ReligionDispatches.org

The Doonesbury comic strip of this past Sunday has caused a little bit of a stir in some of the rabbinic circles I travel in. It also prompted this letter to Gary Trudeau from Rabbi David Saperstein, of the Reform Movement’s Religious Action Center.

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The Agriprocessors fiasco, which came to a head just about a year ago with the ICE raid on the Postville, Iowa, meat processing plant, was, as we say in Yiddish, a shande far di goyim—a scandal in front of the Gentiles. But it's also had a profound effect within the Jewish world, deepening the faultline between those who view the mitzvot, the commandments of the Torah, simply as religious strictures, and those who would also see them as a source for progressive values.

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Hard economic times are continuing to force the organized Jewish community into retrenchment. It puts me in mind of a classic ethical question, posed in tractate Bava Metzia of the Babylonian Talmud: if you and a friend are lost in the wilderness, and you yourself are carrying a flask of water sufficient to sustain only one of you, what should you do with it?

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Vanity Fair is running an on-line extra this month about the latest crop of Jewish writers, and their place in the history of modern Jewish letters. David Sax, who has his own book coming out about the history of the Jewish deli, argues that celebrated young authors like Michael Chabon, Nicole Krauss, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Nathan Englander be collectively dubbed “the New Yiddishists.” He sidesteps the fact that none of these talented people write in Yiddish, let alone speak it. This is significant.  

The only Yiddish writer mentioned in the piece is Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer, who is one of the only Yiddish writers that most people have heard of. (Most other Yiddish writers hated him for his success, as depicted in Cynthia Ozick’s thinly-veiled short story “Envy, or Yiddish in America.”[pdf]) And Sax’s invocation of Singer is rather clichéd, reducing the extensive and nuanced oeuvre to “tales of young rabbis in Russian shtetls.” (It’s nit-picking to point out that Singer was from Poland, but I couldn’t stand the itch.)  

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With the installation of Rabbi Denise Eger as the president of the Southern California Board of Rabbis, on May 11th, another milestone will have been passed in the advancement of GLBT rights within the organized Jewish world. It takes a little bit of unpacking, however, to figure out exactly what that milestone is, and what the road ahead looks like.  

Eger, a lesbian, is the spiritual leader of Reform-affiliated Congregation Kol Ami (“the voice of my people”) in West Hollywood, a GLBT-oriented community that is equally welcoming of straight allies and interfaith families. This is no great scandal in the Reform movement, which, along with Reconstructionism, has long championed full inclusion of GLBT Jews, including an almost decade-old policy of religiously sanctioning same-sex marriages. 

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Passover is a good indication of the attention Judaism pays to detail. Allegiance to the national narrative is expressed through recitation of the Exodus story, but more importantly through the removal of every scrap of leavened bread from the household.  At the Seder, commonplace food items—flatbread, parsley, horseradish, apples—are invested with ultimate meaning, becoming sensual representations of slavery and freedom.  

It’s like this throughout the year, too. How and what you eat, what kind of clothes you wear, the way you grow your hair—all of these become densely compacted signifiers, revealing manifold commitments and tensions when they are unraveled.       

It should come as little surprise, therefore, that the recent decision of a group of Israeli soldiers to grow beards without permits is fraught with contentious historical meaning. The IDF is generally clean-shaven, with beard permits issued only on religious or medical grounds. As reported last week in Ha’aretz, an Orthodox army rabbi refused to acknowledge that a group of Conservative (known as Masorti in Israel) soldiers were religious Jews.

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A study released last week indicates that the current generation of young Jews is more “spiritual” than its elders. Though the study’s authors aren’t entirely certain what “spirituality” means, they do believe, rightly, that this finding has significant implications for the future of Jewish life in America.  

American Jews have a penchant for quantifying themselves such as hasn’t been seen in the Jewish world since the first pages of the book of Numbers. And the reasons are similar. After the harrowing experiences of genocide and immigration, we find ourselves straggling through a new wilderness; anxious to know whether or not our demographics portend survival.  

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Culturally attuned Jews are differing in their responses to Caryl Churchill’s “Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza,” which opened last month at London’s Royal Court Theater and has since been imported to America.

The slender piece is composed of seven scenes, altogether totaling around ten minutes. Each purports to portray a group of Jewish elders trying to determine how they will explain a number of events, all having to do with the State of Israel, to a young daughter; every line begins with the words “tell her.” The culmination is a bloody, vitriolic speech, defending the Gaza war of this past winter. The intended effect is clearly alienation from the speaker: Churchill has allowed the play to be distributed freely, so long as money is gathered at performances for relief work in Gaza.  

The play’s predictable reception demonstrates how anti-Semitism haunts efforts to find a productive way of responding to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Jews often play the anti-Semitism card too quickly when criticism is leveled at Israeli policy. But critics often fail to recognize when their criticism fits into longstanding patterns of Western culture’s abuse of Jews.  

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Yesterday’s rededication of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston’s Holocaust-memorial menorah comes at a particularly sticky moment in Catholic-Jewish relations. And that’s precisely the point.  

The Diocese had to move recently from its sprawling Boston campus to an office park in the southern suburb of Braintree, selling off the old property to compensate the victims of the clergy sex-abuse scandal. Then the menorah, a replica of the one placed at the North American College in Vatican City in 1999, a symbol of improving ties between the two faith traditions, came along. A four-foot bronze structure, its six candlesticks (scaled down from the seven of the ancient Temple) are held aloft by depictions of disheveled, skeletal figures, each one representing a million murdered Jews.  

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J-Street, a “Pro Israel, Pro Peace” lobbying group founded last year to counterbalance the legendary clout of the right-leaning AIPAC, is celebrating the release of its new polling data, which seems to demonstrate that the majority of American Jews are on their side. Here are some of the key published statistics from their “National Survey of American Jews”:

*President Obama enjoys a high level of support in general, and 69% of respondents view his position on the Middle East favorably. (More on this in a moment.)

*88% want active American involvement in the Israel-Palestine conflict, and a slightly smaller number would tolerate pressure being exerted on both sides.

*69% were in favor of negotiations with a Palestinian unity government that included Hamas, and 76% percent expressed some degree of support for the “two-state solution” as outlined in the 2000 Camp David and Taba talks. (This was the agreement, often said to have been rejected by Arafat, but which actually fell apart due to a complex series of failures on both sides).

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The Forward is reporting that a group of congregations is preparing to nail a protest to the door of the United Synagogue, the Conservative movement’s congregational arm. An advanced copy of the strongly-worded missive, obtained by the newspaper, accuses the USCJ of having grown “insular, unresponsive, and of diminishing value to its member congregations.” Set to go out today, the letter also hints that these Conservative synagogues may consider withdrawing from the movement if serious changes are not initiated within ninety days.  

Though in recent decades it has become standard practice to identify Jews by their “flavor”—Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist—denominationalism is actually a latter day, foreign imposition on organized Jewish life, representing the influence of American Protestantism.

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On this day in 1922, twelve-year-old Judith Kaplan was called to the lectern of her father’s new synagogue to read a passage of Torah, in Hebrew and English, from a printed text, thereby becoming the first bat mitzvah’d girl in the three-thousand-year history of the Jewish people. 

The ritual did not exactly mirror the bar mitzvah ceremony, through which boys had been ushered into Jewish manhood since the Middle Ages, as Mordechai Kaplan was apparently not quite ready for his daughter to chant directly from the scroll. But the act was a measure of his respect for the wife and four daughters with whom he shared his home, and a significant plank in his program for the reconstruction of Jewish life.  

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