11 posts tagged “judaism”

A very good weekend, indeed.

• I lost my Jimmy Buffett "virginity" on Thursday night. Dad took me to the Buffett concert at Riverport - my birthday present. It was a seriously good time - the peoplewatching is second-to-none. Things seen: a blender powered by a Weed Eater motor, a flagpole with both Buffett pirate and Mizzou flags, and several of my dad's coworkers. The music was solid, the liquor flowing - it was everything it is purported to be, and if anyone ever has the chance to go to a Buffett show, do it.
• I bought a new-to-me car - a 2006 Chevy Aveo with about 33K miles. It's a nice, very small car, with fairly decent gas mileage... and nothing falling off the bottom of it. I can actually hear myself think in this car - the last one was desperately needed about $1000 in repairs, including a new muffler, new central exhaust, and new axles and boots. Anyway... it's silver and it needs a name. I have not yet ascertained my car's "gender," but suggestions are appreciated.
• I went to services with my dad on Friday night. Mom wasn't feeling that great, but we were on Oneg duty, so someone had to go. It was a very small minyan - maybe 15 people. A funny moment: it is our tradition that the pre-b'nai mitzvot children (under 13) undress the Torah before it's read. On Friday, I was the youngest person there, so I was goaded into undressing the Torah, which I haven't done in almost 10 years. Quite a bit of teasing ensued.
  
• After services, I spent some time with Zach, which was really great - I've missed him a lot this year, and haven't seen him since he was in Chicago for a protest at the end of October. So we went for a drink and then hung out at his dad's for a while, watched the end of the Cardinals game and caught up.
• Saturday was mostly a study day, and then we went for dinner with Aunt Ruth for my birthday. She made a pie for dessert, and I stayed around for a little bit after my parents left, just to talk to her about things.
  

I should be heading back to Chicago in a little bit, just waiting for my iPod to charge... this week is not going to be an easy one in any sense of the imagination!

1. Melted chipotle cheddar cheese
2. St. Louis-style pizza sauce and provel cheese

(Will update throughout the week)

Last night at sundown began the first night of the Jewish holiday of Pesach, or Passover, for those who are not well-versed in, well, Hebrew. It's a beautiful story - one that reminds us of the preciousness of our freedom, and of the suffering of those people who are not yet free. It's a wonderful time to gather with one's family, to sit together and enjoy a meal.

However, the holiday itself comes with a strict set of dietary laws that go beyond even the normal "Kashrut" laws. If one follows the laws to a "T" (and I don't, for several reasons that I will not go into here), then one eliminates anything that may have even a trace of leavening agent in it - nothing with non-approved wheat flour, legumes, corn... it gets tough (and I think, often a little silly). The market for Kosher for Passover food is huge. My personal observance tends pretty much towards "Don't eat anything with leavening in it." So, I do eat a lot of matzah - the topic of this educational entry.

Matzah is, quite literally, the "bread of affliction" our ancestors ate as they fled from Egypt after their freedom was granted. They did not have time to allow the bread to rise, and so it remained flat and hard as a pancake as it baked on their backs in the hot dessert sun. We eat it in copious amounts during the week, so as to remember the struggles of slavery, and the value of our redemption. During the year, there are several tasty varieties. During Pesach, this is pretty much what you get:

KNOW THINE.001

Sure, it looks pretty innocuous - a giant cracker, right? To be fair, that's pretty much what it is. Except for that we eat it constantly. For eight days. It is a part of pretty much any meal. Every year, that first bite, at the first night seder, tastes so, so good. You think, "I've missed this taste so much. I've forgotten how good this is."

Except for one thing: you've forgotten that you think this every year. And it's never true. By the fourth or fifth day, your stomach will be positively crying out, begging for something, anything other than matzah. What makes your body do this?

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1. Finished my last midterm
2. Walked around Winnetka before services because I got there early and it was so nice out, and I wanted to be in the world for a little bit.
3. Went to services, which are rapidly becoming what I look forward to during the week.
4. Drank. Not a lot, but enough.
5. Ate fast food for the first time since I moved to Chicago.
6. Stayed up til 4AM talking with an old friend.
7. Walked barefoot in the grass outside my apartment building while I was on the phone.

Still to come: Cleaning my apartment, shopping, Chicago Botanical Gardens, grocery shopping, sukkah dining at the rabbi's.

Weekends like these remind me that I am indeed still a human being.  

The most major of the High Holy Days having come and gone, I wanted to take a few minutes to reflect before I dive headlong back into studying for my MCB midterm.

I love my new spiritual home no less, but spending the holidays there was an experience to say the least. Chicago, I'm coming to find, has a very strange Jewish environment. Lots of people don't understand why I've chosen the congregation that I have, rather than the one that is a few miles closer. It's hard for a lot of them to conceive the notion of going where you find the best fit. The one that is closer has 3,000 families - their holiday services were divided into an early and a late session. I can't imagine for the life of me that being an engaging religious environment, but I've also never gone to a gargantuan synagogue. It might work for some people. My rabbi knows my name, and that's important to me. The services are small and engaging, and almost light-hearted. It's definitely worth the extra ten minutes in my car on a Friday afternoon.

These were my first holidays that I didn't go home for at least some part of it. The rabbi and his wife have been incredibly kind in always opening their home to me if I didn't have a place to go. Another family that I've become friendly with had me over for their break fast last night. I made challah and brought a bottle of wine and a pomegranate, because that's what you do when people have you over. It was nice to be inside a home for a change, to talk to people who exist outside of the "medical school" plane of my existence. It's sometimes hard for me to find other things to talk about, because that part of my life occludes everything else most of the time. It's sometimes hard to remember that I am indeed an intelligent, socially-aware human being, and not just a medical student.

The services all had a choir, which was very, very strange to me. It wasn't very audience-friendly. The choir and the soloists sand beautifully, but it made me miss Kol Am a little when I realized that I was the only one singing along. The rabbis both gave wonderful sermons. I haven't heard one yet that hasn't left me wanting to seek more answers. I'm planning on writing (for my own benefit) some kind of history of my own spirituality, how it's grown and changed since I first really started practicing Judaism on my own accord.

Anyway, I promised myself I would only distract myself for twenty minutes, and that time is rapidly approaching.        

When nothing particularly exciting happens or I can't find the time or the motivation to write, I write in bullet points.

• Midterms start next Monday! ::projectile vomitting:: This weekend, I didn't even leave my apartment (not my apartment building... my apartment) for almost 2 days. More of the same to follow over the next two weeks, I'm sure.
  

• I'm going to Hawaii in November - it's official. I bought my tickets with help from the voucher I received from the disaster trip to Harrisburg in February. Buying the ticket was, not surprisingly, a real ordeal, and now that I have dispensed with the voucher, I think it's safe to say that I will avoid using USAirways if at all possible. I'd rather pay an extra couple hundred dollars not to have to deal with them. I'm not a mean person, but I've been fighting with them for seven months over everything. Prior to this, I always tried really hard not to be rude to customer service operators, because they're just doing their jobs. However, I have found that their job is to be exceedingly difficult so that I will give up and stop pursuing a refund. I showed those assholes - I perservered.
  
  So, I will spend the week after my first set of finals in Honolulu, with a few extra days for sightseeing! I'm really excited! I've gotten to go a lot of cool places the last couple years, but none of them really had a "vacation" feel. Israel was incredible, but the pace is frantic and you're on a bus with 59 other people for 10 days. The last time I was in DC, we had walk-around time, but only in the evenings, when the museums aren't open. New York and Amherst were all spent on conference time. And all of my other travels were related to med school stuff. So, I'm looking forward to going somewhere cool with extra time built in to play.

• I joined a synagogue on the North Shore about a week ago. It's probably the smallest Reform congregation in the area, but also probably the best. It's very close in practice to my synagogue in St. Louis. They don't have a building, which keeps their operating costs way down, and also allows them to tell the poor-ass medical students who wander their way that they are pleased to have you join them, and won't say no if you want to give a donation, but that they don't need my money. So, basically, they are allowing me to join for free. It's an amazing congregation - the rabbis are incredible and the congregation has strong roots in social action. It's a pretty perfect fit.
  
  I was too young when my parents joined Kol Am to really remember what it was like when we first started going, but I can say without question that the people that belong to my new synagogue are at least as welcoming as they were. The rabbi knew who I was when he introduced himself before the service, and spent a lot of time talking to me afterward. He asked if I had family in the area, and when I told him that I did not, he invited me to his family's dinner before Rosh Hashannah. The family who invited me to sit with them at services invited me to break the fast with them on Yom Kippur. The president's wife wants to have me over for dinner some weekend. It's so nice to spend a few hours each week connecting with people who aren't medical students and aren't connected to that part of my life in any way.
  
  I was pretty anxious about looking for a synagogue when I moved here. I've felt pretty out-of-sync with my spirituality for the last couple of years. I think it was mostly because while I was in Columbia, it became my job - I dreaded going to Hillel every week for services after spending so much time being Kerry's technoslave. I never found the services very inspiring, and the only other option was the congregation, which had the potential to be even less satisfying. So, I either suffered through it or didn't go. I came as close as I hopefully ever get to a crisis of faith this summer. There is nothing wrong with challenging your beliefs, but I hope that I have challenged mine sufficiently for long enough.

• My MOO cards come in soon! I'm so excited! And I can finally give people cards with updated addresses - this whole time, I've been giving out cards and saying, "The phone number is current, but the address isn't." Plus, they have a bunch of my beloved "Mizzou Spring" photos printed on them. I love MOO! Now I just need to find myself a pretty holder...
  

I led services tonight at Hillel. It was the Shabbat after our Sudan Awareness and Holocaust Remembrance weeks, and I was the co-chair of Sudan Week and helped plan for the other. We had a Holocaust survivor come to speak on campus last night, and her story was incredible and inspiring. We collected a lot of pocket change to send to Doctors Without Borders for a medical mission to Darfur. We held a name reading for those who were victims of Nazi oppression in Speaker's Circle. Anyway, at one of the movie nights this week, someone asked me to say something about the Virginia Tech massacre at services tonight, and this is what I said. It's not a true d'var Torah, because it wasn't really based on this week's portion, but it's based on Ecclesiastes.

"I wanted to share with all of you the verses that Sue Kurtz, the Hillel director at Virginia Tech, read at the memorial service on Tuesday. They come from Ecclesiastes, chapter 3, verses 1 through 8. Some of you might also recognize it, as it was immortalized by the Byrds:

'To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose underthe heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die;
    A time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
A time to kill, and a tie to heal;
    A time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh;
    A time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
    A time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to seek, and a time to lose;
    A time to keep, and a time to cast away;
A time to rend, and a time to sew;
    A time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate;
    A time for war, and a time for peace.'

By now, one would be hard-pressed to find someone who did not yet know about the shootings that robbed thirty-two families of their sons and daughters, their husbands and wives, and hundreds of others of their friends. As college students a thousand miles away, it is hard to explain exactly what it is we are feeling - a mixture of fear and grief, of sadness and uncertainty. It becomes easy to look around us and begin to see others as perhaps we did not before, to place blame for this tragedy, and to politicize this incomprehensible act.

But the act was that of a madman, and to understand a madman, we ourselves must be mad. We must remember that it is certainly alright to be angry, to grieve, but we must also understand that in time, we must begin to heal.

I want to concentrate on one verse specifically from the reading: "... a time to keep silence, and a time to speak." We've spent the last two weeks fighting the injustice of genocide in Darfur and commemorating the crimes against our own people in the Holocaust. We know too well the dangers of keeping silent in the face of hatred and oppression. It is our job to speak out to protect those who cannot speak for themselves. It is our job to ensure that those who have died from the acts of hate and madness are not forgotten, and that we continually fight for change, so that such horrors never happen again."

So today makes the half-way point for Passover, a holiday that I have a real love-hate relationship with. Yes, the story of the Exodus is beautiful. Yes, I probably love matzah ball soup and gefilte fish with sucha a love that most other Jews would find it unhealthy. And yes, I hate the fact that I can leave my box of breakfast food open on the kitchen table for four days (...and counting), and it tastes no different.

My objection to Passover is that it lets us forget for the rest of the year the love that we should have for G-d, who freed us as slaves from Egypt. The concentration of this message into eight days allows us to ignore for the other 357 days our obligation to free others from oppression and strife, both before our eyes and half a world away. This isn't to say that a Mazon food drive doesn't do anyone any good. But ask a Jew about Darfur, about Sierra Leone, about the poverty that starves disadvantaged children in their cities and cripples them for any hope of social mobility, and you'll get a blank stare, perhaps a passing of the buck.

So, my challenge to us all, but especially Jews, is to take this week and use it as a springboard for social justice. Let's stop slavery in our towns, our cities, our country, our world. Call your Congressman, organize a rally, collect money for relief, DO SOMETHING.

Show us an unforgettable memory from 2006.  

Kotel: The Womens' Side

I was blessed with the opportunity to travel to Israel in January. Even though it seems like a lifetime ago now, standing at the foot of the Western Wall was perhaps the closest I will ever feel to G-d, the Land of Israel, and the Jewish people.

It's really easy to be a postcard Zionist, to look at pictures and say that you love Israel. But until you stand along those enormous bricks, and the sheer magnitude of the wall and of the experience hit you simultaneously, you cannot comprehend the connection that a Jew at the Wall feels. You cannot understand the impact of the realization that a million people have touched that very spot on the Wall, rocking in prayer with tears in their eyes, overwhelmed by the presence of G-d. What did they pray for? A safe return from war? A bountiful harvest? A match made for a daughter? A healthy newborn son?

Those bricks carry a million memories, a million scraps of paper with wishes scrawled upon them, straight to the heavens.