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:...