Rituals

A Traditional Havdalah Set: wine, spice box, and braided candleMost secular Jews are at least vaguely familiar with the various blessings and observances of Shabbat, but unless you attended a Jewish camp or went on an Israel trip, you might not have experienced Havdalah. The mini-ceremony performed at the close of Shabbat (when you can count three stars in the sky on Saturday night), Havdalah means "separation" in Hebrew, and the ritual signifies separating the holy from the mundane. It's a simple and beautiful ceremony, and a pleasant way to start a Saturday night. Here's some handy info on Havdalah, along with the items you'll need to host your own private service.

• Imbibe: First, you need something to drink. You can’t use water, but pretty much anything else will do. Ideally, get some kosher wine, but tea or coke or juice will work in a bind. Pour your beverage into a cup all the way to the rim. Some people pour enough so that the liquid overflows a little, to symbolize overflowing love and whatnot.

• Inhale: You also need some fragrant spices, such as cloves. I just use the ground cinnamon from my spice drawer, but you can use a spice sachet, potpourri, or make your own aromatic blend. When you sing the blessing over the spices, pass them around so everyone can breathe them in.

• Illuminate: Finally, you need a candle with more than one wick. If you don't have a traditional Havdalah candle, you can just hold two regular candles together, or you can buy one of the many fancy, braided options on the market. They last for ages since you only have them lit a few minutes every week. Everyone should hold out their hands to see the candlelight shed on them during the blessing over the fire. At the end of the ceremony, the candle is put out in the wine.

You can listen to a partial track of Debbie Friedman's Birchot Havdalah here. Havdalah prayers, transliterations, and translations can be found here.

Finally, there's one long blessing at the end:

Blessed are you, Lord, our God, sovereign of the universe
Who separates between sacred and secular
between light and darkness, between Israel and the nations
between the seventh day and the six days of labor
Blessed are You, Lord, who separates between sacred and secular. (Amen)

Get Creative: make your own spice boxFor tips on how to conduct the ritual itself, see Jew FAQ’s helpful page, My Jewish Learning, or Hillel’s explanation.

Finally, there are some weird but cool customs having to do with Havdalah. For example, if you’re an unmarried girl, you’re supposed to hold the candle at the height of the husband you’d like. Also, when you put the candle out in the wine at the end (after drinking from it), you can dip your fingers in (symbolizing holiness) and touch them to your temples (for intellectual strength), your heart (for love), and your pockets (for financial success).

Jon Stewart: doesn't trust the pigsForget whether or not Jon Stewart believes in God: To some, he actually is God, which makes it all the more interesting that he questions the well-known law of kashrut that prohibits Jews from eating pork. The "TV personality, comedian, political gadfly, insightful commentator and all-around raconteur" (as his humble parishioners describe him) seems to think the rule is hogwash. If the following quote is any indication, Jon Stewart will start keeping kosher when pigs fly.

"Thou shall not kill. Thou shall not commit adultery. Don't eat pork. I'm sorry, what was that last one? Don't eat pork? Is that the word of God, or is that pigs trying to outsmart everybody?"

Previous: Michael Showalter on God, spiritual salvation, and corduroy pants.

Pass the grapes: A Tu B'Shevat seder.Rabbi Jill Hammer has a very interesting bit over on RitualWell about Rosh Chodesh Shevat, the first of the month of Shevat, when women and some men can hold an alternative to the Tu B'Shevat seder. Tu B'Shevat celebrates the birthday of a community's trees -- useful because taxes depending on how old the trees were. But as Rabbi Hammer explains:

[T]here is a Talmudic passage that some rabbis believed the date of the birthday of the trees was the first of Shevat. Women, or women and men, who celebrate Rosh Chodesh together as a sacred time can honor that minority opinion by engaging in a "Rosh Chodesh Shevat seder." The Tu b'Shevat seder celebrates the multiple faces of God, and the fruits of the land – this Rosh Chodesh Shevat seder will revive the facets of our souls as we prepare for spring. Instead of a seder of taste, this will be a seder of fragrances. Just as we smell spices to enliven us at the end of havdalah, we will use our sense of smell to wake us up to the worlds around us and the worlds within us.

We missed the boat this year for Rosh Chodesh, but it's something to consider for next year -- or at least something to consider considering.

JOFA also has an interesting take on a Tu B'Shevat seder.

Trees everywhere: need to be hugged.I really love Tu B'Shevat. All the things I want and appreciate in a holiday, it has. In years past, I've both attended and held gorgeous, meaningful sederim for the day and unfortunately have to report that I'm not going quite as all-out this year as I did last year. But, that's okay. (PS- Read Helen Jupiter's lovely post about Tu B'Shevat for inspiration.)

Of course, I'm still going to give tzedekah. In addition to the usual JNF Plant-a-Tree program that I often use, as most of us probably have (I do appreciate the environmental work JNF does, among other things) I've unearthed (no pun intended) a few other opportunities for you to love trees if you're thinking of adding another tree, in addition to perhaps an Israeli tree, to your tzedekah this week.

Continue reading...

In 1954, Aldous Huxley published "The Doors of Perception," a famous essay observing that the effects of mescaline were remarkably similar to the unitive mysticism of the world's great religions, particularly Vedanta, the philosophical-mystical form of Hinduism which Huxley practiced. It caused an immediate sensation. Because He Got High: Aldous Huxley's classic essay, "The Doors of Perception"Many in the public were outraged by its pro-pharmacological spirit, and many in the academy accused Huxley (like William James before him) of flattening different mystical traditions, and of disregarding distinctions between "sacred and profane" mystical practice.

But many more were inspired. Huxley's essay, and other works like it, set the agenda for 1960s spirituality, and what later came to be called the New Age movement. He provided a philosophical explanation of what was important about mescaline—that our perceptive faculties filter out more than they let in, and that mescaline, like meditation, opens those doors wider—and a personal account of what a "trip" was like. He showed how entheogens (as they later came to be called) could be a part of a sincere spiritual practice. And he perhaps unwittingly imported a certain Vedanta agenda of what the "ultimate" mystical experience was like: union. As has been argued by many scholars over the last few decades, this claim of ultimacy—that unio mystica is the peak form of mystical experience, with others defined by how close they approach it—is actually a rather partisan one. Why is "union with the All" superior to, or more true than, deity mysticism, visions of Krishna/Christ/spirits, and the text-based mysticism of the Kabbalah? Sure, for Vedanta it is—but that's just Vedanta's view.

Two generations of spiritual seekers have been influenced, for better and for worse, by this hierarchy. From the naive hippie to the sophisticated yogi, Jewish Renewalniks to Ken Wilberites, hundreds of thousands of spiritual practitioners have implicitly or explicitly assumed the prioritization of the unitive over all else: the point is that All is One.

Most of these constituencies are also, like Huxley, influenced by the psychedelic experience, primarily that of mushrooms and LSD. While most contemporary spiritual teachers have long since given these substances up, in favor of meditation and other mystical practices which afford the same experiences in a more reliable container (and one greatly enriched by self-examination and introspection), if you ask them, as I have, they'll admit that the psychedelic experience formed an important part of their spiritual initiation.Do You See God?: Psychedelic experience can initiate a lifelong spiritual journey Whether it's what got them on the road in the first place, or confirmed their earlier intuitions, psychedelics have set the agenda for a huge percentage of contemporary spiritual teachers, across religious and spiritual denominations, and many of their followers as well.

These two trends — that "all is one" is the point, and that it accords with the psychedelic experience—have occasionally led to a distortion of religious and spiritual traditions. In the Kabbalah, for example, unitive mysticism is only a small part of a wide panoply of mystical experiences. Yes, there are texts which speak of annihilation of the self (bittul hayesh) and a unification with God (achdut). But these are, truthfully, in the minority. Many more are visionary texts, describing theophanies of all shapes and sizes; or records of prophecy or angelic communication; or less explicitly unitive accounts of proximity to the Divine. Yet there's a sense, among teachers of contemporary Kabbalah —and I'm not referring here to the Kabbalah Centre (where Madonna goes), which does not teach Kabbalah proper, but rather a unique and sometimes weird synthesis of Kabbalah, the Human Potential movement, and New Religious Movements like Scientology—that unitive mysticism is the summum bonum, the ultimate good.

Some Kabbalistic texts agree, but many others do not. For example, Rabbi Arthur Green, today one of progressive Judaism's leading teachers, in 1968 wrote an article (under a pseudonym) called "Psychedelics and Kabbalah," explicitly analogizing the psychedelic experiences to aspects of Kabbalistic teaching—but selecting those aspects of Kabbalah and Hasidism which fit the experience. Naturally, Green was also influenced by the many forms of non-Jewish mysticism popular at the time, most of whom asserted that "All is One," but in that essay, he makes clear that the psychedelic experience affected how he understood Kabbalah. Green, and a fellow practitioner-academic Daniel Matt, have been enormously influential: their anthologies of Hasidic and Kabbalistic texts are read far more widely than the texts themselves, and are widely assumed to represent the mainstream of their respective traditions.

I am not taking a position on whether this "distortion" is for good or ill; in my own practice, the nondual/unitive perspective plays a central role, and I am grateful for it, whatever its sources. But I have a hunch that it is about to change.

The reason it is changing is that more and more Jewish spiritual seekers are pursuing non-unitive paths. This includes earth-based ritual, shamanic ritual, and other disciplines which, while they may hold the view that "all is one," provide experiences of differentiation (energies, elements, visions, etc). But perhaps more importantly, it includes drinking ayahuasca, smoking DMT, and visionary shamanic-entheogenic practices which offer different experiences from the unitive one. The ayahuasca trip, unlike the mescaline one, is not especially unitive: indeed, one of its hallmarks is the sense of communication with other life forms or consciousnesses. And while a sense of "all is One" is sometimes reported in the midst of the ayahuasca experience, it's more common to read reports of visions of phenomena—manifestation, not essence.

Some of these accounts are strikingly similar to texts from the Hechalot and Merkavah schools of Jewish mysticism, which flourished between the second and ninth centuries. In the texts from this period, we read detailed accounts of heavenly palaces, Divine chariots, and angels; of ascents to other realms which seem somehow to be in outer space or an extraterrestrial locale; of a sense of great danger, but also great awe, beauty and love; and of beings which travel on some kind of cosmic vehicle. The descriptions are visionary and auditory, much like the accounts of ayahuasca visions. They are "shamanic" journeys, both in the sense of being journeys of the soul to other realm and in the sense of a transformation of the self. They yield information, prophecy, revelation, theophany. And they are not really about "all is one."

Hechalot and Merkavah mysticism is studied in the academy, but it is little known in the contemporary spiritual world. It's complicated, arcane, and literally other-worldly. But just as the unitive moments of Hasidism appeal to those who have had a unitive experience on mushrooms, so too the visionary aspects of Hechalot and Merkavah mysticism appeal to those who have had a visionary experience on ayahuasca. The similarities are striking.

What's more, Hechalot and Merkavah mysticism, related as it is to gnosticism, provides one of world literature's richest libraries of other-worldly mystical experience. It's eerie how similar some of these millennia-old texts are to the records contemporary journeyers provide of the ayahuasca trip: the sense of being in "outer space," the tenuous links to consensual reality, the sense of danger, and above all the colorful descriptions of chambers, angels, songs, palaces, ascents, descents, fire, music, and so much more. It also provides a sense of history, context, and "belonging" to those who affiliate with Judaism, Christianity, or gnosticism; like unitive experiences, non-unitive visionary/ ecstatic experiences have a lineage within these traditions. Perhaps, too, it might offer guidance for those seeking to integrate such experiences into their lives.

To reiterate, I am taking no position on whether unitive or non-unitive experiences are "better," and see nondual essence and dualistic manifestation as two sides of the same ineffable unity. My point, simply, is that much of contemporary Western spirituality derives from a particular psychedelic experience and a particular form of mysticism it approximates. With the increasing popularity of ayahuasca and similar medicines, the former element has changed — and I think the latter will too.

In the esoteric world, this kind of change and interchange has always been with us. Hechalot mystics learned from the gnostics, who learned from the Jews, who learned from the Babylonians. Medieval Kabbalists learned from the Sufis, who learned from the Hindus, who learned from the Buddhists, who learned from other Hindus. One need not make the facile, and false, claim that all mysticism is the same thing in order to recognize that mystics across space and time have understood themselves to be gesturing toward the same truths, albeit in very different ways. And those differences advance, not obstruct, the progress of realization. After all, when one can ultimately know nothing, it helps to learn from everything.

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NEXT: Drugs mix with spirituality. But can they mix with parenting?

Oh, big news in the world of Agunot this week!

Fear not, Agunot!: Canada will save you. But, should it?Canada doesn't mess with religious matters in its courts so much, but the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that the civil divorce agreement signed by Jason Marcovitz, in which is specifically agreed to give his wife, Stephanie Bruker, a get, was declared a valid contract that overrides his assertion for protection under freedom of religion. (Having never been divorced myself, is it standard in a civil divorce to specify a get to be forthcoming? I would imagine not and that this case could potentially hyper-sensitize civil divorce language if a husband has any inclination towards hesitating on the get, no?) The couple married in 1969 and obtained a civil divorce in 1980, with Marcovitz initially agreeing to give a get and later changing his mind, until 1995 when he did finally give her a get, at which point she was 46 years old, past child-bearing age for many women, as the court noted.

So, the court awarded his ex-wife almost $50K in damages, on the grounds that her ability to remarry and have more children was blocked by Marcovitz's lack of cooperation. (What, do you think, is a fair settlement for being barred from remarrying and having children or more children? Can you put a price on that, really? And, is it somehow worth more or less in damages if there were no previous children? Discuss.)

Evelyn Brook, president of the Canadian Coalition of Jewish Women for the Get, called the decision "a great relief." The ruling "does not say that he had to give her a get. It simply said that because he didn't, then there are things to forfeit," Brook told JTA. "For every husband who has gone back on his promise" in a divorce settlement, "this makes a difference." While many women's groups are gung-ho about this ruling, yet many in the legal world aren't so sure this is a good thing, as this ruling could be the first bit of tiptoeing into religious meddling by courts.

Marcovitz's complaint and reason he claimed to withhold the get from Bruker was that she'd had breached their civil agreement by becoming less observant and by turning the couple's daughters against him. This decision was reached 7-2 by Canada's Supreme Court, with the dissenting judges stating Marcovitz's promise was nothing beyond a moral obligation and that "finding otherwise will expand courts into areas where they have no jurisdiction", JTA reports this morning.

The Marcovitz/Bruker case was the first to be presented to Canada's Supreme Court since Ottowa's amendment to the Divorce Act in 1990, which prohibited people from creating or maintaining obstacles for their former spouse to marry religiously.

Surely we have an Agunot or two in our readership that could provide some insight here? Surely a few people with greater knowledge of the Canadian legal system than I can offer? Or, with great knowledge of American family law and how, if at all, this ruling could make waves in our courts...?

 

 

Man, I forgot all about this guy's song. Well, let's dust it off and enjoy it another year, even if it is a day late. (And, on a related note, hit Tamar's post that ponders our actions on Christmas and Easter.)

For a time, Christmas felt like a kind of kryptonite, in all its various colors and effects. Christmas carols, lights, Santa Claus, and even the inexplicable Stollen, produced in me various levels of discomfort, confusion, and even a little misplaced nostalgia. I grew up a very secular Jew, and while we acknowledged that Christmas had come and gone, like most Jews we basically kept our heads down until it was all over. I watched the surreal animated puppets in Santa Claus is Coming to Town with the same hunger that any child watched the annual television show that let him stay up late. I once even sat on Santa’s lap in the mall. But even then I knew I was only a visitor in a foreign land. Santa was a Christian, and his workshop didn’t employ any Jews.

Who needs a crackling fire on Christmas: When you've got the glow of neon?Over the years I took on more Jewish observance, and surprisingly my relationship to Christmas changed, even deepened. I looked forward to Christmas Eve and Christmas Day as moments to define myself against what I wasn’t. I sat in empty coffee shops, went to the movies with friends, and had Chinese food. The cold air and the deserted streets were glorious. I loved the lights in the trees and the darkened windows of the stores. Christmas meant lovely isolation and I felt deeply Jewish.

I would give my friends Christmas presents, but none of those people were really Christian. The obligation felt weird. If they didn’t believe Christ was really born on this day, why weren’t they all in Chinatown with me? My only devout Christian friend eschewed really owning anything. Whenever I gave him a gift he looked at it with the discomfort of a man struggling with a live fish He seemed to worry about it flopping on to the floor. I secretly hated his devout Christianity that was ruining Christmas. What else was I supposed to do for him on this day? There was no way I was going to eat Stollen.

Hanukkah, on the other hand, was always a letdown. The attempt to match Christmas in spirit seemed contrived. I would feel irritated when the local mall would put up the obligatory menorah next to the Christmas tree. I didn’t want Hanukkah to have to compete with Christmas. It couldn’t. What is winter without Christmas, without the blinking lights, without the giant plastic peppermint sticks covered in snow? Like this year, Hanukkah sometimes comes so early it doesn’t even feel like winter yet.

But then I married a gentile and everything changed.

My wife came from a family even more secular than my own. They never talk of God or Christ, and I have never heard them mention the Virgin Mary or the manger. But they celebrate with the fervor of postulants.

I grumbled my way through the first few years. I would read The Forward while they busied themselves with wrapping presents and keeping the fire going in the fireplace. I looked out of the corner of eye for any sign of a baby Jesus so I could leap up with an “Ah-Ha! I knew it!” Eventually Johnny Mathis and the smell of the tiny pine cones used in decorations got to me.

Take your holiday cheer: and stuff itWhat finally undid me, however, was the joy they took in giving. Stockings stuffed to overflowing, the old family photos lovingly framed, just the right sweater, all the perfect books. I would have called it out as obsessive consumption and ugly consumerism, but they always had wonderful things for me. (On Hanukkah, my non-Jewish friends always gave me “Jewish” things, as if Hanukkah presents are supposed to be about Hanukkah.)

As I began to embrace Christmas as part of my wife’s tradition I realized that Hanukkah was also special for me as a Jew. It’s just a coincidence that Hanukkah and Christmas fall around the same time of the year. My mistake was thinking that since Hanukkah is really a minor Jewish holiday and didn’t have anything about it that was distinctly seasonal, it wasn’t worth making a big deal about it. But Hanukkah is a Jewish day, and it marks, like so many other Jewish holidays, the sheer fortitude of the Jewish people. Over and over again we survive. Our lights keep burning, even when they are not as nearly as bright as my neighbor’s giant automaton reindeer.

And so for the last few years, Hanukah has been another time to mark being Jewish. In my home, we don’t celebrate the two holidays together, but go by where they land on the calendar. And secretly, I hope when I light the shamash and the first candle of the menorah that it will start to snow, and that it will be snowing all winter, especially when one year I take my family to Chinatown, and show them how Christmas is really done.

Dealing with the slow-mo death of my Evil Demented Mother (hence, EDM) last year taught me two things, one that I’d always suspected and one that I hadn’t known. First, Jewish traditions around death and dying are simply the best; second, I’m more deeply Jewish than I could ever have expected.

That the Jewish D+D traditions made me the envy of my Gentile friends was, well, interesting; that habits of mind and values I thought were mine alone turned out to be Jewish in origin was a revelation deeper than a story idea that goes "assimilated exogamous Jewish girl comes home when confronted with death of mother."

I suppose it started in the autumn, when EDM was clearly declining. One way to redeem the fifteen years we had both suffered since she was diagnosed with dementia, I decided, was to donate her body to USC Dementia Research, the designated Southern California NIH research institution. (If you want to do this, it has to be arranged way in advance of need. There are human-subject experimentation forms to be filled out!) I was determined that some scientific/medical/educational value should come from the mess of EDM's life (and mine, by proxy, as her primary—if long-distance—caregiver).

The zebra t-shirt betrays a wild streak: Don't let med students anywhere near your cadaver This is, of course, a canonical-nigh-unto-mockable Jewish value. Historically, Orthodox Judaism hasn't liked autopsy, wanting to respect the bodies of the dead, but in modern times the value placed by Jews on learning has trumped. If you are Jewish and have the misfortune to not be part of the medical profession, at least you can help out those who are.

I chose a dementia research facility because of my own experience in a medical family— I know how cavalier medical students can be. With memories of cigarette-smoking cadavers dressed in funny hats dancing through my head, I decided against gross anatomy for EDM. I wanted defined explorations by experts in search of specific research goals, just like the Old Jews would have it: Respect for the body. Pursuit of knowledge.

But the point here, as in the rest of my management of EDM's death, is that I initially didn't think I was being observant or acting from a Jewish ethical point of view. I just thought I was being me, then realizing that what I was actually doing was being Jewish.

For example, the wondrous, skilled, sanity-saving geriatric case-manger I worked with, a former professor of gerontology, told me that she had never before had a client whose family went to such great lengths as I had in order to donate the demented elder's body to science. But according to her, almost all of her previous clientele was Gentile.

And so it went, during the three months of EDM's fade-out from this incarnation. Neither the facility where EDM was housed (Episcopalian), nor the medical staff attending her (lead doctor, Chinese-American), were willing to take her off her meds and just let her go—even though she had indicated to everyone, including all three of us with powers of attorney, that she no longer wanted to be here, not in this desolate condition of body and soul. Jews believe that resources are for the living and not for the dead: if no good can come through sustaining a life that no longer makes sense to the person possessing it, better to preserve resources for the family members who survive.

Then complicated timing issues arose with the actual day of EDM's funeral. I was arranging the ceremony from 400 miles away, people were coming in from out of town, and EDM, the Wallis Warfield Simpson wannabe, would want to have been buried with as big a party as possible, so the in-the-ground-within-48-hours thing couldn’t happen. When a saintly, kindly friend, a woman with a degree in Religious Studies who was also studying to be a hospice chaplain—but who, like most of my friends, is as goyische as they come—suggested having the funeral on a Saturday, I found myself snarling: "We don't have funerals on Saturdays." I couldn't believe my dear friend suggested such an outrage—a funeral on a Saturday! By then, I had to admit it. I was Jewish, she was not, so how could she know? Guess what, I did know, lord knows how. I was part of a "we".

Doing the right thing: We burn a candle after funerals for a reason So to the wonder of my almost-always-non-Jewish intimates, I explained that we don't believe in embalming; we believe in a simple linen shroud; we traditionally have someone wash and sit by the body. I have always personally found open-caskets barbaric, and generally that's something we feel is not comme il faut, either. My funerary aesthetic was Jewish.

But there's more. I found out it was entirely right to wear that torn black boutonniere for the week after EDM was safely placed in the ground. EDM might have been a truly nasty piece of work who shouldn't have been allowed to breed, but she was still, biologically speaking, my mother, and it fit my mood to wear a sign saying, "Hey, I am in Stage I mourning, so don't expect coherence.”

And the thick candle I was given to burn for that week—it did burn for a week. I felt it somehow guided EDM, sped her on her way. Again, if we define religious rites as "outward signs of an inward grace," it was exactly the right thing, both for my psychology and for my place in the community. (“Warning: recent death in this household. Proceed with caution.”)

And when the month of semi-official mourning was over, I really was done with the acute stage of dealing with D+D legal and financial fu. More important, more at the level of the woo-woo, I was beginning to feel unbound from EDM, and released from my handmaiden/caretaker role. The old Jews had it right: After a month of mourning (though it my case, it was really processing, of both paperwork and my own internal state) one is ready to get back to the business of living.

My Gentile friends marveled, too, when I explained about the unveiling to come about a year after EDM's departure for places unknown. We get to have a formalization of the end of the year of mourning. Or perhaps the unveiling marks the year it takes us to understand the shape of our lives without the one who died.

Gone but not forgotten: Grave stonesThese friends loved the sight of the stones placed on the gravestones in the cemetery wherein EDM was laid after I explained that these stones that turned headstones into cairns signified “You are remembered.”

In fact, these dear pals o' mine, as the secular humanist/maybe sometimes vaguely spiritual/classic 21st century American blendo types that they were, were jealous that I had this strong tradition to call on in a time of crises—that it showed me the way sure-footedly and told me what to do and mostly was a source of comfort and made it so I didn't have to make everything up from scratch at a time when I had enough on my mind. And that it was mostly a good tradition that made good human sense, and had the quality of found folk wisdom with a tried-and-true durability of millennia. They liked the Way of the Old Jews a lot, and I owned it by reflex.

So when I coincidentally got a recent email from an ex-boyfriend (yet another of my tawny super-shagetzim—he grew up riding his horse to school in rural Arizona) who had converted to Judaism, and kept kosher, and had taught Torah classes, and who talked about what we believe, I was startled.

For it made me conscious of the difference between Judaism as a culture, and Judaism as a religion. He was a convert to the religion; EDM, the original Marjorie Morningstar-style JAP, whose lunch every day in college had been a ham sandwich and a chocolate malt, who never attended a seder until her freshman boyfriend took her home to his parents'—was imbued enough with the tradition that she had passed it down to me. She taught me, without my knowing she had done so, who we are.

And in regard to D+D, I do feel we have the goods. What I did for EDM wasn't really about religious observance, but about doing right by the dead and doing right by the living. In our time of suppurating hostilities between those who make a fundamentalist claim to know the mind of God and those, as intolerant, who make fundamentalist claims that only fools speak of God, it was a fine thing to have a rite of passage that, while steeped in the majesty of time-honored rhetoric and gesture, had little to do with the problem of God.

This is the first time since I started college that I’m living in an apartment where I’m allowed to light candles, and so don’t have a problem with Chanukkah. But there’s a great article at the Washington Post about how most college students can’t light their own chanukiot because of dorm rules:

 

It's a common puzzle for rabbis on campus this time of year: how to observe the holiday without breaking school rules. Hanukkah, a Jewish holiday, is celebrated by lighting a menorah each night. What many schools, including American, have done is create a public lighting ceremony that lets students enjoy the holiday -- without torching the dorms.

"It definitely bothers students to not be able to light" menorahs, said Rabbi Eli Backman, director of the Chabad group at the University of Maryland. It's a "tricky little situation. Every year, we've dealt with it differently, trying to find ways to make it work."

I Would Like Christmas More: if it involved more pimping

 On Tuesday, the first night of the eight-night holiday, Strauss-Benjamin held a lighted candle to a menorah in a dormitory common room while a crowd of students sang. The menorah, on a sheet of foil stretched over an overhead projector cart, glowed brightly. A university staff member and a rabbi were there to keep an eye on things at the "Pimp My Menorah" night, at which students were invited to decorate their own menorahs with glitter and paint. Strauss-Benjamin wasn't able to light the menorah with her family back home in Tarrytown, N.Y., "but this is my college family," she said.

That type of lighting is not ideal, said Mindy Hirsch, associate director of American University Hillel, but they're trying to turn a negative into a positive, bringing the campus's Jewish community together.

For some students, it was the beginning of a great new tradition, celebrating with friends at a party. Others switched to an electric menorah without a second thought. And some, like a few of the students at the AU party, said they were still planning to light the candles in their rooms and hope to not get busted.

It's all part of the transition to college life and independence, learning to adapt traditions from home to a new place, Backman said. So observant Jewish students learn to ask for keys to their dorms rather than use electronic swipe cards so they avoid using electricity on the Sabbath, and take fall exams early so they can go home for the High Holidays. Muslims find quiet places to pray during the day, sometimes using hallways outside of classrooms. And Christians learn to choose a church and congregation they're comfortable with, or hang a crucifix in the midst of the chaos of posters in a dorm room.

But Jewish students who grew up lighting the candles at home, Hirsch said, "miss that."

Full story

You know what, who even cares what the article says after it mentions ‘Pimp My Menorah’? Fuckin A!

Ahhh: The warming glow of ChanukahAfter the questions I posed, and the thoughts I was kicking around the other day about the pre-Christmas frenzy, it was with great delight I read this article over on Aish today that, though not exactly related to what I was talking about, it is a lovely article about the stillness and introspection that comes of Chanukah. I was loving it after reading this in the second paragraph: "In a world that thrives on flashy externals, Chanukah focuses our attention inwards, urging us to purify ourselves so that the flame we shine into the world will be strong and bright." But, once they olives to illumination and conclusion about cans of tuna can into play, I was loving it even more. Anyway, go read. It's lovely, and that very kind of Jewcy-goodness that I dig to death.

Ritual Well is another source I check often to see different approaches and ways to examine traditions, which I've mentioned here a few times. Anyhoot, for Chanukah, they're running a piece from Kolot Center for Jewish Women's and Gender Studies that is a slightly-tinkered version of Chanukah brachot with male and female pronouns, in Hebrew, transliterated Hebrew and English. Also, a nice piece (which does relate to my Christmas post from the other day a bit) suggesting ways to keep/make Chanukah less material that I like and actually follow a version of myself. Lastly there's an interesting and very different take on candle lighting each night of Chanukah by attaching physical and emotional language and imagery to each observance.

 

Every year around Chanukkah I get annoyed at how often I hear people misuse the word Menorah. This is mainly because I’m ornery. But still it’s probably good to know why a menorah and a Chanukiah are different.
Menorah: from Arch of Titus in Rome

Menorahs have seven branches and burn olive oil. There was a menorah in the Tabernacle, and then it was moved to the Temple. It was made out of pure gold, and all one piece. The instructions for how to craft it can be found in Exodus 25. Though now it’s become a symbol of Judaism, it was originally meant to symbolize the burning bush. The menorah was lit in the Temple, and when the Temple was looted by the Romans in 70 CE the menorah was taken to Rome and carried along during the triumph of Vespasian and Titus. A depiction of this event is preserved on the Arch of Titus that still stands today in Rome. It’s not clear what happened to the menorah after that. It may have been taken by the Visigoths or the Vandals, and later retrieved by the Bynzantine General Belisarius and taken to Constantinople. Basically, we don’t know, and no one seems to have it anymore. Anyway, the miracle in the story of Hanukkah is that the Maccabees were able to light the Menorah, and the light from that one small vessel lasted for eight days.

So, to commemorate the miracle of the Menorah, we light a Chanukiah, which has nine branches—one for each day of the miracle and a shamash. The name "chanukkiah" was given only in the end of the nineteenth century in Jerusalem by the wife of Eliezer Ben Yehuda, the revivor of the Hebrew language, but today in Israel chanukiah means the thing you light on Chanukkah, and menorah means the thing that was in the Temple.

The correct plural of menorah is menorot, but menorahs will do. The plural of chanukkiah is chanukkiot, but I guess chanukkiahs is cool, too.

There is a difference. I think ultimately the menorah is cooler because there’s a lot more history behind a menorah, but chanukiot are almost always more interesting looking.

Happy Chanukkah!
Chanukkiah: for a night at a club

One of the cool things about Chanukkah is that because there are so few mitzvoth connected to the holiday, there’s lots of fun designs going on in chanukiot. You can buy some cool ones online, of course, but you can also probably make one with stuff you’ve got at home already. Here are some ideas:
The Original: timeless
Last year, some of you may remember my rockin’ Beer-nukiah, made out of beer bottles. This year I changed the design up a bit, using hard cider bottles, and a wine bottle for the shamash. It was so indie-frum, you wouldn’t believe.
New And Improved: and kosher
Got some extra doughnuts from your first night’s celebration? Take eight traditional doughnuts with holes in the middle, and a muffin or sufganiya to use as the shamash. Put Shabbat candles in the holes of the doughnuts, and sink the shamash candle into the muffin (using a sufganiya might be kind of messy). Voila!

The traditional Hebrew school chanukiah involves either bottle caps glued onto a piece of wood, with glitter, stickers, and drawings done with markers, or the same deal except nuts (the kind you get at a hardware store) instead of bottle caps glued to a piece of wood. Sweet!
If You Went to Hebrew School: you probably have one of these hanging around

Got a bunch of cans to be recycled? Turn ‘em upside down and stick a tea light in the concave bottom. Use a 40oz or an empty tomato sauce jar for the Shamash.

Do you have an old Connect Four or Checkers set? You can make a chanukiah out of stacks of the pieces, just making a taller stack for the shamash, and melting candles so that they stick on top. You can probably do the same with Legos if you’re feeling industrious.

The traditional Chanukiah-in-a-bind is made out of potato (I recommend Idaho baking potatoes, because they’re pretty soft), with candles just pushed into the potato. Doesn’t get much simpler than that!

Another nice way to improvise your Chanukkah celebrations: gather all your spare change for a dreidl game. Whoever wins gets to choose which charity the money goes to (last night my friend Danny whupped my ass in dreidl during a particularly vicious game, and so I donated all the change—almost thirteen bucks—to his new favorite charity, the Make It Right Foundation). This is a lot more fun if you’re also drinking (i.e., working on next year’s chanukiah).





(Psst—Today is my one year anniversary with FaithHacker! If I could take all my readers out to a fancy dinner and buy you all flowers, I would. Happy anniversary!)

            As I discussed in my last post, there is a new movement afoot aiming to re-understand biblical agricultural laws and find their application for modern day Jews living outside the land of Israel.  Some of these laws like peah (leaving the corners of your field for the poor), shichechah (leaving sheathes forgotten during the harvest for poor) and leket (leaving dropped harvest for the poor) only make sense when one has poor neighbors who can glean from one’s harvest.  Others like shmittah (every seven years renouncing all debts and letting the land lie fallow) and yovel (redistributing land to all people every forty nine years) only apply in the land of Israel.  Modern North American Jews who live in a different social reality have a choice: they can either write off these laws as meaningless, or they can interpret them to mean something different from the original law.   

            Peah is one law agricultural law that has begun to be reclaimed by some Jewish groups in America.  Jewish farmers at Adamah leave one corner of their field ceremonially un-harvested and give a portion of their harvest to a local food pantry.  Others have taken the law and applied it to their salary, taking a portion of their income each month and donating it to fight hunger.  People have similarly understood the laws of leket, shichechah, and ma’aser, donating portions of their wages to relevant charitable causes.   One of my friends has found a very interesting way to connect with the laws concerning peah.    He has decided to grow out his peyos (chassidic looking side curls on the corners of his head) as a reminder that his thoughts should be directed to G!d’s service, just as the corners of one’s field are devoted to the poor.   All of these interpretations are interesting ways to find relevance in seemingly meaningless laws.

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As I walked into the kitchen yesterday, my aunt was chopping beets for dinner. Laying off to the side were a pile of the greens about to be tossed in the garbage. I asked her if she usually uses beet greens and with a shrug she told me that she didn't even know they were edible. "Not edible!!" I laughed, "Beets greens are so scrumptious." I quickly washed them and cooked them with some tofu for lunch.

Two years ago, I couldn't tell the difference between a beet and a rutabaga. I grew up as a typical city boy on the fifteenth floor of my apartment building and commuting to high school everyday on a subway. With the exception of summers at Eisner camp in the Berkshires, the only green space I had growing up was Central Park. I knew that my food came from supermarkets and restaurants, but had never stepped foot on a farm.

In the summer of ‘06, I spent three months as a Jewish organic farmer at the Adamah program in south western Connecticut. I lived, with a dozen others, in tents in the woods and "commuted" by bike to a nearby farm. The only car we had was a big old pickup truck that we ran on bio-diesel that we brewed ourselves. Together we farmed four acres and grew thousands of pounds of organic vegetables.

Before that summer, I had never done anything like growing my own food. It was amazing to find that by simply performing manual tasks like planting, weeding, watering and harvesting, I was able to grow significant amounts of food. A quarter of a potato can yield almost a dozen new potatoes. A carrot seed the size of a point of a pin can grow into a foot long carrot. I know that science can explain plant growth, but there is also an incredible wondering in farming that feelings like I am partnering with G!d. Every morning Jews around the world say the prayer Ahavah Rabah, which stresses how much G!d loves us. I had mumbled it hundreds of times, but before grew my own produce, I don't think I ever felt that love. The psalmist wrote, "you open your hand and satiate all living things according to your will" (145:16), but I never understood it before staring at the beauty of a squash blossom that I myself had grown.

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            As a Jewish environmental educator, I get to experiment with many different practices that are foreign to mainstream suburban Judaism.  During Sukkot we had a Simchat Beit Hashove’ah ceremony, which is a crazy Jewish rain dance with fire juggling, music and flaming old underwear.  In services, we regularly get kids to do physical stretching with their morning blessings in accordance with the Talmudic guidelines for waking up.  My favorite practice out of all we do is hitbodedut, the chassidic practice of going out into the woods and being alone with G!d. 

            Every week during an hour and a half of electives, I lead a group of eleven year olds off into the woods to practice hitbodedut.   We hike quickly up the mountain until we are out of sight of anything manmade. Then we scream.  We scream until there is no air left in our lungs.  This isn’t explicitly part of the practice, but its fun, congeals us as a group and helps to get people’s airways open and ready to talk to G!d.

            At this point, I teach the instructions for hitbodedut as they were first described by Rebbe Nachman, a chassidic Rebbe from the eighteenth century.  He writes that everyone should,

make a habit of praying to God from the depths of your heart. Use whatever language you know best. Ask God to make you worthy of truly serving Him. This is the essence of prayer. 

Rabbi Nachman's Wisdom #229

            I tell them that they will have half an hour to go off into the woods and speak to G!d out loud and without pausing.   I tell them that they can say whatever they want, as long as it is honest, and directed to G!d.  They can bless. They can thank. They can ask for things.  They can even talk with G!d about their atheism or how they feel self conscious standing out in the middle of the woods talking to themselves.  It doesn’t matter as long as they speak from their heart.  Whatever comes up and is addressed to G!d is perfectly kosher.  The final instruction I give them before sending them off is to repeat the mantra “rebono shel olam,” or “master of the world” if they cannot figure out what to say at any point. 

            After a half an hour or personal time with G!d, I call people back with a shofar and so we can share briefly about our experience.  Every time I have ever debriefed a session of hitbodedut, I am always amazed that each person has had a profound experience.  They all leave with insights into life, G!d or nature. Personally, doing hitbodedut every week for the past few months has been deepened my own connection with G!d and given me insight into what comes next for me in life. 

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This week on FaithHacker we're excited to welcome guest blogger Getzel Davis.  Getzel is, among other things, an environmental rock star, a former ADAMAH fellow, and pretty much the nicest guy I know.  To start things off I sent him some tough questions, and to no one's surprised, he totally rocked them. -TF

 

 

What kind of work are you doing now, and how does it fit into your spiritual journey?

I work for the Teva Learning Center as a Jewish environmental educator. Every week I get a new batch of 6^th grade day school students to try to inspire. We go off into the woods every day and practice feeling radical amazement in nature. After a week of group bonding and ecology lessons, I get to sit down with each child and school to help them brainstorm ways to make the world a healthier and happier place.

What's your favorite spiritual practice? Why?

My favorite spiritual practice at the moment is mikvah. It sounds a hokey, but time I get out of a mikvah, I physically feel spiritually cleansed (even if I am covered in muck from the lake). This year, to prepare for Yom Kippur, I dunked forty-nine times for the forty nine levels of spiritual impurity that people of capable of. When I got out, it felt like I was already at Neilah, the last service of Yom Kippur, when we are finally forgiven of our sins. I went through all the motions of Yom Kippur already knowing that I had been forgiven. It was incredibly powerful.

What's a Jewish ritual that really doesn't speak to you? Why?

Stoning gay people. I can’t imagine a compassionate G!d really wanted us to stone two consenting adults who love each other.

What's your favorite Jewish text to study and why?

My favorite text is the Mei Hashiloach by the Izbitzer Rebbe. Despite the fact that the Izbitzer was a leader of a chassidic ultra-orthodox Jews, half of his discourses are about the flawed nature of Jewish law. His radical theology allows for certain people at certain times to do perform acts contrary to normative Jewish law. This book is a great tool for anyone struggling personally with questions of halachic obligation.

What's a social justice issue that's really important to you and why?

I believe that the greatest issue facing humanity is global warming. Rising oceans and desertification of the land scare the shit of me. The solutions are not going to be easy things like recycling or buying hybrid cars (although both are great). The only way humanity will be able to avoid an incredibly ominous future is by radically changing how we consume things. We need to start holding producers responsible not only for the safety of a product while we own it, but also the impacts of its creation what happens to it after it has been thrown “away.”

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This is just to make the official announcement that I am the girl who shows up at big Jewish conventions with a bottle of whiskey and unpopular politics. I share both freely, and usually end up with some guy's phone number written on my arm in blue, courtesy of the free highlighters distributed by CBL. This week at the GA I hung out with Mobius and he kept calling me a frummy and a Litvak. I also hung out with a random group of college students (Ari, from OSU--I washed your number off by accident. Sorry!) and brought food to the hungry. Whiskey for Breakfast: with bagels, obviously.

My next venture will be at Limmud again in January, with my bottle in tow (I'm thinking bourbon as opposed to the more traditional Scotch, but now is the time to make your requests) and I'm psyched for learning, drinking, and general rousing of rabble. In the next few weeks Faithhacker will be featuring some of the exciting speakers who will be at Limmud (Akiva the Believer! Aaron Freeman! Rachel Elior! Ruth Messinger!) and reminding you to register. Plus, at Limmud I'll be hosting a special little gathering of Jewcers who can get together to talk trash about various political candidates, call each other names, roll eyes, and compete as to whose glasses are most indie. You bring the angst and I'll bring the fire and brimstone.

Register now, people!

You know what I really dig? Yoga. It never occurred to me that yoga conflicted with Judaism, because, quite simply, I felt that it only enhanced things I already believed and felt, not contradicted it. Turns out, I'm not the only one.

Shalooooooooooohm: Are you down with yoga?

There's the worldwide Bibliyoga, Israel's CircleYoga, Evolution Yoga in Ohio is "weaving Jewish themes" into their classes, as does Shalom Yoga in DC, apparently. The Genesis Society is the only "ophanim certified" center on the east coast, I hear. What is Ophanim? "A kabbalistic practice in which the body is positioned to correspond to Hebrew letters in postures that are supposed to channel a divine energy" says Nathanial Popper in the Forward, and the Tai Chi-based similar practice of Otiyot Chayot.

Whatever your thoughts are on the Kabbalah bizznass, if you think it might be fun/interesting to make your body into Hebrew letters, check out Aleph-Bet Yoga: Embodying the Hebrew letters for Physical and Spiritual Well-Being by Steven A. Rapp (Jewish Lights Publishing) and try your hand at it at whatever level you'd like. In a book I often reference, Jewish With Feeling, there is a (if I may dust off this word and put it back in service for a moment) rad section about combining the yoga (I think it was the Sun Salutation, if memory serves, but I could be wrong) and stretching with Shacharit (morning prayers). Also, don't overlook the very-popular Torah Yoga. Here's a website and association, here's an excerpt, and here's an interview with the author. Ohh, and check out Jewish Meditation, too.

Ready to hook yourself up with a Jewish yoga teacher? Hit Yoga Mosiac. Schlep your gear with this Om Shalom totebag. Concerned with modesty in your yoga apparel? This article certainly feels you, and tiptoes into (my beloved) eco-kasher territory. Sadly, I couldn't find any Jewcy yoga mats or clothing. Anybody out there know of any such thing? Or did we just stumble upon a business venture? Ahem. I'm in.

Anyway, speaking of career moves, for the truly inspired, here's how to get your Yoga/Jewish Spirituality Teacher Certification at the potentially cool (what? I've never been. I can't vouch!) Elat Chayyim Jewish yoga retreat center. Ahh. Sounds, well, divine. Har har.

Tonight begins Rosh Chodesh Cheshvan, or the beginning of the month of Cheshvan, though you may know Cheshvan by its sad little nickname, Mar Cheshvan, Bitter Cheshvan. We call this next month bitter because it’s the only month without any holidays or special mitzvot associated with it in the Bible or Talmud. We’ve just come out of this holiday high where we couldn’t go 45 seconds without some big feast and instead of easing ourselves back into regular life with some kind of slow holiday weaning, we have to go cold turkey into a sad empty month with nary a hora in sight. What's Your Sign?: If you were born in Cheshvan, it's the Scorpion. Scary!The way you hear people talk about mar Cheshvan you’d think it was a time when we’re obligated to walk around crying and being nostalgic for Shmini Atzeret, but in fact there are some cool things associated with Cheshvan. I have no idea how reliable a source The Inner Dimension is, but on their Cheshvan website they note that Cheshvan’s favorite color is purple, and that it’s empty because it has been reserved for the Mashiach, so that when he shows up he won’t have a tough time scheduling the inauguration of the Third Temple. Planning ahead for the time of the Mashiach—Cheshvan is so organized!

There are other cool things about this month. Recently Cheshvan was chosen to be Jewish Social Action Month and was officially recognized as such by Sen. Joseph Lieberman. Apparently the Government of Israel’s Ministry for Israeli Society and World Jewish Community, declared Cheshvan an annual international celebration dedicated to the Jewish values of tzedek, chesed and aryevut (justice, kindness, and social responsibility) to be practiced by the entire Jewish people throughout the world. To find out more about Cheshvan check out this website put up by Hillel, or the official Jewish Social Action Month (JSAM) website, where there are listings of all kinds of programs all over the world.

The WUJS website about Cheshvan reminds us that it’s a month all about fertility and rain, so if you were thinking of getting knocked up, this might be a good month to go for it. Also, the matriarch Rachel died in Cheshvan, so lots of people do something special remembering her on the anniversary of her death (11 Cheshvan, 23 October).

Finally, you can read a fairly lame dvar Torah about Cheshvan that I wrote when I was a sophomore in college. Before I started at Jewcy it was one of the only things with my name on it on the internet, so whenever I’d go on dates the guys would inevitably try to bring it up, “So, I know you’re a fan of Cheshvan…” So awkward, but not without its charms. Much like Cheshvan, come to think of it.