Judaism – Page 52

Okanagan celebrates 25th

Steven Finkleman, vice-president of the Okanagan Jewish Community, takes a moment to enjoy some Israeli dancing. (photo by Misty Challmie)

When the founders of Kelowna’s fledgling Jewish community decided to open a building, they couldn’t call it a synagogue.

The B.C. government of the day would contribute a third of the construction costs toward a community centre but nothing if it were a church or synagogue. So, a small group of dedicated volunteers named it the Okanagan Jewish Community Centre and got the funding.

The building – also known as Beth Shalom Synagogue – features a sanctuary alongside a large kitchen, library and daycare. Twenty-five years after its dedication in the heart of British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley, a dozen original members and 50 supporters celebrated the milestone with Israeli dancing, humour and heartwarming stories.

Steven Finkleman, who led the event, reminisced about how a few retired couples kept the Jewish religion “alive in these boonies” by getting together at various houses. Members gathered regularly for services at a church after they formalized their community at an inaugural meeting in 1983.

“We met at St. Michael’s Anglican Church. For us, it was St. Moishe’s,” said Finkleman, who grew up in Winnipeg. “The question wasn’t, ‘Do we need a building?’ It was, ‘If someone dies, where do we put them?’ So a cemetery was most important.”

As more Jews moved into the Okanagan, momentum grew. Then-newcomer Mel Kotler, a businessman from Montreal who ran the Western division of Fabric-land, helped launch the community’s first cemetery drive. The committee bought pews, bimah artifacts and an ark from a synagogue that closed in Moose Jaw, Sask. Members contracted Emil Klein, a retired rabbi living in nearby Winfield, to lead services in houses and at St. Moishe’s.

Soon, they picked out a burial site overlooking a lake north of Kelowna, making it the only Jewish cemetery between Metro Vancouver and Calgary. After shifting the focus to establishing a centre, lawyer Robert Levin met with developers of a new subdivision in Kelowna’s North Glenmore area to negotiate a location. They agreed the Jewish community would put in a daycare to serve the neighbourhood as part of the deal.

Plans were drawn up for a $400,000 building, and a successful fundraising dinner followed. Once built, two former members of the Moose Jaw synagogue helped carry in two Torahs for the dedication in October 1992. More than 300 people attended the ceremony, which included a six-foot challah. Among the dignitaries were British Columbia’s former premier, Dave Barrett, member of the Legislative Assembly Cliff Serwa and B.C. Liberal leader Gordon Wilson.

Today, about 60 families – with Orthodox, Conservative and Reform backgrounds – support the centre. Visiting rabbis and cantors lead services, and children learn about Judaism at Hebrew school. Rabbi Shaul Osadchey and Cantor Russ Jayne of Calgary’s Beth Tzedec Congregation currently travel to Kelowna four times a year for Jewish holidays.

“They have the skill set we don’t have,” said Okanagan Jewish Community president Mondy Challmie. “When people have questions of a religious nature that we’re unable to answer, we encourage them to email or call Rabbi Osadchey.”

To celebrate the 25th anniversary, Cantor Russ sang a Hebrew-English version of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” Israeli dancers – who have practised every week for 14 years at the centre – performed. Member of Parliament Stephen Fuhr and Kelowna Councilor Mohini Singh gave speeches. And everyone shared a nosh, a slideshow and plenty of laughs.

As the party wound down and people folded up the chairs, Finkleman reflected on the biggest challenge for this tight-knit but tiny congregation.

“Generating interest, support and commitment in a small community – distant from a major Jewish centre – was difficult. It still is a challenge, but, when the building opened, it served as a focal point for recent arrivals in the Okanagan. We were very honoured to have some of the original members present. We miss those who are no longer with us.”

For more information, visit ojcc.ca.

Don Plant is a retired journalist and member of the Okanagan Jewish Community in Kelowna. He’s now studying archeology and helped excavate an Early Bronze Age site in Israel last summer.

In spirit of Jewish law

The other night, I sat on the couch with my husband in an attempt at togetherness. We watched an episode of Madam Secretary. It was our second attempt. On the first try, worn out, I was about to fall asleep when my spouse suggested that we save it for another time so I could go to bed. It was, he pointed out, supposed to be fun. Sticking to the initial “date time” wasn’t working. Thank goodness for the PVR.

The show we watched was full of allusions to knitting and design, which are parts of my freelance work. I cringed inwardly, preparing for derogatory comments about “women’s work.” To my surprise, the textile theme was respectful. A man with PTSD takes up knitting as part of his therapy – it helps him focus his mind. A first-year university student struggles with a design assignment – she comes away with a couture dress, but not before we hear the sounds of her sewing machine at work in the background. Best yet, when her sister begins to panic at modeling the dress, the student gives her a pep talk, saying, “Pull yourself together, be strong. Do this, I need you.” What started as a frivolous thing – “help me out at this fashion show” – became more. It became a chance to succeed academically, and to use inner strength to prevail over a trying situation. The episode showed strong women and struggling men seeking to be their best selves.

All this came to mind later, in the context of a Talmud class. I signed up for a Jewish Theological Seminary online course. With the wonders of technology, I can hear lectures by Rabbi Dr. Judith Hauptman, who is a gifted teacher and intellect. Her course has an interesting premise – looking at situations when “law meets life.”

She began with basic information, and got started studying talmudic text. Whenever I study Talmud (or any older text), I have to remember the inherent inequalities. Women were seen as subservient, with less agency than we think is appropriate today. Through careful reading, we saw lists of tasks wives are obligated to perform for their husbands (Bavli Ketubot 61a) and a discussion about how one might “wash” – sprinkle water on – a floor on Shabbat (Bavli Shabbat 95a). (This last reference was not cleaning so much as providing a form of air conditioning and reducing dust on an extremely hot Shabbat in Babylonia.)

Hauptman showed us how women’s interpretations allowed them both to obey the spirit of Jewish law, and to accomplish what needed to be done. In more than one place in these readings, the rabbis (all male) allude to the fact that women were smart and had power or agency. Even if the language of the Talmud relegates women to being “property of a man’s house,” the women in these stories shine through as being shrewd and savvy.

We think sometimes that our lives are infinitely more complicated, sophisticated and detailed than those in the nostalgic past. Yet, these talmudic texts reminded me that, more than 1,500 years ago, smart people focused on the details that make our households and lives function. We may have a way to record entertainment now (and a TV!) or access to machine-produced clothing, but our fundamental concerns are similar. How are we to balance the spirit of our commitments with the laws’ requirements? What is the intention of our roles? How do men and women balance and subvert traditional roles in order to cope? How do our household tasks make life comfortable and/or meaningful?

The first text we studied refers to tasks that wives perform for their husbands: grinding grain, baking bread, doing the laundry, cooking, nursing his babies, making his bed, and working with wool. When she has wealth and servants, she can avoid some of these household obligations. As we studied this text together, I was knitting a wool sweater I’d promised to finish for one of my kids. I thought the webcam was trained up, only on my face. No, as it turned out – a friend, also taking the class, in New York, said she could see my knitting.

That’s OK. In the end, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Regardless of your level of observance, we still wrestle with these issues. Women often interpret Jewish law and tradition when it comes to household details. If one doesn’t have enough servants or financial resources, or even enjoys knitting and finds it focuses the mind, one might still be working with wool.

A recent study indicated that, in Reform Jewish congregations, rabbis who are women are paid less than their male counterparts. Women have fewer positions “at the top” as senior or sole congregational rabbis. We continue, even in the most progressive Jewish movements, to struggle with pay equity and gender roles.

The Talmud is an essential part of Jewish oral law, but it’s also literature, with narratives that shed light on daily life. A current TV show portrays a woman as U.S. Secretary of State, and shows that interaction with fibre arts is still an important, useful and viable thing to devote time to creating, no matter your gender.

In both the show’s legal negotiations and this talmudic text, we’re taught that, sometimes, the spirit of the law, the intention, is more important than the letter of the law. Through all the big decisions, it’s sometimes the small household details that make people’s lives rich. I’ll keep knitting handmade sweaters for my kids – and studying Talmud. Even in these times, there’s a place for both.

Joanne Seiff writes regularly 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.

Serving the Diaspora

Ayala and Ariel Wilchfort are recent arrivals to Vancouver. (photo from Ariel Wilchfort)

Two years ago, Rabbi Gideon Osher Shmueli donated a kidney to a stranger, saving that individual’s life. These days, he works at Magen David Yeshivah in Brooklyn, N.Y., teaching Hebrew and bringing with that teaching the culture and values of Judaism and eretz Yisrael, the land of Israel.

To him, teaching about Judaism is akin to donating a vital organ. “Connecting Jews to Torah and mitzvot is no different from helping someone to live,” said Shmueli, 32, who, with his wife, Leore Sachs Shmueli, was matched with the school by Ohr Torah Stone’s Beren-Amiel Practical Training Program for Educational Emissaries, which trains educators who are sent to teach Judaic studies in both Orthodox and non-Orthodox schools throughout the Diaspora. A similar initiative, the Straus-Amiel Program for Rabbinical Emissaries, trains rabbis for synagogue postings in the Diaspora.

Like Shmueli, Rabbi Ariel Wilchfort is a recent arrival to his new post. He is city director for the National Conference of Synagogue Youth in Vancouver, following his participation in the emissary training at OTS’s Israel campuses.

“They guided me and helped me choose positions,” said Wilchfort, 33, who relocated to Vancouver with his wife Ayala and their two young children.

Wilchfort, who attended the emissary training from 2015 to 2017, said he found his current job when a representative for NCSY, the youth arm of Orthodox congregations in North America, visited with him and other emissaries.

Based in Israel, OTS is a modern Orthodox network of 24 institutions on 12 campuses, founded by Rabbi Shlomo Riskin with a mission in part to demonstrate that Judaism’s “laws and traditions remain profoundly relevant to the contemporary world,” Riskin has said.

As part of that mission, OTS has some 200 emissary families serving in more than 50 countries, according to Rabbi Eliahu Birnbaum, who directs the emissary programs. Shlichim (emissaries) serve on average five to six years, with some who have been at their posts as long as 18 years.

They serve not only in large Diaspora communities but also in places that are far afield and have few Jews, such as Quito, Ecuador; Guangzhou, China; Cochin, India; and Harare, Zimbabwe. “We believe that people need to work with people, and the only way to influence other people and strengthen their Jewish identity, as well as the community itself, is by having emissaries and creating personal connections,” Birnbaum said.

OTS annually receives at least 150 applications for the program, and chooses 25. “We accept only applicants who have advanced Torah knowledge and yeshivah background, high academic level and, most important, very good people and leadership skills,” said Birnbaum.

The training program consists of weekly classes with educators, rabbis, experts in halachah (Jewish law) and advisers. Shlichim assignments range from teaching positions, to youth directors to pulpit positions.

In a smaller Jewish community like Vancouver, Wilchfort occupies several roles on the community scene, mentoring young people at Congregation Schara Tzedeck and running a religious education program called Torah High, in which Jewish students can attend afternoon classes and gain a few credits toward earning their high school degree.

Originally from Englewood, N.J., Wilchfort’s family immigrated to Israel when he was a child, and he received his rabbinic ordination from Israel’s Chief Rabbinate at the same time that he was enrolled in the Beren-Amiel program. He said he was drawn to the initiative by a desire to serve Jews in the Diaspora and help them enrich their Jewish lives.

“I entered the program out of a care for other Jews, a love for our nation, and especially a love for our fellow Jews who have not had an adequate religious education,” he said.

Wilchfort has enjoyed settling into Vancouver, which he credits for having a vibrant Jewish scene. “Our community has a great infrastructure; it’s a very pro-Israel community here,” he said. “As for the area itself, it’s beautiful. In Vancouver, we live between forests and the ocean, and everyone is so health-aware, nature-aware.”

For Wilchfort, whose wife’s first language is Hebrew, not English, it’s a true cross-cultural experience. “It’s a new city, new country, new culture. It’s really an adventure, and we feel so excited to be here.”

The greatest Jewish novel?

What strange quirk brought it about that what may be one of the greatest and most Jewish of Jewish novels should be written not by a Diaspora Jew, nor an Israeli Jew, nor a Diaspora Jew who had made aliyah, but rather an Israeli who relocated to New York?

Further stymying expectations, Ruby Namdar did not write this novel in English, but in Hebrew (it was recently translated by Hillel Halkin). “For who?” asked an audience member at the Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival event on Nov. 26, when I had the pleasure of interviewing Namdar in front of a small gathering. If Namdar wanted his novel, which he acknowledged to be soundly in the lineage of Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, to be read by New Yorkers, why write it in Hebrew? If he wanted the novel to make sense to Israelis, why write it about a rootless Diaspora Jew with no connection to Israel?

“I don’t know what I was thinking,” said Namdar, “I don’t know who I was writing for, I just wrote.”

The Ruined House is not just a great Jewish novel or a great novel in modern Hebrew. It possesses a structure that is at once talmudic and kabbalistic, a structure that is deep and intricate yet carried off with such a sense of understatement and naturalness, effortlessly unfolding within Namdar’s lucid, lyrical and vivid prose, that most English-language reviewers thus far have not fully noticed it. This structure is what gives the novel its profoundly Jewish resonance, which is at once modern and ancient, rootless and anchored in the archetypal depths of Jewish experience and textuality.

Talmudic structure

The Ruined House is divided into seven books, with its seventh book being the culmination of an obviously Jewish numerical pattern. Each book follows the anti-hero, Andrew P. Cohen, over the course of one year of his life, as he enters what seems to be a midlife crisis from hell (or perhaps from heaven).

Cohen is a successful and wealthy professor of comparative culture, who lives in an idyllic Manhattan high-rise with a view of the river, a pristine Apollonian realm in the skies. He has a beautiful young lover, Ann Lee, and an adoring group of followers and acolytes. He cherishes his controlled, harmonious and detached existence, which he has gained through leaving his wife and two daughters years before.

At the end of the first six sections of the novel are a few pages of text designed to look like a blat Gemara, a page of Talmud. The central text in these inserts tells the story of a high priest preparing and executing the Yom Kippur sacrifices. While he does so, he is watched by Obadiah, a humble Levite who wonders whether the priest is truly pious or just a functionary in league with the elite. Encircling the narrative are passages from the Talmud, Mishnah and Tanakh, which describe the laws, folklore and spiritual significance of the high priest’s duty. They also feature key excerpts from Shaarei Gilgulim (The Gate of Reincarnation), a kabbalist text written by Chaim Vital (1542-1620) to expound the cosmology of his master, the Ari HaKodesh, Isaac Luria (1534-1572).

The insertion of these texts is deliberate and precise. Just as the narrative in the inserts is flanked by canonical Jewish sources, the narrative of the novel is surrounded by ancient Jewish forces. As the hidden, broken nature of Cohen’s life begins to surface, he begins to have intense, waking visions of the ancient Temple in Jerusalem. His dreams turn nightmarish, alternating between repressed guilt at his betrayal of his family and dreadful tableaus of the rape of Jerusalem by the Romans and the murder of Jews by the Nazis.

The structure of the story and the inserts are not the only mirrors in the book: Cohen’s life is cast as priest-like. His elite status; the pure harmonious realm in which he lives; his having separated from his wife like Moses to live in the skies; even the elaborate meat dinners he cooks up for his dinner guests alone in his perfect kitchen all point to it. His name, of course, highlights both the substance and the irony of his life as priestly metaphor. At one point, his daughter, Rachel, disgustedly mocks people who think that Jews named Cohen are descended from the priestly lineage: “Everyone knows they just gave out those names randomly at Ellis Island.”

As Cohen descends into apparent madness, a grotesque version of the priestly sensibility gets stronger in him. He becomes morbidly obsessed with the impure and averse to the physical, the decaying and the dead. He finds himself horrified by menstrual blood and semen. The explanation of this growing claustrophobic sensibility lies in the paragraphs of Shaarei Gilgulim, which are included in Namdar’s inserts.

Kabbalist elements

Shaarei Gilgulim describes the way that some souls, during the process of reincarnation, unite with other souls in order to complete their own tikkun (repair). In the first pages of The Ruined House, “one shining soul, the figure of a high priest” is suddenly visible above New York among the celestial machinations momentarily revealed as the veil is briefly sundered. The key to the priest’s identity lies in the kabbalist doctrine of ibbur, or impregnation, where a soul from beyond enters into an earthly person in order to help them, to complete their own mission, or some combination of the two. In Cohen’s case, as suggested in a last talmudic insert, he has been “impregnated” by the soul of the high priest in need of tikkun for feeling himself superior to Obadiah, the humble Levite. The high priest and Cohen share a sin in common: arrogance. Their collective confrontation and reckoning with it will be psychically violent and cathartic and come close to doing Cohen in.

Critique of Diaspora?

Some reviewers have read The Ruined House as a critique of the Diaspora Jew, viewing the narrative as a kind of punishment of Cohen, enacted on him by the rising tide of archaic Jewish intrusions into his life. Namdar said this is a moralistic distortion of his ambivalent, questioning text. Instead, Namdar pointed to the shatterings of the illusion of wholeness and perfection that happen in the book. “Where things are broken, there, seeds can take root and grow,” he said.

For example, Cohen’s harmonious life is an illusion that is shattered in the course of the book, leaving a “ruined house.” Yet the figure of the ruined house (bayit asher necharev in the original Hebrew, a phrase that comes from a poem by Yehuda Amichai) is also an allusion to another ruined house, that of the Beit Hamikdash, the Jerusalem Temple, whose pristine world of order and control, Namdar suggests, also was illusory.

The third ruined house is suggested by the timing of the events in the novel. The story begins in the Hebrew month of Elul (signifying its theme of repentance), on Sept. 6, 2000. After the narrative comes to a head on Tisha b’Av, the date of the destruction of the Temple, it jumps from Aug. 1, 2001, to Sept. 18, 2001, leaving a lacuna where Sept. 11, 2001, and the destruction of the Twin Towers, resides.

“I did not want Sept. 11 to appear in the narrative, thus making the novel reducible to being about that event,” said Namdar when I asked him about this. “Rather, I wanted the trajectory to point to its occurrence outside the frame.”

There is much more to talk about in this remarkable novel, which manages at once to be so Jewish, so Israeli, so American and so human. I did not touch here on the attention Namdar lavishes on the details of Cohen’s daily life or Namdar’s subversion of the lineage of Malamud, Bellow and Roth in his intense empathy with the female characters of the novel, and his unsparing deconstruction of Cohen’s narcissistic masculinity. I did not examine his vivid and hilarious slow-motion evocation of a grossly excessive bar mitzvah, or his brilliant parody of the Zionist clichés of a Birthright-like propaganda tour of Israel, and many other delights. I hope this introduction is enough to invite you to step into Namdar’s mesmerizing fusion of a talmudic-esoteric structure with an incandescent evocation of life in Manhattan, and discover what else he has hidden there, of which, I promise you on good authority, there is much.

Matthew Gindin is a freelance journalist, writer and lecturer. He writes regularly for the Forward and All That Is Interesting, and has been published in Religion Dispatches, Situate Magazine, Tikkun and elsewhere. He can be found on Medium and Twitter.

Hatikvah bursting at seams

Land-based activities at Camp Hatikvah form a large part of the summer experience. (photo from camphatikvah.com)

Like most everything, camp enrolment goes in cycles. And, for the past few years, Camp Hatikvah has had a waiting list for its first session, a full second session and has closed off the summers with the highly popular Family Camp experience that sells out within hours of registration opening in October the year prior. With the largest-ever single age group of campers rising through the ranks, Hatikvah is looking to expand its facilities to accommodate these campers as they move toward the counselor-in-training program.

Camp Hatikvah has a formula that seems to be working well. In order to fill every bunk, current board president Joanna Wasel worked closely with camp director Liza Rozen-Delman to make some changes in programming. In addition, they have brought the concept of camper care front and centre, and the programming is more flexible than the camp experience of yesteryear. As but one example, Hatikvah has been bringing in specialist instructors for activities such as tennis or mountain biking to run weekly sessions, and such initiatives are drawing campers. Once their interest is piqued, the kids tend to come back year after year.

“Liza does an excellent job ensuring that the campers are well cared for, safe and happy,” said Wasel. “I believe her reputation of providing exceptional camper care is the primary reason we are seeing the success we are today.”

photo - Camp Hatikvah, 1972. Sailing was one of the writer’s favourite camp activities — Camp Hatikvah, 1972. Sailing was one of the writer’s favourite camp activities. *(photo from Jewish Western Bulletin fonds, Jewish Museum and Archives of BC L.09596)*

While Camp Hatikvah has been known for years as a watersport camp, the land-based activities have been overhauled during Wasel’s tenure as president. “We are now able to offer expert instruction from professionals in a plethora of land activities including tennis, football, basketball, fitness, yoga, dance and more,” she told the Independent. “The change has been dramatic and campers are now equally engaged on land and water.”

Those who remember their own experiences of the “good old days” of camp continue the tradition, and send their children, according to Rozen-Delman. “Many of our campers are second- or third-generation participants,” she said. “Our camp is rich in traditions and many of the programs we offer our campers today are based on programs their grandparents participated in during the ’50s and ’60s and their parents did in the ’70s and ’80s. We are very proud of this dedication to our roots and traditions and believe this makes our camp experience even more meaningful.”

The list of former campers reads a bit like a who’s who of the local Jewish community, something that shows the link between camp attendance and Jewish community involvement. Many of the children from Camp Hatikvah are already well ensconced within the community; many are students at Vancouver Talmud Torah. Rozen-Delman noted that campers also come from Alberta, Ontario, Washington and California. Hatikvah has combined a number of initiatives to draw a diverse group of campers, some of whom have no other connection with the Jewish community.

The effort to diversify and attract unaffiliated Jews this year has been aided by the Laskin Outreach Fund. This initiative, created and entirely funded by Elliot and Megan Laskin, provides $1,800 (almost the full fee) to first-time campers from British Columbia with little or no Jewish communal engagement to try Camp Hatikvah in its second summer session.

Both Wasel and Rozen-Delman stress that the programming at Camp Hatikvah is oriented toward helping children develop as members of the community. As a pluralistic camp, children from all sorts of Jewish backgrounds are introduced to and experience the camp’s motto: “Leadership by example.”

Although the programming for younger campers is focused on fun and socializing, with some Zionist and Jewish learning, it is the staff-in-training (SIT) program that begins the leadership training in earnest.

“This program is designed specifically to enhance the leadership abilities and traits of our campers. Participants engage in almost daily hadracha (leadership) sessions or discussions where they learn the importance of leadership, citizenship and community,” said Rozen-Delman of SIT.

Both Wasel and Rozen-Delman are alumna of Camp Hatikvah, with Wasel starting as a camper in 1988 and Rozen-Delman in 1979. Both have worked and volunteered within the Jewish community, in addition to their work at Camp Hatikvah.

While local Jewish life is part of the formula, Hatikvah’s Zionist roots are as strong as ever. Last summer, there were 14 Israeli schlichim (emissaries) on staff.

This year’s camp sessions are both looking like they will be full, said Rozen-Delman. For more information on the camp, subsidies to attend or the Laskin Outreach initiative, call the camp office at 604-263-1200.

Michelle Dodek is a freelance writer who spent one summer at Camp Hatikvah a long time ago and loved the sailing program.

An education legacy

In October, our community lost one of its most devoted supporters, Leon Glassman, z”l. Leon will be remembered for generations to come for his commitment to Jewish education and its central role in Jewish identity and continuity. Through the Jewish Community Foundation, Leon created a legacy that reflects his lifelong passion in these areas. Together with his wife Rose Marie, they made an indelible impact on our community – an impact that will ensure his memory lives on.

Leon and Rose Marie’s commitment to Jewish education goes back decades to their life as young parents in Regina. Their move to Vancouver was motivated in part because here they would be able to provide their children with a Jewish education, which they saw as an integral aspect of helping them develop strong Jewish identities.

Leon and Rose Marie recognized that the high cost of living in the Lower Mainland today has reduced the ability of many families to enrol their children in Jewish day schools and Jewish educational programs. They wanted to find a way not just to help families and children, but to strengthen Jewish continuity for the community as a whole.

In April 2016, Leon and Rose Marie made a million-dollar gift to create the Leon Glassman Fund for Jewish Continuity through Education endowment fund. The response from community members who share their passion, as well as from the day school community that understands so clearly the impact this endowment will make, was tremendous, and it inspired Leon and Rose Marie to make a second million-dollar gift to the fund.

The fund will provide a steady source of support for tuition assistance, so more children can reap the benefits of a Jewish day school education. This endowment will support an area of need that was close to Leon’s heart, enriching our community in perpetuity.

According to executive director Marcie Flom, the Jewish Community Foundation was “privileged to work with the Glassmans to create Leon’s legacy for the Jewish community.” She said, “Leon’s philanthropy reflected his life’s passion and his commitment to Jewish education in a way that perpetuates his memory for his children and grandchildren.”

Like Leon and Rose Marie, there are many community members who support causes that reflect their interests and their values. If you are among them, then you, too, can create a legacy at the Jewish Community Foundation that reflects your passions. To make a contribution to the Glassman Fund or for more information on how to create a legacy, visit jewishcommunityfoundation.com.

Pondering a hospitable Zion

Jerusalem (photo by Andrew Shiva via Wikipedia)

Hospitality is culture itself and not simply one ethic amongst others. (Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism)

One of the late French-Jewish philosopher Jacques Derrida’s most famous short works is his On Cosmopolitanism, in which he discusses the problem of refugees. Cosmopolitanism is a word first coined in ancient Greece by wandering, homeless philosophers and popularized by the Stoics. It refers to the idea that the whole world (cosmos) is my city, or community (polis). It is the idea of an international or, better, transnational humanity and citizenship. Cosmopolitanism became popular again during the European enlightenment and slowly had a growing influence on international law and modern ethical sensibilities, including the sense that countries have a duty of hospitality, of offering refuge even to peoples of other nationalities.

This same ethical idea occurs in Derrida’s own Jewish tradition, where “love the stranger” is a commandment uttered many more times than “love your neighbour” and where Isaiah the prophet urged Israeli kings to give shelter to refugees of war.

In On Cosmopolitanism, which was based on a speech Derrida gave to the International Parliament of Writers on the subject of refugees, Derrida discusses the nature of hospitality and the contradiction at its heart. Hospitality involves welcoming guests into your home, in sharing resources and shelter, yet, to do so, it must remain “a home.” Should all boundaries of the home dissolve in unconditional welcome then the possibility of hospitality itself will also be obliterated. Derrida’s insight mitigates against a naive or utopian call for the obliteration of borders or the indiscriminate welcome of refugees.

In this thought of Derrida we see a tragic conflict at the heart of modern Zionism. Do we want a hospitable Zionism? Is the house the Jews built in Israel for Jews alone? Yet if the doors are flung wide, what will happen to “our Jewish home”?

There is much anxiety to protect our “home,” of that we can be sure. An extensive security wall, checkpoints, and airport border guards who are masters of interrogation. When we press Israel to become more hospitable – to African asylum seekers, to displaced Palestinians – we hear a chorus of voices arise: if we let them in, if we include them, the demographics will dissolve our home!

And we so badly want a home. Wandering for 2,000 years, we were homeless, exiled, a tolerated or cursed minority. Finally, we returned to our ancient home and, amid controversy with others who had come to live there and also claim it as home, built walls to protect it. We now again had a home, and we have chanted this word to ourselves over and over again, “home, home,” for the last 70 years.

Yet what good is a home that does not extend hospitality? Sure, we airlifted Ethiopians, we opened our arms to Russians, and so on and so forth. Yet they were us, our family. True hospitality, though, as it says in our own foundational text, is given to the stranger. The other.

Unconditional welcome is not the only way to destroy a home. What good is a home that offers no hospitality? Is a home that offers no hospitality even a home at all?

Israel is in the process of deporting the 60,000 African refugees who arrived before the building of a barrier wall with the Sinai to prevent more entering. As Russel Neiss wrote in the Forward, “For years, in actions held to be illegal multiple times by Israel’s Supreme Court, the Israeli government has arrested and placed these refugees in a detention centre in the Negev and forcefully deported them to other African nations in exchange for money or favourable terms for weapons contracts and military training.”

Twenty thousand refugees, most from Sudan and Eritrea, have already been deported or left of their own accord, and the government has ordered the rest to leave, with a small financial gift and plane tickets paid, or be jailed.

According to Derrida, hospitality is both a duty and a defining feature of a real home. The feeling that an inhospitable Israel is not really a home, I fear, is growing and will continue to grow among Israelis and Jews. Maintaining the feeling that Israel is a Jewish home only will require an unremitting focus on perceived and real threats to Jews in Israel and abroad. It will reinforce the unhealthy sense of home as a shelter from others, rather than fostering the healthy sense of home, one that is open to sheltering others.

The result may be that we have a very well guarded home. But, for those of us who perceive the lack of hospitality on offer, it begins to feel like no home at all. The opposite of Derrida’s formula – “in order for there to be hospitality, there must be a home” (a formula that is surely true and needs due respect) – is “in order for their to be a home, there must be hospitality.”

Jews, being a transnational people for so many years, became, in two senses, a “cosmopolitan people.” One was that fact of transnationality; the other stemmed from the involvement of Jews in socialist political movements, which problematized nationalism, as well as our involvement in activism aimed at the liberalization of immigration laws. It was all of this, seemingly, which coalesced to give birth to the use of “cosmopolitan” as an antisemitic code word for “Jew.”

I don’t think “cosmopolitan” is an insult, but rather a very high compliment. When an antisemite calls Jews “cosmopolitan,” I hear it as a calling, not a calling out. Israel will not truly be our Jewish home until it embodies the highest cosmopolitanism of the Jewish spirit, which can be read in the Torah’s call – millennia ago – to love the stranger and refugee.

Matthew Gindin is a freelance journalist, writer and lecturer. He writes regularly for the Forward and All That Is Interesting, and has been published in Religion Dispatches, Situate Magazine, Tikkun and elsewhere. He can be found on Medium and Twitter.

Let’s hear it for camp!

(photo from teenlife.com/summer-program/urj-camp-kalsman)

Going to camp was a rite of passage when I was growing up. Everybody went to camp. In my day, it was the B’nai B’rith camp that all Jewish kids went to, in Sandy Hook, past Winnipeg Beach.

I don’t recall much detail of my really young days as a camper, but we never missed a summer. As small kids, we went with our mothers. It all had to do with getting away from the oppressive summer heat and time at the beach, wading and swimming, sunning on a blanket, playing the games on the boardwalk. I would have an ice cream cone every day, even though, back then, all you could get were vanilla and strawberry flavours. There may have been chocolate, too.

I enrolled in Young Judaea in my early teens. In the heady days leading up to and after Israel declared its independence, movements of every political stripe in Israel had a youth group and camps in Canada and in the United States.

At camp, we built our Jewish consciousness and reinforced our Jewish identity. We were part of larger society, of course, but the one that was becoming central to our lives was the Jewish one, and the camp experience strengthened all that. Everything around our activities focused on our life as Jews, intellectually and emotionally, in our developing teen years. It was easy to pick out the future leaders – assertive, confident, basing their arguments on material accepted as fact. That was the stuff we brought forward into our adult years, colouring what we would become and the messages we would transmit to our children.

Aliyah to Israel was an enormous focus of the Zionist camps I associated with. This possibility, went the argument, was why we had to study our history, our customs, our holidays. We were building a new kind of Jew, unapologetic for his striving nature, determined to never again be a victim. History’s lessons were clear and we had to take heed and take our future into our own hands. The camps I attended were the educational vehicle.

In those days, we pretended we were chalutzim (pioneers), so we went out into the bush and made like we were going to live off the land. We built lean-tos to sleep under, chopped down trees, built things, learned how to make a campfire even without matches, and engaged in marches, canoeing, the whole megillah.

The years I spent as a camper – learning to be a scout, learning to create things with my hands, to develop myself physically, to compete for excellence – we were modeling the new Jew. We were not content with just being students, we knew we could do that – we were going to be doers. We were building pride in ourselves and in our accomplishments.

In turn, I became one of the leaders trying to transmit the messages I had absorbed to others. The young people I grew up with at camp worked in their own communities in the same way. All across the country and across the United States, we were a network fighting assimilation, building loyalty to Israel and a consciousness of being Jewish and the values it represented.

One of the best experiences I had was when I was invited to be a Camp Shalom program director in Gravenhurst, Ont. I spent six months preparing programs and then threw them all out on my second day on the job. I spent the next two months preparing different programs on the fly, built around Jewish holidays or events in Jewish history. We organized camper teams, choosing names, uniforms and cheers, and had athletic competitions, colour wars, talent competition skits, swimming competitions or just fun at the beach. I don’t know about the campers, but I had a great time exploring my creative capacities. We set up a pattern that was followed for years at that camp.

Some of us became community leaders. A few of us even got to Israel, at least for a time. Many of the associations we made have withstood the test of time. Some of the best friendships I have today are ones I made in those years. A good number of marriages came out of those experiences, including one of my own.

What a wonderful institution camps are, whatever their nature! Bringing kids into a healthful environment with responsible supervision, living lives completely different from what they are accustomed to, meeting people they would not normally meet, exposing them to alternative behavioural norms, has to be good. And getting away from the city into a natural environment, who has to be convinced that that is a good thing? Let’s hear it for camp days. Rah, rah, rah!

Max Roytenberg is a Vancouver-based poet, writer and blogger. His book Hero in My Own Eyes: Tripping a Life Fantastic is available from Amazon and other online booksellers.

Completing the Tanya

Rabbi Binyomin Bitton (photo by Noam Dehan)

On Dec. 4, Chabad of Downtown Vancouver, led by Rabbi Binyomin Bitton, held a siyyum, a celebration to mark the conclusion of studying the entire book of Tanya, sometimes called “the Bible of Chassidic thought.”

The siyyum also celebrated Yud-Tes Kislev, the 19th day of the Jewish month of Kislev, which began this year on the evening of Dec. 6, and is known as “the New Year of Chassidism,” due to the release of the founder of Chabad and author of the Tanya, Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, known as the Alter Rebbe, from prison in czarist Russia on that date in 1798.

The Tanya is a guide to the pursuit of righteousness and the meaning of Jewish religious life from a Chabad Chassidic perspective. It is known for its counsel on how the intellect can transform the emotional life, and its teachings on how contemplating the nature of God and the soul can inspire and focus spiritual life. The Tanya also asserts that the height of the spiritual life lies paradoxically in the simple actions of human beings, and that the highest expression of God’s intention in creation is in the human doing of a mitzvah (religious commandment, good deed).

Bitton opened the siyyum by noting his pleasure that it happened to fall so close to Yud-Tes Kislev, when Jews all around the world start a new cycle of Tanya learning. He then welcomed Adina Ragetli, a descendant of the Alter Rebbe, to play the niggun (sacred wordless melody) of the Alter Rebbe, “Arba Bavos,” on the harp.

“We are all very happy tonight,” said Bitton afterwards, “except one person, whose name I won’t say, but I’ll tell you the letters of his name, Samech-Mem-Alef-Lamed [Samael, an evil angel, whose name is not spoken by Chassidim]. You know what the letters of his name stand for? Siyyum masechet lo aseh [the completion of a book you will not do].”

Rivka Arieli read the final section of Tanya with which they completed the book, and then the rabbi invited a series of students to speak of the meaning of the text to them. First to talk were Eduardo and Gabrielle Sonnino, who spoke of their discovery of the meaning of Judaism through the Tanya after coming to Canada from Brazil three years ago. They spoke humorously of their adoption of Jewish observance as a result, teasing Bitton that, in getting them to “leave their cheeseburgers,” he had ruined their lives.

Shirley Hirsch and her husband, Gabriel, had learned previously with Rabbi Lipa Dubrawsky, z”l, the educational director of Chabad-Lubavitch BC for 15 years until his passing in 2013. His wife, Dena Dubrawsky, urged the Hirsches to contact Bitton, and soon they were taking on Tanya every Monday. Hirsch spoke of the uniqueness of the Tanya in conveying the highest mystical truths of Judaism in a form that anyone can understand.

Robert Elias shared how the study of Tanya and its differentiation between the egoic and divine elements in the person had helped him improve his marriage, mend broken friendships, improve his relations with his co-workers, and remove the sense of ennui he was experiencing in his otherwise successful professional life.

Ragetli closed the celebration with another piece of music. Rabbi Yechiel Baitelman of Richmond Chabad also attended the siyyum.

Matthew Gindin is a freelance journalist, writer and lecturer. He writes regularly for the Forward and All That Is Interesting, and has been published in Religion Dispatches, Situate Magazine, Tikkun and elsewhere. He can be found on Medium and Twitter.

Being kosher in today’s world

On Dec. 7, Temple Sholom Sisterhood hosted a discussion on the relationship, history and relevance of today’s kosher practices. The panel aimed to “explore, broaden and in some cases challenge the term kashrut” and “explore integrating values such as ethics, community and spirituality as it relates to food.”

The panelists were Rabbi Lindsey bat Joseph, executive director of the Centre for Jewish Excellence; Michael Schwartz, director of community engagement at the Jewish Museum and Archives of British Columbia; and Noam Dolgin, a Jewish environmental educator and “sustainable realtor.”

As participants ate baked organic apples – sourced locally and made with gluten-free oats – Dolgin began at the beginning, discussing the Garden of Eden and asking the audience to name the first mitzvah (commandment) given to human beings alone. Although many people think it was “be fruitful and multiply,” that commandment was given to animals as well. The first human commandment, Dolgin said, was to “work and protect” the garden. After leaving the hunter-gatherer society of the garden, we became farmers able to produce surplus food and wealth, he explained, and so came the laws around our relationship to the land and to other people, which aimed to promote justice towards the earth and to each other.

Dolgin gave an overview of the development of Jewish law in relation to land, animals and people, touching on such core rabbinic laws as ba’al tashchit (do not waste) and ba’al tzarei chayyim (do not be cruel to animals). Dolgin said, although there are biblical laws protecting the land, there has been a shift in recent years from an emphasis on immediate human concerns – “don’t pollute upwind,” for example – to deeper ecological concerns, such as “don’t pollute at all.”

Schwartz spoke about how Jewish culinary traditions go beyond the legalities of kashrut. He focused on the home as the locus of cultural preservation, and noted the museum’s recent initiative to collect and share Jewish cultural stories around food. As part of this project, he said, one Jewish woman talked of her memories of food from Second World War-era Bangalore, India; another spoke of her Mizrahi Jewish family who had lived in China for years and were more comfortable in Vancouver’s Chinatown than in other parts of the city, including Jewish institutions.

Schwartz also discussed efforts to bring Jewish ethics to bear on food, describing the community’s creation of a food bank, and of other food-justice-related organizations.

“The alert among you will notice that I have made it this far into my talk without mentioning the word kosher,” he said. “That is not an accident. The reason for this is that I wanted to demonstrate that there are many ways that food can preserve our identity and inform our morals.”

Rounding out the discussion, bat Joseph explored the architecture of kosher law and the way it was built out of biblical law. She explained how kosher laws are traditionally considered to be transrational, or beyond human understanding. She said, despite our not understanding the details, the Torah suggests two primary purposes of kashrut: to make us distinct from the nations around us and to promote a holy lifestyle, to encourage mindfulness and “a sense of priestliness in the most mundane things.” She debunked the commonly held idea that kosher laws may have had a connection to health.

A wide-ranging question-and-answer period included humourous stories of trying to live kosher, different family traditions, and the struggle to balance inclusivity both among Jews and between Jews and non-Jews while observing kashrut.