a representation of a flower

I had a conversation this morning about feminism and Orthodox Judaism and me. Someone wanted to know how I stand, or maybe where I stand, and why things do or do not happen here that may or may not happen other places.

How’s that for a convoluted sentence? I think she wanted to know why we do not push the envelope more completely, since we seem like we should be a group that does so.

So I told her that my venue is learning. I have zero interest in performance. I think that ritual is fine in and of itself, but it’s not what interests me in any way to make me motivated to get more involved.  So I can’t really relate.  And singing does matter to me, but not singing to prove something.  What is the motive for performance, I wonder? Is it to be like the boys or is it really Avodat Hashem, service to G-d ?

Yes, G-d gets left out of the equation too often.

She responded in the kindest of ways whether the issue was a matter of giving the benefit of the doubt.

I said I doubt it, but no, I’m already past that.

And then for whatever reason, I thought of flowers.

And being open and vulnerable and almost past their prime, but actually being completely that.

At their prime.

And so I thought about how I much prefer flowers these days when they are completely open. Completely done.

Before they’re done.

You know, sort of right before you need a haircut is when your hair looks the best.

Oh I do remember why I thought of flowers.

I told her that we had a Shabbat afternoon service for women years ago and it was lovely. Beautiful singing, no egos. It dissipated because the main leader moved away and I think I got busy with babies.

And it was nice, but I didn’t feel I needed it so much to recreate it.

So flowers?

Yes.

I said that my favorite prayer time throughout the week is this Shabbat Minchah afternoon service.

The day is almost done. I’m filled with a sense of completion, but also a sense of the future, of the promise of more Shabbatot to come.

And it’s short and so sweet.

Like a flower at its prime.

borrowed again, for a reason!

Seriously, I’m buying.

Also, seriously, so applicable for Pesach! Let me know what you think!

l’éternel étranger

I feel I must say something about Toulouse.

I don’t know what to say.

וַיִּדֹּם, אַהֲרֹן

Aharon was silent after the death of his two sons.

So what can I say?

I’m reading Herman Wouk’s book from 2000 called The Will to Live on: The Resurgence of Jewish Heritage. I have absolutely no recollection of why I found out about that book; I think the last book I read by him was Marjorie Morningstar back in high school. I’ve changed a lot since then.

So has the world.

He has a part about the end of European Jewry, with the understanding that it was shifting all to Israel.

He wrote that 12 years ago, actually referencing a book that he had planned 20 years before that.

I think that we could say we’ve reached the end of the line now. Look at this excruciatingly accurate article on CNN (of all places): Europe’s blind spot on anti-Semitism

A just-released survey in 10 European countries found that 24% of the French population holds anti-Jewish sentiment, up from 20% in 2009. In Hungary, Spain and Poland, anti-Semitic sentiment is “off the charts,” according to Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League. Surveys show that 15% of Americans hold anti-Jewish views.

Powerlessness is all about what we Jews were in Europe; court Jews at best, favors gathered here and there.

No wonder we developed such long and complicated prayers.

We could only turn to G-d. We didn’t really know if His answers were what we needed, but that’s all we could hope for.

I keep thinking about the line יְהִי חַסְדְּךָ ה’ עָלֵינוּ. כַּאֲשֶׁר יִחַלְנוּ לָךְ: in the Psukei D’zimra section of morning prayers. I think it translates as

“May your mercy be upon us, [just} like we have hoped.’

I think this gets it.

It also is (surprise!) what Pesach is about–our total dependence on G-d.

If He hadn’t taken us out our Egypt…dayenu!

Not by any means…

I saw this piece of art and I thought it was cool enough to link.

This is Ward Shelley’s representation of the Diaspora.

I would say it should be called “Where are we going?”

i’m not too big to admit when i’m wrong

There are a million things wrong in the world. Well, I’m probably being too optimistic with that number. But let’s just use that for now, shall we? I’m disgusted by the creepiness of bad things. It’s the boiled frog effect, which, even if it is scientifically untrue, it is too true socially. We get used to things gradually and have a hard time admitting our discomfort. Especially with

Well…

Especially with everything.

Laundry list of things that the world needs to work on? Okay, sure. And I use that word laundry pointedly, since it is about airing our dirty laundry in public.

So in no particular order, here are the big things that bug me. Today.

1. the mess of how women are treated.
2. Everywhere.
3. Particularly in the magical WORLD OF MARKETING. Legos for girls, you say? Why why why?
4. Particularly in Israel in the religious world. (And I say that as an observant woman, wife of rabbi, etc.) If you want to warm up on this cold day, here’s something you can look at to make your blood boil. Yes, they apologized but horse out of the barn, etc.
5. Particularly in the media. I’m not an Obama fan by any means, but why is it that going after the First Lady is always so acceptable? Why is she /the role such a target?
6. But how certain cultures are still given a free ride. It is disheartening to say the least (and that’s what I’m going for) that we in the Western World as still so paternalistic. Here’s a very interesting blog by a woman who is trying to bring some light into the Muslim world. Good luck to her.

Well, look at that! They’re all about how women are being treated! Well fancy that!

I think that’s enough for now.

But what did I start out with, after all?

Oh, I wanted to tell you how I can recognize when I need to see things differently. For example, I had a pretty rotten experience last August at Office Max, to the point that I promised to myself that I would not go there anymore, even to the point that I threw away my rewards card. I had written about it here.  Well, I had to get something else copied last week, so I went to Staples, my new favorite place.

They could not open my document. I stood there for at least 15 minutes. They tried twice. I took my memory stick and left. Crawling back to CopyMax, I asked them to do the same thing. Sure enough, not only did it open on the first try, but there wasn’t even an issue! He printed out the first copy to make sure it met with my approval, then suggested that we lighten up the photos to make them look better, and a few minutes later, the 75 brochures were printed. Oh, and when I mentioned that I didn’t have my card with me, he looked up my phone number and found my account. And then, the piece de resistence in terms of customer relationship, he apologized that they no longer offer discounts for printing, but he would be happy to take some off, since we were indeed a non-profit organization.

Whoah!

Conclusions?

1. Office Max is not Copy Max.
2. Staples printing is not Staples.
3. I can be wrong.
4. And I can try things again and not be categorical about it.

Is this an allegory?

You tell me.

the gift of forgetting

subtitle–the curse of remembering

(Please note: Not to be confused with the curse of memory)

This is the bit from Delancey Place that got me started on this particular facet/rant:

In today’s excerpt – total recall, the ability of someone to remember every word they read or hear, has often been lauded as tantamount to a high level of intelligence. The opposite is more often the case. Those with total recall often have difficulty making decisions, and more readily miss understanding the overall point of a book or lecture – because they get enmeshed in an undistinguishable mass of irrelevant details. Forgetting, it turns out, has enormous value for concise understanding and for emotional health

…

“The act of forgetting crafts and hones data in the brain as if carving a statue from a block of marble. It enables us to make sense of the world by clearing a path to the thoughts that are truly valuable. It also aids emotional recovery. ‘You want to forget embarrassing things,’ says cognitive neuroscientist Zara Bergstrom of the University of Cambridge. ‘Or if you argue with your partner, you want to move on.’

This is returning back to the marriage theme, in case you needed some direction. I’m stating here for the record that the problem in marriage is not always a matter of forgiving and forgetting. Many of us have problems letting go of things. So we hold onto the grudges and the lists of all the injustices that have been done to us. We can’t just let go, that’s for sure. If there is nothing else taking the place of the hurts and the losses, then for sure we will hold onto that pain. But remembering everything? That’s just bad news.

So what should you do, if you only seem to be able to recall the hurt and the pain? You have to fill it up again with good.

And by good, I mean neutral. If you can’t even find the good, if you can’t go back to your beginning and remember what was so good, or that feeling has dissipated so much, then you have to make a new stand. Where you are now.

Ground zero.

And find something you can do together to build up something again.

I finished the book that I mentioned the other day here called  The secret lives of wives : women share what it really takes to stay married by Iris Krasnow. It is not an easy read, Carol. It’s not a manual. It’s a report on the state of marriages that last in America. I would say the most salient point, the take-away, is that women need independence, financial, emotional, and time. But here’s the bottom line, I think.

When I talk to psychologists and divorce lawyers, I ask them what the breaking points are that make it impossible to stay married. The majority of them agree that a long relationship requires these three elements: trust, respect, and intimacy, emotional and physical. (p. 209)

The case that she had just mentioned was one that lacked those elements. And yet, the woman held fast until the breaking point when she demanded that her husband change, but only because she realized that he had been as victimized by his lack of relationship as she was. And she gave him the opportunity to embrace change. And somehow, he did.

So memory gives you the link back to the beginning of the relationship, when hopefully it was open and loving. Remembering is the tool that keeps you bonded to the present. That’s why we have to be grateful to recall the memories, but lose the baggage of all the remembering.

If we can.

let’s start the new Gregorian year by borrowing, shall we?

Three resolutions for the new year–by Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks

An old Jewish story: Mendel meets David. He says, “Tell me, friend, how is life? I haven’t got much time, so tell me in one word.” David says, “In one word? Good.” Mendel says, “Give me a bit more detail. In two words, how is life?” David replies: “In two words? Not good.”That was 2011. It may be true for 2012. As a nation, we’re wealthier and healthier, but the economic outlook is uncertain and much of the world is troubled, if not in turmoil. What would be some Jewish advice for the coming year? First, thank God. Jews call this Barukh Hashem, “Blessed be the Lord.” In the shtetls, where Jews were poor and persecuted but deeply religious, if you asked: “How is business? the answer would come back: Barukh Hashem. How is the family? Barukh Hashem. Your health? Barukh Hashem. You might be ill, your children rebellious, your business terrible, but you thanked God. Jews knew how to rejoice in the midst of hardship. They laughed, they celebrated, they had the gift of simchah, the Jewish word for joy. They were not fools. They knew their fate was wretched. But they felt close to God. After all, he prayed in the same synagogue that they did. Second, love. Love your spouse and you will have a happy marriage. Love your children and you will have a happy family. Love your work and you will have a happy career. Love life and you will be blessed. “If only” is the opposite of love. If only my partner were more attractive, my children more appreciative, my colleagues more friendly, if only I earned more, achieved more. “If only” is toxic to happiness. It focuses on what we don’t have instead of what we do. The consumer culture invites us to an existence of “if only”. It’s the worst investment in life. True faith is all about love. Love God with all your heart, your soul, your might. Love your neighbour as yourself. Love the stranger because to others you are a stranger. You don’t have to be religious to love, but you have to love to be religious. Love is the space we make for that which is not me. By opening ourselves to something bigger than ourselves, we grow. Third, pray. Prayer is our dialogue with the infinite Other. It’s also hard, which is why we have prayer books. The finest collection of prayers is the book of Psalms. It embraces the spectrum of feeling from despair to jubilation. Prayer is to the soul what exercise is to the body, and without it we become emotionally flabby. Some people don’t pray because they try it and it does not work. They forget that prayer is done best in the company of others, in a holy place, in song, the language of the soul as it reaches out toward the unsayable. The most life-transforming prayers are choral not solo. Iris Murdoch has a lovely analogy for what prayer can achieve. She describes looking out of a window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious of her surroundings, brooding on some resentment, feeling sorry for herself. Then, suddenly, she sees a hovering kestrel. “In a moment,” she says, “everything is altered. The brooding self . . . has disappeared. There is nothing now but kestrel. And when I return to thinking of the other matter it seems less important.” She calls this “unselfing”, and that is what prayer achieves at its best. It opens our eyes to the wonder of the world. Three suggestions: more next month. But the principle is simple. When business is bad, invest in the spirit. If the economy stops growing, your happiness can still increase.

really? this is your list?

Wordsmith.org

The Magic of Words

Dec 16, 2011

This week’s theme
Words borrowed from Yiddish

This week’s words
nosh
naches
schmutz
kosher
schlockmeister

A.Word.A.Day

with Anu Garg

schlockmeister

PRONUNCIATION:

(SHLOK-my-stuhr)

MEANING:

noun: One who deals in inferior goods.

ETYMOLOGY:

From Yiddish shlak (evil, nuisance) + German Meister (master). Earliest documented use: 1965.

USAGE:

“Schlockmeister Ed Wood was supposedly the world’s worst director.”
Philippa Hawker and Jake Wilson; Top 10 Films; The Age (Melbourne, Australia); Jul 17, 2010.

“You’re a Harvard historian, for god’s sake, not a pop schlockmeister looking for a quick buck.”
Dan Brown; The Da Vinci Code; Doubleday; 2003.

Your comments Thank you for your comments. Your following message has been sent: From: mysending Subject: this week’s words Really? I thought for sure you’d mention the word “shvitz”. That to me is a marker of how Yiddish has entered the American language. But I guess schlockmeister is more prevalent, or interesting, or however you figure these things out!

True story:

Years ago, I met someone who presented herself as Jewish, but I just couldn’t figure out where she belonged in the range of Jewish experiences. It was a very hot summer day and we were outside waiting for a camp bus to come bringing our big girls. I said, “Whew! I’m really shvitzing!”, or something similar, but for sure using the word shvitzing.

She said “What?”

Oh then I knew. She was definitely not an MOT* from birth.

Or from New York.

Or Hollywood!

*Member of the Tribe. Just sayin’.

True Grit

I love this article in the NY Times magazine. I’ll entice you to read the whole thing, if you haven’t already, by this snippet:

Overindulging kids, with the intention of giving them everything and being loving, but at the expense of their character — that’s huge in our population. I think that’s one of the biggest problems we have at Riverdale.”

This is a problem, of course, for all parents, not just affluent ones. It is a central paradox of contemporary parenting, in fact: we have an acute, almost biological impulse to provide for our children, to give them everything they want and need, to protect them from dangers and discomforts both large and small. And yet we all know — on some level, at least — that what kids need more than anything is a little hardship: some challenge, some deprivation that they can overcome, even if just to prove to themselves that they can. As a parent, you struggle with these thorny questions every day, and if you make the right call even half the time, you’re lucky. But it’s one thing to acknowledge this dilemma in the privacy of your own home; it’s quite another to have it addressed in public, at a school where you send your kids at great expense.

This is one of the main reasons I left teaching; I couldn’t stand the overindulgence of parents, which really, when it comes down to it, means not caring about your kids. Hard work is meaningful. Things that come too easily are too easily left behind.

Including love.

Word of the Day Sunday, September 18, 2011

pleonasm

\PLEE-uh-naz-uhm\ , noun;
1.
The use of more words than are necessary to express an idea; as, “I saw it with my own eyes.”
2.
An instance or example of pleonasm.
3.
A superfluous word or expression.

’nuff said.

the advantage of Godwin’s Law

You don’t know what that is? Or you wouldn’t know the disadvantage of it? Neither did I, until yesterday. I saw it used in a comment on a blog. Of course, I can’t find the comment now, but it led me to explore the idea a little.

Godwin’s Law

385 up, 16 down

A term that originated on Usenet, Godwin’s Law states that as an online argument grows longer and more heated, it becomes increasingly likely that somebody will bring up Adolf Hitler or the Nazis. When such an event occurs, the person guilty of invoking Godwin’s Law has effectively forfieted the argument. “Dude, shut up. Nobody cares what you think.”"Oh, so now you’re trying to censor me? Go to hell, you damn Nazi!”

Hmmm, friendly. And obviously, very much in the manner of Emily Post etiquette, as well.

Of course, what’s more interesting, perhaps, is that I had really no idea of what usenet is, or apparently was, either. I didn’t need to know, but now something left from that experiment (of 30 years!) is being used all the time to shut people up. If you want to get caught up to speed about what that is/was, you can look at the article. I, however, want to keep moving forward.

How do we appropriately stop conversation? How do we not allow the Holocaust to be used casually, to be misrepresented and trivialized? How do we maintain and pursue an authentic conversation? How do we make sure that Israel is not marginalized anymore than it already has been, by people who bleed for anyone else besides the closest to them?

I thought I’d quote from Godwin himself here, in an article he wrote in Wired to explain the phenomenon.

Meme, Counter-meme 

By Mike Godwin  It was back in 1990 that I set out on a project in memetic engineering. The Nazi-comparison meme, I’d decided, had gotten out of hand – in countless Usenet newsgroups, in many conferences on the Well, and on every BBS that I frequented, the labeling of posters or their ideas as “similar to the Nazis” or “Hitler-like” was a recurrent and often predictable event. It was the kind of thing that made you wonder how debates had ever occurred without having that handy rhetorical hammer. Not everyone saw the comparison to Nazis as a “meme” – most people on the Net, as elsewhere, had never heard of “memes” or “memetics.” But now that we’re living in an increasingly information-aware culture, it’s time for that to change. And it’s time for net.dwellers to make a conscious effort to control the kinds of memes they create or circulate. A “meme,” of course, is an idea that functions in a mind the same way a gene or virus functions in the body. And an infectious idea (call it a “viral meme”) may leap from mind to mind, much as viruses leap from body to body.When a meme catches on, it may crystallize whole schools of thought. 

It continues with some more interesting stuff, but I also found another article he wrote in Jewcy, this time connecting to the Jewish angle more specifically.

I Seem To Be A Verb: 18 Years of Godwin’s Law

By Mike Godwin / April 30, 2008

The anniversary of Hitler’s death—just ten days after the anniversary of his birthday (which reminds me that he celebrated his final birthday in a bunker in Berlin)—is as good an occasion as any other for me to reflect once more about Godwin’s Law. This one-off creation of mine, like the Energizer Bunny, keeps on going and going. If Godwin’s Law had been a child, this year it would be old enough to vote. I can’t say I anticipated that Godwin’s Law, which states that, “As an online discussion continues, the probability of a reference or comparison to Hitler or to Nazis approaches 1,” would last this long or that it would propagate into popular culture to the extent that it has. But I’m mostly gratified that it has done so. Although deliberately framed as if it were a law of nature or of mathematics, its purpose has always been rhetorical and pedagogical: I wanted folks who glibly compared someone else to Hitler or to Nazis to think a bit harder about the Holocaust. The genesis of the idea came from my reading Primo Levi’s books in the 1980s. I had grown up with a pop-culture knowledge of World War II, and I had even seen many of the photos of the death camps, with their emaciated bodies stacked like cordwood and the haunted, piercing eyes of the skeletal inmates who survived. But Levi’s writings brought the experience home to me—they helped me understand better what the experience must have been like for prisoners. In their accounts of the behavior of those who operated the camps and conducted the mass murders, I had a glimmer of insight into the psyches of the Nazis and their henchmen as well. Their consistent pattern of humiliating and dehumanizing Jews and other perceived enemies of the Nazi state—both before sending them to the camps and after they arrived—told me that, on some level, they recognized that what they were doing was a crime against humanity. Hence their psychological need to make their victims seem less human before exterminating them. It was difficult, after attempting a greater psychological understanding of why the Holocaust happened and how it was conducted, to tolerate the glib comparisons I encountered on the Internet (Usenet in those days). My sense of moral outrage at this phenomenon found an outlet after I read an article in in the Whole Earth Review about memes—viral ideas—that inspired me to create a kind of counter-measure. And so I created Godwin’s Law and began to repeat it in online forums whenever I encountered a silly comparison of someone or something to Hitler or to the Nazis. As the handyWikipedia entry on Godwin’s Law (crafted by someone else long before I ever came to work for the Wikimedia Foundation) points out, this was a deliberate experiment in memetics. In other words, I was trying to jumpstart Godwin’s Law into becoming a self-propagating idea. By all accounts, I succeeded. The Law turned out to be more successful at propagating itself than I could ever have predicted. Far more people have heard about “Godwin’s Law” than have heard about me, although Wikipedia handily links us together nowadays (another link that predates my arrival at Wikipedia as a hobbyist editor and later as an employee). That’s fine by me. Still, I sometimes have some ambivalence about the Law, which is far beyond my control these days. Like most parents, I’m frequently startled by the unexpected turn my 18-year-old offspring takes. (I’m happy to say that my 15-year-old offspring—my daughter, Ariel Godwin—surprises me at least as often, although invariably in happier ways.) When I saw the photographs from Abu Ghraib, for example, I understood instantly the connection between the humiliations inflicted there and the ones the Nazis imposed upon death camp inmates—but I am the one person in the world least able to draw attention to that valid comparison. Overall, though, I’m content that the Law has as much popcult traction as it does. My feeling is that “Never Again” loses its meaning if we don’t regularly remind ourselves of the terrible inflection point marked in human culture by the Holocaust. Sure, there has been genocide before that point and genocide after it, but to see an advanced, highly civilized nation warp itself into something capable of creating such a horror—well, I think Nazi Germany does count as a first in that regard. And to a great extent, our challenge as human beings who live in the period after that inflection point is that we no longer can be passive about history—we have a moral obligation to do what we can to prevent such events from ever happening again. Key to that obligation is remembering, which is what Godwin’s Law is all about.

Well-said, Mr. Godwin.

And G-d bless.

So I had seen this before, but wasn’t in the know.

Now I get it.