Late olive harvest threatens popular Chanukah project
This year’s olive harvest is late, and Chanukah is early, arriving at the unseemly date of Dec. 1.
That’s bad news for Chabad rabbis who run travelling olive press demonstrations, bringing old-time Chanukah skills to thousands of children in schools and synagogues nationwide.
They need the ripe fruit to squeeze into oil, reports Jeanette Friedman on chabad.org:
According to Adin Hester of the Olive Growers Council of California, the tardy harvest resulted from uncooperative weather. The bloom set late and the farmers couldn’t begin shaking the olives from their branches until October. Producers may have to continue harvesting through Thanksgiving, just days before the start of the holiday, but may not have the workers on hand to help do the picking once the weather gets cold.
Additionally, while the crop is the largest in three years, many farmers are complaining that the olives are smaller than usual.
Chabadniks don’t give up easily, however. The (travelling) show will go on, and perhaps, somehow, those late-blooming handfuls of undersized fruit will, uh, burn for eight nights.
It’s happened before.
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Cooking their way through the December Dilemma
Chanukah is a minor holiday that’s only big because of Christmas. If it weren’t for the mass hysteria brought on by the Santa season, Jewish children wouldn’t be clamoring so loudly for the gelt and the eight nights of presents.
And then there’s tree envy. How to beat the lure of that towering fir of tinsel and glitter -- with a puny candelabra? It’s tough, especially for interfaith families who are raising Jewish children and have to deal with the December Dilemma every year.
Nicole Neroulias, writing for the Religion News Service via Huffington Post, describes non-Jewish women taking on the holidays with food.
Cooking Jewish for Chanukah is easier than Passover, one mother opines. Latkes can be a dress rehearsal for the gantze Seder.
That was before she started in with the oil:
Anne Coyle used to set the holiday table with roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, but this year, she's rolling up her sleeves in an attempt to make latkes and brisket.
Cheered on by her husband and a support group for non-Jewish women raising Jewish children, Coyle's first stab at a traditional Hanukkah meal has a modest goal: don't burn anything. Or anyone.
Coyle, who was raised Catholic, got some help from “The Mothers Circle Cookbook,” a compilation of Jewish recipes and holiday tips for non-Jewish women raising Jewish children recently published by the Jewish Outreach Institute. It’s available online for free download, or in hard copy.
More than 1,000 women like Coyle have taken part in Mothers Circle discussion groups since 2002. I hope they've all eaten as well.
(Another resource for interfaith families dealing with the December holidays is available online from InterfaithFamily.com, a nonprofit that supports intermarried families making Jewish choices.)
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Bar mitzvah invitation 2.0 (biblical style)
At least Jacob never stole a bar mitzvah invitation from his brother.
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Younger Jewish leaders not so worried about intermarriage
Jewish leaders younger than 40 aren’t as bent out of shape about intermarriage as their older colleagues.
That’s a not-very-surprising finding of "Generation of Change: How Leaders in their Twenties and Thirties are Reshaping American Jewish Life," anew survey of young leaders of Jewish organizations commissioned by the Avi Chai Foundation.
Those younger Jews in leadership positions, both in "establishment" groups like the ADL and American Jewish Committee as well as "nonestablishment" groups such as Hazon and the independent minyan movement, come across as passionate about building Jewish identity, concerned about social justice and creating meaningful entryways to Jewish expression, and willing to commit their professional lives to making it happen.
In keeping with the millennial generation’s non-exclusivist ideology, these younger Jewish leaders don’t see intermarriage in quite the same light as Jewish leaders over 40 do:
Older establishment leaders tend to view intermarriage as a threat to Jewish life and as a violation of long-standing communal norms. During interviews, younger nonestablishment leaders described intermarriage as an obstacle to Jewish participation, but felt it could be overcome with genuine commitment and involvement. Moreover, they tended to believe that the Jewish community is unwise or not entitled to take a stance on personal choices such as marriage.
Citing her own "personal obsession with intermarriage," Jewish Week writer Julie Wiener discussed the findings in her In the Mix blog:
Thirty-nine percent of young leaders, compared to 45 percent of older leaders disagree/disagree strongly with the following statement: "Jews should marry whomever they fall in love with, even if not Jewish." (Which, I assume, means that 60 percent of young leaders and 55 percent of old-timers agree with the statement or have no opinion?)
Only 36 percent of little pishers (my terminology, not Jack’s), compared to 44 percent of alter kockers (again, my language) agree with this statement: "It is important to encourage Jews to marry Jews." (I assume this means that 64 percent disagree with that statement.)
If Wiener’s weary of distinguishing between establishment and non-establishment Jewish groups, I wonder how long an organization merits the title "new." Hazon has been around for 10 years, as has IKAR and the indie minyan movement. When does one join the ranks of the established, at least linguistically?
For more on the study, check out The Fundermentalist: http://blogs.jta.org/philanthropy/article/2010/10/12/2741180/newsletter-mental-notes5
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Judaism without the “experts”
Some folks in the Jewish community decry the rise in “privatized Judaism.”
From a Jewish institutional perspective, this makes perfect sense. The bar or bat mitzvah celebration that takes place outside of the synagogue; the wedding officiated by friends of the couple without a rabbi present; couples who create their own wedding ceremony mixing Jewish traditions with their own homespun spirituality--these are all examples of a phenomenon that can make it feel like the role of qualified Jewish guides (rabbis, cantors and educators) and the time-honored institutions of community synagogues will be threatened.
Sometimes I think that the only Jewish communal job that is not going to be privatized any time soon is the mohel, who performs ritual circumcisions. Not many parents of newborns are vying to privatize that role.
But what about the upside to this trend?
At its best, privatized Judaism is an opportunity for those who see themselves on the sidelines of Jewish life to create their own Jewish experiences. It can empower them to find the resources, seek out guides, and answer questions about their own life cycle events as opposed to going through the “stock and trade” ceremony laid out before them like a set table.
Another upside to this trend is that privatized Judaism can yield creative new rituals for life transitions that don’t have satisfying Jewish rituals to mark them.
Consider, for example, a young woman I know who recently got divorced. The traditional “get” ceremony, though necessary for all sorts of reasons having to do with personal status, does not always satisfy the psychological need to mark the loss (and sometimes the relief) of a divorce. This young woman needed more. Sitting shiva for seven days, the ritual for mourning the loss of a loved one, seemed a compelling ritual to mark this loss for her. It also seemed to represent, by opposition, the seven days of celebration after a wedding (the sheva brachot).
Another idea that helped mark this significant transition in her life was creating a ceremony to remove her wedding ring, to oppose the giving of the ring during her Jewish wedding.
Then there’s a woman who was becoming a grandmother for the first time. She was called up for an aliyah during the Torah service in the synagogue right after her grandson was born, but the language of the blessing sounded pat. She felt it didn’t express the awe that she felt bringing another generation into the world, nor the complexity of emotions that she experienced as she witnessed her own daughter transformed into a mother. After seeking out a Jewish educator with whom she could study, she created a new mi shebeirakh blessing – one that alluded to the complex and heartening relationship between grandparents and their grandchildren exemplified by Jacob blessing his grandchildren at the end of the book of Genesis.
I heard from a first-time mother-to-be, who wanted to mark the stages of her pregnancy in significant ways. While nine months is a long time to sustain heightened consciousness about the impending birth, seeking out an educator, she created a personal ritual for Friday night after lighting the candles to reflect the kabbalistic notion of receiving a neshama yeteira , an additional soul, on Shabbat. It marked a time for her to be conscious about the additional soul gestating within her.
Let’s not keep these creative expressions of Jewish identity to ourselves. Let’s share these and other ideas to make Jewish life resonant with Jewish traditions and reflective of our needs today.
(Dasee Berkowitz is a Jewish life cycle consultant in New York. She can be reached at www.jlifeconsulting.com.)
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When a child dies
The death of a loved one is always hard to bear. How much more unbearable is the grief when it’s one’s own child.
In this essay, a father talks about the devastating loss of his teenage son, and how the shiva ritual helped him past those first days he could not have navigated on his own:
The aftermath of this horror helped us gain a profound respect for organized religious life, Jewish and otherwise. After the death knocked us numb and we couldn't reason or plan anything, a synagogue committee devoted to helping those who grieve leaped into action, and the labors of those on the committee impressed us greatly.
People who didn't know us personally were there to help us navigate through the shock of death: They prepared our house for the shivah, the Jewish mourning period, and prepared food for us and the scores of friends and relatives who showed up at our door.
At the same time, the writer notes, the seven-day period of ritualized behavior eventually ends, and one is expected to return to the living. But a parent can never “return” after such a loss. So many little things trigger memories and tug at the heart. It’s important to recognize the limits of rituals, he writes, even while acknowledging the comfort they can bring:
Remembering our son and honoring him with our daily actions are the most important parts of the coping process….The only advice I can give a parent who loses a child is to soldier on. As years move by, pleasant thoughts of the departed will replace the nightmares and the pain. The torment will always be there, but it will recede.
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Justin Bieber and the Shema
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Jewish rituals aren’t just for Jews anymore.
Conservative Rabbi Jason Miller, founder of the Kosher Michigan certification agency in metropolitan Detroit, points out in his blog how prevalent certain Jewish traditions have become in non-Jewish America.
Quoting JTA Editor Ami Eden’s description of the hora at the Clinton-Mezvinsky wedding, Miller suggests that Chelsea would have requested the dance even if she hadn’t married a Jew.
Debatable, perhaps. But then there’s the 87-year-old Catholic woman in Manhattan with mezuza envy. According to a recent New York Times article, she wanted one of those little prayer boxes left behind on so many of her neighbors’ doors:
[S]he often wished she had inherited a mezuza like many of her non-Jewish neighbors did. The tradition recalled her youth, she said, when her local priest appeared each Easter to write "God bless this house" on her family’s front door. To her delight, one of her Jewish neighbors recently hung a mezuza on her doorway. "Every time I come home and remember, I kiss it and touch it and then I bless myself, saying, 'In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, Amen.'"
To cap it off, Miller points out that teen heartthrob Justin Bieber -- not a MOT -- says the Shema before his concerts.
None of this is a bad thing, Miller opines:
There's nothing wrong with non-Jews eating kosher food, dancing the Horah, putting mezzuzas on their doors, or saying the Shema. In fact, it only shows how Judaism continues to transcend borders in the 21st century.
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Mazal Tov: Baby in the mikveh
In this cute-beyond-words video, ten-week-old Clara Grossman becomes an official MOT when parents Ricky and Jennifer Grossman immerse her in the ritual waters of Mayyim Hayyim, a community mikveh in Newton, Mass.
Jennifer hadn't quite completed her conversion when Clara was born. So to make sure she's accepted by Jews beyond the Grossmans' Reform community, mom, dad, and both sets of grandparents watched as baby Clara goes through the ancient ritual, described on Mayyim Hayyim's new blog:
Notice how pretty and spacious the mikveh is. See how the rabbi smiles and teaches and reassures. Listen as parents Jennifer and Ricky explain – in their own words – why they are making this Jewish choice. Watch the joy on her grandparents’ faces – all four of them, including her non-Jewish Grandma and Grandpa, who are beaming, fully engaged and comfortable.
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A Jewish wedding without God?
As a Jewish life cycle consultant who guides couples and families toward creating meaningful ceremonies, I am presented with all sorts of creative, sometimes puzzling requests from couples planning their weddings.
One client had a particularly interesting request -- a Jewish wedding ceremony that left God out of it.
Both members of the couple are scientists who hail from a long line of academics. They didn’t want their ceremony to include words and concepts they didn’t believe in.
They asked me to refer them to a rabbi to officiate. After hearing their story, I asked why they wanted a rabbi rather than a judge. They replied, “We want the wedding to feel Jewish…I grew up very proud of being Jewish but not so connected to the religious parts of it…A judge would be too sterile. A rabbi would create a sense of warmth, someone with a beard, who can play guitar.”
Their request made me wonder: While adapting a Jewish life cycle event to reflect a couples’ lived values makes the event meaningful for them, does altering it by leaving God out undermine what makes it Jewish in the first place?
One of the places in the Jewish wedding ceremony where God is mentioned repeatedly is in the sheva brachot (the seven blessings). Among other things these blessings include statements that recognize we are not masters of our own fate, but “hakol bara lichvodo,” everything was created for God’s glory. For some couples this blessing can be a recognition that we are not totally responsible for finding our soul mates. Some of the other blessings places the couple in a continuum that starts with the garden of Eden and points toward a future redemption, reminding us that every new couple both creates a new world and is a part of bringing about a better world.
Even the parts of the ceremony in which God’s name is not mentioned explicitly situate a couple within in the broader narrative of the Jewish people with its inherited customs and traditions while still recognizing the uniqueness of each particular couple. In the phrase that effectuates a Jewish marriage, “Behold, you are made special to me according to the laws of Moses and Israel” the first part of the sentence affirms this unique relationship while the second situates the couple in a broader context.
If we tailor-make our own ceremonies (e.g. God out / rabbi in) do we limit the profound messages that a Jewish ceremony is constructed to convey? Is a Jewish feeling enough to make a wedding Jewish? Or should we guide couples toward a deeper understanding of the liturgy, introduce them to multiple understanding of the notion of God, and challenge couples, even during this highly personal time to see themselves and their lives within a broader context?
(Dasee Berkowitz is a Jewish life cycle consultant in New York, and can be reached at www.JLife Consulting.com.)
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Biff and Buffy do b’nai mitzvah
Synagogue can be a scary place, and not just because you might get hit up for dues.
What if you're not Jewish and it's your first time there?
With intermarriage constantly on the rise, more and more of the folks in the pews for life cycle events are not Jewish.
What happens? They get handed a book with funny letters that reads backwards, everybody's standing and sitting all the time, and are they really supposed to kiss that Torah moving through the room?
Levi Fishman of the Jewish Outreach Institute took pity, and came up with some helpful tips for intermarried families to help their non-Jewish guests and family members navigate the service. He's talking about bar and bat mitzvahs, but the tips apply to anything:
People will feel more comfortable if they know what to expect during the ceremony. Families can either send a small guide with the invitations or provide them at the event itself. By taking the time and care to introduce non-Jewish relatives to the rituals of the ceremony, you are displaying the warmth inherent to the Jewish community.
Non-Jewish relatives may not be permitted to take part in the actual ceremony, depending on the synagogue. But the event itself can be an opportunity for outreach, Fishman writes, if it’s approached in the right spirit.
See the rest of his article at jweekly.com.
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