EIGHTEEN REASONS JEWS THINK THEY SHOULD NOT BE VEGETARIANS (AND WHY THEY ARE WRONG)

Richard H. Schwartz

1) The Torah teaches that humans are granted dominion over animals (Genesis 1:26), giving us a warrant to treat animals in any way we wish.
Response: Jewish tradition interprets "dominion" as guardianship, or stewardship: we are called upon to be co-workers with God in improving the world. Dominion does not mean that people have the right to wantonly exploit animals, and it certainly does not permit us to breed animals and treat them as machines designed solely to meet human needs. In "A Vision of Vegetarianism and Peace," Rav Kook states: "There can be no doubt in the mind of any intelligent person that [the Divine empowerment of humanity to derive benefit from nature] does not mean the domination of a harsh ruler, who afflicts his people and servants merely to satisfy his whim and desire, according to the crookedness of his heart. It is unthinkable that the Divine...

Continue reading...

A Dialogue Between a Jewish Vegetarian Activist and a Rabbi

For a long time, I have been trying to start a respectful dialogue in the Jewish community. Because I have had very little success, I am presenting the fictional dialogue below. I hope that many readers will use it as the basis of similar dialogues with local rabbis, educators, and community leaders.

Jewish Vegetarian Activist: Shalom rabbi.

Rabbi: Shalom. Good to see you.

JVA: Rabbi, I have been meaning to speak to you for some time about an issue, but I have hesitated because I know how busy you are, but I think this issue is very important.

Rabbi: Well, that sounds interesting. I am never too busy to consider important issues. What do you have in mind?

JVA: I have been reading a lot recently about the impacts of our diets on our health and the environment and about Jewish teachings related to our diets. I wonder if I can discuss the issues with you and perhaps it can be put on the...

Continue reading...

Identity is Out!

In the past twenty-four hours, I've been told several times: 'no more identity!' Yesterday I was sent a review of the book I co-edited on the eighteenth century British proto-feminist, Mary Astell. The reviewer in the English Historical Review laments that my co-editor and I treated Astell as--get ready for this--a woman. Go figure! But to our reviewer, Astell is just a writer, and to call her a woman writer is to make 'invidious distinctions' showing our failure to move into a 'post-modern framework for discussing gender.' For postmodernists, apparently, androgyny is in. Gender is out!

It also turns out that my recent reference to Woody Allen's...

Continue reading...

1. ROSH HASHANAH AND VEGETARIANISM

by Richard Schwartz, Ph.D.
rschw12345@aol.com
jewishveg.com/schwartz

Rosh Hashanah is the time when Jews take stock of their lives and consider new beginnings. Perhaps the most significant and meaningful change that Jews should consider this year is a shift away from diets that have been having devastating effects on human health and the health of our increasingly imperiled planet. While many Jews seem to
feel that the holiday's celebration can be enhanced by the
consumption of chopped liver, gefilte fish, chicken soup, and roast chicken, there are many inconsistencies between the values of Rosh Hashanah and the realities of animal-centered diets:

1. While Jews ask God on Rosh Hashanah for a healthy year, non- vegetarian diets have been linked to heart disease,...

Continue reading...

Hello Semites and anti-Semites! (Is that like matter and antimatter? Kind of, except instead of totally and mutually annihilating each other they seem to have maintained an antagonistic, yet symbiotic relationship for centuries, deathless and regenerating, occupying the others mind and heart, like Harry Potter and Lord Voldemort. I talk about Harry Potter a lot, don’t I? I think it’s because it makes me sound younger.)

Sorry! Wandered off there for a second. You see, I’m in Amsterdam.

Yes, that Amsterdam, where last weekend I had the singular experience of watching You Don’t Mess With the Zohan in a theater full of Dutch people—Dutch, except for the dozen or so Germans parked behind us, loudly expressing their befuddlement at every cry of “Disco Disco,” and at Lainie Kazan, naked and resplendent, throwing her arms around Adam Sandler and cooing, “Oh honey! You are good at everything that you do,” before she dunks her hunk of pound cake in his coffee and shoves it in her mouth. Were they really allowed to laugh at this?

The New Jew Revolution--this reflexive self-mockery, the transformation of our own stereotypes and internalized self-loathing into something like pride--hasn’t quite gotten here yet. This can make for some intriguing exchanges. When one Dutch woman, somewhat haughtily, asked me why I hadn’t changed my last name upon marriage to Mr. Abramowitz, “subsuming my identity like most American women,” I replied:

“Well, I guess I could feed you a bunch of lines about having already established my professional identity and not wanting to go through all the paperwork, but honestly? I just wasn’t prepared for my name to sound that Jewish.”

She looked at me with undisguised shock. I know it’s difficult to detect irony when you’re not speaking in your first language, and standing just blocks away from the train station that processed the transports to Westerbork, I really should have known better. But before I could tell her I was kidding, she jumped in.

“But your last name is Shukert. That is a already a Jewish name.”

“Kind of,” I said. “In America it’s sort of neutral. In Nebraska, where I grew up, it’s just kind of German.”

“Well,” she said. “In Holland, it’s very, very Jewish.”

Ah! The ghosts of the past!

The Amsterdam Joden: in all of their gloryIn regards to Jewish identity, Amsterdam is special. It has a special name, Mokum, bestowed upon it years ago by its Jewish inhabitants, and has many Jewish leaders, including the popular current mayor, Job Cohen. The old Jewish Quarter boasts kosher restaurants and a pristine Jewish Museum. There are several synagogues and Jewish cemeteries still in use, and the Anne Frank House, with an appropriately solemn façade of glass and steel, attracts thousands of visitors each year. And then there are the Amsterdam Joden.

The Amsterdam football (or soccer, for those of you hopelessly unversed in the ways of the Continent) team, Ajax, is one of the three main Dutch football clubs, and like many such teams, inspires almost cult-like devotion in it’s supporters who call themselves… wait for it… the Jews. At games, they drape themselves in makeshift, sometimes homemade, Star of David flags and wear hats and jerseys with Hebrew writing. Some die-hard fans (most of whom, like the players, are not Jewish) set “Hava Nagilah” as their ringtones, or even go the extra mile and have the word Jood (if you went on a field trip with your Hebrew school class to that traveling Anne Frank exhibit in the late 1980’s, your remember as the Dutch word for Jew), often accompanied by a Star of David, tattooed on their bodies. When the team makes a successful play deserving of praise, or a serious bungle requiring encouragement (or reproach) their supported shout "Joden! Joden!" (Jews! Jews!) down at the field.

I thought it might be funny to take up a similar chant whenever Adam Sandler or Robert Smigel appeared on the screen, but managed, thankfully to restrain myself.

In the years since World War II, we’ve gone from martyrs to mascots.

Click The Image: for more Israeli Anti-Semitic Cartoons!But it doesn’t just stop there! American sports fans may argue over the Yankees vs. Red Sox with conviction and fervor, but rarely does it come to bloodshed. Nor have we perfected the kind of taunting verbal warfare, forged in the crucible of centuries of painful and violent history, that European teams unleash on each other. When some teams play Rotterdam, they sing a song referencing the brutal bombing campaign inflicted on the city by the Germans in 1940: “When the spring comes, we will bomb Rotterdam.” Dutch fans scream at German teams: “Give us back our bikes!” (Interestingly, I don’t believe there are many cases of Israeli fans screaming at the same teams: “Give me back my grandmother!”) When The Hague plays Ajax, they often shout “Hamas! Hamas!” while they goosestep in place and salute straight-armed at the opposing stands. And most famously, and creatively, when the Ajax Joden take the field, you can hear a loud hissing sound come from the Rotterdam stands. This is not a hiss of derision. It is meant to sound like the hiss of the gas. Jews to the gas.

I know. I’d be offended if I didn’t sort of think it was a little bit hilarious.

That’s Holland for you. Jews making Jewish jokes (for example, moi) are goggled at and strangely reprimanded. Non-Jews, however, use the Holocaust as a football chant, and it’s basically fine. (I say basically, because now and then a politician or civic leader plays lip service to how terrible it all is, but it doesn’t make much difference.)

More interesting to me is the evolution. Jews have gone from a being a despised minority to being sainted martyrs, and finally, mascots. I think of a story my mother told me, when we toured the old Jewish quarter of Prague, and came upon a group of elderly women selling little figurines of Orthodox Jews outside the ancient and abandoned synagogue. As one of the women tried to press a ceramic Chasid into her hand, my mother asked her if she was Jewish.

“Oh no!” said the woman.

“What happened to all the Jews then?” my mother asked.

“Oh!” The woman fluttered her hand in the air breezily. “They all moved away.”

A vanished people from a long-past time, whose once reviled customs (and existence) seem quaint and picturesque, now that they’re all gone. How strange to be part of a group filed away into irrelevance by the prevailing culture, the rough, unpleasant edges sanded and swept away by the passing of time.

It put me in mind of another group of people similarly removed from lands that they had lived on for millennia, that we in America currently use as mascots and souvenirs.

The Native Americans.

Is there really so much difference between the “Tomahawk Chop” and the hissing of the gas? Do these cultural appropriations only sting when they appropriate our culture? The only answer, I think, is to just take them back. In the words of Amitai Sandy, the Israeli graphic artist and comic book publisher, in response to the anti-Semitic cartoon contest sponsored by an Iranian newspaper: “We’ll show the world we can do the best, sharpest, most offensive Jew-hating cartoons ever published! No Iranian is going to beat us on our home turf!”

Personally, I’d love to see a version of how the Dancing Mascot of the Amsterdam Joden might look. My guess is that it wouldn’t be like Zohan.

Undead Preemie: didn't surviveIn a story that will likely be featured in pro-life literature for years to come, a baby that had been pronounced dead began breathing and showing vital signs hours later in Nahariya, Israel. A baby breathing hours after being pronounced dead—it’s a pro-life activist’s wet dream.

The baby’s mother was five months pregnant when tests showed that there was intrauterine bleeding, and that her fetus had no pulse. Doctors then initiated what’s being called a “second trimester termination procedure” the baby was delivered and pronounced dead. The baby was then sent to a cryogenics lab where she was put in a refrigerator, and five hours later, when the baby’s father asked to see it, doctors found that the baby showed signs of spontaneously breathing. She was rushed to the neonatal intensive care unit, but unfortunately she wasn’t able to survive for even 24 hours. Presumably this time, when doctors pronounced the baby dead they checked a little more thoroughly.

Here in America, pro-lifers are being forced to make a tough decision in the upcoming Presidential election, and pparently neither candidate has convinced hardliners that he’s the best choice.

Did you know that the little kosher symbol on your food may have a geopolitical, rather than strictly religious, purpose – especially if you live in Israel? Some Orthodox rabbis in the Holy Land use that symbol to reduce the number of Palestinians working in Israel. Here’s how it works:

Jewish law requires that many foods be cooked by Jews. This means that even if the ingredients are fully kosher and the food was prepared in a kosher kitchen under the watchful eye of an Orthodox Jew, if a non-Jew did the cooking, Jews are not supposed to eat that food.

Of course, if you’ve eaten a kosher restaurant lately, you probably noticed non-Jews working there. You may also have noticed that many of those non-Jewish workers seem to be directly involved in food preparation. That’s because Jewish law has provisions in place to circumvent the ban. And herein lies the story.

Continue reading...

One Tuesday night [a few years back], I sat at a local cafe with a cappuccino and my just-purchased copy of Abraham Joshua Heschel's The Sabbath; all of my reading for pleasure seemed to be about Judaism at this point. I had already begun to understand why, on the seventh day, Jews traditionally refrain from lighting fires or using telephones or cooking food or spending money or doing many other things understood to be either technically "work" or outside the spirit of rest that governs the day

It seemed clear that abstaining from this stuff would create long stretches of silence and a freedom from distraction that could help a person access the most silent, hidden parts of the self. Heschel, however, explained that there was even more to it than that. He wrote,

To set apart one day a week for freedom, a day on which we would not use the instruments which have been so easily turned into weapons of destruction, a day for being with ourselves, a day of detachment from the vulgar, of independence from external obligations, a day on which we stop worshipping the idols of technical civilization, a day on which we use no money, a day of armistice in the economic struggle with our fellow men and the forces of nature-is there any institution that holds out a greater hope for man's progress than the Sabbath?[i]

The irony is that human progress depends on saying no to technology and economic engagement, at least for a while. Heschel framed Shabbat as a way of returning to too-oft-neglected ways of being human-a way to help us remember what we have in common with the woman who got up at 4 a.m. to clean the office.

I sipped my drink and I chewed on Heschel. The idea of being free from commercial transactions on Shabbat was attractive. I thought through the implications: If I didn't spend money, I couldn't get the eggplant sandwich I loved from the deli up the street. I wouldn't be able to ride the bus, since I never had a monthly pass. I needed Friday-night money to tip bartenders, pay cover charges, pick up the tab on a date, get into a movie. The list seemed to be endless. No eggplant sandwich?

Continue reading...

Rubashkins: not winning any prizes anytime soonSince the raid on the Agriprocessors plant on May 12th, bashing the kosher meat giant has become something of a sport. Everyone from the New York Times to failed messiah to yours truly has taken a few shots (some cheap, some well-deserved) at the Rubashkin family and the business they run out of Postville, Iowa.

I’ve never been a big fan of the Rubashkin family. In fact, I called for a boycott of their meat in January, months before Uri L’Tzedek was on the case. But I’m getting a little frustrated with the way the scandal is being dealt with by liberal-minded people like me.

Continue reading...

Affirmative Action: or reverse discrimination?Home Center, an Israeli home wares chain, has been offering  a secret discount to Arabs. When customer Eli Chai discovered and reported this last week, a Home Center spokesperson explained, “Home Center offers a wide range of attractive discounts throughout the year. As part of a plan to target specific communities, the chain offers different discounts for different sectors from time to time.”

The situation does seem pretty odd, but not altogether uncalled for. I wouldn’t be surprised if Arabs do more than 70% of the construction in Israel, and thus end up spending the most money at those sorts of stores. Why wouldn’t Home Center capitalize on that customer base by offering a good deal?

Of course, that’s not how it’s being framed in Israel. Chai is quoted as saying, “I didn't expect to get a discount, but I was appalled when I realized that had I been Arab I would have received one. I tried to think what would happen if it was a discount only for Jews, or Sephardim, or Ashkenazim.”

There's plenty of discrimination against Arabs in Israel, and Chai isn’t bothered by that. But when Arabs are favored, it’s a grave in justice!  It may feel inappropriate to offer a discount based on ethnicity, but it’s hardly shocking in a society that’s so clearly divided along those lines.

Undocumented workers, always one phone call away from deportation and a moment away from being summarily fired, are afraid to object to abusive working conditions. This makes them ripe for exploitation, as has been amply documented, and is one reason why US labor law does not allow employers to prevent illegal workers from unionizing. The May 12 immigration raid at Agriprocessors in Postville, Iowa, the world’s largest kosher slaughterhouse, exposed the dark underbelly of illegal immigration. In response to this exploitation, the Jewish community has split in two.

One side, overwhelmingly non-Orthodox in affiliation, views the conduct of the Rubashkin family, Agriprocessors’ hasidic owners, as beyond the pale. It looks at the history of Agriprocessors and its owners and sees a clear, long term pattern of disregard for US law and halakha, Jewish law. It has demanded change, urged boycott, and rallied for justice.

The other side, overwhelmingly Orthodox, sees little wrong with Agriprocessors. It argues Agriprocessors is being mistreated; that liberal Jews, unions, and unnamed competitors are behind the raid and its media coverage; and that Jewish law governing treatment of workers should at any rate be divorced from Jewish law governing the preparation of kosher food. To these people, the many well documented sins of Agriprocessors and its owners, sins that stretch back many years in an unbroken chain, are irrelevant.

Continue reading...

I’m sorry. I really am. I had an entirely different column outlined for this week, all about interpreting the book and recent film adaptation of Brideshead Revisited through the lens of the twentieth century American Jewish experience (the striving, the trying to fit in with people who don’t really see you as an equal, the getting by on sheer talent, the masochistic self-loathing); a piece of literary criticism that would have surely made the genteelly anti-Semitic Evelyn Waugh (who for years was desperately, unrequitedly in love with the notorious Diana Mitford Mosley, Britain’s most glamorous Nazi) turn in his grave. It was going to have a beginning, middle and end; it would have had a coherent thesis and concluding statement.

But that was before the Olympics melted my analytic mind, turning it into a messy, manic carnival of nationalistic synapses. And now, I’m too excited to write (or even think) about anything else.

Continue reading...

Be Kind to Your Hoof-footed Friends: for a cow could be somebody's mother We Jews just love to beat ourselves up. We can't even get depressed without feeling guilty about it. This weekend is Tisha b'Av, the one time of year when Jews get to have a good old-fashioned bitching session. We weep and wail and curse at the miserable treatment of Jewish people throughout history: the destruction of both Temples, the expulsion from Spain, the Nazis.

Historians--at least, those historians who sport peyes and streimels and use the Chumash as a source text--say that all of these Jewish catastrophes happened on the ninth day of the Hebrew month of Av. That's today, for those keeping track. The rub, though, is that Judaism is pretty clear on why these things happened: because Jews screwed up.

The first temple was destroyed because Jews worshipped idols, slept around, and killed people. The second temple was destroyed because Jews were feeling too much hate toward their neighbors. The Holocaust happened because...well, whatever we did wrong there, it must have been pretty bad. I guess it takes a Chief Rabbi of Israel to explain such a thing.

Continue reading...

Home Alone: but less funnyLately there have been a number of high profile neglect cases in Israel. We’ve learned that many Holocaust survivors live in abject poverty. A woman revered as a spiritual authority was found to have abused and neglected many of her children. And in just the past few weeks, there have been three cases of children neglected in airports: A four-year-old girl was accidentally left in Ben Gurion Airport when her parents failed to keep track of all six of their children en route to Paris. An 8-year-old boy was accidentally flown to Brussels instead of Munich (this appears to be the fault of his El Al escort), and a 12-year-old was sent to the UK by her mother, with no one scheduled to meet her at the airport, and only the address—which turned out to be incorrect—of a family friend. When her mother was found and arrested, she explained that she couldn’t care for her kids and wanted them to find political asylum in the UK. Turns out she’d already sent her 9-year-old to Leeds.

There are plenty of cases of severe neglect reported in America every year (this story comes to mind), but in Israel it seems to be a symptom of the political situation. Israelis walk around all day trying to distract themselves from their own suffering and trauma. It seems to me that as a result of having to push their own personal grief below the surface, they also end up ignoring all kinds of suffering that they see around them, be it the suffering of Palestinians, Holocaust survivors, or even their own children. To a certain degree, we all push those thoughts aside in order to get through the day, but we try to maintain a sense of compassion. In Israel, because it’s nearly impossible to really ignore the suffering, society has developed a sort of flat affect. Neglect happens and everyone acts shocked but quickly moves on, not wanting to dwell on any more pain.

There’s something about the Israeli machismo that appealing, and that makes me proud to be Jewish. But there’s something ugly under that machismo -- a gaping hole where I’d expect to see compassion, and it’s horrifying.

Tisha B’Av begins tomorrow night, and Jews all over the world will be fasting, reading the book of Lamentations, and thinking about the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem that took place almost two thousand years ago.First be nice: then kill me

But Tisha B’Av shouldn’t just be a commemoration of events that happened hundreds of years ago. Contemporary Jews have experienced plenty of major traumas, events that rocked the Jewish community, and changed the way we practice Judaism. Most recently, the raid on the AgriProcessors plant in Iowa, though certainly not as spiritually damaging as the destructions of the Temple, has had serious reverberations around the Jewish world. It has affected what we buy and serve and eat, and how we think about our treatment of our colleagues and those who work around us. It has changed our relationships with the world, both humiliating us -- as the poor behavior of our brethren is exposed to the world -- and forcing us to shape up and raise the standards we have for ourselves and those we support.

Ancient Jews brought sacrifices to the Temple: animals killed in the name of God. But the sacrifices were not enough. Prophets warned us that our behavior was as important as the sacrifices, and when we didn’t learn, the opportunity to bring sacrifices was taken away. Here we are, more than a thousand years on, and somehow we’ve fixated on kosher meat, and not on our own behavior. Maybe this experience, as difficult and upsetting as it is, will serve to remind us about what’s really important, and will reconfigure our priorities.

Eruv: wires on a telephone pole. not much to it.There’s a dispute brewing over whether a community in Long Island can build themselves an eruv. An eruv is an enclosed space in which it’s permissible for observant Jews to carry items (such as books, keys, and food) from place to place on Shabbat. MyJewishLearning has a great explanation of what exactly an eruv is supposed to be:

The term eruv refers to the act of mixing or combining, and is shorthand for eruv hazerot--the mixing of domains, in this case, the private (rashut hayahid) and the public (rashut harabim). An eruv does not allow for carrying items otherwise prohibited by Jewish law on Shabbat, such as money or cell phones.

Having an eruv does not mean that a city or neighborhood is enclosed entirely by a wall. Rather, the eruv can be comprised of a series of pre-existing structures (walls, fences, electrical poles and wires) and/or structures created expressly for the eruv, often a wire mounted on poles. In practice, then, the eruv is a symbolic demarcation of the private sphere, one that communities come together to create.

It sounds strange, but not hugely problematic, right? Wrong. Over the years, there have been a number of political controversies centered around the construction of eruvs (or, more accurately, eruvin). Major and minor disputes over eruvin have unfolded in New Jersey, London, Chicago, Washington Heights, and Venice Beach.

Meanwhile, even within the observant communities, there are those who don’t believe that eruvin are legitimate ways of getting around the prohibition of carrying. Chabad, for instance, doesn’t generally hold by any eruv.

For those who know about and use an eruv, the idea of it being controversial is absurd. In some cases, it can be as noninvasive as already existing train tracks, or highway barriers. At its most invasive, an eruv is a wire, or a piece of string. There is no holy gravitational pull inside an eruv, no religious force field, no magical powers. An eruv is literally a loophole, a way that the rabbis devised to get around the prohibition against carrying on Shabbat. The only way a non-Jew or non-observant Jew would be affected by the construction of an eruv is if the eruv caused a glut of observant Jews to move to the neighborhood. While one may have objections to living in a neighborhood full of frummies, it’s hard to cast those objections as anything but anti-Semitism.

The world has no shortage of genuine religious controversies. Why waste time on something as relatively petty as an eruv?

Not too long ago, a woman sat in the ‘wrong’ section of a public bus. A group of men asked her to move to the back. She refused. The men became more insistent. She still refused. Infuriated, the men punched, kicked and beat her. The bus driver did not interfere or call police.

Did this happen in America’s Deep South? In Taliban-controlled Kabul? In some Third World backwater?

No. It happened in Israel, and it is not an isolated incident.

The men who beat that woman are ultra-Orthodox. The woman herself is Orthodox. Her ‘crime’? She refused to sit in the section of the bus designated for women.

Ultra-Orthodoxy demands strict separation of the sexes. Men and women sit apart at weddings, family dinners, public gatherings, and in synagogue. Unmarried ultra-Orthodox men do not converse with women they are not closely related to. They have never held a woman’s hand or stolen a kiss, let alone "hooked up." Married ultra-Orthodox men follow the same restrictions. Even contact with their wives is closely regulated.

This hyper-segregation has now spilled over into Israel’s system of public transport. The ultra-Orthodox are demanding – and getting – separate seating on public buses. And, even though compliance with this segregation is supposed to be voluntary, increasingly the ultra-Orthodox choose to act as if it were mandatory, and as if they have the legal right to use coercion and brute force to achieve it.

Continue reading...

Most of the time, as a society we walk in darkness, wounded by walking blindly into an economic barbed-wire fence here, an environmental open manhole there. Once a generation--if we are lucky, once a decade--there is a flash of lightning in the dark that lights up the truth of our country's politics.

For some of us, Katrina was such a flash of lightning. And now, for some of us, an allegedly kosher meatpacking plant oddly located, far from Jews, in Postville, Iowa.

Even in the dark, there is usually some prophetic voice warning of oncoming damage. In this case, prophetic calls to apply "eco-kosher" and "ethical kosher" standards not only to food but also to such consumables as coal, oil, plastics went back to the work of Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi in the mid-'70s and my own book Down-to-Earth Judaism: Food, Money, Sex and the Rest of Life in the mid-'90s. Calls for Jewish support for unionization and workers' rights went back to 1911 and the 1930s, and the continuing work of the Jewish Labor Committee. Calls for a compassionate Jewish approach to immigration law went back to the work of HIAS, the Jewish Funds for Justice, the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs (in Chicago) in two different Jewish coalitions on immigration policy (one moderately liberal, one more progressive) in the mid-'00s.

All these warnings called out the necessity of action; few of the Jewish public got the point.

And then came Postville - not just one lightning flash but a thunderstorm, flash after flash lighting up broader and broader aspects of oppression.

First, PETA filmed the torturous killing of animals who were supposed to be ritually slaughtered in a virtually painless way. Indeed, that was exactly what made their meat kosher for observant Jews (and some other folks who hoped to be getting purer food). For some, under-cover films made of the torture suddenly lit up the whole structure of kosher certification in America, putting it deeply in doubt. Were the Orthodox certification bodies paying no attention? Were the fees they were paid by producers dulling their responses to violations of Jewish law and simple humane decency?

Then--stirred by the kosher factor to look more closely at this plant--a Jewish newspaper, the Forward, and the Jewish Labor Committee began to report rank illegal oppression of the Postville workers - many of them undocumented Guatemalan migrants who were afraid to protest for fear of deportation. That lightning flash revealed not only Postville but a little of what was true about the broader world of immigrant workers.

Whereupon, ironically tipped off by the Forward story, the Federal Migra raided the plant. They charged hundreds of the workers with criminal offenses, sent them to prison, and deported hundreds more. The raid decimated Postville's community, and when an official broke the customary silence, flashed a searing light on how Federal agents behave toward powerless "illegals": no time or lawyers allowed to shape a defense, families shattered.

But--they brought no charges against the rich and powerful owners despite visible evidence of crimes they had committed far worse than those charged to the penniless immigrants. After all, the owners made massive political contributions.

Now larger parts of the Jewish community responded: calls for boycotts; a march of support and collections of money for the workers and their families; some renewed concern about the paralyzed campaign for a comprehensive and compassionate immigration law; (less, but some) renewed interest in stronger pro-labor legislation; a somewhat beefed-up effort by the Conservative denomination to establish "hekhsher tzedek,"its own version of an eco-kosher standard.

But there are three areas in which The Shalom Center seeks a broader vision beyond the lightning flashes:

1. Repairing an unjust "justice system" in which the wealthy are not required to obey the law, while the poor, the powerless, and the desperate are sent to prison for minor offenses, without the opportunity to defend themselves. All Jewish wisdom and all Jewish history teaches: Do not shrug off a system of injustice!

2. Facing the truth that immigration is not a narrowly "domestic" issue. So long as poverty, powerlessness, and environmental destruction in Mexico and Central America drive people to despair, there will be greater numbers of immigrants to the USA than our laws, our economy, and our culture can compassionately sustain. The pressure is a set-up for driving unemployed white and Black Americans into hostility against Hispanic Americans, while the rich and powerful chortle. We must use trade agreements and all other negotiating frameworks to insist on high wages, health and safety standards, and environmental protections for ALL OF US in Anglo and Latino-America, and we must support transnational pressure to those ends by unions, environmentalists, religious communities, and others.

3. Achieving ecological respect and sanity through three factors; how animals are killed; how they live their lives (so eco-kashrut must forbid factory farming, etc); and yet it cannot stop there. It is all too clear that the obsession of many people with eating a great deal of meat is a twin to our addiction to oil and coal as a way to poison the planet. Huge farms of cows and pigs pour methane - an even more dangerous global-scorching agent than CO2 - into the atmosphere. To heal our earth as well as our own bodies, we must return to our forebears' healthier diet of eating meat no more than once or twice a week.

We must go beyond the lightning flashes over Postville -- to a steady, open, sacred light of clarity about the dangers and the damages the lightning has revealed. The light of systemic change is what the Torah calls for.

Continue reading...

We're told the spiritual path is all about integration. Without integrating spiritual insights into our daily lives, even the greatest of peak experiences is just a form of getting high, a narcissistic thrill that's enjoyable, potentially powerful, but ultimately valueless without an integration into daily life, relationship, social justice, and the world. True spirituality, and certainly Jewish spirituality, is not about retreating onto mountaintops, we say; it's about being in the world, and that means integrating the greatest of insights into "real life."
"A Painted Door"
Having spent the better part of a decade devoted to spiritual and inner work, I'd like to argue against this pervasive and seemingly indubitable proposition. I think we Jewish spiritual folk integrate too fast, moving too quickly from low-level spiritual states back into the conventional world, without adequately deepening the stages and insights they bring about. I think we use the rhetoric of integration to have our spiritual cake and eat it too. And I think we deploy this language to avoid making the kinds of changes that true spirituality would demand of us.

First, I think we tend to integrate too quickly. Spiritual experience is deeply powerful. Only last week, at a Beltane celebration in the woods, I danced joyfully in a quintessential peak experience, my sense of self melting deliciously into the Earth Goddess and the Sky God (a/k/a Shechinah and Kadosh Baruch Hu) mating and regenerating in the annual rite of Spring. I know well, thankfully, what the Hasidim call bittul ha-yesh, or annihilation of the self. I am, as Jimi asked, experienced. (The question, "Are you experienced?" is a great little koan: yes, I am experienced, in the conventional sense; but I have also seen that "I" is an experience itself, a phenomenon, not a separate self. Thus it's both 'I am experienced' and '"I" is experienced.')

But for all that, I look at the maps of enlightenment in the world's great traditions, and I see that I've only traveled the first few steps. Yes, I've entered the orchard, but have I eaten the fruits? I've understood, on some transrational level, the ayin, the primordial emptiness -- but has it penetrated me so fully that "Jay" does not remain deluded, in control, and pulling the strings of my life? No way! I'm as much a wreck as anyone, a lot of the time. For a few weeks after a retreat or powerful ritual, sure, I'm clear. But then I turn to mortgages, romance, chores, and achievements, and I'm doomed.

There are two sides to the insight of integration, after all: both what is being integrated, and what it is being integrated into. Often we possess the former but not the latter. I may have a great insight into nothingness, for example, but if I think I'm integrating it into a real world, I'm still confused. Really getting ayin means really getting yesh as well, seeing it as real, perhaps, but translucent, luminous, a dream in the mind of God. That is very different from "I've had my experience of God and now I can bring it back to my everyday life."

Reading the wonderful and best-selling Eat Pray Love, I had just this experience. Elizabeth Gilbert writes beautifully of her peak experiences in India, but seems to believe that the experiences are really "once and for all" moments. That is, she gets it, she sees the Point, she's one with God -- and then she writes as if that insight will never fade.

But all insights fade, and simply calling for integration is not enough. Peak experiences do change us permanently, at least in my own experience, and in what I've heard and read from others. But they don't flip a switch from off to on, and there's a lot of pressure to move back to the "off" side of the sliding scale back in the conventional world. What's needed is not the threading of the peak experience into a pre-existing life pattern, but further work to create new and stronger threads that can then be woven in.
"The Back Court" Pub, Dizengoff Square Tel-Aviv, 1993
There are experiences, and then there are more experiences. The Kabbalists, the Hasidim, all schools of monastic Buddhism and Hinduism, Sufis, Christian mystics -- all of these emphasize that powerful experiences are but the entry point to even more powerful ones, and more crucially, the stage-changes that are so much more difficult than simple changes in mindstate. The point is not to get ever higher, like a dope fiend needing more and more junk to feel good. The point is to continue to burn away the illusion that you are a separate entity, to undermine the natural selfishness of the self through long and serious effort. Jumping too soon to "integration," which should come toward the end of the path, cuts one off from the possibility of these deeper experiences and changes in the self. It's like going to a high-end restaurant and leaving after the appetizer course. Pretty soon, you will get hungry, and will eat whatever's available.

The second problem with premature integration is that it can reinforce unexamined norms of what a well-lived life is meant to look like. Really, we want to have our cake and eat it too. We want both the householder life with children and the rest, and the monastic achievements of enlightenment and union with God. We want this so much that we spin entire theologies about how the Jewish saint is the man or woman with a family, and how any real spirituality must be engaged with the world as we find it. But is that really true? Maybe a "real spirituality" transforms our understanding of the world such that ordinary forms of engagement no longer make sense. Maybe it questions precisely those assumptions which we hold most dear.

I'm not suggesting that this must be the case; only that it might be so. It might be the case that you just have to make a choice: family or mysticism, insight or justice. Maybe you do have devote more than just a few weeks here or there to spiritual practice in order to actually get it. Not that you can't "get it" part of the way -- it's not all-or-nothing. But maybe, just maybe, real contemplative life takes place away from the this-worldly sphere which, in the Jewish world, is so sacrosanct. Maybe there is a choice, at least a temporary one, between engagement with the world and deep work on the self.

Generally, the only folks who hold that there is such a choice are those who critique spirituality as self-centered. This complaint is old, boring, and inaccurate. Supposedly disengaged Buddhists have led the protests in Burma and Tibet, while supposedly engaged Jews have increasingly indicated a willingness to jettison notions of social responsibility and favor whichever politicians best pander to Israel's right wing. Really, I think the critique is mostly lodged by those too afraid to look under the hood of their own inner automobiles. However, many of us on the "other side" have protested a bit too much. In our rush to affirm the this-worldly worth of meditation and spirituality (it makes us more kind, it wakes us up to suffering, it inspires us to do tikkun olam, it recharges the batteries so we don't burn out) we may well have assumed too much of our critics' value systems. Maybe spiritual practice does those things, but maybe it takes a long time to do so.
"Tel Aviv Port"
As I've written about before on this site, I have a great deal of experience with indecision and trying to have it both ways. My newspaper column is called the Polymath, and my six-word memoir is "Couldn't decide -- did it all anyway." Maybe that's the reason I'm taking seven months off this year to meditate and be single-minded about my spiritual path -- because integration can be just another word for trying to have it both ways, and no one knows that more than I do. At the very least, the unreflective assumption that the social world in which one finds oneself is the locus of religious value must be as up for grabs as everything else. Otherwise there is still something being maintained, grasped, defended. True bittul does not work that way.

Finally, and relatedly, just as premature integration can reinforce preconceptions about our lives and what matters within them, it can stand in the way of the changes we might need to make to those lives. This is really the converse of the previous problem: not that integration causes us to value the worldly too much, but that it makes us value it too little. Rilke's encounter with the numinous in "Archaic Torso of Apollo" concludes with "You must change your life." Not "you must make small changes around the edges" or "you must find twenty minutes a day to meditate." Likewise with spiritual practice. I am often asked, at the end of a meditation retreat or other spiritual program, how the practice can be brought home, integrated into regular life. It's a natural question, and a good one, and I do my best to answer. But the real answer may be "you can't integrate it into regular life; you must change your life."

Not many people want to hear that, of course. It's much better to be told "yes, just do this practice half an hour each day, watch what you eat, and you'll obtain all the benefits." But what if a deep process of introspection and contemplation is incompatible with working sixty hours a week, raising a family, and being surrounded by American media? What then? Again, it's not all or nothing. It's possible to make small changes, and they will help. But I've become convinced, over the years, that bigger changes are necessary, at least for me. Just living in New York City, I find, drives me a little bit crazy (by which I mean, it alienates me from my compassionate, loving self). Not to mention watching TV or eating in lots of restaurants. All this is personal, of course; poison to one is nectar to another. But for me, I've concluded that more radical changes are necessary, not just for one week at a time, but wholesale.

So, for seven months, no emailing. No telephone. No movies, no lunch dates. It must sound awfully dour and renunciatory, as if I'm punishing myself for something. But when I consider these next few months, it sounds like paradise. Just the work of wisdom and compassion, learning to love more and see more clearly the impermanence, emptiness, and incompleteness in every thing. Sounds great.

I had expected all kinds of curious looks when I would tell my friends about my plans for 5769. Weirdly, however, the response I've gotten most is envy. And not just from the outwardly spiritual types, either. A lot of times, the response is more general than specific: they're happy for me that I'm pursuing my dreams, taking a big risk, and going for it. And there's a certain romance about going for it in Nepal specifically. But oftentimes, there is a real expression of interest in doing this crazy thing themselves.

Well, go for it. What I want to suggest, in conclusion, is that "against integration" is just a negative way of saying "in favor of going-for-it." I've spent most of the last two decades trying to have my cake and eat it too, careerwise, financially, personally, spiritually. Now I'm ready just to eat. I've quit two of my jobs, transitioned one of the others, and set the other three up as best I can. (I wasn't kidding about the cake.) I've done all this because, while I do eventually want to integrate whatever it is I learn out there in the monastery, first I want to go out and learn it. I want to get serious, and I want to encourage you who've read this far to get serious too, whatever it is that's most important to you. Integration is the final stage, but not the proximate one. First, you must change your life.

 

Continue reading...

Last week, a minor political scandal unfolded around the note that Barack Obama put between the stones of the Kotel when he visited the Wall during his tour of Israel. Dug out from between the stones by a yeshiva student, and printed in the Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv. Obama at the wall: maybe he should have pushed that note a bit further backRabbi Shmuel Rabinovitz, the rabbi in charge of the Kotel, condemned the newspaper and their violation of Obama’s privacy, saying “The notes placed between the stones of the Western Wall are between a person and his maker. It is forbidden to read them or make any use of them.". The yeshiva student apologized for his actions, saying it was “kind of a prank.” Ma'ariv spread some rumors that Obama had leaked the contents of the note before he even went to the wall, but that seems to have been proved false. Ma'ariv’s third helpful contribution was the following sentence, printed the following: "In any case, since Obama is not a Jew, publishing the note does not constitute an infringement on his right to privacy."

There are a few issues here. First of all, publicizing someone’s private letter, whether it’s to God, Santa Claus, or their Uncle Ralph, is inappropriate. Rabbeinu Gershom, a rabbi living 1000 years ago in Mayence, issued a prohibition against reading anyone else’s personal mail, and that prohibition still stands today. I would have to look at the text of the prohibition to see if it seems to extend to everyone’s mail, or just the mail of other Jews. Regardless, stealing the letter and publishing it are in very bad taste. On the other hand, Obama should have and probably did know that this would happen, and had he released his note ahead of time, he may have been able to avoid all of the brouhaha that has surrounded this story. Or he may have wanted the brouhaha. Remember, when the Pope visited the Wall in 2000 he made his note public, and wrote it in English. He also, like Obama, prayed at the Wall.

Written prayer is not to be taken lightly, and I’m appalled at the craziness surrounding this letter, but it doesn’t really shed any light on Obama’s character or qualities. His note was perfectly PC, and earnest in a not-too-creepy way. If he has any secrets, confessions or great sins, he may have brought them up in his spoken or mental prayer at the Wall, but it’s hard to believe he’d be stupid enough to commit them to paper.

If we learn anything from this it should be about privacy—our own, and what we expect from others. We want emails to be private, some phone calls, letters from our employers, and medical information. But who among us hasn’t forwarded a few personal emails to friends wondering about the subtext, or spoken about a private matter while walking down the street surrounded by strangers who could hear every word? Google says that complete privacy doesn’t exist, and maybe they’re right, but if there’s anything in the world that remains private, shouldn’t it be personal prayers?