Adventures in Judaism

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...

For the last eight nights, I’ve been steeped in Hanukkah…more or less. More-or-less because kids and parents still have school and work going on in the background, my wife has a persistent and worsening illness (that she can't get a doctor to look at without a referral...grumble) that has disrupted our evening plans more than a few times, and other events (a T/Th night class, a Friday-night High School choir concert, a Star Wars movie that went way longer than any of us expected, a routine appointment for several of the kids, and last night a "cookies with Santa" event at the elementary school) have conspired to intrude upon our evenings. How much more-or-less? Only once have we managed to light our hanukkiot (the 9-branched "menorah" made especially for Hanukkah is technically called a hanukkiah ; the original Temple "menorah" had only seven branches, one for each day of the week) anywhere close to sunset…and on that  night I had to leave (in the ...

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...