Why I follow the blogs I follow...

It struck me today, looking at the list of blogs I follow, how very different my situation is from them.

I commented the other day on one of them, Undercover Kofer (who, by the way, is fascinating to read and has great taste in blog layout to boot), that

There are a lot of Jewish blogs out there. The vast majority, I have found, are highly uncritical -- of Israel, of Judaism, of pretty much everything. And therefore uninteresting. The big exception are the OTD blogs, mostly because they are written by highly intelligent, conflicted, and deeply introspective people. Althgouh I am not orthodox, reading about how others grapple with their own Judaism is fascinating, insightful and inspirational.

I've been thinking about this lately, why these OTD blogs are so interesting...  I think it's because I see in many of their posts the nuts and bolts of the intellectual struggle it takes to reconcile orthodox Judaism and the modern world.  I'm trying to do the same thing, I think, but from a very different direction.  While the orthodox blogs I'm reading describe the difficulty in combining a fundamentally conservative worldview with the modern, liberal society in which we live, I'm trying to reconcile my fundamentally liberal worldview with what I have come to see is the fundamentally conservative nature of religion in general and Judaism in particular.  How can I claim to be liberal, to respect the Other, without in some way inflating myself?  If I say to each his own, then what is the basis for doing things the way I do them or believing the things I believe?  To the extent I place my faith in the ability of human beings to determine their own destiny and to better themselves, then what role have I left for a Higher Power?

I'm not sure who has it harder. 

Well, okay, I think orthodox probably have it harder insofar as the demands of mitzvot observance are greater than the demands of the kind of heshbon hanefesh I'm engaging in.  I can blog or not, but I certainly don't think I'm transgressing you-know-who's will either way.  But the more I look around, the more I read what other RJs write, the more I listen to my fellow congregants in my own ultra-liberal shul...the more I think I have a long, hard road ahead of me:  to discover and practice a Judaism truly consistent with my own beliefs.

How does one do that?

Last post for this first day...

Shabbat Shalom!

It's really a shame...or is it?

I'm in the middle of reading The World of the Yeshiva: An Intimate Portrait of Orthodox Jewry by William Helmreich.  It's an intelligent, fascinating read on many levels, and I plan to write a more extensive post with my thoughts when I'm finished. 

There's something that has bugged me for a long time, though, and reading this book has really brought up the matter again:  The extent to which Reform Jews (RJs) in general, and myself in particular, lack any substantive knowledge of Talmud.  It's not a big surprise, of course:  the Reform movement from its inception made it clear that halacha was not a binding source of Jewish law.  The fact that we RJs don't know it, therefore, "makes sense."  Reading Helmreich's book has also driven home for me how much foundational knowledge is required before one can even think of approaching the study of Talmud:  Aramaic, Hebrew, and Torah all have to be known cold.  And then one has to devote years to its study, daf by daf.

It's overwhelming.

I know the point isn't to "know" Talmud but rather to "study" it,  I know that very few people ever gain truly comprehensive knowledge of it; I certainly won't.  But even though I definitely view Oral Torah as man-made, even though I undoubtedly would disagree with much that is contained in it, and even though I could never be happy or comfortable living in a community that used it as a basis for its laws...I am nevertheless sad to be distanced from it.  This is for me the paradox of trying to live as an engaged, committed RJ in today's world:  I cannot just shake my head and say "oh well, I don't know much about the Talmud, and that's okay" but neither am I willing to make the sacrifices of time, effort, and ideology that its study would require.

I wish the RJ movement would have started teaching me Hebrew and Aramaic more seriously, at an earlier age.  I wish I had been exposed to real Torah and Talmud when I was young enough to absorb it like a sponge. 

Does anyone else feel that way?

What is going to happen here...

Okay, vague and cryptic first post, right?

So here's what I'm planning to do here:  On a regular basis, daily if possible, but certainly several times a week, I plan to take up different Jewish and Jewish-related topics, questions, problems, and stories.  There is no stone here I'm not willing to turn over. 

Some of these issues will be intensely personal, others will be global in scope.  I imagine some will be brief thoughts, while others will be longer, more in-depth explorations of the topic at hand.  I hope to be as autobiographical as possible, but only to personalize the discussions.  I am well aware that there are many Jews more knowledgable than I on these issues.  But this blog -- the entire point of all of this -- is meant on the one hand as a vehicle for me personally to work through the meanings and implications of the laws, rituals, language, culture, history, politics for my life but also, on the other hand, to offer up my own struggle as a real-time history of what it's like for a committed Jew (well, at least someone who likes to consider himself as one) to work though the contradictions between his faith and modernity, and between his religion, which is fundamentally conservative, and his ideology, which is fundamentally liberal. 

I'm terrified and excited beyond words to see where it goes.

Why another Jewish blog?

Why am I writing this blog?  Why should anyone bother to read it?

This blog, this post, is the culmination really of years of not knowing what to do with the unsatisfactory answers to a million different questions about who I am, where I come from, and who I want to be.  Without realizing it, I've been looking for this blog for most of my life; yes, even before there was such a thing as a blog, before I knew what a blog was, before I came to appreciate the nature of the blogosphere's collective wisdom.  I was desperately looking for a blog by a Reform Jew grappling with the kinds of questions that I have confronted and continue to confront.  Only in the past few months did I finally, belatedly, begin to sift through the many terrific Jewish-related blogs out there -- many of them are linked here -- but none of them focused on the specific issues that I grapple with.  I salute them because they have given me the inspiration to do this, not knowing where it will take me or what I will find when I get there.

I'll have a lot more to say about these things over time.

But it still begs the question, why this blog, and why now?

• because I've been on the road to this moment for a very long time, and I've run out of excuses
• because there are ideas that I believe need to be expressed and that need to be explored
• because the words of Rabbi Bag Bag have always spoken to me:  "Turn it, and turn it again, for everything is in it; And contemplate it, and grow old and gray over it, and stir not from it, for you have no better principle than it"
• because I have fallen short in my life as a Reform Jew -- I have not studied and questioned and known the laws before knowing where I stand
• because over the past few years, questions I never thought I'd have to ask have been put on my table
• because this is the only subject I've ever really wanted to write about

As I said, I don't know where this journey will go.  I don't know how much insight or wisdom I will have to offer.  Actually, I have no idea if anyone, ever, will even see or bother to read any of this.  But I promise that on this blog, I will struggle always to tell as much of my truth as I can, in the hopes that putting it out there will somehow make a difference.  I am not obligated to complete the task, but neither am I free to abstain from it.