http://www.thejewishweek.com/blogs/jewish-techs/kindle-your-judaism-growing-jewish-literacy-through-new-technology

http://theseandthose.pardes.org/2013/02/22/alumni-guest-post-my-first-biblical-love/

My First Biblical Love

The Book of Esther, the Megillah, was my first Biblical love. I had opportunity to delve into it as a McGill undergrad prior to my first yeshiva experiences and discovered that it is a brilliant text. The Megillah is balanced and suspenseful, sacred and absent of God, deadly serious and filled with [ribald] humor. In this short essay I want to show that an essential factor in the reading of the stories of the Megillah is the obedience and disobedience of the characters. We have been trained, as it were, to look for obedient God-fearing Biblical characters as role-models. But, a closer reading, will show that disobedience is often a critical positive shaper of the unfolding biblical narrative.

As children we were taught that the Megillah was full of women. There was, after all, a beauty pageant; Miss, soon to be Mrs, Persia! These were all the beauties of the land. As we’ve grown up we have come to understand that these women were exploited, afraid and pressed into a demeaning service wherein you could only gain notoriety by being the most memorable purveyor of sexual favors to a lecherous king.

But, in fact, we only have three named female characters, Vashti, Esther and Zeresh. Vashti, in a modern revisionist reading, has become a folk heroine for her obstinate refusal to give in to the king’s debased request. Esther, the Jewess, has always been cast was the heroine, after all, she brings deliverance to the Jews. Zeresh, the wife of Haman, has been considered a villain due to her association with her husband the chief antagonist of the Jews.

Vashti is the person who sets the story in motion. Asked to come before the drunken king and courtiers she refuses. Whether or not she was to be dressed or only adorned with her diadem is a matter of debate. I like to read the Megillah as I was taught to read Shakespeare as a high school student. Always imagine that there are two audiences: the pit and the box seats. The box seats filled with the upper crust were at the Globe Theatre to watch the art and absorb the story. The pit, filled with the lower classes, were there to be entertained, not only by the performance but also by the double-entendres that Shakespeare was so expert at. So back to Vashti, when the king summons her to appear in her royal diadem we can read the command in two ways: 1) come only in your diadem or, 2) appear before me and wear your diadem so everyone knows you are queen as you parade in. Big difference.

The Rabbis of the talmud preferred the bawdier reading because it cast Vashti and Ahashverosh in a worse light. It fits into their inclination toward reading Biblical tales as black and white, villain and hero, (see also, Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esav). But, disturbingly, this interpretation has been so ingrained that the midrashim that explain her refusal have become the peshat that is taught to school children.

Consider the stories as the rabbis tell them. Vashti refuses to appear before the king and his courtiers because she is suddenly struck by leprosy. Or her refusal is due to her sudden sprouting of a tail. This makes Vashti, the Queen of Persia, into a disgusting person whose vanity is the only thing that keeps her from appearing nude in front of a group of drunken men. The idea that this is taught to school children is disturbing in its own right, but, as can be discovered in contemporary divrei torah, this idea has also been transferred into a parable of Jewish modesty and sanctity in opposition to non-Jewish promiscuity and debasement.

The peshat is that Vashti refuses to obey her husband. The motivation for this refusal is derash. The most likely reason for a self-respecting person, let alone a queen, for refusing to accede is her feeling that she is being objectified. Her refusal is heroic – it is brave, courageous, and quite possibly a choice with existential repercussions.

Vashti’s disobedience of her husband is often compared to Esther’s obedience of Mordechai. She does what he says and hides her Jewish identity. This is a very disturbing component of the story. Mordechai, my namesake, is meant to be a stalwart representative of Judea and Judaism, but he and Esther are both named for Near Eastern gods. And when Esther becomes socially mobile she is told to hide who she really is. Mordechai seems to be an assimilationist.

So what’s peshat here? I think one way to read this is that Mordechai is deep into his identity as a courtesan and maintains, at the same time, a deep relationship to his Judaism. He of course refuses to bow to Haman but really we don’t know why. But, once his people are threatened, he awakens to his true identity and pushes Esther to do the same. Mordechai’s disobedience of Haman, Esther’s obedience of Mordechai and her subsequent disobedience of the king (she comes to him when she isn’t call to) are the key factors in the unfolding of the story. So Esther’s heroism is counterintuitive in that it is connected to disobedience as opposed to obedience.

Zeresh. Oh Zeresh. She’s a bit player for sure. But the great thing about Zeresh is that she is a truth-teller: “If Mordechai, before whom you have begun to fall is of Jewish stock, you will not overcome him; you will fall before him to your ruin.” She seems to be the most ‘religious’ character in the Megillah. She has some idea about Jews being special and she tells her husband. She does lie, she doesn’t curry favor, she just lays it out. Notice that Esther has to jump through all kinds of hoops to get the king to get to the point where she can tell the king the facts. Zeresh just speaks it straight out.

While the Megillah is about seeing everything a little differently we have fallen into the trap of reading it the same way year after year. Is Vashti the folk heroine for the 21st century? I don’t really think so but at least she is someone with self-respect. Is Esther a pathetic assimilationist? We don’t have to read her this way but we should be conscious of the problematic of her behavior and that of her mentor Mordechai who sets her in a very precarious position. And, Zeresh, she is married to a terrible man. Long enough to give him a minyan of sons. She is certainly a flawed person for that. But I like to reserve a little space for her to be not so bad. In the two times that Zeresh is mentioned she comes in the same sentence with ‘kol ohavav’. The Hebrew could be literally translated as ‘Zeresh AND those that loved [Haman].’ If we read the text literally the Megillah, in its subtle and layered way is telling us that Zeresh saw the truth and wanted to be distant from her husband.

Purim is set up by the Megillah. And on Purim as much as we read the text we should also be reading ourselves. Turning the interpretive lens into a mirror. Along with the openness that the celebration brings we should be attempting – for good or for bad – to reinterpret our own actions and inclinations so that we can have greater clarity in our lives.

Gut Purim

P.S. I only know one rock song that has the name Esther and the word Armenian in it. Here it is.

Esther by Phish

I wrote this for a collaborative blog I’m on with some friends. It’s meant to encourage us all as we work through another February trying to avoid sadness and tragedy.

I’m sure there are details that are wrong but such is life.

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February has been a brutal month. It is connected to Adar wherein we’ve lost friends and students. Both at Brown and when I was a student in Israel. It is also the month in the mid-90′s when there was a spate of suicide bombings on buses in Jerusalem. I was there. It was horrible.

But, like the Purim story, which also takes place in Adar, everything is about turnaround and redemption. And really, my day is February 14. Valentine’s Day. Sweet. Commercialism. Fakery. Imported flowers with a carbon footprint bigger than a Quarter Pounder with Cheese. But I digress.

This is a story about one moment. It’s a long one.

Thirteen years ago on February 14th I went on my first date with my nice wife, Nechama Lea. We were both living in Bat Ayin in the middle of nowhere. I was studying in a Yeshiva and she was in a Midrasha. We were amongst men and women who were hot to get married. It was a crazy time. We had a wedding every two weeks. In those days I learned what it was like to live in the middle-ages, not only because we lacked warm housing, but because we had no entertainment outside of communal simchas – celebrations.

Rabbi Kohn was my teacher and his wife, Batya, was a matchmaker. For reals. Batya and I had met but we’d never spent much time getting to know each other. I mean there was no Starbucks. So Batya corners me one day and says, “Hey. How’d you like to go out with Nechama Lea?” And I was like, “You mean that woman with the beautiful smile and gorgeous blue eyes?” (I swear that’s what I said.) And she said, “Yes.”

While I was being coy the truth is I had recently met NL. She and I had been introduced at the wedding of Jonah and Alison by my very good friend Charlie. NL had been Alison’s roommate. Char and I had known each other for years. I was drunk, weddings you know. And I had literally just walked in from calling off a short relationship with a great woman. (It was by mutual agreement – we were great friends but not lovers. Still are. She’s married, lives in Israel with her husband and beautiful boys.) And the next woman I saw was NL. We said hello and I went on my way.

Then a day later Batya asked if I’d like to go out with Nechama Lea Rackover. I didn’t want to seem like a man-slut, I had, after all, just broken up with ‘Shaindel,’ so I said let me think about it.

That night I went to a party. Sheva Berachot. This is a party that is held every night for the week following a wedding. It’s awesome. So at a Mexican themed Sheva Berachot in Nachloat at the home of Sara Lea, I sat down on a bench and lo and behold who should be next to me but Nechama Lea.

She was drinking beer. From a bottle. Awesome. It felt strange. We had escaped our medieval village. Men and women were shmoozing. Beer was being consumed. We were all adults who had found religious Judaism later in life and this was a space that was clearly a bridge between our ‘former’ and present lifestyles.

There was no chance of ‘going home’ with a girl. We were all celibate and we were all committed to abstaining from pre-marital sex and even pre-marital touching. So we talked. It was great. And, in the end, we did ‘go home’ together, but it was just mutual hitch-hiking back out to Bat Ayin. Our first encounter turned into a 4.5 hour tunnel-visioned experience. We were at a party but I don’t remember much about it. We were in Jerusalem, and then in a car and then walking, but I don’t remember. At some point we were with a third person, Josh, but we lost him. I think he caught the vibe and took off.

The next morning I contacted Batya and gave her the code word and she set up the next meet. We were going to go into Jerusalem, for dinner. We decided on a vegetarian place in the German Colony on Emek Refaim. Yeah, we were on Emek before Emek was Emek. We got a lift and then a bus and then we walked and we went into the restaurant. I think she had a quiche of some kind and I had a Greek Salad.

At some point during the meal we offered each other tastes of our respective food choices. And here was the moment. So small. So insignificant. But so deep. We each took our fork and picked a piece of food from the other’s plate.

Nothing. The smallest most benign gesture. But I remember, at the time, that it was so so powerful. We had crossed into intimacy. We had broken through the barrier that our place-settings represented. We had fulfilled the innate mammalian desire of providing food for those you care for. It was really really deep.

I remember her eyes from that meal. Later I would compare them to sunflowers. Her eyes are blue but there are flecks that bring me to those flowers. In later years, after losing friends, the sunflower was my visual meditative cue. I still use it when times are terrible. It is a place of safety and beauty.

We finished dinner and then went to a pizza shop and drank beer. She’s Czech. I’m Canadian. We talked about our families and hockey and beer.

I don’t remember going home. And then we got married.

I was blessed to be the Chattan Torah at our synagogue. Chattan Torah, literally “The Groom of the Torah,” is a big honor, it means that I was the person who was called up to finish this year’s cycle of Torah reading. The good news – this was not due to any spectacular merit of my own, rather the first-string guy, who had finished learning the Talmud, after 7.5 years!, was called away at the last minute and couldn’t be in town. As a teacher of Torah and a Rabbi I was asked to take his place.

It’s nice to be thought of and even nicer when it comes with a built-in ego deflater.

I was very moved by reading the final section of the Torah. I’ve probably read or heard the last verses over one-hundred times. I teared up when God showed Moshe the Land of Israel and the places where all the tribes would settle. I remembered, in that moment, as I read along, listened and held my sons, that I had been up and down Israel this year. I was on the Land that Moshe only saw in a vision.

There is a book, ha-Giborim sheli : arbaʻ hartsaʼot Tanakhiyot, “My Heroes: four lectures on Tanakh” with a series of talks by the Israeli journalist, now politician, Yair Lapid. (Lapid, the son of Tommy Lapid, is not known as a traditional religious person, I think that that is one of the great things about the book, that a Jew wants to talk about the Torah and actually does it regardless of his religious inclinations.) Lapid talks about Moshe and decides that he was essentially fatherless, he was given over to women to be raised and really never had a long relationship with his natural father, Amram, or father-in-law, Yitro. He is always moving in and out of these relationships.

So God is Moshe’s father. Not like Jesus. God is the character who cares for Moshe, who guides him, who is in constant relationship. And then there comes a time when the father will have to bury the son. Lapid suggests that the vision that God gave to Moshe of the Land of Israel was infinitely better than anything Moshe could have experienced by actually entering the Land. God’s infinite kindness is manifest by showing Moshe the idealized Land of Israel rather than the actual Land of Israel that is subject to the flux of nature and human habitation.

So I stood there reading about Moshe’s vision. I wondered how long it lasted. Was this a moment that lasted an eternity? Was it a ninety minute Smithsonian IMAX film or a bodily sensation of moving up and down and in and out of every inch of our beloved land?

I don’t know the answer to my questions. I do know that even dying by God’s kiss as Moshe did, even after the beautiful vision he was granted, he must have been infinitely sadder than we could ever imagine. It breaks our heart and it should. Every year, over and over, for our whole lives.

Parenthetically: I think this is why children are such a rich part of Simchat Torah, to remind us that even when and end comes there is a beginning. Just like the Torah.

These are the remarks I delivered at both the Reform and Conservative minyanim at our Hillel this past Sunday night.  I’ve removed the ‘thank yous’.

I was in synagogue on Shabbat morning and the Rabbi, my friend Barry Dolinger, told the following story. Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, possibly the greatest rabbi that ever lived in America, was slated to give a speech at a convention in a hotel. So he arrives and everyone is set up they are waiting for this giant to step in to the room and blow their minds. But he’s a little late, traffic. So he finally shows up and for some reason a reporter from a local Jewish newspaper had decided that it was a good time to say Mincha, the afternoon prayer (I guess the wait got long and he had somewhere to go after.)

So this reporter is praying, davenning, right in front of the door to the auditorium that Rabbi Feinstein has to go into to give his speech. So the ‘handlers’ are saying, “Rav Moshe, please everyone is waiting. Rav Moshe let’s go. Rav Moshe is everything ok?”

So they’re really bugging him to get in and get it going and the guy is still praying. So what’s the problem? What’s the big deal? So there is a very beautiful idea – that when we pray God fills the space in front of us, beside us, and behind us. So being that the Divine Presence is in front of this guy Rav Moshe, who is being hassled to come in and give a speech, says, “I can’t come in. God is blocking the door.”

I want to hold on to that idea for a little later.

Now I want to tell you what happened next. Not to Rav Moshe, to me. Remember I was in synagogue and I heard that story from my friend, Rabbi Dolinger.

After hearing the rabbi’s talk which was about concentration during prayer, I was inspired to take a little more time with my prayer, to go a little slower. So I’d say I was about two-thirds of the way through my private prayers and lo and behold a guy walks right in front of me, along one row of empty benches and he’s collecting prayer books and chumashim.

I was blown away. Completely and utterly beside myself – I was out of God’s space – as it were. I collected my thoughts and finished praying and when it was over I decided I had to talk to him. I went over, put my arm around his waist and said, “John Doe, I hope you can hear this, I’m about to give you a little chastisement, tochecha.” So he says, ok. I say, “did you hear the rabbi’s speech?” Yes. “Did you listen?” Yes. “Well then,” I asked, “what would possess you to walk around and collect books during the time when people were praying?”

What would you say? You would probably just say I’m sorry. (And if I was less grumpy I would say it’s ok. But what I really would have said was, “APOLOGIZE TO GOD!” But he didn’t say sorry.)

So he tells me, “well you know there is a halakhic (jewish legal opinion) that says that if there is a bench in front of you then it’s ok.”

What do you think I said? “Don’t give me that!”  And then I explained to him the various opinions that he was trying to refer to.

So that was the end of the story and now you are asking – why is he telling us this? Because after I did what I did I was grasped with a supreme need to clarify what my motives were. It was not guilt, it was a searching, an attempt to determine what I was trying to do. I’ll tell you where this comes from: There was a school of chassidic thought called Przysucha. It was founded by Simcha Bunim of Przysucha (whom my second son is named for) and in Przysucha Hassidut they fought for the “supreme value of personal authenticity.” Listen to how this is explained by Mickey Rosen ob”m in his book, The Quest for Authenticity:

For the world of Przysucha, authenticity meant the process of truthfulness – to oneself and to one’s Maker. Anyone and anything that helped this process was considered holy, but anything that inhibited was sacrilegious. I use the term sacrilegious because only by using such a loaded term can we begin to understand that it was not neutral. To be authentic means to be truthful. In Przysucha, in order to be truthful one needed to be self analytical, because only thus could one clarify the motive of one’s own actions. Was one’s religious behavior motivated by pride, by fear? Or was it in fact part of the process of attempting to be real? The enemy of truthfulness, (especially in a religious context) was feigned piety; even appearing to do something for an external reason, was to be eradicated. Therefore, one needed to engage continually in self-analysis to understand why one was doing what one was doing.

So I have to say that our biggest problem here at Hillel, at Brown, should be people taking too long to pray. Showing off about how deep they are ‘into it.’

But I want to relate this to what does go on around here. I want us to ask ourselves about our relationships, about the people we see and speak to regularly, I want us to ask ourselves how honest are we?

We have had honesty and authenticity beaten out of us since we were children. It is destroyed by the media, by the need to succeed based on ‘grades,’ by market economies and the exigencies of politics and profit.

We have been taught how to give feedback that will never hurt or offend but neither will it help advance our causes as human beings.

I’ll be honest with you – I think that living in Przysucha or Kotzk would have been brutal and unhappy. But it would have been powerful and life-altering. But I don’t think we could support that type of challenging and painful feedback loop on an ongoing basis, no matter how much it was motivated by love of one’s brother.

I very much love my students, both in the real sense – this boy and that girl. But also in the abstract sense – you are all my students. The people of Brown are as well. I feel the same about the Jews and people of the world in general. We love each other. But when we allow ourselves to pass through life without pressing back, without helping others correct then we are really doing a disservice.

Think about the most banal of examples: sometimes there is a little food in your friend’s teeth. And you’re just a little too embarrassed to tell them. Or it’s your own teeth and you get home and you look in the mirror and “Oh GOD! I can’t believe I had food in my teeth. Why didn’t they tell me?”

And that is so small. But what if you’re being a jerk? Or what if you are being just a little bit less of who you could be? And nobody tells you? It happens all the time.

We should not be cruel and that is why there are no Kotzker chassidim around – you really had to connect and to get through torture tests emotionally and spiritually and help out of love and never through cruelty.

And we don’t do that anymore. But we should do a little. We should let go of our fears of offending others and work more dilligently on helping others through kind and careful words of help and correction.

I want to get back to Rav Moshe, standing at the door – the door that God was blocking. This is unbelievably deep. Rav Moshe didn’t really believe that God was in the doorway. Like standing there physically blocking the door. But Rav Moshe, the greatest judge of Jewish law that ever lived in America, believed deeply in his system, in the principles that he had decided to adhere to as a Jewish person. When people tried to get him to bend on those principles, even such abstract and seemingly minor ones, [for everybody knows that everybody walks around in shuls all of the time all around the world,] he wouldn’t bend.

I’m thinking that as we begin to demarcate spaces for the coming year. Spaces of holiness, prayer, good deeds and self-correction, I’m wondering how firm we are about the existence of those spaces. However abstract those spaces – do we have the mental and spiritual energies to draw down these behaviors into the practical and uncooperative world. What fills the space in front of us? What is inviolable even if it is invisible?

And what barriers artificial or real will I break down to help myself and help others become better people.

Shannah Tovah.

Positive Identity Creation – a Response to Joel Frankel – Jewish/Judaism as a Modifier

In a recent post on eJewishPhilanthropy.com Joel Frankel identified some of the core challenges in the Taglit-Birthright Israel enterprise. Specifically he focused on the following: the quality and training of staff, the variety of avenues for Jewish identification for the participants and the role of local Federations in following-up after the trip.

I think Joel, while being a little tongue-in-cheek, is doing a significant disservice to our colleagues who work diligently to make each trip a success. I’ve staffed three trips with two different providers and on each one have had excellent Israeli guides who challenge themselves to not only learn the names of participants but to craft the experience in such a way that enables their personal love of Israel to be conveyed to each and every American participant. True, our medics are prohibited from engaging in romantic relationships with participants, but they are encouraged to help our participants understand life in Israel from the perspective of an Israeli.

In regard to the American staff Joel writes, “However, it takes a pretty committed staff person to try and organize and lead a productive and meaningful “tie-in discussion” for forty exhausted/horny/anxious twenty-somethings who just spent the past eight to ten hours getting on and off a tour bus, especially when the preference of the participants is that sharing time be pushed aside in favor of an extra bar night.” Apparently I’ve only worked with committed staff people. As leaders and educators we work hard to make sure that our participants understand the parameters and expectations. There will be time out on the town and there will be reflective time. There will be fun and the will be sadness. The participants are not kindergartners wanting at all times to run out to the playground. They are intelligent young adults who, if given credit and opportunity, want to learn and grow.

I want to suggest that there are a few relatively easy ways to remedy some of the challenges that Joel identifies.

1. Change the way you think about the participants. Rather than thinking of them as “forty exhausted/horny/anxious twenty-somethings” think of them as forty individuals with different experiences. On our trips we always ask students to identify what they are most looking forward to and what they are most anxious about. We do it aloud so that everyone on the trip can be aware of similarities and differences. We do it publicly so that people can find buddies in their journeys. And so that the staff can begin to keep a mental record that will help them cultivate the participants’ identities.
2. Change the way you think about the American staff. Rather than using the term ‘staff’ use the word ‘educator,’ or ‘trip-mentor,’ or ‘facilitator.’ It’s a small thing but would make the world of difference.
3. Empower the staff vis-à-vis the Israeli guides. Making sure that American staff (I’ll stick to staff as it is the standard term) can identify the participants’ needs and convey them to the Israeli guides is critical. Very often the American staff are inexperienced, young and somewhat lost in the challenges of jetlag, language barriers and generally their impression of domineering Israelis. The guides and the American staff must be taught to work together. The guides must be taught to accede to the educational choices of the American staff.
4. Training. While setting up his identification of the problem of under-trained staff Joel asks, “How can we embrace the “Jewish Diversity” on each Birthright trip while simultaneously empowering participants to take ownership of their Jewish Identity and personal relationship to Judaism and Israel?” On our Taglit-Birthright trips we ask a similar question and we ask it over and over and over again: “What is the content of your Jewish identity?” I believe that we need to be training staff to ask that question and to facilitate the discovery of the answer. As we said above, we ask students to publicly identify their interests and concerns so that we can help them key in to those moments where they can get what they are looking for. That question is part of the larger program of helping the participants recognize the vast scope of Jewish – [modifier] possibilities. Jewish-food, Jewish-mysticism, Jewish- art, Jewish-military history, Jewish-sexuality, Jewish-architecture, Jewish-jurisprudence to name a very few. Further, in almost all cases the word Israeli can precede the hyphen and can serve in places where ‘Jewish’ would be awkward. Israeli-club scene, Israeli-bikini designers, Israeli-geography, etc …

On our trips we’ve challenged our participants to find the content of their identify. To answer, “What follows their hyphen?” We use the trip and all of its opportunities to open their eyes to the infinite numbers of combinations of positive identities they can choose from. We insist that they answer the question at least once to fill in the blank of the content of their identity.

Another important question that Joel asked, ‘how do we train the staff?’ His suggestion of a conference is an excellent one but is likely cost-prohibitive and inconvenient for volunteer staff people who have day jobs. I’d suggest a series of webinars on the various aspects of Jewish identity that can be taught on the trips. Each webinar would be on a topic that will be encountered on the trip – Hebrew language for example. The participants would learn about Hebrew, its history and its revival. How it is used in modern Israel and how it can be taught about on the trip. Each webinar would include practical moments and most importantly would conclude with an explanation of the possibilities for follow up. For example: when participants return to North America where can they learn Hebrew? Another example: The Israeli fashion industry. How did it develop? What successes have there been? Where can it be encountered in North America? What opportunities are there for internships or hiring? Where can you study fashion in Israel?

These are just two examples of the infinite possibilities. Another training method: interactive web-based modules that would require check-ins and game-like tests that would prove the potential staff has ‘studied’ and ‘mastered’ the material. These modules would also be open to participants.

I hope we can continue to improve the quality and quantity of Taglit-Birthright Israel experiences. I’m sure that there are great minds working on these questions and hope that this may bring some new light.

Original post here - http://ejewishphilanthropy.com/positive-identity-creation-a-response-to-joel-frankel-jewishjudaism-as-a-modifier/

Rabbi Mordechai Rackover is the associate university chaplain for the Jewish community of Brown University and the Rabbi of the Brown RISD Hillel Foundation. He can be reached at rabbi@brown.edu or on Twitter @mrackover