The kedushah of femininity

A Talmud Comic from the inimitable Yonah Lavery.

Berachot 10a (from TalmudComics)

 

At long last, I encounter Encounter.

It has been a little over nine months since I first began my journey with the Encounter program in Jerusalem. Nine months that I have not been sure how to begin to write. Nine months – the figure seems apt. As if this piece of writing were subject to some sort of gestation period. As if it had to grow inside of me until it could sustain itself in the world. As if it lived off of the nourishment I could provide it, growing, developing. And now, nine months later, here I am. Commuting between Toronto and Hamilton. Miles from Israel. Miles from Palestine. Miles from the conflict.

The gestation metaphor is nice. I can say that I went into “labour,” so to speak, as I read about and watched news coverage of what is going on in Israel now – in Israel, and in Gaza. In both – innocent victims of a war they did not start, a war whose end cannot come too quickly. In both – casualties; in both – propaganda. I read, I watch, I reflect.

When Israel first invaded Gaza, my mother called her friend Nadia in East Jerusalem – “How are you?” she asked. “How are things?” Nadia answered her, “We’re in Jerusalem. Don’t be silly. We’re fine here.” Two days later, an email. “Things are really bad. It’s scary. I worry that there will be another intifada. I worry about my sons – they are learning to hate Israel – to hate Jews. I worry about my family. I worry it is going to get worse. All I want is peace, and for my sons to be safe.”

I am taken back to the weeks when my mother visited me in Jerusalem. We spent afternoons with Nadia and her family – at her mother’s house in Beit Hanina, at her uncle’s house on the Mount of Olives, exploring the Old City, drinking coffee at Aroma on Har Hatzofim. We sat there together, in those moments – two Canadian Jews and a Muslim Palestinian family. I bonded with Nadia’s niece, Juman, 15, with English better than my own. Top of her class. Confiding in me about boy problems. So much like me. Yet.

When Israel first went into Gaza last spring, before the ceasefire, Juman’s school held a fundraiser – a bake sale to benefit children in Gaza. She said to me, “It is so sad what is happening there, to those innocent children.” I agreed. I could say nothing else.

And now, here I am. Nine months since I began my journey with Encounter. I am preoccupied with Gaza, with Israel, with the people being hurt on both sides. But I went on Encounter to learn about Jerusalem, to hear the stories of Palestinians living in Israel. That is not Gaza. Yet.

Since I have been home, I have alternately absorbed myself in and distanced myself from Jewish activities. I have spoken my mind, regardless of the consequences. I have stood up for Israel. I have stood up for Palestine. I have made new friends and I have alienated old ones. I have learned to speak in “I” – I share what I heard, what I saw, what I learned. And I have still not been able to write about it. Until now. Until it was fresh in my mind again. Until Gaza brought it back.

An image remains with me – standing near the security barrier that cut an Arab village in two, an old woman walked by our group, holding a grocery bag. I was standing a little distance away from the group, absorbing my surroundings rather than the facts and figures our guide was sharing. I looked at the woman, and she looked at me. “Marhaba,” I said, putting the little Arabic I know to use. “Marhaba,” she answered, smiling. In that moment, recognition. A shared moment between a young, Jewish student, and an old, Muslim villager. A true “encounter.” Fleeting, yet everlasting in my mind. I sometimes wonder what she thought of the whole scene – a group of Jews staring at the barrier their “homeland” had built to protect them, listening to a Palestinian man holding a clipboard, explaining the “situation” in a language she likely did not understand.

Later that day, at dinner, I sat with one other member of my group, and two women who were part of the Palestinian group who shared their stories with us. As we ate, the conversation inevitably turned to politics. One of the women was vehemently against a two-state solution – she would be fine with the disappearance of Israel, the Jewish state, and hoped that one day, a one-state solution would be realized. I listened. I told her I disagreed. I told her that I’d love to see a Palestinian state alongside a Jewish state. I told her that I was for peace, but that I didn’t think a one-state solution would provide it. She disagreed. Over a plate of hummus, we agreed to disagree.

I have little to say about the facts on the ground. There are numbers – of citizenship-less Palestinians. Of checkpoints. Of settlements. Of towns cut in two by the security barrier. Of roads for Israelis only. Of roads for Palestinians only. Of abandoned shops. Of competing national narratives. Of wars. Of victims. Of heroes. Of survivors. There are contexts, there are decontextualizations. There are demolished houses. There are examples of reconciliation. There are terrorist attacks. There are services denied. There are soldiers. There are identity cards. There is Hamas. There is Yisrael Beiteinu. All of this is obvious. But these figures, for me, have little to do with Encounter. Of course, without them, there is no Encounter. Yet.

These figures – these competing sufferings, these competing desires – do not begin to tell me the story I heard from an Israeli woman my own age, who, as a teenager, was in the Dizengoff Centre in Tel Aviv when a suicide bomber attacked. She still has the shrapnel scars on her back. These numbers do not begin to tell me about the Palestinian woman whose sister died because the ambulance that was called for her had to wait for an army escort, and got to her house too late. These facts do not begin to tell me about the real pain on both sides, of two groups who are sick of fighting and just want to live side by side in peace, whether they agree on what that peace looks like or not.

We visited the open house run by Ibrahim Abu El Hawa on the Mount of Olives. As we drank tea, he cried – he dreamed of a better life for his children, but feared this meant that they would leave Jerusalem, only to lose their ability to come back home. Some had already gone this route, and he worried about his youngest. I thought about all the families separated. Ibrahim from his children in America, Nadia’s uncle’s wife from her parents and her siblings in Nablus. Nadia referred to as her “sister,” and explained to us that not only was this because she truly felt like the two were sisters, but because she had been cut off from her family, and needed that kinship. I thought about a Palestinian friend, who, because of her Israeli citizenship, needed to know the back roads she could travel to avoid checkpoints so that she could visit her family in the Palestinian Territories. I thought about my Jewish Israeli friends who wanted to visit the Taybeh brewery, or smoke nargileh in Ramallah. I thought about the Christians living in Israel who were unable to make their Christmas Eve pilgrimage to Bethlehem because they could not cross the checkpoint.

So, it has been nine months since I participated in Encounter, and I still think about these things that I heard, that I saw, that I experienced. The more I think about it, the more I realize: yes, it took me nine months to write about Encounter, but this is because to write about Encounter is not to write just about Encounter. It is to write about my year living in the midst of one of the world’s most contentious regions. It is to filter through twelve months of life in Jerusalem, to relive the anxiety I felt the first time I went through a checkpoint. To revisit the fear I was overcome with every time there was a terrorist attack. To think about my friends on both sides of this messy conflict, who are living in the midst of political and military turmoil and uncertainty. To dream of peace. To wake up to the reality that there is none. To continue to believe in human rights and equality. To wish it necessarily coexisted with national security. Encounter encouraged me to think long and hard about all of this. To face it. To talk about it. To resist silencing it.

Thanks to Encounter, I say I.

I have heard your stories. I have told you mine. I have listened to your pain. I have shared with you mine.

I have heard your hopes. I have told you mine.

I have encountered you. I have let you encounter me.

And after it all, as difficult as it is, I believe that there will be peace.

 

Prospective Students’ Institute

I am an unreliable blogger. This is probably clear to all those following this. Anyhow, I have something to report: I have been accepted to the Prospective Students’ Institute of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. I am so excited!

To honour this, I am going to post my application essay, because it tracks a lot of my thinking about religion and my developing desire to go into a profession of religious leadership. I’m cutting out the irrelevant bits, but I’m posting more or less all of it. So, without further ado, here it is:

Before I introduce myself, I would like to thank you for taking the time to review my application for the Prospective Students’ Institute. I first heard about this program from Rabbi Amy Klein, with whom I had the opportunity to talk about Reconstructionism and the rabbinate before I left Israel, where I was living last year. This conversation was engaging and inspiring, and encouraged me to consider the rabbinate seriously and apply for this program to explore whether this career path truly is the right fit for me.

It is only recently that I began to think of the rabbinate as a potential path for myself. Until about a year ago, I was hoping to obtain my PhD in philosophy or a related discipline, intent on securing an academic teaching position at a university. However, soon after I began a year abroad at the Rothberg International School in Jerusalem, Israel, I realized that I had developed a sort of tunnel vision from being immersed in academic study for so long. I was reminded of the various careers I had considered pursuing before I decided to become an academic, and I remembered the days where I felt inclined to ‘do something’ with what I had learned. I remembered considering law school with dreams of becoming an international human rights lawyer, and thought about other similar things I had considered pursuing. I surveyed my university career and discovered that somewhere, around the time that I discovered academic philosophy, I forgot about my drive to be socially engaged – in short, I had moved away from wanting to effect change and begun to feel comfortable remaining strictly in the academic realm.

When I began classes at the RIS, I was struck by my peers, many of whom were, like me, visiting graduate students, but, unlike me, were not there to advance a career path in academia. Rather, many of my classmates were rabbis and lay leaders in training. The particular way that they approached the texts that we were studying gave me a whole new perspective. The texts were no longer only to be understood and interpreted – they were to be applied. The questions they asked were not only about what a text had to say, but rather were questions concerned with how these texts were formative of Jewish identities, and how they could be used to shape communities in the future. Concurrently, I was becoming interested and involved in programs addressing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I explored groups such as Peace Now, B’Tselem and Shovrim Sh’tika/Breaking the Silence, but ultimately felt myself most able to engage and learn about this difficult issue through the Encounter program. The unique way in which the program combined Jewish learning and social awareness really appealed to me. Ilana Sumka, the current Middle East Director of the program, repeatedly reminded me and the other participants in the program that Encounter was started by two rabbinical students – Miriam Margles, an RRC alum, and Melissa Weintraub, a JTS alum – who, on their Israel year, felt that they needed to do something about the conflict, and founded Encounter. This engagement with social justice issues in a Jewish context really spoke to me, and I found myself wanting to take what I had learned home and share it with my community. Furthermore, I was inspired by the tremendous achievement of Rabbis Margles and Weintraub, who were able to take their commitment to and knowledge of their Judaism and formulate it in such a way that encouraged others to come to learn about the conflict through the lens of their Judaism and their own particular attachment to their religion, tradition and culture. Parenthetically, I have recently become acquainted through my work as the Programming Co-coordinator for the Limmud Toronto festival with Rabbi Margles’s mother, Ruth Margles, a member of the Limmud Toronto Steering Committee, who has been very informative about her daughter’s experiences as a rabbinical student and moving into congregational work, and has been very encouraging about my desire to go into the rabbinate.

My decision to apply to rabbinical school is not one that has been particularly straightforward. Growing up a child of racially and religiously mixed parentage – my mother is of Eastern-European Jewish, and my father, of Afro-Caribbean Catholic descent – I have often been engaged, both actively and passively, in a quest to define and affirm my own identity. I grew up in close proximity to my mother’s family, who, due to various family and socioeconomic reasons, were marginal in the Jewish community. However, their Jewish identity was always front and center in my life, and it was this religious and cultural identity to which I have always been drawn. Despite this, my mixed race identity and my father’s upbringing in a devoutly Catholic family were always in the background. I was encouraged to cultivate a racial identity that drew from both my Jewish and my Afro-Caribbean parents. Religiously, while my parents agreed that my brother and I would be raised Jewish, I still learned about my father’s upbringing in the Catholic Church – his time as an altar boy, and his high school years spent in seminary prep school. This unique blend of my Jewish upbringing and my acute awareness of other religious realities gave me a particular perspective with I approach my Judaism to this day.

Judaism for me has become not only my religion – it extends far beyond Friday night dinners, Saturday morning synagogue services, and holidays in synagogue and with my family. It is my culture and my community. It is also what I study. I am currently pursuing my Master of Arts degree in Religious Studies, working with the Canada Research Chair in Modern Jewish Thought, Dr. Dana Hollander. My thesis toward this degree will be on the French-Jewish philosopher Jacques Derrida’s ideas of messianism and hospitality, and how these themes can be applied to an understanding of the Pesach Haggadah and related liturgy. Through thinking about this project, I have come to realize that my concern with this area has a lot to do with my desire to make a place for my own form of interpretation within the Jewish tradition. It also relates strongly to my current thinking about entering rabbinical school, which stems from my commitment to interpreting Jewish sources and educating people about them. In particular, I am drawn to the possibility of being a source of knowledge of Jewish sources, and being called upon to interpret these texts and traditions as they pertain to ethics, community-building, social responsibility, social justice, and so on. This goal comes through in my thesis project, which aims to make explicit the ethical nature of such a key Jewish tradition – the celebration of the Pesach feast.

While my studies to date have not been informed by Reconstructionism, I am drawn to this tradition in my own Jewish practice and identity. My knowledge of and experience with Reconstructionism to date is a result of a progression in my own Jewish identity that began in 2004 when I participated in a Taglit-Birthright Israel trip. At the time, a large-scale event was held for all participants at Binyanei Ha’uma in Jerusalem featuring a performance, some speeches, and a large bazaar with both merchandise for sale and information booths about Jewish programs in North America and in Israel. At this event, I visited the RRC booth, where I met Rabbi Klein, who warmly welcomed me and explained Reconstructionism to me. She shared RRC course calendars, publication catalogues, and pamphlets about what Reconstructionism is, all of which I have on my bookshelf to this day. I never forgot about this conversation, but I was not living in a city with a Reconstructionist congregation, so my thinking about this particular approach to Judaism was put on hold.

When I returned to Israel in 2007, I met Isabel de Koninck, a RRC student, with whom I had class on the Rambam. I quickly became interested in the way she approached the texts and the seemingly encyclopedic knowledge she possessed. Although our conversations were mostly during class breaks, I got information from her about Reconstructionism and learned that RRC is a school that encourages critical thinking about the tradition and developing a relationship with Judaism that emphasizes community and social responsibility. Around this time, I started reading all of the available information on the websites for RRC and other Reconstructionist websites. I also borrowed some Mordecai Kaplan books from the library and began reading about the philosophical foundations for Reconstructionism. I was struck by what seemed to be a very dynamic and engaged way in which Reconstructionists pursue their Jewishness. Later on, Isabel put me in touch with Rabbi Klein, with whom, as I have already mentioned, I had a very informative and encouraging conversation about Reconstructionism and the rabbinate.

Since returning to Toronto, I have begun to attend services at Darchei Noam, Toronto’s Reconstructionist congregation. My first Saturday morning there is still with me – two congregants gave Divrei Torah, and after, they opened the floor for questions, comments, and personal reflections. This attitude of openness and engagement within the community resonated with my own values. It was then that I knew that there was a reason I kept being drawn to Reconstructionism – the high level of congregational participation was exactly what I had found missing in other services I had attended. It was the Judaism that I had wanted to find.

Finding a home within the Reconstructionist community has driven me to explore RRC as my first and only choice for rabbinical school. Because of this, I am interested in attending the Prospective Students’ Institute to experience a taste of rabbinical school, and explore how it differs from the academic study of religion. Although I have said that I am eager to move away from academia, I am also curious to learn what options RRC offers to combine rabbinical training with academic pursuits. In particular, I understand from both the RRC website and from my conversation with Rabbi Klein that RRC has agreements in place for coursework at Temple University and Graetz College, and I am interested to fully understand how this works. I am very interested in continuing to engage in scholarly discussions about Jewish issues, and thus am curious to know whether RRC is the kind of place that can bolster this sort of endeavour.

 

To internalize is a challenge

It has been a while since I last posted. This isn’t because the “spirit” wheels in my head haven’t been turning. On the contrary. It’s just because mundane life details have been in my way lately. They still are, so this is going to be a short one.

It is written in the course catalogue for the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College that “rabbinical students need to cultivate and internalize a rabbinic identity.”

This will be my project over the next week. Start internalizing, see how it fits. You see, I’m applying for the Prospective Students’ Institute at RRC, and they ask for a 2- to 4-page essay exploring my interest in and potential contribution to the rabbinate. These things are not something I’ve fully vocalized as of yet. This essay is going to be supremely challenging.

I’ll be updating more regularly for a while, including bits of my application essay. Any and all comments will be appreciated.

 

To be supported is not something I expect

The truth about this “spiritual journey” that I’m on is that it is extremely serious, and of highest importance to me. The reason for this: I’m thinking about becoming a rabbi. There are many ways to explain this possibility for me, and I will at some point dedicate a post to them.

For now, though, I just wanted to say that it’s extremely hard for me still to say that I’m considering rabbinical school to many of the people in my life. Some of them I already know won’t be supportive. Some of them don’t know what to think. Some people respond with “Oh, interesting” which I find the most vague and coded judging statement of them all… All in all, my social circle at large looks down on religion and spirituality and probably will never understand this part of me, and will probably always reserve some sort of judgement for what they think is my lack thereof.

But ultimately, what I need to learn — not learn, teach myself — is that it’s not about them. They can question and judge all they want. It’s about me, what I need, and what I want out of my life. I need to become brave enough to assert that this is ME. That this is what I want, and what I think would be good for me. That this is a huge part of who I am and is shaping my thought all the time. And I need to be able to do this without feeling the need to persuade them that it’s not what they think it is… That the sort of rabbi I want to be is not a mere dictator of religion, but something else. Because ultimately, what they think doesn’t matter. I should qualify that — there will be those who disagree but are supportive and wanting to have meaningful discussions on my choice, what it means to me, and ultimately what I see Judaism as. With them, I can talk about it, explain, persuade, and so on.

But to those who won’t even muster up support for me, I need to assert myself and move beyond their judgement. Because ultimately, what inspires me is not them, it’s myself, my faith, my ethics. And anyone worth explaining that to will at least try to understand.

 

Jewish atheism in the press

An interesting article from the Jerusalem Post today:

You don’t have to believe in God to be Jewish

 

Homeward-bound

There are only three weeks left of my life here in Israel. I’m excited to come home, but I’m really nervous about what it will mean for me in terms of the journey I’ve begun here. My friends here, by and large, have some sort of a relationship to Judaism, and I largely credit them for setting me out on this path. Before coming here, I mostly encountered one kind of Jewish spirituality, which was one that I did not relate to. Here, I’ve had the opportunity to meet, talk to, pray with, celebrate with, etc., Jews with interesting and meaningful personal relationships with G-d. Seeing that there is more than one way to relate to the Holy was huge for me in recognizing my own relationship to G-d.

I’m nervous, though, that once I come home, the dialogue I’ve been living here will come to a screeching halt. As silly as it sounds, some of my concerns about this are purely financial. To enrol in the classes that encourage the kind of dialogue I’m looking for takes money. To attend the events where I might meet people in the same spiritual place as me costs money. To join a community (or two) costs money. Yes, most have geared-to-income scales, but when the concern is already that I’ll be on a bare minimum budget, sliding scale doesn’t do much to comfort me. All the same, I’ll look into it. Which brings me to another worry: I need a job. But I need Friday nights off of work. I know that they can’t technically compel me to work on a Friday, but try explaining that to a prospective boss… Saturday afternoon is also out of the question. I guess I could promise to work on Saturday nights…

All I can hope for is that my friends who take an interest in the same sort of things I do will push me to keep asking these questions, and maybe even drag me to services (theirs and my own) from time to time. It would mean so much to me for the friends with whom I have opened this dialogue with to come and experience my tradition, as well as for me to experience theirs. Consider this an open invitation to spend the Sabbath with me anytime.

 

Airports

Again, something old. I write in my journal and then I forget to blog. Well, here it is anyway.

2 June 2008

Sitting at the airport in Rome, reading about the country I left to be here. About Eretz Israel:

“You were doing a PhD in philosophy, last I heard.”

“I came here and fell in love with God. He beats the hell out of nothingness.”

from:

“Ambivalence” (Jonathan Garfinkel)

I miss Jerusalem already.

 

Do I already have a relationship to G-d?

One thing I have been thinking about lately is my relationship to G-d, if I can be said to have one. This is something that has been troubling me a lot, actually. I find that I am still reluctant to admit to believing in G-d. Yet at the same time, I acknowledge that Judaism inspires me to act in certain ways, and aspire to certain character traits. The words kavod (honour, respect, dignity) and emet (truth) have been circulating my mind as the things that Judaism stirs me to aspire to. But I am still working to figure out exactly what both of those words mean to me. Which means, I think, that I need to seriously consider what G-d means to me. Because I’m unsure that Judaism can drive me toward morals unless I have some relationship with G-d, whatever I see G-d as.

I don’t know why I’m so reluctant to admit to a belief in G-d. Maybe it’s the baggage that belief comes with. I’m really not comfortable with big-guy-in-the-sky theology. I’m not comfortable with redemption and judgment, and I’m really not comfortable with chosenness (of these, though, I’d say my relationship with the idea of redemption is the most complicated, and I will write about it in a post soon). But I feel more and more like maybe I am a believer. A reluctant believer, but a believer. And that maybe I’ve always been. I need help figure out how to assimilate this, and embrace this, and, without qualifying it in at least ten different ways, to say out loud, “I believe in G-d.” Which means I need to know what this belief means to me, right now. And that is so hard.

 

Words of Welcome

I wrote this in my journal a few weeks ago, but I think it probably serves as a good introduction to why I’ve started this new blog.

I used to think that I was not a spiritual person. Spirituality to me was something wishy-washy, airy-fairy and all the rest of it. But living here in Israel subconsciously made me question my own relationship to faith, to spirituality – to Judaism. I didn’t realize that this is what has been going on during my time here until just recently. Until now, celebrating the holidays and Shabbat was simply something I did because I “enjoyed” it. Keeping kosher l’Pesach was something I never questioned – it was the one time in a year that I followed Jewish law. But something shifted in me over the nine months I’ve been here. It’s almost as if I’ve come to recognize myself in something that I never identified with. I realized: my “traditional” side
is the way I express my “spiritual” side. Why else do I insist on dressing up to visit “holy” sites? Why else do I pray even though I claim not to be a believer? These parts of who I am make no sense unless I am in some way in touch with the Holy, whatever it may be. I know I’m still foundering a bit with this new realization, and I don’t really know where it will take me in my life. I don’t feel like I’ve begun a process of becoming religious, but rather that I’ve begun to see myself as connected to something I’d never recognized my connection to before. I’m welcoming the “spiritual growth” wholeheartedly.

And with that, I begin this new blog, and invite my readers to join me in my process of exploration, and ask that they will be nothing but supportive and encouraging of me as I struggle through this.