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By Heshy Fried
The whole concept of being off the derech bothers me because in my opinion there is no right derech, if we call those who aren’t observant or don’t follow the ways that they were brought up in we feel the need to belittle them. Oh he or she is off the derech sounds really crappy and I decided to put in my two cents on this situation.
I am constantly questioning and have my moments, but I am orthodox and it suits me well, but unlike many orthodox Jews, I don’t think that orthodoxy or being observant is for everyone. Like many people I know, I was brought up to believe that orthodox Jews were right and everyone else was wrong, but I think that belief is wrong, I have met many people that aren’t orthodox anymore and are great people, they are good Jews and I am cool with that, but many people aren’t.
I know some of you are already screaming blasphemy and the off the derech crowd (I use the terminology because it works best – but I don’t like it) are cheering for joy. I don’t even like the term authentic when combined with religion, religion itself has evolved so many times that we don’t even know if we are practicing the right thing anymore, hence the reason that I don’t have a hashkafa, I work on things I think are important (good thing the sages view most of these things as important too) but the second someone calls me a Torah Jew or Authentic Jew I cringe – seriously – it makes me feel that all of the other Jews out there practicing in ways foreign to the average yeshiva bochur aren’t real Jews and that is wrong.
I guess I never really learned how to be such a fundamentalist that I discard everything else as hogwash when my own religious practice is built on some pretty shaky ground and I am sick of having it proved to me from the 600,000 person revelation stuff, I believe but don’t think everyone should have to or be disregarded and treated harshly because of their varying beliefs.
When you run a non-profit organization called PunkTorah, it’s fairly easy to get pigeon-holed. I can’t count the number of times that someone has raised their hand in my face, made rocker “devil horns” and said, “yeah, PunkTorah guy” in a Sid Vicious voice. It’s for that reason that people might be surprised that my new favorite Jewish album is “The Threshing Floor”, a choral masterpiece by the musicians that make up Congregation Bet Haverim of Atlanta, Georgia*.
What, no Jewish punk? No Heebie hip hop? Patrick, shul is the “establishment”!
Before you get your undies in a twist, let me tell you a little something about Congregation Bet Haverim: their rabbi is a gay body builder, and the lay cantor screams Earth Goddess when she wails on hand drums. At Friday night services, you’ll find yourself wedged between a black, lesbian college student and a retired hippie couple, craving the organic, locally sourced vegetarian oneg prepared by a Sephardic family while adopted Asian children run around at your feet dropping crumbs of challah on the floor.
Am I still a sell out? Didn’t think so.
Less talk, more rock. And the Threshing Floor rocks!
The album kicks off with “Dodi Li”. Lay cantor Gayanne Weiss has this kind, maternal voice that later booms to life as hand percussion and choral background dance together in harmony with melodic guitar and make your spirit shoot out of your chest. Moving on to ballads by Will Robertson (who also produced the album), world musical influences with Iraqi, Ugandan and Indian flair, Sephardic and Hasidic incantations and African American call-and-response, this album breathes new life into congregational music.
It doesn’t surprise me at all. Bet Haverim is Atlanta’s “misfit” Jewish community, a rag tag group of people united under the banner of diversity. It’s no wonder that “The Threshing Floor” is equal parts Civil Rights spiritual and Shabbat liturgy, features covers of Michael Stipe (REM) songs and folk music inspired midrashic interpretations of Lamentations. “Solu, Solu” could easily be an homage to the Benedictine monks, while “Ken Es Akeyo De La Meniana/Wayfaring Stranger” could be the missing next single by DeLeon. In the back of my mind I heard the voices of my friends say, “if I could hear this kind of music, I would come to services.”
The kicker for me is track five, a cover of Mosh Ben Ari’s “Od Yavo Shalom Aleinu”. The warm strings are like a parent soothing you to sleep while guitar picks up the tempo. Suddenly you’re hypnotized by the percussion creeping beneath the choir’s mantra and without warning, you’re a True Believer.
The Threshing Floor shows me our greatest strength as a people: our collaborative nature. Across genres, languages, cultures and styles, this album is a love poem, a psalm, to our higher power. I love it, and I think you’ll love it, too.
Visit www.congregationbethaverim.org to order the album. Available on iTunes soon.
*Since the Feds are cracking down on bloggers accepting gifts and the whole “ethics” thing, I should in full disclosure admit to being a member of this synagogue. But even if I weren’t, I’d still review this record because I love it.
I’ll admit it, there’s nothing objectively Jewish about St. Patrick’s Day. But I have a strong urge to make St. Patrick’s Day a Jewish event, because my name is Patrick, and for the past twenty years or so, people around me have acted like St. Patrick’s Day was somehow my second birthday.
I’m not going to get into the particulars about who St. Patrick was. Bottom line: he was a Catholic missionary who went to Ireland and converted the natives. That simple.
More important to the how-to-make-St.-Patrick’s-Day-Jewish story is about the process of St. Patrick’s Day being an Irish-Catholic holiday, to the Guiness-drenched, Shamrock Shake chugging pot-pie festival that turns everyone green for a day.
Like most great things in America, it came from immigration: after the Great Potato Famine, Irish immigrants flooded the United States seeking better opportunities. They were met with strife: a Protestant nation that considered itself settled that did not want any more people “polluting” its shores. Yet, they came, and integrated into society. Eventually, their cultural practices blended with other cultures in the key metropolitan immigrant cities, and became normalized. As people left these large cities for smaller cities and towns to escape overcrowding and to find better opportunities, they took this Americanized Irish identity with them. Over time, people found themselves attracted to their culture and eventually we got the St. Patty’s Day that we have today.
So what does this have to do with Judaism?
The Jews, like all other religious cultures that survived the Axial Age, are really good at adapting to the world that surrounds them and integrating other cultures’ ideas to meet their needs. The Purim story is a great example. This tale of survival is most likely an adaptation of the Babylonian story of Ishtar (Esther) and Marduk (Mordechai). Most of what we call “Jewish food” is really “kosherized” versions of dishes that already existed in Europe and North Africa. The wearing of kippah is another folkway that found a means of expression in the Talmud and became the yarmulkes that we wear in synagogues.
Today, Jews celebrate St. Patrick’s Day, like everyone else in America, in a secular sense. Wearing green, pinning a shamrock to your chest, searching for four-leaf clovers, eating traditional Irish dishes and of course, drinking copious amounts of dark lager, are all a part of the festivities. The fact that Jews can celebrate this holiday without feeling less Jewish is what makes the holiday Jewish!
Our survival has been based on taking what the world provides us, and making it Jewish, so that we can always have a place to be. By being active in the culture around us, but with a Jewish inflection, Jews show that we are the same as everyone else. And it’s this adaptability that makes us both attractive, and unique. There are no “Jewish” people in the way that there are no “American” people. We aren’t one culture, one language, one race. In fact, we are a collection of cultures, languages and races. But we fuse these elements together, each of us with a different slant, to create this amazing Oneness called “Jewish”. This is the same way that America made an Irish holiday a favorite past time.
Shalom, and save a beer for me!
Parshat Vayikra: Heroism and Hamburgers
Parshat Vayikra is an expensive parshat. The Hebrews are asked to give sacrifices to G-d for their guilt, their sins, and also for peace. The sacrifices themselves are meat or flour, burned on an altar.
Burning a hamburger or roasting some wheat doesn’t seem like a big deal, especially for doing some naughty stuff. But in reality, the Hebrews don’t have Burger King or Whole Foods in the Middle East. It was a big deal to watch your best crops or your best animals burn in front of you.
Every culture has a story about the hero and sacrifice. The hero doesn’t ultimately become a hero until he or she gives up something for someone else. G-d gives us the chance, in Vayikra, to be heroes, to give up something for the greater good. What a cool thing!
We saw this today and wanted to share it with all of you. Remember, “Judaism is not theirs alone.” We need to stand up and defend ourselves. Sending an email will only take literally five seconds. I sent three in that time. We can make our voices heard!
-Patrick and Michael
Dear Friends of IRAC,
We write to you today because of a very serious situation that developed here in Israel last night.
We have learned that the Knesset may vote during the coming week on legislation that would make important changes to conversion authorities in Israel and to the Law of Return.
This new law would roll back the clock on all the achievements we have made for Reform and Conservative conversion rights in Israel: not only losing recognition for Reform and Conservative conversions in Israel, but even completely redefining who is a Jew. From now on the power to perform conversions would rest solely with the Chief Rabbinate – which only recognizes Orthodox conversions.
At your next Jewish gathering, take a look at the people around you: chances are good that you are sitting next to someone who would no longer be considered a Jew in Israel.
This decision, which impacts the very definition of who is a Jew for all of Klal Yisrael, is being made by a few politicians who happen to be in power during the 18th Knesset. They are not at all in conversation with world Jewry, on whom this decision will have a major impact.
There are millions of Jews in the Diaspora, and the current Israeli leadership needs to hear from all of you – and right away – if we are going to stop this.
The various arms of our Movement are asking you to send urgent messages of protest to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and your local ambassador.
IRAC is working intensively on lobbying efforts with Members of Knesset, but we need the strength of your numbers to remind those who promote this bill that Israel and Judaism is not theirs alone.
Please send the attached letter right now to the Prime Minister and your ambassador, and forward this urgent call to your friends and family.
For more information on the conversion bill, click here
Please click here for the Union of Reform Judaism’s press release.
Prime Minister Netanyahu: Prime.Minister’sOffice@it.
pmo.gov.il
U.S. Ambassador Michael Oren’s office: info@washington.mfa.gov.il
U.S. Ambassador Michael Oren’s office: info@washington.mfa.gov.il
Sincerely,
Anat Hoffman, Executive Director, Israel Religious Action Center
Rabbi Gilad Kariv, Executive Director, Israel Movement for Progressive Judaism
Note: This will only take like two seconds, to send this email. Do it!
The Honorable Benjamin Netanyahu
Prime Minister of Israel
Office of the Prime Minister
Jerusalem, Israel
Dear Prime Minister Netanyahu,
We write to request your immediate intervention to prevent passage of the legislation being brought forward by MK David Rotem.
We are deeply concerned about the intention to grant the Chief Rabbinate sole control over conversion in Israel. Such legislation would be an open attack on the legitimacy of non-Orthodox Jewry, which composes the majority of world Jewry. In addition, passage of this bill would have the effect of altering the Law of Return, or, at the very least, cause undue hardship to anyone in Israel who come from Diaspora communities and seek to convert in Israel.
While we are supportive of efforts to create greater accessibility to conversion courts in Israel, the overall impact of the Rotem Bill will set back these efforts. Should this bill be enacted, it will exacerbate a widening gap between Diaspora and Israel communities, which we are working very hard to avoid.
Therefore, we believe it is imperative that you, as leader of Israel, and as one who cares deeply about the well-being of Klal Yisrael, intervene and urge immediate withdrawal of this bill.
In this weeks portion, we finish the book of Sh’mot, Exodus, and read the twin parshayot Vayakhel and Pekudei.
At the beginning, Moses reiterates the commandment to observe Shabbat, and then goes on to explain, in excruciating detail, the construction of the Mishkan, the Tabernacle, that is to be Hashem’s dwelling place with the Israelites as they travel. The question in this portion is what, in all of these details regarding the kind of blue, purple and red dyed wool, goat hair, animal skins, gold, silver, and copper, what can we learn from this, this mishegas? This craziness?
This is the questions I asked myself:
What does this have to do with me?
At the beginning of the portion, Moses asks the Israelites to donate these rich and precious materials to build G_d’s house, His Tabernacle, and to work to build the Sanctuary.
And what do the Jews do?
They give.
And give.
And give some more.
The Torah says:
“Every man and woman whose heart motivated them to bring for any of the work that Hashem had commanded to make, through Moses – the Children of Israel brought a free-willed offering to Hashem.”
They came and gave freely. Not only did they give, they worked, they sewed and built and labored.
In fact, they gave so much of their possessions and of themselves that Moses had to say, “Man and woman shall not do more work toward the gift for the Sanctuary”!
Moses told them to stop!
So what did I learn from this?
We are called to give, not as charity and not just money. Jews are called to give tzedakah, which means “righteousness” or “justice”. We are called to do right with ourselves and our resources.
So give.
Keep giving.
Not just of money, not just of gold and silver and goat skins.
We need to give and give until Moshe Rabbenu himself tells us “Enough!”
And then, being Jews, we should give some more!
WE WANT QUESTIONS!
Ask us some! We’ll answer them!
Reply to this video, send us a video, or just send us an email at questions.indieyeshiva@punktorah.com!
Hosted by Michael and Patrick
