The JackB

"When you're in jail, a good friend will be trying to bail you out. A best friend will be in the cell next to you saying, 'Damn, that was fun'." Groucho Marx

Judaism

When Rabbis Panic

It sounds like the title to some cheesy video, doesn’t it. Just imagine a deep voice announcing “When Rabbis Panic.” For three low payments of $9.95 you can receive the video. Order now and if you are among the first 100 callers we’ll throw in a copy of “Rabbis Gone Wild” for free.

The thing is that this is not a total joke. About this time each year my friends start to get stressed out about what sermons they are going to give for the High Holidays. Those that are in to sports start to throw around the sports analogies.

“Jack, it is a really intense playoff system that leads right into the championship.”

Or

“This is when I really put my game face on because it is the one time of year that you really have the congregation’s attention.”

This is about the time when I suggest that we play “Sermon Bingo.” The idea is simple. You create a playing card that looks just like the seating chart of the shul. Then during the sermon you and a few others look around the room and identify sleeping congregants. Each time you find one you get to mark off a space on your card. The first one to mark off a complete line of spaces wins.

Here is some friendly advice. You friend the pulpit rabbi usually does not take too kindly to people suddenly shouting during the sermon, especially when doing so points out how many people they have put to sleep.

I have a few ideas for how to spice things up so that people don’t fall asleep, but something tells me that I’ll probably never see my favorite come to fruition. Imagine using a teleprompter to guide the sermon along. In this wacky world of mine I could type out the sermon and the rabbi would just read whatever appeared on screen.

It has potential. Ok, maybe potential is over stating it a bit, but one can dream a bit.

Fleeing From Holiness

Stories like Escape From the Holy Shtetl make me shake my head. I am a Jew from LA, born and bred here. Spent the last 39 years interacting with BT’s and FFBs of all types.

In plain English I know Jews of multiple observance levels. There are those in my circle who are what you would call culturally Jewish and those who you’d call Ultra Orthodox. For better or for worse I have been happy to say that I can comfortably interact with all of them.

It is no secret to say that I have my agreements and disagreements with them regarding various issues. But overall I haven’t any problem recognizing their Judaism. They may do things differently than I do, but that’s ok. I get it, We’re all Jews.

But the Satmars are a different bird altogether. And while I would never say that they aren’t Jewish (a courtesy that they probably wouldn’t extend to me) I find their ways to be cultish and wrong.

It is not an exaggeration to say that things that I have heard and read make me cringe. That story is going to be read by a lot of people who don’t have enough common sense to distinguish that Jews are not monolithic in behavior and we are all going to be tarred with the same brush.

(This is a post in progress. I need to come back and do something polishing. Hopefully there will be time to do so later.)

America’s Top 50 Rabbis

Last year Newsweek shared a list of America’s Top 50 Rabbis. The second annual list is here. The excerpt below shares how the list was developed. Not unlike many lists I take this one with a grain of salt.

Here is the second annual version of the list—generated by Michael Lynton, (chairman & CEO, Sony Pictures Entertainment), Gary Ginsberg, (executive VP, global marketing and corporate affairs, News Corp.) and Jay Sanderson, (CEO and executive producer, JTN/JTN Productions)—of the 50 most influential rabbis in America. In the fall of 2006, the friends, interested in the future of American Jewry and the evolving role of the rabbi, started a conversation that eventually became “the list.” The machers ranked the rabbis based on the following unscientific criteria:

• Are they known nationally/internationally? (20 points)
• Do they have political/social influence? (20 points)
• Do they have a media presence? (10 points)
• Are they leaders within their communities? (10 points)
• Are they considered leaders in Judaism or their movements? (10 points)
• Size of their constituency (10 points)
• Have they made an impact on Judaism in their career? (10 points)
• Have they made a greater impact beyond the Jewish community and their Rabbinical training? (10 points)

The Shame Of It All

Daniel Gordis still produces some of the finest essays I have read. In his latest he discusses how the mindset of Jews was supposed to be changed from viewing themselves as victims and the role of the state of Israel in that.

“When you’ve lost the sense that Jewish statehood is about changing the condition of the Jew, and when you can no longer recall that independence was designed (inter alia) to end the era of hunting seasons in which the Jews are the ducks, just because they’re Jews, when any semblance of a Jewish conversation is thoroughly absent from your worldview, it’s hard to say much about why the Jews need a State. It’s hard to say why the high cost of living here (and I don’t mean financial) is worth it. How do you explain to your friends, and to yourself, why you should drive your eighteen year old son to the base where he’ll be inducted, and hope and pray for three long years (or more) that he’ll be OK, if you have no idea why a Jewish State matters?

When you can’t articulate why you need this State, you fret. You worry mostly about what the world thinks of you, because more than anything else, you simply want to be “normal,” indistinguishable, just like everyone else. So, just like the “men” in Bialik’s poem, you don’t allow yourself to be horrified by the fact that almost 8,000 rockets have been fired at Sederot, that life there has been transformed into hell. You don’t allow yourself to remember that for years, yes seven years, kids (and old kids, sometimes in their teens) have been sleeping in their parents’ rooms, making any kind of normal family life utterly impossible, elementary school kids have been wetting their beds, half the businesses are vacated, more than half the town is empty, the economy doesn’t exist and everyone is scared to death, all the time.

You don’t allow yourself to focus on the fact that this is exactly what Zionism was supposed to prevent. You get so used to it that you don’t see that Jews sitting like ducks, simply waiting to be hit by homemade missiles while the region’s most powerful army sits on the side and polishes its boots, is a bastardization of what Zionism was supposed to be.

When you can’t say anything anymore about why the Jews need a state, about what Statehood was supposed to do to the condition of the Jew, you don’t allow yourself to stare reality squarely in the face and to wonder what will happen when they get Grads, and then Katyushas, and hit Ashkelon and then Ashdod – until they start. And then, when they do (which they did, this week), you tell yourself that it’s “not so bad.” After all, in yesterday’s attacks on Sederot, “only” one woman was killed. “Only” one house (not her house, but a different one) was burnt to the ground. And in the roadside bombing of an army patrol, which isn’t even on the news anymore, because last night got a lot worse, they “only” killed one soldier, and “only” one soldier was in extremely critical condition. “Only” a few families forever destroyed – we’re going to get worked up about that?

When a country’s leadership can’t express a single coherent thought about why the Jews need a State, when its Prime Minister can articulate no agenda for the Jewish State beyond the hope that it will be “a fun place to live” (and look who gleefully cites that interview), you know we’re bankrupt. You’re bankrupt because Bialik and Alterman were too successful. They were part of a movement that so utterly disconnected the Jews from the discourse that had nurtured them for centuries that now, aside from being a marginally Hebrew-speaking version of some benign and characterless country, we can’t remember why we wanted this State to begin with. So we don’t defend it, because we don’t want to hurt their civilians (even though they openly target ours).”

Read the whole thing, it is worth it.

Ugandan Jews

Some of you might remember my post about The music of Ugandan Jews. This evening I came across an article about Ugandan Jews that you might find to be of interest.

Here is an excerpt:

“Segments of the Igbo of Nigeria and the Sefwi people of Ghana trace their origins to Jews who traveled from Israel to West Africa, some dating back to the period following the destruction of the first Temple in 586 B.C.E. The once vibrant Sephardic and Mizrahi of Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, and Egypt, were established in North Africa approximately two millennia ago, but since 1948, the vast majority of North African Jews emigrated, settling in France, Israel, and the United States.

Now, in contrast to these communities, the Abayudaya, which means “Jewish people of Uganda,” proudly reference their conversion to Judaism in the 1920s, stating that they were drawn to Jewish practice by the truth of the Torah, the five books of Moses. Their founder, Semei Kakungulu, was a powerful Ganda leader, and he considered Christianity and Islam, and then according to community elders, said, “Why should I follow the shoots when I could have the root.”

Presently, the Abayudaya number of approximately 750 people, and live in villages surrounding Mbale in eastern Uganda. Many members scrupulously follow Jewish ritual, observe the laws of the Sabbath, celebrate Jewish holidays, keep kosher, and pray in Hebrew. Since the community’s original self conversion, and through the difficult period of Idi Amin’s rule in the 1970s, the Abayudaya have been distinguished by their commitment to following mainstream Jewish practice, an approach that’s been amplified since their increased contact with Jews from North America and Israel since the mid-1990s.”

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