how to subscribe

There have been several requests to be updated regularly when I post to the blog. Thus, I have created a mailing list, which I will notify when there is a new posting. For instructions on being added to the mailing list, click the SUBSCRIBE link in the left sidebar.

Holy Limericks, continued (#2)

I wrote a second in my series of limericks last week. It was inspired by the words of Cantor Eli Schleifer, head of the School of Sacred Music here at HUC Jerusalem. During services one morning, he employed a fitting musical metaphor to express the relationship between innovation and tradition, and the value of both:

The psalmist says: "Sing a new song";
And we do, for it makes us belong.
This can cause some anxiety,
Even verge on impiety.
But forgetting the old -- that's what's wrong.

on the limits of leadership...

Tonight I leave for my first Wexner Graduate Fellowship institute, which means flying from Jerusalem tonight (through Newark) to Stowe, Vermont. We'll spend five days in the mountains together, praying, learning, thinking, arguing, and building community (which is really just another way of saying the first four things, right?).

This posting is short because I haven't quite finished packing.... But please take a moment to read the d'var Torah I am giving on Monday morning to my class (XVIII) of Wexner fellows.

Drop me a line and let me know what you think, too -- these things should always be the beginning of a conversation, not the end!

Shabbat shalom and shavua tov,
David

Alien grief?

Tisha B'Av begins tonight, when we mourn and mark the destruction of the Temple. In fact, the first nine days of Av are to be a mourning period; many Jews refrain from eating meat and from celebrations of any kind during this period.

This is complicated for me for a few reasons, one descriptive and two normative:

1) I grew up with no real understanding of Tisha B'Av. We didn't observe it in my synagogue or family, and it has never been a part of my Jewish identity.

2) I cannot see the destruction of the Temple as an unmitigated tragedy. It is, in some sense, a "mixed curse". For it was that destruction that allowed (facilitated, even?) the transformation of Judaism into a rabbinic religion that could flourish in the Diaspora. I am a product of this diaspora Judaism. Hence, my American Jewish experience and identity is thanks to, traced back far enough, the destruction of the Temple.

3) I do not yearn for the rebuilding of the Temple and the return to Temple worship practices.

Quite insightfully, a classmate of mine suggested last night that mourning for something does not necessarily imply yearning for its return. Mourning, rather, involves learning to live with loss. On that reading, the past 2000ish years of Jewish life would seem to attest to a successful mourning process, i.e. learning to live with the loss of the Temple.

Perhaps it is appropriate on Tisha B'Av to mourn the loss of a naive conception of a perfect Israel. The early Zionists dreamed of a land without a people for a people without a land, an Israel living in harmony with her neighbors, an Israel where discrimination and oppression were buried with the ashes of the Holocaust. It is (well past) time to mourn for that dream -- not to yearn for its complete return -- and in mourning to prepare ourselves to live with and address reality.


p.s. Some pictures in the Old City, including a day at the Temple Mount

Holy Limericks

In the early 17th Century, John Donne wrote a cycle of 19 Holy Sonnets (which I cannot recommend highly enough!) about his relationship to God, Christianity, and the world. Desiring to emulate his pious poetic project (though about Judaism, of course, in my case), but finding the sonnet too lengthy and inaccessible for our (post)modern sensibilities, I am undertaking to create a cycle of Holy Limericks: bite-size doses of religious pith. Here is the first, which came to me in the wake of a stimulating class discussion about the relationship between autonomy, obligation, law, Torah, mitzvot, and community.

If your sense of self-rule should feel frozen,
And the fence around Torah should close in;
If you find that the Law
Should get stuck in your craw,
Then consider: you choose to be Chosen.