A look at the memoir by Scott Thorson that inspired the new HBO movie about his former lover, Liberace; the recent winner of Survivor; Mel Brooks, Kat Dennings, Josh Radnor, and more!
When my husband read an early draft of this essay, he asked, "Why doesn't her partner have to support our daughter? After all, they agreed to raise children as Jews." What does it mean to raise a Jewish child?
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What were you taught about your LGBTQ heritage? Kick off Boston Pride Week with a retelling of the story of LGBTQ liberation using the Passover Seder model. June 1st, Boston, MA.
Supporting rabbis and cantors looking to engage interfaith couples and families in their communities and help them make a stronger connection with Judaism.
A great way for Jewish professionals and volunteers who work with and provide programming for people in interfaith relationships to locate resources and trainings to build more welcome into their Jewish communities; connect with and learn from each other; and publicize and enhance their programs and services.
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You know what? Maybe I’ll go out of my way to buy a really expensive lemon, keep it in a box as I walk around town, just to use it as garnish for the fish I’m going to cook.
I want to buy a lovely bouquest for my partner, but flowers are just so cliche. I know, I’ll buy some branches and a palm frond instead!
Ok, snarky, yes, but that’s what some members of the press wrote about photos of Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, walking to/from synagogue with their lulav and etrog for the festival of Sukkot. (If anyone needed proof that Jews don’t actually control the media, here it is: we wouldn’t have made those mistakes!)
The media’s interpretation of the photo is that of a celebrity launching a new hat style and her husband carrying flowers that he bought for her.
It doesn’t take much for anyone familiar with the Sukkot holiday to see that she’s wearing a hat because that’s what Orthodox Jewish women do when they go to shul and what Kushner is carrying is a lulav, wrapped in the cheap plastic bag that it comes in.
Rabbi Jason Miller, a writer for Jewish and internet sites and blogger at RabbiJason.com, points out the cluelessness of the media with this situation. In his current blog post, Miller comments on two funny aspects of this celebrity sighting:
First is the fact that the well-to-do couple wouldn’t be using a fancy etrog holder. As Kushner was pushing their baby daughter Arabella Rose on the second day of Sukkot, he was also carrying a lulav and etrog. One would think that Donald Trump’s daughter and son-in-law would have a nice silver etrog carrying case, but it appears that the Kushner-Trump couple is sporting the simple cardboard box etrog carrying case along with the plastic bag the lulav comes in.
The second funny thing is that the Daily Mail first published this photo over the weekend in its online edition explaining that “Jared, wearing a casual black jacket, pushed little Arabella Rose’s pram along the streets on their way to lunch. He also held some flowers in one hand – perhaps a gift for his wife.” I suppose you could combine a palm branch with some myrtle and willow branches to form a bouquet of sorts, but I don’t think it’s a popular gift for ones wife.
There was no word on where the couple was headed for yuntif lunch or if they had their own sukkah outside of their Manhattan home.
Growing up in suburban New Jersey, I attended religious school at Monmouth Reform Temple. At MRT, every year, we learned the valuable lesson of giving back through Tzedakah (Hebrew word for “righteousness”). We’d collect cans for the local food pantry on the high holidays; we’d plant trees in Israel every Tu Bishvat; and we’d collect our loose change throughout the year as our class project to give to our favorite charity.
As rooted in my Jewish values, I believe in the importance of Tikun Olam (Hebrew for “repairing the world”) and Tzedakah. And, I encourage you to do the same.
Whether you collect your loose change each year or make an online donation, consider supporting IFF with your Tzedakah. Did you find a great Rabbi to officiate your wedding? Did you download one of our helpful booklets to welcome your interfaith grandchildren to your Passoverseder? Or do you enjoy reading our blogs? We want to continue to serve both you and the interfaith community. Consider giving back to IFF today.
Tu Bishvat is just a few days away, a one day holiday starting Wednesday, Jan. 19, 2011, at sundown. It’s a minor holiday and, as such, I think it gets lost among the bigger, better known holidays. But there’s a lot to it – and it’s a great way to gather friends and family in your home on a cool winter’s night to remind ourselves that, if nothing else, spring will soon be here.
For starters, why are there so many different spellings of the holiday name? I’ve seen Tu B’shvat, T’u B’shvat, Tu Beshvat, Tu Beshevat, and more. On this website, we use Tu Bishvat. Why? Check out Mah Rabu, a great blog, for the explanation.
One of the ways people celebrate Tu Bishvat is by having seders. The Jew and the Carrot explained,
Over the last decade, seders for Tu Bishvat have spiked in popularity. This growth is largely due to the contemporary Jewish community’s interest in “greening” ritual and holidays. Every year, the number of organizations turning to Tu Bishvat to inject some sustainability-awareness into their annual programming grows, as does the collection of environmentally-inspired haggadot for Tu Bishvat available online. (Like this one from My Jewish Learning, this one from Hillel, and this one from Hazon.)
The downside is that some people shy away from celebrating the holiday precisely because it feels too “hippie” or eco-spiritual. But while the Tu Bishvat seder, which was originally developed as a mystical celebration by kabbalists in 16th century Safed, provides a helpful structure for celebrating Tu Bishvat, there are no official rules for the holiday. The lack of halakhic requirements means that seders can be tailored to meet their hosts’ personalities–even if they happen to prefer fine china over bicompostable dishware.
The Seder Structure
Borrowing from Passover’s four cups of wine, the kabbalistic seder for Tu Bishvat is divided into four parts that correspond to four “worlds.” This notion of the importance of the number four repeats itself in multiple ways: through assigning a season and mystical attribute to each world, through drinking four cups of wine, and by dividing the foods eaten during the seder (generally a feast of fruits and nuts) into four categories that reflect human nature. Each of these components attempts to coax another level of contemplative thought, creativity, and wonder from seder participants.
You can also check out this quick video I made, explaining a basic Tu Bishvat seder structure:
The Jew and the Carrot continues, listing example menus for different Tu Bishvat seder types: the hippie, the sophisticate, the newbie, the multi-culturalist and the chocolate lover. Check them out.
Another option, which I’ll be doing this year, is straight from television:
“I’d like to make an impression on those guys. Man, I love the Office Halloween Party. It is so much sluttier than the Office Christmas party. Though, not as freaky as the Office President’s Day Rave. Or the Office Tu Bishvat Pajama Jammy Jam.” – Barney Stinson, How I Met Your Mother
If, like me, you’re a fan of the show How I Met Your Mother, you might have caught this reference back in October, 2010. My housemate and I were watching when we heard Barney (played by Neil Patrick Harris) mention a Tu Bishvat Pajama Jammy Jam. None of the characters on the show are Jewish, and yet they all just nodded, as if this was a totally normal holiday (and normal way to celebrate it). We knew we had to host our own. So this year, in addition to a seder, we’ll be inviting our friends to show up in their pajamas, we’ll be watching fruit-themed movies (like The Apple and James and the Giant Peach). See? Tu Bishvat really can be celebrated in many ways…
So gather some friends and family and give Tu Bishvat a try this year!
It’s that busy time of the year (is there ever not a busy time of the year?). Hanukkah’s over but we’re still celebrating the December holidays with friends and family, colleagues and communities. You need a break, we need a break, time for a hodgepodge of links. Happy reading!
Take a break…
In The Forward, Edgar Bronfman opines on the rising profile of interfaith discussions in the Jewish community. My favorite excerpt? “Intermarriage today can even be an opportunity for a stronger embrace of Jewish identity… [My nephew] became engaged to a non-Jew, and when his fiancée decided to convert, he decided to join her in study. In the old paradigm, the community would have lost one uneducated Jew; instead, it has gained a Jewish family.”
To my joy and surprise, we’ve had a few comments on our discussion boards over the last week about the Jewish or Hebrew calendar and its often confusing and complicated particularities. So for those calendar geeks (myself included), The December Dilemma: 10 Tevet on Friday.
Wow, I really hate this new Hotmail ad campaign. I noticed and loathed it for the first time yesterday on a poster in a bus shelter in Boston, a big green field with the words, “THE NEW BUSY THINK 9 TO 5 IS A CUTE IDEA” in white letters.
Now, there are a lot of reasons to hate this. First, as one Seattle-area blogger pointed out in an aptly-titled post, New Ad Campaign for Hotmail Is Everything We Expect From Microsoft–Awkward, Baffling, Hard to Escape, “This exercise in tone-weirdness, this ball of syntactical confusion, has started showing up on billboards, buses, banner ads, and the signature lines of Hotmail users everywhere. ” Local Boston journalist Alex Beam considers this campaign part of “the War Against the English Language.” It’s a bad ad campaign for what seems to be an inferior product, a 15-year-old web-based email system.
I’m not all that crazy about Hotmail, since they seem to me to be more than usually vulnerable to hacking–but that’s not why I’m writing about this on our blog. I’m writing about it because I am finding our 24/7 work culture an affront to basic human dignity, because it flies in the face of the reason I observe Shabbat.
Shabbat is the opposite of the New Busy. Shabbat is the very old Not Busy. Shabbat is a time to unplug. Shabbat is the time when your family can be together without working. Without working! No working! Stop working! Rest! Because you have a RIGHT to rest sometimes! Your boss cannot possibly pay you enough to justify working all the time!
This isn’t only a Jewish issue–I’m not saying this just to get interfaith families to go to Tot Shabbat. (Though that’s also so nice.) I am saying it’s time for everyone to get off of this treadmill and admit that we need to rest.
I’m giving you advice about what you should do tonight. Go have a nice meal with your lovely family or friends, and then afterward, lie down and sleep. Take a DAY OFF this weekend. You are a person with needs and relationships. Affirm the basic inherent dignity of human individuals, the beauty of the natural world and its rhythms, something good that is not work. The New Busy is the old oppression.
It’s still Passover and I’m still processing the experience of my family seder, but I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to link you to two pieces about a new book by Judith Shulevitz, The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time. I’m delighted to see that Rebecca Neuberger Goldstein, who wrote the fantastic recent book on Spinoza and Jewish identity, did the New York Timesreview of Shulevitz’s book.
Shulevitz, who grew up in an observant Jewish household, is ambivalent about how to keep Shabbat in a traditional way. No longer Orthodox, she has to come to terms with how to rest on Shabbat. She has both a deep understanding and background in Jewish thought and culture, and a profoundly American sensibility–I’m listening to her interview with Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air program, and it’s amazing.
When I’m trying to figure out how to talk about Jewish observance for interfaith families and not to repel people by making one mode of observance the normative one, it’s really hard to talk about resting on Shabbat. By resting I mean not only doing the rituals that make Shabbat beautiful, but stopping work, or as Shulevitz puts it, being together, not exerting mastery over the world–resting together, not only resting. Shulevitz says some great things in this interview and I’m enticed to read this book and have it reviewed on our site, if I can.
I baked challah last night. I’m sorry I don’t have a photo–I did some cool braiding. I made the first recipe in the wonderful A Blessing of Bread, by Maggie Glezer. Glezer collected recipes, mainly from Jewish grandmothers, for holiday and festival breads. I’ve learned a lot since I started baking from it. I wanted to bake again to try to use up the rest of the flour in our house. I also made cake, and I’m planning to make pasta. The carb-a-thon is due to my need to clean out my cupboards of non-Passover food before cleaning the house for Passover.
I was thinking about how I would like to have more guests just this morning, as I was mulling over the resource guide to Jewish spirituality that I’m writing for IFF. I wanted to make the case that Jewish spirituality was mundane, something in which everyone could participate, Jewish or not. I thought of the mitzvah of hospitality in Judaism. I hadn’t known until I looked it up that it trumps prayer or study–it’s one of the most important mitzvot of all. Great for interfaith families, too, because there are lots of hospitable people who don’t realize that they are doing something spiritual. I have a great impression of the people who read and write for our site–they love to cook and invite people. When we do that, we’re in imitation of God, of whom we say in Psalms 145:16, “You open your hand and satisfy all the living.” That’s how we should be, too.
That’s why I am planning to spring Global Hunger Shabbat on my havurah this Shabbat, when I lead services on Saturday morning. (Now I’ll find out who is reading my blog posts, eh?) I’m going to use some of their educational materials–I also have some selections from Psalms in mind to sing. The Global Hunger Shabbat is part of a project from the American Jewish World Service. I also want to give a shout out to Project Mazon, A Jewish Response to Hunger, which makes grants to local hunger-relief agencies. In my area we have the Greater Boston Food Bank. We also have organizations that give to Jews in need–Passover food is extra expensive–like Jewish Family and Children’s Service Family Table.
Before Passover is a great time to think about people who are hungry, as we gear up for the seder when we say, “All who are hungry, let them come and eat.”
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 [float=left][/float]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.
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.
In the Hebrew school parking lot on Wednesday night, my son and I witnessed another little boy howling at the moon. “Sure glad I’m not a Jewish werewolf,” I said to my kid. “You would miss all the holidays.” It’s true–the Hebrew calendar assures that many Jewish holidays fall on the full moon, including Passover, Sukkot and Hanukkah. If you transform into a wolf when the moon is full, no matzah or latkes for you.
Tonight minor yet intriguing holiday, Tu Bishvat, called Hag La-Ilanot, the tree holiday, is no exception. Even its name, the 15th of Shevat, is a clue–because all Hebrew months start on the new moon. The holiday could be called the birthday of trees, since it was the date that Jews in ancient Israel used to figure out the age of their trees in order to know when to bring fruit from them to the Temple in Jerusalem on Shavuot. A highly technical date, Tu Bishvat has been transformed into a holiday celebrating agriculture in the land of Israel, kabbalistic theories of the universe and environmental consciousness.
When I was a kid, we celebrated Tu Bishvat by eating raisins and almonds in Hebrew school and by buying trees in Israel through the Jewish National Fund. We also sang a little song in Hebrew about almond trees, “Ha-Shkediyah Porachat.” (It’s not easy to transliterate the Hebrew word for almond tree.) The lyrics mean something like, “the almond trees are blooming, the golden sun is shining, on the top of every roof, birds sing to herald the holiday.” My friend taught me an alternate version that fits the weather here much better:
The almond tree is freezing, the apple tree is sneezing
If you think that this is spring, I can sell you anything
Tu Bishvat is here, Hag La-Ilanot
Tu Bishvat is here, where’s my overcoat?
I went searching for the original version of the song, and found this adorable Spanish-speaking family getting all excited about the almond trees and cyclamen in Israel:
Today, it’s become increasingly common for people to celebrate Tu Bishvat with a seder, a mystical practice that compares the peels and seeds of fruit to the inner nature of everything. We ran a great piece by Aaron Kagan about his interfaith Tu Bishvat seder that he had last year. I also found a cool little article with recipes on The Jew and the Carrot A Tu Bishvat Seder for Every Personality.
We’re actually invited to a Tu Bishvat seder tonight at my havurah–but we aren’t going. I can’t imagine how we are going to have enough energy even to eat the stuffed cabbage I prepared last night. (Which has fruit in it! Yes!)
If you are interested in an opportunity to think about the environment, to appreciate your local trees, and to think about mystical connections–and most important if you are not a werewolf– Tu Bishvat is the holiday for you.
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[/float]doesn’t have it! My current oven isn’t very useful for 
