Adventures in Judaism

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.  ...