Hearts and arts
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Tis the season of sinful sweets and bountiful bouquets.
Yet inside the heart-shaped box of chocolates lurks at least one with a jelly center, among the long stemmed red beauties, at least one thorn.
Ah, Shakespeare was right: the course of romance, much less true love, does not run smooth, especially in the Jewish community.
Here, the randomness of Cupid’s arrow becomes the worrisome prick of the likelihood of intermarriage, as marriages between Jews and non-Jews become as ubiquitous as those frilly Valentine’s Day missives and the scores of frantic shoppers searching for just the right one.
And yet, the serendipity of love reminds of its many ways, both to find Mr. or Ms. Right and to create enduring pairings. So, too, it reminds of the multiplicity of Jewish connections that inform both our identity as individuals and our choices as couples.
Let me count the ways, beyond our traditional points of access, that can inspire those romantic pairings.
Visual arts, music, literature, theater, film, dance pulse with Jewish spirit that has the capacity to move us in ways we may have never known. The arts can open our eyes, our ears, our minds. They can strike chords, give voice, inspire emotion. They provide doorways that lead us to spiritual connections, innately Jewish spiritual connections, and they can draw us through those doorways into Jewish places where Jewish life can be at once made, and remade, in a way that is deeply meaningful for us.
So, in recent weeks, a concert of Sephardic music by Ohr Chadash Cantor Ruth Berman Harris and visiting Rabbi Silvina Chemen of Temple Beth El in Buenos Aires enchanted their audience with a melange of songs in lilting cadences of Ladino, ancient Spanish, Hebrew and Yiddish.
And a visit by another rabbi whose Judaism is also both deeply felt and profoundly expressed again reinforced the power of the arts to touch us. Matthew Berkowitz, creator of the Lovell Haggadah, with its beautifully crafted words and images, shared his exquisite work during a weekend Shabbaton sponsored by the local Wexner Heritage Scholars. Berkowitz, both rabbi and artist, later explained, by email from Jerusalem where he heads the Jewish Theological Seminary Israel program, that there are many ways of learning and many avenues for encountering Judaism. Art is one.
“Each of us has a different and unique path into understanding and interpreting the world around us,” he writes. “The visual and performing arts are powerful keys that have the potential . . . to empower individuals to make their own connections with tradition.”
Art forges connections, both between the viewer and the art and the viewer and his peers, says Berkowitz. It can open us up to Judaism, and connect us not only to its richness -- but to each other.
And with love in the air, who knows where those shared connections that bring us closer to Judaism might lead? Just maybe they’ll be the tug at the heartstrings that lead each of us to find our beshert and make our hearts sing.
11 Feb, 2010 > Comment - 0 -
In the rubble, a divine spark
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Beni Swa Leternel.
Blessed be the Lord.
So the words echoed from the rubble in Port au Prince just hours after a catastrophic earthquake left Haiti’s capital city in ruins.
They resonated, as the grisly scenes of collapsed buildings, buckled roadways, upended fields, flashed across screens, big and small, and the plaintive voices of the innocent victims echoed.
But it was that one line that stayed with me, even as the agonized faces of the dead and the dying, the buried and the trapped, were seared in my mind’s eye, evoking the words of the Kaddish, where even as Jews mourn we praise God and seek solace in the reminder of divine beneficence.
How else to confront the horror, much less to even begin to comprehend Mother Nature’s power to literally cleave open the earth and wreck such havoc and such suffering? How else to find the strength to claw out from the rocks, to dig with bare hands in search of a tiny hand, a foot, a broken body writhing in pain? How else to go on?
Even as Pat Robertson and others proclaimed that the mighty force that opened up the ground could be conceived as a sign of God’s anger, the voices of the people rose in the lyrical Creole cadence parsing songs of help and hope.
And as frantic families fought to find loved ones, the world responded with a humanity that can only be termed heartening with food and water, with rescue teams and emergency vehicles, with dollars and prayers. Humanity reaching out to humanity, reassuring that yes, there is a God, and that, yes, despite the incomprehensible death and destruction wrought, there is good in the world.
The word religion comes from the Latin religio, meaning link. It defines a link, a connection, between the material and the spiritual that since the beginning of time in infinite ways and in myriad traditions has helped to assuage both the hugeness of the world and its vast unknowableness. And especially at times like these, when nature rears up and in a single cataclysmic act unsettles not only the earth but its inhabitants thereof, for many there is no where else to look than up.
So, even as the very real human propensity to evil surfaces, the youths flashing machetes, the looting, the fires, so too the prayers, the songs, the numerous acts of kindness that remind not only of the divine presence that links us this world to the other, but the very divine spark to do good that lurks in us all.
18 Jan, 2010 > Comment - 0 -
Telling -- and retelling
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I am teaching Holocaust to my students in world religion at Glendale Community College. A daunting endeavor, especially to a diverse group of 20-somethings whose world view -- and life experience -- is very different than mine.
Where to begin -- and how to make it relevant to their world?
We begin by talking about persecution, what it meant to be a Jew in Germany in the 1930s as Hitler’s deadly plan began to unfold. We talk about the gradual abrogation of rights, limits on where Jews could work, where they could go to school, where they could live. We talk about how the Jewish world grew increasingly smaller, increasingly tenuous, increasingly dangerous.
“Does anybody have a story to share from their own families that might be an example of religious, racial or ethnic discrimination?” I ask.
A couple of hands go up.
I call on a student who usually does not speak. A shy, dark-haired young woman, who when she responds, has a decidedly Spanish accent.
“What about the immigrants?” she asks.
“What about the people who are afraid to go out of their homes?”
I stop. It is almost a revelation to me to hear the student make that connection.
We hear it often within the Jewish community, our history of persecution, our understanding of what it means to be a stranger in a strange land, or, even worse, in Germany in those years, of being a stranger in your own land, and how that should inform our position on immigration reform. But I don’t expect to hear it in a classroom in Glendale, Arizona, from a young woman who probably has had little, if any, exposure, to Jews and Jewish history much less Holocaust. But I do.
It resonates later in the week, in Deborah Sussman Susser’s column about the AJC initiative on immigration reform, and, later, in my story about Israel’s diverse ethnic mix and the program created by the TIPS partnership that hopes to instill newfound confidence and pride in the immigrant women of Kiryat Malachi and Hof Ashkelon, Phoenix’s partnership communities in Israel. Yes, what about the immigrants?
There is a relevance, and a power, in our stories and their stories, and, yes, a continuing imperative not only to tell and retell them, but to use them as the impetus to write the stories to come.
03 Nov, 2009 > Comment - 0 -
Go forth
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The holiday season came and went in a blur, ushering in a welcome flurry of fall activity. After the slow pace of the long, hot summer, there is something refreshing and energizing about not only the beginning of a new Jewish year but a new academic year and a new communal year as well.
Sitting in high holiday services, with time to reflect, I thought about the comfort that comes from the continuous cycling of the year, its very predictability, like clockwork, first Rosh Hashanah, then Yom Kippur and then Sukkot. Too, looking around the congregation where we’ve been members for almost 30 years, I counted the blessings of family, friends and community.
And yet, it is too easy to slip from one year to the next, cosseted by what is comfortable, predictable, familiar. Even if we sit in the same seats in the same shul, there is inherent in the message of a new year a push to go forth to find new ways to renew ourselves.
There are a plethora of possibilities to choose from, classes, lectures, programs to excite the mind and restore the soul. Even with the economy in the doldrums, there are lots of opportunities for learning and growing, many free or at nominal charge. Next week’s Ethnic Flavors of Israel might be a delicious one to consider, and the upcoming Valley of the Sun Jewish Community Center Book and Cultural Arts Fair is another. The Bureau of Jewish Education offers ongoing programs, and many of our local congregations offer a variety of ways to stretch your mind or rejuvenate your spirit.
Check out Jewish News listings and coverage during the year and consider venturing in a new direction in the months ahead. When the high holidays roll around next year, you won’t be the same person, even if you are sitting in the same seat.
25 Oct, 2009 > Comment - 0 -
Irish power and the Jews
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Amongst the many heartfelt tributes to the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy last week, the Jewish community remembered him as a steadfast friend of Israel and a partner in the movement to free Soviet Jewry. It is a testament not only to the late senator, but to the very system of government we hold dear, that Kennedy was such an active proponent of so-called Jewish interests and that his influence on behalf of American Jews could impact U.S. policy. That’s just the point that Prof. Henry L. Feinberg makes in his incisive new book, Jewish Power in America, Myth and Reality, reviewed last week in Jewish News. Feinberg, an eminent professor of American Jewish history, uses a historical lens to look at the evolution of so-called Jewish power in America. He makes two very important arguments: first, Jews by dint of their history of oppression and persecution, have always worked to understand the lines of authority in government and use them for self-protection. So we are as a people keyed into learning how the system works and proactive in wielding whatever influence it will afford. Secondly, and more importantly, Feinberg shows that in America, Jewish interest will go only so far in determining national policy as it is aligned with national interest. To suggest that the government -- or the media or the banks, for that matter -- pander to what the Jews want is patently false and blatantly anti-Semitic.
Jewish power, as the late senator’s legacy attests, is only as real as its ability to coalesce with what is in the best interests of the nation.
And that can be very powerful indeed.
04 Sep, 2009 > Comment - 1 -
Are you there?
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I often wondered if what I wrote landed in the bottom of the bird cage where, even if it went unread, it was put to good use. Yet over the years, I’ve been lucky enough to hear from many readers who’ve taken the time to pick up the phone, write a note, or, more recently, shoot off an email, to let me know that they actually have read what I’ve written. Sometimes they agreed with what I’ve had to say, and sometimes they didn’t. And sometimes they wrote to say that my words resonated, evoking a treasured memory, a common experience, a shared insight. While I’ve appreciated their kind words, what I most valued was the real, human connection my words could spark, the aha moment, the incredulous, hey, you feel that way too, the stuff that binds us together.
In a world that moves all too fast, with way too much information for any of us to process, it still amazes me that someone would take the time to write -- and connect.
So the chance to blog for Jewish News seemed a perfect way to multiply the potential for those ahas, or oh mys. More writing, I thought, more readers, more interchange.
Alas, that has not been the case, at least from the dismal rate of response to my blog. Only two comments, one left by a loyal cousin from Brooklyn on my Facebook page, another in the form of an email from a reader with an interest in Sephardic music (and children with CDs to market).
So, if you are reading this, I’m putting out a sort of Judy Blume-like plea (you remember the “Are you there God, it's me Margaret?” preteen classic) and ask you to just let me know.
Hey readers, are you there?
21 Aug, 2009 > Comment - 0 -
Rock on
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Spotted in the airport recently, a 60ish guy -- both in age and generation, I presume -- sporting a tie-dyed T-shirt, its faded whirls of color and ragged neckline suggesting repeated wearings and washings. He strolled through the terminal, graying pony tail swaying, worn Birkenstocks flip-flopping, oblivious, it seemed, to the passage of time, past and present. Maybe he was just too tuned in to the music on his iPod, probably Jimi Hendrix or Janis Joplin, or some other relic rocker. A 1960s throwback to the summer of peace and love, I thought, one of the last remains from the Age of Aquarius, recalled this weekend with the 40th anniversary of Woodstock.
Yet though I could relate to the psychedelic hues, the now silver-streaked hairstyle, and the Birks, true be told, on August 15, 1969, I was nowhere near Yasgur’s Farm and its three day celebration of raucous rock ‘n roll and youthful exuberance. Nah, I was just returned from my honeymoon, settling into a new apartment and most likely writing and re-writing lesson plans for my first day of school as a new teacher.
And yet, even as I began my adult life on a decidedly more conventional path, I could not have escaped -- nor would I have wanted to -- the maelstrom of revolutionary change that whorled through the 1960s. Civil rights, political protest, women’s liberation, sexual freedom, you name it, the world was a’ changin -- and has never been the same since. It was an exhilarating time.
The ensuing decades have seen the pendulum swing, moderating the movement for cataclysmic change with more conservative impulses, and yet, the dynamism of those years, the intense energy, the promise, the hope that we can make the world a better place, continues to live on, resonating for me, as I moved through my adult life, with a decidedly Jewish beat.
Peace and love, you bet.
Rock on.
14 Aug, 2009 > Comment - 0 -
Love and marriage
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Forty years ago, as a 20-something bride-to-be planning a wedding with my then and now Prince Charming, I recall our rabbi counseling us to choose a date either before or after a three-week period when Jewish weddings traditionally did not take place. Without questioning the practice, we chose August 2, just after the prohibited time.
Years later -- and light years ahead on the Jewish learning curve -- we learned that the mid-summer chuppah hiatus had little to do with wedding planning and more to do with understanding the arc of Jewish history and the cycle of the Jewish year. Weddings don’t take place from the 17th of Tammuz until the 9th of Av, a period of mourning for the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem which occurred on Tisha B’Av.
Nearly another decade or so later in our happily ever after -- wishing for our children to find their own besherts and embark on happily married lives -- did we learn of Tu B’Av, the Jewish Valentine’s Day. It comes just six days after Tisha B’Av -- this year on Aug. 5 -- and trades the destruction and despair of that holiday with the promise of new love and new life. In ancient times, unmarried daughters dressed in white and cavorted in the fields at midnight. In more recent times, romance is in the air, and I imagine matchmakers spinning their rolodexes with abandon and Jewish wedding sites deluged with millions of hits.
From bitter to sweet, from sadness to joy.
How innately Jewish is that?
07 Aug, 2009 > Comment - 0 -