Is the Kotel a Jewish tourist trap?

Yesterday's article by URJ President Rabbi Eric Yoffie at jweekly.com, about recent events at the Kotel, got me thinking.

(For those who missed it, "Women of the Wall," a group of women who meet regularly to conduct services at the Kotel, ran into trouble last November when one of their group brought a Torah scroll and put on a tallit.  That ran afoul of a previously-issued High Court ruling that required the group to adhere to the regulations for behavior at the Kotel, regulations, of course, written by Orthodox Jews who are, shall we say, unsympathetic to such behavior.  You can read a contemporary account of what happened here.)

I get why some Orthodox Jews view it as a holy place.  It's the sole remnant of the Temple.  Insofar as some pray for the restoration/rebuilding of the Temple, it stands to reason that the Kotel is hugely significant.  (Why it's considered to be a synagogue for legal purposes is another matter...)  But for the rest of us Jews who do not hope and pray for the restoration of the Temple and the resumption of sacrifices...why do we make such a big deal out of it?  Yoffie writes, "Throughout the generations, the Kotel has been a source of inspiration to Jews everywhere. It is a concrete symbol of our love for Jerusalem and our common Jewish destiny. The Wall belongs to the entire Jewish people; it must be a place that unifies our people, where all Jews are welcomed and all are respected." 

Frankly, I don't buy it. 

As far as I can tell, the Kotel is a tangible symbol of what divides Jews, not unites them:  Those who long for the restoration of the Temple vs. those who don't; those who view it as a powerful religious site vs. those who view it as a powerful nationalist site.  It may be "a source of inspiration to Jews everywhere," but if the things we're being inspired to do are widely divergent, it's hard to see how it unifies us.

The first time I went to the Kotel was in High School, on Tisha B'av.  It was one of the most profoundly moving experiences of my life.  I had planned for my semester in Israel for years, hoped and dreamed it would come...and when I saw it lit up at night, thousands of Ultra-Orthodox chanting Eicha, I wept on the stones for what seemed like hours.  By the end of my six months in Israel, it still felt special.  Several years later when I returned, it felt familiar, but there was something strange about being there -- I felt as if I was supposed to feel something, and the more I thought about it, the more I didn't know what was even appropriate to feel.  And, of course, I got hit up a dozen times for money every time I went to pray. 

And then it started to feel a bit idolatrous. 

In my opinion, one of the genius things about Judaism is its distinction between real holiness and its trappings.  Jews aren't supposed to have holy places -- anywhere 10 Jews come together to pray is perfectly holy enough, thank you.  We don't need art, or things, or monuments...just Torah and people.  The Kotel, though, seems to undo all of this, as if the remnants of the retaining wall of the Second Temple could ever be imbued with any holiness beyond that brought by the people who go there...and the Orthodox certainly have no monopoly on that.

Don't get me wrong, I think people have the absolute right to feel whatever they want to feel about the Kotel.  That's none of my business.  But from where I stand, it's the ultimate Jewish tourist trap:  That place to which we're all supposed to go, supposed to feel something...supposed to put our prayers on paper and stick them between the stones where they're supposed to get to God faster.  Where we get hit up for money from every other Black Hat in Jerusalem. 

Others can have a blast there if they must, but sorry to say I think it's baloney.

Hard to even know how to respond to such bile...

Last night, before turning in for bed, I turned to a 9:30pm Queens Public Television (QPTV) program on Channel 82 called (!) "Judaism."  (Based on the programming guide, it seems like a regular spot.)

I know, I know:  big mistake.

The entire 30 minute segment was of a single guy standing in front of a bookcase, ranting directly into the camera.  I really should have known better, but photos of Meir Kahane and Baruch Goldstein were visible over his right shoulder, and in light of my recent foolhardy attempt to take a dip into that pool of quicksand (here, here and here), I couldn't resist.

It's not that the guy (whose exact name I can't remember) said anything I haven't heard before:

• he likened the Maccabees revolt against the Seleucids and Hellenistic Jews in the 2nd Century BCE to Yigal Amir's assassination of Rabin:  in both cases, he claimed, "real Jews" did what was necessary to save Judaism from "assimilationist, evil Jews"
• he claimed that the "so-called Chassids or Chassidic Jews" do not have the spirit to keep Judaism alive
• he repeated many times -- actually screamed -- "No Arabs, No Terror!!!"
• he discussed how "Rabin HaRasha" ("Rabin the Evil One"), among other things, was responsible for murdering unarmed, innocent people during the Altalena affair; was an alcoholic and a "nicotine addict" (!); and "ate swine, pork" when he visited the U.S. and that, in sum, "what went around, came around," viz., his assassination

And so on.

As I said, nothing new here. 

But listening to this sad, angry little man, and thinking about what he said and what he represents, I became deeply sad...and very angry.

It makes me sad and angry that bigoted, fundamentalist nutjobs like him put on their kippas and spew this hateful, murderous bile...while insisting that Jews who eat pork are the evil ones.

It makes me sad and angry that many Jews think that it's only other religions that have crazies like this guy; "goyyim, sure, but not us."

It makes me sad and angry that my religion -- the beautiful, comforting and meaningful tradition without which I don't know who or what I would be -- gets perverted and twisted by the dirty hands and foul mouths of such sick people.

It makes me sad and angry that anyone could ever turn to a literal interpretation of a book written thousands of years ago as justification for inflicting pain and suffering on other people.

It makes me sad and angry that many American Jews turn a blind eye to this billious intolerance out of a misguided and misdirected "support for Israel."

It makes me sad and angry that so many people are so narrow-minded to think that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is "all the Arabs fault," and that if they would all just move to the Saudi desert, everything would be perfect.

It makes me sad and angry that saying these kinds of things leads others to think I'm a "self-hating Jew."

It makes me sad and angry that some Jews have spent so much of their time and effort to give the veneer of intellectual legitimacy to philosophies that only lead to the misery and suffering of other human beings.

It makes me sad and angry that I once thought there was something different and special about Jews...only to learn that we're just as screwed up, crazy and ignorant as everyone else in the world.

But listening to the broadcast reminded me of something else as well that I don't remember enough, and is part of the reason I'm writing this blog in the first place:  What other people say, think and do affects me as a Jew, but it does not -- it cannot -- define my Jewishness.  I too get to say what I feel, think and believe and in doing so play my part in shaping what it means to be Jewish.  To paraphrase Hillel,

If I do not play an active role in defining what Judaism means to me, who will do it?  But if all I do is think and write about myself, failing to speak out against the ignorant, the intolerant, and the fundamentalists who routinely arrogate to themselves the right to define authentic Jewishness, then what does that make me?  And if not now, when?

This is why you can't swim on Shabbat?!?

A relatively green baal teshuva friend of mine told me the other day that he had asked his rabbi if he could swim in the ocean on Shabbat.  The answer was, effectively, no. 

This made me sad.  And confused.  And angry.

Is anyone else like me out there?

I have found lots of great frum (i.e., religious) and off-the derech (i.e., by former "observant" Jews) blogs out there, and I have even come across some right-wing sites that at the very least are giving me some food for thought.  The Reform Shuckle and Mah Rabu, from the Reform angle, are pretty great as well.

But I'm not finding other blogs written by people like me:  Liberal, Reform Jews searching for a meaningful, authentic connection with the nitty-gritty of our faith.  There are some great cultural sites out there dealing with modern Jewish issues, but they're not quite what I'm looking for.

I'm trying to find personal answers to some big questions:

• How can a truly liberal person take seriously religion in general and Judaism in particular?
• What is the meaning of Jewish community if I only cherry pick the elements of Judaism that "speak" to me personally?  But once I surrender autonomy to some other authority -- God, Chazal, my rebbe -- then how can I stay liberal?
• I cannot believe the Torah was dictated to Moses by God, and I simply can't accept that Oral Torah could be binding for all Jews for all time.  But then how do I read and understand these texts?  How am I to relate to them?

Does anyone know of other blogs, sites, etc. where people are grappling with these issues?

Thanks in advance for your thoughts!

What's really the matter with the Christmas Tree?

I really disliked Christmas Trees.

Surely I'm not the only one, but there's no point in generalizing here -- it's hard enough for me to figure out what's going through my head, so I can't hardly claim to know what other Jews think, or why they think as they do.  In retrospect, it's fair to say that Christmas Trees touched on a number of unexamined, sensitive spots for me; sensitive likely because they were unexamined.  So when a Christmas Tree -- more specifically, my then-girlfriend/now-wife's Christmas Tree -- first entered my life and then my home, I found myself ill-prepared to handle the latent emotions and underlying prejudices that bubbled up to the surface.  Having examined these thoughts and feelings over the past few years, though, I must admit that I've learned a great deal as well as found a lot of new answers to questions that I thought were settled.

For a long time, Christmas Trees represented a lot of wrong things for me:  the hegemony of Christianity and Christian culture in the U.S. and the concommitant minority status of Jews; "trojan horses" carrying Christian symbolism and theology into secular spaces -- and, of course, some Jewish homes -- under the guise of celebrating multidenominationalism or cultural tolerance; and, somewhat contradictorily, as an example of the dumbing down of religion whereby something that once meant something specific to some people, comes to mean nothing as a result of its morphing into a symbol of something to all people.  In my book, it was more than fine if Christians wanted to have their Christmas Trees, but when they get pushed in my face every year and put up in every Manhattan office building; when I hear about the beleagured Christian masses under assault by the so-called "War Against Christmas" I'm allegedly waging against them; when I get told that Christmas Trees arent' so much about "Christmas" as about the holidays...well, that's all a different story.  So one the one hand, clearly the issue wasn't the tree per se; it was what the tree represented vis-a-vis my perception of Jew's position in American society.  And as for having a tree; no way was I going to ever have one of those things in my house.  Assimilationist Jews who had no knowledge or interest in knowing their culture and religion might have one, but not me.  And anyway, wasn't there some relationship between the wood of the tree and the wood of the cross, and wasn't the star on top of the tree the "Little Star of Bethlehem" under which that good Jewish boy named Yeshua was born?  You get the point.

There was, though, a pretty major exception in my family.  I have an aunt who was and is Jewish, always had a Christmas tree growing up, and continued to do so into adulthood.  Funny thing, in spite of all my issues with Christmas Trees, her having one never seemed to bother me too much.  I certainly didn't and don't think of her as an "Assimilationist Jew" with no interest in things Jewish; my aunt and uncle went to shul, celebrated the holidays, and, well, let's just say if you didn't know about the Tree Situation, you'd have never guessed.  Actually I never saw anything wrong in her practice, which is odd given my own strong feelings about the matter.  But looking back now, of course I wouldn't have had a problem with it:  my hangups were the result of unexamined assumptions, not reasoned logic; I was the one with an unclear sense of boundary between my Jewishness and American-Christian society, not her.  I mean, her tree violated no Jewish laws (at least not in my book), and besides, she was/is my aunt!  Silly, I know, but personal connections often trump general prejudices.

And therein lies the rub.  To know someone is to have context, and to know one's self is to have self-assuredness.  A Christmas Tree represents nothing more or less than what I see when I look at them, and what I see is not some God-given (or socially-determined) fact but rather what I allow myself to see:  What remains after I open my eyes and do my best to see what is in front of me without regard to preconceived notions or fears, or ideas long-ago planted in Jewish summer camp...or concerns that, somehow, the scope and content of my Jewish identity is something that is open to judgment and interpretation by others.

I first started to really think about Christmas Trees in the context of my relationship with my then-girfriend, now wife (I'll call her "N").  For N, they were a symbol of much family warmth and togetherness; all good things.  So of course she always had one and planned to continue having them around come Christmastime.  As we became closer, it became clearer that Trees were going to be a part of our life, and that awakened some of these long-dormant issues I've been talking about here.  In particular, as our relationship depeened, the fact that she wasn't Jewish started to loom a little larger, and as that happened, certain little things that wouldn't otherwise be that big of a deal started to feel like they were important.

These little things, I discovered, weren't always obvious ones.

But one of them was the Tree.

In a way it was a fortuitous thing on which to be fixated, because while it helped bring into sharper relief some of the religious issues under the surface, the thing itself -- the Christmas Tree -- was so thoroughly unobtrusive and unobjectionable, and was so definitely going to be a fixture in our life together, that I really had no choice but to "get over it."  Looking back at that period of time, when I came to terms with the Tree, I see myself as a sort of addict who, when confronted by friends and family during an Intervention, comes up with every bogus, self-serving explanation in the book to avoid admitting the problem...but in reverse.  I knew the tree was a-commin into my life, but as I finally turned to face it, what came out was:

• What kind of Jew has a Christmas Tree in his house?!?
• What does it say about my real beliefs and feelings that I would have a Tree in my house?  That I would live with someone who wanted a Tree in the house?  What's wrong with me?
• If I let a Tree into my house, what else will find its way into my house?
• What will other Jews think of me?  Will I be accepted or rejected by my family?
• How will letting this Tree into the house -- how will the decision to let it into my house -- change me as a person in unforseen, negative ways?

Nice stuff, right?  I mean, where did all this crap come from that would be stirred to consciousness by a frickin Christmas Tree?  Was I so insecure, so weak, so unaware, that a Christmas Tree would be some kind of Fifth Column in my household, undermining everything I held dear?

The easy answer is no, of course not:  As I was finally able to give voice to these questions, to answer them, and to follow the answers to their logical conclusions, I learned that what was really going on was that a deeply-seeded set of ideas on which I was raised and educated came into conflict with another, ultimately more powerful set of liberal ideas that I was exposed to and came to adopt as an adult...and that the point at which they met was where my inevitable work must be done. 

The harder answer, however, one that cannot be answered in a few paragraphs -- and the search for which is a major reason I have started this blog -- is that I don't really know what is at stake when a parochial, religious identity comes up against a self-styled modern, liberal mindset.  I don't know what the implications are of all this, of how the answers to new questions -- how turning over the stones of my Jewish identity -- will change things...will change me.

But I do know that I'm grateful that N and her Christmas Tree are in my life.  Ironically, they have pushed me to understand my own Judaism in ways I would never have anticipated, "to turn it this way and that," to not take for granted.

Who woudda thunk it?


Fun and/or Disurbing Things to Read:

On Being a Jew at Christmas

Hertzel's Christmas Tree

What Do Jews Do On Christmas?

Toby Belfer Never Had a Christmas Tree (!)

A Lonely Jew on Christmas

Christmas for Jews

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?

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.