Judaism

Chana verbalized a number of my concerns in this post.

We humans are a superstitious lot. If you think about it you can probably come up with a list of ten superstitions that are relatively well known. And if you really concentrate you can probably come up with a list of personal superstitions. I know that I have my own and in spite of what others may claim it has nothing to do with OCD.

Some of my fellow MOTs find the three weeks to be terribly distressing. They expect and anticipate that bad things will happen to them during this time. I can think of more than one conversation in which someone explained the real reason behind the car breaking down or a summer cold.

It all culminates on Tisha B’Av. On Tisha B’Av we see the end of this cycle and the beginning of a new one. In my mind I always like to think of redemption as being the second and in some ways more important part of the day.

I can attribute this attitude to how we observed Tisha B’Av at camp. The evening was always somber. We’d gather on the tennis court and listen to the chanting of Eicha. Under a star filled sky I’d try to imagine what had happened with varying degrees of success. It is not hard to remember heading back to my tent with a myriad of thoughts running through my mind.

In the morning we’d wake up knowing that although it would be somewhere between 90 and 100 degrees outside there wouldn’t be any food or drink. It was a fast day that often moved slowly. Sometimes it was tough to be living in a place that was designed for so much fun on a day that was supposed to be so somber. But that was only for part of the day because in the afternoon we’d start to think about redemption.

And redemption is something that I find quite interesting. I am not speaking of the days in which moshiach comes. The truth is that I have kind of mixed emotions about that. It is a hard concept to wrap my brain around. It is hard for me to imagine that time and what life will be like. It is not that I can’t do it, but sometimes it is just hard to let go of the concrete realities of the life I have now and picture that particular future.

So when I think about redemption I think of it as a time of growth. I picture it as being a time in which things can and often do get better. Life improves because we make it improve. For me it is a particularly salient point because lately life has been very tough. So now I am doing whatever I can to make that happen. And the thing is that I do feel like a weight is lifting off of my shoulders.

Perhaps that is just my own superstition or perhaps there is something more. All I know is that perception is often a major part of the battle and my own perception is that a positive change in the air. Redemption is here.

New Orleans — ‘DO you have a pioneering spirit?” read the recent ad in the Jewish Week newspaper of New York. “Are you searching for a meaningful community where YOU can make a difference?”

To generations of American Jews, the pitch had a familiar ring. But this was not an invitation to settle the Promised Land. It was a call to repopulate New Orleans, a city known less for its Jewish culture than for its shellfish, sin and pre-Lenten carnival.

New Orleans’ Jewish population, in fact, has long been a subtle but important ingredient in this curious dish of a city. But its numbers, though always small, have declined precipitously since Hurricane Katrina. Of the 10,000 Jews in the area before the storm, 7,000 remain.

With fewer dues-paying members, some synagogues and Jewish service agencies have been kept afloat by donations from Jews around the country. But the bulk of that largess, provided by the nonprofit United Jewish Communities, dries up at the end of the year.

The Jewish community is by no means New Orleans’ most afflicted demographic. But Jewish leaders do not want to see a single Jewish institution closed. They don’t wish to consolidate any of the seven synagogues and two Chabad centers that offer a full range of religious observance.

The issue is plain.

“We need people,” said Jackie Gothard, president of Congregation Beth Israel, a modern Orthodox synagogue that has seen more than 40% of its members move away.

So Jewish New Orleans has cooked up a novel solution: a recruitment drive. With an ad campaign crafted by an Israeli public relations firm, the city’s Jewish leaders are hoping to attract at least 1,000 Jews to the city over the next five years. They will appeal to potential pilgrims’ better natures, stressing the Jewish concept of tikkun olam, Hebrew for “healing the world” — or, in this case, healing a broken city.

They also plan to lure them with cash. Starting next month, any Jew who has relocated to the city since Jan. 1 will be eligible for up to $5,500 for moving and housing expenses, interest-free loans of up to $30,000, half-price tuition at Jewish day schools, and a year of free membership at a synagogue and a Jewish community center.

I first read about the plan last week but what really caught my eye was this:

In the late 1990s, during one particularly uninspiring football season, local poet Andrei Codrescu remembers watching with astonishment as a rabbi marched through Jackson Square with a handful of congregants. He was playing “When the Saints Go Marching In” on the shofar.

Now there is something that you don’t see every day.