When you write about religion - as I do - one of the things people ask you about the most is Scientology. Because of Scientology's many celebrity members (John Travolta, Tom Cruise, Juliette Lewis, Beck, and Chick Corea, just to name a few), their love for lawsuits against anyone who writes about them, a brilliant South Park episode that gave insight into exactly what the religion's main beliefs are, and the hard work of activist group Anonymous, people who three or four years ago might have dismissed Scientology as just a weird but harmless celebrity religion a la Kabbalah are now asking serious questions about the Church and its practices. While there have been vocal critics - primarily former members who have "blown" (left the church) - on websites like Operation Clambake and The Ex-Scientologist Message Board for decades, it took longer for the mainstream media to investigate the Church. (Notable exceptions would be coverage of the death of Scientologist Lisa McPherson, who died while undergoing a controversial Church process known as the Introspection Rundown, and a landmark 1991 Time magazine article entitled "The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power.")

Now, the St. Petersburg (Florida) Times is running a three-part series on some of the innermost workings of Scientology. Why St. Petersburg? One of Scientology's two largest U.S. centers, the Flag Land Base, is in the nearby town of Clearwater. Residents of the town have often clashed with their Scientologist neighbors, including Shawn Lonsdale, a local photographer and videographer. Lonsdale, who was often harassed by Scientologists when he attempted to take pictures of public spaces in Clearwater, began to research the religion and then became an outspoken critic. He died in a mysterious alleged suicide last year. The Times has often covered Scientology and won a Pulitzer Prize for previous reporting on the Church in 1980.

The first of the three articles was published on June 21 and marks the first time that two former high-ranking Church executives - Mike Rinder and Marty Rathbun - have publicly spoken out against the Church they once were willing to give their lives to. Rinder and Rathbun were, like all Scientology executives, members of the elite Sea Org, in which members sign one billion year contracts. Both blew within the last few years, and until now have remained low profile. Video of both men sharing their experiences - and admitting to committing illegal acts or ordering others to do so - is available on the Times' website alongside the article. However, they reserve their harshest words for David Miscavige, Chairman of the Board of the Religious Technology Corporation (the company that owns the rights to all Scientology trademarks as well as the writings of Church founder L. Ron Hubbard) and the head of Scientology since Hubbard's death. Rinder, Rathbun, and the other ex-Scientologists interviewed for the article, Amy Scobee and Tom De Vocht, talk about how Miscavige repeatedly used physical violence against them and other Church executives, including a sadistic game of "musical chairs" where all losers were informed they'd be sent away to remote Scientology outposts and separated from their families.

While the musical chairs story and other ones like it were well known to critics, this is the first time it has been documented in the mainstream press. Miscavige himself rarely appears in public - although he did serve as best man at Tom Cruise's wedding to Katie Holmes - and refused interview requests from the paper, leaving longtime Scientology spokesman Tommy Davis to do the dirty work. Davis, the son of Scientologist actress Anne Archer, has also reportedly been a victim of Miscavige's emotional and physical abuse.

As someone who has been following Scientology for some time, I highly recommend reading the St. Petersburg Times' well-written and researched reportage. The second part of the series deals with Lisa McPherson's life and death, and the third with more staff abuses. What never fails to surprise me is how, now that so much information about the inner workings and criminal behaviors of Scientology is now public, why they have not yet been investigated by the U.S. government. At the very least, I can hope that articles like this one help educate the public and drastically reduce the number of new converts to the Church.

Aish HaTorah is the largest ultra-Orthodox "outreach" movement outside of Chabad. But unlike Chabad, Big Aish does not reveal that it is an ultra-Orthodox proselytizing organization. Preferably, Big Aish does not want you to know that it is Orthodox at all.  In fact, Big Aish will blatantly lie about it.

Via Failed Messiah,  jweekly reports,

I should have known that a trip advertised on the side of my Facebook page would not be what it seemed, but it just looked so enticing.  How could I not take advantage of a trip to New York (everything but the flight) for only two hundred dollars?  I decided to apply for the Women’s’ Future Jewish Enterprisers two-week trip in New York. [...]

I am a Reform Jew, and I appreciate the denominational diversity of the Jewish people, but I was informed at the beginning of the trip that Aish HaTorah does not have any affiliation with any particular denomination of Judaism, so I was less than thrilled when bombarded with Orthodox Jewish opinions. 

Why does Aish resort to such deceptive techniques? Because they work, and no one that matters in either the Orthodox nor the Liberal/secular Jewish world seems to care. The State of Israel rewarded Aish with Kotel-front property for their efforts to "engage" Anglo-Jewry by hook or by crook.  There are more religiously radical groups than Aish to be sure, but with the one exception, Aish is the most deceptive any major Kiruv organization.

The first prize for deceptive behavior, of course, goes to NCSY. Like Aish, NCSY - the youth group movement of the Orthodox Union - operates under an ecumenical front. The difference is, Aish targets adults, some of whom - like Elizabeth Katzki - are wise to cult-like tactics, even when coming from a Jewish source. But NCSY targets underage students through their Jewish "Student" Union (JSU) in our public schools.   

Not surprisingly, NCSY and Aish HaTorah have a long history of partnership in "outreach."

Birds of a feather flock together.  For them, lying in the name of Kiruv is a higher truth.

At a glance, there really aren't that many "movements" in Judaism. Orthodox, reform, reconstructionist and conservative. That's pretty much it. Sure, there are some variations on this, but compared to the Christian world, Jews like to keep it simple.

Or do we? 

I decided to jump into the proverbial rabbit-hole of Jewish Denominationalism and discovered that there are more ways of being Jewish than there ever have been before.

Secular-As-Balls:

You still don't understand WHY Jews believe in G-d. Frankly, you think the whole "G-d Thing" is irrelevant. There's nothing about being Jewish that requires religion, customs, beliefs, worship, a love for Israel or the Jewish People. But if anyone DARES to slam the Jewish People or pretend that the Holocaust didn't happen, you'll be the first to kick their ass. It's like being an older brother: you can torture your siblings all you want to. But the minute some other kid tries to pick on your kid brother/sister, you're going to pound them into the ground. You express your faith (or lack thereof) by reading Heeb Magazine and going to the opening of the new Jewish Museum in your neighborhood. Just try to avoid the rabbi at all costs!

See: anyone on the Tattoo Jew Facebook Group

Hippiedox:

The product of Orthodox or immigrant parents, you voted for Barak Obama because he's cool like the new iPhone. You tone of voice moves between stoner and yiddishkeit, and your love for Matisyahu at times rivals the Lubavitcher Rebbe. You're more comfortable at Whole Foods than you are around your conservative in-laws, but you still feel a sense of sadness when a non-kosher restaurant opens near your shul. Kabbalah is your favorite pastime, because it's like being on a permanent acid trip.

See: Shemspeed, FrumSatire and "that guy" on the Birthright Israel trip.

 

Chabad-Could-It-Be: Thanks to Chabad's supply chain of eager rabbis, your small town of approximately ten Jews just got an Orthodox shul. Too bad for you that you have a shaved head, love bacon and still don't know what a mezzuzah is. But because you feel a cultural connection to Judaism, you decide to start attending services. You really hate the religio-political attitude of Chabadniks, but because this movement offers you the "real" Judaism that you cannot muster for yourself, you keep going back as an atonement for all the Friday nights you spent playing X-Box instead of reading the Good Book.

See: any Jew living west of the Mississippi river and east of Phoenix, Arizona.

 

Trans(gender) Denominational: You're an activist within Judaism. You want to reform (no pun intended) every corner of the Jewish World. Your obsession with Tikkun Olam really has nothing to do repairing the world as a whole, but instead concentrating on key issues within Judaism. Such examples include gay/lesbian rights, trans-inclusion, gender feminism, environmentalism and animal rights. You can't settle on one shul because they just don't address your "issues". Like a serial monogamist, you fall in love with one synagogue/rabbi and work the hell out of it until there is nothing left, then move onto another hot affair.

See: Union For Progressive Judaism, Barney Frank, and Kosherveg.com.

 

PolitiKosher: You love Israel. In fact, you're IN LOVE with Israel. There's something about the desert, the ruins, the graffiti and the bombs that just gives you this tingling feeling in your stomach. You think the Palestinians are secretly plotting your death and that if Netanyahu could just get his act together, the Messiah will surely come. Hopefully that person is you. Just in case, you've got your passport and a duffle bag filled with tallit ready to go.

See: Friends of the IDF, the Libi Fund and anyone wearing an "I Love The IDF" T-shirt.

 

Deconstructionist Judaism: Innovation is the tradition of the Jewish faith, and you are its greatest champion. You believe that G-d has a great sense of humor and personally marvels at your creative thinking skills. You pioneered such moments in Judaism as the chocolate seder, dog and cat bar mitzvahs, and menorahs hacked together from leftover Ikea stuff. You express your Judaism by taking Jewish ideas and making them better.

See: Moderntribe.com, Rabbi Laura Baum, Mel Brooks.

Many religions approach their movements like a ladder: the higher up you climb, the more "authentic" your faith. And generally speaking, the more conservative practice is usually what you're striving for. Judaism has a motto of horizontally-intergrated faith. A belief that Judaism is not a climb to the top, but rather a continuum that you place yourself on. More liberal? Slide to the left! More Orthodox, then move to the right.

Judaism, for me, is more like a spider web. A spider web starts by having a few pillars to hold it together. From these platforms, the spider is able to weave its web to the center. The purpose: to catch what the spider needs in order to survive. If one of the pillars that the web is connected to simply cannot hold the web, then the creative little spider finds a new anchor. If someone breaks the web from the inside, then the spider repairs it, differently than it was originally created. Still, the web stays intact. And every spider web is different, just like everyone's Judaism.

I've been in Israel for a couple of weeks on a fellowship (more on that to come), and before coming back home to New York I decided to do a quick three day stopover in Istanbul. While friends in Tel Aviv told me Istanbul was a great getaway for a long weekend and the airfare was pretty cheap, I still had some reservations about journeying to a Muslim country. Yes, I'm well aware that Turkey is a pretty secular country, but the reality of being a white Western woman traveling alone makes me a little bit more anxious about any destination. (Note: I am meeting up with a friend here, but I had the first 24 hours to myself. You can stop worrying, Mom.)

After a whole day in Istanbul, I can definitely say it's a beautiful city with helpful people and good food. (You know how pretty much every culture has a food that is potatoes, cheese, and/or meat stuffed inside fried dough? The Turkish one is called a burekha, and it is rad.) I'm staying in a pretty touristy neighborhood, so there are always lots of people walking around on the street and I feel very safe coming and going on my own. I have definitely had to get stern with a couple of men who didn't take the hint that their advances weren't welcome, but this is far from the only country where that's happened. This morning, I got up, caught a bus, and headed over to the Hagia Sophia and Blue Mosque, arguably Turkey's two most famous sites.

So, if lots of the women dress in Western style and people speak English with you, what's the problem with being an American here? The issue, of course, is that I'm not only an American - I'm also a Jew. And, as a Jew, is it right or proper for me to descend eagerly into a mosque, wearing a scarf on my head and snapping photos? As a person who writes often on the subject of religion, it seems logical that I'd want to visit important religious sites all over the world - after all, in Jerusalem I went not only to the Kotel but to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Temple Mount. Is there anything odd about wanting to see in person the famous Hagia Sophia art and architecture that I studied in college? Shouldn't I, as a person of the Book, believe in expanding my knowledge? And does wearing a scarf over my head mean I'm trying to look like a Muslim or that I'm just being respectful of local rules and customs?

At what point, I wondered to myself, does a mosque stop being an art museum or a tourist attraction and start becoming a place of Muslim worship?  As I walked out of the Blue Mosque, I noticed that the guards at the front were not allowing any more tourists to come in. By the time the midday call to prayer began, I was already in a tram, heading back across town.

Recently, on a trip to South Korea, I was moved to tears at a rock formation venerated by Korean shamans.  The place was so holy that the power of it, the energy of it, was immediately apparent and absolutely obvious.  And it moved me to tell a story about irony, idolatry, and nature.

Here's the irony: for many monotheists, nature-centered spirituality smacks of paganism, and thus idolatry.  But for me, being cut off from nature is idolatry.  When I'm surrounded by the noises of the city, and the incessant lures of consumer capitalism, I become diverted from my true self and my spiritual path. 

I'm not such a puritan as to resist the joys of urban life.  Yet those pleasures evoke, sometimes within minutes, a consumption-based perspective of "what do I want and how can I get it" -- the yetzer hara indulged so completely that it becomes invisible, taken for granted.  I define myself in terms of the pleasure or pain that is being provided, and confuse stillness with boredom.  Surrounded by glass and concrete, I lose my connection to my Source, and have to work to get it back.  So, to the extent I still subscribe to monotheism at all, I find it enriched, not compromised, by the spirits in nature my Israelite ancestors sought so hard to erase.

Theoretically, as a nondualist/pantheist/whateverist who thinks that "God is Everything" makes more sense than "God is in Heaven," I shouldn't be so attracted to nature.  My spiritual practice is oriented towards resting in the simple feeling of being, in naked awareness itself, regardless of what perceptions are occurring.  In theory, I should be as at home in a parking lot as in a meadow; awareness is in both.  "Is" -- the way I translate YHVH -- is in both.  And yet, I'm not.

Perhaps the pivot here is that, while we often think of nature as a positive quality, as if it is something added to our experience, I want to suggest that nature is, well, our natural state.  It is urban life that is something added to life as it is, something that covers up the natural state.   Our ancestors lived in conditions more immediate with the facts of natural life than all but the most rugged of our contemporary vacations.  Like other animals, humans are connected to the cycles of time and the seasons.  Yet unlike other animals, we have created an artificial world that defies those cycles.  That world, not "nature," is the change.  The artificial world is the idol we erect between ourselves and everything else.

So it's not that "going into nature" is adding ingredients to the soup of consciousness.  "Going into nature" is subtracting noise.  Maintaining contact with "the simple feeling of being" is easier sometimes than others, and when there is something interposed between the soul and its natural state, and that something is a giant titillation of the selfish inclination, it is more difficult to rest in the omnipresent truth.  Nature does not condition God.  But un-nature tends to block our awareness of Her.

There is, perhaps, even a third irony, which is that I am most able to be monotheistically devotional when I am polytheistically awake.  When God is abstract, I am able to approach God-consciousness with wisdom.  But when God is concrete, and manifest in form, then devotion becomes primary.  When I'm in touch with the various spirits inherent in natural settings, my heart opens, and my religious soul awakens.  The fact that the spirit in question resides in a sacred mountain venerated by shamans might trouble some monotheists, but at this point in my journey, the particular form in which God/dess manifests is much less important than the energy of the manifestation itself.  I am a more ardent Jew -- that is to say, a more heart-centered and devotional one -- when I am in sacred spaces, regardless of the particular traditions which venerate them.

More ardent -- and more firmly grounded in what matters.  In my experience, religion denuded of religious experience is likely to have a very short lifespan.  Of course, I know that many people are not interested in spiritual experiences, and do not want to have them.  I didn't have them myself, until a few years ago.  Ten years ago, if someone had told me they visited a shamanic rock and felt a surge of sacred energy, I would raise my eyebrows and confess that such experiences were not part of my spiritual path.  But because I have trained, investigated, and explored, they are now.  And as a result, I feel closer to, not farther from, the essence of religious life.

My intent is not to pronounce judgment on those who worship an abstract God, or an imaginary father figure derived solely from Scripture.  I have also experienced God in traditional monotheistic ways -- as a father figure, concerned with righteousness and integrity -- and I appreciate that experience.  But I appreciate it because it is an experience, not because it happens to conform with a text or tradition.  It sits alongside my experiences of Goddess-in-the-form-of-nature-spirit, God-as-emptiness, Spirit-as-eros, and so on.  Thus the last of my ironies is that precisely because I remain a monotheist, I am committed to the holiness of all of these encounters. 

I confess, the spirit of the sacred mountain does not feel to me like the spirit in the ancient tree; they do indeed seem like separate, distinct things, and if I were differently inclined, I might well describe some as sacred, others as profane.  But I am not so inclined.  I want to know the sacred in all of its garbs, recognizing all our concepts and maps as so many attempts to interpret the uninterpretable.  The counter-intuitive and revolutionary proposition of monotheism is that beneath all those forms, there is One Reality.  And to me, the necessary consequence of that proposition is that all religious forms gesture at the truth.  Of course, the interpretations we provide may well lead us astray from monotheism.  But before and beneath those interpretations, there is the experience, and that is where truth resides.

I want to suggest that, today, monotheism needs the paganisms of nature in order to fight the new paganism of commercial capitalism, with its deification of desire and its technologies of satisfaction.  Against the market, God doesn't stand a chance, unless religion offers a tangible alternative to Mammon -- and that means experience.  Indeed, we are seeing in our times a return to non-rational experience, to spirituality, and to personal mystical encounters with the Divine.  This trend is both for better and for worse -- all these moves are often couched in fundamentalist religious language, or still more crusader-like zeal.  But if we open the doors to multiple forms and sources of inspiration, monotheistic religion can be radically pluralistic, rather than imperialistic, and, above all, deeply powerful.  Dry religion cannot be felt -- but nature religion can.  Let's open our hearts to the spirits of the rocks and the trees.  They will forgive us our trespasses against them.  We need them.

"The most important thing in this portion is seldom noticed," Rabbi Solomon ibn Uzair said, as he lay on a pile of cushions beside his lover Joseph. A small scroll of the Torah lay open in front of them, rolled to the beginning of the book of Shemot. Beyond the rabbi's study, in the square below, they could hear the sounds of the market, heavy wooden wheels of carts, and the horses that pulled them, sounding on the hard dry earth of summer. The cacophony of shoppers' voices, the cry of vendors calling out their wares, all mixed together and rose up into the room, bringing the heat of day into that chamber, lit only by the shafts of light that poured through the open lattice-work shutters.

"And what is that?" Joseph the younger man asked his lover, running a slim dark hand over the rabbi's forearm, running against the grain of coarse hair, his own hand then stopping over the page, like a golden yad above the text, pointing. The rabbi smiled and let his own hand caress his partner's shoulder. "Joseph, you aren't paying attention to what I told you last week, when we were finishing Bereshit."

"How can I pay attention, when the day is so hot and dusty?" Solomon leaned over the young man to grab a pitcher off the small round copper table that sat beside the divan. Tall and thin, the pitcher of green glass was filled with water, which he poured into the two empty cups on the table.

"You mean the water?" Joseph asked. "There's water in Bereshit and now there's water here, the river." The rabbi smiled. "You've got the right idea. But go back to the text and read for me." Stumbling over the Hebrew words, Joseph read the first passage. The room was still. He could feel his lover's impatience with him, in the controlled rasp of his breathing. These were moments when he hated Solomon, only five years older, but acting as if he were the wisest man in all of Jewry. He glared at him for a moment. The older man's hand extended over the open scroll, about to point out what he had missed.

"Don't! Let me find it," Joseph snapped. Solomon pulled back his hand. He hated it when his temper rose, especially when it rose up against Joseph, so sweet, so good to him. Without waiting, Joseph dived back into the text. He read slowly, with an edge of hostility in his voice. And then he came to the beginning of the story about Moses, to the fifteenth word, and the sixteen. "Ki Tov!" "That's it, isn't it? That's what you wanted me to see. That Bereshit begins with God saying Ki Tov about creation, and now, at the very beginning of Shemot, Moses's mother says that about her baby son!"

Solomon reached out a broad hand and rumpled Joseph's hair. Usually when he did that Joseph hated it. "I'm not your horse," he'd snap, "so get your fingers out of my mane." But this time, the heat, the words of Torah, and the tender warmth of his lover's dark hand, telling him that he'd learned the lesson of the day, made him smile, grab that hand, pull it to his mouth and sink his teeth into the web between Solomon's thumb and index finger. "Ouch!" the rabbi shouted, pulling his hand away. But Joseph grabbed it back and licked where his teeth marks remained. "Ki Tov," he whispered, then licked it again, as Solomon, with his other hand, rolled up the scroll of the law and placed it on the table.

 

Why do we pray? What do we pray for?

Liturgy raises the most fundamental theological questions, daily, if we pay attention. But we rarely do. We are born into or find a denomination, are born into or find a congregation, and learn its liturgy.

Often—too often—the prayers become rote. But not for everyone. Because if you read the texts, actually read them, you will often find a language that is unbearable: an angry, vindictive God; a masculine universe; and an abstract language of praise completely disconnected from the world we know—the world of plants and animals, friends and family, love and loss.

Some of us can mask these uncomfortable words behind a linguistic veil, chanting Hebrew or Aramaic we do not understand or allowing ourselves to forget the meaning and find comfort, even uplift, in the familiarity of old niggun communally sung. However, especially for those whom conventional prayer excludes, the very act of praying can become agony, a struggle (agony’s root: agon) between words on the page and words in the heart.

Queer liturgy arises out of the particular struggle of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people to find their own voices in prayers that are meaningful for their lives. Queer liturgy attempts to answer the theological questions hidden behind the solid wall of conventional prayer: why pray? What to pray for? To Whom do we pray?

Why call this liturgy “queer” instead of “lgbt” or some other set of acronyms? The word “queer,” reclaimed from decades of abusive use, reminds us that sexuality and gender are not fixed. “Queer” suggests that lines are always a bit fuzzy and a bit curved, that nothing ever is quite as “straightforward” as it seems. Queer liturgy begins in identity but does not remain there: it is a liturgy that keeps moving, keeps questioning.

 

Why Pray?

Queer liturgy insists upon prayers that are intimately personal, prayers that allow us to speak directly as ourselves to a God who is approachable. In the remainder of this essay, I will take as examples prayers from Siddur Sha’ar Zahav, a new LGBT siddur which I was privileged to help edit and guide to completion as project manager.

Here is a prayer to be read before lighting candles on Friday night, a prayer that asserts the direct, personal connection between the person who prays and the God to whom prayer is directed:

 

I draw Your energy toward me with my hands before

Covering my face with Your warmth, and at once it

Seeps through my eyelids, into my blood vessels,

Soothing organs that have held the week’s anxieties

And uncertainties, pouring in stillness and

Timelessness, bringing me closer to myself.

Blessed are You, O God, whose light comes to life in

Friday evening’s burning flames.

 

This prayer draws upon the custom of lighting the Shabbat candles, drawing their light towards the eyes with hand gestures, and then closing the eyes. The custom of closing the eyes began to ensure that as we bless the candles, they are not “working” to provide us with light. Here, however, the gesture is reinterpreted as one that removes anxieties and draws one closer to oneself. And that self is not some abstract someone but a person of flesh and blood, organs and vessels, in need of healing and prayer. Why pray? To bring God into my life.

 

The One Who Prays

Queer liturgy is adamant about recognizing the person who prays. Who is that person? Torah tells us that each of us is created b’tselem elohim, in the image of God. We are each of us holy. 

Leviticus chapter 19 is known in Judaism as the “Holiness Code” because of its many commandments regarding human relationships and dietary laws, including the prohibition against sodomy. The following prayer, by Rabbi Lisa Edwards, reframes sexual and gender identity in the fuller context of the chapter:

Example:

 

On Holiness

We are your gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered children:

 

You must not seek vengeance, nor bear a grudge against the children

of your people. (LEVITICUS 19:18)

 

We are your bi, trans, lesbian, and gay parents:

Revere your mother and father, each one of you. (LEVITICUS 19:3)

 

We are elderly lesbians, bisexuals, gay men, and transgendered people:

You shall rise before the aged and show deference to the old.

(LEVITICUS 19:32)

 

We are the stranger:

You must not oppress the stranger.

You shall love the stranger as yourself, for you were strangers in the

land of Egypt. (LEVITICUS 19:34)

 

We are lesbian, gay, trans, and bi Jews:

You must not go about slandering your kin. (LEVITICUS 19:16)

 

We are your trans, gay, bi, and lesbian siblings:

You shall not hate your brother or sister in your heart.

(LEVITICUS 19:17)

 

We are lesbian, gay, trans, and bi victims of gay-bashing and murder:

You may not stand idly when your neighbor’s blood is being shed.

(LEVITICUS 19:16)

 

We are your bi, gay, trans, and lesbian neighbors:

You must not oppress your neighbor. (LEVITICUS 19:13)

You must judge your neighbor justly. (LEVITICUS 19:15)

You shall love your neighbor as you love yourself. (LEVITICUS 19:18)

 

Precursors of Difference

The aim of creating a liturgy that speaks to us, now, today, is not really an innovation. Many of our prayers were written in Aramaic because Aramaic was the lingua franca of the Second Temple period—these were prayers meant to be said by ordinary Jews in the pews, not by the priests in the Temple. Many of the most beautiful prayers in our siddurim, the piyyut, were written in the middle ages in order to bring more spiritual uplift and beauty to a collection of largely formulaic prayers. The entire Kabbalat Shabbat service was added by the kabbalists of Safed in the 16th century to inject a sense of spiritual oneness into the Shabbat service.

In the 19th century, nationalists added prayers for country and state; rationalists began reworking prayers as they questioned theological principles like the chosenness of the Jewish people.

The most significant change to the liturgy since the kabbalists was the work of feminists in our own time. When we think of feminist liturgy, we may think mainly of new rituals like the revival of rosh chodesh as a women’s holiday, or we may focus on the egalitarian language feminists introduced to more accurately represent a God without gender. The most significant innovation that feminists brought to liturgy has been our effort to reconnect the personal with the spiritual (just as, in the secular world, we reconnected the personal with the political).

A strong non-canonical liturgical tradition of women’s prayers flourished through the last millennium. Often these were very personal prayers connected to childbirth and lifecycle events. Contemporary feminists brought back that tradition by creating prayers that connect aspects of our daily lives to God. For example:

 

On Being A Woman

The moon is inside me,

Rage, joy, sadness, love –

They cycle, crescent, gibbous.

 

When young, I could not control

This wash of blood and light.

With age – and your help, Shechinah –

I can direct these currents,

Ride them to new shores.

 

Shechinah, give me wisdom

To find power in my cycles.

Bless you, Mother of us all,

For giving women the strength of the tides.

 

Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender liturgists have carried this feminist model into their own liturgy, creating prayers that recognize the uniqueness of the lgbt experience. These prayers are rooted in identity difference, yet refuse to name specific difference. Instead, queer liturgy embraces difference and uniqueness as qualities, celebrating that which makes each individual b’tselem elohim, an image of God.

 

Unique In The World

My God, I thank You for my life and my soul and my body; for my name, for

my sexual and affectionate nature, for my way of thinking and talking. Help

me realize that in my qualities I am unique in the world, and that no one like

me has ever lived: for if there had ever before been someone like me, I would

not have needed to exist. Help me make perfect my own ways of love and

caring, that by becoming perfect in my own way, I can honor Your name, and

help bring about the coming of the Messianic age.

 

If feminists—at least some feminists—focused on bringing women into the liturgy, queer liturgists want every Jew to feel welcome, no matter what their sexuality or gender, no matter what their race or religion of birth.  As Jay Michaelson notes, LGBT people have suffered enough exclusion that the aim is to be inclusionary whenever possible. 

Here is an example of a prayer familiar to us from the Shabbat evening liturgy, the “vShamru,” reconceived to remind each of us of the commandment to observe Shabbat. The Hebrew calls on “b’nei Yisraeil” to celebrate Shabbat. In Hebrew, the plural is formed from the masculine noun, so that the word for “children” and “sons” is the same. What if a minyan of women reciting this prayer? What if we do not identify as either sons or daughters, as either male or female? Why not open up the language to numerous possibilities:

 

V’sham-ru v’nei Yis-ra-eil…

V’sham-ru v’not Yis-ra-eil…

V’sham-ru a-dot Yis-ra-eil…

V’sham-ru ke-lal Yis-ra-eil…

et ha-sha-bat, la-a-sot et ha-sha-bat

l’do-ro-tam brit o-lam.

 

 Keeping Shabbat

The sons of Israel / The daughters of Israel…

The communities of Israel / All of Israel…

shall keep Shabbat, observing Shabbat

in all generations as a covenant for all time.

 

In a queer context, the service leader might choose any of these options—or, more likely, will encourage the community to sing the option that most meets their needs. The resulting mix of words and voices creates unity from difference, the harmony of multiple identities woven together.

 

Beyond Identity

But queer liturgy moves beyond identity politics, since the experiences of lgbt people also invokes theological problems. Who is chosen? How do we trust the words of Torah when Torah prohibits our love?

The most radical aspect of queer liturgy may be its refusal to answer these theological questions. Queer liturgy is about questioning, not answering. It is defiantly non-canonical. At Sha’ar Zahav, the most significant argument around the new siddur was whether in fact to publish the siddur at all. As long as our prayerbook was stapled and Xeroxed, congregants argued, it could be easily changed, while a hardcover might look like an impenetrable canonical text.

That reluctance to fix prayers is echoed in a reluctance to resolve theological problems. In the v’Shamru, for example, “bnei,” “sons,” is not replaced by a neutral term, but rather offered alongside other options. Likewise, multiple names of God are used in English for the unspeakable Name, including Adonai (Lord, a masculine name), Shechinah (Presence, a feminine name) and God (the English neutral).

Like the Reconstructionist liturgy, queer liturgy questions theology that seems to exclude rather than include. For example, why must we pray, in the Aleinu, that we have been chosen by God from among all other people? One way to address such questions is to change the text, to change “from” others to “with” others. Queer liturgy, however, prefers to leave the root text because we understand that prejudice cannot just be ignored—it must be addressed. Alongside of offering a language change for the Aleinu, why not also offer a new Aleinu that reworks the theme, thanking God for choosing lgbt people, making us “different from all others,” with unique gifts to offer? This playful—though serious--response addresses the theological question without answering it.

Queer liturgy often includes prayers that question why we pray, that question Torah, that question God. Queer liturgy includes commentaries that suggest we might not want to take prayers for granted, might want to change them or even discard them. For example, Siddur Sha’ar Zahav includes an alternative Amidah that is a Contemplation for Non-Believers.

What may be most moving, however, are prayers like these from the Remembrance section. Here we have another example of the personal as spiritual, a direct address of the individual to God in the prophetic mode: angry, defiant, but still engaged.

 

On Leaving Me Angry

It says in the Amidah that You revive the dead. What good does that do for

me now, God? Now You have taken, much too soon and far too cruelly, one

whom I love and long for.

 

To put death in Your world and not fully explain why – why trees fall, why

mountains crumble, why whales sink into the abyss and our beloved ones

vanish – leaves me twice mad, God: once at death, and once at You, Creator

and Destroyer.

 

And I cannot say, Amen.

 

For An Unresolved Relationship

Your memory is blessed in anger and in love. Both fill the space of your

absence in equal, imperfect measure, for how else could I honor the truth of

your life or of mine?

 

In struggle born of love our boundless and dangerous hearts sanctified each

other with rage’s improbable grace. I cannot now forget how each hand of these

feelings fed the other if it is really you I want to remember. My anger, like my

love, is also sacred. With them both I bless your stilled and silent body, your

still and silenced breath.

 

Queer liturgy brings back the prophets. It brings back an engagement with God on God’s own holy ground. How Jewish is that?

 

The flaw of Big Kiruv is ultimately the same one that has ravaged traditional Judaism for centuries. It is why we left in the first place. It is why today, most Jews are not Orthodox, and will never be Orthodox, despite Liberal Jewry's rapid attrition, and the high birthrate of the frum. A difference between the normative Orthodox "ex-Os" and  the "baal teshuvahs" (newly ultra-Orthodox) is that the latter are not brought up with this nonsense and do not have the same familial restraints, so their fallout is naturally much higher as the truth fights its way to the surface despite every possible appeal and exhortation. And even with the BTs (baal teshuvahs) that stay, many of their children and grandchildren return to the secularism and Liberal Judaism of their ancestors for this very reason. Once you have seen the light, it's out there. There's no submerging it forever.

The fatal flaw of Big Kiruv on one foot is:

Kiruv recruits are told that they are learning how to serve God. But in the end, they are taught how to serve rabbis.

All else is commentary about this inherent structural flaw of traditional and fundamentalist Judaism.

"Faith of Our Fathers" is a rousing hymn that never fails to inspire even the weakest of voices to roar.  I well remember singing it in church with my family, the words and the swelling music eliciting from deep in my soul a feeling of passionate faith: 

Faith of our fathers, living still,
in spite of dungeon, fire, and sword;
O how our hearts beat high with joy
whene'er we hear that glorious word!
Faith of our fathers, holy faith!
We will be true to thee till death.

The fathers that it referred to were, I assumed, my own Christian ancestors as well as the larger Christian world, for we, and only we, were people of faith.  By definition, if you didn't believe in Jesus, you weren't Christian.  Therefore, you didn't have faith.  As I got older, I reluctantly would agree that there were non-Christians who had faith -  but not the right kind of faith, not the kind that I had, not faith in Jesus. 

But then, for various reasons, I lost that faith.  And if I no longer believed in Jesus, was it possible to have any kind of faith? 

It was then that I became more interested in "our fathers", the Biblical patriarchs and the original "fathers" of monotheism who pre-dated Jesus, and who obviously had faith in God.  They also pre-dated the events at Mt. Sinai and therefore there was no temple, no holy days, no required sacrifices, no laws on purity and impurity with respect to everything from food to sex to clothing, none of the rules and regulations that the three monotheistic faiths all now require.   These guys didn't really pray, they just sort of talked to God when God came around or when they wanted something.  Nor was the afterlife or being saved a part of this early theology.  It would be difficult to say exactly what these fathers had "faith" in, aside from this one God who was interested in their lives and Who'd created the universe.  Abraham's was a nascent faith, and seemed to simply assert that faithfulness will be rewarded with land and progeny. 

"Faith of our Fathers," written by Frederic William Faber, an Anglican priest who converted to Catholicism, was composed against the backdrop of the Anglican Church's persecution of Catholics in the time of Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth I.   Many of my Jewish friends remain puzzled by this propensity Christians have had to kill fellow Christians, simply for being a different type of Christian.  No matter how much you may disagree with another Jew, you will ignore your temptation to annihilate him, and content yourself with calling him a shmo.  We don't have any extra Jews to spare, first of all, and second, there's no central authority in Judaism that monolithically dictates how each person should practice his faith and so, though we might not like the other's stance or agree with it, but we don't take it personally and wouldn't kill you just because you eat bacon sandwiches - on white bread. 

It's not that there aren't Jews who are passionate about their faith.   But Christianity is literally based on "The Passion" - Jesus' crucifixion.  As a result, getting people to believe in Jesus' deity and thereby be saved is quite important.   In Judaism, when religious arguments do break out, it's more of an intellectual exercise - fencing for the soul - in which you try to poke a hole in the other person's logic, not in order to be right, but just for the mental stimulation of it. 

At a bar mitzvah not long ago, the bar mitzvah boy went into a very long, complicated and scholarly explanation of the Biblical text he'd studied.  It was like hearing a legal brief - there was one rabbinic citation after another.  Not only was it painfully boring, but I didn't spy God anywhere in any of the gobbledygook he'd said.  It had clearly been more about displaying his mental acuity than it was about discussing where God was in his life.  For me, I couldn't help wondering: What's the point?  Seriously.  Sure, you can be a Jew culturally and historically, but when you leave religion or faith out of it, Jews are no different than Armenians or Finns or any other ethnic group in the world.   

When I converted, I became a "bat Abraham," daughter of Abraham, and that is true.  Normative Judaism rarely makes my heart "beat high with joy," and I often feel it lacks the spiritual depth that I expect from religion.   Abraham, on the other hand, "had faith in the Lord," and God "found his heart faithful and made a covenant with him."  

Faith of our fathers, we will love
both friend and foe in all our strife;
and preach thee, too, as love knows how
by kindly words and virtuous life...

Happy Father's Day to Abraham, the father of three monotheistic faiths.

           

 

“The Holocaust is a uniquely Jewish event.” So sayeth Assemblyman Dov Hikind, representative of Brooklyn.

You might not be aware that Nazi Germany, in addition to murdering six million Jews, also managed to snuff out the lives of some five million other undesirable groups: gays, Roma (gypsies), and Jehovah’s Witnesses just to name a few. If you weren’t aware of that, it’s probably due in large part to the efforts of people like Dov Hikind.

The occasion for Hikind’s remarks is a plan that would honor gays and other non-Jewish victims of Nazi persecution at Brooklyn’s Holocaust Memorial Park. You’ve probably seen a memorial like the one in Brooklyn. They exist all over the country, virtually anywhere a sizable population of Jews reside. It hardly matters that the Holocaust didn’t happen here. Hikind and others in the Jewish community have made it a communal mission for several decades now to commemorate the deaths of 6 million Jews at the hands of Hitler’s minions.

Good for them. I’m a fan of remembering the Holocaust. I think it’s a significant part of our history, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, and we have much to learn from it. As with all shameful moments in human history, it can be tempting to turn away from it, bury it, pretend it could never happen again. It is critically important that we not bury it, not forget it, if only because it certainly can happen again.

During World War II we marched Japanese-Americans into internment camps. After 9/11 we didn’t have to march Arab-Americans and other Muslim citizens into camps. But we did persecute them in a similar manner. In a moment of fear, we repeated our historic mistakes.

To avoid this, we study history. That is why it is there, recorded for posterity. That is how we learn.

That is why Hikind is an unlearned fool.

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This is the third installment in the saga of Noah, a secular Jew who is happily engaged to a non-Jewish woman, and his baal teshuvah cousin Moishe. Moishe emailed Noah to express his displeasure with Noah's choice of a bride, and Noah wrote back basically telling his cousin to go play in traffic.. Now, Moishe has emailed his own mother ("Mother") and Noah's mom Rachel, hoping to pull them into his battle for Noah's eternal soul.As before, not a single word or misspelled word has been changed.

Subject: hi HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!

This is a special birthday message to you to give you a very great present- namely coaching on this very important matter to give it the proper focus and energy and intention it deserves!!

I have timed things perfectly as I have now successfully 'tilled the soil' sufficient enough for you each to share your true feelings with Noah.

The truth is before one sews seeds one must take a perfectly goo dpeice of land and rip it up quite a bit and so now the ground is soft for you to plant our delicate seed Rachel, please do so with care.

Rachel,
I recommend, especially after seeing his having written that you could care less and you don't believe in G-d, that you tell him the truth about how it saddens you, and weakens you, and that you don't feel good at all about supporting the endeavor in any way and that you were only merely resigned to having to say 'what can I do'

Mother, I recommend you tell Noah the truth about your loss, my lack of a Father, your lack of a husband and that you admit that had your parents or grandparents been clear to you about not supporting you to go through with it, that you likely would not have as you respected your parents and what they told you.

Furthermore, I recommend you get clarification as to what Noah meant when he made the claim as to the 'crazy women that raised me' what he meant by that.

Continue reading...

The news of the shooting at the United States Holocaust Museum yesterday reached me as I was en route to the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York to rehearse for that evening's program -- Freedom Songs -- a celebration of the shared African-American and Jewish musical heritage.

I was honored to be sharing the bill with Joshua Nelson, an African-American Jew known as the Jewish Prince of Gospel Music. As my own musical journey had recently led me to a collaboration with the soulful Green Pastures Baptist Choir, led by Reverend Roger Hambrick, I have been humbled by the magic that unfolds each time we perform in public, the combined richness of both spiritual traditions finding a perfect home in the music composed by my late father, the great Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach.

Though I knew that a Jewish site had been targeted by a racist murderer, I was still startled to find a squadron of police cars camped outside the Museum of Jewish Heritage at the scenic tip of Manhattan, overlooking the Statue of Liberty. Vigilant police officers stood outside their vehicles and a Fox News truck was parked nearby...to capture any additional violence by local lunatics, I thought grimly.

Once inside, I learned from museum personnel that a number of school groups had cancelled their trips that day and that the concert might also have cancellations. Shrugging, the arriving musicians began unpacking, setting up and starting to rehearse.  The image of the police cars outside did not leave my eyes, no matter how many times I wished it away. Standing backstage as the auditorium filled up, I heard the news that Stephen Tyrone Johns had died in the line of duty, guarding the United States Holocaust Museum.

Shortly thereafter, I found myself on stage, performing with the talented Joshua Nelson, singing my heart and soul out with the beautiful singers of the Green Pastures Baptist Choir, this group of African-Americans who believe in the music of my father and its power to unite humankind.

"Return again," we sang last night. "Return again. Return to the land of your soul."

Yesterday afternoon, an African-American man died protecting a museum in Washington, DC. built as a monument against racism. Standing on the auditorium stage of the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City last night -- side by side with my African-American brothers and sisters -- I looked beyond the footlights and saw an auditorium filled with men, women and children of all colors and faiths whose combined voices wove a bulletproof vest against hatred.

One of my favorite SNL characters is "Debbie Downer," who was played by Rachel Dratch during her tenure on the show. Debbie Downer, for those unfamiliar with the skits, always ruined people's birthdays and happy celebrations by bringing up bad news or scary statistics. Looking into this week's parashah, Behalotecha, we witness the entire tribe in full "Debbie Downer" mode, kvetching with the strength of Olympic athletes to Moses about of all things -- the lack of diversity in their diets. The Israelites cry to Moses about their cravings for the particular foods they sampled so readily in Egypt, "We remember the fish that we ate in Egypt free of charge, the cucumbers, the watermelons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic. But now, our souls are dried out, for there is nothing at all; we have nothing but manna to look at" (Numbers 11:5-6).

After reading the tribe's complaints to Moses, a reader is perplexed at the Israelites' critiques. The rabbis of our Jewish tradition teach that the Hebrew word for Egypt, Mitzrayim, connotes narrowness or restriction. In Egypt, the Israelites' lives were constricted both spiritually and physically. Not only were tribe members forbidden from worshipping God or practicing their religious customs and traditions, they were also vulnerable to physical abuse or death at the hands of their taskmasters.In the desert, it was a completely different story. During their journeys in the desert, the tribe witnessed the splitting of the Red Sea and received the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai. These were just two of the many moments at which they felt a great spiritual connection to God. In Egypt, the Israelites often complained that they had felt abandoned by God during their suffering. However, in the desert, the tribe was shadowed by a special cloud which was dispatched by God. This special cloud guided them in the right direction during their travels and affirmed God's concern for the tribe's well-being. While it is certain that the tribe grew to like certain foods from their time in Egypt, they ate all of their meals in freedom during their travels in the desert. Instead of depending on their taskmasters for access to food or slaving away to produce Egyptian crops, the Israelites' basic human needs for nourishment were taken care of by God. They were sustained by a plentiful supply of manna, a special food source which was grinded to make cakes.  Although the people complained about the taste of the manna, rabbinic sources teach that the manna actually tasted like whatever a person desired. Even though the manna apparently did not taste like cucumbers, watermelons, leeks, onions, and garlic, it's important to remember the tribe still had access to hundreds of different tastes and textures!

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The Holocaust Museum murder and the murder of Dr. George Tiller at his church in Wichita share several characteristics:

Both men who have been accused of the murders have long histories of involvement with ultra-right-wing political-religious groups like the Christian Identity movement. Both might, therefore, have been labeled "Christian terrorists" by the media as various other murderers have been labeled "Muslim terrorists  or "jihadis." So far as I know, this has not happened. I would add, "Thank God" for this restraint, if I thought the media would abandon that kind of labeling for every such incident.

I must admit, however reluctantly, that the media won't abandon religious labels because there is a seed of truth in them. Something about the mysterium tremendum that is at the heart of religious experience is somehow engaged in murders like these. Not only did the alleged perpetrators base some claim to legitimacy in their religious beliefs, but both attacks were aimed at sacred places: the Lutheran church in Wichita, one formally designated "sacred" by our customs; the other, the Holocaust Museum, treated essentially as a place of pilgrimage and awe even more than as a place of education.

The fact is that all our religious traditions (even Buddhism: see under "Sri Lanka") have streaks and strands of blood woven in their fabrics. Even though most of us experience a special twinge of horror when religion is invoked as the justification for murder and when a "sacred" place is the scene for murder, every tradition has been guilty of "playing God," taking the name of God in vain in order to commit acts of violence.

How can both these impulses - the impulse to celebrate our own "god" through murder and our impulse to be horrified by violence in God's Name or in God's Place -- co-exist within us?

It is because each tradition passionately teaches community in celebration of the One. Then proponents of each tradition meet other folks who claim also to be honoring The One but have a totally different set of words, symbols, metaphors, practices. THEY must not only be wrong about their connection with the One; they must be lying about it. Demonic falsehood!

It is clear that we need to strengthen that twinge of horror at "religious" violence" into a torrent. Every one of our traditions needs first to unpeel the truth of its own bloody streaks, -- in bloody texts and bloody actions -- and do penance for them.

We must not only apologize, but publicly mourn the deaths that have been committed in our name, as well as the deaths we have suffered. Lutherans horrified by the murder of a Lutheran in a church on Pentecost Sunday need to grieve the deaths of Jews who were demonized by Luther and murdered by Lutherans. Jews outraged by a murderous attack on the Holocaust Museum and by murderous attacks on civilians in Sderot need to mourn the deaths of hundreds of Palestinian civilians killed by Jewish bombs.

After looking our selves in the mirror, each of our traditions, our communities, needs to make much clearer its prohibition on violence, not only within the circle of its family but toward us all, each other. No more chaplains should be hired by the military-instead, but independent clergy should instead challenge each soldier to stop killing. Congregations that observe Memorial Days and Armistice Days should mourn not only the dead but the system that killed them.

May the One Who makes harmony in the ultimate reaches of the universe teach us to make some harmony within ourselves, among ourselves, for our own tribe and for all the unique and glorious tribes that You have shaped upon our planet.

Rabbi Arthur Waskow is director, The Shalom Center http://www.shalomctr.org; co-author, The Tent of Abraham; author  of  Godwrestling - Round 2, Down-to-Earth Judaism,  and a dozen other books on Jewish thought and practice, as well as books on US public policy.  The Shalom Center  voices a new prophetic agenda in Jewish, multireligious, and American life. To receive the weekly on-line Shalom Report, click on  http://www.shalomctr.org/subscribe

 

Last week, we posted an email sent to "Noah," a Jewish guy about to marry his non-Jewish girlfriend "Sheila," by his ultra-Orthodox cousin "Moishe." Moishe vehemently - and inarticulately - disapproved of Noah's choice and sent him an email encouraging him to break off the engagement. Here is Noah's response.

Moishe,

While I was saddened by this email, sadly I was not surprised. I'm going to let you in on a little secret.  You've always sort of been a family joke.  That wacky cousin, who could never keep a job and kept looking for meaning in his life, bouncing from false hope to false hope (think about how much time you wasted on EST, seriously, how stupid do you have to be to believe in that crap.)   Everyone sort of humored you and thought it was funny, while wondering when you would actually grow up and start acting like a man.  I understand it was difficult without having your father involved daily in your life.

Let me be perfectly clear, I don't believe in god.  I'm culturally Jewish, I honor and appreciate the traditions, but I am not religious in any sense of the word.   So you can continue being the family joke as long as you want.  As a relative I wish you nothing but happiness.  As a man I shake my head in disgust at your utter lack of substance and accomplishment. 

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Today we mourn the death of Dr. George Tiller, a physician who has been murdered for making it possible for women to actually use their constitutional right to choose an abortion.

All honor to Dr.Tiller, who joins the list of martyrs for ethical decency and human rights, killed for healing with compassion. Dr. Tiller is a religious martyr in the fullest classical sense,  killed in his own church as he arrived to worship, killed for acting in accord with his religious commitments and his moral and ethical choices. (The American Jewish Congress has also condemned this murder).

And all dishonor to those vicious attackers like Bill O'Reilly who have egged on the kind of violent acts that finally murdered Dr. Tiller.  And who have blasphemously invoked the name of God to justify these incitements to murder. 

The Torah's only comment on abortion makes utterly clear that it is not murder.  (In Exodus 21:22-23 we read that if someone causes an abortion but does no other harm to the mother, the agent owes a monetary recompense to the father for the loss of his potential offspring. If the mother is killed, however, a life has been killed. This passage makes clear that while the fetus is a potential person, not just tissue, it is not considered to be a human being.)

I recognize that other religious traditions do claim abortion is murder, but I both disagree with their theology and think they have no right to impose it on mine,  by state power or by murder. Two real-life cases of abortion have shaped my judgement of the practice.

One of these real-life cases of abortion happened in my own family. My father's mother-my grandmother--had already birthed five young boys when she became pregnant again in 1914.  She hoped to be able to concentrate her energy on raising those five instead of birthing more. Because abortions were illegal, she had a "back-alley" abortion--and it killed her.  So she was unable to raise any of them.  Her early death cast a shadow over my father's life till his own dying day.

The second case is that one of my friends and teachers, a great and eminent rabbi, who was the child of a mother who fled Vienna after Hitler annexed Austria. His mother was pregnant when the family needed to leave, and they knew that the underground "railroad" to freedom was bound to be too arduous for a  pregnant woman. The choices were: staying in Austria, to die together; leaving her behind, to die alone; or aborting the fetus, so that all of the family had a chance to live. She had an abortion. Today my rabbi friend says they thought then and ever since that she had given birth to the whole family.

I wish that President Obama, when he spoke at Notre Dame,  had said explicitly what these stories teach me: that women are moral beings, possessed of moral agency and responsibility in this unique situation where their own bodies are intertwined with another's; and that the lives of women would be endangered if abortion were criminalized again.

He chose instead to say only that the choices are difficult  and that unwanted pregnancies should be  minimized. The best way to minimize unwanted pregnancies would be if our culture and our government stopped running away from talking about sex! The U.S. government should subsidize comprehensive sex education and the provision of free condoms, the pill,  and other contraceptives in all American high schools,  and should require health insurance companies to cover the cost of birth control and abortion.

And I wish that religious communities would begin providing comprehensive sex education as their children reach adolescence (and probably for adults as well). In the Jewish community, sex education should be part of the preparation for bar/ bat mitzvah.

In fact, the ancient rabbis linked sexual maturity with adulthood. Rabbis originally defined the moment when a boy became an adult bound by the sacred commitments of mitzvot as the day when he had two pubic hairs. At some later point, the rabbis said that instead of checking individuals, they would settle on thirteen years and one day for all boys. But the point about puberty and sexual maturity was made. (Indeed, it is probably precisely because of the imperative need for ethical sexual behavior beginning with the onset  of sexual maturity that the rabbis thought Jews should at that point be bound by the mitzvot.)

Unfortunately, in modern Jewish life this teaching is prudishly ignored.  What rabbi have you heard ever address the new Jewish adult and the adult community about sexual ethics, as part of the public ceremony of welcoming him/ her as a bar/bat mitzvah? Time to renew this ancient teaching! We will have fewer unwanted pregnancies, and less need for abortion.

Even so, abortion will still be necessary at times-to save the life of the mother, to save the mental health of a woman who has been raped, to allow a woman to live a full life she would not otherwise have if she birthed. And so we need more heroes like Dr. Tiller, who will stand ready to protect this important right. May his memory be a blessing.

The following email was sent to Noah, a secular Jew about to marry his non-Jewish fiancee Sheila, by Noah's baal teshuvah cousin Moishe. By an odd and fortuitous chain of events, the email found its way to Jewcy HQ. The people in this exchange are all real but have had their names changed to protect the innocent - and the guilty. In other words, we could not have made this shit up if we tried. That includes the spelling and grammar errors.

Subject: hi noah

So I have some very bad news that EVERY Torah observant Jew shares (not just Moishe) Regarding your plans: You may already know that you Childen will not be Jewish, but I think you are not really aware of what that really means... That means that while biologically you will have children, spiritually you will not. Furthermore, besides it being a punishable (in heaven) prohibition to marry a non-jew, you will not be married spiritually (under heaven.) In other words, you will have a secular marriage, or an invalid fradulent 'religious' marriage, but in any case you will not have a wife, therefore you will not fulfill the commandment to take a wife and as well you will not fulfill the comandment to have children.  Furthermore you will not be able to cook for your goyishe wife or children on Shabbos or on Festival days.

If your goyishe children convert, then they will still not be your children as they will receive new souls, not connected to you.

If you were to lend her money (for even a day, or even an hour) you must charge her interest.
As first and foremost she is a non-Jew, second she will never be your wife in heaven, never.

You will be pretendng to married and it will be to a stranger, ultimately as your souls are truly incompatable in ways you do not experience, because you are distracted by where you have compatability, namely your acting like a King who is enjoying the company of a peasant, which is obviously a very lowly king and so your compatability as the opposite of holy and extraordinary.

Furthermore by going through with this you are thus sending not only yourself but your true Jewish soulmate into Alone-ness

And you will feel it, eventually, mark my words, and when you do, if you disregard everything I am writing and go through with it than G-d help you realize before you ave children, for then you will begin to see what you have done, as they reject you and your mother.  It is said that anti-semintism goes through Mothers Milk, so I pray these Goyishe children, G-d willing that you never have, but if you do that she'll feed them formula for your sake.

Not for the worlds, because they will be weak.

First generation goyishe children off of a Jewish father are always weak.

They are psychologically strong as the Mind goes by father and their ideas can corrupt whole cultures, due to the inherent distortions in their composition, nevertheless they are weak.
Your wife will eventuallly hate you also, or should Moshiach come, as he will very soon please G-d, she may be one of your Goyish slaves and when she is on all fours, not allowed to walk as a human you will see the animal you married.

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The giving of Torah happened at one specific time, but the receiving of Torah happens all the time, in every generation.  -- Isaac Meir Alter, the Gerer Rebbe, 1799-1866

In the Torah our ancestors were instructed to make three annual pilgrimages to the temple in Jerusalem, at Sukkot, Passover, and Shavuot. Both Sukkot and Passover are weeklong celebrations, noted for their joyous observances, but Shavuot is a one or two day festival with few symbolic rituals. It's time to change that. Like the other chagim, Shavuot should be observed for a full week.

Shavuot's origins are agricultural--early summer was the season when the first fruits and grains were brought to the temple. In many communities, the synagogue is decorated with plants and flowers, and the agricultural roots of the festival are also recalled by eating dairy meals. The Book of Ruth, with its harvest references, is read on Shavuot.

However, since the Temple was destroyed, the agricultural aspect of the holiday has diminished in significance; instead, Shavuot, which comes exactly 7 weeks and one day after Pesach (and the Exodus from Egypt), has come to be observed as the anniversary of the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai. Usually, contemporary Jewish communities observe the giving of Torah by staying up all night studying from the Tanakh and rabbinic texts. This custom began in mystical circles in 16th century Safed as a way of preparing Jews to receive the Torah once again.

I propose expanding on the tradition of Torah study by suggesting that we extend our Shavuot observance to a full week, dedicating each day to another level of Torah study, using Torah in the broadest sense. Texts will be chosen each year to expand upon our understanding of revelation and deepen our capacity to be vessels of Divine inspiration. Study sessions can incorporate music by Jewish composers and art by Jewish artists, along with meditation and movement, from dancing to dance midrash. During these sessions we will also create stories, prayers, poems, songs, dances, and pictures that emerge from our studies. Gardening, flower arranging, cooking classes, and hiking in nature, and time at the mikveh will also be held, allowing us to celebrate all of our senses.

First Day of Shavuot - will be organized around texts and themes from the Tanakh.

Second Day of Shavuot - will be organized around texts and themes from the Talmud.

Third Day of Shavuot - will be organized around texts and themes from Midrash.

Fourth Day of Shavuot - will be organized around texts and themes from kabbalah.

Fifth Day of Shavuot - will be organized around texts and themes from the siddur.

Sixth Day of Shavuot - this day will be organized around Jewish writings from ancient and Medieval times until the beginning of the Enlightenment.

Seventh Day of Shavuot - this day will be organized around texts written by Jewish writers since the Enlightenment, in all genres, secular and religious, including novels, stories, poems, prayers, essays.

A full week-long celebration would give Shavuot its due as one of the three Torah-mandated chagim, and also illuminate the depth of Jewish textual tradition. Next year, let's make the Festival of Weeks a week-long festival!

 

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Andrew Ramer will be a regular Zeek columinst on Jewish spirituality. He writes a regular column on spiritual practice for White Crane Journal and has published essays and stories in a number of magazines and anthologies including The Sun, Sh'ma, RFD, Monk,  Best Gay Erotica 2001, Kosher Meat,and Love Castro Street (forthcoming). He is the author of the forthcoming collection,Queering the Text: Biblical, Medieval and Modern Jewish Stories. You can find out more about him at www.andrewramer.com

Tonight at 92YTribeca, I'm looking forward to hosting a Comic Book Shabbat dinner with Arie Kaplan. Arie is well-known writer and author within the comic book industry, and his fascinating book From Krakow to Krypton: Jews and Comic Books traces the history of Jews' involvement within the comic book industry starting from the early 1930s until today. In anticipation of Arie's "animated" Shabbat, I started to think about what our classical Jewish sources teach us about heroism and where we can find the tradition of these concepts in comic books.

In the Pirke Avot, the rabbis of our Jewish tradition describe that a hero is someone who can master his thoughts, impulses and desires. They wrote, "Who is a hero? He who conquers his passions, as it is written in Proverbs 16:32, "He who is slow to anger is better than the mighty, and he who rules his spirit than he who takes a city." Carrying these rabbinic ideas over to comic books, we find many comic book superheroes and characters wage internal battles to control the demons in their minds. For example, Batman, a.k.a Bruce Wayne, fights to conquer the dark thoughts in his mind and the nightmares from his tragic past. On the lighter side, Archie Andrews struggles to balance his affections for the noble Betty, who always has his best interests at heart, with the troublesome Veronica, who often mistreats and manipulates Archie to get her way.

Within both Jewish tradition and comic books, there comes a pivotal moment when every hero must step into his/her destiny and take charge of his/her obligation to help those in need. However, during these moments of change and transition, a hero oftentimes has to negotiate for the opportunity to save the day! Once these characters openly convey their heroic intentions, they find the courage to step into swift action when the time calls. For example, in the book of Samuel, David morphs from small-time shepherd boy to war hero after he defeats the giant Goliath. Similarly, in Megillat Esther, Queen Esther comes forward with the admission of her Jewish identity to the King. Esther's confession, which comes just at the right moment, saves the entire Jewish nation from the perilous schemes of Haman. In the world of comic books, we find that superheroes such as Spiderman, Superman, and Batman initially run away from their heroic duties. However, after they complete honest conversations with loved ones and supporters (like Esther!), each character eventually acknowledges that they must utilize their powers for tikkun olam (repair of the world). Looking into other sources within our Jewish tradition and history, we see that Judaism also acknowledges the role of physical strength in determining a hero. In Tanakh and books outside of the Jewish canon, various men and women utilize their brawn as a means of sustaining themselves and protecting the Jewish people from various enemies. Jacob wrestles with an angel all night long and emerges with a new name, Israel, (the one who struggles with God), as a result of his physical prowess, Moses protects Zipporah and her sisters by fighting off some rival shepherds, and Yael (Judges) and Judith (Apocrypha) kill off enemies of the Jewish people in gory physical attacks.

On the historical side, scholar Todd Pressman writes in Muscular Judaism  that physical strength was viewed as an essential part of creating a new Jewish people in the land of Israel during the creation of the Zionist movement. Envisioning military leaders Bar Kokba and the Maccabees as role models for the Jewish nation, Zionist leader Max Nordau believed that a heightened awareness of fitness could enable the Jewish people to lead a healthier life and safer existence. Within the world of comics, most of us are aware of the superhuman talents of strength utilized by a hero for a mission. These physical feats include flying, jumping, and the ability to render oneself invisible.  As the history of our Torah and Jewish sources teaches us, we need not leave all of the superhero fun to the creations on comic book pages. Every day, each of us is given the opportunity to save the day by using our unique superpowers to make the world a better place. We can use our mental abilities and education to help tutor someone who would not be able to afford these services, verbal abilities to cheer up a sad friend or family member, and physical abilities to lend a helping hand in the Special Olympics. During this Shabbat, let's summon the hero inside of all of us. May we take an accounting of individuals and communities in need of our help and support, and pitch in our efforts and energies as necessary to make the world a kinder and happier place. 

 

Hayley Siegel is the Rabbinic Intern at 92YTribeca            

Waking up to the news that the FBI foiled a plot to bomb two synagogues in Riverdale, New York was shocking not only to the local Jewish community but to all New Yorkers...and to our nation at large.

The would-be targets of this well-planned attack were synagogues - one Orthodox, the other Reform, located within walking distance of one another within this warm, close-knit and diverse Jewish community just north of Manhattan.

If we ever needed confirmation that our diverse and often divided religious community is indeed united --as one people with one heart -- the failed terrorists from Newburgh provided us with that reminder.

 As a native of Riverdale, I feel a unique connection to the news of the thwarted attack. I grew up down the street from the Riverdale Jewish Center and have attended numerous events, programs, bar mitzvahs, weddings and functions there as well in the various other local houses of worship, including the Conservative Synagogue of Riverdale where one of our own Rabbinical Assembly members, Rabbi Barry Dov Katz, is spiritual leader.

My elderly father still lives in Riverdale, numerous faculty members of the Jewish Theological Seminary and leaders of the Conservative movement are residents and the community is renowned for its vibrant Jewish life.

Riverdale is a model of diversity, similar in many ways to the White Plains community where I live. It is one of the main arteries of my life, not only because I drive through it twice daily on my way to and from my home in Westchester to my Morningside Heights office.

Riverdale is central to my life because it is the place where I drop my children off every morning to attend the warm and loving Jewish day school they attend, located within walking distance of the targeted synagogues.

On behalf of the Rabbinical Assembly, I commend the FBI, the New York State Police, the anti-terrorist investigative team and Mayor Michael Bloomberg, all of whom performed a stellar job in preventing what might have been a tragedy of enormous proportions.

Let us take this opportunity to transcend our differences and come together as a community of Jewish New Yorkers. We will not give in to fear or bend to terror. Let us not wait for hatred to remind us of our common bond.