Adventures in Judaism

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 Christ...

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...

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...