Adventures in Judaism

So I spent part of the last afternoon of Pesach surfing YouTube with my boys, listening to the rather impressive number of Passover-related song parodies that have been posted to that particular media hub. "Uptown Funk" parodies (think "Pesach Funk" and "Uptown Passover") seem particularly popular this year, as did riffs on Disney's "Let It Go". There was a Bieber-Adele mashup video (culminating in the feel-good moment of Moses shouting "Hello from the other side"  across the Red Sea to Pharoah) , and a hilarious "Bohemian Rhapsody" spoof that delighted my older boys (who at some point mysteriously became Queen fans). But the stage was stolen, as always, by the incredibly talented a capella group The Maccabeats, who led off our search for Pesach tunes with the traditional Jewish song "Dayeinu" ("it would be enough") re-sung in almost every musical genre of the 20th century, and ended our musical spree...

There is a common saying in Unitarian Universalist circles that people who discover UUism often feel like they have been UU's their whole lives without knowing it. I once felt that way, but – alas – the feeling didn't last forever.  Facebook's memories feature reminded me yesterday about how, just about exactly two years ago, I was engaged in the frustrating exercise of trying to launch a progressive Christian group at our local UU church. I had a ton of support from my UU brethren and sisteren, in the sense that a lot of people felt very strongly that the existence of such a group at their church was a Good Thing, but no participation . Sitting in that room by myself for several weeks running was more than just a lonely experience: it shook my faith that the group of people I was looking for – people who wanted to join together in some sort of belief in God, who valued the Judeo-Christian legacy of stories and teachings, who wanted to be part of a religion that wasn't...

Passover. In Hebrew, Pesach. A word meaning, roughly, to skip something. You know, to pass over it. And I have never been tempted to skip, to pass over, an entire Jewish holiday until Pesach began to loom on my event horizon. Neither the 24-hour fast and gloomy sobriety of Yom Kippur, nor the poorly conceived construction project of Sukkot, nor the eight crazy nights and gift-giving expectations of Hanukkah, nor the Halloween-meets-Mardi-Gras excesses of Purim daunted me in the least. But Passover had me wanting to run for the hills.  What was it about this holiday that intimidated me so? The prospect of cleaning my entire house, top to bottom, to remove every last speck of leavened anything? The coming week of dietary restrictions that would make being a vegetarian in Texas look convenient? The three-hour blend of prayer service, religious education class, and fancy dinner known as "the Seder"? The search for a Haggadah my kids could all parse, put up with, and perhaps ev...

I have never been especially thankful for mornings. I would rather they came a little later and took a little longer to get started up. This was especially true that one semester back in college when I got up at 7am every morning for either an 8am calculus class or an 8am chem lab.  It was also especially true last Monday, when I faced the rare challenge of getting all four kids to school on time without any help from my wife, who was attending a memorial mass (wearing her mogen  david necklace, no less) half a continent away.  Now, I have faced a similar challenge every Wednesday this spring, since those days took Elie away to her student teaching internship, but at least on those days she would drive one kid to school on her way.  This day, I either needed to get two kids to schools 20 minutes apart within the same 15 minute span of time, or I needed to get a different pair of kids to their day care a full hour before they were accustomed to even being ready to lea...

You know, I've begun to think that it's very difficult to be a Jew in this culture (I could probably just stop there) without getting a bit of a chip on your shoulder (there, too) about holidays (oh, so that's  what this is about). One the one hand, there's the fact that Jews have easily five times as many religious holidays as Christians do, in addition to being "allowed" to celebrate any American holidays that can be considered "secular" either in origin or in current observance. You can measure your passage through a year in a manner that comes pretty close to "what holiday are we preparing for or celebrating this  week?" It's a lot for a new Jew to learn, and I feel like I haven't gotten any holiday but Chanukkah "right" yet. Just this weekend, we have our kids each a small gift for Purim, partly in lieu of the "Easter bunny" gifts they would have gotten this time of year, but partly because we heard somewher...

A conversation I had with some students this evening has been bugging me tonight, kind of in the way that you find yourself coming up with snappier comebacks or wittier comments than the ones you actually said, hours or even days after they no longer matter. But in this case, it wasn't an insult I wanted a comeback to or a conversation I wanted to sound a bit wittier in, but a terribly vital, deceptively simple question: why? I had overheard a conversation about problems of a religious sort between a couple of students who had dropped in for anatomy tutoring this evening, but when I offhandedly asked what was up they told me it was "church problems," in a tone of voice that seemed to say "you're Jewish, you wouldn't understand." Wanting to feel a little more relevant, I admitted to having tried to be a Christian minister once, prior to   choosing  Judaism. This decision seemed to puzzle them. They wanted to know why I would do such a thing.  Why become J...

It's been a while since I've written a blog post. Partly, that's because it's been a while since I've felt I had anything to write about. Lately, being Jewish just hasn't been a central focus of my attention: no holidays being celebrated this month, no new religious practices being integrated into my life, in short: no news. Either that means I'm doing something wrong, or it means I'm doing something very right in letting Judaism become part of the background hum of my life: the new normal, as it were. You see, more so than any other religion I have been part of, Judaism isn't something you do once or twice a week and besides that maybe ponder once in a while. No, Judaism stakes a claim on every moment of your life in one way or another. In a way, Judaism is less something you do and more something you are . Something you become . The wonder of that is that over time you get so used to it that all of those religious practices that once required gr...