Monica

This morning in torah study we talked about this part of Nitzavim: "And not with you alone will I make this covenant and this oath, but with him who stands here with us this day before the Lord our God, and also with him who is not here with us this day" (Deut 29:13-14). The context is Moshe's final address to Israel; we can prety much take as given that this is not referring to people who slept in that morning. The rabbis understand this as a source for the covenant being binding on all Jews, the ones who stood at Sinai as well as those who came later. In other words, Judaism claims you by virtue of your birth. (I knew that, of course, but I learned a new term for it: "birthright dogma".)

This is hardly unusual; some other religions do this either as a birth condition or based on an action that your parents take very soon thereafter. We say "once a Jew always a Jew"; the Roman Catholic church says the same thing once you've been baptised. Surely there are others. (I'm not sure if Muslim status is automatic at birth; I have the impression it is.)

Some modern Jews have a problem with this, but I don't. We're born into other obligations that we got no say over; why should this be different? The issue to me isn't what you're born to but what you're going to do about it and what anyone else can or should do about it. As a convert from one "we claim you forever" religion to another, I find myself in an interesting position.

There are folks out there who try to preach obligation to the people they see straying -- and that just doesn't work. The church thinks I'm a lapsed, sinning Catholic -- fine for them, but I don't care, because I don't subscribe to their belief system. That they think they have a claim on me means nothing to me; I think they're wrong. (No offense meant to my Catholic readers, of course.) Any attempt to reach me via the "but you have to" path would utterly fail. (Ok, any attempt to reach me at all would fail now, but there might have been times in my life when that was not true.) And we have this in Judaism too; there are people who are very concerned with bringing back those who've strayed by going down the "obligation" path. Going down the "benefit" path is much more likely to be productive. You'll almost never succeed (long-term) in intimidating people, but if you can show them the beauty, fulfillment, or richness of a religion or tradition, you might hook them. Chabad, for all its other problems, gets this; the people who stone cars on Shabbat do not.

If status is forever, then we should be picky about entrance criteria when we can be. If a gentile eats bacon cheeseburgers on Yom Kippur, so what? But once he becomes a Jew, he's sinning. if the members of the beit din (the rabbinic court) think he's not committed, they can and should tell him "not now". This is part of why Judaism requires a significant period of study and evaluation, which can take years. The rabbis on the beit din need to assure themselves that they aren't making things worse for K'lal Yisrael (the community of Israel), while of course also weighing the issues of the individual candidate. As a candidate I expected that kind of rigor and would have been unhappy if I hadn't gotten it. (In fact, during my studies I met one local rabbi who said "I always say yes", and I made sure that rabbi was not on my beit din.)

Somehow from here we ended up talking about interfaith families, but that's another set of topics for another time.

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If you want a set of questions, leave a comment asking for some. (It may take me a few days to respond.)

This source tells a strange parable (a mashal). What follows is my translation, augmented by a few notes, from the Hebrew (he didn't give us English): One day [a man] crossed from place to place (that is, was travelling) and he saw a tower (birah) "on fire" (doleket). He said, this tower has no owner? [A man] peeked out and said "I am the owner". The parable ends here, without telling us why the man seems unconcerned that his tower is burning. Fortunately for us, the midrash doesn't end there. :-) It continues with a nimshal, an explication.

The traveller, the midrash says, is Avraham Avinu, who said: this world has no owner? And ha-Kadosh Baruch Hu, God, peeked out at him, saying: I am the ruler of this world. According to this midrash, God didn't reveal himself to Avraham until Avraham deduced that the world must have a creator/ruler and went looking. Avraham was a seeker; God didn't just speak to him out of the blue and say "lech l'cha" (go forth from your homeland to the land I will show you, etc).

We talked in the group about the alarming vision in the parable. The translation of doleket isn't entirely clear; Rabbi Green initially did not translate it (wanting to see what we would come up with) and then we more or less settled on "on fire" -- but he suggested that it could also mean "full of light" (think "blazing with light" in English; when you say that you usually don't mean a literal fire). "On fire" suggests brokenness in the tower; did Avraham see brokenness in the world? I suggested that seeing a tower "full of light" might inspire one to seek hospitality, a very different interpretation. (This seemed to meet with some approval.) Someone else in the group drew a connection between the birah doleket and the burning bush. Another suggested that Avraham's birah doleket could be an internal event, not a vision but a question he was "on fire" with. (Nice.)

I'm used to thinking of Lech L'cha as God choosing Avraham, but maybe Avraham chose God first. I'm told that Heschel wrote a book that explores this question, God in Search of Man. That sounds like something I should take a look at.

My own quasi "lech l'cha" experience was not nearly so clear-cut as Avraham's (which is good!); now I wonder a little whether this interpretation applies a little to myself. Not consciously, for sure, but the subconscious is a funny thing sometimes.

Food for thought.

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I'm not going to do a detailed chronicle here, but I'll mention a few things that particularly struck me.

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I have heard the following story before, and my rabbi told it again at the shabbaton:

A poor man in the shtetl has a dream one night that he should go to a certain bridge in Prague and dig under it to find a treaure. The man shrugs it off. The next night he has the same dream, but it feels more urgent. He'd love to have enough money to feed his family, he thinks, and mentions the dream to his wife, but following a dream is silly so he shrugs it off again. The next night the dream is even more intense, metaphorically picking him up by his shirt, shaking him, and telling him to go to Prague and dig under the bridge. The next morning, over objections from his family, he says he's going to do this and sets out.

After several days he arrives in Prague and finds the bridge from his dreams. He feels embarrassed, and there's a watchman there, so he just stands around for a while. Eventually, overcoming the awkward feeling, he begins to dig in the dirt with his hands, at which point the watchman asks what he's doing. He answers evasively and the watchman summons the police, who escort the man to jail for loitering.

The police ask him why he was digging and eventually he says "this is really silly, but I had this dream that if I came to this bridge and dug, I would find enough money to feed my family". The guard laughs at him, saying: "Ha! Just last night I had a dream that if I went to the home of some stupid Jew 50 miles west of here and dug under his stove, I'd find a treasure! You don't see me doing that, do you? Dreams are just dreams. Go on, get out of here." And he sends the man on his way. The man, of course, goes back home, digs under his stove, and finds a treasure.

Sometimes you have to travel away from your home to find something that was there all along. This Shabbat was kind of like that for me.

( classes )

( Shabbat evening )

( Shabbat (day) )

2. What made you decide to convert to Judaism? ( Read more... )

3. What made you decide to keep Kosher?( Read more... )

4. When you're not listening to filk, what kinds of music do you listen to?( Read more... )

5. If you were stranded on a desert island with only the essentials and were told you could only have one musical instrument or device, what would that be, and why? ( Read more... )

Much of the feedback so far weighs in on the side of "required -- family is family". Someone cited honoring one's parents (the source of the request), and a couple people mentioned protecting a life (the sibling is apparently in real danger of injury without someone there).

I, on the other hand, am leaning toward "forbidden", though "permitted" is a possibility. Definitely not "required", though.

The issue is complex. While the sibling needs a caregiver, that's a service that can be hired -- so there's no apparent need for the poster to do it personally. Of course it's important to honor one's parents (this comes up a lot in text), but the talmud also teaches that if a parent asks you to transgress the Torah, you must decline (Bava Metzia 32a). This raises the question of whether attending another religion's worship service -- on its second-holiest day, to boot -- is avodah zara, forbidden worship. Is it enough if you don't intend to worship? What if you don't participate? What if you don't listen? That is a complex question with varied answers depending on circumstances, ranging from exactly what will take place to the strength of your own Jewish education and commitment, and you really need to ask your rabbi for a personal ruling.

I think the experience of facing this issue is valuable for the conversion candidate, actually. As a member of a minority religion (that sometimes faces hostility from others), sometimes you are going to have to make choices between your religion and your family/friends/society -- things like this, or resolving Shabbat issues with your employer, or various other matters. Finding out how you will handle those choices before it's "too late" -- before you convert and acquire new obligations -- seems useful to me.

I assume that most conversion candidates face some sort of religion-vs-world-at-large test during the process, but I don't actually know.

A few days ago I received email from a local gentile who's interested in converting to Judaism. (She found me via a mailing list.) She's been reading for a while but hadn't been to services and was nervous about doing that (this sounds familiar), so I invited her to join me for services and dinner.

She's a very nice person. Sounds like a seeker -- she's been thinking about this for years and isn't doing it because of a dating situation or the like. The more she learns the more it resonates for her. She got a lot out of the service, and I think she'll be back. I pointed her at other congregations in the area, too. Sounds like she really likes what she's seen of my rabbi, though; I wouldn't be surprised if she ends up with us.

Dinner was pleasant, and she and Dani also get along well. I'd like to invite her for a holiday -- maybe Sukkot, as she probably isn't ready to build her own sukkah yet. She's been to a few Pesach seders with friends, as it turns out. And if she decides to give our Shabbat morning service a try (she sounded interested, but not this week), I can also invite her back for lunch.

Yesterday there was no bar mitzvah, so we got to have a torah service and the rabbi didn't have to leave partway through study. After the service and study, some of us stuck around to discuss the new format, particularly implementation details. The plan is to do torah study first, so we can guarantee half an hour of the rabbi's time, and then do the service. The rabbi will leave partway through the service (if there's a later service for a bar mitzvah), right around the time the torah service would start. So we need minyan members to be able to complete the service, including reading torah. We have enough volunteers to get this off the ground, and I'm hoping we'll be able to get more, including supporting those who want to learn but aren't ready to just jump in.

We decided to switch in two weeks; we have someone who can learn a short torah portion in that amount of time. (We're not going to do the entire portion.) By virtue of having the foresight to bring a list of dates and torah portions, with room to add names next to them, I seem to have ended up as the person who keeps track of these things. :-) We're doing some delegation, though; the person reading torah in a given week is responsible for leading that part of the service (not just doing the reading itself) or recruiting someone, and also for assigning honors (aliya, hagbah...). That way I don't have to keep track of a bunch of different people for each week and worry about what happens on weeks when I'm not there. I call it distributed problem-solving; one of them called it "making my life easy". These are not contradictory. :-)

I also talked with the new cantorial intern tonight. She seems really nice and easy to work with. She asked me to fill her in on how services work when there aren't any rabbis, and I did so. I told her she should pick whatever music she wants; I'm not going to try to dictate to her. We'll have a little huddle 20 minutes before the service to make sure everyone understands cues and it'll all be good. (I warned her that while I'm not new to the congregation like she is, I am new to being worship chair and she should let me know if she sees any problems.)

The rabbis will actually be gone for two Shabbats (that one and the next). The plan had been for the worship committee to lead one and the cantorial intern to lead the other. She told me tonight that she's a little uneasy about that, being new to the congregation and never having led a full service. I told her we have people who can lead a service cold (including myself) if need be and she should think about it and let me know what parts she wants to offload. We can decide this at close to the last minute, after she's had a chance to settle in a bit more. (I've already lined up a torah reader and am working on someone to give the d'var torah, so she doesn't have to do those.)

The torah portion is coming along well. I have one verse left to work out; I got to it (after working on this for a while) tonight, saw that it started with a trope symbol I don't know how to sing, and decided that this was as good a time as any to pause. I'll come at that fresh on Shabbat, when I plan to spend a lot of time working on this. But hey, I read the previous two verses without having to consult the trope book, so I'm definitely internalizing the more common symbols. I can currently chant about half of the portion from the unpointed text, and all but one verse of the rest from the pointed text (sometimes with hesitation). It's often flowing well. I think I'm in good shape for a service that's two weeks away. My rabbi will want to hear me chant it when I see him next week, and my goal is to have it nailed by then.

This morning's mini-class (after minyan) was on tevila, aka immersion in a mikvah (ritual bath). ( Read more... )