Left to right are panelists at a
recent National Council of Jewish Women panel on organ transplants: Dr. Aviva
Goldberg, Rabbi Yossi Benarroch, Marshall Miller and Na’ama Miller. (photo
from NCJW)
On Dec. 11, the Winnipeg section of National
Council of Jewish Women (NCJW) held an organ donation awareness event,
featuring community members Rabbi Yossi Benarroch, Dr. Aviva Goldberg, and
husband (organ recipient) and wife (organ donor) Marshall and Na’ama Miller.
“The short of it is, basically, that Jewish law
permits organ donations,” he said. “There’s no question about that. Of course,
when we talk about law, law is complicated and there are lots of opinions.
There’s an ideal in Judaism, which is one of those foundations, and it’s called
‘pikuach nefesh doche hakol’ … which basically means that, in Judaism,
there’s nothing more important than saving a life.
“I’m a very observant Jew and I keep kosher,”
he said, “but if I had to eat something that wasn’t kosher – pork or whatever –
in order to save my life, then Jewish law says you’re obligated to do that.”
Benarroch said it is written that, if someone
saves a life, it is as if they have saved the entire world. Furthermore, he
said, we are called to not stand idly by if another person is suffering. “We
are obligated to intervene and actually obligated to help that individual,” he
said.
Marshall Miller, who was diagnosed with
progressive kidney disease more than 25 years ago, eventually required
replacement therapy.
“Slowly, over time, my kidney failure began to
get worse and worse,” he shared. “The disease progressed to the point where, a
few years back, my GP at the time said, ‘Marshall, you’re now at the point
where you have to go see a specialist because I can’t do anything more for you
here … you need an expert to deal with your situation.’
“Everybody who suffers from kidney disease
understands that, what kidneys do, among many things, is purify your blood.
When your blood isn’t being purified properly, you can start to feel kind of
lousy. I think my family can attest to the fact that I was starting to feel
lousy. I think my whole family suffered along as I did, as I got sicker and
sicker.”
When his kidney function was down to less than
10%, the specialist started talking seriously about replacement therapy. This
involved dialysis three times a week until a matching donor could be found.
During the search for a donor, Na’ama Miller
decided to find out if she might be able to help other people in her husband’s
situation. As it turned out, she was a match for her husband.
“We were told it was a one hundred million
shot,” she said. “And so, we were next faced with a bit of a dilemma …
because it was scary for the kids. But Samantha and Maya were very much in
favour of it, because they didn’t want me to be miserable anymore.”
She said, “People ask me, how I could do this
… if it was hard. I give everyone the same answer. It was a no-brainer, a
very easy decision for me. As Marshall said … we were all suffering along
with him.”
“It’s worth it. You saved a life,” her husband
added. “We hope this event here – even if only one more person signs up …
hopefully, more and more people will choose to do it among the Jewish community
after hearing the story.”
After the Millers spoke, a second video was
screened, about a former Winnipegger who donated a kidney to save the life of a
woman in California, who he has never met.
“Right now, in Canada, there are over 4,500
people waiting for an organ transplant – 4,500 Marshalls,” said Goldberg, who
is the director of the Canadian Society of Transplantation and chair of the
Transplant Manitoba kidney allocation review committee. “We don’t have 4,500
Na’amas. That’s why we need donors – both living and also deceased donors.
“That’s what we want to talk about today,” she
said, “even if you don’t go forward to become a living donor, which is a really
big deal. It’s not something that every person in this room is going to be able
to do and that’s totally fair. But, there’s something that everyone in this
room can do and that’s to sign up for organ donation after you’ve died – say
that this is something I’d like to do, that you’d like to leave a legacy …
you can save lives after you’ve died, either with organ or tissue donation. You
can save lives by donating organs – heart, liver, lungs, pancreas, kidneys and
even small bowel – but, also tissue donation.”
In some cases, people can donate their corneas
to help improve the life of others. According to Goldberg, Manitoba, last year,
was the fourth on the world list of most donors.
While Goldberg implored people to sign up as
donors online, she further reminded them that talking to family about your
willingness to be a donor is also very important – and not just immediate
family, as they might be in the same car with you when you have a horrific
accident, for example.
“The way that organ donation works in Canada,
here, in Manitoba, is that after someone has died and they are potentially
going to be an organ donor, their family is approached,” said Goldberg. “If you
sign up for the registry, it’s a way of saying to your family, on the very
worst day of their lives, that this is something your loved one wanted – wanted
so much that they went to the registry, signed up, made that choice. It’s a
hard discussion to have … [but] it’s so important to do.”
During the question-and-answer period, one
attendee asked if there was an age limit for someone to donate an organ. The
answer? “No.”
Another question was about the possibility of
rejection and, to that, Marshall Miller shared his experience. “I suffered from
a mild early rejection,” he said. “But, the ability to detect the rejection and
be able to remedy it is incredible. They were able to treat me with medication
instantaneously and, really, it was a non-issue for me. Even though there is a
risk of rejection, it can easily be found if you attend your appointments and
take your medication.”
For information on organ donation in British Columbia and to register, visit transplant.bc.ca.
Union for Reform Judaism will be
closing down their summer camp for teen leadership development: Kutz Camp, in
Warwick, N.Y. (photo from onehappycampernj.org)
It’s that time of year again – when it’s too
cold in Winnipeg sometimes to go to synagogue. For many folks, this never
happens! For others, they never intended to go in the first place. Others would
like to attend, but aren’t well enough to leave home when it’s frigid.
Once, my twins, age 2, wanted to go to a
Shabbat family service when the temperature was ridiculously cold. With wind
chill, it was below -40. We bundled them up, got outside (we don’t have a garage),
seat belted them in and, though the cars were plugged in, car #1 wouldn’t
start.
Our hands were stiff with cold as we took off
our mitts, got the twins out of their car seats and into the other car, and
then? Car #2 wouldn’t start either. Dang.
We grabbed the kids, rushed back indoors, and
they screamed. No services. What would we do? We streamed a service from my
parents’ Virginia congregation online. The screaming stopped. The kids were
transfixed.
Sometimes, streaming services at home is the
only answer. However, it’s not the same as being there. No one knows whether
you stand up and sit down. And if you sing along? You’re all alone doing it. If
the streaming has a hiccup, well, I’ve been known to give up. (I’d only “give
up” in person if my kids disrupted things.)
So, it’s fair to say that technology offers
amazing benefits, but it’s not being there in the flesh. There are rabbinic
discussions on why streaming doesn’t fulfil certain mitzvot and, of course, it
certainly doesn’t abide by the traditional things you can “do” on Shabbat.
Why bring this up? I recently learned that the
Union for Reform Judaism will be closing down their summer camp for teen
leadership development: Kutz Camp, in Warwick, N.Y. In the press release
announcing its reluctant close, the Reform movement noted that, in its 54
years, the camp has been a living laboratory. Some of the best and most
innovative Reform Jewish experiences happen there. However, today’s teens seek
experiences closer to home, and at different times during the year.
As a camper for two years and a staff member
for one, Kutz offered me the opportunity both to learn a marketable skill and
to wrestle deeply with Jewish music, texts and tradition. The marketable skill,
song leading, allowed me to earn money teaching music at summer camps, at
religious schools and in adult education classes for years. It helped cover
expenses during my undergraduate and graduate degrees. It offered me a great
deal of joy and spiritual meaning. I helped create kid communities who sang
their way right through services together.
I also joined a program called Torah Corps,
which allowed me to study and learn Torah and commentary every camp day with
other similarly motivated teenagers. It was a meaningful endeavour, and it gave
me an opportunity to feel less alone about my passion for both Jewish text and
prayer.
The people who attended Kutz Camp over the
years went on to be real leaders, not just in their congregations, but also in
the larger Jewish community and beyond. Every so often, I hear a name pop up
and I remember someone from summer camp. These are people who make change in
the world far beyond a single summer experience. For instance, Debbie Friedman
(z”l), the famous song leader and Jewish musician, got her start at Kutz Camp.
Dr. Andy Rehfeld, the newly appointed president
for the Reform movement’s seminary and graduate school, HUC-JIR, was an admired
mentor and song leader of mine at Kutz Camp. For years, I toted around cassette
tapes that recorded the entire NFTY Chordster, an encyclopedic “real
book” for Reform Jewish song leaders. I used a Walkman, boom box and car
stereo. I learned every single melody that Andy sang into that recording.
When I Googled Andy’s name, three or four other
names from camp popped up – all are now rabbis, cantors, educators or other
leaders. Kutz Camp was an incubator. It attracted teenagers from all over the
United States, Canada, England, Israel and elsewhere. Through Kutz Camp, I had
contacts all over the continent (and beyond) for quite awhile. When I went far
away from home to attend Cornell University in upstate New York, I wasn’t
alone! I went with several dear friends from camp.
I’m sad that Kutz Camp will close. It’s sited
in a beautiful place, though the buildings were falling down even when I was
there, around 30 years ago. However, just as online streaming has changed our
options when it comes to attending services or Jewish learning online, it has
also taken away the need for some families to send their kids away to camp.
But those face-to-face leadership incubators –
Jewish summer camps – are priceless. I met people from all over the world at
Kutz, just as I knew teenagers who did the same at USY, Habonim Dror and other
camps.
We give up some things when we stay home. Maybe
it’s the casual exchanges at shul that we miss. Or that we can’t hear everyone
singing harmonies around us in the Kutz Camp congregation. Or perhaps it’s
missing a lifelong friendship or even a spouse you might have met at camp.
Sometimes, it’s just better to be there in person. (Assuming your car will
start!)
Joanne Seiffhas written for CBC Manitoba and various Jewish publications. She is the author of three books, including From the Outside In: Jewish Post Columns 2015-2016, a collection of essays available for digital download or as a paperback from Amazon. See more about her at joanneseiff.blogspot.com.
BaMidbar students hike in all weather conditions, learning to live and care for themselves in outdoor environments. (photo from BaMidbar)
When she was 15 years old, now-camp director
Jory Hanselman had some family members who were struggling with mental illness
and addiction. At the same time, a couple of close friends passed away in
pretty quick succession. Hanselman was struggling to cope, until her parents
sent her to a wilderness therapy program.
“It was an extremely transformative experience
for me,” Hanselman told the Independent. “I was there over Passover and
so, while the program I was at was not in the least bit Jewish, my identity as
a Jew was really central to what I experienced and got from it.
“I really connected it to the narrative, and
thinking about finding my freedom from narrow places and overcoming obstacles
I’ve faced in life. So, I looked into how I could become more involved in
wilderness programs.”
In college, Hanselman spent summers at Ramah in
the Rockies and saw firsthand the beautiful integration of Jewish learning via
meaningful, outdoor-based experiences. And, when Ramah in the Rockies started
exploring the idea of opening a Jewish wilderness therapy program, their
director reached out to Hanselman, knowing that she had been working in the
field. Hanselman was asked to provide input on how to build a therapy program.
“They decided they would move forward and
officially create BaMidbar and so I came on board at that time, in September
2016, to help move the program from a space of ideas to implementation and actuality,”
she said.
One great thing about its location – literally,
in the wilderness – is that it’s only an hour-and-a-half drive from Denver,
Colo. However, said Hanselman, “To give you a perspective, we are an hour drive
from cell service in any direction.”
The therapy retreat is for Jews from 18 to 28
years old who are struggling with mild to moderate social and behavioural
challenges, including depression, general anxiety, social anxiety and more. The
young adults in the program have reached the tipping point where the issues are
getting in the way of their being able to fully engage with the people and
things around them in life.
“We also see lots of folks who have
co-occurring substance abuse disorders, who are also using substances in
addition to working through challenges associated with other mental health
challenges,” said Hanselman.
“The idea of wilderness therapy (WT) is using
wilderness- and adventure-based experiences as the vehicle for therapy, to
grow. So, we joke a lot in the WT industry that it’s not about doing therapy in
the wilderness, it’s about doing wilderness-based therapy. It’s not just going
out and meeting with a clinician in a wilderness-based setting; it’s really
using that experiential environment as a vehicle for working through different
therapeutic concepts.”
The BaMidbar program involves the whole family.
While students work with an individual therapist, their family is having weekly
phone meetings with the therapist who, in turn, also works with the field staff
to implement a treatment plan.
“So, our students are learning how to, for
example, build a fire with friction, and they use this opportunity to build
primitive skills to challenge themselves,” said Hanselman. “They learn what
tools they need to work through and understand what they’re capable of.
“Wilderness-based experiences are used as
metaphors and storytelling to support our students in connecting what is
happening in the wilderness environment to life outside the program.”
The small-group environment at the camp is used
as a way to help campers learn and rebuild communication skills and other
tools.
“We provide feedback and strong support for
them, as they determine how to have healthy emotional responses to different
stressful situations, or anger management strategies, and things like that,”
said Hanselman.
While there are many WT camps, BaMidbar is
possibly the only one that uses a Jewish lens and framework in everything they
do, including using the Jewish calendar as an opportunity to look at topics
that are thematically relevant to campers.
“To give an example, for Passover last year,
every day we had a theme we focused on that tied to the Passover narrative, as
well as our student therapeutic journey,” said Hanselman. “Day One, we focused
on our narrow place. Day Two, we talked about the story of Nachshon Ben
Aminadav … jumping into the unknown and what it might look like to take a
leap of faith and know that you need to change your situation, even if you
don’t know what the future holds. Day Three, we looked at manna in the desert
and talked about what sustains you physically, metaphorically, spiritually. Day
Four, we talked about receiving the Torah on Mount Sinai and did a summit hike,
talking about our personal value systems, what we live by, things like that.”
With BaMidbar being a kosher camp, Shabbat is a
break from the routine, which, in this case, is wilderness. On Shabbat, they
spend time in a cabin, while still studying texts through the lens of how they
are relevant to one’s life. This is the perfect time, said Hanselman, to talk
about family. For instance, “because, throughout Genesis, that revolves around
challenging family dynamics…. I always joke that Abraham was the first
wilderness therapy participant. He leaves everything he’s familiar with and
goes off into the wilderness on this journey of self-discovery. So, we do a lot
of programming around Shabbat.”
BaMidbar (which means “in
the desert” in Hebrew) is non-denominational and the organizers are dedicated
to meeting every student where they are in their unique journey, recognizing
and honouring that it can be very different for each individual.
“We are very dedicated to making sure that
students understand that our goal is to explore meaning, values and purpose
through a Jewish lens – not to tell them how to live Jewishly or what that
ideal Jewish life might look like,” said Hanselman. “That’s not our goal. Our
goal is to look at the wisdom Jewish tradition provides and to support students
for whole health wellness.”
Participants can expect 10 to 12 weeks in the
wilderness (Shabbat in a two-room cabin). Groups are small, with a current
maximum of eight individuals, and the program runs year-round.
In winter, said Hanselman, “We fully outfit our
students, so they receive all their gear from us. We make sure they have what
they need to be safe and warm in a wilderness environment. We have a lot of
staff practices around safety and support in that winter environment, and then
we have tents that have wood stoves in them when it gets below a certain
temperature.”
The camp fee is around $3,500 US per week. A
nonprofit, the BaMidbar program offers scholarships and works with every
family, regardless of their financial situation. Currently, about 75% of
students receive scholarships provided mainly by private donors and
foundations.
While BaMidbar has received many inquiries from
Canadian families, they have not had any Canadian participants. “But, we can
work with them – from Canada, or Israel, or other countries,” said Hanselman.
“We just haven’t yet.”
Left to right: Archbishop JohnMichael Miller, Dr. Gregg Gardner, Fr. Nick Meisl, Dr. Jay Eidelman and RabbiJonathan Infeld. (photo by Rabbi Adam Stein)
“This is a unique opportunity to learn and growtogether. What better way to open ourselves to that holiday spirit, to welcomethe mysterious and send away the fear of the unknown,” said Congregation BethIsrael president Helen Pinsky in introducing the Dec. 5 program at thesynagogue on Chanukah and Christmas, which was co-hosted by Beth Israel and theRoman Catholic Archdiocese of Vancouver.
After the lighting of a giant electronic chanukiyah by Rabbi Jonathan Infeld, the reciting of the motzi by Archbishop of Vancouver John Michael Miller and a latke-laden dinner, the crowd moved into the sanctuary to hear three scholars: Dr. Gregg Gardner, Diamond Chair in Jewish Law and Ethics at the University of British Columbia; Fr. Nick Meisl, a professor at St. Mark’s College; and Dr. Jay Eidelman, who lectures on the Holocaust and Jewish history at UBC.
Infeld started things off with a short talk.
“The neighbourhood we grew up in, in Pittsburgh, was 50% Jewish or Catholic,” he said. “The kids did not refer to themselves as Jewish or Christian but as ‘Chanukah’ or ‘Christmas.’ We don’t love this, but it shows that the holidays have a particular power.”
Noting that, for many Jews and Christians of the past, neither Chanukah or Christmas were important as religious holidays, the rabbi quoted a documentary he had watched that argued that Charles Dickens had created Christmas, quipping that maybe Dickens “created Chanukah as well, in its modern version.”
Gardner spoke on the origins of Chanukah, noting it was a festival created by the Maccabees to mark their military successes against the Greeks in an effort to preserve traditional Jewish culture. “Ironically,” he said, “creating a holiday to honour yourself is, in fact, a very Greek thing to do.”
The “subversive” rabbis of later generations altered the holiday to downplay its militaristic elements and its focus on the Maccabees, Gardner explained, replacing that with a focus on God’s miraculous intervention in the miracle of the oil that burned for eight days in the rededicated Temple.
In his remarks, Meisl said the balloon of his “naive beliefs” about Christmas popped when, in the course of his studies, he learned that Dec. 25 was not Jesus’s birthday, but rather a date chosen for other reasons. He explored the theories linking the day to the ancient Roman Saturnalia festival of late December, or the Dec. 25 holiday of Sol Invictus (Unconquerable Sun). With humour, he quoted the ancient Christian theologian Origen, who questioned whether Jesus’s birthday should be celebrated at all, noting that, in the Hebrew Bible, only “bad people celebrate their birthdays.” In seriousness, he said it seems that it was around 336 CE that Christians began celebrating Jesus’s birthday on Dec. 25.
Eidelman took to the podium to the sound of the 1970s classic “Eight Days of Chanukah” by Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings, while changing from his suit jacket to a tacky Chanukah sweater, in the style of the dreaded Christmas sweater. His speech covered various historical and pop-culture themes related to the two holidays, with a focus on how Jews have imagined and reimagined Chanukah “as a way to define ourselves spiritually and a way to claim space in a culture largely based on Christian customs.”
After a short question-and-answer period in which people asked about the development of certain Chanukah customs and the role the story of the Maccabees has played in the Christian tradition, among other things, the archbishop wrapped up the event.
“This has been a wonderful evening of sharing the joy we each feel in the holidays with each other,” said Miller, who made a point of thanking everyone involved in the event by name, right down to the members of the catering and kitchen staff.
“The event was a splendid manifestation of the ties that bind Christians and Jews together in an age-old spiritual heritage,” Miller told the Jewish Independent by email. “Such occasions foster friendships and mutual understanding, and my hope is that they continue. I am very grateful to Rabbi Jonathan Infeld for his leadership role in interfaith relations.”
Matthew Gindinis a freelance journalist, writer and lecturer. He is Pacific correspondent for the CJN, writes regularly for the Forward, Tricycle and the Wisdom Daily, and has been published in Sojourners, Religion Dispatches and elsewhere. He can be found on Medium and Twitter.
Rabbi Joshua Samuels holds thecongregation’s Torah from Lithuania. (photo by David J. Litvak)
Congregation Beth Israel in Bellingham, Wash.,started out its life as a Lithuanian Orthodox shul in 1908. Today, thecongregation is housed in a stunning building in the woods, on 20 acres ofland.
The newly constructed synagogue opened its
doors in March of this year to serve the spiritual and cultural needs of Reform
and Conservative Jews of Bellingham and Whatcom County, Mount Vernon and the
Skagit Valley, the San Juan Islands and even Jews from Metro Vancouver.
Several weeks ago, for instance, the
congregation hosted a screening of a film about Israel, The Original Promise,
which was produced by Fraser Valley resident Bill Iny (who is a member of
Vancouver’s Congregation Beth Hamidrash) in conjunction with the Northwest
chapter of StandWithUs, an advocacy group for Israel that has chapters in the
United States, Canada and Israel. The screening, which attracted more than 100
Jewish and non-Jewish attendees, featured a panel discussion moderated by Beth
Israel’s spiritual leader, Rabbi Joshua Samuels.
This event is one of many that the Pacific
Northwest synagogue has hosted since relocating. However, while the synagogue
building may be new, it houses a nearly 300-year-old miniature Torah from
Lithuania that was commissioned in the mid-1700s by a czar of Russia.
Samuels said the czar gave the Torah to his
doctor, one of Samuels’ Lithuanian ancestors, and the Torah has remained in his
family ever since. His great-grandmother – hiding the Torah in a big coat –
fled Lithuania with her children to the United States, joining her husband in
Fargo, N.D., where he had found work.
The tiny Torah, said Samuels, has “lived in
Fargo, Long Beach, California, San Francisco (I read from it for my bar
mitzvah) and then it followed me after my ordination to Los Angeles and now is
with me here in Bellingham.”
A Torah is meant to be chanted and studied, he
noted. And, in Bellingham, he has used it on special occasions, such as on the
second day of Rosh Hashanah and for the Shabbat of Bereishit (his Torah
portion), as well as for b’nai mitvzah studies, and he has taken it to
Bellingham high schools and to Western Washington University. He wants students
“to see the beauty of a Torah scroll and to hear it chanted.”
“It’s the highlight of any visit,” he added.
Samuels also took the Torah to a cousin’s bar
mitzvah in California and will take it to Jerusalem next month for his niece’s
bat mitzvah, he said, “so that she can read from as it as her mother did 33
years ago.”
When he travels with the Torah, said Samuels,
“I feel like I am a concert musician traveling with a Stradivarius – I think
about it all the time, even if it is in a cushy case right above my seat.”
Samuels, who is a fifth-generation San
Franciscan – his family arrived in San Francisco during the gold rush – worked
in the stock brokerage business in Los Angeles and San Francisco before
deciding to make a major life change. “I felt a gentle nudging to take another
path in life and, after some soul-searching for about three years, I applied to
rabbinical school at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion,” he
said.
After studying in Jerusalem and Los Angeles for
five years, Samuels was ordained in 2010. He began his new career at Temple
Beth Hillel in Valley Village, Calif., before coming to Bellingham to become
Beth Israel’s spiritual leader in July 2012.
Congregation Beth Israel was established in
1908 with 30 families, including Jews from Germany and Lithuania. The synagogue
was Orthodox until 1986, when it became a Reform shul and joined the Union for
Reform Judaism, which, at that time, was called the Union of American Hebrew
Congregations.
The congregation has grown to include 275
families and moved to its new building from a synagogue on Broadway that was
built in 1925 (and was recently sold). The new building was built to
accommodate the congregation’s growing community, drawing worshippers
throughout the region and from as far away as Surrey, White Rock and
Chilliwack, to attend services and the Sunday school. (For the Canadian
congregants, there is the added bonus of being able to shop at Trader Joe’s
after Sunday school.) The synagogue also hosts a Conservative minyan on the
fourth Saturday of every month.
While the new synagogue opened its doors in
March, Samuels said the construction began after he arrived in Bellingham in
2012. “The reason it took so long to build was to avoid incurring any debt,” he
said. “Just as the early Bellingham Jews bought the Broadway building outright,
we wanted to do the same with the new space.
“The state-of-the-art facility that we built
can accommodate our needs for at least the next 100 years.”
The sanctuary can seat more than 500 congregants,
and there is an outdoor patio overlooking the woods that can accommodate almost
as many. The building has 10 classrooms, two kitchens, a preschool, library,
study space and tons of storage.
Since March, the congregation has hosted a
variety of activities, including several StandWithUs events, a concert
featuring Seattle musician Chava Mirel and one with Bellingham klezmer band
What the Chelm (who performed at the synagogue’s grand opening in August), a
Purim party and a second-night Passover seder. In addition to being able to
host holiday parties, Samuels said, “We were finally able to host the High Holy
Days in our own shul after years of renting space around the city.”
And the congregation continues “to look for
opportunities to host events, speaker series, movies, classes, etc.,” he added.
As well, they would like to participate in more cross-border collaborations, he
said.
Samuels believes that his Lithuanian ancestors
would be happy to see their tiny Torah in its new Bellingham home, at the shul
in the woods. He said the Torah reminds him of his grandfather Jack (Yaacov), a
real mensch who died when Samuels was 7. His grandfather – whose mother had
brought the Torah to the United States – helped build a synagogue in Fargo.
“He is present every time I see the Torah,”
said Samuels. “I wish I could travel back and meet my family and tell them that
everything is going to turn out just fine. Their legacy is alive and well.”
David J. Litvakis a prairie
refugee from the North End of Winnipeg who is a freelance writer, former Voice
of Peace and Co-op Radio broadcaster and an “accidental publicist.” His
articles have been published in the Forward, Globe and Mail and Seattle
Post-Intelligencer. His website is cascadiapublicity.com.
Almost half of Adeena Karasick’s latest volume of poetry, Checking In (Talonbooks, 2018), is comprised of whimsical Facebook status updates, most of which have deeper meaning on second and third thought. Together, they speak, as the book’s description notes, “to our seemingly insatiable desire for information, while acknowledging how fraught that information can be.”
“It was a totally compulsive exercise over four years, where literally everything I read or watched or where I went or what I heard was fodder for the text,” Karasick told the Independent about the faux updates’ origins. “And, I must admit, I threw away as many lines as I kept.
“Sometimes, it was just that I couldn’t get a song out of my head and then would just riff on it,” she said, giving as examples, “Ulysses is listening to Siren Song on Spotify”; “Gustave Klimt is listening to KISS”; and “Salvador Dali is doing the Time Warp. Again.”
Sometimes, she said, it was linguistically driven, such as, “E & G are saying F off” and “Bold italics are refusing to move into an upright position.” Or, “it was just pure, silly fun” to create updates like “William Wordsworth is wandering lonely on iCloud,” “Edvard Munch is watching Scream 3,” “Google is mapping the territory” and “Narcissus is using his selfie stick.”
“It was so obsessive,” said Karasick, “that even now that the book’s been published, my brain is so wired to creating those one-liners, I walk around the streets reading every sign and riff on them: ‘Thin Lizzy is watching her carbs,’ ‘Fatwa is doing a cleanse,’ ‘The Pre-Pesach Jew is clearing her cookies,’ ‘The Long, Long Sleeper is Woke.’”
Karasick’s sense of play is evident throughout Checking In. Even when describing heartbreak, confusion and other emotionally charged states, the joy she derives from words, from language and from constructing layers of meaning, is obvious.
“I think I’ve always had a really dark sense of humour,” she said, “and there’s something about taking that which is frightening or deeply disturbing and disempowering it – by not so much making fun of it, but ironically or parodically making it strange, decontextualizing it, hyberbolically defamiliarizing it.
“A lot of my work takes hard-hitting political issues, whether that be the Holocaust in Genrecide (Talonbooks, 1994) and superimposing it with the policing and massacring of language, or dealing with 9/11 in The House That Hijack Built (Talonbooks, 2004).… ‘There was a Big Building that Swallowed a Plane … How Insane to Swallow a Plane….’ A sense of jouissance (pleasure, play) really permeates all that I do. There’s nothing more exhilarating for me than playing inside language, finding unexpected liaisons, connections, sound clusters. It’s a type of erotics of the text that is for me very jewy; that jouissance, a jewy essence: all diasporic, nomadic, exilic, ex-static.
“I see this ‘play’ as operating with an ‘assimilationist’ brand of Jewish humour,” she explained, “not of bombastic neurosis, but one that threatens to unleash chaos, creates unsocialized anarchy, embodies unpredictability – impassioned, engaged, shticky, outrageous and earnest all at the same time – in a post-Woody Allen/Jon Stewart/ Sarah Silverman/Sandra Bernhardish kind of way. And, sometimes, it’s audacious, subversive, provocative and, in the true definition of ‘irony,’ explodes ontologically and cuts into the fabric of things; the smooth functioning of the quiet comfortability or the ‘homeyness’ of our world. That is the role of art.”
And one cannot separate Karasick’s art from her Jewish heritage – it’s “part of my DNA,” she said – and from her study of Jewish texts. With a PhD in kabbalah and deconstruction, it is not surprising that, in speaking about the concept of play, she pointed to 13th-century kabbalistic mystic Avraham Abulafia’s Science of the Combination of Letters, in which, she said, “we are instructed to play inside the language, using ancient practices of recombinatoric alchemy, gematriatic (numerological) substitution, combination, and, through lettristic ‘skips’ and ‘jumps’ slippage, meaning is infinitely re-circulated.
“According to kabbalistic thinking,” she said, “we are commanded to permute and combine the letters; focus on them and their configurations, permutations; combine consonants into a swift motion, which heats up your thinking and increases your joy and desire so much, that you don’t crave food or sleep and all other desires are annihilated. And nothing exists except the letters through which the world is being recreated, through a continual process of constructing and reconstructing borders, orders, laws, mirrors, screens, walls…. And, in accordance with the strictures of Abulafian play, to properly play is to travel inside the words within words, traces, affects, projections, sliding and slipping between the forces and intensities distributed through the texts’ syntactic economy. And this very play speaks both to how everything is infinitely interconnected – reverberant with our social, consumerist, communicative patterns – generating a contiguous infolding of meaning.”
She connected this type of play to “the actual conversation habits of Yiddish.”
“According to etymologist Michael Wex – in his Just Say Nu (Harper: New York, 2007) – Yiddish itself is inscribed in derailment, evasion, avoidance, where the norm is not to be ‘clear’ but to ‘seduce and lead astray,’ to say the reverse of whatever’s been said. For example, as we know, to say, ‘Hi, how are you,’ ‘Shalom aleichem,’ the answer is ‘Aleichem shalom.’ Answers are answered with a question, repetition, reversals, circumlocutions, interruptions, insertions (ptoo, ptoo, ptoo). Compliments are avoided in favour of their opposite. Or, like how you should never say what you mean because naming something (such as cancer, leprosy, pig) could bring it into existence.”
As for her own existence, Karasick said, “All my life, I’ve been fiercely drawn to all that seems enigmatic or paradoxical, and get great pleasure in connecting the unconnectable; drawing from different genres, lexicons or mediums and reveling in ways they inform each other in radical and innovative ways, inviting us to see the world anew.”
While she has spent years teaching philosophic and critical theory, and media and pop culture at various universities, as well as attending lectures on media ecology and ontology, she also watches “a lot of trashy TV,” she said. “I like classical jazz and MTV videos. I read [Louis] Zukofsky, [Slovoj] Zizek and Vogue magazine. And my favourite thing to do is to mash these language systems together into a kind of linguistic tzimmes; each flavour, taste, texture informing the other, expanding the palette.
“It’s especially exciting for me to break down that binary between high and low culture; draw from the music hall and the circus, erotics and spirituality; and play with ways all of this information erupts as a palimpsestic web of both sacred and secular echo-poetic referents.”
Karasick writes “on the road, on buses, trains, subways, boats; in motion,” she said. “I write best amid the bustle of life and, oddly, when I’m really busy is when I’m most inspired. I’m always hunting and gathering, drawing on the world around me. Though, I must say, when drenched in aching nostalgia, frustrated by contemporary politics or steeped in throbbing desire is when the work especially flows.”
Approaching the poetry
“Contour XLV: With Asura,” “Lorem Ipsum” and “In Cold Hollers” are all “homophonic translations, and so they all fall under the same rubric,” said Karasick of three of the poems in Checking In during a brief poetry lesson over the phone.
She explained, “Each of these [works] take the same sounds of an original poem by somebody else and I’ve translated them. I’ve done an avant-garde, post-modern translation by using the same sounds and rhythms of the original poems but changing all the words, so that if one read it simultaneously with the original poem, it would sound like the same poem, but it’s completely different. It’s a way of commenting on the previous piece; it’s translating it, moving through and across different modes.”
“In Cold Hollers” is a translation of Charles Olson’s 1953 poem “In Cold Hell, In Thicket”; “Contour XLV: With Asura” is based on “Canto 45 with Usura,” a poem by Ezra Pound, which Karasick described as a “famously antisemitic, women-hating, Jews and women are pigs kind of poem”; and “Lorem Ipsum,” which is in English, but plays on the sounds of the Latin of Cicero’s “De finibus bonorum et malorum” (“On the Ends of Goods and Evils”). “Lorem ipsum is the standard placeholder text used to demonstrate the graphic elements of a document or visual presentation,” writes Karasick elsewhere. “I am interested in exploring how the notion of ‘place holding’ gets reworked through an impossible relationship both in love and in language.”
As to how to approach a poem that you’ve never read before, Karasick said, “On one level, it depends on how deeply one wants to penetrate the text. The way I like to read is to not worry about what everything means per se, but rather … in reading, I think the most important thing is to feel the text, to go inside and feel its rhythms, its textures…. I work a lot with sound, so I’m really interested how sound itself communicates meaning and so, therefore, a lot of this type of work is about moving with the rhythms and the textures and some of that crazed emotion, how that bleeds through, just through the way that it sounds and feels in your mouth.”
Turning to the poem “Lorem Ipsum,” she said the words mean “pain itself.” She has translated Cicero’s treatise on the theory of ethics into a “passionate love poem” about the “difficulties and grueling angst that one traverses through that. Just like love itself, or pain itself, isn’t something that’s easily definable, so it is with the poem itself, which takes us through this journey of multiple ways that are easily comprehensible and other parts that are strangely defamiliarized and confusing because these very strong emotions are fiercely that…. Just like in life, you come across things that are completely foreign and impenetrable, so, similarly, the poem interweaves through the familiar and the defamiliar, the expected and that which completely takes you into new arenas of wonder and confusion.”
Karasick similarly takes Pound’s “Canto 45” and, playing with the Yiddish word asura, which means forbidden, and the English word usury, creates a new work that’s both a scathing commentary on Pound’s, as well its own poem, with its own meanings.
About “In Cold Hollers,” Karasick said she used the word “hollers” because it’s “homophonically related to hell, but it’s hollering in, calling back into Charles Olson’s original ’53 piece; and his original title, ‘In Cold Hell, In Thicket,’ refers to the opening of Dante’s ‘Inferno.’ What seems simple, it just has layers and layers and layers of history, literary history, philosophical history, as well.”
The title of Olson’s poem refers particularly to “selva oscura,” she said, “which is the dark wood that Dante wanders into in the middle of his life … so Olson’s poem, which riffs on that, is a similar excursion into a visionary experience, where he struggles to come up with a new understanding … from his own midlife … putting a voice to his own time. It is a personal drama of experience, conflict; it really speaks to the wrenching process of living and loving that, by turns, is grueling and funny and dramatic and trivial. My translation of that is dealing with all of those things and, in a way, it’s like, do you remember that old Gwen Stefani song, ‘I Ain’t No Hollaback Girl’? – I am a hollaback girl. I am hollering back, in cold hollers, to this cold hell, and basically calling into that history of both Dante and Olson, the history of post-modernism, 65 years later.”
In talking about Olson’s work and hers, Karasick said, “I sometimes like thinking of translation as trans-elation because you can never really translate anything because of culture and all the different references – in my piece, in my trans-elation, the attention is focused on a world of connected life, the personal, the political, the poetic as a system of relations. And, lastly … highlighting how the words themselves are imaginative participants; the words themselves are creating and recreating the sense of connecting the personal, the political, the poetic.”
And it’s not just the words, but how they are placed on a page that matters in poetry. So, for example, Karasick’s “In Cold Hollers” not only plays on the sound and meaning of Olson’s poem, but also mirrors its typography. “I wanted to keep it very much as he had it,” she said of where the lines break and other aspects of the formatting.
“The notion of the physicality and the materiality of where the words are placed on the page has just as much meaning as what they are communicating. We’re so often used to looking at the left margin … but I want the phrases to be moving and fluid, and that sense of how the white space between the words is equally as important as the words themselves. We can go back to kabbalah and the black fire on white fire, that the whole page becomes a series of fiery energy.”
If I wrote that I had been trying to get a review copy of Rising: The Book of Challah by Rochie Pinson (Feldheim Publishers) since November 2016, readers would find that hard to believe, but the book only arrived at my door recently.
Pinson, who grew up in Vancouver, is co-founder of the IYYUN Centre for Jewish Spirituality with her husband, Rav DovBer Pinson, in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn. They have four children. She mentors women and teaches various classes. She also conducts a challah-baking workshop, which she teaches worldwide, including in Vancouver.
For Rising, Pinson has written 352 pages about challah. This book is about her philosophy, spirituality, history and everything you wanted to know about challah. And, yes, it includes recipes – 38 of them for challah and seven for toppings.
“The intent of challah,” writes the rebbetzin, “is to reveal our innate power to nurture and nourish, and reclaim our mothering potential in all the forms it can take.”
Section I, “The Story of Challah,” explains how, as a new bride, Pinson arrived in Kobe, Japan, which had no kosher bakery, and soon got into making 40 challot a week for the Jewish community.
The book then expands to other information about challah, spirituality and other topics, including a detailed examination of each ingredient and information on the concept of “rising.”
Section II is the cookbook, with reviews and details of ingredients and equipment and troubleshooting.
There are eight recipes, including her own classic challah recipe, gluten-free challah and vegan challah; eight holiday specialties, like apple-and-honey challah and pretzel challah; six recipes from around the world, including Moroccan challah, Yemenite challah and Bukharian challah; nine challah innovations, such as a “fish” challah (shaped like a fish with salmon, tuna, mushrooms and other vegetables), a deli challah (with deli meats) and a rainbow challah (using food colouring); and eight recipes for leftover challah, like babka, cinnamon bars and French toasts. Rising also has recipes for seven different challah toppings, including cream cheese frosting, and accompaniments for other dishes, such as challah stuffing and challah croutons.
Section III is called “Laws and Customs,” which is mainly self-explanatory, though it also includes challah meditations. A glossary and index conclude the book.
There are more than 100 colour photographs in Rising and many sketches, such as 37 ways to braid and shape a challah.
Rising really is the definitive “everything you ever wanted to know about challah” book, written with love and nurturing. It contains a huge amount of information, including the story of Pinson’s life “as realized through challah baking, and challah baking as a metaphor for balanced, integrated nurturing of our self and our loved ones.”
This is the book to give to anyone who bakes challah, and to anyone else who might be contemplating it.
Sybil Kaplanis a journalist, author, compiler/editor of nine kosher cookbooks and a food writer for North American Jewish publications, who lives in Jerusalem where she leads weekly walks of the Jewish food market, Machaneh Yehudah, in English.
The mikvah at Herodian, which was apparently built during the Second Temple period (530 BCE and 70 CE). (photo by Deborah Rubin Fields)
The Dark Ages weren’t given their name for nothing. After the collapse of the Roman Empire, sanitation virtually disappeared. During the Dark Ages – also referred to as the Middle Ages or the medieval period – few people bathed regularly. What did they do? Those who could, or were so inclined, covered up body odour with perfume.
Progress does not always move in a forward direction – the older, classical civilizations bathed far more than did medieval Europe. In the non-Jewish ancient world, the earliest unearthed bathing and plumbing systems date back nearly 6,000 years to the Indus River Valley, in today’s Pakistan. There, archeologists excavated copper water pipes from the ruins of a palace, as well as the remains of what appears to be a superbly constructed ritual bathing pool at Mohenjo-daro. And, in a find dating 3,000 years later, archeologists found a pottery pedestal tub on the island of Crete that measured five feet long.
By instituting a practice of daily bathing, the Romans improved the general level of sanitation. Baths, moreover, functioned not just to raise the level of hygiene, but also provided opportunities to socialize, to exercise, to read and, importantly, to conduct business. From 500 BCE until 455 CE, Roman public baths were common. Moreover, privately owned Roman baths were quite luxurious, often taking up a whole room. The comprehensive sewage system of the baths consisted of lead and bronze pipes and marble fixtures.
Now, note this contrast: until the 1800s, most water pipes in the United States consisted of no more than hollowed-out trees, and the first cast-iron pipes in the United States were imported from England. Only in 1848 was a U.S. plumbing code enacted, with the passage of the National Public Health Act. In 1883, both the Standard Sanitary Manufacturing Co. (now the American Standard Co.) and the Kohler Co. began adding enamel to cast-iron bathtubs to create a smooth interior surface. Kohler advertised its first claw foot tub as a “horse trough/hog scalder [which] when furnished with four legs will serve as a bathtub.” Kohler began mass-producing these tubs, as they were recognized as having a surface that was easy to clean, thus preventing the spread of bacteria and disease.
To give additional perspective, consider this finding: after the First World War, the United States experienced a construction boom, and bathrooms were fitted with a toilet, sink and bathtub – but, even in 1921, only one percent of American homes had indoor plumbing.
Since antiquity, Jews have maintained a relatively high level of sanitation, due in part to the prescribed hand-washing ritual before eating and to the religious practice surrounding the mikvah, or ritual bath. In Israel, the oldest discovered mikvah dates back to the Second Temple period, more than 2,000 years ago. In recent years, archeologists discovered Europe’s oldest mikvah – in Sicily’s ancient Syracuse, it goes back to the Byzantine period, or the fifth-century CE.
But two important questions need answering: how do we know bathing was so important and what is a mikvah? The Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Berakhot 57b, provides this insight: though anointing (oil) and bath (water) do not enter the body, the body benefits from them. Moreover, in Tractate Sanhedrin 17b, we learn that scholars were forbidden from residing in cities that did not have public baths.
Historically, municipalities often barred Jews from bathing in their rivers, and Christians blocked Jews from using public baths. Moreover, there was a fear that Jewish women might be molested in a general public bath. So, there was a need to construct separate facilities, and Jews built bathhouses, many with mikvot close by. Thus, Jews began to link the concept of the mikvah with physical hygiene.
Significantly, the mikvah was never a monthly substitute for a bath or shower. In fact, Jewish law calls for immersion only after one has bathed or showered. Oceans, rivers, wells and lakes, which get their water from springs, can usually serve as a mikvah. The common thread between these bodies of water is that they are natural sources. To traditional Jews, they are derived from G-d. As such, they have the ability to ritually purify.
A human-made mikvah must be built into the ground or built as an essential part of a building. There are two pools: one that contains collected rainwater and the other, the actual immersion pool, is drained and refilled regularly with tap water. The pools, however, share a common wall with a hole that permits the free flow of the water, so the immersion pool also receives rainwater.
When the Temples stood, the high priest immersed in the mikvah at prescribed times. But, today, when there is no Temple, for the Orthodox, the mikvah serves the following four functions: a woman uses the mikvah after menstruating and after giving birth; immersion in a mikvah marks the final step in converting to Judaism; before beginning to cook and eat from them, Jews use the mikvah to immerse new pots, dishes and utensils; and the mikvah is also used to prepare a Jew’s body before his or her burial. Men go to the mikvah before their wedding and before Yom Kippur, and many Chassidic men use the mikvah before each Shabbat and holiday.
It is speculated that up to 60% of the general European population died of the Black Death. There are no statistics as to how many Jews died of the plague, so it is hard to actually say that Jewish bathhouses or the Jewish practice of hand washing or other sanitation prescribed by Jewish law kept Jews safer than the general medieval public. Two points, however, may be stated with certainty:
In a number of instances, European Jews were blamed for the Black Death. As a consequence, beginning in November 1348 in Germany, Jews were massacred and expelled from their homes. In February 1349, 2,000 Strasbourg Jews were murdered. Six months later, Christians wiped out the Jews of Mainz and Cologne. By 1351, 60 major and 150 smaller Jewish communities had been eliminated.
Even today, comments on the subject need to be scrutinized for possible antisemitic motives.
As for today, in the Western world, there seems to be an obsessive amount of soap bars, soap liquids, no-soap cleaners, hand wipes and wet wipes. Can one over-clean? Yes.
In an interview with Global News earlier this year, Dr. Anatoli Freiman of the Toronto Dermatology Centre explained the negative consequences of excessive showering or bathing. “The skin can dry out,” he said. “But the message is, after the shower or bath, you need to pat yourself dry and moisturize to seal it.”
Prof. David Leffell, chief of dermatological surgery at Yale School of Medicine, gives these guidelines about keeping clean. “You don’t want to do the Lady Macbeth thing, where you’re scrubbing and scrubbing,” he told businessinsider.com. “The purpose of showering is to eliminate dirt.” This can be done, he explained, in less than a few minutes by focusing on the grimier parts of the body (armpits and groin) and not overdoing it with soap elsewhere. He advised using warm, not hot, water; aiming for a three-minute shower; and moisturizing while the skin is still damp.
Deborah Rubin Fields is an Israel-based features writer. She is also the author of Take a Peek Inside: A Child’s Guide to Radiology Exams, published in English, Hebrew and Arabic.
“The Triumph of Judas Maccabeus” by Peter Paul Rubens, between 1634 and 1636.(photo from Wikimedia Commons)
One of the richest statements found in the Talmud about the meaning of Jewish identity is the following: “He who does not feel shame and humility before others, does not show love and compassion or abundant kindness to others, such a person is not from the seed of Abraham.” According to this statement, Jewish “genes” are as nothing without Jewish ethics. To be counted among the seed of Abraham, one’s character structure must reflect the values by which Abraham lived.
Maimonides was fully in accord with the talmudic concern with action rather than descent, with purpose and commitment rather than race. He expressed it as follows: “The distinguishing sign of a child of the covenant is his disposition to do tzedakah.” Placing action at the centre of Jewish identity mirrors a fundamental characteristic of the Judaic tradition.
For Aristotle, the peak of human perfection was to be found in thought. Man perfected himself to the degree that the objects of his thought were perfect. God – the most perfect being – was engaged in thought upon His own perfect self. In the biblical tradition, human perfection was realized in moral behaviour. Not thought but action; not knowledge of the cosmos, but involvement in history. The prophets condemned the community not because of their failure to become intellectuals, but because of their failure to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, care for the lonely and protect the socially vulnerable.
In the Torah, God is an active being. He creates the world, He feeds the hungry, He is involved in the drama of history. Typical of the Judaic worldview is the midrashic “question: “What does God do now that he has created the world?” (Such a question could never have been asked by Aristotle.) The midrash answers: “He arranges marriages!”
In the Jewish tradition, God is the creator of life, and His message to humanity is expressed in the language of mitzvah (commandment). His presence in the world entails human responsibility to improve the conditions of society and history. In the Jewish tradition, we live in the presence of God when we hear a mitzvah that obliges us to act in a particular way. Maimonides wrote that God gave the 613 commandments so that a Jew can find one mitzvah that they can perform with love and complete devotion.
One of the distortions of modern existentialism is the exaltation of the virtues of sincerity, devotion, authenticity, etc., irrespective of their specific content. The sincerity of the Nazis in no way mitigates their barbarity and depravity. Subjective attitudes are important aspects of human behaviour, only if their content is worthwhile and significant. It is ludicrous to celebrate Maccabean courage without appreciating their commitment to monotheism, mitzvah and the dignity of Jewish particularity.
In celebrating Chanukah, therefore, we should direct our attention to the problematic issues involved in the spiritual survival of the Jewish community within the modern world. Many traditional Jews believe that Jewish particularity is incompatible with modern mass culture and that Judaic bonds holding together the community cannot bear the stress caused by exposure to the cultural rhythms of the larger non-Jewish society.
Those who accept this assessment of Judaism in the modern world turn to social and cultural separation in order to secure Judaism’s survival. There are others who are skeptical as to whether this ghettoization can succeed. Modern communication makes it impossible to escape acculturation to modern “Hellenism.” It is, in their opinion, futile to resist. We should accept our fate and accommodate ourselves to the inevitability of our eventual assimilation.
A third option, which defines the philosophy of the Shalom Hartman Institute, rejects the defeatism of the latter point of view and also the separatism of the former. We question the belief that Judaism has always survived because of its radical separation from the surrounding culture. Chanukah does not commemorate a total rejection of Hellenism but, as Elias Bickerman shows in From Ezra to the Last of the Maccabees, the revolt focused specifically on those aspects of foreign rule that expressly aimed at weakening loyalty to the God of Israel.
Maimonides’ thought was clearly enriched by his exposure to the writings of Aristotle and Plato and Islamic scholars such as al-Farazi and Ibn Baja. Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik was enriched by Kant and Kierkegaard. These two great halachic teachers are living examples of the intellectual and spiritual enrichment that results from exposure to non-Jewish intellectual and spiritual frameworks.
The major question that we must ponder on Chanukah is whether the Jewish people can develop an identity that will enable it to meet the outside world without feeling threatened or intimidated.
Can we absorb from others without being smothered? Can we appreciate and assimilate that which derives from “foreign” sources, while at the same time feel firmly anchored to our particular frame of reference?
In order to determine what we can or cannot select, it is essential that the modern Jew gains an intelligent appreciation of the basic values of their tradition. Learning was not essential for our ancestors, because they were insulated by the cultural and physical Jewish ghetto. For the Jew to leave the protective framework of that ghetto, it is necessary for them to have a personal sense of self-worth and dignity.
In celebrating Chanukah, we remind ourselves that our Jewish identity must not be grounded in biological descent but in a heroic commitment to a way of life. Our past, the memories we bring from the home we came from, are only the beginning stages of our spiritual self-understanding as Jews. How we live in the present and what we aspire for in the future must be the major sources nurturing our identity as Jews.
On the holiday of Shavuot, we remember how our people pledged to live by the Ten Commandments. On Chanukah, we remember how that commitment inspired a nation to engage in a heroic battle against religious tyranny. Today, the battle for cultural and spiritual survival continues.
In the Western, free world, the battle is against indifference, anomie and cultural assimilation. In Israel, the challenge is to do battle against making nationalism a substitute for covenantal Judaism. For Jews who live in the different areas of the globe, the memory of the Maccabees can be an inspiration to persevere and believe that, ultimately, they will be victorious in their struggle.
Rabbi Prof. David Hartman(1931-2013) was founder of the Shalom Hartman Institute. This essay on Chanukah, one of several on the holiday, dates to 1984. This and other writings have been brought to light by SHI library director Daniel Price. Articles by Hartman, z”l, and other institute scholars can be found at shalomhartman.org.
The light of our chanukiyot must shine as a commitment to discovering a Judaism of ideas and values as an integral part of our journey. (photo by David Williss/flickr.com)
Chanukah is a holiday with an identity crisis. From the beginning, the rabbis had difficulty pinpointing what it was that we were celebrating. Was it the Maccabees’ or God’s military victory over the Assyrians? Was it a spiritual victory of Judaism over Hellenism? Was it the miracle in which one small jar gave light in the Temple for eight days? Or is it a holiday celebrating a victory of the Jewish people against religious oppression?
What we often do when we have many options is that we pick all of them. Instead of clarifying, however, this creates confusion and a lack of focus and a relegating of the holiday away from values to the realm of ritual observance alone. We light candles without really knowing why and celebrate without a clear understanding of the cause of our joy.
The identity crisis of Chanukah, however, comes from an even deeper source. Many of the above potential meanings for celebration are no longer compelling or meaningful. Military victories are wonderful, especially when one takes into account the alternative, but in a world in which Jewish power is integral to the Jewish experience, the celebration of a victory more than 2,000 years ago is not particularly compelling or meaningful. For a military victory to be memorable, its outcome needs to have produced a tipping point. The Maccabean victory was no such tipping point in Jewish history.
Today, however, we face an even more substantive issue. When Chanukah became a holiday, we lived in a world of dichotomies between Judaism and Hellenism, in which the lights of Chanukah symbolized a purity of faith and commitment to Torah free from Hellenistic influence and corruption. We spoke of Athens and Jerusalem as two alternative and mutually exclusive paths. One’s identity was either grounded in and nurtured by Jerusalem or was rooted and guided by Athens. Each creates a distinct and mutually exclusive identity. The victory of one is the defeat of the other.
The essence of the modern era, however, may be encapsulated as the period in which such dichotomies have come to an end. A modern Jew is one who has multiple identities and multiple loyalties. He or she is a traveler in an open marketplace of ideas in search of new synergies and meanings. What a previous generation would call assimilation – that is, the penetration of “outside” ideas and cultures within a Jewish one – the modern Jew sees as essential to building a life of meaning and a Judaism of excellence.
Whatever Athens or Jerusalem might have signified in the past, today they represent the notion that to be a Jew is to live in the larger world and aspire to create a new dialogue with that world in which both sides learn from and impact each other. As a result, Jewish identity has changed. We no longer see our identity as singular and unique, but as integrated and complex. Jews today see themselves as citizens of both Athens and Jerusalem.
What then does Chanukah mean? For many, it acquires special significance as a buttress to Jewish identity during Christmas season, when Christian identity shines. The chanukiyah is the antidote to the Christmas tree, and we can give our children presents for eight days and not merely one.
Far from ridiculing the above, I actually believe that therein may lay the beginning of a new meaning for Chanukah. Not, however, in its commercial sense or as an antidote to anything, but in its aspirations to create a space for Jews and Judaism within a larger world. We do not yearn to reject Athens or to go back to a singular identity. We celebrate the possibilities of engaging one of our identities with the other, one idea with another, to the mutual growth and benefit of each. The challenge, however, in a multicultural, multi-identity world is how not to descend into mediocre notions of common denominators and superficial syntheses.
If the real gift of modernity is the moral and spiritual consequences of having a complex identity and living in both the metaphorical Jerusalem and Athens, the challenge is how to sustain all the various features of one’s identity. Assimilation today is no longer the removal of dichotomies, but the abandonment of difference.
Our enemy is not outside but within. The purpose of lighting a candle is not to celebrate a miracle of yesteryear but to declare a commitment to ensuring that to maintain a Jewish identity is a part of my being. One is obligated to place the chanukiyah in a window where passers-by can see it and, in so doing, make space within one’s public persona for Judaism to shine forth.
A “good Jew” is no longer one who fights Hellenism but one who maintains a Jewish core within the multiple facets of his or her life. It was often much easier to be a Jew when we were fighting “them,” whoever “them” may have been. To maintain a Jewish commitment within a world in which dichotomies are gone requires a level of Jewish education and knowledge unparalleled in Jewish history. A dialogue between Jerusalem and Athens in which the value of each is maintained will only be possible if one knows what Jerusalem means and what values and ideas Judaism can contribute to living a meaningful life.
We are free today to light our chanukiyot, but the light must not only shine outside as a wall between us and them, it must shine within as a commitment to discovering a Judaism of ideas and values as an integral part of our journey.
Rabbi Dr. Donniel Hartmanis president of the Shalom Hartman Institute and author of the 2016 book Putting God Second: How to Save Religion from Itself. This article was initially published in 2010, and updated and syndicated by Religion News Service in 2017. Articles by Hartman and other institute scholars can be found at shalomhartman.org.