We Hate Yom Kippur

The holiday of Jewish guilt is upon us again. And this year, it falls on a Saturday! While the rest of the world is enjoying the last sunny weekend of fall, Jews across the world will stuff their necks into dress shirts to atone for our sins. And to gripe.

Rivals--A Rosh Hashanah Sermon

I delivered the following sermon (audio and text below) at the Reform service, Rosh Hashanah morning 5771 with Hillels of Georgia.

In the summer, I work at a Jewish camp in Cleveland, GA, Camp Coleman. It’s been my home for 16 dazzling summers. Down the road from Camp Coleman, only about 3 miles away, is Camp Barney. Camp Barney is also a Jewish camp, run by the JCC of Atlanta.  And every year, the staff at the two camps square-off for a basketball game. It’s one of the most anticipated events of the summer. In the unlikeliest of locations, four-hundred Jews pack the bleachers of the White County Recreation Center to watch the game, Barney on one side, Coleman on the other. Barney dresses in all blue; Coleman wears tie-dye. Barney bangs on a drum; Coleman cheers their faces off. Tempers flare. Players get injured. Fans get in each other’s faces. It is easily the biggest rivalry I have ever been a part of—bigger than Florida-Georgia, bigger than Yankees-Red Sox, bigger even than Emory-Wash. U.

And it strikes me as funny. Here we are in the middle of rural Georgia, miles from any organized Jewish community, and the two Jewish camps hate each other. Why? We all come from the same cities. We all go to the same schools. We all listen to the same music. We all get really excited about basketball. We all love camp. So, in the words of the prophet, “Why can’t we be friends?”

We read on Rosh Hashanah two stories about exactly that—rivalry. Maybe the ancient Rabbis, in their wisdom, knew that football season was a good time to consider the topic. Let’s focus on just one of those stories, about Penninah and Hannah. I’ll give you a little background.

Penninah and Hannah are married to the same man. Penninah has been able to conceive with him, but Hannah has not. And though their husband claims to love Hannah best, he gives more of himself to his fertile wife, Penninah. For this, Penninah taunts Hannah to the point of tears, until Hannah prays that God grant her a son. God hears Hannah’s sorrow, and she gives birth to the prophet Samuel.

Feel for a minute the deep-seeded family rivalry—a love-triangle, favoritism, deceit, envy, contempt. You can imagine the emotional scars this story must have left on its characters. It reads kind of like a soap opera.

I guess the ancient Rabbis, when they chose for us to read these stories on Rosh Hashanah, were trying to tell us that rivalry is a part of life. We can’t avoid it. It’s like friction—even on a glass plate, there’s still a trace. And like friction, rivalry is not always a bad thing. The same friction that causes a rolling marble to eventually slow to a stop allows a rolling tire to push against the road and speed away.

Sometimes rivalry can spark genius. Think of Lennon and McCartney. Or 2Pac and Biggie. 2Pac said it himself: “Can u c the pride in the pantha / as he glows in splendor and grace / Toppling OBSTACLES placed in the way / of the progression of his race.”

Sometimes we need a rival to give us the kick in the pants we need to get moving. Think of Charlie Brown and Lucy. Think of Apple and Sony. Do you think the MacBook Pro would be as great as it is if it didn’t sometimes have to look around and wonder what the Sony VAIO was up to?

Our sages taught that in order to learn, we must acquire a study partner. Someone to bounce ideas off of and to challenge our flimsier arguments. Educational psychologists will tell you that having a study partner helps students probe deeply and think critically. A sounding board. A fact checker. Someone to point out the holes in your argument and challenge you to fill them. Of sorts, a rival.

Funny then that the word for these study partners is chevruta—Aramaic for friend. Chevruta is a little more complicated than friendship. In chevruta, your partner needs to push back, give a little resistance, a little friction.

Indeed, our ancient namesake, Rabbi Hillel, is most famous not for his copious legal writings or his role as head of the Rabbinic assembly, but for debating against his rival, Rabbi Shammai. Think the Lincoln-Douglas debates.

There’s a great scene in Fiddler on the Roof where Tevye is listening to an argument. One side claims, “You can’t close your eyes to what’s happening in the world,” and Tevye responds, “You’re right.” The other side asks, “Why should I break my head about the outside world?” and Tevye responds, “You’re right.” Puzzled, and curious, an onlooker asks, “Tevye, he’s right and he’s right? They can’t both be right!” To which Tevye responds, “You know—you are also right.”

Judaism for centuries has obsessed about the right way of doing things. Do we light the Chanukkah menorah starting with one candle or with eight? Can the same cash register be used for selling meat as well as milk? Can gay and lesbian Jews become rabbis? What we forget to notice is neither side is ever right or wrong, that rivaling ideas have coexisted for centuries. While my father’s grandparents in Austria were busy disposing of their grains for Passover, my mother’s grandparents in Greece were cooking rice to prepare for the holiday.

So what does this all mean? Ashkenazi AND Sephardic. Hillel AND Shammai. Apple AND Sony. Lennon AND McCartney. Penninah AND Hannah. Camp Coleman AND Camp Barney.

It means there’s no one right way to be a Jew. I hear it all the time: I’m a bad Jew, I don’t do this, or I’m a bad Jew, I don’t do that. I’m here to tell you: THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS A BAD JEW. Picture a five-legged stool, or a fork with many prongs—this is Judaism. It’s not just a religion, it’s not just a history, it’s not just a set of values. It’s whatever you choose it to be.

So I’m here to be your rival. I’m here to challenge you. If you had unlimited resources and unlimited time to build a new way of expressing your Judaism, what would you do? Would you found a Jewish hiking club that spends weekends in the mountains? Would you organize your friends to read and think critically about editorials from the Israeli press? Would you start an online dating community for gay and lesbian Jews? Would you organize an interfaith group to fight poverty and hunger? Would you start a Jewish yoga studio? A Jewish book club? A klezmer-funk band? A Jewish meditation group? A silkscreen company that prints clever Jewish t-shirts? Would you organize your friends to devise new, creative, interactive ways of celebrating Shabbat? Would you commission new Jewish art? Would you explore the overlap between Jewish thought and quantum physics?

This New Year, acquire for yourself a rival, a friend who’s willing to push you. Together, do something Jewish you’ve never done before, something that speaks to you, something that challenges you. Make for yourself an experience that can’t be compared, that’s rivaled by none.

Camp Coleman might never love Camp Barney, but they sure do make us play good basketball.

Shana tova.

Walking in Lullwater

Cross-posted at TheShabbatExperiment
I just want to point out that two weeks in a row now I've done my Shabbat-observing on Sunday, not Saturday.

Today I took a walk in Lullwater Park near my house. (It also happens to be the Emory president's residence.) I was struck by how many different scenes there were to watch--parents playing with their children, men fishing, people walking their dogs, a student in the grass reading. It reminded me of a set of postcards. While I walked, I tried to turn-up my sense of hearing and and my sense of sight. I enjoyed the sound of the wind hushing the leaves and a small waterfall running from the lake. I also really enjoyed noticing the different shapes and personalities of tree trunks. I thought about my mom, who likes to walk around our neighborhood for exercise. She's a nurse and hospital administrator. She encourages people to walk 10,000 steps per day to stay healthy.

Oh, I also walked over a small and narrow bridge, but most importantly, I wasn't afraid!

Family Matters (based on Parshat Vayeshev)

The following is in response to a short essay question on the application to HUC's rabbinical program.
Parshat Vayeshev shows that family isn’t for the weak. The episode between Judah and Tamar at once affirms the value of family and highlights the struggles therein.

Judah has three sons, and he finds for the eldest a Canaanite wife—Tamar. But God kills the eldest son before he’s able to conceive a child. So Judah brings his second son to Tamar, so that he will sleep with her and thereby carry-on the line. But the second son pulls-out and doesn’t finish the job. So God kills him. With two sons down and one to go, Judah sends Tamar away. He promises her that when his youngest son, Shua, has grown up, Tamar and Shua will have a child. Many years pass and Tamar never hears from Judah or Shua.

Some time later, Judah passes a prostitute on the road. He sleeps with her, and leaves as collateral for payment some of his clothing. When he returns to pay the prostitute, she can’t be found. Meanwhile, the audience knows that the prostitute was actually Tamar in disguise. She has fooled Judah into impregnating her. One trimester later, Judah hears that Tamar has been knocked-up by some skirt-chaser. He orders Tamar burned for prostitution. She presents his clothing, which he had left for collateral, and says, “I am pregnant by the man to whom these belong.” Judah is embarrassed and never sleeps with her again. Several months later, Tamar gives birth to twins.

Recall that it was Judah who convinced his brothers to sell Joseph into slavery, and Judah who is ultimately responsible for deceiving their father, Jacob. This story begins “About that time, Judah left his brothers.” Midrash relates that Judah was in fact running away from home to avoid his shame.

But there is nowhere Judah can hide. The biblical narrator reveals Judah at his worst. First he tries to evade his promise to Tamar. Then he sleeps with a prostitute who turns out to be his daughter in law. When he slept with Tamar, Judah’s wife had just died. He doesn’t even finish his period of mourning, he waits only until “he is comforted.” He condemns Tamar for prostitution, when in fact he solicited it. And in the end, he never outwardly admits that he slept with Tamar. He only admits that he shouldn’t have withheld from her his youngest son, Shua. Judah is kind of a jerk.

As Judah deceived Jacob, so does Tamar deceive Judah. This biblical foreshadowing fits with the ancient Rabbis' notion of kav l’kav, that a person’s fate is doled out measure for measure according to their deeds (Visotzky 127). Judah was made to “examine/hakerna” his clothes and “recognize/vayaker” them as his own. The same words are used when Judah shows his father Joseph’s bloodied coat (Plaut 253). Both men fall victim to an article of clothing. And whereas Jacob is made to believe something that is false, Judah is made to recognize something that is true. For deceiving his father, Judah can’t avoid the mirror of his shame.

Tamar, by contrast, is a clever, strong woman, who plays by her own rules at a man’s game. In Who Wrote the Bible, Richard Friedman argues that Tamar’s wit forces us not to rule out the possibility that the biblical author “J” could have been a woman (86).

The story ends with Tamar’s twins fighting over who will emerge first from the womb. Clearly, this is a story about family struggle—brother betraying brother, a father’s turmoil visited on his son, a woman wronged by her in-laws, a father who sleeps with his son’s wife. This sounds like a soap opera, but it reads like real life. The characters are human, scarred, proud. They are blurred by the image of their siblings and tied-up by the fears of their parents. This is the flux between hate and love, the pushing away and the holding tight that binds a family together. Regardless of how they are defined, these sticky relationships are the glue of a family.

The Shabbat Experiment

Cross posted at The Shabbat Experiment.
See our coverage on eJewishPhilanthropy and Jewlicious.

A Jewish role model recently introduced me to the Sabbath Manifesto, a set of 10 principles developed by the Reboot Network that they define as core to Shabbat observance. The principles are founded in tradition and open for interpretation. They are short and clear. They are accessible and directive. For the first time in several years, I felt I could tap into Shabbat.

As a Hillel professional, I spend my days, nights, and weekends helping students connect to Jewish life. It's a busy job. While I help students celebrate the day of rest, I myself am working. I and many of my colleagues lose touch with the reasons why we went into this work in the first place.

To reignite our passion for Judaism, we created four cohorts of Hillel professionals across North America who over the course of 10 weeks will observe each of the 10 principles outlined in the Manifesto. Each week, at the end of Shabbat, we will post our reflections, creations, experiments, and experiences to this blog. With the creative support of our colleagues, and with the commitment that we're all in this together, we will rediscover what it means to set aside one day a week. We will be not preaching Jews, but doing Jews.

We call it the Shabbat Experiment.

Hillel Professionals Engaged in Shabbat Manifesto

A Jewish role model recently introduced me to the Shabbat Manifesto. For the first time in a few years, I felt that I could tap into Shabbat.

Inspired by this work, I am helping to organize a group of 10 Hillel professionals nationwide who will over the course of 10 weeks observe each of the 10 principles outlined in the Manifesto. Each week, at the end of Shabbat, we will post our reflections, creations, experiments, and experiences to a shared blog. The 10 weeks will culminate on the Shabbat preceding 10/10/2010.

As Jewish professionals, we are excited by the opportunity to engage in a Jewish experience that is not for our students, but for us. And in creating this experience for ourselves, we are also modeling for our students creative Jewish enterprise.

National Thank Your Counselor Day

The first annual National Thank Your Counselor Day was a huge success. With more than 475 members, the Facebook initiative saw a tremendous outpouring of thank yous to past and present counselors. Thanks to Shira-Rose Lebow for posting this link to a This American Life special "Notes on Camp."

Staff and campers at URJ Camp Coleman acknowledged a favorite Coleman role model, Lauren Zeichner. Lauren is the head of specialists, and has been an integral part of the Coleman family since 1995. Loved for her expertise in the Campscape Garden, Lauren has taught countless Colemanites to make soap from scratch, sew lavender dream pillows and weave dreamcatchers, grow and fry okra, make "Coleman Star" wind charms, and how to pick the ripest blackberries off the bush. The whole camp dressed in tye-die shirts and khaki shorts--Lauren's usual attire--to show their love for her. Watch this clip below.

That evening, seven generations of campers demonstrated the impact camp has on lives. Amanda and Sophie thanked their counselor Jordan, who thanked his counselor Jeremy, who thanked his counselor Daniel, who thanked his counselor Diana, who thanked her counselor Jon, who thanked his mentor Bobby.

Please share who YOU thanked and why.