I am editing the recipes we received for our Passover recipe contest and attempting to digest my lunch. See, I have this great plan--I'm going to try to use up all the non-Passover food, all the non-leavened food--all the hametz--before I make our house kosher-for-Passover. The problem is, that means eating a lot of mystery soupsicles. Every Saturday night after Shabbat, I try to remember to freeze the leftover soup in containers to take to work and eat, and now...I have to take it to work and eat it. Today I ate some...tofu matzah balls with leeks and carrots? I think.

One of my all-time favorite internet friends (one whom I've recruited to write for IFF and visited in person) asked me for help developing her Passover seder prep list, and I've been meaning to throw the question out to you folks. Now, if she'd asked me before she wrote her own list, my bare-bones list would have looked like this:

Matzah
wine or grape juice
copies of the Hagaddah for each person
eggs
ingredients for haroset
horseradish

But that's because I go to either my mother, my mother-in-law, or my husband's aunt every year for Passover, and they worry about all the stuff you really need and give me cooking assignments. Also, because I happen to own a lot of Passover dishes and cooking utensils. If you buy only one cooking implement per holiday but you keep the holiday in your own home for whatever, 20 years, you're going to have the mini-food-processor, offset spatula, egg whisk, coffee grinder... plus the dishes my great-aunt Jane got from the bank one year and gave me because at the time I wasn't married and needed good china. I've got born-in-an-observant-Jewish-family privilege here, and it's not fair--I have to check that privilege if I'm going to give good advice! Help me.

Yes, so much for keeping it simple, as Tamar Fox advises us all to do. Some go crazy cleaning, some cooking and some, acquiring educational materials. My friend is still looking for a poster of the order of the seder she saw at one point. Luckily, I know a good place to send people online to get enriching seder materials--my friend Joe Gelles sells a plagues bag if you don't have a Judaica shop that's local to you, and Modern Tribe has Passover gifts for children that might also make your seder fun.

Give my friend your list. What do you make sure to have on hand for Passover to make it yummy, fun for your kids, accessible to non-Jewish relatives and friends, simple enough so you don't lose your mind?

I've been working for weeks on a blog post to put all the conversion hysteria in the Jewish world into some kind of context. Yesterday I spent an hour trying to work the latest news from Israel into the whole complicated, world-wide, cross-denominational mess. I realized it's taking too long and I just need to tell you this:

There's a bill before the Knesset in Israel to change the Law of Return to bar converts from being integrated into Israeli society as Jews and we have to act now.

At the moment, any convert, no matter who has converted him or her, can make aliyah (immigrate to Israel) under the Law of Return--even people whom the Chief Rabbinate would deny the right to marry a Jew. Israeli law also dodges the problem of excluding people who are Jewish by patrilineal descent through a 1970 amendment that allows relatives of Jews to come on the same basis as Jews.

Now the right-wing secular party Yisrael Beiteinu has put forward a new bill to exclude converts to Judaism from the Law of Return--catering to the Chief Rabbinate, whose officials have declared hundreds of Orthodox conversions performed in the State of Israel invalid. (We're not even talking about Reform or Conservative conversions done in the US or elsewhere.)

If you think this is pushing Israel toward theocracy, you are dead wrong. At least, if it is a theocracy, it's not a Jewish one, because declaring converts to have a different status is not based on Judaism. Jewish religion says that a Jew is a Jew and there's no distinction between converts and people who are born Jewish. This is a scary piece of legislation designed to cut off the rest of the Jewish people from the State of Israel. On JewsByChoice.Org (a fantastic web resource that seems to be back in business!) I found this plea from the Conservative movement to act immediately on the Knesset bill. The Reform movement, through its Zionist organization Arza, is also urging action.

This is not the solution to the problems of interfaith families in Israel, as Yisrael Beiteinu seems to believe. Jewishness is not a racial category and we can't resolve our communal differences over how to do conversion by taking from converts one of the major tokens of belonging to the Jewish people. The bizarre and anti-halachic campaign of the Chief Rabbinate to undermine conversions in Israel has had widespread impact here in the Diaspora. It's time to tell them no.

Our CEO Ed Case is attending the Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR) in San Francisco. The CCAR is the rabbinic association of the Reform movement. I look forward to his opinions on the presentation of the CCAR task force on intermarriage. News reports, including this one in the New York Times suggest a slight shift on the issue. The panel proposed that Reform rabbis work on encouraging interfaith couples to stay in the Jewish community instead of trying to prevent interfaith marriage.

The task force did not suggest any change on rabbinic officiation at interfaith weddings. Currently, Reform rabbis can choose to officiate at interfaith weddings according to their conscience, though the Reform movement formally opposes rabbinic officiation at interfaith weddings.

Since 1983, the Reform movement has recognized children of interfaith families as Jewish if their parents raise them as Jews--whether the Jewish parent is the mother or the father. This has brought many more interfaith families into Reform congregations, making it the largest of the Jewish denominations in the United States, which is the largest Jewish community in the world. Reform congregations have been working for years on integrating interfaith families and their children and finding ways to honor non-Jewish spouses who support Jewish family members' practice of Judaism.

If you're a member of a Reform congregation, what has your experience been? Does your rabbi make your whole family feel welcome? How about the rest of the community?

Several people whom I know happened to be purchasing new stoves or ovens, and asked me, "What does it mean that the appliance has a Sabbath mode?" I knew what it was, even though my oven doesn't have it! My current oven isn't very useful for Shabbat observance, since it shuts off after a few hours. Though I can leave food in to stay warm on Friday evenings in the winter, the oven would shut off before lunch the next day. Apparently, some people complained to oven manufacturers, and they invented Sabbath mode as a way to let oven users override the automatic shutoff.

Once I had explained what the oven feature was, one of my friends wanted to know why someone would want to leave the oven on for 24 hours. At that point, I had to explain that not working on Shabbat has a very specific meaning in rabbinic Judaism. The rabbis had to figure out which work counted as the labor you aren't doing on Shabbat, and which other activities you could do, and they developed the classification of 39 categories of labor which is based on this week's Torah portion and the proximity of the instruction to keep Shabbat to the discussion of how the Israelites built the mishkan, the portable tabernacle they used while wandering in the desert.

My friend said, "I knew you weren't supposed to cook--I just assumed that meant a cold meal." The rabbis of the Talmud didn't like that idea, and they invented work-arounds that would make it possible not to cook but to still keep the food warm. Today's work-arounds are of course more sophisticated. (Well, and less, since part of what they involve is a button to shut off the ways the oven beeps and thinks for itself about when to shut off!)

Professor Aryeh Cohen (whom I used to follow around with puppy-like devotion when we were both graduate students at Brandeis) wrote a discussion of this week's Torah portion in which he understands Shabbat as a means of separating into a special space, just by what we aren't doing:

So this is how I understand Yehudah Halevi's poem. Shabbat is, essentially, a state of mind. Once you stop doing all the activities which are forbidden (sowing, sewing, building, writing, burning, etc.) you carry Shabbat around in your head and everything you do is done in the territory of Shabbat. There you can be walking down the same street as your neighbor who is not Jewish. Both of you are out for a morning stroll. Yet, you are doing a Shabbat activity since you are "in" Shabbat and he is not.

I thought this was cool, because I was trying to figure out how to translate "Sabbath mode" into what human beings do, and it's true--shutting off your regular functions is what makes it possible to have a Sabbath mode.

On the other hand, Aryeh's implication here about Jewish distinctiveness is difficult for me, because I know a lot of interfaith families who are sharing the benefits of Shabbat. What if "your neighbor" isn't just your neighbor, but your very very good friend, such a good friend you decided to get married? Not exactly a neighbor. As Ed Case puts it, any Shabbat experience an interfaith family does is shared.

Not that I totally want to reject an opportunity for Jewish pride in distinctiveness. I sometimes see a bumper sticker, "The Labor Movement--The Folks Who Brought You the Weekend." You could say the same about the Jewish people--we invented the idea of a day off, something everyone needs. Everyone in the world should feel invited into Shabbat territory, Shabbat headspace--Sabbath mode. It's a Jewish contribution, a gift to civilization.

I'm writing this knowing fully well that stopping, not working, not doing, is much more challenging than you think. Most people, even those who want to, can't do it. That's why Exodus 31:13 in this week's portion has this mysterious word "ach" meaning still, but, nevertheless or however. Because not working is hard, even on your day off.

At InterfaithFamily.com we have posted previously about Rebecca and Joseph Reyes' divorce and custody battle in Chicago, which could have implications for other interfaith couples divorcing. Joseph Reyes had agreed to raise his daughter Ela as a Jew and had indeed converted to Judaism himself. When the marriage broke up, Joseph Reyes brought the child to church and had her baptized Catholic. He took photos of the baptism and sent them to his ex-wife. Rebecca Reyes sought a temporary restraining order to prevent Reyes from taking the child to church again--which he proceeded to do, in apparent violation of the order, and this time, brought a television crew with him.

Chicago television spoke with Joseph Reyes and presented his views on their websites, which we found disturbing.

On ABC's 20/20 show on February 26, reporter Chris Cuomo interviewed the estranged parents. Rebecca Reyes, who had not spoken to the press about this personal matter, apparently decided to go public. Rebecca Reyes told Cuomo on the show, "The constant undermining of who [Ela] is, who she was born as, and who we agreed she would be in our home, is really harmful. There will be confusion; there will be an abrogation of her identity." She expressed concerns over the threatening emails and Facebook messages she's had from people she's never met, and especially over visits to her child's Jewish preschool from strangers.

It's tempting just to side with the mother in this case, especially since she's Jewish and her thinking is similar to everything we've read about consistency in child-rearing after divorce. We have a lot of trouble, from the selections quoted in the press, believing Joseph Reyes' self-presentation, especially his insistence that he was coerced into conversion. You can watch the story on the ABC website to see what I mean. But even though we are freer, as a non-profit organization, to take a partisan position on this private matter than journalistic organizations ought to feel themselves to be, we know we don't know everything about this case, and that any judgment we offer will be based on this limited information.

One thing, however, seems obvious. Parenting in an interfaith marriage means being able to negotiate--even when the marriage is breaking up. Sticking with agreements about religion is just as important as sticking with other parenting agreements, like the ones about school and who will supervise a small child. What obviously seems to the media like a sexy case about freedom of religion or father's rights looks very different when you think about what this may be like for the little girl involved.

I'm way behind on my Purim prep. Yes, I made hamantashen, last night, but I'm still writing my chapter of the Purimspiel, which will be performed on the eve of Purim--Saturday night! My husband is making my son's costume. (I cannot tell you what my son wants to be for Purim, or I will start cackling hysterically again.) I am going as...a very tired mom, probably, even though I think that's what I went as last year.

What a great holiday for introducing your non-Jewish partner, friend or relative to the Jewish community, though. It's traditional to have parties, eat yummy sweets, drink alcoholic beverages and dress up in costumes. It was also the start of Jewish theater--the Purimspiel, based on the Book of Esther, is always full of satire. (And sometimes actual humor. Jokes, anyway.) Plus it's a holiday all about a Jewish woman who preserves her religious and cultural identity in an intermarriage and saves the Jewish people. Can't say better than that.

Here's this year's 92nd Street Y Purim video. It's about a werewolf dentist. I have no idea why it's about a werewolf and not a vampire, but whatever. Enjoy.

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lbt1KRSWIqY" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lbt1KRSWIqY</a>

Last July, I blogged about Wyman Brent's efforts to start a Jewish library in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. Vilnius, known as Vilna in Yiddish, was a center of Jewish life. Many Jewish families who live in the US are descendants of Jews from Lithuania. As Brent explains,

The purpose of the Vilnius Jewish Library is to help strengthen Jewish culture in the Jerusalem of Lithuania. There were more than 100 synagogues and prayerhouses in Vilnius before the war. There was also the YIVO Institute which did so much to promote knowledge and education. Now there is one functioning synagogue here and, YIVO has moved its operations to the USA. Since the liquidation of the Vilna Ghetto, there has not been a proper center of Jewish culture.

Another focus of the library is to promote tolerance and understanding. There remains lingering anti-Semitism which is visible in the national media and within the Lithuanian government. The idea is to create a center which puts the spotlight not just on Jewish religion and culture but also upon the amazing accomplishments of Jews throughout history.

Brent, who is not Jewish, believes in libraries and the power of books and culture in general to overthrow bias. Now, people in the rest of the world have an opportunity to support his vision:

I was able to see the space which will hopefully house the library. This is not the permanent location but it will be more than suitable for two or three years. The place is directly across the street from the Parliament and the National Library buildings. Both can be seen from the front windows of the proposed library. There is room for concerts, lectures, and offices. I say not permanent because eventually the collection will outgrow those rooms. However, it is a beautiful and fitting location in which to begin.

After years of work, I feel like I can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel. There is one thing which still needs to be done. The Prime Minister is the one which will have the final decision in this matter. I was told the best way to influence things in a positive manner is to receive letters of support for the Vilnius Jewish Library. The letters need to be actually mailed as opposed to being sent by email. I am reaching out to you and to anyone you know in getting out those letters. The letters can be printed out or hand written but all must be signed and there must be somewhere their name printed so it can actually be read. If a person is uncomfortable in providing a home address, they are very welcome to use a P.O. Box or business address. This is NOT a call for donations of money or materials.

Here's my letter--it's really short:

Ruth Abrams, Managing Editor
InterfaithFamily.com
90 Oak Street
Newton, MA 02464

Wyman Brent
Ausros Vartu 20-15A
Vilnius LT-02100
Lithuania

February 25, 2010

Dear Mr. Brent,

I am writing in support of the creation of a Jewish library in Vilnius. As Jewish tourists seek their roots in Eastern Europe, the library could provide them with a space to explore Jewish culture. The library would also be a resource to Lithuanians and a source of pride for them and of connection between the people who share this history.

Please share this letter, among many others from interested parties around the world, with the Prime Minister of Lithuania.

Sincerely,



Ruth Abrams

You may wonder why I'm making a post about the 2010 US Census. As a non-profit organization, InterfaithFamily.com relies heavily on sociological and demographic research to prove that we're needed and that what we do is meeting our goals as an organization. Probably the research that did the most for our founding was the National Jewish Population Surveys, which persuaded the Jewish community in the United States of the widespread trend of Jews marrying non-Jews. We've also used data from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life and kept abreast of the studies of Jewish sociologists through the North American Data Bank.

The US Census Data hasn't been that useful to us at IFF, because in the United States, the government hasn't, for many years, asked questions about religion on the census and doesn't classify Jewishness as an ethnicity. For Jews, this has been reassuring. In the near historical past, governments that considered Jews an ethnic group nearly invariably discriminated against Jews.

(I should be clear that the US Census, in any case, does not release individuals' data for a full 72 years after you fill in the census, at which time the documents are archived. My friend who is working for the census bureau told me that she had to take an oath of preserving the confidentiality of the documents. The penalty for breaking the oath is five years in prison or $250,000.)

The Census is going to be useful to you. This is the second census on which individuals can identify with more than one racial category. For people of mixed heritage, this is pretty exciting, because it means that you'll be helping both sides of your family count. If your dad was an Ashkenazi Jew and your mom had one parent who was African-American and another who was Japanese, you don't have to pick only one.

This is the first year that the census will allow people in same-sex relationships to identify as married, even if their relationships aren't recognized as marriages in their state. If your relationship is committed but not a marriage, the census has a category for that too--whether your partner is male or female.

There are a lot of reasons to want to be counted accurately--it makes a difference in your congressional representation, and in federal funding your area receives for things like hospitals and roads. It could also change our picture of who lives in the United States--of racial and ethnic identity, what constitutes a household, who has disabilities--who counts. Let's be counted.

This is amazing. I knew something like this was going to be invented, but I'm still blown away. IFF's partner and friend, BBYO (the organization formerly known as Prince --no, sorry Bnai Brith Youth Organization) sent out a press release about their new resource, buildaprayer.org. It's a website where people can put together their own Jewish services out of the traditional liturgy, meeting the needs of the people who will be there.

I started making a sample service on the site, just so I would know how it works. (I didn't print out, because the last thing I need is to have to find a respectful way to dispose of paper with the divine name printed on it.) Right now they have four choices: Friday evening, Saturday morning, Saturday evening services and Grace after Meals. As you may know, there are set prayers in Hebrew for different occasions--these are the ones that youth group members need the most frequently. You can choose a traditional service or only components of it to build your own custom service--Hebrew prayers, with translation or transliteration, with two choices of layout of the components and places to insert other introductory or inspirational texts.

If, like me, you used to participate in Reform youth group services back in the dark ages before personal computers were common, you know that we did, in fact, use actual scissors and rubber cement to lay out services with these components.

Now, it's true that this site doesn't give you the opportunity to change the Hebrew liturgy. You can't paste a text from the Talmud into the Psalms, as we sometimes do at my Havurah. But for knowledgeable Jews in interfaith families who are planning a bar or bat mitzvah or a wedding and want to make sure that their non-Jewish relatives and friends understand the service? This is a fantastic tool. There are also impressive resources on the site for learning more about the history and meaning of Jewish liturgy.

We already love BBYO around here. Check out this great article, Teenagers In Love which shows how enthusiastic teens from interfaith families feel about the youth movement. This buildaprayer.org site is such a nifty resource that I would be excited about it even if we didn't already think BBYO was awesome--go look!

The Joseph Reyes case that we blogged about a month ago is in the news again – there is a court hearing today on whether he should be punished for violating a court order that he not expose his daughter to any religion other than Judaism.

I’m concerned about the news slant on this story – on the ABC website part of the headline is “Afghanistan War Vet Faces Jail Time For Taking His Daughter To Church.” If you don’t know more, it makes the Jewish mother look bad, objecting to her child being exposed to the father’s religion.

The child’s best interests are paramount in a divorce case. Joseph Reyes converted to Judaism and obviously he and his wife must have agreed to raise their child as a Jew. Courts should require parents to live up to their agreements in a divorce. I would feel the same way if the mother were Catholic, the father converted to Catholicism, then divorced and wanted to expose the child to Judaism.

Plenty of intermarried parents have written for us that they are raising their children Jewish but on occasion take them to a church service. If the Reyes’ child were older, I don’t think there would be any problem with doing that, and don’t think the mother would have a good reason to object if her ex-husband requested her agreement. But baptizing a young child seems to clearly indicate an intention to raise the child as a Catholic, contravening the parents’ earlier agreement.

I would never say that it is a mistake to convert just prior to a marriage or in order to get married, because in many cases when that happens the conversion is sincere. But apparently, Joseph Reyes’ conversion was not – he is quoted as saying he did so because his in-laws wouldn’t accept him otherwise. If that was the case, it certainly was not a good way for the marriage to get started.

There are other parts of this story that strongly suggest that Reyes’ motivation is not one of sincere religious conviction, but instead just part of a bitter divorce struggle. Reyes, a law student, says that Catholicism “falls under the umbrella of Judaism”? That he was just taking his daughter to hear the teachings of the greatest Jewish rabbi ever? Please. He called a reporter to film him going to church in violation of the court order?

Again, the child’s best interests should be paramount to both parents. Exposing children to conflict like this between two trusted parents is the worst possible thing. And to repeat, I’m not disapproving of Reyes’ conduct because he is trying to raise a child Catholic who would otherwise be Jewish – if he were trying to raise a child Jewish who would otherwise be Catholic, I’d feel the same way.