Adventures in Judaism

It's the secular New Year, and the Internet is full of Top 10 lists, many of questionable value to anybody but who wrote them, but they abound all the same. So, in that spirit, I offer my list of the top 10 ways in which Judaism has pleasantly surprised me so far this year.  In no particular order, they are... 1. A one-point statement of belief "Hear, O Israel, Adonai our god, Adonai is one". This is all the theology you are asked to agree to during a Jewish prayer service – and to be honest, there are plenty of agnostic Jews who don't firmly believe that much. But no holy trinity, no virgin birth, none of the many other "I believes" that I couldn't bring myself to believe growing up. One God, that's it. Love it! 2. It's not all about one guy Growing up I remember getting fed up with the fact that the answer to every question in Sunday School was "Jesus." Our liturgical calendar traced the life of that same guy. Every week we heard a ...

This past week, everyone and their dog (including quite a few Jewish dogs -- see my companion post on the winter holidays) celebrated Christmas. But December 22nd-23rd had an additional meaning for me and my family: it was the one-year anniversary of my father's death, known in Judaism by the Yiddish word יאָרצײַט ‎ = y'artzayt , usually anglicized as "yahrzeit." Now, for those readers of this blog who are not yet Jewish, you have probably been trained as I have by our Western Civilization to think of memories of death as something to be avoided at all cost - or, when unavoidable, to be gotten through with as quickly as possible and perhaps even apologized for. That has always been my family's way. When my father died last year two days before Christmas, we did what I have always taken to be the standard Western/Christian mourning rite: the women in my family pushed back their tears until those few moments when they could not be contained, the men and boys st...

I lost one of my jobs yesterday. It wasn't a "job job," or even a "payed gig," more a part of the service aspect of being a college faculty member, so I'm not worried about my bottom line or anything. Nor do I fear boredom: the College will find plenty more things for me to do, eventually. But whenever someone takes away something you have invested yourself into in the name of thinking someone else will do it better, and especially whenever that something is a group of people you have enjoyed being a part of and care deeply about nurturing – well, despite my best effort it tends to hurt a bit.  Yesterday, however, the meeting in which this particular bomb was dropped came right after reading a fantastic article on the Jewish-motherhood blog site Kveller :   http://www.kveller.com/mommy-sometimes-i-wish-we-were-christian/ I'll let you read the article yourself, but one of the gists is that throughout our history – a history that has given Jews a spectacul...

With Chanukkah starting tomorrow night, I've found myself reading a number of articles asking – and purporting to answer – the incredibly important question of whether or not the eight-day Festival of Lights counts as "the Jewish Christmas." Now, anybody who is at all familiar with the Jewish and Christian holiday cycles should be aware that the only actual similarity between Chanukkah and Christmas is that they both begin on the evening before the 25th day of the first winter month. Chanukkah is a celebration of what may be the first recorded example of a people winning its right to religious freedom and self-determination. Christmas is the first in a trilogy of Christian foundation-myth holidays that proceed from the incarnation of their God (Christmas) to His death-and-resurrection (Holy Week) to the founding of their Church (Pentecost). Now, Jews have our foundation-myth cycle as well – God saving us from Egypt (Pesach), feeding and protecting us in the wilderness (Su...

...but "the big one" (and you know which one I'm talking about) is yet to come! In all seriousness, Thanksgiving weekend with my mom and sister went about as well as it usually does, which is to say pretty darned well for a family with four kids, with almost no impact from our semi-controversial first year of Judaism. There were a few funny-awkward moments – the kids were actually upset when I started the prayer before the Thanksgiving meal in English, for example, and insisted on re-blessing the food in Hebrew immediately afterward – but my family seemed generally ready to accept this Jewish thing. As long as we were happy to start talking (and prepping for) Christmas on Friday, and steer clear of our own upcoming holiday, that is. :-/ My mother did make two negative comments about Judaism, one a minor thing about how baking challah would send her back to Methodism, the other that led to a conversation about how she (like me) got a really skewed idea of what Judaism is a...

I am now entering the fourth month – by Jewish reckoning at least – of this "first Jewish year" project. And I have hit the closest thing there is to a boring spot in the Jewish calendar: a two month span with no holidays, no festivals, no special observances. Reminiscent, in a way, of that six month span in the Christian calendar between Pentecost and Advent, known affectionately to liturgical Christians as "ordinary time." And so, I thought this was as good a time as any to reflect on and share some of the things I've experienced and observed in the past few months about "ordinary" Jewish life. First, the gems: Judaism gives one a whole new language even for talking about ordinary things. My wife and I talked with the kids a few times about the idea of mitzvot , for example, a Hebrew word and Jewish concept that doesn't translate perfectly into any English word or Christian concept.* We found it a good metaphor for learning to keep up with ...

There's nothing like Christmas looming on the horizon to make a person question their commitment to Judaism. One wants to participate in the sheer spectacle of it all: its status as both a national holiday and an oft-cherished family one, the three-month build-up as stores push every manner of toy and tchotchke at you and neighbors add lights upon lights to anything they can hang a light on, the TV specials and the episodes of every children's show in which its characters once again "save Christmas" (could they, this year, not? what would happen then, I wonder?), and of course the music. Oh, the music! I finally got around to picking up my son's trombone for band this year from the music shop yesterday (long story) and he pointed out the small stand of music books for purchase at the back. There were, of course, half a dozen Christmas song books for any instrument you happened to play, but the only "holiday" book we found had a single nod to Chanukkah:...

On a lighter note, who knew that the thing many adults find most daunting about conversion to Judaism – learning enough liturgical / Biblical Hebrew to have a clue what's going on when you attend a prayer service or when you (heaven forbid) conduct your own at home – would be one of the biggest bonding opportunities with the kids?  My kindergartener, in particular, is thrilled to find that he already has a Hebrew name, so much so that he insisted on printing his name in Hebrew letters alongside the English ones on his all about me poster for school: (I outlined the letters in pencil, he did all the marker-ing)  Our synagogue, like many, follows its hour of traditional "Sunday school" on Sunday mornings with an hour of "Hebrew school". This means they learn some Hebrew there but we have to reinforce it at home. Monday and/or Wednesday night's have become Hebrew-with-Dad nights for three of our four boys, and it turns out they love it. Our oldest two have a wo...

Recently, I have been listening to a great book on the history of Judaism in America, which in particular highlights how the environment of religious freedom Jews found (and worked tirelessly to expand and improve) in the States shaped our nation's various forms of Judaism in very different ways than the forces of government interference that shaped the Jewry of most of the world.  There are some really intriguing themes that emerge, such as a struggle of those who wanted European-style conformity to try to enforce it. Several times it seems that hard-to-come-by Torah scrolls were either lent to or withheld from particular worshipping communities as a way of showing where the "true" Judaism was!  But another intriguing theme is the struggle to defend visible, public Judaism – the only kind that had heretofore been known – against the freedom to not  express one's religion in public. While it seems that a good percentage of American Jews (in the century before the Civi...

A student needed to make up a test this week on account of attending a grandparent's funeral. In the course of arranging the makeup test, I said something about wishing that I had known of the funeral earlier so that I could plan for this. It turned out that her grandmother was Jewish, and so had to be buried within a certain short amount of time set by her religious beliefs - there was no earlier time that I could have found out. I realized quite suddenly that I had made what must be the ultimate Jewish faux pas : assuming that the person I was talking to was not Jewish (or Muslim, for that matter), and therefore would be following one of the typical majority-culture customs and practices. I apologized, of course, but still: big oops! Two days later, as I was setting up the make-up exam, she told me about how her Hispanic grandmother became Jewish by marriage, about how her grandmother then took the "Jewish name" Sarah "because it's in the Bible, in the older...

This experiment with Judaism is starting to change me. What began as a simple (deceptively so) attempt to keep the Sabbath – to clear away work, shopping, or errand-running of any kind from one day a week in favor of family, recreation, and renewal – has led to little changes in priority everywhere in my life.  I no longer lead a life of quiet desperation, looking for little bits of time most evenings to escape the clamoring kids and finish off that last little bit of work from the day. Instead, I find myself lingering over family dinner, playing with the little guys in the bath or reading them an extra story, of course singing them to bed with the shema , and then running not to the computer but to read a bit of Torah or something from my growing Judaica library, to write a blog, to learn some Hebrew, to be wistful over rabbinical school.  That isn't to say it has been easy. The work still has to get done, after all, and I have spent a fair number of evenings and mornings bea...

Last week I lent one of my students a study aid to help her prepare for the next exam. She started to say it felt like I had given her a Christmas present, then (remembering that I had canceled class for Erev Yom Kippur) she corrected herself: "wait, you're Jewish, you don't celebrate Christmas. Maybe a Chanukkah present, then." Teaching as I do in a town where students regularly correct my "Happy Holidays" wishes to "Merry  Christmas, " Dr. Camp, I was pleasantly surprised she had noticed. And yet, her comment made me uncomfortable for two reasons.  The first reason is that, of all the many things I am giving up as I leave the faith of my upbringing, Christmas is the one thing I have had substantial regret about leaving behind. Even though I am trading Protestant Christianity's two holidays for about a dozen Jewish ones, I am just not ready to give up the songs, stories, and family traditions of Dec 25th. But that is fodder for another post.  ...

It should be no secret by now that I'm something of a religious nerd mixed with an obsessive perfectionist. Which makes it perhaps surprising that I would choose Reform Judaism as my religion-to-explore: while the Reform pendulum does seem to be swinging back toward a fuller observance of Rabbinical-period traditions, many (if not most) Reform Jews approach halacha with a "do what works for you and don't sweat the rest" attitude. I, on the other hand, do sweat the small stuff.* My wife and I have a running joke that I might be happier being a Conservative Jew -- if it weren't for the pesky fact that I'm starting this Jewish journey as a goy . It's also no secret that I'm having a blast immersing myself in the new/old world of Judaism, absorbing and learning and experiencing everything that I possibly can, and on the whole it has been the best thing for my mental and spiritual health that has come down the pike in a decade or more. But the jo...

So, in the spirit of admitting my imperfections (see Yom Kippur 1 post), I feel the need to admit that I cheated on my Yom Kippur fast. A little bit. I ate my entire dinner after the fast had officially begun (at sunset) because, well, that's the way it worked out. So I didn't really fast for the whole 25 hours. And I had a few crackers with my morning medicines to keep them from upsetting my stomach. And I had a cup of coffee in the morning because, well, I had to go teach. Why this long list of fast-related mea culpa' s? I'm not really feeling guilty about it at all. I fasted. It was bloody uncomfortable. The point was made. Or was it? I have been told that there are a lot of "benefits" or "reasons" for fasting on Yom Kippur. For instance, fasting is supposed to make us more aware of the plight of the poor, who miss meals all the time for reasons beyond their choosing -- the hunger we feel for a day, some feel every day. Students at my mothe...

"God does not expect perfection." This is a message the universe has been sending me for about two months now, from a variety of Jewish sources: books, web articles, and, last night, from my own Rabbi. It is a message I have needed to hear for decades now, a message that is having a hard time sinking into my poor stubborn head. I cling stubbornly to the perfectionist God that I grew up with, the God of the Protestant Work Ethic and of the famous Gospel verse "be perfect, as your Father in Heaven is perfect," the God who has so little tolerance for my imperfections that "His only begotten son" had to die as a human sacrifice in order to make me acceptable in God's sight. The thing is, I grew up being told that this harsh, perfectionist Diety was the Jewish God. I grew up in a Christian tradition that had long ago cleansed itself of any remnant of Christian anti-Semitism, or at least told itself that it had, and yet I got this message loud and clear...

My second Day of Awe seems to have been cursed - by my failure to even set a virtual foot in a synagogue on Rosh HaShanah, perhaps?  On a morning when I was supposed to be at work preparing to give my students an exam, my wife being laid-up-in-bed sick, I had to take three of my four kids (one of whom really should have made it to his bus) to school – and the fourth, who did catch his bus, forgot his ADD meds so I am now sitting in the school nurse's office waiting to deliver those. In between, I set up the coffee machine wrong and the filter actually exploded...all over my only clean pair of slacks. After cleaning up the kitchen and starting an emergency wash load, I am heading to school to slam together an exam in record time, wearing jeans dotted with food spots that hopefully won't "read from the audience."  Cursed, I tell you... --- Okay, so any curse here might actually just be in my head, but I am left with a couple of mildly serious questions. How do I say tha...

Well, I've had my first, er, Jew-fail.  Spent a large amount of my day planning and shopping for Rosh HaShanah dinner and related celebratory items. At 5:45, finally got enough space cleared on table and groceries put away and all that to start making challah. At 6:30, put up the dough to rise. At 7:00, took the family to the dog park as promised (and as intended for much earlier in the afternoon). At 7:30, watched in utter helplessness as the sun set and took my hopes for any Rosh HaShanah celebration at all with it. At 8:00, took my family home and at 8:30 I am still trying to clear the table and fix enough leftovers for rest of the family to eat. The challah is still on its first rise.  Well, it's not an auspicious start to my Jewish Year, but a Shanah Tovah to the rest of you, anyway. 

My oldest son recently said to me "one of the things I like most about Judaism is that Jews know how to party!" – by which, of course, he was referring to the Judaic practice of liberally sprinkling the year with holidays, or as we sometimes call them in our household, challah-days.  The most obvious way in which Jews party early and often is that the "holiest day of the year" for Judaism is Shabbat, which comes 52 times a year on average. But even if you don't consider the weekly Shabbat or the monthly Rosh Chodesh to count as true holidays, you might still agree that Judaism beats most other North American religio-cultural systems hands-down in the number of special days with which it marks the passage of each year. Judaism, for those who (like me until about a month ago) haven't been paying much attention to the Jewish holidays printed on your wall calendar, celebrates at least* 5 "holy days" and 4 "festivals" each year** (counting ...