Adventures in Judaism

For the last eight nights, I’ve been steeped in Hanukkah…more or less. More-or-less because kids and parents still have school and work going on in the background, my wife has a persistent and worsening illness (that she can't get a doctor to look at without a referral...grumble) that has disrupted our evening plans more than a few times, and other events (a T/Th night class, a Friday-night High School choir concert, a Star Wars movie that went way longer than any of us expected, a routine appointment for several of the kids, and last night a "cookies with Santa" event at the elementary school) have conspired to intrude upon our evenings. How much more-or-less? Only once have we managed to light our hanukkiot (the 9-branched "menorah" made especially for Hanukkah is technically called a hanukkiah ; the original Temple "menorah" had only seven branches, one for each day of the week) anywhere close to sunset…and on that  night I had to leave (in the

It’s been a while since I’ve posted what was originally intended to be an every-other-week cataloguing of “Jewish moments,” so I feel like I owe you all an installment! The fact is, two months post-conversion (and two years and some change post-getting-started) the new-car-smell has all worn off of my Judaism, and there are fewer moments in my life that make me notice being Jewish. It just is what I am now, and that has mostly led the religious side of my life into a comfortable sort of routine-and-boring. Which possibly means that it is time to find some way to kick it up a notch, but for right now I’m enjoying the ability to “just be” for a while.  But that doesn’t mean there haven’t been some moments that made me feel my Judaism, mostly due to being a Jew in a part of the country that is most definitely “Jesusland.” There are so many moments when my religion gets held up in sharp relief against the backdrop of a mass culture that largely assumes a weird mix of boiled-down Christiani

I have, over the past I-don't-know-how-many years, had several people try to explain the concepts of "white privilege" and "institutional racism" to me, and I must confess that for most of that time, until quite recently really, the best I could manage was to nod my head politely and pretend to understand. The idea, in case it hasn't been explained to you on multiple occasions, is that (a) even though it is no longer okay in most circles for a "white" person to be openly derogatory toward people of other "races" (I put words about race in quotes here because race is a vague and socially-constructed idea at best, but because we don’t really have better words for the ideas behind them) or ethnicities (or at least it hadn't been okay before the rise of "white nationalism" and the "alt right" during Trump's run for the White House), and (b) even though there may be quite a number of "white" people (

Everyone seems to like John Lennon's wistful ballad "Imagine". I admire a lot of its sentiments, but I always flinch at the words "imagine no religion", which equate the entire enterprise of religion with war and prejudice and the rest of the awful things Lennon is imagining a world without. A friend of mine from Seminary who has gotten rather soured on religion lately echoed on Facebook this morning the sentiments of writer Dan Brown that " the world will be just fine without religion and that it is heading that way quickly. ". I disagree with the idea that the world would be better (or even "just fine") without religion. You see, the woman I call my "adoptive grandmother" died recently. And because of my religion, I had a few pre-built ways to cope with this. Now, before you jump to conclusions, I do not  mean that I had a canned set of handy beliefs about the afterlife that made it possible for me to say "she is oka

I really want  to feel the "awe" in the Days of Awe this year, but as it happens, so far I'm not. The High Holy Days find me this year in a time of boredom and burnout in my career, serious strain on my abilities to parent my kids and support my spouse, and not much personal fulfillment to speak of. There is stress leaking into every corner of my everyday life as I try (sometimes in vain) to keep my household running, get my kids to school on time with all of their various accoutrements, and stay even half a day ahead of the prep and grading my teaching schedule demands. My community is still recovering from a massive hurricane, even as we hear of more natural disasters hitting more places in the news every week. It feels like a world on the edge of falling apart. Sure, I'd have liked to take Rosh Hashanah as a time to, in the titles of YouTube videos popular with my kids, "get clarity" about "starting over" on the path to "the book of

On Rosh Hashanah, we welcome a new Jewish year. We take a serious moral inventory and make plans to be better people, to live lives we are more proud of, to be the sort of Jews that God Himself would brag about, in the year to come. We try to make amends for our moral and personal failures, and we throw our sins away as bread on the water. We pray to be inscribed in what the Maccabeats called "The Book of Good Life" for the year to come, despite our shortcomings. But perhaps most important of all, we express our hope for a good and sweet new year in the form of good and sweet foods! So, without further ado, I give you...a recipe for a sweet new year! APPETIZER:  apples and honey Apples (sliced), a few varieties One or more good  honeys for dipping BREAD:  round honey-craisin challah 1 cup water, 100-110 °F 1 Tbsp salt 1/4 cup sugar 1 packet active dry yeast mix above and stand until yeast is active, about 10 minutes 4 eggs 1/4 cup butter 1

I waded out against the push of the gently-crashing waves, my 2nd-grader's hand in mine, waiting for the water to get deep enough. The beach we were using had such a gentle slope that I could barely reach water even waist-deep. So I waited for a large wave to come, curled up at just the right time, and let the warm, saline water wash over me. I was Jewish, at last. But more on that later. Here is this week's roundup of "Jewish moments"... To be honest, I went through most of the week without anything "especially Jewish" happening to me, until Thursday evening. There was that moment Thursday night when my students noticed me working desperately hard to plan Shabbat... Thursday afternoon, I realized that - what with my wife's early-to-bed, early-to-rise high school schedule and my teach-'til-9pm Tuesday-Thursday class schedule - we were not going to see each other again, in terms of having any substantial conversation, until Sabbath was about

I am given to understand that it is common  recommended during the Hebrew month of Elul -- the month that precedes Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur -- for Jews to conduct an "accounting of the soul," or heshbon ha-nefesh , in which one takes stock of the state of one's soul in much the same way that one periodically evaluates the state of one's finances. (Actually, I read somewhere that many Jews also see Elul as an opportune time to do a financial self-evaluation as well) The problem I have with this is that an accounting of the soul is so, well, nebulous. There are dozens if not hundreds of aspects of my life that might fall under the rubric of "soul traits" or "things that impact my soul," so where do I begin? For financial accounting, there are hundreds of spreadsheet templates and web tools designed to help you identify and account for your various income and expense categories, to plan for financial goals, and so forth and so on. Why not do t

Now that I've passed my  beit din  and am a quick dip in the ocean away from being legally Jewish, it's time to turn this blog from thoughts about what it's like to become  Jewish toward thoughts of what it is like to be  Jewish, day-to-day, holiday-to-holiday, life-event to life-event. One way to do that is to post a cataloging of "Jewish moments" in my otherwise-secular life that (hopefully) finds the right balance between light-hearted humor and deep spiritual insight. Easy, right? In that hope, I bring you my first list of "Jewish moments" - the back-to-school edition. 1. That moment when you attend a faculty professional-development event and breathe a deep sigh of relief that there is one turkey sandwich left among the sea of ham- or bacon-laden alternatives. Rabbi Harold Kushner writes, in his excellent introduction to Judaic thought To Life, that it strikes him as wonderful (wonder-full?) that the creator of the universe cares what he ha

Hurricane Harvey hit Houston hard, no doubt about that. It hit other, more southerly parts of the Texas coast even harder. And while my family was fortunate to suffer neither physical injury nor substantial damage to our home, we watched scenes of devastation flood our screens as surely as the water was flooding our streets and we wept for the people – friends in some cases, neighbors in others, countrymen all (in the sense that Texas really is a country of sorts) – who had suffered so greatly and lost so much so quickly.  And yet, when the floodwaters receded and we were able to return to our home (we had been visiting family in Central Texas) and get safely back to our normal life (minus school for the kids, as it happens), I expected that my boys would let out a deep sigh of relief and let the stress ebb away like the waters that had overfilled the bayous and be done with it. I underestimated their empathy.  One of my boys – the autistic one, at that – would not let himself be done

I skipped lunch today. I suppose this is not, in itself, a rare occurrence in these modern times. We get too busy to stop for lunch some days. Or we don't have time to pack a lunch in the morning and the lunches for sale nearby seem too far away, or too expensive, or too junk-food for our taste.  But today I was at home, and there was food in the fridge and the pantry, and I was hungry . And I skipped lunch anyway. Because today is the 17th day of the Hebrew month of Tammuz, a minor fast day in the Jewish tradition. Now technically, I should have fasted from first light (not sure how this is defined in halacha ) to nightfall (enough darkness to see three small stars, or alternately, 50 minutes after sunset). But I'm still a baby Jew and, to be honest, I didn't notice that it was a fast day until well after breakfast. Oops. And thanks both to the My Jewish Learning daily email and to the Jewish calendar the Chabad people send me every year for reminding me whe

So it's time for the second in my series of things-I've-learned-about-being-Jewish, which I'm writing in summation of this two-year conversion journey, in preparation for my Bet Din, and as a way of getting thoughts clear in my head as I contemplate writing a book on my Journey Into Judaism. Last time, as you recall, I wrote about the Jewish relationship with belief. One of my rabbis suggested that I look into 12th-century  Rabbi  Moses ben Maimon's (aka Maimonides or "the Rambam")  thirteen principles of Jewish faith (see a nice article on these principles by the excellent Jewish educators of My Jewish Learning at  http://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/the-thirteen-principles-of-faith/  ). I had three thoughts about this: First: is there anything Maimonides didn't do? The man was a court physician, rabbi, scholar-philosopher, and writer of myriad books and commentaries that have stood the test of centuries – he gives me quite an inferiority comp