Topic: Nigel

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. […]

The teaching that is speaking to me most deeply, these days, is the one about the two pockets – that we each should walk around with two pieces of paper in our pockets. In one pocket: “for me the world was created” And in the other: “I am dust, and will return to dust…” One of them is about power and impact; the other is about our deep insignificance. One of them reminds us of the goodness in the world; the other is about its darkness. They speak to me so deeply because it feels as if both are true, and are somehow becoming ever more true with each passing day. From one pocket: our great-grandparents could hardly dream of the peace, freedom, affluence, and choice that so many of us take for granted each day. They couldn’t have imagined the medicines that heal us or the technologies that enable us to learn or to stay connected. They didn’t expect to see three Jews on the US Supreme Court, or Ivy League schools that are a quarter Jewish, or a State of Israel that is prosperous, diverse, culturally vibrant, and militarily strong. Yet those of us who are able to […]

Halloween wasn’t really a thing when I was a kid in England; we had Guy Fawkes Night, five days later. So my first Halloween was when I was a Junior Year Abroad student at Georgetown, where it was a big deal, both on campus and in the neighborhood. We began Halloween by going to Dahlgren Chapel for a Hallow’s Eve Mass, led by Father Healy, z”l, the President of the University. Dahlgren Chapel is small and dark, an atmospheric place, and famous as the location of a key scene in The Exorcist. For Halloween it was packed. Students were dressed up, had already started drinking, and were planning to go out and hit the bars in Georgetown afterwards. It was quite a scene. It was to this audience, and to considerable laughter, that Father Healy began: “I’m so glad that you are all so committed to the celebration of All Hallow’s Eve…” He went on: “Hallow’s Eve is about celebrating the holiness in each of us; the holiness in our friends, the holiness in our fellow students, the holiness in our teachers…” And already the atmosphere had shifted, and the congregation was settling into quiet, and one could feel people […]

This is a brief note to thank you for your support during this year that’s gone by, and to wish you and your family well in the coming year. It has been a hard and complicated year for the world and for the Jewish people, and yet Sunday’s Climate March here in New York summed up what our response to challenge can be and should be: bringing people together with determination, idealism, and a shared commitment to a better future for everyone. For Hazon this has been a remarkable year. We completed the merger between Hazon and Isabella Freedman. We delivered more than 26,000 person-days of immersive programs – and we published the JOFEE Report, substantiating the human impact of many of those programs. (Plus we added a vitally needed new acronym to the American Jewish lexicon: it stands for “Jewish Outdoor, Food & Environmental Education.”) Jewish Food Festivals are sprouting around the country. With the support of the Leichtag Foundation we hired our first staffer in southern California. We’ve hired a wonderful new director for Teva, and we continue to deepen and broaden our work in Boulder, Denver, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. We’ve had a further joyful crop of […]

Yesterday Lord Sacks, in a teaching for the Wexner Foundation on teshuvah, described Jewish tradition as “a religion of realistic hope.” I was struck by this phrase and wondered if he had used it before. He seems not to have done; but Rabbi Levi Olan (rabbi-ing with a different theology in a rather different time and place) used it as the title of his commencement address at HUC-JIR in 1953. I doubt very much that Rabbi Sacks was quoting Rabbi Olan; rather they were each drawing on their own understanding of our shared tradition. It is a beautiful, accurate, and useful phrase, and never more relevant than at the remarkable time in which we now find ourselves. Yesterday Scotland voted to remain part of the United Kingdom. That signifies realistic hope on the part of the Scottish people – trusting that significant constitutional and thus existential change will be possible, without having to blow up a centuries-old union. I pray that in the coming year such peaceful evolution will be possible in other parts of the world where the boundaries of legal border and personal identity do not cleanly coincide – not only in Canada or Spain, for instance, but […]