Judaism – From Under the Fig Tree

Shabbat Shalom … Or is it Shalom Shabbat?

joselitOctober 31, 2017December 9, 2017Leave a comment

I don’t envy future historians who will set out to chronicle modern Jewish life, ca. 2017. Swirling with contradictions, with a “this” for every “that,” it’s enough to make Tevye, Sholom Aleichem’s famously ambivalent character who delighted in routinely invoking “on the one hand” and “on the other,” run for cover.

Consider, for instance, contemporary attitudes towards the celebration of Shabbat, the traditional Jewish Sabbath. An age-old practice that has received a new lease on life of late, keeping Shabbat is increasingly associated with tuning out, with putting one’s smartphones, laptops and iPads to rest. As Reboot’s “Sabbath Manifesto” would have it, we digital devotees would do well to pledge to “unplug from technology regularly.”

Whether encouraged by Reboot or by the rabbinate, the Sabbath is hailed these days as an opportunity rather than a burden. Its latter-day promotion is reminiscent in many ways of the postwar campaign launched by the women of the Conservative movement to honor the Sabbath by pledging publicly not to do laundry, market, head for the golf course or the local museum and movie house on that day.

So far, so good.

On the other hand, there’s this: leading Jewish cultural institutions such as the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles and the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia now open their doors on a Saturday — and to paying customers. The decision to “operate normally,” explained a former official of the Philadelphia facility, reflects the “tension between freedom and tradition [that is] at the core of the American Jewish experience.” (The Jewish Museum in New York is also open on a Saturday, but admission is free.)

And this: Just the other day, Israel’s High Court ruled that over one hundred businesses — food stores, mainly — in Tel Aviv, would be allowed to offer their wares on Shabbat, overturning a longstanding municipal interdiction against commercial activity on the traditional day of rest.

Good news for some, especially those who’ve chafed under the heavy hand of halakha (Jewish law), this latest turn of events profoundly upsets others, raising the possibility that the Sabbath, once considered a “national asset,” will come to have a limited shelf life.

The jury is still out — and will undoubtedly be out for some time. We’ll have to await the verdict of history.

Sustainability

joselitMarch 24, 2013November 16, 2017Leave a comment

What’s striking about the holiday of Pesach isn’t its historicity so much as its contemporaneity. There, I’ve said it.

Moses and Einstein action figures — Moses and Einstein. Flickr/Steve Calcott

You would think that I would be most quick to praise the festival’s biblical origins, the 9th-century roots of the haggadah, or, at the very least, great grandma’s Depression-era dishes.

While there’s much to be said for each one of these historical phenomena, what really hits home is how the repertoire of Pesach-related objects, activities, and foodstuffs grows and grows and grows.

Several years ago, Moses action figures capable of “articulating” their joints in 16 different directions took pride of place at the holiday table. “This pint sized hero can bring a miraculous new level of excitement to your Seder,” gushed advertisements, suggesting that this most agile of biblical heroes would make for a very good guest, indeed.

Last year, the New American Haggadah was all the rage. Panned or praised, it was the talk of the town. Virtually everyone I knew had one.

This year’s crop includes frogs, flies and locusts -- in the shape of nail decals -- as well as various and sundry apps that render the seder a virtual experience. The haggadah apps, which are said to provide “interactivity and surprise and layers of information,” are available from iTunes and other online vendors for a nominal fee. As for the decals, which promise to “take your seder to the next level,” you’d better hurry. Amazon has only a few sets left in stock.

Some of us may roll our eyes or scratch our heads at the prospect of a seder at which participants alternatively flutter their fingers or use them to tap, tap, tap away. Others among us might even give voice to dark thoughts about the dissolution of tradition and lament the ways in which novelty seems to have trumped history.

I prefer to look on the bright side. What extends the meaning -- the shelf life, so to speak -- of this ancient Jewish holiday is its malleability. An exercise in both tradition and innovation, Pesach gives new meaning to the practice of sustainability.

Roots

joselitDecember 4, 2011November 16, 2017Leave a comment

Not since the 1939 debut of Sholem Asch’s The Nazarene: A Novel Based on the Life of Christ, has so much media attention been showered on the Jewish perspective on Jesus and the New Testament.

The recent release of The Jewish Annotated New Testament, an Oxford University Press publication co-edited by Marc Zvi Brettler and Amy Jill Levine, has generated considerable attention at conferences, in the press and online. When I asked Professor Brettler to account for the book’s success, he responded by saying that “this is a new era,” one in which Jews no longer regard the New Testament as “dangerous,” but rather as a text that is “important for Judaism.”

Seventy years earlier, Asch’s sympathetic treatment of Jesus rocked the Jewish community, some of whose members all but placed the once-popular author beyond the pale of social acceptance. Abraham Cahan, the editor of The Forward, led the charge, insisting that Asch’s yidishkayt iz yezuskayt, that his claims to Jewishness were actually those of Jesus-ness.

The Jewish court of public opinion indicted Asch on a number of counts. That the celebrated Yiddish writer chose to publish his nearly 700 page novel in English translation rather than in the original Yiddish was tantamount in many circles to his having given up on Yiddish as a viable modern language. Asch’s decision, explains literary historian Anita Norich, constituted a real breach in “literary decorum.”

Bad timing compounded matters. 1939 was not the time to call for a rapprochement between Judaism and Christianity. Worse still, Asch’s sympathetic treatment of Jesus and of the early history of the church seemed to suggest that he was guilty of proselytizing.

Where the American Jewish community virtually anathematized Asch and turned its back on The Nazarene, the non-Jewish community roundly applauded the novel as a “masterpiece,” lifting it onto the best-seller list.

I suspect it won’t be too long before Amazon recommends to its readers that when they purchase The Jewish Annotated New Testament, they add The Nazarene to their shopping cart as well.

Rites of Passage

joselitNovember 27, 2011November 16, 2017Leave a comment

At first blush, most of us are probably inclined to liken religious ritual to an heirloom, something handed down to us from our parents and grandparents. We’re enjoined, sometimes explicitly and sometimes more tacitly, to take care of rituals, to ensure that they don’t vanish. When seen from that perspective, ours is the responsibility of stewards, curators and historians.

But now and again, we’re reminded of an alternative reality, one in which we’re not just caretakers but architects of ritual practice. And when that happens, we come to see that rituals themselves are anything but static.

Take, for instance, the steadily growing popularity of the bat mitzvah. An innovation of the 1920s, it took hold, little by little, within American Jewish circles, slowly gathering momentum and acceptance. By the 1980s, the bat mitzvah had become as entrenched and widespread an American Jewish phenomenon as its male counterpart, the bar mitzvah whose origins dated back to the 13th century. ...continue reading "Rites of Passage"

Magid

joselitApril 17, 2011November 16, 2017Leave a comment

This year, or so it seems to me, the American Jewish community is awash in new editions of the haggadah, the age-old ritual text that structures the Passover seder.

Haggadot. Source: Flickr/Sanford Kearns.

At one end of the spectrum, there’s the stunning Washington Haggadah, a facsimile edition of a 15th century text. Its brightly colored illustrations of daily life -- women stir the pot, an entire family crowds atop a horse, birds chirp, a jester beats a drum -- dazzle the eye and enlarge our sense of wonder at the ways in which earlier generations of Jews claimed the haggadah as their own.

At the other end of the spectrum, there’s a brand new version of the Maxwell House Haggadah, whose very ordinariness belies its extraordinary hold on the American Jewish imagination. Households across the country may lack a Kiddush cup and perhaps even a set of Shabbat candlesticks, but chances are they own a copy or two of the unadorned and down-to-earth Maxwell House Haggadah, which has been around in one form or another since the 1930s.

These most recent iterations of the text are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. If history is any guide, and I sure hope it is, American Jewry and its sister communities around the globe have, over time, generated any number of fascinating Passover texts, many of which can be found at GW’s very own Kiev Collection.
...continue reading "Magid"

Holy Toledo!

joselitApril 10, 2011November 16, 2017Leave a comment

When people talk of travel as broadening, they usually have Paris in mind, not Toledo, Ohio. But as I discovered recently, travelling to the heartland of America can be just as eye-opening.

I had come to the University of Toledo to deliver an illustrated lecture about the Ten Commandments and to participate in a Jewish-Christian-Muslim conversation about religion in contemporary America. By the end of my 24-hour stay, I had learned a lot.

For starters, I was exposed to the debilitating, corrosive effects of de-industrialization on the urban landscape. I then discovered that despite a first-rate women’s basketball team, the lecterns in the university’s student union are not equipped with digital technology. I subsequently drove all over town in search of a laptop as well as a clicker and, in the process, visited Corpus Christi Church where an interfaith dinner was being held.

While in church, I met a Jewish student clad in a yarmulke as well as a tallit, a ritual garment customarily worn only in the morning, much less in a Catholic house of worship. I found a laptop, too, courtesy of a professor of Islamic studies.

If this didn’t set my head spinning, the Q & A session that followed my formal remarks certainly did.
...continue reading "Holy Toledo!"