Adventures in Judaism

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...

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...