic and Islamic studies. It’s a fascinating process, trying to glean what people have done and why they wanna come. Oldest cliches in the book still apply, though: a well-written cover letter will win you more points than a badly-written one, and yes, we can tell when you’re BS-ing. Fascinating to see who this thing has attracted, from which ends of the earth. There are just a lot of them, so I’ll need to take a break soon so my eyeballs don’t fall out.

[UPDATE: This is absolutely crazy. We have applicants from Malaysia, Uganda, Nigeria, the West Bank, Israel, England, Germany, Kazakhstan, Russia, Canada, Turkey, Iran, and a whole lotta very, very, very smart Americans. And I’m not even done looking through them all yet.]

Golly, is it a lovely day out.

some ruminations on Yom HaShoah

Today is Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Rememberance Day. I was down at the Iriya (Municipal building) dealing with my Arnona stuff when they did the thing they do here, which is sound an air raid siren for two full minutes at 10am. Everybody stops. Traffic comes to a halt and drivers get out of their cars, stand at attention, hands at their sides. In the Iriya, there were lots of different kinds of people who live in Jerusalem. Everyone around me stood up, immoble, silent, as this strong shofar-like sound blasted through us. During those two minutes, I was able to plug into the fact that it was Yom HaShoah, to be there in the pain and the memories and the suffering in a way that’s not sustainable for a full day. To be shocked and horrified anew. That’s part of what it’s there for, I think. There was such stillness, just the bleating of this war noise there. Then, after the siren ended, there was a collective pause, and then everybody pretty much picked up where they left off–me in conversation with the clerk lady, people walking in or out, and so forth. By the time I got out of the building the city was back on full steam ahead.

As I was walking home, I looked into a cafe window and saw a guy with a big newscamera right in the face of two very old men. They had to have been survivors. It was, in the context of the siren and even just how far away and abstract and irrelevant the Holocaust generally feels to me, very profound to see them laughing and telling stories (or answering questions, dunno–couldn’t hear them) in this country at this time. They made it, and lived to tell the tale.

I have, for years, criticized the Jewish community and some who speak for Israel for behaving too much in a “victim mentality”, and not acknowledging the power that they/we actually do have and the ways in which we use it. And I still think that’s true. But today, I think, I was feeling the other measure of things, that is, feeling pretty powerfully the kind of suffering that has, in fact, taken place in what is still the lifetime of some Jews here today. They’re not mutually exclusive sentiments.

In recent years, some people have taken on Yom HaShoah as a minor fast day, akin to other minor fasts connected to major disasters in Jewish history (mostly connected to the destruction of the Temple). I don’t agree that this is the appropriate way to commemorate. First of all, it’s not clear that the minor fasts we already have are obligitory. In the Gemara, we find (Rosh Hashonah 18b): “Rav Papa replied: What it means is this: When there is peace they shall be for joy and gladness; if there is destruction/persecution, they shall be fast days; if there is no destruction/persecution but yet not peace, then those who desire may fast and those who desire need not fast.” Obviously we’re not in a time of peace, but I also think that the position of Jews in the world and the fact of Jewish statehood would have impressed the Amoraim (Rabbinic thinkers of Rav Papa’s generation) quite significantly. I was walking home, thinking about Rav Papa writing and teaching from Babylonia, trying to help construct a system of Judaism that didn’t require living on this land, and I tried to picture what he’d make of all this–the cars and the movie houses and the yeshivas and the kippot walking to and fro, and the kosher pizza joints. I think he’d consider this to really, really count for something–a lot. Even with all the ideological infighting, and the painful relationship of this country to its neighbors, and everything, I don’t think he’d define the current situation of the Jewish people as שמד (destruction/persecution)–I think we don’t have any idea how good we have it, frankly. I know some people who argue that since there is a state now, we should consider ourselves in a time of peace. I’m not comfortable going that far, but I can appreciate the reason why some people think that–this IS probably what Rav Papa meant, to some degree, or this might be considered a success beyond his imagination. But at the very least, we are in the neither peace and neither (Jewish) destruction space. I believe that all minor fasts should be optional.

More lately, I’m thinking, though, that I might want to take them on (I’ve been not such a fan in recent years) as a way of acknowledging the destruction and persecution that’s happening all over the world. I don’t think I’m obligated vis a vis the Jewish people (because frankly, though there still is antisemitism out there, we priveliged people mostly don’t know from real persecution these days) but perhaps as a citizen of the world, I am required to afflict myself a few days a year as a symbolic, ritualized way of acknowledging all of the persecution and destruction that takes place, all the time.

But in any case, given the complex halakhic status of the minor fast (and given the fact that the Crusades, the Inquisition, Pogroms and other destructions in Jewish history are covered under the umbrella of Tisha B’Av and I believe that fasting because of the Holocaust is more appropriately set there), I’m not such a fan. Also, it doesn’t strike me as what I would imagine people who perished in the Holocaust would want their descendents to do–rather, I think the better way to memorialize mass murder is, in addition to some somber remembering of what happened, to a) celebrate life, do life-affirming activities, b) to mark the failure of Jewish obliteration by doing what Jews do: learning Torah and c) to use this day as a time of concrete activism aimed at addressing the situation in Darfur, or any one of a number of other places where “never again” is happening right now.

Some resources:
Amnesty Int’l
Africa Action’s talking points on how to end genocide in Darfur
SaveDarfur.org
Genocide Watch

I ♥ stupid stupid sexist literature

I actually really do. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. There’s something disturbingly entertaining (that is, when it’s not utterly painful and entirely enraging) about reading the lamest, stupidest essentialist apologetics for women’s traditional role in Judaism. For a project I’m doing on hair-covering for my Poskim class, here are two nuggets I’ve come accross from my new favorite, Modesty: An Adornment for Life by Rabbi Pesach Eliyahu Falk. Pages and pages on exactly how opaque your pantyhose has to be. Anyway, here goes:

It should be noted that in the times of Chazal [the sages] even non-Jewish women covered their hair (Sanhedrin 58b). This demonstrates just how deep-rooted the need for tnius [modesty] is in the constiution of the married woman, and all the more so in the nature of the Jewish married woman. It is, therefore, an unnatural state of affairs that some women no longer feel a need for special modesty once married. Segregation, which is the cornerstone of kedushas Yisroel [the holiness of Israel]…is particularly indicated for a woman after marriage, as she is an eishes ish. [A man’s woman.]

Here’s the other one, which I have taken to quoting often:

What Torah does for men, tznius [modesty] does for women.

Isn’t that fabulous? The boys get, you know, God’s word, Revelation, a whole system for living in connection with the Divine and holiness. All I gotta do is get dressed.

Today’s Poem

Because it has been rattling around in my head the last few days, and because it is beautiful and powerful, I thought I’d share a poem by my friend Yosefa Raz, from her book In Exchange for a Homeland. The third stanza from the bottom is the one that really kills me (but read the whole thing, for pete’s sake.)

ABU GOSH
by Yosefa Raz

They consider themselves to be allowed to own only what they hold in their hands, or between their teeth.
– Franz Kafka on Jews

On Shabbat Abu Gosh is bumper to bumper.
What mirror land
where we seek only Lebanese hummus,
Syrian olives, to hold between our teeth?

Up the road you can buy wicker chairs and potted plants,
Armenian pottery, pink almond sweets off a truck.
The first restaurant was built with lottery money.
Hummus joints were fruitful; they multiplied.

Are they happy to feed us?
Better this than construction work,
building our squat, red-roofed houses.
We ask about the waiter’s family: family is important to them.

The lemon tree courtyards are walled; they hide their women.
We gorge on stuffed grape leaves,
skewered meat. It’s cheaper here.
They’re even learning to serve ketchup with the chips.

In this spring day we’re tourists in our own imagined future.
Peace might be like this:
curly haired boys bringing out plates of little salads:
no extra charge

and the village of white-washed houses, feeding us
as if it knew down under we were still refugees;
needed the famous Arab hospitality
to help us acclimate, forget our scars.

This is the land itself: the dark olive oil, almost muddy,
how even the cookies are a little salty.
We say there’s nothing like Arab hummus,
but learn nothing.