One Response to 9-11

It's obligatory to comment on the seventh anniversary of 9-11, a day that cannot be forgotten by anyone who lived through it, as it changed the world as we knew it.

Like the Kennedy assassination in 1963, becoming aware of the terrorist attack on our own soil was a moment so imbued with emotion and adrenaline that it becomes frozen in consciousness. We each have our own stories, but I want to share one aspect of mine.

Because we live in the Northwest--i.e. on the west coast--we were not yet up, and certainly not tied into the news when the attack occurred, so we were shocked when we received a phone call from a family member living in Jerusalem. We do not have a television, but listening to the events unfold via radio commentators was terrifying--an experience we shared with everyone else in our nation. (I consider myself fortunate to be spared those searing images.)

After I heard the awful descriptions, it was my job to awaken my 9-year-old son for school. I came to his bedside, and in the protective way each mother intuits, gently spoke: "Something terrible has happened to our country." I told him that evil people--terrorists--had attacked New York and Washington DC. My son sensed my controlled distress, hugged me and we cried together.

But then came the issue of how to respond. The Jewish approach is to look inward, to see hugely negative events not only as an expression of evil on the part of the perpetrators, but as an indicator of our own failures. The need then is to come closer to God. "What should I do?" my son asked, as we both felt helpless.

"Take on a new mitzvah," I told him. "Wear tzit-tzit." My son had resisted wearing the traditional four-cornered undershirt that Jewish men wear as commanded in the bible (the fringes hanging at the corners remind them of Torah obligations). Usually little boys start wearing tzit-tzit at age three, and my son certainly had several in his drawer. But he complained, and hadn't worn them regularly--until 9-11.

Without any protest, he wore his tzit-tzit daily under his regular shirt, tucked into his pants as well as an active kid can keep them tucked in, to public school--where he was often teased when they became visible (He had always worn his kipa, the traditional head-covering, or a baseball cap). We both understood that this was a way to address the relationship between us and God; to show Him we're conscious of the cosmic impact of even small personal behaviors.

Of course, prayer was also appropriate--lots of it. And certainly support for those in a position to respond militarily to remove the physical threat. We donated to charities that aided the victims; I put a magnet on the back of my car showing an American flag with the words "God bless America." Funny, that magnet is still displayed proudly on my minivan, but the similar stickers and magnets that proliferated around that time seem to have disappeared from the other vehicles I see on the road. We say "never forget," but we've removed our symbols of solidarity as indeed, the urgency and unity of that emotional time has faded.

But beyond those responses, we could do something personal to acknowledge God's role in shaping every event. And our role in fulfilling what He wants us Jews to do.

I wish I could say that my son considers the mitzvah he undertook that day (and continued faithfully for about 5 years) to be something integral to his soul; something that connects him with that time and place, and the need to be close to God. But now that he's 16, and (since he's post-bar-mitzvah age) required to wear tzit-tzit, it's become a nag-fest to get him to wear them. He goes to a Jewish high school, where it's normal to follow Jewish law, and yet, at this time of life, being "cool"--or, more correctly--"hot" seems to trump his religiosity on that issue.

Even if I fail in motivating him to comply with that Jewish responsibility, I hope that I conveyed to my son that at times of vulnerability and anguish, we should evaluate ourselves, and approach God--as well as kick the tuchus of anyone who dares breach this greatest nation on God's green earth.

More Consternation about Jewish Rules

My last post was about my difficulty with all the minutia that goes into preparation for Passover--and here I am writing on my laptop at a Passover Resort hotel. The sun is shining brightly outside and I just came back to my room from a wonderful outdoor buffet brunch, where the cheerful mosgiach made me the perfect omlet on one of those little gas flame burners, and in the background I heard the whirrr of the blenders making choose-your-ingredients smoothies. Matza brei and platters of cheeses and lox and fake bagels that look like the surface of the moon (and probably taste just as good) were on tables in the shaded patio, with crocks of hot porridge, bins of cool yoghurt and other comestibles embarrassingly abundant. So how can I continue to feel that many details of mitzvot are, um, unnecessary and weird?

Coincidentally (if there is such a thing), my 15-year-old son joined me sitting on a comfy couch in the sun this morning and we devoured our perfect omlettes together. He told me that he was up late moderating a heated discussion between a young fellow who is an atheist and only performs mitzvot to honor his parents, and one of the rabbis supervising the food prep here. The upshot was that the moshgiach used all the "why there has to be God" arguments and the disbeliever was unmoved.

Meanwhile, I had a fascinating conversation with a young seminary graduate who posits that halacha, every fastidious detail, is meant to further man's interaction with God. By applying logic to new issues, derived by a posek from the vast array of Torah thought, we bring otherwise staid and stale pronouncements into our personal realms on a daily basis. It is halacha, then, that actually forges our personal relationships with God. Whether or not to put tin foil on the shelves of one's refrigerator puts our efforts to conform to God's will foremost in our experience.

I can accept that to a point; my reaction is that we have choices even within the tight confines of halacha, and exactly HOW tight those confines are is a matter of which rabbi you follow or how some view went akimbo several hundred years ago, and just kept billowing further into ridiculousness--but now, entrenched as either minhag or halacha, cannot be retracted or rethought or revised.

An example: At the time electricity became available, I'm told, there was much discussion about its impact on Shabbat. Is turning on a light switch akin to opening a spigot? As water flows readily through pipes, electricity flows in an ongoing basis through a home's wires, and tapping into it for one's hot tray or electric blanket is no different from flushing the toilet to let the waiting water through.

It was decided that use of electricity was not similar to opening a spigot, and so Jews ended up with dark bathrooms and cold nighttime bodies and so many other inconveniences that arise from not being able to use electricity. One can say that this makes Shabbat special, if not more uncomfortable (which it certainly does) and that restraining from changing the world, which using electricity emphatically does, is the point of Shabbat, anyway.

OK, but let's say there's a new means of conveying energy that doesn't require electricity. I understand that in Israel, Jews can use the hot water from their faucets on Shabbat since the heating mechanism is solar, rather than via a gas tank that increases its flame when empty. Israeli Jews, then, regain the comfort of washing their faces on Shabbat with hot water--ahhh!--while I continue to shiver while spashing frigid water on my face. Is my experience of Shabbat somehow better because I have endured a throwback to discomfort?

Which takes me back to my disdain for halachic minutia. Yes, Torah is integrated with everything, every decision, every moment on our planet (and elsewhere!) But the amount of prescribed, mandatory behaviors is just toooooo encompassing, constricting and picayune. I contort my attitude with great duress to envision halacha as wondrous means to bind me to God. But, it's always my fault (God has none, of course) that I can't Pollyanna my way through many directives. In this religion, my view that many rules are over-the-top demanding and strange is by definition wrong, and it is my job to learn my way to seeing that fact.

Even as I write this, I am internally arguing the other side. That old yatzer ha ra is acting up, I tell myself! Also, being Jewish involves questions, so delving and questioning isn't so bad--as long as you keep following the rules. Still, there's that minutia. And then again--are we REALLY supposed to know why God tells us to so peculiarly celebrate matza, the bread of both freedom and affliction? Can we REALLY conceive why chumetz is such an anathema? And that's where I remain--stuck between reason and rebellion and acceptance.

So Rabbi Soloveitchik's "task of covenantal man" becomes a nearly impossible challenge:
“The Halakhah believes that there is only one world—not divisible into secular and hallowed sectors—which can either plunge into ugliness and hatefulness, or be roused to meaningful, redeeming activity, gathering up all latent powers into a state of holiness. Accordingly, the task of covenantal man is to be engaged not in dialectical surging forward and retreating, but in uniting the two communities into one community where man is both the creative, free agent, and the obedient servant of God.”

How do YOU solve this dilemma?

Troubled by Passover Minutia

It's just a couple days before Passover, and no time to have a crisis of faith.

Most people I know are too busy pouring pots-full of boiling water on their counters, perhaps with towels on the floor below waiting for the overflow. They're taking blowtorches designed for creme brulee to their stovetops. They're boiling pans of water in their microwaves. They're taping pieces of tin foil on the grates inside their refrigerators, being sure to poke holes for air circulation. They're cutting pieces of thick plastic or aluminum and using lots of sticky shelf paper. And they're wrapping up all their cereal, flour, cookies, and just about all their regular food--and completing a contract selling it to a non-Jew.

Is this crazy, or what? Hours and hours taking a toothbrush to the grout. Sorting through toys for a stray stub of granola bar. Flipping through the pages of books, shaking them upside down combing for crumbs. This is indeed insanity. Is this really what God wants us to be doing? I thought learning Torah was the most important thing--or maybe praying, or doing kindnesses for others, or visiting someone alone and sick. No, for a week--or several--Jews are overcome with a fear of specks of leavened products.

And the job falls almost exclusively to women. Unless a guy lives alone, in which case he'll only attack this job if he's too poor to hire somebody else to do it, men have women to obsess about this. How many guys do you know who are diligent and compulsive about Pesach cleaning?

The bottom line for me is that--I will confess--my faith is shaken. Frankly, I am of the privileged few who are spared this entire weirdness as I am hired as a staff person at a lovely and luxurious Passover hotel getaway, and I have no right to complain about the work that once again, I need not do.

Still, enough of my friends ARE doing it, and my memory of the process is fresh enough that I do wonder how any clever God would come up with this as something beneficial to His creations. A test of faith, you may say--God provides this so He can reward our loyalty and our effort. Then why threaten us with being "cut off" from our people, ie the end of our eternal souls--if we snatch a slice of pizza over Passover's eight days? Or if we sell all our chumetz except the bag of tortilla chips?

We're taught that the inflation of flour by yeast represents the puffiness of our egos--i.e. arrogance. Arrogance is one of the two characteristics--midos--that we're told to eliminate from our personalities. And here, for eight days, is a means to symbolically eliminate this puffiness, both spiritually, as we relive Jews' transition from earthly bondage to spiritual bondage to the only worthy master, God--and physically by never taking any leavened products into our bodies.

This doesn't wash for me. (I'll skip the Urchatz pun). Why didn't God say we could eat non-leavened stuff like cookies? We can have cookies, but they have to be matza meal or potato starch based--I know, I know, you'll give me the stuff about flour having the potential to be leavened. But it's not about flour--or else we couldn't have matza, which is--flour and water. We know that the already-baked matza can't rise; it's had no more than 18 minutes to combine its ingredients. But the pre-baked cookies can't rise either.

All the permutations of this chumetz-restriction are so way out there as to make Jews look primitive and brainless. Gentiles who enter a Pesach-dik kitchen think we've gone to the moon. I don't really care what gentiles think; I want to do what God wants, and I trust He knows better than I do how to maximize my spiritual potential. But when you spend hundreds--usually THOUSANDS of dollars, and days, WEEKS of work to very indirectly and obliquely tamp down our egos--well, first off, I don't think it works any better than less intrusive means, and it just plain doesn't make sense. I know that God MADE "sense;" if He made everything, He can do whatever He likes. Still the "fences" around avoiding chumetz, and the complexities of it, and the potential punishment for NOT doing it, or doing it incompletely--is just too bizarre.

Tell me where I'm wrong. And in the meantime, have a Pesach kasher v sameach--if you ever get THROUGH kashering.