The Evolving Jew

Two weeks ago, 230 girls were kidnapped from their school in Nigeria by Boko Haram fundamentalists. Boko Haram opposes education for girls. Unfortunately, they do believe in rape and murder. The girls have not yet been found and hope is fading fast. But wait! A jetliner is still missing! We must saturate the media with as much information about every aspect of the search. Two weeks ago, 230 girls were kidnapped from their school in Nigeria by Boko Haram fundamentalists. Boko Haram opposes education for girls. Unfortunately, they do believe in rape and murder. The girls have not yet been found and hope is fading fast. What's this? The crisis in Ukraine continues? Well, it's important. There needs to be a lot of posturing by eastern and western leaders. And we need to know every detail of what Putin said. Two weeks ago, 230 girls were kidnapped from their school in Nigeria by Boko Haram fundamentalists. Boko Haram opposes education for girls. Unfortunately, they do believ

I know most of you have already seen the article "Orthodox, gay, and the rest is private" by Mordechai Levovitz. But one sentence, early in the article, caught my eye, and deserves a discussion of its own on the greater issue of sexual shame and guilt in Yeshiva high schools. Here's the line: "Every Friday my Rebbe would give a mussar shmooze (life lecture) about the ethical importance of resisting the sexual temptation of girls. Although the Rebbe took a hard line on these issues, my classmates actually really enjoyed the Friday shmoozes because it seemed to validate the normalcy of their adolescent hormonal experiences." In a way, I wish my yeshiva had had something like this. As it was I suffered alone, sure that I was a deviant for not being able to stop fantasizing about girls. I was sure that all the boys around me were tzadikim. All teenage boys fantasize. And with hormones coursing through their systems, it's almost impossible to refrain from

Here's my take. I grew up mainstream Orthodox in the 1970's and 80's in Brooklyn. I went to a boys' yeshiva day school in Boro Park in the 1970's and early 80's. We had very frum rebbes and the student body ranged from Modern to Yeshivish. I NEVER heard of Shlissel Challah in all that time. Not from my rabbeim, not from my friends, not from my yeshivish relatives. In the 80's I went to a high school that had a fair number of modern kids, but the basic tilt was fairly yeshivish. During my entire time there, I NEVER heard of Shlissel Challah. After high school I went to yeshiva in Israel for a year. Again, Shlissel Challah never mentioned, not once. My entire twenties (admittedly when I got more modern and spent a lot of time on the Upper West Side)? Not a single mention of Shlissel Challah, by anyone. I got married in my early 30's. We lived in several Orthodox communities since then, in NYC and in the midwest. Never heard of Shlissel Challah. No one ma

These are all the comments that I collected from my old blog before Haloscan went kaput. Most of those posts have been imported to this blog, so these comments match up with many posts. At some point in the future, I'd like to insert these comments into the appropriate posts, but till then, I figure may as well make them available to my readers.

I have no objection to anyone giving up the prohibition of kitniyot. But for me it's still relevant the same way all halacha is relevant. All halacha is man-made. Some rules were created 2,500 years ago, some 1,700 years ago, and some, like kitniyot, is only around 700 years old. But that's old enough for it to have become embedded deeply into Ashkenazi Jewish life, and to become something kept by generations of my ancestors, alongside shabbat, kashrut, etc. So I'm not ready to just jettison it.

Jerusalem is under siege. The revolt against Rome is failing. The Beit Hamikdash, the heart and soul of Judaism, is about to be destroyed. The true worship of Hashem will be over, forever. The year is 69 CE, and the end of Jewish nationhood and of the Jewish faith seems nigh. But one man, Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakai, has the vision to realize that the true heart and soul of Judaism is the study of the Torah. THAT is what will sustain Judaism without a temple, without kohanim, without sacrifices. He negotiates with Vespasian and secures a safe sanctuary in Yavneh, a place where he and his students can begin the work, through limmud Torah, of rebuilding Judaism into something that will be able to survive the coming centuries. --------------------------------- Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakai was a visionary. He knew that Judaism lay in intellectual achievement, in creating a legal and ritual system that didn't depend on grandiose temples or tributes to a priestly caste. He knew

Today Dov Bear reposted (on Facebook) a piece of his from 2007 about the forms of the Seder being taken from the Roman Symposium. This is hardly new and is well known (though evidently not in all circles). Yet some commenters objected, on the grounds that such "borrowing" would mean that "tannaim and amoraaim were stupid and needed the greeks to help them with our holy things". Sigh. One of the most beautiful things about Judaism is that our religion is, in a sense, a time capsule. We adopted so many things from so many vanished cultures and made them our own. Half of what we do came from other cultures. The Italian Carnival, which started in medieval times but mostly (though not completely) petered out by the end of the 18th century? Where do you think we got the custom of dressing up on Purim? Dreidel? Based on the Teetotum, a Eurpoean gambling top many hundreds of years old. Even the letters we use, supposedly standing for Nes Gadol Haya Sham, were rea

In this article by Rabbi Arthur Green (HT: Gideon S), he asks: "Can a religion without literalist claims to divine will and dictate command the hearts of its adherents" My answer? I'm not sure that can be done. Without the certainty of fundamentalist beliefs, without the absolute certainty that Hashem specifically commanded us (through the halachic process) to do things like have separate dishes for meat & milk, I'm not sure that the masses can ever develop the necessary passion for a living movement of any large size. I wish that it were possible, since I'm certainly one of those who rejects "literalist claims to divine will". And happily, the passionate engagement I crave is certainly there in certain small communities. But I can't see it ever taking over and attracting hundreds of thousands of adherents. My next paragraph is going to seem sort of elitist, but so be it. Most people don't want to think that deeply about matters of f

My wife and I just got back on Friday from our trip to Israel for my sister's wedding. I'm still totally jet-lagged. I'm not usually given to superlatives, but the trip was wonderful, amazing, and inspiring. Why? I'm not really sure. Part of it was just being there for my sister's beautiful wedding, and spending a lot of time with family. But part of it was just being there, in Israel. It's hardly my first time there. If I count up all the time I've spent in Israel, I've lived there about 3 1/2 years. That includes a year of high school, when my father took a sabbatical from his university, my traditional yeshiva year after high school, and aliyah in my late 20's. Plus various summers. Still, most of the time I'd spent in Israel previously was during my younger, more idealistic years, and back then, I expected to be inspired and uplifted. Those were the years when I assumed I'd be living most of my life there. So I was never surprise

Got an extra day here because of the Lufthansa pilots strike. Really don't want to leave...