Today I helped bring four people into the covenant and holy congregation of Israel.

Two were a couple, Bill and Barb, Bill in his 70s, Barb in her 60s, who are very active members in the synagogue, and very keen on learning and increasing their knowledge and observance, and who will be marrying in a halachic wedding on their 18th secular wedding anniversary in December.

One, Bob, an octogenarian career crop duster who has been trying to convert for just about 20 years. He doesn’t see or hear well, he is in failing health, and was terrified that he would die before he was allowed to convert. He cried when we told him we’d unanimously agreed that he should proceed to the mikveh.

The last, James, is a young man in his early thirties who began his learning on Aish.com and then called my friend Rabbi Jacobson and asked if she would please deprogram him. He is the son of a Japanese father and a half(?) Native-American mother, and is extremely eager and enthusiastic about his journey into Jewish observance. I felt compelled to caution him against being judgmental of other Jews who are less than perfect or still searching in their observance. I explained that Jewish observance is like a ladder, and we are all at different places on that ladder at different points in our lives for different reasons. Since no one is at the top, the goal is to always be ascending in holiness. I warned him to have some humility on that account, and he affirmed that he would work on that.

I’ve been joking for the past week that while in Oklahoma I was going to be “Making Jews.” I say such things because I think that it is important to have a sense of humor about things, especially religion. It is good grounding sometimes (maybe even often) to take some healthy pot-shots at oneself and the things one holds dear. But now I’m going to be serious:

I did not make any Jews today. My friends, Dina and Abby (both rabbis) who served with me on the beit din today did not make any Jews today. The mohel who performed the hatafat dam brit, and the shomrim who witnessed the immersions in the mikveh did not make any Jews today. Rabbi Jacobson who spent the past year or so teaching and meeting with these four people regularly, did not make any Jews today. Today, four Jews were brought into the covenant and holy congregation of Israel by The Kadosh Baruch Hu, HaShem the Holy One Blessed is God, and I was extremely blessed to have been a part of this holy process. I went into that space with no idea what I was going to ask these people when they sat before us, and as I listened to them speak, the words came to me out of nowhere. I knew what I needed these people to articulate to make sure we were all certain we knew what we were doing and where we were going and that this was the right thing. I prayed with all of my might today that I should have the willingness to do God’s will, and not to be seduced by my own willfulness, and that I should have the humility to push my ego aside and listen to the voice and will of my God, and do what God asked of me. I prayed this afternoon that the four Jews whose births I witnessed today should be guided by God in their paths to increased holiness and observance, that they should be a credit to the Jewish people, to our God, and that they should always strive to do God’s commandments and to be a source of light unto our people, the nations, and the world.

Today I felt like a holy vessel. Today I felt very very small. Today I felt immeasurably blessed.

Baruch Hashem, amen, v’amen.

Rabbi Rami posed these questions. Good blog fodder, I figured.

1. Do you think your faith is the one true faith, or do you believe that there are many paths to Truth?

I believe that Judaism is the True Faith for Jews. For a whole variety of reasons, some cultural and historical, and some fuzzily metaphysical. I believe that Judaism points to deeper universal objective truths, but there are perhaps infinite ways of obtaining and living by that truth. Furthermore, I do not think that any faith or religious system guarantees living a Godly or “Truthy” life. It is up to the individual to heed the message embedded in their faith/moral/ethical/philosophical system.

2. If your faith has a Holy Book, what makes it holy? How do you know your book is true? Are the Holy Books of other religions as holy as your own? If not, why not?

Our Holy books are holy because they are an expression of God’s will and Truth, and reveal a face of God. I know that this is true because every text contains such potential truth, including King Lear and Spiderman. Some texts and textual commentaries are more self-aware than others and reveal their messages more or less explicitly than others and from within their varying cultural and temporal contexts. Are other books as holy as those of my religion? Perhaps, maybe even probably. But not to me. Why? Cause I’m a Jew, silly.

3. As a person of faith, what is your obligation to all the other peoples in the world?

My obligations as a person of faith boil down, I believe, to three basic principles: Love God. Love my neighbor. Pursue justice. These all come down to recognizing the ultimate THOU, and recognizing the spark of THOU in every YOU, thus recognizing the “I” in every YOU, which makes my obligation to other people and other peoples, in principle, the same as my obligation to myself. Practically, however, this of course doesn’t work out, because if I do not put myself first, I lose my means by which to be of service to others. Same, I think, goes for peoplehood. It is our place as a people, especially Jews who are meant to be “A light unto the nations” to be of service not only to God but to the peoples of the world. But there is a need to care for our own peoplehood as a prerequisite to caring, as a people, for other peoples. Service starts at home, but must ultimately be to the end of reaching beyond the self.

4. When they die, what happens to those who do not accept your faith?

How am I supposed to know? I don’t even know what happens to those OF my faith when we die!

5. When your theology disagrees with scientific fact and proven theory (theory as understood in scientific circles not everyday speech), do you adapt to science, or insist science adapt to your theology?

My theology doesn’t disagree with scientific fact or proven theory. Never really has.

6. Why do you believe what you believe about God, creation, humanity, and the afterlife?

Oh boy… that’s a big and complex question. Problem with answering this question is that it involves some terms that need defining, like “believe” “God” “Creation” etc. The simple answer is that my belief system is a narrative view of reality, and that the narrative is one of my People and religion, and therefore an appropriate one for me to hold by. It is not my only narrative, as I am a multifaceted person, as are we all, but it is a lens through which I view everything and which informs every aspect of my life. Also I find the Jewish narrative to be one of exceptional complexity and beauty.

I suspect the next time I write here it will involve some defining of terms.

Ok, so I have something Jewish to write about. Or, you know, semi-Jewish. Or not Jewish… Jewish related. Depending on how you define what is or is not “Jewish.” I’m talking about the Clinton-Mezvinsky wedding. This was the subject of a d’var Torah I gave last week at my shul. Before I begin, let me reiterate the basics of how I think about and practice my religion:

I am Jewish. I hold by The Conservative Movement of Judaism, as I understand it, because it it what makes sense to me. I also happen to have been raised in this Movement, but my practice and philosophy have changed since I was a child and are currently quite different from that of my parents. I believe that Jewish law, halacha, is binding upon each individual Jew. I believe that a Jew, halachically speaking, is someone whose mother is halachically Jewish at the time of their birth, or who undergoes a kosher conversion. I believe that, since it is against Jewish law for a Jew to marry a non-Jew, it is obligatory upon Jews not to do so, and not to facilitate such an occurrence.

I also believe that we are commanded to love all Jews, even those who do not uphold or adhere to the law. Further, I believe that we are commanded to love all people, and that to be a “Light Unto The Nations,” a “Holy Nation,” a “Nation of Priests” necessarily entails our living and demonstrating three principles above all: Love God. Love your neighbor. Pursue justice.

So now, we come to a question of humility. Humility is a Jewish value. It is high praise indeed to be referred to in Judaism as a humble person. It is said that even God practices humility (nice midrash, Breishit Rabbah 1:12 that I learned from my Rav, Shmuel Lewis). Humility, I believe, is an essential quality in anyone who hopes to work with people in a religious capacity. In the field of “doing God’s work,” one must always be cognizant of where ego creeps in and blinds us to the needs of our employers, God, and the People. I try to remind myself daily of how little I know, and that I must remain teachable. I must remember that my job is to trust in God and God’s will for me and for the world, and to remember that I do not have all of the answers.

On the one hand, my humility in my religion very often means trusting in the Tradition, setting aside my personal biases in favor of the Law and the Text and the Rabbis, learning and DOING what I can, while being patient about understanding. The commandments are not contingent upon my being satisfied with their reasons, and often I must first do the practice in order for the Truth to come to me, to realize where the value lies in something that might initially seem distasteful to me… realizing why I should adhere to a law that is particularly inconvenient, why the seemingly ridiculous minutiae of Shabbat observance makes sense, what makes texts which, on the surface, are contradictory, fit together with a little Midrash and why that process is good, and how it can be understood as The Word Of God… my holding by the binding nature of Jewish law is an exercise in humility for me. It is my challenge to the comfortable easy “well this is how I feel and this is what I want” attitude which is so seductive in our society. It is acknowledging that God has a will that supersedes my own, that what *feels* right is not always what *is* right, that sometimes you cannot understand until you get down to the *doing.*

Of course, the other side of this coin is that everything I stated above constitutes a belief system… a belief system to which I strongly adhere. On the inside, it is a practice of humility. From the outside though, it may seem like an arrogant certainty. I am studying to be a rabbi. A rabbi is a teacher. In order to teach something, you must have something to teach. We no longer have prophets, it is the rabbis who carry the prophetic message to the people. I have been already blessed with the opportunity to do more study of Judaism and Jewish law than your average Conservative Jew can even dream of… and I’ve only been at it seriously for 3 years, and I have another 5 to go at least before, God willing, I am ordained. I have some knowledge… I know some things that they don’t.

Marc Mezvinsky, a Jew, has married Chelsea Clinton, a non-Jew. They were married in an interfaith ceremony where clergy from two different religions, a Reform rabbi and a Methodist minister, co-officiated. This is something that Jewish law forbids. For a person who doesn’t believe that Jewish law is binding, they’re likely not going to care about that… though even the Reform Movement’s main Rabbinic body, the CCAR, advises their clergy not to co-officiate with non-Jewish clergy in performing marriages. For someone like me, who does believe that Jewish law is binding, I have to look at this marriage, and I have to say that it is forbidden, I believe, by God’s law for us, the Children of Israel, the Jews.

So. Love God. Love your neighbor. Pursue justice. Above all. Do I condemn Jews who do not adhere to Jewish law? Nobody is a perfect adherent to Jewish law, even the most observant. Nobody knows everything about Jewish law. Not everybody has been given sufficient reason in their life to believe that Jewish law is binding. This is reality. This is understanding that other people live different lives. This is knowing that I don’t walk in other people’s shoes, have their experiences, fully understand their thought processes.

This is not me congratulating myself on how tolerant and accepting and open-minded I am… this is rather something of which I have to constantly remind myself. When you take the time to study very intensely in Yeshiva, and then you come back to the real world, it is very easy to be become very intolerant. I know I was after my first year of study. When I first stepped into the Beit Midrash of The Yeshiva, one of my earliest lessons was one of humility: the realization of just how little I knew, and how much there was to learn. Stepping out after a year and coming back to visit home and my community, that humility was flipped on its head. Here I was, only a year of study, knowing that if I studied nonstop for the rest of my life I would still not know all there was to know, even all I wanted to know about my religion. And here I was suddenly thrown back into an environment where the people around me didn’t have even that… and didn’t care. Not only didn’t they have the learning, not only didn’t they know, they had NO IDEA even what it was they didn’t know. And it didn’t even matter to them. It tore me apart inside. I didn’t know how to handle this new reality, how to live in such a community after spending a year with a learning community, a group of people who learned and grew Jewishly alongside me, who helped each other along in coming to understand the vast richness of our tradition. Suddenly I was in a barren soulless wasteland. How was I to cope?

I have since calmed down. I have come to be gentler with others and with myself, trying to teach wherever the opportunity arises for me to do so, if it is wanted and welcomed. I have worked hard to get better at accepting people where they are and celebrating what they, what we have rather than lamenting what they, and I, do not. All that said, I am not willing to do or say certain things.

I am not willing to disregard Jewish law, to say that it is unimportant, ever.
I am not willing to say that I think someone is living in accordance with Jewish law when I truly believe that they are not, based on my learning.
I am not willing to perform an action that I believe to be in violation of Jewish law for the sake of pluralism.
I am not willing to say directly that it is ok for a Jewish person to violate Jewish law. What I will say is that Jewish observance is a journey that we all travel at our own pace according to our own abilities. The best any of us can do is to be as honest with ourselves and with God as we possibly can, and to try our best to do what we hear as God’s will. If we live with honesty and integrity, we are on a path of holiness, and God always loves us no matter what.

There are multiple legitimate interpretations of halacha, and what one person may hold as halachic another may hold as a violation. That is nothing new. That is one thing. Sometimes, some people, for some reason, are compelled to violate halacha. Sometimes it is out of ignorance, sometimes it is out of a personal necessity. That is another thing. It’s not for me to judge them morally. I do not believe it makes someone a “bad Jew.” I do not believe that it makes God love any of us any less. But it doesn’t mean that the halacha is in accordance with whatever they do. It doesn’t mean that the halacha goes away.

I have my understanding of what my religion dictates. That understanding is not my own invention. It is based on the learning I have been blessed to receive from many wonderful teachers, who in turn learned from their teachers, and so on back until God only knows how long ago. I work very hard at using the language of humility when speaking of my religion, but I also have to take a stand at some point and admit that there is a limit to the boundaries of Judaism. In many ways Judaism is about boundaries, about distinctions. Many call this exclusivism, tribalism, elitism. Arrogance. That may be true in some ways, to some people, and in the way some Jews practice and speak of the faith and the peoplehood. Personally, I believe it is about something else… about having the humility to admit that you don’t understand everything, that those who came before had wisdom worth listening to, and that we do dishonor to ourselves and to our predecessors by forgetting who we are and where we came from.

Sometimes I feel as though my even having any sort of belief or boundary is grounds to be accused of arrogance and small-mindedness. But if (future) clergy can’t have beliefs and faith and principles, then where have we gotten ourselves to?

My good friend Rabbi Josh Gutoff wrote a lovely insightful post about Tisha B’Av over at his blog frost and clouds.

We moderns think and speak about historical time, understanding the difference between “then” and “now”; modernity itself is a product of the development of what we call history. And so the questions that we ask about an event are, “What were its causes?” “What were its effects?” and most important, “Did it really happen then?” The Rabbis, though, trafficked in sacred time, mythic time, for which the essential question was not whether something happened once, but whether it was eternally true.

In terms of understanding the literal physical destruction, the pshat of the day as it were, even if one doesn’t wish for the restoration of sacrifices, there is value in remembering and mourning. Last year at camp, I was a yahadut teacher with a class of 4th graders, most of whom had never heard of Tisha B’Av, like me at their age. I suspected that many of their parents, if they thought about it at all, didn’t observe because they don’t believe in rebuilding the physical Temple, or a return to animal sacrifice.

In order to teach about Tisha B’Av, I overturned the table and benches in our mirpeset-classroom, sat on the floor with the children, and recounted to them what my day was like on September 11th, 2001. Metaphor and symbolism would have been, if not lost on them, probably forgotten forthwith. But these children, who have grown up their whole lives hearing about “September 11th” as this great modern tragedy of which they have no memory, will not soon forget a personal story of what it is like to live in a community as it experiences a great destruction.

On the drash front, I had a conversation with a friend last night, who objects to the idea of fast days other than Yom Kippur on the grounds that they constitute a mythologizing of history which is antithetical to what he believes to be the true purpose of Judaism, that the Temple should not be viewed as a physical historical object that can or should be rebuilt, but that the Temple represents and, in fact is, per se, the unification of heaven and earth. It is entirely metaphorical, and to mourn for, and seek the rebuilding of, the physical Temple is a perversion.

I can appreciate and take this on as well. As a student of Kabbalah, it makes perfect sense to me. The day, however, does not lose its value because it is represented by most as being about a solid place and time in history. It is precisely the rabbis poetic understanding of history to which Rav Josh refers which redeems the day for one who believes as my friend does. The Rabbis, as he notes, do not engage the question of linear historical geo-political narrative to understand the destruction and its meaning. Rather, they tell stories with essential Truth in them to explain what brings about tragedy and destruction. What are the stories that they tell? Are they about the cruelty or injustice of the Roman occupation? Are they about empire building or failed revolutions? No. They are about senseless hatred between people. Sinat Chinam.

This is the essential point, this is the eternal truth, the lesson, of Tisha B’Av. In a sense, the historical destruction is a convenient event upon which to hang a day of observance which has a much more important center. It is not a coincidence that this is one of only two major 25-hour fasts in our calendar- Today should be a day of introspection, like Yom Kippur. However, while on Yom Kippur we focus on sins, primarily wrong actions, on this day we should look even deeper, into our cores, into how we think about each person we encounter.

Whether we are talking physical-literal, or transcendent-metaphorical, it is hatred that brings about destruction. Lack of love, blindness to the Other, to the Self, the I, in each individual, that makes life tragic. It is blindness to the transcendent Truths, to Martin Buber’s model of human relationship, which causes God to hide God’s face from us, leaving us broken and abandoned and starving. When it’s framed in these terms, then you have the metaphor right there in the tradition: the Temple is destroyed because of Sinat Chinam. Tisha B’Av is the day on which we remember what happens when we forget how to love. And so we fast and mourn, and we remember that we must love each other… because lack of love brings about destruction, heartbreak, unbearable pain.

Baseless hatred is the root of all human evil and destruction. Baseless hatred is the root of cruelty and suffering. Baseless hatred is a cycle that can be stopped only when a person makes a decision to stop it. Tisha B’Av is therefore not about a building that was destroyed, a ritual practice that was ended, even a land that was lost or lives that were extinguished. Tisha B’Av is, and must be, about love.

One might say that this should be a day for baseless love to counter baseless hatred. The problem with this thought is that there is no such thing as baseless love. Not for us, anyway. For us, only hatred can be baseless. We are each created in the Divine Image. Each of us owes each other love and kindness. We have every reason to love one another, and no reason to hate. Only God can give baseless love. Only God owes us nothing and gives it anyway.

This is my take, for this year, on what Tisha B’Av is meant to teach us. I wish an easy and meaningful fast to all who do so, and to everyone that all of your contemplations be fruitful.

This is a post I started writing years ago. It is again relevant to my current theological work, so I’m going to try to finish it.

After I wrote about 1, 0, ∞ in response to something Getzel said about Buddhism, I was talking to Jason and he said, basically:

“Yeah that’s great. Only that’s not what one means.”

How upsetting.

“What are you talking about?”

“Oh, you’ve got it right with zero and infinity. But one doesn’t fit.”

“But… sure it does…” but I was scrambling to figure out how I could prove this.

“No, because one implies other. It implies a distinction from something else. It’s not all encompassing unity, its unity of something in the face of something else.”

Then he had to go. And I was left to ponder whether I’d made a horrible (in my mind) mistake and should give up amateur philosophizing altogether and go be a farmer somewhere.

Today I read something that brought me back to the question and gives me new confidence that I might be in someway not incorrect about my understanding of the essential sameness of One, Zero and Infinity. I was reading the 4th installment of a series of lessons on daily prayers, Pray and Mean It written by Cantor Jack Chomsky of Congregation Tifereth Israel of Columbus Ohio. This installment was on the Aleinu prayer in which we, before leaving our prayer service and going out into the world, acknowledge our obligation and renew our commitment to pay homage to HaKadosh Boruch Hu, give thanks for and acknowledgment to our special relationship with The Creator, and express a hope that one day all peoples will be united in acknowledgment of The One True God. Lots of people have moral issues with the content of this prayer. I am not one of them… and I am not going to go into that right now. But the last line, which has always struck me as extraordinarily significant, struck me particularly sharply on this occasion:

“Bayom HaHu Yihieh Adonai Echad uShemo Echad”

“On that day, God will be One and God’s Name will be One.”

In this vision, on the day when everyone unites together in praise of Adonai, then the words that we say in the Shema, that God is One, will actually be true. In True Unity, when everything, everything is united, you have a ONE that is not as distinct from another. The true Echad, the ONEness of God is the ONEness of everything, ein od… there is nothing else.

To my mind, this is evokes Spinoza. As I understand it, Spinoza’s vision of God was the unity of everything, the universe itself as a unified conscious entity. This is God. Of course, Spinoza is condemned by many in the Jewish world as a pantheist and therefore an atheist. If everything is God, then nothing is God. This objection is similar to Jason’s desire to distinguish 1 from 0 and ∞, which is perhaps the root of a deep problem people have with theology. There is a strong desire to separate God from not-God, to be able to hold up God and point and identify “This, and not that, is God.” This is reflected in attitudes of both theists and non-theists alike. For theists, they are comforted by the idea of God as a discrete being. For non-theists, they are comforted by the notion that all theists are invested in this idea of a discrete being, Whose existence they can easily deny. The imaginary invisible friend named God which may just as well be the Our Noodly Master, The Flying Spaghetti Monster.

My view is a bit different from Spinoza’s, or at least differently focused. I’m less concerned with the entirety of the natural world or universe, and more concerned with the conscious aspect, the self-regarding existence part. The macro-scale principle of Being contemplating Itself, of which I believe we, as humans, are a microcosmic reflection. My sense is that the experience which we call God originates in something akin to the unification of all consciousness of SELF, which is comprised of the collective consciousness of humanity and something beyond that, some larger intentionality, pattern-maker, dot-connector, that is the consciousness of the universe.

There is a more detailed and fleshed out version of this theological vision in the works, which also includes insights into the practical elements of religion and prayer, and why this theology isn’t necessarily cold, intellectual and emotionless when approached properly… but this is not the space for it. Not yet.

Coming back to 1, to unity, this 1 doesn’t have to be distinct from, in the face of, anything else. You could try to say that it is the conscious as distinct from the non-conscious, but the distinction is irrelevant. What the 1 here signifies, rather than a demarkation, is the melding of seemingly distinct elements into a unified whole… a whole that is infinite, and at the same time empty and clear. It is SELF and it is lack of self. Boundaryless connection, radical honesty, self seeing self with nothing in the way.

This is actually going somewhere, don’t worry.

I’ve been wanting to post about this here for a while… might as well use the momentum.

I remember a Saturday afternoon in Jerusalem last year spent with my friend Paul (Yankele) from Yeshiva. We sat in the living room of some classmates and talked for hours. The subject of much of the conversation was how much we had come to like Shabbat.

Here’s the thing about Shabbat for a halachically observant Jew… it comes. And you have to let go of everything. You simply have to. It is required. You put down your phone, you put away your money, you put on nice clothes, light candles, walk to shul, and you can’t worry. Whatever you might be worried about, there’s nothing that you can do about it for the next 25 hours. All you can do for right now is look around you, breathe in and breathe out, praise God, eat, rest, laugh, hug, talk, study… Shabbat forces you to take a break. It gives you an excuse to be with people, to not stray too far. You have to be where you are. Shabbat forces you to appreciate the world as it is at this moment.

On Shabbat, we don’t change things. It is not our place. This is the day we let go and leave everything up to Not Us.

There are a lot of laws of Shabbat observance, mostly about what one is not allowed to do. There is a set of laws about what is called muktze, dealing with the category of things that one is not allowed to touch or handle on Shabbat. You are not supposed to handle anything on Shabbat that doesn’t have a legitimate Shabbat use. You are also not supposed to pick any plants, anything attached to the ground. You are not supposed to write. You are not supposed to engage in commerce or touch money, or even discuss commerce. Though there is some debate about this, most accept that you are not supposed to use electricity on Shabbat. You are not supposed to make fire or cook.

A lot of people have a problem with these laws. They see these laws, they see the whole thing, as unnecessarily restrictive, bothersome and annoying, and not conducive to what they regard as “rest,” which they equate with enjoyment. I didn’t get it either until about the middle of my first year in Yeshiva. I was walking to shul Friday evening. It was not yet Shabbat but I had davened Mincha already and lit my candles and consciously accepted shabbat early. I was walking down Derech Beit Lechem and all of Jerusalem smelled like honeysuckle. I love honeysuckle. I love the smell, and the flowers are beautiful, and they remind me of the happy parts of my childhood. As I passed a honeysuckle bush, I had an urge to pick one. But I couldn’t. Because it was Shabbat (for me) already and you don’t pick things on shabbat. And so I stepped back, and I looked. And it was so beautiful.

And suddenly everything was so beautiful. I stepped back and I saw a vision of the world on Shabbat… a world where you don’t touch the pictures. You don’t mess with it, you just live in it. That is what Shabbat is. It’s the day on which you just live, and you don’t touch the things that you don’t need to just live. Why touch them if they are just going to take you out of the space? Why carry your phone if it will just tempt you to try to control things? Why carry money if it will lead you to do business, or to even think about business, and worry about how much you can or cannot acquire? It is healthy, I would say even necessary, to have a day where you let go of the desire to control the world, to make marks and changes, to have an impact. Six days out of the week you have for that. One day, you can just let it go. One day you can reassess your place in the grand scheme and realize that the world won’t end if you don’t have your cellphone.

Shabbat is about acceptance. And that is rest in a very true sense.

The kids I think of as my baby cousins are the ones who, about 15 years ago I realized, didn’t know who Mr. Hooper was. At 28 and a half years old, it is getting more and more difficult to deny the fact that I am, in fact, an adult… maybe even a grownup. Any my baby cousins… well, they are clearly no longer babies. They are in high school and college and even graduated, some of them. And they now inhabit many of the same worlds of culture and media as do I. They’ve caught up with the online world I’ve watched develop through my own adolescence and young adulthood, and I’m encountering them on Facebook and Twitter, giving me a window into their lives, and them a window into mine, that was once screened from mutual view by the venetian blinds of age discrepancy. Now the blinds are open, which leaves me pondering a glaring question about my own status as a member of the first wave of the Internet Age.

We all remember when our parents and even *gasp* our grandparents started to figure out email and AIM and slowly started to trickle onto Facebook. Many of us felt threatened, invaded, even a bit disgusted at the prospect of sharing online space with the generations above us. We were embarrassed by their clumsy mass-emails, forwarded jokes, tactless comments, as they tested the waters of this new pool we’d grown up splashing about in. Even for those of us whose parents were part of the development of the technologies we used with such dexterity, it was our generation that made a culture of the internet, who made it a home. Our parents’ halting forays into this world seemed child-like to us as we are reminded of our first clumsy websites written in awkward HTML with blinking text and primitive clipart at age 13 or so.

So for my 12-year-old cousin Sam, my 18-year-old cousin Daniel, or even my 22-year-old cousin Rebecca, what is it that they see when they notice a friend request from their older cousin Gella? How do they experience my comments on their statuses and pictures? Do they have the same awkward feeling we had when Mom or Dad or Uncle Paul wanted to be our internet buddies? Do they cringe at our ability to see the pictures of where they’ve been, what they’ve done and with whom, with whom they are currently in a relationship, the sort of language they use with their friends? Are we, the former young and hip internet generation the old fogeys of this world already?

I can’t help but ponder the differences in how we developed with the internet, we and the internet growing up together like classmates, learning as we went. We who started with Bulletin Boards and IRC and Prodigy and listservs, we who remember the start of AOL, we who learned to type on Apple IIe computers in elementary school… whereas these kids today, they are coming into maturity a world in which the Internet is already grown up and established. They learned URL along with ABC. And whereas we grew up in an Internet of which our parents were largely ignorant, they are growing up in an Internet which their parents have learned to regard, to use, and to try to monitor. It’s a different world for them, but I’m troubled by the question of how different.

When I first saw my kid cousins had gotten themselves Facebook accounts, I must admit, I had mixed feelings. A combination of “Oh, isn’t that cute!” and “They’re growing up so fast!” and “I’d better watch what I say” and, I’ll confess, a measure of the same sense of invasion that I felt when Mom figured out how to create her own profile. I find myself now, somewhat pathetically, wondering if I am the embarrassment to Sam that Grandma was to me when she sent that first IM, formatted like a letter, opened and sealed with salutations “Dear Gella” and “Love Grandma.” We are not clumsy, we know what we are doing. But do we know better or not as well as the young’uns now joining our ranks?

I have no answers.

So here I am.

What does that mean?

Remember when I was 15 (maybe you don’t, but I do) and I first had that crazy thought that maybe I wanted to go to rabbinical school? Remember how the second I began to show an interest in Judaism, people started to assume, without my saying anything, that I was headed for rabbinical school? Remember how I came to a realization then that this was precisely what was creating the oft-lamented gap between the laity and the rabbinate, that as soon as a young person shows interest they are pushed towards the rabbinate? Remember how much it pissed me off, and how as a result I became adamant that I would not go to rabbinical school, that I would start a counter-trend and remain part of the laity? Remember how that idea failed?

So here I am. In rabbinical school. Failure. Loser. Clergy (to be).

Part of the problem.

Well, I figured out where the other people like me are. Those people around my age who decided that they wanted active and authentic Jewish lives, were ideologically pretty much in line with the Conservative Movement, but frustrated with the lack of like-mindedness of the Jews In The Pews. The ones that succeeded in not going to rabbinical school.

They’re post-denominational. Gosh darn it.

What frustrates me so immensely about post-denominationalism is that this demographic of people, this group of engaged active Jews interested in practice and prayer, these are exactly the people most needed by the Conservative Movement. What is their reason for not wanting to be a part of the Conservative Movement? Not wanting to go to Conservative shuls? They don’t want to be there because the other people like them aren’t there. Where are they? At the post-denominational minyan. Why? Because that’s where they all are.

They seem to see no need to put in the work to revitalize the Movement that fosters the institutions that sustain them. They see the old guard, the leftovers of the suburban age of Conservative Judaism (which I think/hope is ending) and they jump ship thinking that even if they could change something, it’s not their responsibility to do so.

It’s mine. And sometimes I feel very very alone.

There’s a lot to write about but for now I’ll stick with what I was talking about before, which is davenning. Jeremiah asked some really good questions about what kind of work I believe davenning takes and what exactly it is that I mean by davenning in the first place.

We’re actually studying davenning in school… That is to say that we’re learning masechet berachot in Talmud and hilchot tefillah (Mishneh Torah) in Halacha. The question of what actually constitutes davenning has been the focus of much class discussion, especially, it seems, over the past couple of days. The bottom line is that, when you come down to it, as far as Torah obligation is concerned, any praise, supplication, thanks combination communication with God constitutes the fulfillment of the obligation to pray. And, according to the strictest minimal Torah obligation, as long as you do this at least once a day, you’ve done what God commands as far as prayer is concerned. In that sense, it is never appropriate to say that a person does not know how to daven

That said, we as Jews do not live by the Torah. We live by the Rabbis. Unless you are a Karaite, if you are a Jew with any sort of practice tradition, you are a Rabbinic Jew. Our Judaism is entirely based upon how the Rabbis established their interpretations of scripture, and what they established that Jews ought to do practically in order to stay in line with what they understood to be God’s will for us. If it weren’t for these rabbis and sages, there would be no Judaism.

All this is by way of saying that we have forms and structures of davenning, and these forms, one can be good at or need practice with. I’ve met many who are quick to blame these structures for their problems with communal or organized davenning, or to blame the leadership of a particular synagogue or minyan for their boredom or lack of engagement. I’ve also known several who have felt this way initially, before they actually took the time to study and unpack the davenning structure as it exists in rabbinic law, as it is practiced by Jews throughout the world. There is a flow to it, a poetry, a rationale. The structure of our prayer service is carefully crafted to make communication with God easy and meaningful. We’d all like to think that we are artistic and poetic souls, that this need for structure doesn’t apply to us. But until you sit down and learn why the rabbis set the process of prayer as they did, until you take a minute to learn something of the elegance and poetry of the language of the service, and until you make an effort to actually use the structure, and do so uncynically, with a mind open to the possibilty that structure can be a help and not a hinderance, it is little more than hubris to think that you are above the use of the siddur.

There is, of course, more to this than just laziness and hubris. My words above are largely about principles rather than people. When it comes to people, I’m sympathetic. The prayer book is hard. Learning enough Hebrew to really appreciate it is hard. It takes time and work and I know very well the feeling that it is just too much. There is a very real fear and even shame about not knowing how to do what everyone around you seems to be doing effortlessly. That is why, when my rabbinical school class, during orientation, met in the synagogue to talk about prayer, I decided to make it known to the group that I still read a lot of the siddur in English. Everytime I daven I read through a section in Hebrew that I don’t yet have down, and sometimes that means I fall behind the congregation and don’t get to sing all of the out loud parts with everyone else. And sometimes it means that I have to skip over certain psalms or piyyutim. That is ok. Though it may not seem like it, everyone knows that there is a learning curve and no one will begrudge you the time which that learning process takes. And if they do, they’ve got their own problems.

Back to the singing. Singing, as I’ve said, has always been a very importand part of my life and a very significant and joyful experience for me, whether I understood the words I was singing or not. There is something to that. However, I came to a whole new understanding of singing as prayer when I came to a point where I did understand what it was that I was singing, when they were words that I could say meaningfully in prayer, quietly, by myself. At that point, taking those words and singing them out loud with a congregation became real davenning.

More to come, on this subject and others. Meantime, may we all be sealed in the book for a good life full of blessing, joy and meaning.

And for God’s sake be nice to each other!!!

(By the way, I wrote this entire thing on my iPod. How cool is that?)

While I’m restoring my iPod in an attempt to get it to be less annoying, I may as well write something.

There are some great things going on at my shul. Great people with great projects and great innovations and the like. All of the people in charge, I believe, are wonderful and well-intentioned and doing really good things that could be real positive contributions to the synagogue.

And I’m worried.

I’m worried about what I’m hearing from other congregants. I’m worried about certain attitudes I feel brewing around these innovations, approvals and disapprovals and divisions and personality cults etc.

So I’m going to discuss principles rather than people, because I’ve not yet had conversations with the people involved, and I’m trying not to engage in Lashon HaRa here.

I love to sing. I mean I really, really love to sing. There is very little else in this world that makes me happier. Singing is up there with Really Good Learning and sex on my enjoyment meter. So I can easily see why people call the experience of singing “spiritual.” And indeed, I do find that singing and harmonizing and clapping and dancing can enhance my davenning experience.

But there is a difference between a singing experience and a davenning experience. I might feel the same visceral thrill singing Eddie From Ohio or Great Big Sea songs with my friends as I do singing Havu L’Adonai at Kabbalat Shabbat. The difference is in the content. The difference is the singing as the experience itself, versus the singing as an extra set of wings to elevate the davenning.

Getting the content, folks, takes work. I’m really sorry, but there’s no getting around that.

Now, the problem arises when you’ve got two minyanim, one which is, shall we say, “traditional” in the sense that it follows more or less a certain established pattern, shaliach tzibbur, a standard nusach, a sanctuary of a certain size with immobile pews, etc. The second is, shall we say, “neo-Chassidische” in the sense that it intentionally utilizes a smaller, less formal-appearing space, leadership is shared (people stand around the sha”tz and kind of co-sha”tz together), upbeat catchy niggunim are used to encourage harmonizing, hand-clapping and the like, etc.

It is not the existence of these two minyanim that is the problem. On the contrary, I think it is wonderful. When I was living in Jerusalem over the past two years I loved the fact that I had the option to go to a relatively standard traditional Conservative service, a Chassidische Carlebach service, a quasi-egal Carlebach-y service, a standard Orthodox service, a young hip non-denominational egal niggun-heavy service, etc. you get the idea. Options are good. Having the ability, the resources, to switch things up is good. Exposing yourself to different davenning experiences is good. Being able to pray effectively in different communal models is good.

Competition, however, is very very bad.

I wish to reiterate, it seems to me that it is not the leaders who are fostering the competitive attitude I am sensing. It is those who make presumptive statements about one service or the other’s lack of “authenticity” or “neshama” or “kavannah.” It seems to always boil down to something political, something that becomes personal, something that is insulting or imposing or lacking…

Personally, I think there needs to be some re-education going on here. We need to start talking about what it means to daven in a community, as part of a community. Perhaps we need to back it up further and teach people what it means to daven, period.

Davenning is less about you and your experience than you think it is. I think someone needs to be brave enough to say that out loud to our population of middle class American Conservative Jews.