Adventures in Judaism

This High Holy Day season marks the end of my third full Jewish year of living Jewishly (even though I only formally completed my conversion about a year ago) and the start of what promises to be a lovely and exciting fourth year! As it happens, this is about as long as I have managed to stay with one religion in my entire adult life – it seems that my pattern prior to this point has been to embrace a faith tradition with the “zeal of the newly converted” for a couple of years, wear out during the third year as I start to confront all of the places where the theology or practice or culture of that faith just don't fit me, then begin to dabble with alternatives or outright jump ship at the beginning of the fourth year – and so it is time to announce that I am about to become either Sufi Muslim or Zen Buddhist, or some sort of fusion of both.  Just kidding. Seriously, that was just a joke. My rabbis can stop having a heart attack now. For the first time I can remember in

As I continue to prepare for a New Year, the Melekh Ha'Olam has been sending me a couple of messages that I am not especially comfortable with: trust me, and slow down. I'm having trouble with both of those, but I'm going to focus on the first one today. The "trust me" message has come from a couple of unusual sources of life-career-faith advice: the admissions professionals at the two AJR rabbinical schools.  There are, as it happens, two completely unrelated schools, one on the East Coast and one on the West, both named Academy of Jewish Religion, both experimenting with the radical idea of offering their entire catalog of courses online via teleconference to those of us poor souls who live in Middle America, far far away from any of the brick-and-mortar rabbinical schools. And so I, naturally, inquired into both of them. The admissions professionals from both places scheduled initial phone interviews with me just a few days after I inquired. And t

There is some debate about the relative importance and, for lack of a better word, "relative holiness" of the many (many) Jewish holidays. But if pressed, I suspect that most Jews would identify Yom Kippur -- which is just around the corner now -- as the holiest of Jewish holy days: the day on which we seek forgiveness, reconciliation, and at-one-ment with God (however we understand Him/Her). But I propose that a lot of Jews are less aware of the holiness of the entire month that precedes the Days of Awe, the month of Elul, which is already upon us! Elul is a time for introspection and self-reflection, for a practice known as h eshbon ha-nephesh , accounting of the soul. For the four weeks of Elul, I am trying to write one blog post a week looking at values, drawn from the Jewish tradition of Mussar as interpreted by contemporary sage Alan Morinis, that I think I -- and perhaps we as a society -- need to have more of in our "soul accounts." This week: h esed (

So here I am, day one of "re-entry" into my normal life after my first whirlwind, wondrous "Smicha Week" with the ALEPH Ordination Program. And I'm trying to figure out how to integrate all that I learned and present you, my dear readers, with some sort of "take-home message" from my forty eight days on Sinai.  Well, I learned a lot of things that I'm still sifting through, like "davening (praying) shacharit before breakfast every morning is a really awesome way to start your day" and "you can actually do your prayer services differently every single time and have them all feel 'right'" and "if I can get out of my I'm-a-smart-guy-who-everybody-should-listen-to ego and start listening to all of these other smart people I'm surrounded by I can really learn some stuff." But I'm still processing all of that (and more!) and maybe I'll come out with a lessons-learned blog later this week.

"What [Fackenheim] claims all [self-affirming] Jews hear is a 'commanding voice' from Auschwitz that tells them they must persist as Jews, lest they grant Hitler a post-humous victory. … In the face of all those terrible murders, many Jews, whatever their ideological commitments, have been moved by a strong resolution to continue as Jews..." (Alter, Feb 1981, p.55) "American Jews, [Novick] argues, may have given Hitler a posthumous victory by tacitly endorsing his definition of the Jew as despised pariah." (Penkower, Mar 2000, p.129) " 'What we have done is to make the murder of the Jews of Europe into one of the principal components of the civil religion of American Jews' " (Neusner, Aug 1979, quoted in Alter, Feb 1981, p.55) "Serious problems do arise with the near fixation of American Jews on the Holocaust. … can the destiny of Jews be joined decisively to victimization? … the Holocaust, while vital to understanding Jewr

I recently ran across a post I had written for this blog around the end of my first year of Judaism, despairing of ever understanding the Jewish approach to mysticism – known generally as Kabbalah – and, I’m sorry to say, poking fun in little ways at that which I did not understand. Fast forward nearly two more years and I have not made tremendous progress understanding Jewish mysticism. But it is quite true that “when the student is ready, the teacher appears” and I do believe that I have found a teacher – a group of them, really, in the form of the ALEPH Ordination Program – who may finally help this soul connect to its mystical roots.  I have recently started reading Rabbi Marcia Prager’s beautiful book The Path of Blessing , which takes an exhaustively detailed look at the six words that introduce a whole category of Jewish prayers known as b’rakhot : “ barukh attah Adonai, Eloheinu melekh ha-olam ” (typically, but as always without capturing the full sense of the Hebrew, t

It should not come as a big surprise to those who know me that I have this dream of becoming a rabbi someday – you know, "when I grow up" – if I can ever find a way to attend rabbinical school. Every brick-and-mortar rabbinical school I know of is located far from Houston, most of them in the northeast (NYC, Philly, Boston, and Cincinnati), and while there  is  one distance-learning rabbinical ordination program that is the equivalent of a full five-year rabbinical education, it is run by a group ("ALEPH - Alliance for Jewish Renewal") about which I know very little and with which I have had no interaction – their nearest affiliated congregation appears to be in Albuquerque. But I digress. One of the things I enjoyed about the pre-pastoral life back in my Presbyterian Seminary days was the practice of sermon-writing: the effort to write one short (okay, not if you're Presbyterian), witty, and wise treatment of a religious subject each week felt like a good way