Topic: Newsletters

My Bobbie, as we called her in Manchester when I was a kid, (my father’s mother, z”l) was born on this day – in 1892. How crazy is that? That’s as far distant from today as the year 2138 – a number that seems more like the 4–digit combination for a bike lock than an actual calendar year. 12 days from now I’m going to the New York dinner for the 500th anniversary of my high school. It was founded in 1515 by Hugh Oldham, 94 years before Henry Hudson sailed up the river that now bears his name. Will MGS be around to celebrate the next 500, in the year 2515? And so I wonder: what are the cycles of time that make sense to us, and why? This coming Sunday is the last day in a 7–year cycle of Jewish life that began the evening of Monday September 29th, 2008. Sunday night – Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year – starts a new cycle that ends on the last day of the next shmita year, which will be September 25th, 2022. Thus more so than most years, now is a time for looking back and looking forwards. For […]

I’m here at Isabella Freedman, learning about shmita with a group of Israelis and Americans, and noting in relation to shmita that the next few months has an interesting conjunction of events. Next Thursday sees the release of Laudato Sii (“Praised Be To You”), Pope Francis’s first encyclical. We don’t know what he will say; but the presumption is that he will bring to bear his distinctive voice, and his very considerable moral authority, on two closely related topics: how we treat this planet; and the consequences of how we treat this planet on poor and vulnerable people around the world. And meantime, the shmita year is drawing towards its close; this Rosh Hashanah will mark the start of a new 7-year cycle in Jewish life. When I first started thinking about shmita, in late 2007, I thought that we would spend several years preparing for the shmita year. Only a year or so ago, as the start of the shmita year came clearly into view, did I understand for the first time that the opposite is also true: the shmita year is a time to step back and reflect on the last six years, and to imagine and vision […]

Facilitation 501: How to construct and deliver a panel The Lippman Kanfer Foundation for Living Torah are supporting Hazon (and, I think, some other organizations) in our “oral Torah” project – helping us to harvest some of our accrued wisdom over these last fifteen years. It’s a fascinating process, reflecting on some of the things that we feel we have learned or do well, and starting to codify them. Most of this is focused on framing Jewish tradition: how, and why, and in what ways, we draw connections between Jewish tradition and the world that we live in today. Allowing Jewish tradition out of the small boxes we sometimes place it in. But marinating in Jewish tradition like this – allowing it out, as it were, to roam more widely – also can and should enable us to see aspects of contemporary life with a Jewish sensibility also. And so it is, therefore, that I offer you today a very different kind of “oral Torah.” I have earned it and learned it slowly, by trial and error, over 20 years. It consists in ten rules to help you construct, produce and deliver superb panels at conferences and events. At our […]

On our Israel Ride we often cycle to Ein Karem. But this week, for the first time, I visited Kaima Farm, in Beit Zayit, just on the other side of the hill. It was founded by Yoni Refet Reich, a recovering lawyer who is both practical and inspiring. He and a group of friends have created an organic farm that’s run by at-risk teenagers – kids who have been in trouble in all sorts of ways. The kids are actively involved in all decision-making. They are paid for their work, and they’re expected to be there by 7am in the morning – which they are. Many hundreds of volunteers helped to clear the fields of stones. They have a great record of their participants getting clean and getting back into education. They sell the food they grow in a CSA that generates a significant part of their revenue. Very inspiring. We went to the Heschel Center’s new Sustainability Center in Gilo, a neighborhood of Jerusalem in which locals are steadily cleaning up the neighborhood – quite literally. As they do so they’re making it more sustainable, in all sorts of ways, and they’re significantly strengthening relationships amongst neighbors. I met […]

I think of the period from seder night until Shavuot as a sustained reflection on the nature of freedom, and in particular about traveling from freedom from (want, oppression, slavery) to freedom to (make a difference in the world, exercise choice, restrain oneself in certain ways.) The period from Purim to seder night is thus preparation for this. It’s the work we need to do to be able to start to leave our own enslavement and to think freshly and confidently about our freedom. And the tradition’s great insight – hidden in plain view – is that a significant part of that process is about getting rid of stuff. Certainly this involves removing chametz, traditionally understood – bread and beer and whisky and other fermented products. But the deeper gift of this period – certainly in our time, certainly in the west – is the deeper notion that we have too much stuff of all sorts, and that if we truly want to be free – if we want even to begin to imagine our true freedom – the road to doing so involves getting rid not only of literal chametz but of existential chametz – the superfluities that hinder […]

I continue to be struck that the Jewish community spends a lot of time talking about “leadership” and almost none teaching about what we ought to call “followership.” Part of my understanding of this derives from my reading of a famous line in Pirkei Avot, one of the oldest and most famous parts of the Mishnah: “aseh l’cha rav” – עֲשֵׂה לְךָ רַב – make someone your rabbi; “u’knei l’cha chaver” – וּקְנֵה לְךָ חָבֵר – and acquire a friend; “v’hevei dan et kol ha’adam l’chaf zechut” –  וֶהֱוֵי דָן אֶת כָּל הָאָדָם לְכַף זְכוּת – and give every person the benefit of the doubt. Some damage has been done to Jewish life by simply gluing Jewish teachings to contemporary liberalism. I’m less interested in where Jewish teachings coincide with what I know already than where they dissent. This teaching is for me one of the most striking, one of the most interesting and one of the most useful such instances. The heart of how I read this verbal triptych starts with thinking about the curious use of the verb “k’nei” – קְנֵה – acquire. We would not normally say to someone, “go out and buy yourself a friend:” that […]

Where does secular Jewish culture come from? Can or should we try to preserve it? Someone wrote to me about last week’s email to say that I was disrespecting “the secular Jewish community.” I replied that I didn’t think that I was, and I certainly didn’t intend to; but the correspondence (and, perhaps ironically, one or two things in this week’s parsha) prompted me to reflect on the nature of contemporary Jewish secularity. It’s an important conversation, and one that, for me, began almost thirty years ago at lunch with Felix Posen in a sushi restaurant in London’s West End. Felix thought you could educate for secular Jewish culture. I was – and remain – skeptical. Yet this skepticism is not the end of the story. I want to note that when we talk about “secular Jewish community” we actually mean two quite distinct things. One is at the level of theology – people who “don’t believe in G!d.” The other is really about Jewish culture – a sense of Jewish culture deriving from Jewish tradition but independent of, for instance, synagogue or services. These two kinds of secularity are quite distinct. There are many observant (ie “religious”) Jews who, […]

Beinart at Bloom’s… Sometimes if I’m talking about the Jewish Food Movement I’ll say to an audience “put your hands in the air if you grew up with schmaltz in the fridge.” 90% of anyone 70 or over puts their hands in the air. Then I’ll say, “put your hands up if you have schmaltz in the fridge now.” If there are a hundred people in the audience, maybe two hands might go up. More recently – seeing quizzical faces – I added “put your hands up if you don’t know what schmaltz is.” A bunch of hands go up in the air – all of them amongst the younger people in the room. That’s the backdrop to Peter Beinart’s piece in Ha’Aretz, yesterday, copied here in full, because it sums up so clearly something I’ve been thinking about recently: I realized the other day that my two children, ages nine and six, have never tasted pastrami. In fact, I’m not even sure they know what it is. They’ve never tasted chopped liver or herring either. They’re unfamiliar with Dr. Brown’s Soda, and they feel no particularly affinity for rye bread. Were they growing up in Bismarck, North Dakota, this […]

I have been thinking, recently, about tza’aka – crying out. It is the motif in the Torah for the moment when a person or a people says: enough is enough. After twenty quiescent generations of slavery, it is the tza’aka of the children of Israel which signals that something is about to change – that freedom is about to be within our grasp. And this is not just in the Torah. It was a kind of tza’aka that brought the Civil Rights movement in this country. It was a tza’aka that brought down the Berlin Wall. The Climate Change march in New York just before Rosh Hashanah was a tza’aka, and it helped to nudge the US and other governments in the direction of a substantive climate treaty. And what happened in Paris and in France on Sunday, provoked and inspired by tragedy, was a very glorious moment of tza’aka. Less than four weeks ago I was writing about fissures in our community, partly provoked by having just been in Paris. Here’s what I wrote then. I ended, inter alia, with “May we never need to defend ourselves – but may we have the courage and the confidence to do […]

In the last week I was in England, briefly in Paris, and I reread Amos Elon’s beautiful and tragic The Pity Of It All, his history of the German Jewish community from Moses Mendelsohn to 1933. Then yesterday I was honored to be at one of two White House Chanukah parties, at which two schoolmates – a Jewish Israeli kid and a Muslim Israeli kid – lit Chanukah candles under the supervision of a Californian rabbi for an African American President, child of a Christian and a Muslim, who grew up in Hawaii and, for a while, Indonesia. So I’ve been thinking a lot about the historical context for the moment in which we find ourselves. And I’ve been thinking, in particular, about two larger stories that inform Jewish life, about the extent to which those two stories seem to overlap less and less – and whether there is anything we can or should do about that. The first is the story of fragility – at best. Jewish communities have always been in the minority. There have been “golden ages” – Spain in the early Muslim period; the emancipation; Germany after Mendelsohn. But the golden ages have indeed been evanescent. […]