Mah Rabu

Independent

2009-11-21T22:20:00.002-05:00

(Crossposted to Jewschool.)

Blogging from the Bolt Bus on the way, appropriately, to the National Havurah Committee board meeting:

Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight wrote this insightful post last fortnight following the elections:

Why did Democrats lose in Virginia and New Jersey on Tuesday? Because independent voters moved against them, say the pundits.

This is true [... b]ut it doesn’t really tell us very much. It’s a lot like saying: the Yankees won the Game 6 last night because they scored more runs than the Phillies. Or: the unemployment rate went up because there were fewer jobs.

It’s worth a read in its own right, but I want to focus on one section and draw an analogy to the Jewish community:

Part of the problem is that ‘independents’ are not a particularly coherent group. At a minimum, the category of ‘independents’ includes:

1) People who are mainline Democrats or Republicans for all intents and purposes, but who reject the formality of being labeled as such;
2) People who have a mix of conservative and liberal views that don’t fit neatly onto the one-dimensional political spectrum, such as libertarians;
3) People to the extreme left or the extreme right of the political spectrum, who consider the Democratic and Republican parties to be equally contemptible;
4) People who are extremely disengaged from politics and who may not have fully-formed political views;
5) True-blue moderates;
6) Members of organized third parties.

These voters have almost nothing to do with each other and yet they all get grouped under the same umbrella as ‘independents’.

Similarly, many overlapping terms are used for Jewish individuals and communities who are not affiliated with any of the major denominations: independent, unaffiliated, nondenominational, postdenominational, Just Jewish, etc. Each of these terms connotes somewhat different shades of meaning, but even so, within each such category, and certainly within the union of all those categories, there are people who “have almost nothing to do with each other” except for what they aren’t. And so when we try to talk about people and communities outside the denomination, we suffer from the same confusion and conflation that Silver writes about, conflating essentially the same six categories that he lists (among others).

American political discourse often assumes incorrectly that all “independents” are in category 5, with positions right in between the Democrats and the Republicans (and so the way for a party to pick up these voters is to adopt some of the other party’s positions), when in fact there are other types of independents too. Similarly, until very recently, “unaffiliated”/”Just Jewish” was associated strongly with category 4: “People who are extremely disengaged from [Judaism]“. (It was recently enough that I had to write this article to explain to a mainstream Jewish audience that this isn’t always the case, though I think the other types of “independent”/”unaffiliated”/etc. Jews have gotten enough attention since then that maybe the points in that article are now obvious to everyone. But maybe not.) The survey results seem to indicate that this is still true of most people who check “Just Jewish”, though I wonder how much those results are contaminated by active independent/nondenominational/blah Jews who also think of themselves as “Just Jewish” and aren’t survey geeks and therefore don’t know that “Just Jewish” isn’t the option they’re supposed to pick.

Even worse, category 4 is sometimes conflated with category 3: Some think that people who are extremely disengaged from Judaism are on the extreme left! This is the idea behind phrases like “very Reform” and “ultra-Reform”. The analogy to American politics shows this conflation to be ridiculous: you can’t have extreme-left views if you don’t have fully-formed [political | Jewish] views. There are also people who hold extreme-left Jewish views (along one or more axes in n-dimensional space, some of which can be classified as left-right spectra), but this is a very different population from the apathetic masses.

Participants in independent minyanim and other unaffiliated/nondenominational communities are often mischaracterized as falling into just one of these categories, when the reality is that there is great diversity within and among such communities, so they can’t be neatly places into just one. One common characterization of independent minyanim, particularly those of the “traditional egalitarian” style, is that they are “Conservative congregations flying a Liberian flag”, i.e. Conservative in everything but name, placing them in category 1. Another common characterization is that they fit between two denominations on a linear left-right spectrum (category 5), e.g. “to the right of Conservative and to the left of Orthodox” or “to the right of Reform and to the left of Conservative”. (The former is wrong on the facts in many cases, while the latter is simply incoherent.) And indeed, there are some individuals who see themselves as Conservative (or Orthodox or Reform) in everything but name (or even in name too) and are involved in nondenominational communities, and other individuals who identify as “Conservadox” or some other hybrid of multiple denominations. But independent/nondenominational communities also include plenty of people from category 2: those whose approaches to Judaism can’t be placed on a one-dimensional spectrum.

In the comments, feel free to add to the list of types of “independent” Jews.

More press for independent minyanim

2009-11-15T22:27:00.000-05:00

(Crossposted to Jewschool.)

Independent minyanim have been popping up all over the press lately. First of all, they make an appearance in this CNN piece on “New Jews”, but that deserves a whole snarky post of its own, so I’ll leave it alone for now.

Two articles focus on independent minyanim: one in the August/September issue of Hadassah Magazine (it’s old, I know, but it wasn’t available online when it first came out, so it seems to have slid under the blogosphere’s radar), and one (which is really four and counting) in the latest edition of the URJ’s Eilu V’Eilu.

What do all three pieces have in common? The obligatory quote from Jonathan Sarna, of course. Seriously, is it the law that he has to be quoted in every single one of these stories?

Anyway, the Hadassah piece is in some ways the usual story about independent minyanim, but it does a good job presenting the diversity of independent minyanim, discussing the wide range of different practices within and among minyanim. It also presents independent minyanim mostly in their own words and own ideas, defining them by what they are rather than what they’re not: “pluralism, egalitarianism, social justice and song-filled prayer”, “to take responsibility for our own Jewish lives”, “joy, reverence, inspiring prayer, high-level educational programming with support for beginners, a culture of cooperation and openness”, etc. Unlike other articles on this topic that have appeared in the Jewish press, there is no worrying about Jewish continuity or intermarriage or the future of the denominations, and there is a quote from a pulpit rabbi saying that independent minyanim are swell, since it is “exciting to see people serious about their Judaism and seeking to come closer to God in an active way.” There are a few glitches here and there: this article propagates the error (which was quickly fixed) from the initial release of the 2007 Spiritual Communities Study, saying that “more than half [of independent minyan participants] spent over four months on an Israel program”. (The actual survey question asked about spending more than four months in Israel, not specifying anything about a program.) In a closing section about what happens when minyan founders move out of a neighborhood, there is a sentence about some Tikkun Leil Shabbat founders that is technically correct yet amusing: “Novey and her husband travel to Tikkun Leil Shabbat on Friday nights from their Maryland home.” This makes it sound like they’re trekking into DC from deep suburbia or Baltimore or the Eastern Shore, when in fact their apartment (like my apartment down the street) is just a few feet from the DC line, in a Maryland neighborhood that is more urban than the adjoining parts of DC, and is much closer to TLS than (for example) the distance from Brooklyn to the Upper West Side. (We’ve even walked home from TLS, though it’s not a short walk.) Anyway, props to Hadassah for running this article (and a network of hospitals in Israel).

Eilu V’Eilu is a weekly email sent out by the Union for Reform Judaism, in which two writers each month debate some question, in the style of The Onion’s popular Point/Counterpoint feature (except that the writers are real people). And sometimes the two sides even disagree, but it seems that they don’t always check to see that the panelists actually have opposing views, so other times (such as when I participated) the two writers basically agree on the main points, and then are forced to search for minor points to rebut. (The best example of this was when the presidents of the Men of Reform Judaism and the Women of Reform Judaism faced off about whether there should still be single-sex congregational organizations. This is like the chairs of the DNC and the RNC “arguing” about whether there should be a two-party system.) This month’s dialogue fits into the latter mold. The question is “Are the growing numbers of independent minyanim a challenge to the movements?”, and the interlocutors are Rabbi Elie Kaunfer of Mechon Hadar and Rabbi Sydney Mintz of Congregation Emanu-El in San Francisco. As it turns out, both are supportive of independent minyanim. It might have been more fun, in a demolition derby kind of way, to see Rabbi Kaunfer go up against the old (hopefully straw-man by now) “Independent minyanim are destroying American Judaism by luring young adults away from the synagogues they would otherwise join” argument, but oh well.

In Week 1, Rabbi Kaunfer argues “Independent minyanim are not a challenge to the movements — the Internet is.” The point is that one-size-fits-all (or three-sizes-fit-all) movements are on the way out, since the Internet “allows people to organize into groups with very few start-up costs”, making it easier for communities to serve niche markets. Independent minyanim (independent of the major denominations) thrive in this new reality.

This is a positive development for Jewish life. When people care enough to stake out their own nuanced, complex relationship to Judaism, and reject broad labels in the process, they demonstrate that being Jewish matters deeply to them. If you claim to be “nondenominational,” people can’t make assumptions about your Jewish identity like they can when you claim a traditional denominational label. Instead, you have to explain what about Judaism you connect to—forming the baseline of a robust Jewish conversation.

Rabbi Kaunfer makes a solid argument that more segmentation is actually a good thing. I agree with the overall message, but unfortunately, there are a number of distracting minor issues with the article (though I’ll give the benefit of the doubt and assume based on past experience that some of these errors may be due to editing). Rabbi Kaunfer writes “New self-proclaimed movements sprung up — Reconstructionism, and the Renewal and Chavurah Movements.” The “Chavurah movement” is not now and has never been a “self-proclaimed movement” parallel to the “big three” or the Reconstructionist movement. Rabbi Kaunfer himself has argued for why the latest wave of independent minyanim do not constitute a “movement” in that mold, and the same is true for earlier waves of havurot. It goes on: “The lines between the big-three movements also blurred: what is the fundamental difference between the right wing of Reform and the left wing of Conservative, or between the right wing of Conservative and the left wing of Orthodoxy?” As I have argued before, the wing of Reform that he’s talking about (where one finds Hebrew, kashrut, etc.) is actually the left wing when viewed within an intra-Reform frame (rather than projecting frames of other denominations onto Reform); the right wing of Reform is the small-c conservative wing that holds onto tradition for tradition’s sake (aka Classical Reform). It’s the lefties of both movements that find common ground. (Cf. the advocates for the peace process are left-wing Israelis and left-wing Palestinians.)

Rabbi Kaunfer writes: “At Mechon Hadar, we have tracked the growth of independent minyanim (see www.mechonhadar.org). In the past ten years, they have exploded. In 2000, there were three of them; in 2009 there are more than sixty.” Here he is using the definition of “independent minyan” that was used in the 2007 Spiritual Communities Study. That study was only looking at communities founded since 1996. So what he means is that three independent minyanim were founded between 1996 and 2000 (and, possibly, still existed in 2007 — I’m not sure whether or not these figures include minyanim that ended before then), while many more were founded between 2000 and 2009. Yes, it’s true that the growth of independent minyanim has exploded in the last ten years, but this is a misleading way to show it. By this definition, no independent minyanim at all existed in 1995! This isn’t true, of course. For example, the Newton Centre Minyan qualifies as an independent minyan by most definitions, but it was founded in 1973. Rabbi Kaunfer links to this Zeek article which identifies differences between the minyanim founded in more recent years and the havurot founded in the ’70s, and as a general trend, these cultural differences are real, but it’s not a sharp line by any means. While Hadar and some other post-1996 minyanim may focus on “quality control”, plenty don’t and are included in the statistics nonetheless. The somewhat arbitrary cutoff of 1996 may have made sense for the survey, just so that there would be some boundaries in which communities are being studied, but I don’t think it makes sense going forward to define every community founded before 1996 as automatically not being an “independent minyan”.

Rabbi Mintz’s opening piece (which spreads the same inaccurate claims from the Spiritual Communities Study, inflating the growth rate of independent minyanim and repeating the “Israel programs” claim) is a very welcome voice to hear from the synagogue movements:

If independent minyanim can appeal to those who may not at this point in their lives step into a synagogue, why should we be threatened? Why shouldn’t we pay attention to where these young Jews are heading and strengthen our movement by creating vibrant minyanim of our own? No one is stopping us. [...] The Reform Jewish community needs to not only blow our own shofar, but also to listen closely to the new voices that are blowing our ancient instrument. They are showing us the possibility of a new engaged, immersed, committed generation.

Instead of suggesting that independent minyan participants are doing something wrong by building meaningful Jewish communities, or that it doesn’t matter because they’ll come crawling back when they have children, Rabbi Mintz is saying that synagogues and movements can look inward and learn from the successes of independent minyanim and use this to strengthen their own communities. This message is particularly welcome coming from the Reform movement, which thus far has not appeared to be as aware of the independent minyan phenomenon as the Conservative movement has been. Let’s hope this is where things are headed in the future.

In Week 2, Rabbi Kaunfer apparently didn’t see anything to dispute, so instead he asks and answers the question: “what is the future of the ‘alumni’ of independent minyanim?” And the answer is fantastic; you should just go and read it. The key point is that there’s not just one path that everyone takes when they get priced out of the old neighborhood, but many possibilities:

More independent minyanim
Minyan-synagogue hybrids [not to be confused with human-animal hybrids]
Minyanim as training grounds for future synagogue members
Rabbis who bring independent minyan ethos to their communities
Minyan participation as a deviation from an otherwise unengaged Jewish life

Rabbi Mintz responds to something that isn’t actually what Rabbi Kaunfer said. She says she disagrees with his statement that the Internet is threatening the movements, and gives examples of how synagogues (not just independent minyanim) are using the Internet successfully to build community. But Rabbi Kaunfer wasn’t talking about synagogues, he was talking about movements. It’s important to keep the synagogue-vs.-minyan/havurah axis separate from the denominational-vs.-nondenominational axis separate in principle, even if they’re not entirely uncorrelated. And if anything, Rabbi Mintz’s examples support Rabbi Kaunfer’s claims: one of the examples she provides of a thriving synagogue is New York’s B’nai Jeshurun, which is not affiliated with a movement!

Coming next, in Week 3, they’ll respond to questions and comments sent in by readers.

Rabbi Yoffie endorses flexitarianism, the "kashrut establishment"

2009-11-10T13:58:00.001-05:00

(Crossposted to Jewschool.)

Last week in Toronto, the Union for Reform Judaism held its biennial convention, and as in past years, URJ President Rabbi Eric Yoffie delivered a sermon laying out goals and initiatives for the next two years.

The sermon began with a great shout-out to the Biennial’s host country:

We Americans, it needs to be said, do not know Canada as well as we should. [...] I have a question for the Americans sitting in this congregation: How many of you can name the last three Prime Ministers of Canada?

Well, we Americans need to do better. The Canadian political system is far from perfect, but remember this: it has well-regulated banks; tough gun control laws; legalized marriage for gays; and an excellent, publicly-run health service - all matters of importance to Reform Jews and worthy of emulation by the United States.

This American (who can name the last three Canadian prime ministers and knows all the words to “O Canada”) says hear hear! (However, I was surprised that this was the only mention of health care, an issue that was featured so prominently two years ago, given that this sermon was just a few hours before the House passed the health care bill.)

The major initiatives are about food and technology. David A.M. Wilensky has already weighed in on the technology part, so I’ll leave that alone for now. There’s a lot to say about food; I’ll just focus on two points.

First, kudos to Rabbi Yoffie for endorsing flexitarianism (though he didn’t use that word). “Flexitarian”, the American Dialect Society’s 2003 Word of the Year, refers to someone who isn’t fully vegetarian but eats mostly vegetarian. There are different reasons for not eating meat, and a flexitarian lifestyle makes sense under some of these but not others. If you’re vegetarian because of a categorical opposition to eating meat, then being flexitarian doesn’t make sense, since eating any amount of meat is wrong. But even if you’re not opposed in general to eating meat, there are solid reasons for eating less meat than the standard American diet, mostly based on the effects of meat consumption. And if two people cut their meat consumption in half, that has the same effect as one person becoming fully vegetarian.

Rabbi Yoffie lays out some of the reasons for meat reductionism:

My proposal is this: let’s make a Jewish decision to reduce significantly the amount of red meat that we eat.
[...]
[M]eat consumption in North America has doubled in the last fifty years, and we can easily make do with far less red meat than we currently eat. And contrary to what many think, Jews are not obligated to eat meat on Shabbat and holidays. The Talmud suggests that fish and garlic are the foods that we should serve to honor Shabbat (Shabbat 118b); it also instructs us to eat meat in modest quantities (Hullin 84a). Remember too that in biblical Israel, the common diet consisted of barley bread, vegetables, and fruit, along with milk products and honey. My point is this: for the first 2,500 years of our 3,000 year history, Jews consumed meat sparingly, and we can surely do the same.

And we must. The meat industry today generates nearly one-fifth of the man-made greenhouse gas emissions that are accelerating climate change throughout the world. According to a U.N. report, animal agriculture is responsible for more greenhouse gas than all transportation sources combined. And the preparation of beef meals requires about fifteen times the amount of fossil fuel energy than meat-free meals.
[...]
Professor Gidon Eshel of the Bard Center has suggested that the effect of reducing our collective meat consumption by twenty percent would be comparable to every American driving a Prius instead of a standard sedan. And this twenty percent reduction is something that every one of us - every Jew, every family, every synagogue - can do.
[...]
Perhaps we can begin by offering some Shabbat dinners and Passover Seders that will delight with their variety, creativity, and taste, and that will be a model for our members of healthy, festive, meat-free meals.

This is a way that non-vegetarians can make a real difference in our environmental impact and our use of resources. Vegetarian meals are already standard at public functions throughout much of independent progressive Jewish culture; this would be a welcome shift if the URJ brings it into mainstream Jewish institutions as well.

Unfortunately, Rabbi Yoffie’s sermon goes downhill after that:

What about kashrut? This is not about kashrut. There are many Reform Jews who find meaning in the observance of kashrut, wholly or in part, and we deeply respect their choice. But it is not a choice that the great majority of us want to make.

In fact, the rejection of kashrut was long a hallmark of North American Reform Judaism. Kauffman Kohler, an early leader of the Movement, proclaimed that “Judaism is a matter of conscience, not cuisine.” Ours is an ethically-based tradition, and Reform leaders saw no connection between the intricate rules of kashrut and ethical behavior. Sadly, for too much of the kashrut industry, this disconnect still exists; in recent years, kashrut authorities have failed in their duty to treat workers, immigrants, and animals with compassion and justice. For that reason, we applaud the Conservative movement for creating a new system of kosher certification that takes ethical factors into account.

Nonetheless, we - as a Movement - have put kashrut aside, and kashrut is not the issue for us. We do not accept the authority of the kashrut establishment, and its problems are for others to resolve.

What is he trying to accomplish here? Is this just a “No Ortho” disclaimer to preempt reactions along the lines of “I’m Reform, so you can’t tell me what not to eat”? Or is there something more to it?

The reason I find this problematic is, of course, framing. One could advocate for the exact same practices, but frame it differently, and the way Rabbi Yoffie framed it seems like a big missed opportunity.

He does note that ethical eating is about “what is proper and fit to eat”, a translation of “kashrut”:

But we do now realize that we need an approach of our own–our own definition of what is proper and fit to eat. Because our ethical commitments remain firm, and we understand - as we did not a century ago - that Jewish eating has a profoundly ethical dimension. We now know that God cares what we eat, and that eating can be an entrance to holiness. We now see that when we eat with mindfulness, even the humblest meal can become a sacred act.

But rather than framing this sacred eating as a form of kashrut (cf. the framing of “eco-kashrut” and the “Hekhsher Tzedek”), he frames it as “not kashrut”, with no connection to the dietary laws in the Torah and Talmud (which are part of the textual heritage of all Reform Jews, regardless of practice). He could instead have framed it as a modern application of those laws — not only in the general category of sacred eating, but in some of the specifics. For example, I see a strong connection between my kashrut observance and my meat reductionism, and find that one reinforces the other. Kashrut sharply limits what meat I can eat (I can’t just pick up a McDonald’s hamburger, or french fries for that matter), makes meat less accessible and more expensive (more accurately reflecting the true cost of meat consumption), and makes me think twice about eating meat even when I have kosher meat available to me (since it means no dairy concurrently or for a while afterwards). The original kashrut in Leviticus 17 restricted meat consumption even more, limiting it to sacrifices (until Deuteronomy came along and loosened the rules). (To have a brief “No Ortho” moment of my own, I find that these restrictions on meat, which I think of as being at the center of kashrut, lose some of their power if everything, even vegetables, can be considered “not kosher” based on where it was cooked or whether it’s broccoli. But that’s not an important point.) So when Rabbi Yoffie cites texts supporting meat reductionism, it’s strange that he doesn’t include the Torah’s most obvious example of a structure limiting meat consumption. This structure can be an inspiration for modern efforts at meat reductionism, whether or not those modern efforts incorporate specifics of that classical structure.

Rather than framing kashrut as something that has multiple approaches (which might include vegetarianism, eco-kashrut, the inaccurately named “Biblical kashrut”, etc.), Rabbi Yoffie says “There are many Reform Jews who find meaning in the observance of kashrut, wholly or in part”, suggesting (again) that there is a well-defined external definition of “wholly” observing kashrut, and that other kashrut practices are merely “in part”, and everyone’s kashrut practice is on a linear spectrum from 0 to 100.

Of course I agree with his condemnation of Agriprocessors et al., but when he (as the leader of the largest Jewish denomination in North America) implicitly equates kashrut with “the kashrut establishment” (see the parallelism in “…kashrut is not the issue for us. We do not accept the authority of the kashrut establishment…”), he also grants power to that establishment and in a sense does accept its authority, in the sense that he does not challenge the connection between kashrut and that establishment.

Also, the frame of “rejection of kashrut” is strange in the 21st century. As Rabbi Yoffie notes, the majority of Reform Jews don’t keep kosher. This means that the majority of Reform Jews in this generation (unlike in Kaufmann Kohler’s generation) can’t “reject” kashrut, since they didn’t have it in the first place. See this post and this post for more discussion of this point.

Oddly enough, if Reform congregations follow Rabbi Yoffie’s recommendations and hold more vegetarian events, they’ll actually be more accessible to people with various kashrut practices, though this is apparently just incidental.

One year later

2009-11-04T07:37:00.000-05:00

So show us why we came here
Before we lay on the ground
Give it to us loud and clear
Make the devil turn around

The world around me’s turning
I’m just standing still
The time has come for changes
Do something or we will

--Phish, "Crowd Control"

(This is directed not only to the Obama administration, but to the "filibuster-proof" U.S. Senate majority, the Democratic majority in the New York Senate, and anyone else I helped elect on promises of change.)

Choice through knowledge

2009-10-27T21:24:00.002-04:00

[UPDATE: Some people were confused about this, so I should clarify that "really" in this post is used in the sense of "actually", not in the sense of "very".]

Mazal tov to Yeshivat Hadar on getting their year-round full-time program up and running! This article in the New York Jewish Week is chock full of things to comment on, but I'll leave the full-scale fisking to someone else. Rather than discuss the inaccuracies in the article ("the entire Hadar movement", "l'shma") or the dreadful framing (do the men wear pants too? it doesn't say), I'm going to focus narrowly on one point, and in the process piss off just about everyone.

Look at this paragraph:

Making decisions about practices that are in accordance with normative Jewish law and with contemporary egalitarianism is “not as simple as opening a Shulchan Oruch,” the Code of Jewish Law that serves as a basic reference for many observant Jews, Rabbi Kaunfer says. The yeshiva’s students, he says, are encouraged to seek their own answers, in consultation with their teachers at the yeshiva, not to simply ask a rabbinic authority to make rulings for them. “Our gedolim [recognized authorities] are the rabbis of the Talmud and the Mishna.”

We'll ignore the "observant Jews" framing, which I'll assume isn't a direct quote from Kaunfer, and the juxtaposition of the reporter's transcription of "Shulchan Oruch" with "not the Ashkenazi pronunciation heard in most Orthodox yeshivot", and focus on the substance.

I've spent much of the last few years fending off the allegation that Kehilat Hadar is "really Conservative" (see, e.g., here and here and here and in the comments here and here and here), so now I'm going to do something truly irresponsible and suggest that, based on this paragraph, one could argue that Yeshivat Hadar is "really Reform". After all, this paragraph provides a succinct formulation of the Reform doctrine of informed autonomy. And even if that bears little similarity to what goes on in Reform communities, a central piece of the "Kehilat Hadar is really Conservative" argument is "They're practicing true Conservative Judaism even if most Conservative congregations and their members aren't", so this is no different, mutatis mutandis.

Ok, I don't entirely believe that myself (not least because I don't think it's useful or meaningful to say that someone or something is "really X" when they don't identify themselves as such, but not only for that reason), and was just throwing it out there to play devil's advocate. But even if it's not true, I think it's still a valuable intellectual exercise to have to argue why it's not true. (And when you're done, I leave it as an exercise to figure out why I don't think it's true, which may not be the same reasons as yours. E.g., it certainly isn't because they daven in Hebrew. See this post for some hints.)

But there's another reason I'm introducing this meme (albeit immediately retracting it). The "Kehilat Hadar is really Conservative" meme, though problematic, is useful for one purpose: it gets Conservative communities to look in the mirror and say "There's no reason we couldn't try that here." Likewise, I hope a "Yeshivat Hadar is really Reform" meme might prompt some Reform communities to do the same. Serious text study to enable laypeople to make informed decisions about their individual practice should be the bread and butter of the Reform movement. It should be an embarrassment to the Reform movement, with all its buildings, staff, money, and longevity, that it's being beaten at what should be its own game by a 3-year-old startup organization operating in rented space. So perhaps Yeshivat Hadar's proof of concept will inspire others to think bigger.

Framing in the Forward

2009-10-22T01:05:00.003-04:00

This week's issue of the Forward includes an oped on framing and liberal Judaism:

For liberal Judaism to thrive, it must develop frames to see itself as authentic on its own terms. Orthodox Jews aren’t doing anything wrong by viewing Judaism through Orthodox frames, but we as liberal Jews are missing an opportunity by failing to see Judaism through our own liberal Jewish values.
This framing problem manifests itself in subtle ways. When we refer to Jews of other denominations as “more religious” or “more observant,” we undermine our own standards of religious observance, and judge ourselves on a scale external to our own Judaism.

If you got to Mah Rabu via the Forward, welcome! Here are some other posts that address framing issues.

Outer planets update

2009-10-21T22:39:00.001-04:00

(Crossposted to Jewschool.)

Back in January, we posted about the contest to come up with Hebrew names for the planets Uranus and Neptune, as part of the International Year of Astronomy. Some of you may have submitted entries. The finalists have now been announced!!!

The two contenders for the planet hereunto known as Uranus are:

Oron - “The name means ‘little light’ , and it hints at the faint light of the planet as seen from Earth due to its great distance from the sun. The name Oron sounds similar to the foreign name [Uranus] and helps in remembering it.”
Shahak - “The proposal follows the meaning of the name Uranus, the name of the god of heaven. In Hebrew tradition there is no parallel name for the god of heaven (besides the name of the Supreme God). The word ’shehakim’, in rabbinic literature, indicates one of the seven firmaments, and is also found in our Hebrew, and thus the singular form Shahak is appropriate as a proper name for the planet.”

And for Neptune:

Rahav - “The proposal follows the meaning of the name Neptune - the name of the god of the sea. The name parallel to it in Jewish tradition is Rahav - the name of the master of the sea. Thus, for example, the Babylonian Talmud explains the verse [JPS translation: 'By His power He stilled the sea; By His skill He struck down Rahab'] (Job 26:12) as describing the victory of the master of the sea. The name Rahav bears mythological connotations like the Latin name.”
Tarshish - “This is the name of one of the stones of the breastplate [Exodus 28:20] whose Aramaic translation (Onkelos) is ‘the color of the sea’ (among other opinions) — and this is also Neptune’s color as seen from Earth — bluish-green. ‘Tarshish’ is also connected to the sea in its other biblical use: the name of a place on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, whose identification is not certain (recall the flight of Jonah the prophet to Tarshish). And on the phrase ‘the ships of Tarshish’, Rashi says ‘Tarshish - name of a sea’. In rabbinic literature and in liturgical poetry ‘Tarshish’ is a synonym for sea, and also a name of angels. Thus the name Tarshish combines the connection to the sea (like the Latin name) and the mythological foundation (angels).”

I was one of 25 entrants (including an 8th-grade class in Netanya) who submitted “Shahak” for Uranus, and congratulations to ADDeRabbi, one of 15 people who submitted “Rahav” for Neptune!

So the next step is voting! The vote is being conducted online. Unfortunately for those of us outside Israel, the ballot asks for a te’udat zehut (ID number), so only Israeli citizens can vote. If you’re eligible, vote!!! The fate of two planets is in your hands. The winners will be announced in December at the conclusion of the International Year of Astronomy.

Fifteen minutes

2009-09-17T19:48:00.004-04:00

The Jewschool version of my last post was linked from the official Talk Like A Pirate Day website!!!

Also, the Howard Dean town hall I went to the other day has been making the news, particularly his harsh words for the ridiculous Baucus bill.

Speaking of Baucus: Today I got to see President Obama at a health care rally at the University of Maryland. (Living in the DC area is great!) As DailyKosTV reports, the crowd wildly cheered the public option, and booed the Baucus bill. I think I was the one who initiated the Baucus-booing! But as you can hear from the video, it took just a fraction of a second to spread around the whole arena, so there is overwhelming sentiment in favor of real health care reform.

Obama's speech at the rally had much of the same content as his speech last week to Congress, but he threw in other stuff specific to the college student audience, including a nod to the bill passed today by the House to fix student loans and financial aid. Obama was introduced by a UMD student who was diagnosed with thyroid cancer and was able to receive treatment that has been successful so far because she was on her parents' insurance, but will need expensive medication for the rest of her life and is going to be shit out of luck when she's out in the world trying to buy her own insurance (due to her preexisting condition) if we don't fix health care now. Let's do it!

Shanah tovah, matey!

2009-09-16T22:19:00.000-04:00

(Crossposted to Jewschool.)

Here at Jewschool, we have covered many calendrical confluences, from the total lunar eclipse on Purim to Birkat Hachamah on Erev Pesach to Ice Cream For Breakfast Day on Tu Bishvat. But all of those pale in comparison to the big one that we’ve been awaiting for years: Rosh Hashanah on International Talk Like A Pirate Day!!!

The 2nd day of Rosh Hashanah fell on September 19, 2001, but that was before The Onion gave us permission to laugh again, so talking like a pirate was the last thing on our minds at the time. Other than that, this year is the first combined Rosh Hashanah / TLAPD since TLAPD was founded in 1995. The next time will be in 2020.

So, to help us prepare for this rare conjunction, here are 10 ways to incorporate Talk Like A Pirate Day into the Rosh Hashanah liturgy:
1) (the obvious one) sound the shofARRRRR!
2) …made from rams stolen from another ship
3) (in communities that read Genesis 21) read the story of HagARRRRRR!
4) (in communities that read Genesis 22 on the first or only day) …al echad heHARRRRRim … vaYARRRRRR et hamakom meirachok.
5) Apples and honey can prevent scurvy.
6) …et yom hazikARRRRRRon hazeh…
7) Throw your enemies overboard for tashlich.
8 ) The HadARRRRR CD is sold out, so get a PIRATED copy.
9) Show up without a ticket.
10) Who shall live and who shall die, who by sword and who by walking the plank! ARRRRRR!!!

If you can’t wait until 2020 to do it all over again, Talk Like A Pirate Day 2013 is the first day of Sukkot; start practicing your lulav swordfights! Also it will be none other than Yom Kippur in 2018; I totally want to lein Jonah that year.

Marriage in generalized coordinates

2009-09-16T20:38:00.002-04:00

As I mentioned, wedding-related posts are coming at some point. In the meantime, some meta notes on the topic: liberal/egalitarian Jewish marriage is in a period of ferment. If our evolving civilization is characterized by punctuated equilibrium, we are very much between equilibria at least in this particular area. In a few decades or so, I think things may settle down, but in the meantime, there's no universal standard of how to effect an egalitarian Jewish marriage, either practically or conceptually, and the options are multiplying. This means that everyone who gets married has significant decisions to make. The other night I was speaking to someone else who recently got married, and they were talking about the decisions they had made about these ritual matters, based on the specific constraints of their situation.

I should note that my day job currently includes thinking about Lagrangian mechanics. That night, I got up to use the bathroom, but was still mostly asleep, and in the moments my thoughts were adrift, with the Kiddushin Variations intermingling with the calculus of variations, I had an insight that seemed profound at the same time, and in the morning seemed less profound but still worth blogging:

Devising an egalitarian Jewish wedding ceremony is a variational problem. We each have different constraints, and the goal is to find a trajectory that gets us from the initial point to the final point and (at least locally) extremizes the action. Part of the task that each couple undergoes is choosing the appropriate generalized coordinates that take these constraints into account, and then formulating their Lagrangian. Unfortunately, at that point there are no Euler-Lagrange equations to simplify the calculations (and in any case, the equations of motion aren't solvable analytically), so instead we just have to choose and compare possible trajectories by hand.

Question

2009-09-15T22:34:00.002-04:00

Tonight I got to see Gov. Howard Dean at a health care "town hall meeting" at Busboys and Poets, where he was answering questions about health care from host Kojo Nnamdi and the audience, and signing his book.

This is the question I would have asked, but by the time I thought of it, the line to ask questions was too long, so I didn't bother:

A major argument for the public option is that it provides more competition. Some opponents of the public option have argued that it's not a fair competition, because the government has the ability to subsidize the public option to make it more attractive than private insurance. I want to ask the opposite question: Assuming the public option passes, how do we prevent a future Congress (beholden to the health insurance industry) from deliberately crippling the public option in order to benefit private insurance companies?

Recombobulation Area

2009-09-08T21:22:00.003-04:00

Sorry I haven't been posting. My only excuse is that I've been busy with just about every type of life transition. A few months ago I was an unmarried high school teacher living in New York, and now I'm a married graduate student, college TA, and rebbetzin living in Maryland (a few feet, or a few inches, from the District of Columbia, depending on where in the apartment I'm standing). And the last time I spent two straight weeks in one place was in May, and (as weddings give way to chagim) the next time won't be until (at least) October.

Now that relative stability is in sight, life feels like this picture I took on Sunday at the Milwaukee airport (immediately after going through the "security" line):

So more regular blogging may return at some point. I know some readers were hoping for posts about weddings, and at some point we'll write up what we did, how, and why. In brief: bilateral kiddushin bishtar with tenaim making each kiddushin dependent on the other, symbolic shutafut-style lifting of a bag of rings, and bilateral kinyan sudar with the rings to acquire the obligations of the ketubah. To learn what all those terms mean, stick around for future posts.

In the meantime, with the holidays coming up soon, a related update on a topic near and dear to Mah Rabu: Under the chuppah, in addition to the rings that belonged to my great-great-grandparents Natalie (Hamburger) and Rabbi Leo Baeck (who were married in 1899; the story of how the rings got out of Nazi Germany is undoubtedly spectacular, but no one is alive to tell it), we used two family kiddush cups, one that belonged to my wife's grandfather Abe Richman, and one that belonged to my great-great-great-great-grandfather Rabbi Adolf Wiener (1811-1895). (Yes, in my family tree a Wiener married a Hamburger, foreshadowing their great-great-great-grandson's vegetarian home.) I was inspired by this to google Rabbi Wiener. I knew he had written some books, so I thought he might turn up somewhere, and sure enough, he shows up in the old public-domain Jewish Encyclopedia.

According to his article there, "he advocated ... the abolition of all second days of festivals". So it turns out that, in past posts when I explained my practice of one-day yom tov as minhag avoteinu by describing myself as a "fifth-generation Reform Jew", I wasn't telling the whole truth. I am actually (at least) the seventh generation of my family that has held one day of yom tov!

Overheard at Institute

2009-08-04T20:56:00.000-04:00

"What are we going to do on Thursday night?"
"Rock the fuck out!"
"Pshita! But..."

Jeremiah was a fellowship, he was a good friend of mine

2009-08-04T20:52:00.002-04:00

If you're in the DC area and meet the qualifications, this new fellowship, named after one of our greatest prophets, is a fantastic opportunity! Here's the blurb:

***

Jews United for Justice is proud to partner with the Progressive Jewish Alliance to bring an exciting new social justice training program to DC!
The Jeremiah Fellowship educates and trains a select cohort of young adults (ages 25-35) to become the next generation of Jewish social justice change makers.

Empower yourself through in-depth training in professional and leadership skills .
Expand your knowledge of what Jewish text, tradition, and history have to say about putting ethics into action.
Acquire tangible organizing and activism skills within a Jewish context.
Explore pressing social, political, and economic issues facing our region.
Become a member of a lasting community of vibrant and engaged leaders.
Access a dynamic network of organizers, advocates, rabbis, artists, and renowned scholars.

During the nine-month course, Fellows come together twice monthly to learn different models of putting ethics and values into action, for intimate conversations with leaders in Washington's Jewish and social justice worlds, and for intensive study of Jewish history and texts. Two Fellowship retreats during the year offer in-depth training in professional and leadership skills, study of Jewish tradition and history, and intensive community-building activities. Participants leave the Fellowship with concrete skills in community organizing, activism, and grassroots fundraising, better equipped to pursue their own volunteer work and careers in the social justice field.

We are seeking creative, dynamic, and engaged young Jews who are:

Already volunteer leaders or have leadership potential
Passionate about making our community better
Actively interested in building community
Committed to using the skills gained through the Fellowship

The Fellowship is committed to the diversity of each cohort, and believes that a breadth of experience adds to the richness of the program. People of all Jewish backgrounds are encouraged to apply, and prior knowledge of Hebrew or Jewish texts is not required.

Applications for the Jeremiah Fellowship will be considered on a rolling basis, with a final deadline of September 8th. Submit your application as soon as possible for the best chance of acceptance. For more information and to download an application, go here.

You can also call the JUFJ office at 202-408-1423 or email jeremiah at jufj dot org.

Desperate measures

2009-07-29T12:06:00.001-04:00

One solution to not having the kitchen fully set up yet:

Fast for 25 hours!

Goodbye New York, hello Maryland!

2009-07-16T23:35:00.002-04:00

This is Mah Rabu's first post from its new home just a few feet away from the District of Columbia!

Michael Jackson tribute

2009-07-07T16:30:00.000-04:00

I would be remiss if I didn't link back to this.

Still no Bacon number, though

2009-06-19T00:44:00.001-04:00

Today's xkcd inspired me to investigate my own Erdos number, and I have determined that it is at most 7!

According to this site, Rudolph Marcus (winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in Chemistry) is 4.
Therefore, John R. Miller is 5, Andrew R. Cook is 6, and I'm 7!

Cesspool on the Potomac

2009-06-18T21:20:00.001-04:00

This summer, Mah Rabu is relocating its base of operations to the DC area! More precise details on when and where are still to be determined.

על ידי חופה וקידושין

2009-06-17T19:33:00.003-04:00

Assuming an egalitarian* Jewish paradigm, what do you see as the conceptual differences between kiddushin (eirusin) and nisuin? Should there be a difference?

* defined here as one in which there is no substantive distinction between same-sex and opposite-sex marriage

Oops!

2009-06-16T23:54:00.002-04:00

The new Koren Sacks Siddur (which is, apart from the nitpicking in this post, an impressive work) has a section in the back entitled "A Halakhic Guide to Prayer for Visitors to Israel". Among other things, this includes the various opinions regarding what 2-day-yom-tov observers should do about yom tov when they're in Israel. One of these opinions is (in part):

On the day after Shemini Atzeret (Simhat Torah in the Diaspora, Isru Hag in Israel), one abstains from labor, but says weekday (or Shabbat) prayers (putting on tefillin in the morning, if not Shabbat).

5 points to the first person who catches the error.

A Conspiracy Unmasked

2009-06-15T23:06:00.002-04:00

For the last four years, I've been certain that my students had never discovered this blog. The reason I was so certain was that I figured if the students had seen it, they wouldn't keep quiet about it (but, rather, would be quick to show off their sleuthing). Therefore, by the contrapositive, since I hadn't heard any students talking about the blog, I could be sure they hadn't found it. QED.

Then today, my last day teaching high school for the foreseeable future (last day of classes, that is; we still have exams and such), two students (graduating seniors) told me that they had been enjoying my blog. As in, they've been aware of it for some time (they may even be reading this post) and hadn't mentioned it until now. So I had underestimated their self-control, and/or forgotten that seniors aren't the same as freshmen.

There isn't actually anything incriminating here. As I've said from the beginning, there has always been a possibility that students would find this blog, and even though I don't use my real name on the blog, it's not particularly anonymous (there are plenty of places elsewhere on the Internet that connect my name to this blog). So I don't talk smack here about my students, colleagues, or supervisors, and I don't discuss anything personal that I would worry about falling into the wrong hands. So the biggest consequence of this discovery is that it means the students will find out that teachers have lives outside of school. But it's ok, since they're about to graduate anyway.

Lesson for teachers: Never underestimate your students.

Soon by you

2009-06-11T04:32:00.002-04:00

Being engaged means that, at family weddings, when people say "You're next!!!", it doesn't come off as obnoxious anymore, but just as factual.

Phish 6/4/09 Jones Beach: commentary

2009-06-05T18:46:00.003-04:00

So first of all, my predictions were completely off. It seems that my whole premise (picking songs that hadn't been played since the second hiatus) was off; I only got 3 songs right, and 2 of them were among the 3 I chose that had been played since the hiatus. In the actual setlist, the only songs that hadn't been played since the hiatus (besides Drowned, which I nailed) were Dirt and Meatstick.

Even my realtime predictions were wrong; during Ghost, I could have sworn that they were teasing Seven Below, but they didn't go there.

I was right about the ocean/beach theme, though wrong about the specifics. In addition to Drowned ("Let me get back to the ocean / Let me get back to the sea"), there was Squirming Coil ("Tried yesterday to get away and hitchhiked to the beach"), NICU ("A slipper of sand dollar day at the shore"), Punch You In The Eye ("I come from the land where the oceans freeze /
Spent three long months on the open seas", etc.), and Water in the Sky ("Rising tides and ocean walls"; this song was also no doubt connected to the rain that fell throughout the first set, though by the time they played it to open the second set, the rain had stopped).

Anyway, beyond this little game, it was an amazing show. Phish is really back! Since they've been gone for almost 5 years, I wasn't sure what to expect as far as the scene. I've always had an arm's-length relationship with the scene. I'm into veggie quesadillas, but I don't use drugs or alcohol. (Though if I had to choose between being surrounded by drunk people or stoned people, I'd definitely pick the stoned people. And I'd choose the smell of pot smoke over the smell of cigarette smoke.) The people who changed our flat tire at Coventry get a thumbs up; the people who push and litter get a thumbs down. Anyway, as soon as we arrived in the parking lot, I couldn't get over my shock. It was as if the last 5 years had never happened -- everything was back as it always was (for good and for ill, though probably not as much for ill). I was sort of expecting everyone to be 5 years older (and certainly, many of us are), and figured that the 18-year-olds wouldn't be there, since they were 13 when Phish last played and wouldn't have heard of it. Nope - they were there, and fully acculturated. How did that happen? Have they been selling grilled cheese in the lots of other bands during the interim?

As far as the music, my relationship is not so arm's-length. And all five members of the band were really on. They went to 11 on Divided Sky, which seems to be continuing to develop in that direction - that was how I felt about the "last Divided Sky ever" at the Tweeter Center 8/11/04. Drowned is by The Who, which already went to 11 on everything, so I'd have to say that Phish took it to 13. (So much that the Live Phish release split it into "Drowned" and "Jones Beach Jam". This seems arbitrary, since Ghost also had a Type II jam, but is just listed as a single track. I think it's for copyright reasons -- Drowned is a cover of someone else's song, but Phish can claim Jones Beach Jam as their own composition.) I approve of the two new songs (Ocelot and Time Turns Elastic), and I'll have to listen to them more (especially the latter) to really get them.

Next stop Maryland 8/15/09!

Phish 6/4/09 Jones Beach: setlist

2009-06-05T08:34:00.001-04:00

I:
Grind
The Divided Sky
Ocelot
Squirming Coil
Punch You In The Eye
Dirt
NICU
Ghost*
Antelope

II:
Water in the Sky
Birds of a Feather
Drowned >
Meatstick
Time Turns Elastic
Waste
You Enjoy Myself

E:
Rock and Roll

* glowsticks

Commentary to come later. For now, just wow.