Mah Rabu מה רבו

Tu Bishvat Halls of Fame and Shame

2012-01-26T19:48:00.003-05:00

Last week was D-Day in the War on Tu Bishvat. This week, as the New Year of the Trees gets closer, it's time to publicize who is in the right and who is still committed to being wrong.

Here is Mah Rabu's 5772 Tu Bishvat...

Hall of Fame

They "shall be like a tree planted by waters, sending forth its roots by a stream: it does not sense the coming of heat, its leaves are ever fresh; it has no care in a year of drought, it does not cease to yield fruit." (Jeremiah 17:8)

Wikipedia remains the authority on every topic in the universe except chickens. And it's not just the English Wikipedia: a quick tour down the left margin reveals that every language using the Latin alphabet represents that vowel with "i" (or "ie"); in the Cyrillic alphabet it's "i" or "и".
MyJewishLearning is reliable even about chickens.
The Union for Reform Judaism remains committed to environmental justice.
"At The Jewish Theological Seminary, the teachings of Torah and the issue of sustainability have intersected in our efforts to preserve and conserve Earth's precious resources."
The Open Siddur Project has made a valuable historical document accessible to the public.
Etz Chayim DC just started last year, and has a perfect record so far.
B'nai Jeshurun is one of the largest and most influential synagogues in the country.
Neohasid provides many useful resources about the holiday.
Yeshiva.org.il is "The Torah World Gateway".
Kveller has something to kvell about.
We wish the Knesset a happy 63rd birthday.
The Conservative Yeshiva offers learning programs in Jerusalem and online.
The Kotel is the last standing piece of the retaining wall around the Temple Mount.
InterfaithFamily.com encourages Jewish choices and a welcoming Jewish community.

But then there's also the...

Hall of Shame

They "shall be like a bush in the desert, which does not sense the coming of good: it is set in the scorched places of the wilderness, in a barren land without inhabitant." (Jeremiah 17:6)

Hazon, as a (once-)prominent voice of Jewish environmentalism, truly has no excuse, especially since they used to be on the right side of this issue.
Isabella Freedman ("in partnership with ... the many branches of the Jewish Environmental Movement") is also guilty of greenwashing.
If the Shalom Center is a "prophetic voice", then the message got garbled.
Aish probably actually denies climate change (they certainly deny evolution).
The people in the rabbanut who banned Häagen-Dazs were right about one thing: the Orthodox Union is not kosher.
As for Canfei Nesharim, eagles aren't kosher either.
The United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism is shrinking.
Chabad worships a false messiah.
The Jewish Agency goes downhill fast after the URL and page title.
Hey Hillel: Go and learn it.
Ritualwell is down the drain.
The Big Jewish Tent is missing some stakes.
Finally, Hebcal has earned its way into a special division of the hall of shame, for messing up not only the English but the Hebrew too. (I suspect this was the result of an automatic algorithm of the sort that used to bring us "You have 1 new messages", and shouldn't be too hard to fix. RET points out that Shevat is the only month that begins with a sheva.)

Those who have found themselves in the hall of shame should remember that it's not too late to change, and the gates of repentance are always open. Except, perhaps, to this guy, who spells it "Tu B'Shvas". There, he asks "did my parents get their money’s worth on my yeshiva day school tuition?" This question is left to the reader as an exercise.

The War on Tu Bishvat

2012-01-19T02:13:00.001-05:00

It's less than three weeks away, and you've started getting emails about Tu Bishvat events. You're probably also getting emails about Tu B'Shvat and Tu B'Shevat, whatever those are. This blog has previously explained why "Tu Bishvat" is correct, while "Tu B'Shvat" and "Tu B'Shevat" are WRONG WRONG WRONG. Yet many of those who are wrong continue to persist in their wrongness, even after being corrected. Not only that, but they come up with a range of defenses (from the simple to the epicycle-like) to justify their stance. This post responds to those defenses, to show that they are utterly without merit.

(Note: It has been brought to my attention that the sheva under the shin is a sheva meracheif: an intermediate form between a sheva na and a sheva nach. If it were a true sheva nach, the second bet would take a dageish kal, so it would be "Tu Bishbat". For this reason, this post will not take a stance on whether the last part of the word is "--shvat", "--sh'vat", or "--shevat", since all of these have some justification, however weak. Instead, we'll focus on the truly important issue: the vowel under the first bet is a chirik, not a sheva. It's "Bi-", not "B'-".)

Here are, in no particular order, the top five rationalizations for "B'Shvat"/"B'Shevat", and why they're wrong.

1. It's just transliteration! There are so many different ways to transliterate any Hebrew word. Just last month we had Hanukkah... or was it Chanuka? Which transliteration scheme you prefer is an aesthetic judgment, but none of them is wrong.

No, it's not just transliteration.

Yes, there are at least eight valid ways to spell (C)hanuk(k)a(h). The letter ח can be represented by "h" or "ch", or even "j" (for the Spanish speakers) or "hh", and that's just in ASCII. A dageish chazak can be represented in the transliteration by doubling the letter ("kk"), or not ("k"). A ה at the end of the word can be transliterated ("ah") or not ("a"). These are indeed aesthetic choices about different transliteration schemes.

But that's not at all what is going on with the New Year of the Trees. The vowel under the first bet is a chirik. Yes, there are several different ways of transliterating a chirik: it could be "i" or "ee". But no one would ever transliterate a chirik with an apostrophe. The origin of "B'Shvat" is in not knowing that the vowel is a chirik. This isn't about making a different aesthetic choice about how to transliterate that vowel; it's about putting in the wrong vowel. It is no more correct than "Boshvat" or "Bushvat" or "Bqshvat".

2. "Tu B'Shevat" is in common usage. It's been spelled that way in print in such-and-such authoritative source.

All this means is that lots of other people (including some people you trust) have been wrong. Appeal to authority doesn't change the rules of Hebrew grammar.

And if you're going to try to make the descriptive lexicography argument (i.e. the fact that so many people have spelled it this way makes it a valid spelling), that's a rather tortured argument to make in this case, because it rests on the dubious proposition that English-transliterated Hebrew has a life of its own as a language evolving independently of actual Hebrew, a claim that few if any would make during the other 11 months of the year. Most would instead say that transliterated Hebrew is merely a representation of Hebrew itself. Therefore, the descriptive lexicography argument holds water only if there are documented cases in modern vocalized Hebrew sources in which בשבט is written with two shevas in a row.

3. "B'-" represents how people actually pronounce it. I've never heard anyone say "Bee-".

So English speakers commonly mispronounce the word. But should that mispronunciation be reflected in the written form? We still write "would have" and "going to", even if people pronounce them "would of" and "gonna". Ok, we might write "gonna" if we were trying to produce a faithful transcription of spoken language (rather than using proper language) or if we were being cutesy and casual, but that doesn't apply to otherwise serious and formal settings such as titles of books and articles (where you might expect to see "Tu B'Shevat").

And while the idea that transliteration should be a phonetic transcription of non-native speakers' mispronunciations might be an argument (however tenuous) for "Tu B'Shvat", it completely fails to justify "Tu B'Shevat", because no one has ever pronounced the "e" in "B'Shevat" (or any other vowel in that position). Whatever you're doing when you write "B'Shevat", you're doing something other than spelling the word the way people pronounce it.

4. The actual prefix is "B'-", so "B'Shevat" illustrates the grammatical structure more clearly than "Bishvat".

If you want to indicate that the word is a prefix followed by the name of a month (a proper name), there are ways of doing this typographically without changing the vowels: "BiShvat", "Bi-Shvat", or even "Bi'Shvat".

Yet some would claim that "B'Shevat" is superior to any of these, because it shows that the prefix "B'" is added to the word "Shevat". This idea, that a transliteration should represent the raw morphemes that make up a word without any regard to transformations that those morphemes undergo when combined, is another one of those exotic ideas that no one would even think of (much less argue for) for 11 months of the year. To use another holiday as an example, the word סוכות is formed by adding the suffix "-ot" to the word "sukkah". Does anyone transliterate the name of this holiday as "Sukkahot" or "Sukkah-ot"? Why not?

Once again, you didn't know it was a chirik, you got corrected, and rather than admitting the mistake and fixing it, you doubled down.

5. Seriously, are we really wasting our time arguing about this? This is the modern Jewish environmental holiday, when we should be worrying about much bigger things such as the mass destruction that climate change is wreaking on the planet, not something as insignificant as a Hebrew vowel.

I certainly agree that preventing the destruction of the planet is paramount. But this isn't an either/or: both struggles are fundamentally the same.

In the United States, a major obstacle to taking meaningful action against climate change is that a politically influential faction denies that climate change is even happening. To promote this view among the public and stymie needed environmental regulation, they are fighting a war on epistemology. In this war, they are aided and abetted by the media, which seeks to appear neutral and therefore reports any issue as if it has two equally valid sides, regardless of whether one side is objectively true (since pointing that out would be "partisan").

Those who try to claim that "Tu Bishvat" and "Tu B'Shevat" are equally valid, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, are aligning themselves epistemologically with climate change "skeptics" and their media enablers. Is this really the company you want to keep? By reducing everything to a difference of opinion, you are contributing to this toxic intellectual atmosphere.

Safeguarding the Earth's future requires being prepared to accept inconvenient truths, whether that means the dangerous effects we are having on the climate, or whether that means that the first vowel in "Bishvat" isn't the vowel you thought it was.

Shall the rich pay more?

2012-01-11T23:49:00.000-05:00

As noted previously on this blog, I always try to file my taxes by Rosh Chodesh Adar. This year, that means sending in the return before the National Havurah Committee Chesapeake Retreat (February 17-19, 2012, Presidents' Day weekend), which will be exploring the vital issues of taxation, regulation, and other wise restraints that make us free, as well as having lots of fun and networking grassroots Jewish communities from across the region.

Here's this year's blurb:

Join the National Havurah Committee, havurahs and minyans from across the Mid-Atlantic Region for the NHC Chesapeake Retreat!

In parashat Mishpatim, Moses receives law concerning fines, lending, and restitution. On Shabbat Shekalim, the haftarah defines a system of census and taxation, including that “the rich shall not pay more and the poor shall not pay less” than a half-shekel. In the midst of a presidential primary, with Wall Street recently occupied, and in the weeks before Passover, how do we perceive these laws? Does equal taxation promote or hinder equality? Do regulations and taxes represent an infringement on, or an enabler of, human freedom?

Take a weekend to examine these questions while experiencing the holiness of a community that learns, prays, and rests together. Individuals, families, and havurot of all ages will gather to sing, eat, study, dance, pray, debate, relax, and bond.

If you've thought about going to the NHC Summer Institute, but stayed home because it was too long, too far, or too expensive, the regional retreat is a great way to get a taste of the experience that is shorter, cheaper, and (if you're in the Mid-Atlantic region) closer. There are activities for all ages, and courses on both the Mishpatim/Shekalim theme and other topics from Sephardi Passover songs to farming. Registration is entirely online this year, and work-study and scholarship assistance is available. Register by January 16 before the price goes up (speaking of taxes and regulations). See you there!

Winter is coming

2011-12-25T22:08:00.001-05:00

In honor of Rosh Chodesh Tevet. (You'll see why!)

Every Hebrew calendar geek knows the "ATBaSh" parlor trick, where if you know the day of the week of (almost) any Jewish holiday, you can quickly figure out the day of the week of (almost) any other holiday that year. As we have blogged before, this works only for the period from Adar through Cheshvan. Fortunately, that period includes all of the major holidays, and a few minor ones too. But it doesn't cover the minor holidays that fall during the winter, and that's what this post will seek to do.

***

The trick dates back at least to the Tur (14th century) and it works like this: Take the first six days of Pesach in a given year (note that the period from Adar to Cheshvan spans two Hebrew years, so we're looking at a given Gregorian year), and write the Hebrew alphabet backwards, starting from the end. You'll find that the corresponding holidays fall on the same day of the week as that day of Pesach.

1) תשעה באב = ת Tish'ah B'Av is always exactly 16 weeks after the first day of Pesach. (Also, 17 Tammuz is 3 weeks before 9 Av, and therefore the same day of the week. When they fall on Shabbat, as they will in 2012, the actual observance is delayed to Sunday.)
2) שבועות = ש Shavuot, by definition, is 7 weeks after the second day of Pesach.
3) ראש השנה = ר Rosh Hashanah. (Sukkot and Shemini Atzeret are also on the same day of the week.)
4) קריאת התורה = ק In communities that observe two days of Shemini Atzeret, this is "Simchat Torah" (on the second day of Shemini Atzeret).
5) צום כפור = צ Yom Kippur (9 days after Rosh Hashanah, and therefore 2 days of the week later). (Also, Tzom Gedaliah is 1 week before Yom Kippur and thus the same day of the week, except when it is delayed due to Shabbat.)
6) פורים = פ Purim (in unwalled cities).

The original version just covered the first six days of Pesach, but the 7th day was added in the 20th century:

7) עצמאות = ע Israeli Independence Day (at least before the Knesset starts mucking with the date).

It works so perfectly that one wonders whether this was the real reason that Ben-Gurion decided to declare independence a day before the British Mandate expired.

Other Israeli civil observances tied to the Hebrew calendar can also be located with this framework. Yom Hashoah is always the same day of the week as Purim (again, before the Knesset reschedules it); to remember this, note that some have suggested that Yom Hashoah is the Purim story without Esther. Yom Yerushalayim is exactly one week before Shavuot.

Finally, Lag Ba'Omer is also the same day of the week as Purim: not hard to remember.

Rosh Hashanah can fall on only four days of the week (Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Shabbat), and therefore all of these other days are also restricted to four days. To figure out which four days, just use the relationships above. For example, Shavuot is on the day (of the week) before Rosh Hashanah, so it can only fall on Sunday, Monday, Wednesday, or Friday.

***

During the winter months, it's not so simple. This is because there are three variables that can cause the calendar to be different from one year to the next:
1) Cheshvan can have 29 or 30 days.
2) Kislev can have 29 or 30 days.
3) There can be one or two months of Adar. (In leap years, Adar I is the "extra" month, and always has 30 days.)

In order to connect winter holidays to non-winter holidays, you need to know at least one of those three pieces of information. To keep it as simple as possible, the mnemonics below will be for a year that goes from Tevet to Kislev. (As a convenient and coincidental memory aid, this corresponds roughly to the Gregorian year, but not precisely: 10 Tevet can fall in either December or January. Thus some Gregorian years have two Fasts of Tevet, and some have none.) This way, you only have to know one additional variable: the number of days in Cheshvan (to expand forward into Kislev), or whether it's a leap year (to expand backward into Tevet and Sh'vat).

Let's start with days that depend only on whether it's a leap year, since that's something you're more likely to know off the top of your head.

Tu BiShvat: In a leap year, it's on the same day of the week as Rosh Hashanah. (Remember, this is the following Rosh Hashanah.) In a non-leap year, it's on the same day as Yom Kippur. Mnemonic: New Year of the Trees.

Since Tu BiShvat is the same day as Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur, there are five possible days of the week when it can fall: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, or Shabbat. (Neither Rosh Hashanah nor Yom Kippur can fall on Friday or Sunday.)

10 Tevet: It's always one day (of the week) after Tu BiShvat. Mnemonic: Deuteronomy 20:19 says that when you besiege a city, you shouldn't cut down the trees. Trees before siege.

Thus, 10 Tevet can also fall on five days of the week: Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday. As a guest post here discussed, this makes it the only fast day that can fall on a Friday. As discussed there also, it can never fall on Shabbat, which makes the question of whether we would still fast purely hypothetical.

***

Finally, Chanukah. It's complicated because whether Cheshvan has 29 or 30 days in a given year isn't something we're likely to know without looking up. So here's a quick way to find that from information you're more likely to have handy (which just happens to also be the way it's determined in the calendar algorithm itself).

You need to know the day of the week of Rosh Hashanah this year and next year, and whether it's a leap year. From the number of days in between, you can figure out how many days are in the year. Non-leap years have 353, 354, or 355 days, and leap years have 383, 384, or 385 days, and it helps to remember that 350 and 385 are both divisible by 7. If the year has 353, 354, 383, or 384 days, then Cheshvan has 29 days; if the year has 355 or 385 days, then Cheshvan has 30 days.

Once you know that, then you can find which day of the week Chanukah begins on. If Cheshvan has 30 days, then Chanukah begins on the same day of the week as Rosh Hashanah (exactly 12 weeks later). If Cheshvan has 29 days, then Chanukah begins one day earlier, on the same day of the week as Shavuot. Mnemonic: Applesauce or sour cream?

Since Chanukah can begin on the same day as Rosh Hashanah or a day earlier, there are six days of the week when it can begin: all of them except Tuesday, because years beginning on Tuesday can only have 354 or 384 days, so in those years, Cheshvan always has 29 days (so Chanukah begins on Monday).

***

To see this in action, let's use this year (5772) as an example.

Starting with Chanukah: it's in 2011, so it goes with that set of holidays (Pesach on Tuesday, Rosh Hashanah on Thursday, etc.). Did Cheshvan have 29 or 30 days? Well, I know that Rosh Hashanah this year was on Thursday, and next year it's on a Monday, and this isn't a leap year. From Thursday to Monday is a 4-day gap, so this year must have 350+4 = 354 days. That means Cheshvan had 29 days. So Chanukah began on the same day of the week as Shavuot (one day before Rosh Hashanah): Wednesday.

For the minor holidays in Tevet and Sh'vat, we look instead at the upcoming holidays in 2012 (when Rosh Hashanah is on a Monday). It's not a leap year, so Tu BiShvat is on the same day as Yom Kippur: Wednesday. 10 Tevet is one day later, on Thursday.

Chodesh tov!

The other question everyone is asking

2011-12-22T16:50:00.000-05:00

Q: Is Parshat Mikeitz ever not read during Chanukah?

A: Yes, in 353- or 383-day years beginning on Shabbat. The Shabbat start means that Bereishit isn't read until a full week after Shemini Atzeret (so the whole Torah reading cycle gets off to a relatively late start), and the deficient year (Cheshvan has 29 days) means that Chanukah comes sooner than otherwise. In those years, the Shabbat during Chanukah (on day 2) is Vayeishev, and Mikeitz is the day after Chanukah ends. (In 355- or 385-day years beginning on Shabbat, Cheshvan has 30 days, so Chanukah starts one day later, and contains two Shabbatot: Vayeishev and Mikeitz.)

Overall, this occurs in about 10% of years, but during the current decade, there's a drought. The last time the actual haftarah for Mikeitz (the famous story of Solomon offering to cut the baby in half) was read was December 2000, and the next time will be December 2020.

Darkness falls across the land

2011-12-21T13:53:00.001-05:00

Happy solstice festivals! This year (as every year, but more so for some reason), a number of people have been asking this question: Why isn’t the earliest sunset on the date of the solstice? Indeed, the solstice this year is at 05:30 UT (12:30 am EST) on December 22, while the earliest sundown in many places (as many noticed, particularly Sabbath observers) was around two weeks earlier. (This depends on location, but here in the DC area, the earliest sundown was at 4:45 pm on December 7, while sundown on December 22 will be 4:49 pm.)

The answer to this question depends on what you mean by “why”, and I’ll try to answer both interpretations of the question.

(I apologize to readers in the southern hemisphere that this post is written from a borealocentric perspective. To apply it to the southern half of the globe, either change "December" to "June" (and switch around some of the specifics), or change "shortest" to "longest" and swap "earliest" with "latest".)

1) Phenomenological: I thought the solstice was the shortest day! If the earliest sundown was on December 7, why don’t we call that the solstice?

The winter solstice is indeed the day with the shortest amount of daylight (i.e. the shortest time from sunrise to sunset). But sunrise and sunset times don't move symmetrically. During the fall, sunset times are getting earlier and sunrise times are getting later. But after we hit the earliest sunset (sometime last fortnight), sunset starts getting later again (albeit slowly*), while sunrise continues getting later (somewhat faster). Thus, the day is still getting shorter. This continues until the solstice. After the solstice, sunrise is still getting later but has slowed down, while sundown is also getting later and has sped up, so the day is getting longer. Finally, sometime in early January, we get to the latest sunrise, after which sunrise starts getting earlier.

This is all easy to overlook since many of us, for a variety of reasons, are more attuned to sundown times than to sunrise times.

[* For those familiar with calculus, this makes sense if sunset time is a smooth function: on the date of the earliest sunset time, its derivative is zero; therefore, near that date, its derivative must be small.]

For a concrete example: Here in DC, sunrise on December 7 was 7:12 am (so the time from sunrise to sunset was 9 hours 33 minutes), and on December 22 it will be 7:23 am (so sunrise to sunset will be 9 hours 26 minutes, which is shorter!). The latest sunrise in DC won't be until January 6, when it is 7:26 am. (On that day, sunset will be as late as 5:00 pm, so sunrise to sunset will be 9 hours 34 minutes, longer than on the solstice.)

(Ok, technically the latest sunrise was actually 7:39 am the first weekend in November just before we "fell back", because this country is addicted to Daylight Saving Time and stays on it much longer than it should, but that's just a clock trick that's neither here nor there.)

2) Mechanistic: Ok, but why don’t sunrise and sunset move symmetrically?

Yeah, why? It doesn't seem like they should be independent, because the same mechanism is responsible for the changes in both sunrise and sunset times, right? The earth's tilt means that you get different amounts of light and darkness each day depending on where you're located in the annual orbit (the standard explanation for the cause of seasons). And there's no reason this should affect sunrise and sunset differently (after all, we would expect the earth-sun system to look basically the same if we ran time backwards).

The answer is that, separate from the seasonal variation in day length, there is also variation in the time of solar noon (the time halfway between sunrise and sunset, when the sun is at its highest point in the sky). This variation is known as the equation of time, and is the same everywhere on the planet (unlike day length, which depends on latitude). That Wikipedia link explains it in more detail than you ever wanted, but here are the basics:

The equation of time is the result of two factors: a) the eccentricity of the earth's orbit, b) the earth's tilt. So if the earth's axis were not tilted and the earth's orbit were perfectly circular, then there would be no variation in solar noon, and the earliest sunset (and latest sunrise) would indeed be on the date of the solstice.

a) Eccentricity: The earth's orbit is an ellipse, not a circle. It's close to a circle (the eccentricity is only 0.0167), so the earth-sun distance doesn't vary substantially over the course of the year; contrary to a popular belief, this is not the cause of seasons. However, the eccentricity has another effect: As described by Kepler's second law (and explained by conservation of angular momentum), Earth's speed as it moves around the sun is not uniform: it moves faster when it is closer to the sun, and it is closest to the sun in January.
Not every solar day is 24 hours: that's just the average over the entire year. The solar day (time from one noon to the next) is equal to the sidereal day (the time it takes for Earth to rotate once on its axis, relative to faraway points such as other stars: about 23 hours 56 minutes), plus the extra amount of time it has to rotate so that the sun is at its highest point again, to account for the fact that the earth moved a little bit during that day. The earth moves through about 1/365 of its orbit every day, so this extra rotation should be about 1/365 of a circle, and should take about 1/365 of a day: about 4 minutes.

But at times of the year when the earth is moving faster (e.g. close to January), it moves through more than 1/365 of its orbit each day, so this extra rotation is more than 4 minutes, and the time from one solar noon to the next is more than 24 hours. Solar noon gets later each day, which is exactly what we see above, with the sunrise and sunset data. At times of the year when the earth is farther from the sun and moving slower (e.g. close to July), it's the opposite.

b) Tilt: Around the two solstices, part a is basically the whole story. But around the equinoxes, Earth's rotation is at an angle (up to 23.5°) relative to its motion around the sun. This means that the Earth's motion around the sun in a single day corresponds to less rotation around the axis, so it has the same effect as the earth moving slower: solar noon gets earlier each day.

Putting the two parts together, the combined effect is greater around the December solstice, since the two parts act in the same direction: both the solstice and the nearby perihelion cause noon to drift later. Around the June solstice, the effect still exists, but is less pronounced, because the solstice and the nearby aphelion act in opposite directions. (In DC in 2012, the summer solstice is on June 20, the latest sundown is on June 27, and the earliest sunrise is on June 13 or 14. So there's still a difference, but it's not as big.)

***

Advanced section:

In thinking about this question, it occurs to me that sunrise time and sunset time, as time-dependent variables, can (like any other pair of functions) be decomposed into a symmetric and an antisymmetric part (or, if you like, a differential and a common-mode signal). The antisymmetric (differential) component is the length of the day (call it L), and the symmetric (common-mode) component is the time of local noon (call it N), relative to the average solar noon in that location. (There’s also a “DC offset” (call it D) representing the time of average solar noon, which is by definition constant throughout the year and depends only on longitude – essentially where you are within your time zone – but that doesn't tell us anything interesting.) I think this is a more natural choice of basis to understand what’s going on.

Sunrise time can be expressed as D + N – L/2, and sunset time can be expressed as D + N + L/2. (This analysis requires the approximation that these variables change slowly enough that fluctuations on the scale of less than a day are negligible, so that on a given day, N and L have the same value at sunrise as they do at sunset.)

Then we can look at each variable separately to see what affects it.

L has two components: L₀ is constant, equal to 12 hours plus a few extra minutes to account for the refraction of light in the atmosphere (so in a vacuum, it would be exactly 12 hours). L₁ is a periodic function with a period of one year. The amplitude of this function depends on latitude, while the period and phase are the same everywhere. At the equator, the amplitude is zero (so the day length is 12 hours and change for the entire year), and the amplitude increases as you go up in latitude. In the southern hemisphere, the amplitude is negative (or you could call it positive and call the northern hemisphere negative; you'd just have to shift the phase by 180°). Inside the polar circles, it starts to break down, since there are parts of the year when the sun never sets/rises, so L isn't well-defined. The minimum and maximum of L are on the solstices.

N is the equation of time (but with the reverse sign because of the convention of how the equation of time is defined). As shown in the Wikipedia article (and its graphs), it has two Fourier components: N₁ (for eccentricity) with a period of a year, and N₂ (for tilt) with a period of half a year. This function is the same everywhere on earth. The two zeroes of N₁ are at perihelion and aphelion, so the maximum and minimum are about halfway in between. The four zeros of N₂ are at the solstices and equinoxes, so the maxima and minima are about halfway in between those.

Putting this together, it becomes clear why the date of the earliest/latest sunrise/sunset depends on latitude: you're combining functions with two different periods, and the extrema of the combined function will depend on the amplitudes of the components (set the derivative to zero and solve!), and the amplitude of L₁ varies with latitude.

#OccupytheMinyanConference

2011-11-08T18:57:00.000-05:00

(Crossposted to Jewschool.)

This past weekend, the great city of Washington DC played host to Mechon Hadar’s fourth (approximately sesquiannual) Minyan Conference. Unlike the previous conferences, this one wasn’t called the Independent Minyan Conference (at least not exclusively). This wasn’t because the 10-1/2-year-old Kehilat Hadar is no longer an “independent minyan” by some definitions; it’s because the conference broadened its reach to other lay-led minyanim that are affiliated with larger institutions, such as synagogues and Hillels.

I was there representing Minyan Segulah (on the DC/Maryland border), and it was a great opportunity to network with organizers of other minyanim from San Francisco to London, discuss issues facing our communities, and yadda yadda yadda.

But I wanted to share one highlight. The prayer options on Friday night and Saturday morning included 5 local minyanim (including Segulah). For Shabbat mincha, there were two options at the conference location: a traditional egalitarian minyan downstairs, and a partnership minyan upstairs. Then during se’udah shelishit, they announced the same two options for ma’ariv. Some participants stood up and made another announcement: “We were also thinking about doing something alternative. If you’re interested, come to [location].” Multiple people shouted out “What is it?” They responded “Come to [location] and help figure it out.”

On the basis of no information beyond “something alternative”, 43 people showed up (out of around 120 participants).

As one might have expected from the announcement, there wasn’t a specific plan. A substantial fraction of the ~15 minutes allotted for ma’ariv was spent discussing what we should do. We also sang several niggunim (one of which had been taught at a session earlier that day, another of which was taught right then), and someone talked about transitioning from Shabbat into the week, and someone else connected Parshat Lech Lecha to her own recent experiences. And then it was time to join the rest of the group for havdalah.

A few of us were debriefing afterwards, and we agreed that this had been “Occupy the Minyan Conference”: get the people on board first, and the specific policy proposals come later. The significance of this event wasn’t the content, but the fact that so many people were attracted to it. There was a visible feeling of “We are the 36%”, and the excitement that we all knew from going to the first meeting of a new minyan, and a sense of empowered Judaism (two people spoke this gathering into being, and it was so). I don’t know what the larger message is (beyond the obvious – that anyone trying to generalize about the independent minyan organizer population (and, kal vachomer, the independent minyan participant population), by ascribing to them a particular religious outlook and style of practice, is being lazy and missing the mark). But it was a reminder not to let anything get stale.

Reform surrender

2011-10-02T22:42:00.000-04:00

(Crossposted to Jewschool.)

Happy 5772! Another year, another blog post I don’t really want to write. But I’m writing it anyway, because who else will? Criticizing the Reform movement on its own terms (as opposed to either not criticizing it, or judging it by external standards) is a lonely beat.

An article that everyone has been commenting on lately is “Campus Life 201: Trying Out Frum“, from the Fall 2011 issue of Reform Judaism magazine. The author, a Yale undergrad “raised in a committed Reform household”, tells the story of a week in which she adopted various practices including kashrut, praying three times a day (apparently with a non-egalitarian minyan), praying before and after eating, and wearing long skirts.

Some of the other blogs that have picked up this article have understood it a certain way: one blog gives it the headline “Reform Girl Tries Out Orthodox Judaism For a Week”, and another describes the experiment as “practicing Orthodox Judaism for a week”.

Had this been the actual stated objective of the experiment, I would have no objections. There are many streams in modern Judaism, and each one could stand to gain a better understanding of the others. One way to gain this understanding is by experience. (I’ve visited many types of Jewish communities myself, and occasionally I’ll pray out of a Yemenite siddur just to shake things up.)

But those who characterized the experiment this way didn’t read closely enough. Just as the word list in the famous psych experiment doesn’t include the word “sleep”, this article doesn’t use the word “Orthodox” even once.

In the author’s own words, the aim was different: “For seven days, I would do every Jewish ritual I could think of—big or small, no exceptions—to see whether rituals I had never tried or been mindful of would be meaningful to me.” This was done in order to “g[i]ve the informed choices I make as a Reform Jew renewed depth and meaning”.

Starting with this goal, there are a lot of different ways that this week could have gone. For example, it could have looked something like The Year of Living Biblically by A.J. Jacobs, an amusing read in which Jacobs chronicles his attempt to observe all the biblical commandments, including the more obscure ones such as shiluach hakein. Of course, modern Judaism (in all its forms) is more than just biblical, so one could envision a version of this that also includes practices originating in rabbinic literature and later. This experiment could have included a broad assortment of rituals (some still observed today, and others revived for this purpose) taken from all periods of Jewish history, and practiced in all parts of the Jewish world. Imagine shacharit from Kol Haneshamah, mincha from Nusach Ari, and ma’ariv from Seder Rav Amram, or the non-prayer equivalent of all that.

But that’s not how it ended up. (At least that’s not how it was described in the Reform Judaism article; the experiment may have included a wider variety of Jewish rituals, but we don’t have any written evidence for that.) Instead, the actual implementation looks a whole lot like a week in the life of a 21st-century American Modern Orthodox college student (albeit with more self-reflection). And not just any Orthodox college student, but specifically, a female one. Thus, “every Jewish ritual [she] could think of” didn’t include things like tefillin or tzitzit, which seem to be standard stops for people (of all genders) who are experimenting with Jewish rituals. Perhaps she didn’t think of those. But then in the discussion of “modest” clothing, the author mentions “male friends who wear kippot”. So if kippot count as a ritual (and I’m not sure I would classify them as such, but they certainly count at least as much as skirts do), then they are an example of a ritual that the author thought of (which we know because she wrote about it) but didn’t try (as far as we are told).

Thus the implementation involved Orthodox gender roles, contemporary Orthodox modes of dress, contemporary Orthodox views of kashrut (the author checks cookies for a hechsher – a practice that certainly originated after the Reform/Orthodox split), and apparently an Orthodox daily minyan (the author writes that “as a woman I simply did not count”). So the bloggers who characterized this experiment as “Orthodox Judaism for a week” can be forgiven for making that leap. Though it was framed as an exploration in informed autonomy, “Orthodox Judaism for a week” is basically how it turned out.

My point here isn’t to pick on some college student. As I wrote in Hilchot Pluralism Part VI, this result is typical when you bring together students from Reform and Orthodox backgrounds. When one group of students is brought up to self-identify as “not doing everything” and another group is brought up to self-identify as “doing everything”, the first group can hardly be faulted for believing the second group, when they haven’t been given any alternative paradigm. (Besides, as a Harvard alum married to a Princeton alum, I have low expectations for anything coming out of Yale, alma mater of George W. Bush and C. Montgomery Burns.)

Rather, my reaction is summed up (mutatis mutandis) by David Hammer, in his response to an article by an engineering undergrad who had volunteered to teach physics in a first-grade classroom:

I do not fault the author: He was new to thinking about science teaching, in a context that inspired presumption, and his intentions and enthusiasm were sincere. I would welcome Physics for First-Graders as an early paper in a science education seminar, hoping to see more sophistication later in the semester. But I cannot fathom the decision at Kappan to publish the ingenuous impressions of a novice, as if they represented an important contribution to the community. The Professional Journal for Education should have more respect for the profession.

Reform Judaism is an official publication of the Union for Reform Judaism, mailed out to every member of a URJ congregation. As such, I think it was irresponsible for them to print this article. The URJ is supposed to be “for Reform Judaism”, but by running this article, it is promoting the frame that being “more observant” is synonymous with Orthodox Judaism. In this frame, Reform Jews can make choices about their observance, but the menu from which they make these choices is contemporary Orthodox Judaism (rather than the full scope of Jewish practice from the past, present, and future).

At the end of “frum week”, this author decided that this lifestyle wasn’t for her, mostly because it was too difficult (plus one sentence on why it was ideologically problematic). But someone else might be inspired by this article to try out the same experiment, and might not come to the same conclusion of “Davening is hard. Let’s go shopping!“. Thus Reform Judaism finds itself in the position of doing recruiting for Orthodox Judaism, by promoting the frame that Reform is a sampler but Orthodox is the real deal. Even if many Reform Jews do indeed think of their Judaism this way, the movement’s official institutions and publications should be showing more leadership and presenting alternative options. Even if many Reform Jews have already surrendered their sense of authenticity, the movement shouldn’t be joining them in retreat.

It's a trap!

2011-07-26T19:41:00.000-04:00

This morning on the bus, I picked up a copy of the Washington Examiner (a free conservative local paper) that had been left on my seat.

On page 2, there is an editorial saying that the "debt-ceiling debate" "misses the larger point", because it doesn't address the long-term debt. The editorial praises the Cut, Cap and Balance Act, "a concrete plan for avoiding default, getting federal spending under control and putting the federal government on the road to a permanent spending, taxes and debt settlement," [serial commas missing in original!] and attacks President Obama and the Democrats for "keeping the federal spending spigot wide open."

On page 4, there is an article with the lede "A new study shows Maryland's unemployment rate would nearly double ... if federal spending is cut by 22 percent as recommended by President Obama's deficit commission."

This is a preview of what the 2012 election will look like.

Triage

2011-07-24T14:50:00.003-04:00

In a democracy, the people are sovereign. Our elected representatives work for us. This org chart for the New York City government has it right: the various city departments are underneath the deputy mayors, who are under the mayor, and at the very top of the chart, above the mayor, are "the voters of the City of New York".

Voting in an election is different from voting in a legislature, because elections are by secret ballot. This is necessary and unavoidable. As corrupt as our elections have become, the billions of dollars spent on political campaigns ultimately have no power over voters beyond the power of persuasion (often combined with deception and fearmongering). The same is not true for the money spent on buying legislators. And if we were to eliminate the secret ballot, electoral voting would become as corrupt as legislative voting, and possibly much worse. Many opportunities would arise to coerce voters with carrots and sticks. (Do you want to keep your job at Wal-Mart?)

So I'm not suggesting that we eliminate the secret ballot. However, we should recognize that it has real tradeoffs.

Legislative votes are public, so legislators can be held accountable for their votes. This can happen in the next election. And even legislators who aren't running for reelection might be concerned about their legacies. But voters have all the power (albeit diffuse over a large population) with none of the individual accountability that would ordinarily come with being at the top of the org chart. The costs of bad decisions at the polls are completely externalized.

This is part of why systems like California's (with more direct democracy) are flawed. Direct democracy sounds good on paper, but the secret ballot means that it lacks the safeguards that representative democracy has. California voters can pass irresponsible initiatives like Prop 13, and then leave it to someone else to clean up the mess.

We can see the negative consequences of the secret ballot in the present debt-limit crisis. If the unthinkable happens and we hit the debt limit next week, then (in the absence of 14th-Amendment remedies or other emergency solutions) President Obama and the executive branch will have to start making decisions about which bills the government will stop paying. The most just way to proceed (if the secret ballot didn't make it impossible) would be to cut off Social Security checks to people who voted Republican in 2010. Why should the innocent suffer along with the guilty?

In the absence of the data needed to implement such a solution, we'll have to settle for blunter instruments such as cutting off all Social Security checks to House districts represented by Republicans until the debt ceiling is raised. Anyone who has a problem with this could contact their congressman.

The Wedding...: omnibus edition

2011-07-14T17:24:00.000-04:00

If you got here via the "Kiddushin Meets 21st-Century Egalitarianism" course, welcome! Here are the links to Mah Rabu's wedding series, all in one place:

For everyone else: This series of blog posts has been assigned for Talya Weisbard Shalem's course on "Kiddushin Meets 21st-Century Egalitarianism", at this year's National Havurah Committee Summer Institute, to take place August 1-7, 2011, at Franklin Pierce College in Rindge, New Hampshire (though it would be indisputably in Massachusetts if it weren't for George II).

If you're interested in taking this class, or one (or two!) of the 20+ other fantastic courses, it's not too late to register for Institute! You shan't regret it.

One person one vote?

2011-07-06T00:50:00.000-04:00

Like many jurisdictions across the country, the District of Columbia is redistricting this year, to make sure its 8 wards continue to have roughly equal populations following the 2010 Census. This means Ward 2 (downtown) has to get smaller, Wards 7 and 8 (east of the river) have to get larger, and Ward 6 (located between Wards 2 and 7&8) has to shift over.

DC Councilmembers are elected to 4-year terms, with half of the Council elected every 2 years. Thus, Council terms are staggered, much like the U.S. Senate (but with only 2 classes, not 3).

This combination of redistricting and staggering is unusual. For example, the U.S. Senate is staggered, but is (unfortunately) not subject to redistricting. Conversely, the U.S. House is redistricted every 10 years, but all representatives are elected at the same time. (Any special House elections between now and November 2012 will be based on the old 2000 Census districts, even in states that have completed redistricting.) Many state legislatures operate the same way.

This unusual combination leads to some strange consequences, which I haven't heard anyone else discuss. Take, as an example, Wards 2 and 6, since they are mutually exchanging territory. Ward 2 is currently represented by Jack Evans, who was last elected in 2008. Ward 6 is represented by Tommy Wells, last elected in 2010. This means that the people who live in the part of Ward 6 that is being transferred to Ward 2 got to vote for (or against) Wells in 2010, and then will vote again in the Ward 2 election in 2012. Thus, for the 2013-14 term, they will be represented by two different ward-based councilmembers: Wells (from Ward 6) and the councilmember from Ward 2. The people who live in the part of Ward 2 that is being transferred to Ward 6 have the opposite situation: they didn't vote in 2010, and they won't be able to vote in 2012 either. Thus, from 2013-14, they will not have had the opportunity to vote for any current members of the Council (except the at-large councilmembers).

Does this violate the principle of "one person, one vote"? Would the voters in these neighborhoods (Mt. Vernon Square and Shaw) have standing to bring a lawsuit? Are there other jurisdictions outside DC with the same issue?

NEW YORK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

2011-06-25T23:02:00.001-04:00

If you miss me in Connecticut, and you can't find me nowhere...

Judgment Day November 14?

2011-05-22T15:15:00.002-04:00

(Crossposted to Jewschool.)

So the world didn’t end yesterday. To be fair, they weren’t actually predicting the end of the world until October 21, at the conclusion of five months of torment for those of us left behind. Yesterday was supposed to be only Judgment Day. But that didn’t happen either.

Of course this is all nonsense, but we can check their math and see whether it is at least internally consistent nonsense.

Let’s start with the year:

According to the tract explaining the calculations, the world was created in 11,013 “BC”, so we are now in the year 13,023 from creation. (It’s one less than you think because there was no year zero; 1 BCE was followed immediately by 1 CE.) The biblical flood occurred in the year 4990 “BC”, 6023 years after creation. God says in Genesis 7:4 that the flood will come in 7 days, and since one day to God is like 1000 years to us (they cite a New Testament verse for this, but we have the same idea in Psalm 90:4), this means the world will be destroyed 7000 years later, which comes out to 2011 CE.

I was baffled at how they arrived at this year count in the first place. According to the Jewish calendar, we are now in the year 5771 from creation, and the flood took place in the year 1656 from creation (4115 years ago, or 2105 BCE). While the exact count of the number of years from “creation” is somewhat controversial (particularly at the interface between biblical chronology and real history), counting the years in Genesis from creation to the flood is very easy, since we have a detailed list of how long each ancestor lived before the next generation was born. Assuming they’re reading the same Bible (and I just checked the King James and the numbers are the same), it’s hard to see how the totals could be off by so much. At first glance I thought they were just applying the same principle that 1 day to God is 1000 years to us, so the six days of creation would add an extra 5999 years (subtract one because, according to the rabbis, humans were created on Rosh Hashanah of the year 2, so creation began on 25 Elul of the year 1). But that can’t be it, because the time from the end of creation to the flood has to be much more than 24 years.

So I did some googling and it turns out that they get this chronology based on a general principle that a generation is a lifespan, so in these biblical genealogies, we can assume that the son was born in the year that the father died. For example, since Genesis 5:11 says that Enosh lived 905 years, they ascertain that the time from Enosh’s birth to his son Kenan’s birth was 905 years. Thus they completely disregard the explicit statements in Genesis 5:9-10 that Enosh lived for 90 years and then fathered Kenan, and then lived 815 years after that. By this method, they arrive at a stretched-out chronology. If they hadn’t done this, then the 7000-year anniversary of the flood wouldn’t take place until 4896 CE, so the end would be far from nigh.

Now let’s look at the day of the year.

According to Genesis 7:11, the flood began on the 17th day of the 2nd month. In the Hebrew calendar, even though the year begins in Tishrei (in the fall), the 1st month is Nisan (in the spring), and so we observe all the biblical holidays accordingly: Pesach (in “the first month”) in Nisan, and all the holidays of the “seventh month” in Tishrei. Based on this, the 2nd month would be Iyar, and yesterday (May 21, 2011) was indeed the 17th of Iyar, which would make it the anniversary of the flood by this count.

But it’s not that simple. First of all, yes, yesterday was 17 Iyar for the Jews, and that’s based on Rosh Chodesh Iyar having been on Thursday, May 5. But the actual astronomical new moon was on Tuesday, May 3. In our calendar algorithm, Rosh Chodesh is frequently observed later than the actual new moon due to various considerations: for example, Rosh Hashanah in the coming year will be on Thursday rather than Wednesday, so that Yom Kippur will not fall on Friday, immediately before Shabbat. By stating that yesterday was the 17th of the month, are these Christians endorsing rabbinic rules that were instituted centuries after the Jewish-Christian split?

Second of all, it’s not so clear that “the second month” in this context would be Iyar. In Exodus 12:2, God commands very clearly that “this month” (the month in which Pesach takes place, in the spring, understood to be Nisan) shall be the first of months. But the rabbis are split on which month was the first month before this command was given. In a baraita at Rosh Hashanah 10b-11a, Rabbi Eliezer says the world was created in Tishrei, and Rabbi Yehoshua says the world was created in Nisan. In another baraita at Rosh Hashanah 11b, it is made clear that in dating the flood, both of them count the months from creation. Since the flood began on the 17th day of the 2nd month, Rabbi Eliezer places it on 17 Cheshvan (the 2nd month starting from Tishrei), and Rabbi Yehoshua places it on 17 Iyar (the 2nd month starting from Nisan).

The May 21 doomsayers seem to be following R. Yehoshua, so they have some support for their position, but it is R. Eliezer’s view that has survived in Jewish tradition. Rosh Hashanah (1 Tishrei), not Nisan, is when we mark the anniversary of the world’s birth. The date 17 Cheshvan also comes up in Mishnah Ta’anit 1:4. The rainy season in Israel begins in Cheshvan, and the Mishnah says that if it hasn’t rained by 17 Cheshvan, individuals begin fasting for rain. The Yerushalmi (Ta’anit 64a) connects this date directly to the beginning of the flood. This is not a stretch, since both the biblical flood story and the theology of Masechet Ta’anit see rain as something sent by God in response to human actions. You can’t make the same connection for 17 Iyar, which is nowhere near the rainy season.

If the anniversary of the flood is on 17 Cheshvan in 2011 CE, then it won’t occur until Monday, November 14. Still, it’s not surprising that the Judgment Day folks went with May 21 instead. In yet another baraita at Rosh Hashanah 12a, it says that the sages of Israel date the flood according to R. Eliezer, and the sages of the nations of the world date the flood according to R. Yehoshua.

Finally, what’s up with October 21, 2011, as the end of the world?

They cite a verse from Revelation saying that people (excluding those who are raptured) will be tormented for 5 months after Judgment Day. Add 5 months to May 21 and you get October 21. Of course, this would be 5 Gregorian months, even though they got to May 21 in the first place by using the Hebrew calendar (and 5 lunar months after 17 Iyar would be 17 Tishrei, or October 15, 2011). But the Gregorian calendar is the Christian calendar, so we’ll give them that one.

But then they note that “October 21st of 2011 is also the last day of the Biblical Feast of Tabernacles”, and see eschatological significance in this (which, to be fair, we do too — check out Zechariah 14, the haftarah for the first day of Sukkot). Except that they’re wrong. Depending on how you look at it, “the last day of the Biblical Feast of Tabernacles” could refer to the 7th day of Sukkot (21 Tishrei) or to Shemini Atzeret (22 Tishrei). But October 21, 2011, is 23 Tishrei, the day that some Diaspora Jews observe as the 2nd day of Shemini Atzeret, or “Simchat Torah”. Even though this is still a holiday for some, no one would consider it to be a day of Sukkot: e.g., even though some have the practice of still eating in the sukkah on 22 Tishrei, no one does on 23 Tishrei. And even if some did, they’re talking about the biblical festival. There’s no way that Christian eschatology incorporates yom tov sheini, and in any case, the apocalypse should be centered on the land of Israel, where all agree that 23 Tishrei is not a holiday. So instead, they should expect the end of the world anywhere between October 15 (the 3rd day of Sukkot, 5 lunar months after 17 Iyar) and October 20 (Shemini Atzeret, the latest day that could reasonably be considered “the last day of the Feast of Tabernacles”).

Tax me!

2011-05-19T02:05:00.000-04:00

(Crossposted to Jewschool.)

In the District of Columbia, the highest income tax bracket begins at $40,000. You read that right: a person making $40,000/year and a person making $40,000,000/year are taxed at the same marginal rate.

Like many states across the country, DC is in a budget crunch this year because the recession leads to both lower tax revenues and higher demand for safety-net services. As a result, DC’s social safety net is at risk. Mayor Vincent Gray’s proposed budget makes the tax brackets ever so slightly more progressive, with an additional 0.4% tax on income above $200,000. This is a trivial increase for high-income earners (millionaires would owe another $3200 per year), and still would not prevent cuts to the safety set, but it is a step in the right direction. Yet some Councilmembers are opposing even this minor tax increase.

Enter the Jewish community. As the Washington Jewish Week reports this week, DC’s Jewish community, led by Jews United For Justice, has been at the forefront of efforts to tell the Council that the people of DC really wouldn’t mind paying higher taxes in exchange for a better city to live in. (91% of people in the affluent Wards 2 and 3 support a tax increase.)

The article also includes an obligatory quote from a (probably Jewish) libertarian representing midat Sedom (”What’s mine is mine”), riddled with factual errors (in addition to what ZT points out in the comments, I don’t think the DC Treasury actually accepts donations — this would run afoul of corruption laws).

Still, most of the Jewish community understands that we all have obligations to our society and to our neighbors. If you live in DC and want to make sure that this perspective wins out, get involved with JUFJ’s efforts.

In defense of autonomy

2011-05-19T01:20:00.000-04:00

(Crossposted to Jewschool.)

The article making the rounds this week is Rabbi Leon Morris’s oped in the JTA, “Reform Judaism must move beyond ‘personal choice’”. In past blog posts, I have both agreed and respectfully disagreed with Rabbi Morris; here I’m going to do the latter (from my usual perch as a Reform Jewish expat).

Rabbi Morris’s thesis is “A 21st century Reform Judaism can no longer afford to have ‘personal choice’ as its core principle because it eclipses other more central Jewish values that are needed now more than ever.” And I certainly don’t take issue with those other Jewish values, including “an increased commitment to Jewish study” and “committed core of learned and deeply engaged liberal Jews whose lives revolve around the Hebrew calendar and who are immersed in the study and application of Jewish texts”. Yes, these are needed now more than ever. But I think he’s beating up on a straw man, and basing his argument on two unfounded claims:

1) “Personal choice” is the core principle of Reform Judaism.
2) “Personal choice” is to blame for the Reform movement’s ills.

I’ll address these points one at a time.

1) No, “personal choice” is not the core principle of Reform Judaism.

The core principles of Reform Judaism are the same as the core principles of any other stream of Judaism. “Personal choice” takes center stage only when Reform is contrasted with other denominations. Calling it the core principle of Reform Judaism is like saying that the 24-second clock is the core principle of NBA basketball. Yes, the 24-second clock is one rule that distinguishes NBA basketball from other forms of basketball, but the core principle of NBA basketball (like any form of basketball) is still getting the ball into the hoop.

But don’t take my word for it; take a look at the CCAR’s official platforms. The 1998 Pittsburgh Principles have God, Torah, and Israel as the three major section headings — what you would expect from any Jewish religious movement. Under these headings, there are 30 separate principles, and I count at least 22 (a solid majority) that people from all major Jewish religious streams would agree with. (And among the other principles, some of them are non-universal for self-referential reasons, e.g. “We are committed to promoting and strengthening Progressive Judaism in Israel…” and “We are committed to furthering Progressive Judaism throughout the world…”, which non-progressive Jews would disagree with because they already disagree with progressive Judaism.) “Personal choice”, “autonomy”, etc., do not appear explicitly at all. The closest approach is “We are committed to the ongoing study of the whole array of mitzvot and to the fulfillment of those that address us as individuals and as a community”, and even there you can only find it if you know what to look for. So in the CCAR’s most recent platform, personal choice/autonomy constitutes less than 1 of the top 30 principles.

The previous platform, the 1976 Centenary Perspective, had a greater focus on autonomy. This is manifested in such statements as “Jewish obligation begins with the informed will of every individual”, “Reform Jews respond to change in various ways according to the Reform principle of the autonomy of the individual”, and “We stand open to any position thoughtfully and conscientiously advocated in the spirit of Reform Jewish belief.” Still, this platform lays out principles under the subheadings of “God”, “The People Israel”, “Torah”, “Our Religious Obligations: Religious Practice”, “Our Obligations: The State of Israel and the Diaspora”, and “Our Obligations: Survival and Service”, and only one of those sections (”Our Religious Obligations: Religious Practice”) includes any mention of choice/autonomy. There, autonomy is a means, not an end.

The earlier platforms, before 1976, don’t have anything remotely close to personal choice; the tone was that the authors of the platforms knew what was best for everyone.

Ok, so even if “personal choice” isn’t the core principle of theoretical Reform Judaism as expressed in official platforms, is it the core principle of folk Reform Judaism as popularly understood by self-identified Reform Jews? I don’t have any scientific data on this, but I suspect that most Reform Jews, if asked to explain their religion on one foot to someone from New Guinea who had never met a Jew, wouldn’t start with personal choice, but would start with elements that are common to all Jewish denominations. Personal choice would only start to come up if they were asked to explain Reform Judaism to an Orthodox or secular Jew from Israel who had never met a Reform Jew. (And even then, I’m not sure that this is the tack that the typical low-information Reform Jew would take in distinguishing Reform from other denominations; I think many would instead say some version of “We’re Reform(ed), so we don’t do that.”)

And I do think Rabbi Morris is indeed talking about the core principles of Reform Judaism in the absolute, and not just the core differences between Reform Judaism and other types of Judaism, since the other principles that he proposes replacing “personal choice” with are not unique to Reform Judaism — they are embraced (at least on paper) by the other movements as well. On this absolute scale, it is not accurate to say that personal choice is the core principle of Reform Judaism, either in theory or in practice.

2) No, autonomy is not the problem.

I’m going to run the risk of spawning a completely off-topic comment thread and say this anyway: Rabbi Morris’s response to autonomy in Reform Judaism reminds me of the Right’s response to the Obama stimulus.

President Obama proposed a stimulus that many economists warned was insufficiently large (even before it was cut down further by Congress) to pull the economy out of recession. When, as predicted, unemployment remained high after the stimulus (albeit not as high as it would have gone without the stimulus), the Republicans drew the conclusion that the stimulus had failed, that the very principles of Keynesian fiscal policy were at fault, and that the solution was fiscal austerity.

I don’t dispute that much of the Reform movement is characterized by ignorance and lack of commitment. But it is inappropriate to blame this on an ideology that has never been fully put into practice in the Reform movement, particularly in the more ignorant and uncommitted segments. I haven’t found Reform communities where informed autonomy truly exists as a way of life; I have only been able to find this in non-denominational communities.

The Centenary Perspective (the platform with the greatest embrace of autonomy) says “Within each area of Jewish observance Reform Jews are called upon to confront the claims of Jewish tradition, however differently perceived, and to exercise their individual autonomy, choosing and creating on the basis of commitment and knowledge.” This frames informed autonomy not as a privilege but as a responsibility. A Reform Jew who truly believes in informed autonomy has the obligation to study Jewish texts to the point where s/he can make educated choices about all areas of Jewish practice. In principle Reform Jews have the responsibility to become far more knowledgeable than Orthodox or Conservative Jews (who can defer to their rabbi’s p’sak) or Reconstructionist Jews (who can defer to their community’s consensus). Needless to say, this is not how it works out in practice.

Rabbi Morris would have us believe that this failure of informed autonomy qua responsibility to take root among the masses is an inevitable consequence of an ideology that lacks the power to motivate. I would respond that the experiment hasn’t been attempted. Reform institutions have not provided the tools necessary for individuals to carry out the demands of informed autonomy. It’s not like Reform synagogues across the country are offering advanced Talmud shiurim (or even introductory Talmud shiurim, in the original language) that no one is showing up to. And even if there are opportunities outside the movement for high-level Jewish learning, the Reform movement’s culture is not one that values this among laypeople. Individuals who express interest in learning more are told “You should become a rabbi”, not “You should become an educated Reform Jew”.

But it’s not just that the Reform movement hasn’t embraced the “informed” part of informed autonomy (which is part of Rabbi Morris’s point); it has never truly embraced the “autonomy” part either. The average rank-and-file Reform Jew may exercise autonomy in selectively opting in and out of Jewish life, but when he is in a Jewish context, he does what he is told. To take prayer as just one example, Reform synagogues are the Jewish worship contexts in which it is least socially acceptable for individual participants to have their own practices about when to sit and stand, or which siddur to use, or what to be doing at any point during the service. Instructions are given throughout, and everyone is expected to conform. Rabbis may have less power on paper in Reform Judaism than in other movements (in which they render binding p’sak), but in practice, they are granted more elevated clerical status by Reform Jews than anywhere else in the non-haredi Jewish world. Rabbis are considered indispensable to “officiate” at any sort of Jewish ritual; most laypeople do not feel empowered to do it themselves.

What we see is not informed autonomy gone too far, but rather a population that is neither Jewishly informed nor Jewishly autonomous.

While we don’t have empirical data on what the Reform movement would look like if informed autonomy were a large-scale reality, we do have data from another controlled experiment: Let’s say you start with a population that looks a lot like the American Reform Jewish population, and an institutional structure (synagogues, rabbis, etc.) that looks a lot like the structure of the Reform movement. But you take Rabbi Morris’s advice and remove personal choice from the stated principles of the movement, and replace it with something about communal religious standards. Then what you get, according to the data, isn’t the engaged and passionate liberal Judaism that Rabbi Morris and I would like to see — what you get is the Conservative movement! And outside of a few isolated pockets, the Conservative movement is also characterized by ignorance and lack of commitment. Most Conservative-affiliated Jews aren’t familiar with their movement’s official principles, and much of what Rabbi Morris writes about the Reform movement applies there as well: “Volumes of thoughtful responsa and guides to Jewish practice, mostly unknown to [Conservative] laypeople … , gather dust in libraries.” The experiment yields the same result, but this time, it can’t be blamed on “personal choice”.

The answer is not to remove informed autonomy as a Reform Jewish principle and replace it with other values, but rather, to implement informed autonomy in truth so that these other values will come along with it. Create a culture in which informed autonomy is seen as a responsibility, so that individuals have to become knowledgeable in Jewish text and tradition and apply this knowledge creatively to meet the needs of the present age. Armed with this knowledge, individuals will be better equipped to form true communities.

I realize that this is a tall order. Many members of Reform congregations don’t have a strong ideological commitment to progressive religious Judaism, and won’t be interested in this project. But it’s possible to start smaller. Even if it won’t work to implement informed autonomy for an entire congregation at once, it can start with a committed core who can at least make informed autonomy a socially acceptable option. And if even that committed core isn’t attainable (yet) in every community, it can start in some communities that can be held up as role models and successful proofs of concept. And if those role models of informed autonomy are not to be found in the Reform movement, then the Reform movement can look to successful models elsewhere.

I hope that turning informed autonomy into a reality, and not just a slogan, will (as Rabbi Morris concludes) “allow us to experience a richer, fuller liberal religious life — one that is passionate, inspiring and moving, one that matters ultimately and allows ‘Reform Judaism’ to mean so much more.”

Baby Boom

2011-05-01T15:13:00.000-04:00

Baby Boomers are generally defined as people born between 1946 and 1964. This graph illustrates the Baby Boom:

As you can see, the Baby Boomer population more than doubled in a single year, from 1946 to 1947, and increased more than fivefold from 1946 to 1950.

Post-Independence Day

2011-04-28T21:54:00.000-04:00

(Crossposted to Jewschool.)

On April 28, 2001 (Shabbat Tazria-Metzora), about 60 people crowded into an apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan to participate in a new egalitarian Shabbat morning minyan. This minyan would be named Kehilat Hadar several months later, and it has grown dramatically in both size and influence, becoming a household name around the world and inspiring many spinoffs and imitations. So today we congratulate Kehilat Hadar on reaching its 10th anniversary. (The community celebrated its anniversary several weeks ago, on Shabbat Tazria.) We wish it many more years of success if it continues to meet a need, or a graceful end if it ever outlives its mission.

But today marks an even more important milestone. (And not just Mah Rabu's 800th post.) As of today, according to some (including Hadar founder Rabbi Elie Kaunfer), Kehilat Hadar is no longer an independent minyan.

How is this possible? Let’s look at the evidence.

The 2007 Spiritual Communities Study, sponsored by the S3K Synagogue Studies Institute and Mechon Hadar, restricted its sample of communities based on certain criteria. The report says “For the purposes of this report, we define a qualifying community as one with the following features:”, and among these features is “It was founded in 1996 or later.” (Other features of independent minyanim include “It exists independently of the denominational movements” and “It meets minimally once a month for worship”.) At first it seems like the 1996 cutoff (10 years before the study began) is just about defining the scope of the study and nothing more. But later parts of the report attribute more real-world significance to this categorization, such as the infamous bar graph which illustrates that “these communities … have grown in number more than five-fold”. (Of course you’re going to see huge growth after 1996 if you only include communities founded after 1996! If “synagogues” were defined as “synagogues founded after 1996″, then a graph of the “number of synagogues” in each year would also necessarily show some year x such that the “number of synagogues” increased fivefold between x and the present.) Agree with it or not, the idea here is that the period after 1996 is different in some way from the period before 1996. And because 1996 is in the past, you might think that whatever happened in or around 1996 already happened, and this historical cutoff isn’t going to change.

But you’d be wrong.

In Rabbi Elie Kaunfer’s book Empowered Judaism (published in 2010), he writes “What is an independent minyan? They are defined by the following characteristics:”, followed by a familiar list that includes “No denomination/movement affiliation” and “Meet at least once a month”. But there is one crucial difference between this list and the list in the 2007 report: instead of “founded in 1996 or later”, Kaunfer defines independent minyanim as “founded in the past ten years”. (At the time of publication, that meant founded in 2000 or later.) Since he has essentially adopted the definition from the S3K/Mechon Hadar study, he seems to understand the significance of 1996 not as a specific moment in time, but as 10 years before the study’s data collection. (For the Excel users out there, it’s the difference between E2 and $E$2.) On the next page is another version of the same bar graph, but this time it begins in 2000, and doesn’t claim to be linked to a particular sample, but is instead labeled “Total Number of Minyanim”. (This graph also features the humorous caption “Growth of independent minyanim in the United States, 2000-2009. Includes six minyanim in Israel.”)

So if we extend this dynamic definition of independent minyanim into the present time, then as of today, a community is only an “independent minyan” if it was founded after April 28, 2001. So Kehilat Hadar doesn’t make the cut.

If Kehilat Hadar, once viewed by many as the flagship independent minyan, is no longer an independent minyan, then what is it? Is it a synagogue? Is it a havurah? (Kaunfer writes that the purpose of the 10-year cutoff for independent minyanim is “distinguishing them from the havurah movement”.) Is it something else?

As Kehilat Hadar enters its second decade, it will have to figure out what it is. Either that or it can remain an independent minyan (after all, that’s what it’s good at), and we can stop pigeonholing communities based on an arbitrary chronological cutoff. We can acknowledge that independent minyanim (any way you define that) existed before 2001 (and even before 1996), and at the same time see that this takes nothing away from the significance of the work that a new generation of minyanim has been doing for the last 10.01 years. We can explore the substantive similarities and differences among independent Jewish communities, whether they were founded around the same time or decades apart.

Happy birthday, Hadar!

Is Pesach 7 or 8 days?

2011-04-12T22:05:00.000-04:00

The question of 1-day vs. 2-day yom tov is a favorite topic here on Mah Rabu. But while I have lots of posts addressing some of the more complex intricacies of this topic, I don't have a general post explaining the basics.

Until now.

If you're wondering what this is all about, check out my new post on rj.org, the Union for Reform Judaism's blog, on the question of 7-day vs. 8-day Pesach (and 1-day vs. 2-day yom tov more generally).

Tazria-Metzora or Behar-Bechukotai?

2011-04-10T13:56:00.003-04:00

A few years ago when I blogged about the question of what 1-day yom tov communities do about Torah reading in years (such as next year) when the 1st day of Pesach falls on Shabbat, I quoted Rabbi Solomon Freehof's CCAR responsum from the 1960s. He wrote, in regard to non-leap years (such as next year):

But if, as happens fairly often, the eighth day of Passover is on a Saturday, then in Israel, which considers the eighth day a regular non-festival Sabbath, the regular cycle of Torah reading resumes. Therefore Israel is one week ahead of the rest of the Jewish world in the Torah cycle. But not for long! Israel continues ahead until they come to the first double portion. On Pesach, which usually takes place on the Sedra Tzav, the dislocation continues for only two weeks, when the double portion Sazria-Mezoro comes. That week Israel just reads Sazria separately, and the next week Mezoro separately, and thus the rest of world Jewry catches up with them.

I wrote in response:

But I'm not sure this is an accurate description of Israeli practice. Or perhaps there are multiple practices in Israel (though that's a little bit hard to believe, with the pervasiveness of the Jewish calendar there), or the practice has changed. In my post on single and double Torah portions, I wrote (based on Israeli calendars) that in this case, Israelis read Behar and Bechukotai separately (not Tazria and Metzora), even though that's not the next opportunity to get everyone back in sync. I don't know why that is, but it seems to be supported by empirical evidence. Can anyone shed light on this?

And now it turns out that the plot has thickened. I looked into this issue and found that the Magen Avraham and the Mishnah Berurah (both at 428:4) both say that there are two different minhagim in Israel in this situation: separating Tazria-Metzora, and separating Behar-Bechukotai.

So there are actually 3 different possible calendars of Torah reading:

Shabbat   2-day yom tov     1-day yom tov #1  1-day yom tov #2
=======   =============     ================  ================
15 Nisan  1st day Pesach    1st day Pesach    1st day Pesach
22 Nisan  8th day Pesach    Shemini           Shemini
29 Nisan  Shemini           Tazria            Tazria-Metzora
6 Iyar    Tazria-Metzora    Metzora           Acharei-Kedoshim
13 Iyar   Acharei-Kedoshim  Acharei-Kedoshim  Emor
20 Iyar   Emor              Emor              Behar
27 Iyar   Behar-Bechukotai  Behar-Bechukotai  Bechukotai
5 Sivan   Bemidbar          Bemidbar          Bemidbar

For 1-day yom tov communities, the advantage of calendar #1 is that it minimizes the amount of time that 1-day and 2-day communities are out of sync (while doing so in a way that 1-day communities can maintain their integrity and self-respect, unlike some of the solutions currently in use in Reform congregations). According to an article by R. Mordecai Kornfeld, the reason for calendar #2 is that "it is Behar and Bechukotai which are kept apart, because they were joined together not by virtue of a similarity between them but only out of necessity", in contrast to Vayakheil-Pekudei, Tazria-Metzora, and Acharei Mot-Kedoshim, which all have thematic connections between the two parshiyot. That article presents evidence for the thesis that "whatever the criteria are for deciding whether to combine two particular Parshiot or to read them separately, bridging the gap between the Jews of Israel and those of the diaspora does *not* seem to play a major role, if any at all." And indeed, as far as I can tell, the modern Israeli calendars I have found use calendar #2.

So I'm full of questions:

Is it historically accurate that the two Israeli calendars once coexisted? (The authors of the Magen Avraham and the Mishnah Berurah didn't live in Israel, so they wouldn't have had firsthand knowledge.)
Does anyone in Israel today use calendar #1?
If the answer to the first question is yes, then how, when, and why did calendar #2 become dominant in Israel? (Kornfeld suggests a "why", but doesn't cite a source and may just be speculating.)
Do self-respecting Diaspora 1-day yom tov communities (i.e. those that don't read the "8th day of Pesach" reading on a Shabbat that they don't consider yom tov, and don't split a parashah over two weeks) use calendar #1, #2, or some of each?

Any answers would be appreciated. Thanks!

The Humpty Hump Passover Guide

2011-04-10T11:15:00.001-04:00

(Crossposted to Jewschool.)

Our coverage of the Humpty Dance continues.

Foods mentioned in the Humpty Dance that are chametz:

crackers
licorice
oatmeal
biscuits
Burger King (in most of spacetime)

Foods mentioned in the Humpty Dance that are not chametz:

a pickle
Hennessy
Burger King (in Israel during Pesach)

Welcome, Forward readers!

2011-03-30T22:35:00.000-04:00

If you got to Mah Rabu from my oped in the Forward, welcome! Here are some links to related resources.

Some of the recent articles I'm responding to:

Margot Lurie's review of Empowered Judaism in the Jewish Review of Books
Noam Neusner's oped in the Forward
The Forward's editorial

Some of my longer-form responses:

My response to Lurie's review
My response to Lurie's followup interview in the Jerusalem Post
My response to Neusner (conveniently written 4 years before the fact)
My review of Empowered Judaism when it came out

Lurie 2, straw men 0

2011-02-16T00:47:00.001-05:00

(Crossposted to Jewschool.)

I don’t really feel like writing this post. Instead of taking the bait and responding to Margot Lurie’s latest hit piece on independent minyanim, my time would be better spent on actually organizing an independent minyan. If you’re in the DC area this weekend, you’re all invited to Segulah on Shabbat morning. We’ll be meeting in the Tifereth Israel building, 7701 16th St NW (entrance on Juniper St), Washington DC, starting at 9:30 am. (Yes, we rent space from a synagogue, and no, that’s not a secret.)

But I’m taking the bait anyway, because I guess someone has to.

But before I do that, a number of people have asked me if I was going to respond to Noam Neusner’s oped in the Forward. (It seems to be Crap-On-Independent-Minyanim Month in the Jewish press.) The answer is that I already responded 4 years ago. And that’s all I have to say about that. (I would think that Neusner, as a former Bush speechwriter, would understand that independent minyanim aren’t taking away synagogues’ share of the pie, but are making the pie higher.)

Back to the story. Margot Lurie wrote a fanciful review of Empowered Judaism by Elie Kaunfer, in the Jewish Review of Books. I took it apart last fortnight right here on this blog. The review also got attention in other parts of the world, including from Shmuel Rosner on the Jerusalem Post website. Rosner then ran a letter from Kaunfer, correcting Lurie’s fabrication about “organized community money”. Then this week, Rosner did an interview with Lurie, asking some followup questions. (I don’t know whether either Rosner or Lurie has read my original fisk; neither of them reference it directly, though they both refer in general to criticism.)

In this interview, Lurie once again conjures up straw men, and then defeats them. She criticizes independent minyanim for failing to live up to goals that they never claimed to have in the first place.

From the top:

Let’s start with factual questions. You write that “There is an open secret about Hadar: like many other minyanim, it is funded by lots of organized community money, offered by institutions eager to keep young Jews connected to their heritage.” Hadar’s Elie Kaunfer writes: “Independent minyanim are overwhelmingly self-supported by the supposed slacker population that attends it.” Can you both be right?

“Shape of Earth: Views Differ”

I was referring to things like Hillel campus subsidies for leaders of independent minyanim which draw college students,

I’ve never heard of these subsidies, so I’m unable to respond to this. Does anyone know what she’s talking about?

as well as the subsidized rent and other in-kind contributions that most independent minyanim receive.

This is clearly a retcon (or in Aramaic, chisurei mechsera v’hachi katanei). There is no way that the plain sense of “funded by lots of organized community money” is “in-kind contributions”; by definition, “in-kind contributions” can be anything but money. Lurie got caught in an error, and then instead of saying “Oops, my bad” and printing a correction, she’s doubling down.

But addressing her claim at face value, I’m curious how she arrives at the figure of “most independent minyanim”. There are, roughly speaking, three types of independent minyanim: 1) Those that meet in participants’ homes or other “free” spaces. As a commenter pointed out in the previous thread, these spaces represent in-kind donations. However, that doesn’t involve the “organized community”. 2) Those that meet in non-Jewish spaces. These generally don’t receive any “subsidized rent”; their relationship with their host space is purely a landlord-tenant business relationship. 3) Those that meet in Jewish spaces. These include a) those that receive donations of space (and for you minyan entrepreneurs out there, I don’t recommend this: your host institution will want something in return; you just don’t know what it is yet), and b) those that pay rent. It’s hard to determine which minyanim in group 3b are receiving “subsidized rent” and which aren’t — they pay whatever level of rent they negotiate with their hosts, and the hosts don’t necessarily have a standard rate for renting out space, to which the minyan’s rate can be compared to determine whether they’re getting a subsidy. Lurie is claiming that 3a plus part of 3b adds up to “most”, and I’d like to see some justification for that.

I just did a quick back-of-the envelope estimate: I’ve been to at least 25 independent minyanim, so I listed the ones I could think of, and about half of those meet (or most recently met, if the minyan no longer exists) in Jewish buildings. That’s an upper bound for how many of them are getting “subsidized rent” from the “organized community” (since some of them may be paying full price, however you define that). So I don’t think “most” is correct.

As for Hadar in particular, the minyan is only one of its three affiliated institutions, the other two of which report receipts of funding from the organized community.

The minyan is also the only one of the three institutions that is a minyan! The original article said “Hadar, like many other minyanim”, suggesting that it was talking about a minyan named Hadar, not a yeshiva named Hadar or a star named Hadar.

The three (terrestrial) Hadars are two separate legal entities, with separate budgets (Yeshivat Hadar is a program of Mechon Hadar, but Kehilat Hadar is separate). If you want to accuse them of money laundering, then come out and say it.

You write that “It is no accident that of the three leaders of Yeshivat Hadar, both Kaunfer and Ethan Tucker are the sons of prominent Conservative rabbis, and Shai Held is the son of a late professor at the (Conservative) Jewish Theological Seminary.” Is this more proof that independent minyanim aren’t really “independent” or more indictment of the Conservative movement’s inability to retain its best and brightest?

The term “independent” suggests a self-sustaining body outside the traditional synagogue structure. But most minyanim are not independent in that sense.

I (inadvertently) had a central enough role in the popularization of the term “independent minyan” that I feel qualified to play Marshall McLuhan and say “You know nothing of my work.”

That’s not what “independent” (in “independent minyan”) ever meant. “Independent” means two things: 1) not affiliated with any of the Jewish denominations. (The denominations all have formal membership for congregations, so there’s no gray area here. None of the denominations accept being founded by the son of a rabbi of that denomination as a substitute for a membership application.) 2) not part of a larger organization, such as a synagogue.

That’s all. “Independent” doesn’t mean completely self-sufficient, with your own power generator and a basement full of canned food. The United States is an independent country, even though it imports goods from other countries, and even though its founders were originally British subjects. Independent candidates appear on the same ballot as other candidates. Rosner and Lurie are trying to play “gotcha” (and they’re not the first), but this stems from a misunderstanding of the claims that independent minyanim are making.

Or, more accurately, their independence extends only to serving the needs of their members for prayer and learning, and that’s it. As soon as someone wants to get married or divorced, or arrange for a funeral, then, well, no minyan is an island – it needs the resources of the larger community, on which it is very much dependent.

Independent minyanim don’t claim to be one-stop shops for everything Jewish in their participants’ lives. In many (most?) cases, they don’t even claim to be one-stop shops for prayer and learning: as Lurie noted in her original review, many (most?) independent minyanim don’t have services every week, so anyone who wants to pray with a community every week has to look elsewhere some of the time. No one denies this. Independent minyanim are very openly a-la-carte, intended to function as part of the larger Jewish ecosystem. They focus on the areas where they have a comparative advantage, and let other organizations do the rest. No minyan claims to be an island. This is in contrast to many synagogues, which do attempt to be one-stop shops for everything Jewish, regardless of whether they’re any good at it. This is understandable in places where one synagogue really is the only game in town, but wasteful in big cities with many Jewish congregations.

Tikkun Leil Shabbat is an excellent example of an independent minyan that engages strategically with the broader community. TLS is a community committed to social justice, and decided from the beginning that rather than putting together its own half-baked “social action programs” (with great effort and minimal impact), it would connect its participants with organizations that are already doing real social justice work, both inside and outside the Jewish community. This leads to the maximum benefit for everyone.

As far as the specific examples that Lurie cites:
Jewish marriage doesn’t require any institutional infrastructure; it just requires two witnesses. Lots of independent minyan participants have organized their own weddings.
Jewish divorce is a big mess, and that’s a problem that independent minyanim can’t solve, but apparently neither can synagogues.
Funerals and burials do, of course, require infrastructure. But most synagogues don’t operate their own funeral homes or cemeteries either. They work with funeral homes and cemeteries in the larger Jewish community, and there’s no reason an independent minyan couldn’t do the same. For example, the Newton Centre Minyan does its own funerals (led by participants), and has its own section in a local Jewish cemetery.

Independent minyanim speak to the portion of the Jewish community that is interested in traditional prayer and ritual practice, in progressive halakhah, in modernization, and in women’s full participation in services—in other words, Conservative Judaism.

Independent minyanim come in many flavors. Not all of them are “interested in traditional prayer and ritual” (depending on how “traditional” is defined), and not all of them are gender-egalitarian. So a good number of them don’t fit into even this overly broad definition of Conservative Judaism.

As for those minyanim that do display all these traits, it’s a logical fallacy to say “X has these traits, Y has these traits, therefore X=Y.” Conservative Judaism defines itself by other aspects besides these, including a structure for religious authority that independent minyanim do not recognize. (And by the way, not all Conservative congregations are gender-egalitarian either, so this isn’t a defining feature of Conservative Judaism.)

One Conservative rabbi has said that my problem with independent minyanim is that they aren’t Orthodox. Nothing could be farther from the truth. My interest is in having a vigorous liberal Judaism that can hold its own next to Orthodoxy. In my article I gave my reasons for thinking that the minyan movement doesn’t hold the answer.

“These do-Nothings profess a commitment to social change … and then abstain from and discourage all effective action for change. They are known by their brand, ‘I agree with your ends but not your means.’ They function as blankets whenever possible smothering sparks of dissension that promise to flare up into the fire of action.” –Saul Alinsky

If your interest is in creating a vigorous liberal Judaism, how is attacking the people who are trying to do something about it going to advance that interest? Early on in her review, Lurie writes that “the suburban mausoleum that is the liberal synagogue was, at best, built for a sociological reality decades out of date”, so surely she would agree that attempting incremental change within those institutions is not a recipe for success. Nor is it possible to have alternatives to those institutions descend from heaven in flames, fully built, like the Third Temple. So the remaining option is to start small and build from there, even if the alternative communities don’t start out fixing every problem in American Judaism from day one.

I moved to New York’s Upper West Side from Iowa, so I can attest to the fact that people in small or struggling Jewish communities see the minyan movement (to the extent that they’re aware of it at all) as largely irrelevant to their concerns. There are much more significant issues facing American Judaism, and much greater challenges for young and energetic leaders with big visions.

So what should these “young and energetic leaders” outside of Iowa be doing differently that would have a more positive impact on the Jews of Iowa? Bear in mind that most of us have day jobs.

Did you expect this article to become so controversial - did you think you’re going to be criticized in such way? Do you think independent minyanim have become the sacred goat [SACRED COW?] of contemporary Judaism?

Ok, that was weird. Is “[SACRED COW?]” a copy editor’s note that got left in by mistake? I’ve never heard of “sacred goat” before.

I knew I was going to kick up some dust. Still, the extent of the hysteria brought on by one person’s dissent is a little telling, don’t you think?

And if no one had responded, Lurie would instead have written “Still, the deafening silence brought on by one person’s dissent is a little telling, don’t you think?”

I’m certainly not calling—or capable of calling—for the dismantling of independent minyanim, which are, as I say in my article, a response to the spiritual bankruptcy and the organized failures of the Conservative movement.

The Conservative movement doesn’t have a monopoly on spiritual bankruptcy and organized failures. Independent minyanim are responses to the spiritual bankruptcy and the organized failures of all the movements.

But the tendentiousness of the independent minyan movement’s critique of synagogue life needs to be addressed, as it has real, and not unrelated consequences.

Here, Lurie (or Rosner?) links to an article about the shrinking membership numbers in the Conservative movement (and some inside baseball in the other liberal denominations). Is she really suggesting that these shrinking numbers are a consequence of independent minyanim? A few paragraphs earlier, Lurie wrote that minyanim are “largely irrelevant” to “people in small or struggling Jewish communities”, and now they’re the reason those communities are struggling.

According to the article, USCJ congregations lost 37,100 member families. Let’s conservatively (as it were) estimate an average of 2 people per family, for a total of 74,200 members. By all estimates, this is far greater than the total number of people involved in independent minyanim. There’s just no way mathematically that independent minyanim can be a significant factor in this decline.

Furthermore, these population trends began before the independent minyanim discussed in Empowered Judaism were founded. To the long list of problems that independent minyanim haven’t solved, add time travel. It seems that post hoc ergo propter hoc doesn’t even need the post hoc part anymore!

The elitism and uncritical self-regard of these communities are a big problem.

“Elitism” : independent minyanim :: “socialism” : President Obama

Think about it: they’re both self-perpetuating accusations that get thrown around repeatedly because everyone else is doing it, to the point that they have become almost completely divorced from the actual meaning of the word or the actual facts about the accusee.

Rather than debunk this yet again (not that that would be any more effective at staving off further accusations of “elitism” than asking what exactly is socialist about cutting taxes on millionaires), I’ll just link to my old comments here and here. There’s probably more too - bonus points for finding them.

For one thing, I don’t think it’s a random statistical point that independent minyanim are so age-specific.

No one has claimed that it was random. There are many causal explanations for it. All we said is that it wasn’t an intentional decision by the minyan organizers.

Some of the explanations: The founders of many minyanim were in their 20s and 30s, and the word spread first to their friends, and their friends’ friends, and people tend to be friends with people around the same age. Why were the founders in their 20s and 30s? There’s an age explanation and a generational explanation. Age explanation: people in their 20s and 30s have more time and energy to devote to this kind of thing. Generational explanation here. Why haven’t more people of other ages gravitated to these minyanim? In the case of older adults, many of them have been involved with other Jewish communities for years and are attached to their existing community. In the case of parents and children, there’s a coordination problem, since there’s a need to be in a community with other children. Finally, the most obvious explanation is that people in their 20s and 30s feel most out of place in establishment Jewish institutions, and therefore have the greatest motive to find (or found) alternatives.

These explanations apply to some minyanim and not others. The independent minyanim founded in the ’60s and ’70s may have been founded by people in their 20s and 30s, but their participants have aged, and now those communities have older (as well as younger) populations. And some of the new minyanim have attracted more multigenerational crowds. One successful example is Segulah, which has all ages from babies to over-70. See you this Shabbat!

Empowered fisking

2011-02-02T03:44:00.006-05:00

(Crossposted to Jewschool.)
The 21st-century independent minyan phenomenon has inspired many newspaper articles. However, the published “serious” writing (with the appropriate academic or intellectual credentials) on this topic is still far more limited, leading to founder effects, with a few mutations being propagated over and over. For example, Riv-Ellen Prell’s article in Zeek, comparing two generations of independent Jewish communities, is often cited as an authority. While Prell literally wrote the book on an older generation of havurot with an ethnographic study, there is no evidence that she did any primary research on the newer minyanim, or has even been to one; her main source of information on these communities seems to be the roundtable of minyan leaders that appeared in the same issue of Zeek. Yet that article is what there is. In the quantitative realm, the 2007 National Spiritual Communities Study gathered lots of valuable data on independent minyanim, but the report (and/or initial media stories about it) also originated some misleading conclusions that won’t go away. Rabbi Elie Kaunfer’s book Empowered Judaism isn’t the entire story, but there is absolutely no question that Kaunfer knows his subject, and it’s now out there as a real live book.

Margot Lurie’s recent review of Empowered Judaism contains many of the lazy smears about independent minyanim that we’ve been hearing for years (citing such sources as “one parent of a minyan-goer” and “a friend of mine”). Under other conditions, the best thing to do might be to ignore it. But this review is published in the Jewish Review of Books, which gives it the intellectual cachet to place it into the small pond of “serious” writing on this subject. So this review needs to be fisked in the bud before it becomes the next authoritative voice on independent minyanim.

So here we go.

These minyanim are, in some ways, descendants of the “havurot” (fellowships) of the 1960s and ‘70s for which the Jewish Catalog served as a guide. Those participatory communities were marked by a countercultural, anti-institutional, Do-It-Yourself aesthetic, of which the new minyanim, to some extent, partake.

This past Shabbat, I attended Fabrangen’s 40th anniversary celebration. They still meet every Shabbat, and they still don’t have a rabbi or a building. Many of the havurot of the ’60s and ’70s still exist, so the past tense is not the correct way to refer to them. By their continuing existence, they also provide an answer to the question of whether an independent lay-led community can survive as its participants get older.

It is important to distinguish further between two types of independent minyan, which, while often possessing overlapping sets of congregants, have very different motivating impulses. First, there are “partnership minyanim” … Fundamentally a response to the difficult question of women’s roles in the Orthodox world, they rely on a controversial halakhic responsum of Rabbi Mendel Shapiro allowing women to lead non-obligatory parts of the prayer service. … The second type of minyan is not an outgrowth of halakhic re-interpretations within Orthodoxy or a response to segregated gender roles, but an effort to meet a “crisis in spirituality,” …

Lurie is correct to delineate these two separate motivating impulses whose confluence around the turn of the century enabled the independent minyan boom. However, while these impulses may have originated separately, they have become intertwined to the point that it’s not just that the two types of independent minyanim have overlapping participants; it is no longer possible to sharply delineate two types of minyanim. The “partnership minyan” model is being adopted not only by communities that want to increase women’s participation in the Orthodox world, but also by “big tent” communities who (rightly or wrongly) perceive this model as a pluralistic compromise that can accommodate everyone. On the flip side, many minyanim with deep roots in the Orthodox world (such as Shira Hadasha, the flagship partnership minyan) give serious thought to the “spiritual” issues associated with the “second type of minyan”.

There is an open secret about Hadar: like many other minyanim, it is funded by lots of organized community money, offered by institutions eager to keep young Jews connected to their heritage. (This may explain why Kaunfer writes like someone who has devoted a big chunk of his life to writing grant applications.)

Yeshivat Hadar does indeed do a lot of fundraising from foundations, making it possible for students to attend for free and receive a living stipend. However, Yeshivat Hadar isn’t a minyan; it’s a yeshiva. Kehilat Hadar (which is a minyan) is funded almost entirely by donations from its own participants. Kehilat Hadar has received some “organized community money” in the past (e.g. from Bikkurim), but this was never a secret, open or otherwise; when Kehilat Hadar was participating in Bikkurim, this was mentioned at the bottom of every email. And, in having received this funding in the past, Kehilat Hadar is not “like many other minyanim”. Most minyanim have never received any “organized community money”; they are either funded entirely by donations or they operate on a budget of zero (meeting in participants’ homes or other free spaces).

(As an aside, I wonder if the founders of the three Hadars are starting to regret their decision in naming the newer two. It may have made sense from a marketing perspective, since Hadar was already a successful brand, but it means they and others are forever stuck making this sort of clarification when people inappropriately conflate the various Hadars.)

Through this, Jewish organizations, while creating opportunities for young Jews to worship and study—and they do create these opportunities, and these opportunities are valuable—also prop up a not-very-impressive aspect of elite American culture: the long-extended enabled adolescence. In an interview with Tablet, Kaunfer called this period the slacker-sounding “post-college, pre-whatever.” It has also been described by Jeffrey Arnett, a psychology professor, as “emerging adulthood,” and in David Brooks’ more august term as “the odyssey years.”

On the ground, what this looks like is upper middle class Americans spending the ten to fifteen years after college messing around and “figuring out their lives” while postponing marriage, children, and responsibilities.

Let’s first assume for the sake of argument that “emerging adulthood” exists. What is the mechanism by which independent minyanim (whether they’re funded by their participants or by the Elders of Zion) prop it up? Is the idea that if the only Jewish community option were suburban family-centered synagogues, then young adults would be in a bigger hurry to get married, have children, and buy a house in the suburbs so that they could be part of those sweet sweet synagogues, and independent minyanim are the crutch holding them back?

More likely, the societal factors contributing to later ages of marriage and parenthood were around before this latest wave of independent minyanim, and are much larger than our tiny Jewish community. If these minyanim didn’t exist, no one would have children and settle down any earlier, but a lot of people would spend more time alienated from Jewish life.

One way or another, the bill for this eclectic adventurousness is footed by parents, or, for the best and brightest, by various institutions and sinecures.

Wait a minute. Here, Lurie is characterizing independent minyan participants as unemployed trustafarian slackers, but just two paragraphs earlier, she wrote about “the e-bankers, lawyers, and bright-eyed young professionals who form a core segment of the minyan: stockbrokers in Birkenstocks.” So which is it?

Probably a little of both, but again, that has nothing to do with minyanim. Lurie (and perhaps Arnett, Brooks, et al.) are conflating multiple factors that need not go together. To be sure, the growing population of childless young adults does much to enable urban minyanim such as Kehilat Hadar (and not the other way around); because they’re not raising children, they can afford to live in neighborhoods such as the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and have the time to contribute volunteer energy to creating and sustaining minyanim. But that has nothing to do with “messing around and ‘figuring out their lives’”, or “postponing … responsibilities”. Many of these childless young adults are employed in “responsible” jobs.

It seems that Lurie wants to attack various full-time year-long programs run by the Jewish community as enabling a prolonged “odyssey”, but if so, she’s going after the wrong target: most independent minyanim meet on Shabbat, when even most employed people have the day off, so participating in an independent minyan (unlike, say, spending a year learning in Israel) doesn’t postpone anything.

Certainly, in opting out of synagogue life, most young Jews become unaccustomed to supporting Jewish institutions financially.

This is true, but “most young Jews” aren’t involved with independent minyanim either. Among those who are, they do become accustomed to supporting their communities financially. And unlike synagogue members, who pay membership dues in exchange for perceived benefits (like paying for a gym membership), most newer independent minyanim don’t have formal membership, and therefore independent minyan participants who donate to their minyan do so without the expectation of getting anything directly in return; they do it because they know the community needs their support.

In a faith that initiates its 12- and 13-year-olds into adult responsibility, the concept of thirty-year-olds as “emerging adults” should be, at the least, suspicious.

For sure. But independent minyanim may be the sector of Jewish life that treats thirty-year-olds least like “emerging adults” and most like (adjective-free) adults, with adult responsibilities. Unlike conventional synagogues that run “20s and 30s groups” that are extensions of the youth group, and unlike Federations with their “Young Leadership Divisions”, independent minyanim are places where adults of any age can take full responsibility for running the community, without being marginalized as “young people”. Far from being slackers, the 20somethings who start minyanim are taking action when they don’t even have to.

Now that independent minyanim have been through several crop cycles, it is reasonable to speculate about their future. “When people ask what will happen to the minyan as it ages, my experience suggests that it simply won’t [age],” writes Kaunfer. “Most people past their mid-thirties leave the urban area, and a new crop of college graduates moves in . . . The institution itself is actually quite stable, because it caters to a demographic that is constantly replenishing itself.”

This quote from Kaunfer isn’t about the future of independent minyanim in general. When he says “the minyan”, he’s not talking about an abstract minyan, but rather, a specific minyan: Kehilat Hadar. And this model of dynamic equilibrium has proven to be correct for the Upper West Side. It’s not correct everywhere, but he’s not claiming that it is. Kaunfer has listed a number of other possibilities.

Pretty soon, those who stay will need Hebrew school, they will need bar/bat mitzvah training, and before you can say egalitarianism, bang, they’re a shul.

And here we have the framing of independent minyanim as rumspringa (a classic move by Jewish establishment types who want to avoid feeling threatened): these responsibility-free young adults are running wild now, but once they have children, the clock will strike midnight and poof! what they’re looking for in a Jewish community will revert back to what their parents’ communities do. Then they’ll uncritically accept–nay, “need”–the institutions of Hebrew school and bar/bat mitzvah just the way they are. There’s no chance that they’ll embrace new models of Jewish education just as they embraced new models of prayer communities, and there’s certainly no chance that anyone has done this before and emerged unscathed (oh wait, see above, about Fabrangen’s 40th anniversary).

The Havurah movement had a necessarily different relationship to institutions (part of their function, in the early years, was to earn 4D draft exemptions for those participants who were studying for ordination), but even they could not resist the institutional pull: in 1979, the National Havurah Committee was founded.

It was Havurat Shalom (a specific havurah) that was set up as a seminary to earn draft exemptions, not “the Havurah movement” (whatever that means). And I have no idea what the NHC example is supposed to prove, or what Lurie thinks the NHC is. The National Havurah Committee is an organization with one not-quite-full-time staff member, one summer intern, and a whole lot of volunteers, and it provides resources, events, and networks for anyone interested. Unlike a denomination, the NHC has no affiliated congregations. The hundreds of havurot and minyanim across the country have become no more “institutional” due to the NHC’s presence than they would be without it.

There are, however, ragged edges to these commitments. Most minyanim that stress prayer over other forms of Jewish communal life do not meet weekly (Hadar is now an exception). To one parent of a minyan-goer, this signals the unseriousness and “lack of commitment of a generation—they can’t even commit to coming to shul every week.”

Are you for REAL? Here’s a simple exercise: take a Reform or Conservative shul, and count how many people are there on the high holidays. Then count how many people are there on an average Shabbat. Then calculate the ratio of these two numbers. Next, do the same calculation for an independent minyan (that does high holiday services). Not even the same order of magnitude! If the average minyan-goer shows up every two weeks or so (i.e. every time the minyan meets), that is FAR more frequent than the average synagogue member. (And that doesn’t account for cities with multiple alternating minyanim, where many people go SOMEWHERE every week even if it’s not the same place.)

In what is perhaps the most disturbing result of this antiauthoritarian impulse, independent minyanim have encouraged the growth of communities without rabbis, and sometimes without anyone above the threshold of don’t-trust-anyone-over x (adjusted for my generation’s protracted youth).

Communities without rabbis (in the sense of a job description, not a professional degree), yes. Age thresholds, no. Yes ,there are many independent minyanim with populations mostly in the 22-40 range, but none of these minyanim explicitly encourage that homogeneity (unlike “20s and 30s programs” from the established Jewish community, which do). There are various reasons (some of which Kaunfer explores in his book) why people above a certain age are less likely to be found in these communities, but anyone who wanted to be there would be welcome.

Where, finally, do the minyanim stand in the rough spectrum of practicing American Judaism?

“The minyanim” are not the Borg. They really are independent — of the denominations and of each other. If there is a “spectrum”, then there are independent minyanim in many places on it (and off it).

Hadar and other communities are to be praised for appealing to the Orthodox, which the havurot never managed to do.

Why is appealing to “the Orthodox” more praiseworthy than appealing to anyone else? And who are “the Orthodox”? Obviously, most Orthodox-identified people wouldn’t daven somewhere like Hadar.

Certainly the right wing of Hadar is left-wing Orthodox in observance.

“Certainly”? Who is “the right wing of Hadar”, and what does “left-wing Orthodox in observance” mean? The only part of this sentence that I understand is “is”.

Trying to place these minyanim on conventional left-right spectra is a fool’s errand. There are people who are dumbfounded that Hadar does same-sex aufrufs and full Torah reading, but that’s only a contradiction if you start with faulty assumptions.

But still: Kaunfer is a dyed-in-the-wool, Cradle Conservative Jew, as are 46 percent of all independent-minyan-goers.

The actual statistic from the 2007 Spiritual Communities Study is that 46% of independent minyan goers were raised identifying as Conservative — no mention of how many of them were “dyed-in-the-wool”. And 46% is still less than half, so we can conclude that the majority of independent minyan goers were not raised in the Conservative movement. In comparison (from the NJPS data presented in the same report), 35% of synagogue members identify as Conservative, so the independent minyan population is not dramatically different from the synagogue population in this regard.

If the independent-minyan movement is, at heart, a Conservative critique of Conservative synagogue life, does it not follow that the phenomenon is much less expansive, and less important, than is claimed?

If the independent-minyan movement is, at heart, a front for the Mexican drug cartels, does it not follow that they should face federal prosecution?
If my grandmother has wheels, does it not follow that she is a streetcar?

Even I could do a better job arguing the case for “independent minyanim are really Conservative deep down”, and I don’t even believe that position! Making this claim based on a few leaders (who started one independent minyan, not “the independent-minyan movement [sic]“) and less than half of the overall independent minyan population is pretty weak.

Furthermore, the innovations of independent minyanim are fully compatible with Conservative Judaism itself.

They’re also fully compatible with the phlogiston theory, bimetallism, and plate tectonics. Nu?

Conservative synagogues would like nothing more than to welcome independent minyanim, and their young members, into the fold.

Especially if their young “members [sic]” will provide warm bodies to maintain the status quo at those synagogues.

But the minyan movement has taken on a life of its own, abandoning rather than revitalizing the Conservative world.

Except for the majority of independent minyan participants who couldn’t abandon the Conservative world, because they were never in it to begin with.

Such a non-normative concept of halakha is empowering mostly in the sense that it empowers people to think that they are keeping halakha whether or not they really are.

I carry around Beg The Question cards, to promote the proper use of the expression “to beg the question”, but then I often find myself at a loss when trying to think of correct examples of “begging the question”. But thanks to this sentence, now I have one.

To spell it out: Lurie’s critique of this approach to halakha (in which there is not “a simple yes-or-no answer”, but there is support for either conclusion) relies on the predicate “whether or not they really are [keeping halakha]” having a well-defined objective truth value. That is, showing that this approach to halakha is invalid relies on the basic assumption that this approach to halakha is invalid.

ANOTHER SONG WILL RISE: An evening of song in memory of Debbie Friedman

2011-01-14T13:46:00.000-05:00

For those of you in the DC area: The community is joining together on Tuesday, January 18, 2011, at 7 pm, at the Religious Action Center, 2027 Massachusetts Avenue NW, Washington DC, to sing the songs of Debbie Friedman z”l and remember her far-reaching legacy. Please spread the word to your friends and communities. You can RSVP at the Facebook event page.

For those of you who aren’t in the DC area: What’s been going on in your area?

Memories of Debbie Friedman

2011-01-13T08:39:00.001-05:00

(Crossposted to Jewschool.)

Debbie Friedman’s memory is a blessing. Beyond the hundreds of songs she composed, she was a pioneer of an entire genre of Jewish religious music (sometimes known as “American nusach”) that has revolutionized American Jewish prayer. My memories of Debbie are too numerous to put in a comment, so I’m putting some of them in a new post.

Everything I know about songleading I learned from Debbie Friedman. She could lead a group in song (whether she was performing a concert or leading a service) with her little finger. I had the opportunity to study songleading with her at Hava Nashira for four years. At my first Hava Nashira in 1997, in Debbie’s songleading workshop, it was my turn to get up and teach a song to the group, and then be critiqued by the group. After I finished, the first thing Debbie said was “You need to take off your clothes. Get naked.” After I got over the shock, it became clear that she was speaking figuratively; she meant that when we lead a group in song or prayer, we need to shed our inhibitions. And she was right; I have taken her advice to heart ever since then (as well as laughed many times about the time Debbie Friedman told me to take off my clothes).

In some ways she was a larger-than-life figure. She composed hundreds of songs without knowing how to read music; if you asked her for the chords to a song, she would say that she didn’t know the names of the chords, but she would play it so you could watch and write them down (”…and then it’s this one with the two fingers over here…”). There was the time at NFTY Convention 1997 when she broke a string during “Miriam’s Song”, and the backup musicians kept on going while she removed the broken string, put on a new one, wound it, tuned it, and came back in for a triumphant final chorus. And then there was the time at Hava Nashira when the power was out on Shabbat morning. Before services began, Debbie taught her new melody for Yotzeir Or (”creator of light”). When we got to that point in the service, we sang Debbie’s Yotzeir Or… and all the lights went back on!

Yet despite her larger-than-life celebrity, Debbie Friedman never sought out the spotlight. Her goal was always (as she wrote in the liner notes to Sing Unto God back in 1972) “the importance of community involvement in worship”. Debbie was at Limmud NY in 2006, where I was leading the Shabbat team. We had asked Debbie to lead havdalah for the conference. Then, on Shabbat afternoon, she told me that she was having second thoughts, and didn’t think it would be appropriate for her to do it. She felt that she was already famous, and that Limmud should be an opportunity for a new generation to take the reins, and that it would be a step backwards for her to lead it. My thought as a program organizer was that this would have been a good conversation to have several weeks before, but now that it was a few hours before havdalah, it was too late to rethink the plan for an 800-person program. But Debbie persisted, and tried to encourage me, of all people, to do it. To be clear, she was Debbie Friedman, and I was (and still am) a nobody, but I was one of her students and she was encouraging me to take off my clothes. In the end, Debbie led havdalah after all, and it was amazing of course, but what made it amazing was the way she brought the whole room together in song.

May this be our blessing, amen.

The Wedding... Part 5

2011-01-02T23:05:00.002-05:00

This post is likely the final installment in the series, which began with Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4. The topic of this last post is not a pleasant one, but is one that any discussion of the structure of marriage must address: divorce.

The issue of divorce has two aspects that need to be considered:
1) how divorce should function according to our understanding of egalitarian halachah
2) how to deal with the practical reality that not all of the Jewish world shares our understanding of egalitarian halachah.

Now #2 is an important issue that should not be minimized (at least for opposite-sex couples). If a divorce is not recognized by all parts of the Jewish world, and then the woman subsequently has children with another man, those children (and their descendants) can face serious future consequences. And unlike having a marriage or conversion that is not recognized by some, there is no remedy.

However, as important as #2 is, there is an unfortunate tendency to consider only #2, to the point that it overshadows #1. For example, as mentioned in previous posts in this series, the model of marriage that Rachel Adler proposes in Engendering Judaism goes to great lengths to emphasize that it is not kiddushin. For example, the order of the service begins with a cup of wine, but Adler writes: "In the kiddushin ceremony, this blessing would be followed by the erusin blessing, and only the couple would drink from the cup. ... To distinguish this cup from the erusin cup, it may be passed to all those around the huppah." Why is it so important to do various things with a shinui [change] to make clear that kiddushin is not happening, even egalitarian kiddushin? "[B]ecause any kiddushin requires a get, a halakhic divorce, for its termination, it is important to establish that b'rit ahuvim is not equivalent to kiddushin. For if b'rit ahuvim is not a halakhic marriage, then it can be dissolved without a get." And why is requiring a get a bad thing? "Greedy husbands blackmail and extort in exchange for granting divorces. Vindictive husbands withhold divorce for years, leaving their wives in limbo. ... In our own time, religious courts research and record marriages and divorces with unprecedented assiduousness in a central computer bank." In other words, because the process of gittin in other parts of the Jewish world is undeniably disgusting (both because of the potential for abuse and because, even when the system is "working", it creates a huge power imbalance), we should rule out anything in our part of the Jewish world that resembles gittin, and therefore anything that resembles kiddushin. (The possibility of egalitarian gittin isn't even considered.)

I find this approach problematic for two reasons: First of all, it results in a definition of marriage that is too negative ("not kiddushin") and cedes too much to other Jewish subcultures. In the name of avoiding the abuses of vindictive husbands and the Orthodox rabbinic establishment (a laudable goal), the unfortunate result is defining our own marriages as "not a halakhic marriage". When we make decisions about the wedding ceremony because of how it may appear to someone else outside our community, we lose the opportunity to decide what we would do if we were the only Jews on earth. That freedom might result in fixing kiddushin and gittin to eliminate these abuses and power imbalances. But yes, even under those circumstances, many would still oppose kiddushin, even egalitarian kiddushin, for other reasons. Adler herself rejects it as "equal opportunity commodification". But there's still a difference between the choice not to use the framework of kiddushin (a choice that could be made for many reasons) and the choice to essentially wave red flags saying "This is not kiddushin" (which seems motivated only as a reaction to external perception).

Second of all, despite all the efforts to say "this is not kiddushin" in order to avoid the need for a get, I'm not convinced it would actually work. That is, no matter how many ways you try to mark your wedding ceremony as "not kiddushin", there's always the possibility that some corrupt functionary in the Israeli rabbanut will deem that kiddushin has taken place anyway, and therefore that you need a get. And then you're back where you started, when it comes to practical concern for descendants. So since there's no way to avoid this possibility completely, it seems to me that it's not worth trying too hard.

And I don't mean to pick on Adler specifically. She does outline how the berit ahuvim is to be dissolved. Others, in contrast, don't consider the question of divorce at all, or if they do, they frame the issue as creating "rituals" rather than as determining the legal procedure by which the marriage is terminated; the legal procedures are either ceded to someone else or deemed unimportant.

Instead, I would advocate fighting the war as if there is no White Paper, and so forth: figure out how divorce works in the context of marriage as we understand it, then figure out whether any additional provisions need to be included to address the rest of the world. We did both of these, but kept them separate: the former was addressed in the structure of the sh'tar kiddushin, while the latter was addressed by a provision in the ketubah. The remainder of this post will look at each piece of this.

The first question is how egalitarian kiddushin should be terminated. As discussed in Part 3, the procedure for divorce (one partner writing and giving the other a document) appears explicitly in the Torah, while the procedure for marriage does not. Some of the laws of kiddushin (especially kiddushin bishtar) are derived from the laws of gittin. So it would appear that kiddushin and gittin are inverses of each other, and a get is required to terminate a kiddushin.

How does this apply to egalitarian kiddushin, in which there are two separate acts of kiddushin? The simplest answer might be that each kiddushin requires a separate get to terminate it. But this interpretation leads to problems in practice: Many liberal Jewish weddings include two acts of kiddushin, and very few divorces include two gittin. If we take egalitarian kiddushin seriously (which, fortunately in this case, the Israeli rabbanut doesn't), then this interpretation forces us to conclude that many individuals (usually men) who were married via egalitarian kiddushin and gave a get to their ex-spouses, but did not receive a get, are unknowingly agunim! (Perhaps one could address this bedi'avad through a less condescending (and more tautological) version of Moshe Feinstein's infamous ruling that marriages officiated by non-Orthodox rabbis don't really count and therefore don't require a get: one could say that if they were of the belief that their kiddushin didn't require a get, then ipso facto they didn't really have the intent to do kiddushin, and thus kiddushin never occurred. Still, lechatchilah we shouldn't be thinking that our kiddushin doesn't count.) It also leads to problems in theory: If both partners must give a get before the marriage is completely dissolved, this doubles the potential for abuse rather than eliminating it, since either partner can now hold the other hostage.

But maybe this interpretation (that a get is required for each kiddushin) is not the correct one. After all, a get does more than terminate kiddushin: it also terminates nisuin, a mutual relationship that has no other formal termination. So perhaps a get terminates not just a single kiddushin, but ALL marital relationships between the two parties, including the kiddushin in the reverse direction. If this is the case, then if one partner gives the other a get, then it would automatically terminate both kiddushins.

The second way certainly seems like how things should work: either party can initiate divorce, neither party can take hostages, and no new agunim are created. But how do we know how it does work? This would require much research to figure out, since the question wasn't directly asked in the classical sources.

In the meantime, to ensure that it would work this way, that one get from either party could terminate both kiddushins, we stipulated it explicitly. As discussed in Part 3, our sh'tarot kiddushin included a condition that they were dependent on each other, so that if one kiddushin is terminated, the other is too. It's possible that this condition was unnecessary (except in determining when the kiddushin first went into effect), if that's the way it would work anyway, and it's also possible that the condition was necessary; by including the condition, we covered all our bases. As discussed in Part 3, this condition could also be used by couples doing other modes of kiddushin; it would just have to be in a separate document or spoken.

So that should cover us in regard to our own understanding of egalitarian halachah (#1 above). That is, if (chas v'shalom) either of us gave the other a get, we would both consider ourselves divorced. But, as discussed above, that's not good enough. What about the practical realities in the rest of the Jewish world?

Ideally, the non-egalitarian portions of the Jewish world shouldn't accept our kiddushin in the first place, and therefore there should be no issue: one kiddushin is from a woman to a man (and therefore not recognized on those grounds), and the other kiddushin (from a man to a woman) is conditioned on the validity of the first kiddushin. However, it's dangerous to count on that working out in practice. There's always the possibility that someone at the rabbanut or wherever would consider the condition itself to be invalid, and therefore consider one of the kiddushins to be valid. So it's still important to be prepared for that possibility.

Also, the rabbanut or whoever would only accept a get from particular batei din, likely a proper subset of the set of batei din that we would consider valid. And we wanted to deal with the consequences of that reality, without suggesting that we consider only batei din in that subset to be valid.

To address this, we adapted a solution developed by our friends Debra Cash and David Fillingham (which has been included in newer editions of The New Jewish Wedding). They signed a document committing to a particular process in the case of divorce. We didn't use their whole process, but did take one piece of it: "[W]e pledge that neither will create an impediment to the other's Jewish remarriage. Specifically, we pledge that ... if one of us requires a formal get from the other, in accordance with any denomination of the Jewish world that the requester identifies, the other will not be recalcitrant and will participate in person or by a proxy acceptable under the norms of that denomination's practice." In other words, this requirement that a get be granted from any denomination requested is not the act that dissolves the marriage, but is part of the divorce settlement.

We adapted this provision and translated it into Aramaic: ודאי בעא חד מינייהו או תרוויהו למפרש דא מן דא ח"ו יהון פורשין בספר תירוכין באפי בי דינא דיתרעי כל חד מניהו ולא מעכבן דא לדא. ("And if a time comes that one or both of them desire to dissolve their marriage, they will separate with a get, granted by either to the other in a bet-din requested, without delay.") This clause appears in our ketubah, in the same paragraph quoted in Part 4 that talks about dividing possessions, etc. It was an intentional choice to put this in the ketubah and not in the sh'tar kiddushin, so that it is far away from the conditions dealing with what it takes to actually dissolve the marriage, and is instead categorized with the responsibilities that we have towards each other during and after the marriage. This is in the same spirit as Cash and Fillingham's making this provision part of the divorce settlement.

Ok, now let's get real: this requirement that a get be granted, above and beyond the get (or other act) that actually terminates the marriage, is very unlikely to be invoked by "either party" in "any denomination". In practice, the likely scenario is very specific: a woman would ask a man to give her a get in an Orthodox beit din, and this clause would require him to grant it. However, by keeping the language general, we can deal with the situation without hard-coding either the gender inequality or the denominational politics into our ketubot.

Of course, this sort of clause would be unnecessary for same-sex couples. However, they might still choose to include it, in solidarity with straight allies for whom it is necessary (since some straight allies do many things in solidarity with same-sex couples).

We didn't give this clause teeth, e.g. state that if one party fails to abide by it, s/he will be subject to a financial penalty, or that the kiddushin will be retroactively annulled. While we know that we are honest people and would take our commitments seriously with or without teeth, I realize that's not the point: the point of teeth is to establish precedent for the whole Jewish world, so that even less honest people would be subject to that precedent. So why didn't we do it? I guess it's because we had already done our Kantian duty in establishing precedent by doing egalitarian kiddushin that can be terminated by either party: if everyone did what we did, there would be no agunah problem, and this additional clause is just a concession to the fact that not everyone does what we do.

The case that we haven't dealt with is the original agunah situation: what to do if one partner is missing and presumed (but not proven) dead, or analogously, the Terri Schiavo scenario. The solution to this (for which there is historical precedent) is probably to write conditional gittin, which will go into effect only if one of those horrific scenarios takes place. But this doesn't need to happen at the time of the marriage; it can be written any time.

So that's all for now. I obviously hope nothing in this post has to be implemented, whether in my marriage or in yours, but I hope kicking off this discussion is still helpful. This is the end of the series, but if you have questions about anything, please post away in the comments.

The next frontiers for marriage equality

2011-01-02T13:59:00.004-05:00

Following the 2010 elections, these 6 states have Democratic majorities in both houses of the state legislature, have Democratic (or independent) governors, don't already have civil marriage equality, have no constitutional restrictions on same-sex marriage, and aren't West Virginia:

Which will be next?

The Wedding... Part 4

2010-12-26T23:56:00.001-05:00

To see what this is all about, read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 first, then come back here.

Ok, did you read them? Good. (For those who have been around from the beginning, note that I have added two paragraphs to Part 2, which I had erroneously deleted before posting the original post. They're at the end of the "kesef" section.)

Part 4 is about the ketubah. Before getting into what a ketubah is, we'll start with what it is not:

A ketubah is not the same as a sh'tar kiddushin. This distinction is discussed in Part 3. Some ketubot serve as (among other things) a written record of kiddushin, and include the text "X said to Y: 'You are hereby consecrated to me...'", but this kiddushin takes place whether or not it is reported in the ketubah.

A ketubah is not a document that enacts marriage. Two people who get married without a ketubah are still married by any definition. In order to make husbands give their wives ketubot, the rabbis ruled that a couple without a ketubah is not permitted to live together; however, they are still married.

A ketubah is not, classically, a document under which a woman is acquired for the price of 200 zuz. As discussed in Part 2, insofar as classical Jewish marriage resembles acquisition, the price is actually (for better or for worse) one perutah! And once again, if there is anything resembling acquisition, the ketubah has no part in this.

Ok, so if a ketubah isn't any of the things that it is commonly believed to be, then what is it?

The classical ketubah was essentially a "severance package". The husband would give the wife this document at the time of the marriage, and then if the marriage terminated, due either to divorce or the husband's death, the wife could cash in the ketubah and collect the designated amount from either the husband or his estate. (In those days, wives did not automatically inherit from their husbands; the inheritance would go to the offspring or closest blood relative.)

The ketubah was not in itself a misogynistic document. Rather, given the context of a society that would be considered misogynistic by today's standards, in which most women were not independent economic actors (and any income earned by married women went directly to their husbands), the ketubah provided a corrective by ensuring that divorced or widowed women would not be penniless when their marriages ended.

The minimum amount granted in the ketubah was, generally speaking, 200 zuz for women who had not been previously married, and 100 zuz for women who had. There was no maximum amount; any amount above the minimum could be specified in the ketubah. This 200 vs. 100 distinction makes some amount of sense: a woman who had been previously married (and therefore had previously collected at least one ketubah) might already have some financial assets of her own, and therefore be in less dire need than someone who had gone directly from her father's household to her husband's household and had nothing to her name. (But categories such as mukat eitz certainly problematize this rational basis for the distinction.)

How much was 200 zuz? Well, according to a popular song, two zuzim was the price of a kid (a goat, not a child), which means that this was enough to buy 100 kids. But more seriously, in a source more contemporary with the original ketubah, the Mishnah (Peah 8:8) defines 200 zuz as the poverty line: someone who has 200 zuz is not eligible to collect funds designated for the poor. So this is a significant amount, intended to put the divorced or widowed woman on her feet so that she's not living in poverty.

Furthermore, the rabbis ruled (Mishnah Ketubot 4:7) that a woman who never received a written ketubah was still entitled to collect the appropriate minimum amount (100 or 200 zuz) on the termination of her marriage; thus, this provision of the ketubah became automatic, with or without the actual ketubah. This chapter of the Mishnah goes on to name other ketubah provisions that go into effect and are enforceable whether or not they are actually written into the ketubah: the ketubah obligation is secured by the husband's property; if the wife is taken captive, the husband is responsible for ransoming her and bringing her back; if the wife dies first, her sons can collect the ketubah amount on top of what would otherwise be their share of the inheritance (this was more relevant in a time when men had multiple wives, so there were multiple sets of sons competing for the inheritance); the wife's unmarried daughters will be supported by the husband's estate after he dies; the wife herself will be supported by the estate until she is paid her ketubah. We can infer that these were all meant to be written into the ketubah. Most of these provisions, like the original core of the ketubah, deal with responsibilities that accrue after the termination of the marriage. The one exception is the part about redeeming the captive, which is a responsibility during the marriage, and is therefore perhaps the link from the ancient to the modern ketubah.

Over time, the ketubah grew to incorporate more responsibilities during the marriage, and the standard wording (see, e.g., Rambam, Hilchot Yibum v'Chalitzah 4:33) came to include אנא אפלח ואוקיר ואיזון ואפרנס יתיכי ("I will serve and respect and sustain and support you"). Thus the current "traditional" ketubah text contains both some of the responsibilities of the husband during the marriage and the financial guarantee after the termination of the marriage.

Modern egalitarian ketubot tend to focus on responsibilities during the marriage, though of course, the responsibilities apply to both partners. Our ketubah is in this model, containing both the responsibilities (in Aramaic) found in classical ketubot and some (in Hebrew) based on the text of Rachel Adler's berit ahuvim and other versions used by our friends. All provisions are mutual and incumbent equally on both partners; adapting the text for a same-sex marriage would require only grammatical changes. We intentionally used very little original text, and the two couples working on this used identical texts (except for names, dates, and locations), in accordance with the principle (discussed in Part 1) of doing things in a general way that other couples could use rather than specifically tailoring the ceremony to ourselves.

As for the original core of the ketubah, we included a paragraph stating that property would be under joint ownership, and a paragraph regarding the termination of the marriage (which will be discussed in Part 5). However, there is no reference to 200 zuz or any analogous amount, because we couldn't see any coherent way to incorporate this into an egalitarian ketubah between two partners who are both financially empowered. It wouldn't have made sense to apply this financial responsibility to both partners: in our society, it is assumed that spouses inherit each other anyway, so specifying a fixed amount payable to the surviving spouse would have been redundant. And in the case of divorce (in which both partners survive), the two payments would cancel each other out and would thus be meaningless. Instead, in the case of divorce, we included a requirement that כל רכוש דאית לון יהון פלגין באורח קשוט וכל טפלא דיתברכון בהון יהו באחריות תריהון ("they will divide all of their possessions with integrity and share responsibility for any children with which they are blessed"), which we think matches the original intent of the ketubah, to ensure that both spouses and any children are provided for after the termination of the marriage.

So that's the text of the document. The other issue is the means of accepting it.

Classically, ketubot were signed only by the witnesses. Nowadays, many ketubot are also signed by the couple (and/or the officiant(s)). We went with the former approach, but not for any ideological reason.

At many weddings, the couple (in the case of an egalitarian ketubah) or the groom (in the case of a non-egalitarian ketubah) formally acquire the responsibilities of the ketubah via the mechanism of kinyan sudar: They take hold of some object, such as a handkerchief (sudar) or pen, that belongs to someone else (e.g. one of the witnesses), and in taking possession of that object, they acquire the ketubah obligations. The witnesses watch this happen, and then sign the ketubah to affirm that they have seen it. Typically this takes place before the chuppah. (However, it occurs to me that couples that don't do a formal kinyan sudar are still covered if they sign their own ketubah, since in 21st-century America, signing a document is the standard method of accepting responsibility for the contents.)

You may recall from Part 3 that we didn't use rings for kiddushin. But we still wanted to exchange rings. So we used the rings as the "sudar" to acquire the obligations of the ketubah. (This is similar to R. Dov Linzer's model for a bilateral nonegalitarian "double-ring" ceremony, in which the groom gives the bride a ring to effect kiddushin, and the bride gives the groom a ring which he accepts to take on the obligations of the ketubah. However, instead of 1 ring for kiddushin and 1 ring for the ketubah, we used 0 for kiddushin and 2 for the ketubah.)

We gave the rings ahead of time to one of our witnesses, who was then the owner of the rings for a brief period of time. At the appropriate moment (after the ketubah was read aloud under the chuppah), she brought the rings forward to the chuppah in a bag. We then lifted the bag of rings together, to indicate our intent to establish a partnership. (This echoes the berit ahuvim, which is in turn based on the classic method of establishing a business partnership (shutafut). However, we were doing this only symbolically, since shutafut requires pooling resources that belong to each partner, whereas the rings still belonged to our witness at that point.)

We then removed the rings (which still belonged to our witness until then) from the bag, and each of us gave the other a ring. In taking possession of the ring, we each accepted responsibility for our respective obligations in the ketubah. The witnesses witnessed this, and signed the ketubah. (This method required signing the ketubah under the chuppah, rather than ahead of time, since the witnesses were testifying that they had seen us accept the responsibilities.)

This was followed by sheva berachot, etc., as at any Jewish wedding.

***

Coming in Part 5: provisions for divorce

Google hit of the day

2010-12-21T22:26:00.002-05:00

Someone found their way to Mah Rabu yesterday by Googling (without the quotes) "is watching a lunar eclipse halachically permissible?".

(By the way, while last night's eclipse was on the same date as the solstice, it didn't coincide with the solstice itself, which was over 12 hours after the eclipse ended.)

The December Dilemma: 10 Tevet on Friday (guest post)

2010-12-14T09:46:00.004-05:00

In the tradition of Mah Rabu's calendar geeking, this is a guest post by Dunash.

This year, for the first time since 5762 (2001), the Fast of Tevet will be observed on a Friday. This creates an awkward situation, where one is preparing for Shabbat while also fasting. In perhaps the greatest contrast, at erev Shabbat mincha, one reads Torah and Haftarah as normal on a fast day, before going into Kabbalat Shabbat and Maariv and then breaking the fast at Shabbat Kiddush.ⁱ

This may not be an enormous undertaking in the Northern Hemisphere, when Shabbat in late December or early January starts mid afternoon, but in Buenos Aires or Cape Town or Melbourne this could be a significant hardship. Still, the fast is observed on a Friday worldwide.

The situation raises three questions:
1) What are the calendar mechanics that cause the 10th of Tevet to fall on a Friday?
2) What would happen if another fast day fell on a Friday?
3) Why is the Tenth of Tevet so special?

First, a brief primer on how the Jewish calendar is calculated. It consists of lunar months, which are between 29 and 30 days, over a fixed 19-year cycle of non-leap (12-month) and leap (13-month) years. This is necessary because a non-leap lunar year is approximately 11 days short when compared to a solar year and so must be augmented to keep the holidays seasonal. (This is in contrast to the Muslim calendar, which is purely lunar with no leap years and so the holidays shift throughout the year.)

There are also constraints such as on when the first day of Rosh Hashana can be (with the mnemonic לא אד"ו ראש – meaning not on Sunday, Wednesday, or Friday). This is so that Yom Kippur does not fall on Friday or Sunday and so that Hoshana Rabbah does not fall on Saturday.

These constraints result in at times needing to add one or two days to each year (both leap and non-leap) to make the next RH come out right. Days are added to Cheshvan (and potentially Kislev), which always makes them fall between Simchat Torah and the end of Chanukah. As a result, the period from Purim to ST always has the same number of days and so there is a 1-1 relationship between the days of the week of RH and most other holidays.ⁱⁱ

Based on this calendar algorithm, for the next 100 years (2010-2109), the 10th of Tevet will fall on a Friday 21% of the time.

10th of Tevet

Day of the week	Shareⁱⁱⁱ
1	30%
2	0%
3	26%
4	3%
5	20%
6	21%
7	0%

While this hasn't happened since 2001, 1996, 1993, and 1983, it will happen again in 2013, then 2020, 2023, and 2024 (which actually occurs in Jan 2025).
The only other fast that could occur on a Friday would be Ta'anit Bechorot (because of a Saturday Pesach and therefore a Monday Rosh Hashana). If this happens, though, it is pulled up to the previous Thursday instead of observed on a Friday.^iv

So why is the 10th of Tevet so special that we observe it on a Friday? And why do we ensure in the calendar that it cannot fall on Shabbat? It seems that there is a biblical relationship between the 10th of Tevet and the other fast day that we structure the calendar around instead of shifting its observance: Yom Kippur. In Leviticus 23:28, Yom Kippur is described as בעצם היום הזה ("on the very day"). Similarly, in Ezekiel 24:2, 10th of Tevet is described using very similar language, as עצם היום הזה ("the very day").

This suggests that were the 10th of Tevet to fall on Shabbat (which is currently impossible) we'd actually fast, which would create a strange situation since it is not a fast day with anywhere near the theological significance of Yom Kippur. However, this is not an issue with a Friday that has no particular significance, and so the 10th of Tevet can fall on a Friday, with only minor inconveniences to Shabbat cooking and erev Shabbat mincha.

May we all have a צוֹם קַל – an easy and meaningful fast.

***

ⁱ Despite reading Torah and Haftarah, because it is erev Shabbat, one omits Tachanun as usual, and also Avinu Malkeinu. One still does bathe as usual in anticipation of Shabbat. See Shulchan Aruch, Orach Chaim 566.

ⁱⁱ There is a spectacular את בש mnemonic (formed by starting at either end of the alphabet and then pairing letters going inward from each end) for the days of the week that each holiday falls on, corresponding to the days of Pesach. It does not take into account holiday observance that is pushed off because of Shabbat. Say the first day of Pesach was a Tuesday. Then את means Tisha Bav is on a Tuesday, בש means Shavuot is a Wednesday, גר means that Rosh Hashanah is on a Thursday, דק means Kriat Torah – reading of the Torah - Simchat Torah is on a Friday, הצ means Tzom – fast – Yom Kippur is on a Saturday, ופ for Purim on a Sunday, זע for Atzmaut – Israeli Independence Day on a Monday. However, (northern hemisphere) fall holidays are more flexible – Chanukah, 10th of Tevet, Tu Bishvat, due to the extra days in Cheshvan or Kislev.

The את בש goes back at least to the days of the Tur (1269-1340), though obviously there was no Yom Ha’Atzmaut back then. That its missing seventh day is now accounted for is an amazing/divine coincidence.

ⁱⁱⁱ The fact that the 10th of Tevet can't fall on Monday either is interesting, though not crazy - since there are only three numbers of days it can be after RH, which can only be on four days of the week, but not every combination is possible - 353 only occurs with Monday and Saturday, 354 with Tuesday and Thursday, 355 and 383 and 385 with Monday, Thursday, and Saturday, 384 only with Tuesday. You'd need a 354 or 384 to occur with a Monday or Saturday RH, or 353 to occur with a Tuesday to get it on Monday or Saturday, none of which ever happens, since they would result in a Sunday or Friday RH the following year.

^iv Several other fasts, if they fall on Shabbat, are observed a day late or two days early. In these cases (even for Tisha B’Av) certain special individuals can eat at very festive occasions that cannot be moved, such as those intimately involved with a bris, since the fast does not actually “fall” on that day but is merely “observed”.

If Tzom Gedaliah were to fall on Saturday (because of a Thursday RH) it is pushed off to Sunday (it cannot fall on a Friday because that would mean a Wednesday RH)

If Ta'anit Esther were to fall on a Saturday (because of a Sunday Purim and therefore a Thursday RH) it is pulled up to the previous Thursday (it cannot fall on a Friday because that would mean Purim on Shabbat which would mean a Wednesday RH)

If Ta'anit Bechorot were to fall on a Saturday (because of a Sunday Pesach and there a Tuesday RH) it is pulled up to the previous Thursday.

If 17th of Tammuz / Tisha B’Av were to fall on a Saturday (because of a Monday RH) it is pushed off to Sunday (it cannot fall on a Friday because that would mean a Sunday RH).

Technically, the beginning of Tisha B’Av can overlap with the end of Shabbat, either because it actually falls on Sunday or is pushed off from Saturday. But one does not experience fasting during this hour, since one has just finished the pre-fast meal.

Snow Shabbat's ripple effects

2010-10-21T20:02:00.002-04:00

(Crossposted to Jewschool.)

Back in February, we blogged about how Segulah’s and other Mid-Atlantic Jewish communities’ Shabbat plans were affected by what some called “Snowmageddon”. It turns out that that snowy Shabbat has had more profound impacts on one family. Go and read Washington lawyer Viva Hammer’s inspiring story about it, published in the Jerusalem Post.

Two lessons of this story (beyond the explicitly stated ones) include:
1) When we build communities, they can have powerful effects on individuals beyond what anyone expects.
2) It’s always a good idea not to be intimidated by the snow, and to let life (and Shabbat) go on.

Vote early and often

2010-10-19T19:38:00.006-04:00

Election Day is a mere fortnight away, and early voting is already open in 25 states, and opens here in Maryland on Friday. So it's time for Mah Rabu's endorsements: in all partisan races, as usual, I endorse Democrats for everything. (Except in the Florida Senate race, where I endorse instant-runoff voting, which I also retroactively endorse for Florida 2000.) I can't say I'm thrilled with how the congressional Democrats have used (or, more precisely, not used) their once-in-a-generation supermajorities. Still, the Democrats are better than the Republicans on every single issue (we recently saw a unique exception when the Obama administration voluntarily appealed the decision in Log Cabin Republicans v. United States, but that's irrelevant to this election, since neither Obama nor the Log Cabin Republicans are on the ballot), and a Democratic Congress that does nothing at all (which is a close first-order approximation to the current Democratic Senate) would be vastly superior than a Republican Congress that does anything at all. Withholding your vote to "send a message" to the Democrats will accomplish nothing; a resounding defeat will be merely interpreted as proof that the Democrats have "overreached" and need to "move to the center". (Funny how everything seems to be interpreted that way.) And at the state level (in the 43 states with multiple congressional districts), this year's legislative and gubernatorial elections will have an impact on redistricting following the 2010 Census, and therefore on the makeup of state legislatures and the U.S. House for the next 10 years. So go vote!

So that's the partisan elections, but I also need to figure out how to vote in the nonpartisan elections and ballot questions here in Maryland and Montgomery County, so I'm posting the information I've gathered so far, and inviting input from readers.

Circuit Court (Circuit 6):
The Circuit Court is the higher of the two trial courts in Maryland, with jurisdiction over felonies and major civil cases. (The District Court handles misdemeanors and minor civil cases. As far as I can tell, they seem to be roughly parallel to the two levels of trial courts in my former state of residence, with the Circuit Court parallel to the New York "Supreme Court" (which, confusingly to everyone, is not the highest court in the state), and the District Court parallel to the NYC Civil Court and the NYC Criminal Court.) Judges are elected for a term of 15 years or until they reach age 70. However, when a vacancy occurs, the governor appoints a replacement who serves until the next biennial election. (Since 15 is an odd number, it seems to me that this means that this would happen almost all the time.) This year, 6 judicial positions are up for election in the 6th Circuit (which includes Montgomery and Frederick Counties). Six candidates are running for these six positions, and all 6 (Sharon Burrell, Cynthia Callahan, Richard Jordan, Cheryl McCally, Joseph Quirk, and Steven Salant) are incumbent judges. If I understand the system correctly, this means that 6 positions opened up in the 2 years since the last election, and all 6 judges appointed to fill those positions have chosen to run for full terms. Does anyone know anything about any of these judges? Given that this isn't a competitive election, in the absence of further information I think I'm going to sit this one out, as a protest against judicial elections. (I can't vote for myself, since Maryland judges have to have been Maryland residents for 5 years.)

Court of Appeals (Appellate Circuit 7):

As in New York, Maryland's highest state court is called the Court of Appeals (though Maryland doesn't have a lower court called the Supreme Court to confuse everyone). The Court of Appeals consists of 7 judges, one from each Appellate Circuit, and the 7th Appellate Circuit is just Montgomery County. Judges are appointed by the governor to a term of 10 years (or until age 70) and confirmed by the Senate, then are put before the voters at the first election thereafter for a retention vote. Judge Mary Ellen Barbera took office in September 2008, apparently too close to the 2008 election to get on the ballot that year. What do we know about her?

Court of Special Appeals (At Large):

The Court of Special Appeals is the intermediate state appellate court, and its judges are appointed by the same system as the Court of Appeals. There are 13 judges, one from each Appellate Circuit, and 6 at-large. Judges Peter Krauser (the Chief Judge, appointed in 2000 and up for a second term), Albert Matricciani, Jr. (appointed in 2008), and Alexander Wright, Jr. (appointed in 2008), all at-large, are up for retention this year. Thoughts?

Montgomery County Board of Education:

The Board of Education has at-large members as well as members representing districts, but all of them are elected at-large (except the student member, who is elected by students in the county's middle and high schools). They are elected to staggered 4-year terms, so half are elected every 2 years. The candidates already ran in a nonpartisan primary in September, and the top two candidates for each seat went on to the general election. The at-large candidates are Shirley Brandman* and Lisa Lloyd; in District 1, Judy Docca* and Mike Ibanez; in District 3, Patricia O'Neill* and Karen Smith; and in District 5, Mike Durso* and Martha Schaerr. (The incumbents have asterisks. Did they all win because they were first in the alphabet?) The teachers' union endorses all 4 incumbents, as does SEIU Local 500.

State Question 1:

The Maryland Constitution says that every 20 years (non-presidential election years ending in zero, so this is the year), there has to be a ballot question asking whether there should be a state constitutional convention, which can then propose constitutional amendments (or a new constitution) to be submitted to the voters for approval. There seem to be several websites advocating for such a convention, though not openly advocating for any particular constitutional amendments. In the absence of any specific proposed amendments that I'd like to see, I'm inclined to vote no. I'd be too worried that a convention would be dominated by crackpots and/or corporate money, and that we'd see California-style amendments that would abridge civil rights and/or make the state ungovernable. (I don't think Prop 8 would pass in Maryland, but I'd rather not find out; I didn't think it would pass in California either.)

State Question 2:

Most people know that the 7th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees the right to trial by jury for any civil suit in which the amount in controversy exceeds $20. Since the $20 has not been adjusted for inflation, that's not so much in today's dollars, so a jury option is available for basically any civil trial. However, this only applies to federal cases. The corresponding amount in the Maryland Declaration of Rights is $10,000 instead of $20. The proposed constitutional amendment on the ballot would raise this amount to $15,000.

I'm not sure I have enough information to know how to vote on this. How common are civil trials where the amount in controversy is between $10k and $15k, and how often do the litigants exercise their right to a trial by jury? Is there a systematic difference in the outcomes of civil trials tried by judges and by juries? Is the reason for this proposed amendment to save money (because jury trials cost the state more), or to help corporations (because juries are more likely to rule in favor of the plaintiff), or something else?

State Question 3:

This proposed constitutional amendment would require that judges of the Orphans' Court in Baltimore City be members in good standing of the Maryland Bar. I think I'm going to abstain on principle; this seems to be a matter entirely internal to Baltimore City (with no impact on the state budget), so I don't see why it should be up to me.

UPDATE: An anonymous commenter raises a good point: in order to become law, the amendment must be passed by a majority of statewide voters AND a majority of Baltimore voters. Therefore, a yes vote is a vote to let Baltimore decide. So now I think I'm voting yes.

County Question A:

This law, charging an ambulance fee of around $400, was passed by the Montgomery County Council in May, then referred to the voters by petition. The ballot question asks "Shall the Act to require the collection of an emergency medical services transport (ambulance) fee from: (1) County residents to the extent of the resident's insurance coverage; and (2) non-County residents subject to a hardship waiver become law?" Again, I'm not sure I have enough information. The county claims that the fee is only charged to insurance companies and not directly to patients (and is waived for uninsured County residents), but how does this interact with copays, deductibles, etc.? Is it true that people don't have to pay anything? If it really is charged only to insurance companies, it seems harmless enough, but if not, it seems like a highly regressive tax, and there are better ways to make up the budget shortfall. It also seems to screw over non-residents (and there are many DC and PG County residents who work in MoCo and could have emergencies there). Thoughts?

UPDATE: Here's the actual law that is up for a vote. No amount is specified for the ambulance fee; it is to be set by the County Executive. It looks like the county indeed covers everything for county residents that isn't covered by insurance (including copays, deductibles, etc.), so residents indeed don't have to pay anything out of pocket. (And lifetime coverage limits are now illegal under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.) Non-residents are on the hook for whatever their insurance doesn't cover, but can request a waiver if their household income is less than 3 times the poverty line. (It's not clear how simple or complicated this process would be.) The ambulances are required to transport people regardless of their ability to pay. County Executive Leggett has proposed significant cuts to county programs in anticipation of the ambulance fee being voted down. I can't say I agree with his quick dismissal of the possibility of raising taxes, but whether I agree with it or not, that doesn't seem to be on the table right now, while the ambulance fee does. So to avoid all these cuts, from firefighters to road maintenance to mental health services, I'm now inclined to vote YES.

The Overton window for 1-day and 2-day yom tov

2010-10-14T23:54:00.001-04:00

This is another followup to Hilchot Pluralism Part VIII, which used Tikkun Leil Shabbat's Simchat Torah celebration as a case study to explore the possibility of pluralism regarding 1-day vs. 2-day yom tov.

The previous post talked about 1-day and 2-day individuals vs. 1-day and 2-day communities. This post is just here to clarify that there are far more than two possible stances that a community can take on this issue.

For example, Tikkun Leil Shabbat (featured in HP8) has explicitly not taken a communal stance on the issue. (Explicitly not taken a stance, as distinct from simply not taking a stance by default, like any community in the state of nature, or like TLS as of a few month ago.) You might think this is unusual, even unique. And perhaps it is, among prayer communities that meet for prayer on 16 Nisan, 22 Nisan, 7 Sivan, 16 Tishrei, or 23 Tishrei. But there are other types of Jewish communities out there, such as Hillels (which contain multiple prayer communities under one roof), or non-denominational Jewish organizations that are not ritual-focused. Such groups can and do take neutral stances on 1-day vs. 2-day yom tov (though the implementation is not always given enough thought).

And among those communities that have either 1 day or 2 days as the norm, there are different ways of approaching this. There are communities for which "1 day" or "2 days" is the answer to the question "How many days of yom tov should we do?", and there are communities in which the question is never asked in the first place. For example, (and people who know otherwise can correct me if I'm wrong) when the first Hadar Shavuot Retreat was being planned, I suspect there was not an initial gabbai meeting at which they discussed (or even rubber-stamped) whether it would be 1 or 2 days.

A useful way to think about the range of possible stances on this issue is the concept of the Overton window, which incorporates not only the actual position of a given community, but the range of other positions that are considered acceptable within that community's discourse (which is generally smaller than the range of all possible positions).

The Overton window is named after the late libertarian activist Joe Overton. The classic example is on the issue of education, in which he ranked different public policies from "least government intervention / most freedom" to "most government intervention / least freedom". (As a public education advocate, I obviously disagree strongly with Overton on the framing of the various policies. I'm citing him here for the structure, not the substance.)

His ranking was:

No government schools
Parents pay for only the education they choose
Private and home schools monitored, not regulated
Tuition tax credits
Tuition vouchers
Private and home schooling moderately regulated
Charter schools
Public‐school choice
State‐mandated curricula
Private and home schooling highly regulated; parents pay twice
Home schooling illegal
Private schools illegal
Compulsory indoctrination in government schools

The point is that in addition to the status-quo policy, there may be a "window" on either side of it containing other policies that are considered within the realm of possibility.

So if we arrange the possible communal stances on 1-day vs. 2-day yom tov on a spectrum, it might look something like this:

2 days as the unquestioned communal standard
2 days as the unquestioned communal standard, but individuals who observe 1 day can be open about their practice
the number of days of yom tov is a question, and the answer is 2 days
the number of days of yom tov is a question, and the answer is no official communal stance
the number of days of yom tov is a question, and the answer is 1 day
1 day as the unquestioned communal standard, but individuals who observe 2 days can be open about their practice
1 day as the unquestioned communal standard

Where does your community fall on this spectrum, and where is your community's Overton window?

Ontology of yom tov

2010-10-12T21:01:00.005-04:00

This is a followup to Hilchot Pluralism Part VIII, which used Tikkun Leil Shabbat's Simchat Torah celebration as a case study to explore the possibility of pluralism regarding 1-day vs. 2- day yom tov.

To address this issue more deeply, we have to look at the ontology of yom tov, and where it is situated: with the community, or with the individual? SPOILER ALERT: I'm going to claim that it's some of each. (These thoughts are relatively raw, and refinements are welcome.)

In that post, I wrote "This is an issue that will become more and more relevant in the future, due to various trends resulting in more intermingling between 1-day and 2-day people," and one of the trends mentioned (hat tip to JGN for this one) was:

the increased incidence of "shulhopping" (individuals participating regularly in multiple Jewish communities, and thereby having a greater need to define their own practice and identity rather than adopting a single community's practice)

If people are part of just one Jewish community (particularly if it is the only Jewish community they have ever been part of), they are less likely to have to give any thought to their personal minhagim, on 1-day vs. 2-day yom tov or any other issue, since they are more likely to just go along with the community's practice, whatever it is. Now that people participate in more communities, whether simultaneously or serially, it leads many of them to be more thoughtful about their own practice. I think this is mostly a positive development, since it contributes to a world in which people are more deeply engaged with and invested in their Judaism. But when taken to certain extremes (in either direction), it can become incoherent, as I'll discuss in this post.

The extreme manifestation of this individualization of Jewish practice can be found in the discourse of Stage-1 pluralism. (Just to be clear, when I say "individualization", I'm not talking about Sheilaism. What I mean is that if you find yourself in the desert for Shabbat with no other people around, you still keep Shabbat, without a community.) In Stage 1, the discourse is about what is forbidden, permitted, or required for the individual, and various properties of communities become projected onto the individual. For example, rather than talking about egalitarian and non-egalitarian communities, we can now talk about egalitarian and non-egalitarian individuals, even though this concept is mostly meaningless outside the context of a community, and even though the specific communal practices in question have their roots in concepts such as "kevod tzibbur" (the dignity of the community). Stage 2 is fundamentally similar in this regard, but more toned down.

The opposite extreme is in some non-pluralistic communities, where the community is seen as the source of all Jewish practice. This is manifested most not in the Orthodox world (where the concept of individual minhagim is alive and well), but in the allegedly individualistic Reform movement. Perhaps the most extreme example is in those Reform communities that do havdalah before dark on Saturday. The underlying assumption enabling this is that Shabbat exists only in the context of the community, and therefore the community has the power to determine when Shabbat starts and ends. There is no consideration that an individual might have a Shabbat practice that transcends the community (and therefore is not subject to the communal decision to end Shabbat at this time); that simply isn't the conception of Shabbat as understood by that community.

I think a happy medium can be found in Stage 3, in which the identity-based discourse includes individual identities, communal identity, and the interaction between these.

So with that in mind, let's look at the ontology of yom tov. Yom tov is an aggregation of multiple elements, some of which are situated with the individual, some with the community, and some are ambiguous. Here are some examples (looking only at the 3 pilgrimage festivals), but this is not a complete list; other examples are welcome.

Elements of Yom Tov Incumbent on the Individual

the prohibition on work
kiddush and havdalah
the yom tov prayers
dwelling in a sukkah (on Sukkot)
eating matzah and maror (on Pesach)
not eating or owning chameitz (on Pesach)
not wearing tefillin

What these have in common is that an individual who observes yom tov would do them even if s/he were spending yom tov in a desert with no other people, or in a foreign city with no other Jews. In some cases, their inverses are obligatory on days that are not yom tov (e.g., if you're praying on a day that is not yom tov, you should use the weekday or Shabbat amidah, and not the yom tov Amidah), and in some cases they're not (e.g., just because it's not Pesach doesn't mean you have to eat chameitz).

Elements of Yom Tov Incumbent on the Community

"Simchat Torah"
Torah/haftarah reading
reading of megillot

These are things that only happen in the context of a community, that individuals can't do on their own. For example, an individual who observes Shemini Atzeret (whether for 1 or 2 days, it doesn't matter), who finds him/herself in rural Djibouti when the holiday rolls around, would say kiddush and refrain from work activities, but wouldn't really have anything called "Simchat Torah".

I think this dichotomy among elements of yom tov is useful in thinking about 1-day and 2-day communities, on the one hand, and 1-day and 2-day individuals, on the other. An individual who observes n days of yom tov should hold on to the elements in the first category (as applied to n days of yom tov) wherever s/he happens to be, whether in a Jewish community that observes n days, in a Jewish community that observes (3-n) days, or not in a Jewish community. See, for example, the one-day-yom-tov person's guide to the second seder.

On the other hand, the elements in the second category don't follow individuals around in the same way. For example, it doesn't make any sense for a 1-day individual located in a 2-day community to say on 22 Tishrei, "Today is Simchat Torah for me." If there's no community doing the ritual of Simchat Torah, then there's no meaningful sense in which it "is" Simchat Torah. (If a Torah falls in the woods...) To take a more obscure and convoluted example, many communities read Kohelet on Shabbat Chol Hamo'ed Sukkot. In years in which there is no Shabbat Chol Hamo'ed Sukkot (because yom tov falls on Shabbat), 2-day communities read Kohelet on the Shabbat that is (the 1st day of) Shemini Atzeret. In order not to make the long Simchat Torah service even longer, 1-day communities read Kohelet on the Shabbat that is the 1st day of Sukkot instead. But if a 1-day individual is spending the 1st day of Sukkot (in a year when it falls on Shabbat) in a 2-day community, it doesn't make sense for him/her to say "My minhag is to read Kohelet today", or conversely, if a 2-day individual is spending that day in a 1-day community, it doesn't make sense for him/her to say "My minhag is not to read Kohelet today". This is because there is no individual minhag to read Kohelet (in a ritual context); this is only something that communities do.

Ambiguous Elements of Yom Tov

yizkor

Does yizkor belong to the individual or the community? I'm not sure. Specifically, if a 1-day individual is spending the 7th day of Pesach and/or (1st day of) Shavuot with a 2-day community (which does yizkor on the following days, when this individual is back at work), should this individual do yizkor in some form on the day s/he considers yom tov, or not do it at all?

Learn by teaching, teach by learning

2010-10-07T20:05:00.001-04:00

Do you have something to teach?

The National Havurah Committee is now accepting course proposals for the 2011 NHC Summer Institute! The Institute will be August 1-7, 2011, at Franklin Pierce University in Rindge, New Hampshire. It is a week of Jewish learning and living in a pluralistic and multigenerational community comprised of people from grassroots Jewish communities across the continent.

We’re looking for proposals for four-session courses, whether connected to this year’s Institute theme “Y’hi shalom b’cheileich - May there be peace within your walls”, or on any other topic of interest. Teachers whose courses are accepted receive free registration, room, and board for the week, and get to participate fully in the Institute when they’re not teaching.

At the Institute, every teacher is a student and every student is a teacher. As someone who is a teacher in real life and has taught Institute courses, I have found teaching at Institute to be one of my most rewarding teaching experiences, thanks to the productive contributions of everyone in the class. Teachers at Institute include people who work professionally in the field they’re teaching about, as well as people pursuing an “extracurricular” interest who are excited to study something in depth and share it with others.

The deadline for course proposals is November 17. Learn more, and download a course proposal form. See you in August!

Hilchot Pluralism, Part VIII: Simchat Torah

2010-10-05T22:00:00.010-04:00

The Hilchot Pluralism series documents and analyzes the pluralistic practices that independent Jewish communities are developing.

Read this first:

Back in January 2008, Part VII concluded:

Coming in Part VIII: I don't know. Maybe something with an actual concrete solution?

And it's taken almost 3 years to find something, but now here we are!

***

Abstract

We look at Tikkun Leil Shabbat's first ever Simchat Torah celebration (last week), which successfully avoided taking a communal stance on whether or not it was yom tov.

The Broader Issue

This represents an attempt to achieve Stage-3 pluralism on the question of 1-day versus 2-day yom tov. (As we'll see, this solution is of limited generalizability, but still valuable.) This is an issue that will become more and more relevant in the future, due to various trends resulting in more intermingling between 1-day and 2-day people:

cross-fertilization between Israel and the Diaspora (including Israelis living in the Diaspora and retaining their 1-day practice, and 2-day Diaspora Jews going to Israel and picking up the 1-day custom there)
greater empowerment and education among people coming from 1-day backgrounds who may be more likely to retain their practice when making contact with 2-day Jews
potential shifts in practice catalyzed by the upcoming calendar patterns
the increased incidence of "shulhopping" (individuals participating regularly in multiple Jewish communities, and thereby having a greater need to define their own practice and identity rather than adopting a single community's practice)
the more general trend of pluralistic communities defining themselves along lines other than the established denominational boundaries

Background on Simchat Torah

Contrary to popular belief, there is (technically speaking) no holiday called "Simchat Torah". Simchat Torah is the celebration of the completion of the Torah that typically takes place during the holiday of Shemini Atzeret. (Similarly, there is no holiday called "Seder"; seder is a ritual that takes place on the holiday of Pesach.) Shemini Atzeret is observed on 22 Tishrei (by those who do 1 day of yom tov), or 22 and 23 Tishrei (by those who do 2 days of yom tov). In most cases, communities that observe 1 day have their Simchat Torah celebrations on that one day (22 Tishrei), and communities that observe 2 days have their Simchat Torah celebrations on the second day of Shemini Atzeret (23 Tishrei). Of course, the day on which the Simchat Torah celebration takes place (whichever day that is) is often colloquially referred to as "Simchat Torah", but in more formal contexts (e.g. the kiddush, the Amidah), it is still called "Shemini Atzeret".

While the timing of Simchat Torah celebrations is highly correlated with a community's stance on 1-day vs. 2-day yom tov, there are some exceptions: Some Chasidic communities (and the Carlebach Shul in New York), which do 2 days of yom tov, do hakafot (dancing with the Torah) on both nights of Shemini Atzeret. And for various reasons, some communities that do 1 day of yom tov have their Simchat Torah celebrations on the night that would be the "2nd night", even though it is no longer yom tov for them. In some cities in Israel, you can find "hakafot shniot" (second hakafot) on the night of 23 Tishrei, originally for the benefit of visiting Diaspora Jews who were keeping two days, with musical instruments played by Israelis (who wouldn't play instruments on yom tov, but for whom it is no longer yom tov).

Background on Tikkun Leil Shabbat

Tikkun Leil Shabbat (TLS) is an independent minyan/havurah in the District of Columbia, founded in 2005. As its name suggests, it meets primarily on Friday nights. TLS has also had non-Shabbat services on several special occasions: Purim, selichot, and the second night of Rosh Hashanah. However, before this year, TLS never met on any of the three pilgrimage festivals, and therefore never had to take a stance on 1-day versus 2-day yom tov. (Yes, TLS has had Rosh Hashanah services on the 2nd night, but for reasons beyond the scope of this post, Rosh Hashanah is a separate question from the other holidays.)

TLS is an extraordinarily diverse community, with participants originating in all of the Jewish denominations and non-denominations, and TLS embraces pluralism. One of the constituent communities that merged into the current incarnation of Tikkun Leil Shabbat was the DC Reform Chavurah, which identified as Reform. Though the post-merger TLS has retained no denominational identification, TLS continues to have more participants from Reform backgrounds than most independent minyanim of its vintage. Combined with participants from Reconstructionist and other backgrounds, this means that the TLS community includes a number of 1-day-yom-tov people. They dwell alongside 2-day-yom-tov people, as well as people who don't have a firm position on 1 day vs. 2 days (but would go to a Simchat Torah celebration wherever and whenever the party is happening).

So all this means that the question of 1 day vs. 2 days was an actual question for TLS, unlike for many communities in which the answer is self-evident. It was a question that TLS never had to ask for its first 5 years, but it finally came up this year when TLS decided to do Simchat Torah. And the decision was made to avoid taking a communal stance on the issue.

The easiest way to do this might have been to hold the Simchat Torah event on the night of 22 Tishrei, which everyone agrees is yom tov. This would have been out of the ordinary for the 2-day people, but not objectionable in principle (cf. the Chasidic communities mentioned above that do hakafot on both nights). But among the people who had preferences on this question, more preferred to do it on 23 Tishrei. (And of course, 1-day people are already well-accustomed to compromising on this if they want to go to the happening Simchat Torah events.) And so the decision was made to do "Simchat Torah" on 23 Tishrei, but not take a position on whether or not this night was yom tov.

Here's how it played out in practice:

Ma'ariv

The event began with the evening service: a yom tov service for some, and a weekday service for others. Everyone davened together, and a packet was made up that had all the prayers for yom tov and for weeknights. The logistics were made immeasurably easier by the fact that the vast majority of liturgical differences between yom tov and weekday ma'ariv are in the Amidah, which is said silently at TLS. There are also a few minor differences in the parts said out loud:

"Vehu rachum", at the beginning of the service, is said only on weekdays.
Hashkiveinu has different endings for weekdays ("shomeir amo Yisraeil la'ad") and yom tov ("haporeis sukkat shalom...").
"Vaydabeir Mosheh", before the Amidah, is said only on yom tov.
[Some communities add an extra berachah before the Amidah on weeknights. However, TLS had already established a precedent, through several years of Purim services, of not being such a community.]

And so there was one primary sheliach tzibbur who led only the parts of ma'ariv that are common to both weekdays and yom tov (i.e. everything except the pieces noted above). There were also two helpers in the kahal, one for weekdays and one for yom tov, who loudly said the pieces specific to weekdays and yom tov respectively, leading whoever wished to join them.

What of nusach? The musical modes associated with the time of the day, time of the week, and time of the year situate the entire service in Jewish time. Since the sheliach tzibbur was representing the entire community, neither yom tov nor weekday nusach would have been appropriate, since this would have framed the communal prayer as a yom tov or weekday service. Instead, the sha"tz (when not leading non-nusach melodies) used High Holiday ma'ariv nusach, which some communities use for "Simchat Torah". This is associated with "Simchat Torah" as an event, not with a particular date on the calendar, and so it did not break the calendrical neutrality. (No one in attendance actually believed it was a High Holiday.) The weekday and yom tov helpers used weekday and yom tov nusach for their pieces, as appropriate.

Alternate proposals that were not implemented:

Have two simultaneous leaders for the entire service, one for yom tov and one for weekday, diverging when the liturgy diverged and converging the rest of the time. This would have had the advantage of each leader leading a coherent service from start to finish. However, having co-leaders tends to be clunkier, since the leaders can't make adjustments in the moment without conferring with each other, and the differences between yom tov and weekday ma'ariv (listed above) were not significant enough to warrant this layer of complexity.
Have one leader lead the whole service according to his/her own custom (weekday or yom tov), and one helper fill in the pieces for the other custom. After all, one might say, isn't this consistent with the principle in Part IV that the sheliach tzibbur need not represent the entire community, but simply one facet of the community's diversity? No, I think this case is different, because the framing of the service as a weekday service or a yom tov service (even if the differences in the words are small, outside the Amidah) is an act of much greater magnitude than differences here and there in the words of a service that has a communally agreed shared framing (e.g. as a Shabbat service). Furthermore, since almost no one there had any prior experience participating in a service where it was explicitly unstated whether or not it was yom tov, it would be much harder to convey this message through mere explanations than through actions. If the sha"tz led a [weekday | yom tov] service, people would walk away with the impression (correct or not) that the community was acknowledging [1 | 2] days of yom tov. It's not like going to a service where you hear the imahot included in shacharit and excluded in musaf, and you come to the conclusion that the community doesn't have a stance on the issue; in this case, the next opportunity to correct this impression wouldn't have been until next year.

Everything Else

After ma'ariv, there weren't really any other times when the yom tov / weekday issue had to be finessed; the rest of the event was fully compatible with both. The Simchat Torah celebration took place in one of TLS's regular Shabbat locations, so it was in walking distance for whomever TLS is usually in walking distance for.

Some of the hakafot were accompanied by musical instruments, and some were not. However, this wasn't explicitly a compromise between the 1-day and 2-day yom tov positions. After all, TLS's Friday night services alternate between instruments and a cappella, and everyone agrees that it is Shabbat. There are some people who attend only one type of service, but most attend both (though they may prefer one over the other). Thus, the yom tov vs. weekday question didn't really come up in the deliberations over instruments, except in that some people thought it was yom tov, and some of those people wouldn't go if there were instruments on yom tov (or would prefer no instruments on yom tov), and this was a reason for having some of the event without instruments. (I'm not aware of anyone who wouldn't go if there were instruments on yom tov, but didn't think it was yom tov that night. But maybe there were such people.) But, given that instruments are already not expressly forbidden at TLS on Shabbat, there were many other arguments both for and against instruments that had nothing to do with whether or not it was yom tov, and in the end this resulted in splitting the difference.

Torah was read. Yes, it's weird for 1-day yom tov people to read Torah on a day that isn't yom tov (or Shabbat, or Monday, Thursday, Rosh Chodesh, etc.). On the other hand, Simchat Torah is weird in general. There's a sense in general that this celebration of Torah is so exuberant that many of the usual rules and conventions of Torah reading are suspended. The most prominent example is that many communities never read Torah at night, except as part of their Simchat Torah celebration. (TLS is one such community. In fact, since TLS has only had evening services, this was TLS's first time reading Torah!) In this spirit, reading Torah on that night was entirely appropriate (or festively inappropriate) for everyone.

The evening didn't include any official kiddush or havdalah, but could have included both if desired, whether simultaneously, sequentially, or interwoven (and there were drinks available, and people could have done either for themselves).

Scope and Generalizability

A number of factors conspired to make this solution feasible, and at the same time limit its generalizability to other communal events on days with disputed status:

Davening wasn't the focus of the event; it was just a warmup for the main event (hakafot and Torah reading).
It was an evening service, so the Amidah is silent, and the overall structure of the service is almost identical for weekdays and yom tov.
"Simchat Torah" allowed for a creative resolution to the nusach question.
TLS does not meet every Shabbat, and does not meet on most holidays; this was a special event.

So the specifics of this solution are generalizable to other Simchat Torah celebrations on the night of 23 Tishrei, and with some adjustments, to other ma'ariv services and perhaps minchah too (particularly with a "heicha kedushah"). Beyond that, it gets more complicated. Communities that meet regularly for yom tov services (particularly morning services) and want to maintain a neutral stance on the number of days of yom tov have a more difficult task ahead of them (though the 2nd days of Sukkot and Pesach are a little bit easier because of the shared material between yom tov and chol hamo'ed services). Options might include offering multiple simultaneous service options (particularly if the disputed day is on Shabbat, when the community would be having services whether or not it is yom tov), or having a service on the 2nd day but making it clear that this represents only a segment of the community (while the 1-day observers are presumably going to work anyway). Other creative solutions are yet to be developed, but are likely to see much exploration in the years to come. Please leave a comment if you know of others.

***

Now taking requests for Part IX.

History repeats itself

2010-10-04T22:53:00.002-04:00

Yesterday's post attracted the notice of Alan Brill, who asks:

So, I have a historical question. When modernizing Jews gave up the second day of yom tov in the 19th century was the push from certain professions or certain districts?
Jacob Katz, following his method of relying on Mannheim’s concept of ideology, presents the issue as an ideological battle between Reform and Orthodoxy (See, “Orthodox defense of Second Day of Yom Tov in Divine Law in Human Hands). But has anyone checked- did the push to get rid of yom tov sheni occur after a series of 3 day yom tovs pushed people to feel a need for the change? Was it more in certain professions? Maybe it was not ideological but a social push from ordinary businessmen? Was there a need to do manual labor or more likely to check the European stock market? Someone want to check the 19th century dates and determine if there was a decade like the next decade with many 3 day yom tov’s in a row? Does it coordinate with the push for the change?

I totally never thought to look into this before, but it appears that the answer is yes. Yom tov sheini was repealed by the Breslau Conference of 1846. The days of the week for Rosh Hashanah in years leading up to that were:
1830 Sat
1831 Thu
1832 Tue
1833 Sat
1834 Sat
1835 Thu
1836 Mon
1837 Sat
1838 Thu
1839 Mon
1840 Mon
1841 Thu
1842 Mon
1843 Mon
1844 Sat
1845 Thu
1846 Mon

(See this post for a key to what each configuration contains.)

So their time was much like ours: they had recently gone from a weekend-holiday-rich era to a weekend-holiday-poor era.

Hasty generalization

2010-10-03T19:30:00.001-04:00

(Crossposted to Jewschool.)

A wise person I know says “Whenever I read articles where I know something about the content, I always find mistakes or misunderstandings, which makes me wonder how many mistakes there are in articles where I’m not familiar with the topic.” We get to see this principle in action as the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz tackles American independent minyanim.

Over the last 10 years, the massive surge in independent minyanim has attracted media attention from both the American Jewish press and the American secular press. (After a while, this has converged so that they seem to write the same article over and over.) But this Ha’aretz piece might be the first time this phenomenon has reached the Israeli media.

The author of the piece, a self-identified secular Israeli, visited DC Minyan, and apparently did little or no research or fact-checking beyond what she saw and heard there. Thus she arrived at the unsupported conclusion that all or most independent minyanim (which in reality display a great deal of diversity) are similar to DC Minyan.

(However, on the plus side, this may be the first news article on 21st-century independent minyanim that doesn’t include a quote from Jonathan Sarna!)

To set the record straight, I’ll give the article a mild fisking:

At present, some 20,000 people are paying members of independent minyanim

The actual number is probably far less than this (especially since the article seems to adopt the “founded in the last 10 years” definition of “independent minyanim”, which is problematic in itself, of course). The vast majority of this wave of independent minyanim have NO members at all, let alone paying members. DC Minyan (profiled in the article) is on the extreme fringe of post-2000 independent minyanim in this regard, in that they have wholeheartedly embraced a synagogue-style membership structure, with membership dues, activities that are restricted to members or have different prices for members and non-members, etc.

(The havurot of the late 1960s and the ’70s may have been an early precursor of the independent minyanim, but they tended to be more counter-culture in style, and their latter-day heirs are more likely to be found in the Renewal movement.)

In reality, many havurot of the late ’60s and ’70s still exist, and many of their participants are still found in those havurot. “Latter-day heirs” may not be well-defined (and therefore not falsifiable), but the havurot of the ’60s and ’70s rejected rabbinic authority, as do many of the newer independent havurot/minyanim, while the Renewal movement embraces it.

Like many of the independent minyanim, DC Minyan defines itself as a “traditional egalitarian” community; the men and women sit opposite each other, without a partition - but still separately.

Both statements here are true, but the semicolon (suggesting that this is the usual definition of “traditional egalitarian”, and that this practice is “like many of the independent minyanim”) is highly misleading. DC Minyan is one of only two minyanim I know of with this precise set of practices (equal ritual participation by men and women, separate seating); most communities that define themselves as “traditional egalitarian” have mixed seating.

This makes it possible - unlike at typical Conservative and Reform congregations - for Jews of all denominations to take part.

Yeah, try again. The number of self-identified Orthodox Jews who would attend a service led by men and women that has separate seating but no mechitza (but wouldn’t attend such a service with mixed seating) is tiny, and probably much smaller than the number of non-Orthodox Jews who would be put off by the separate seating.

However, DC Minyan’s website does stipulate that people who identify with a different sex from that written on their birth certificates are invited to sit in the section designated for it. “No one will ask what gender you are,” Zuckerman adds.

They’re mixing up sex and gender here, though I wonder if this article was first written in Hebrew and then translated.

UPDATE: The Hebrew version has a number of differences from the English, which seems not to be a direct translation. Did the same writer submit articles in both Hebrew and English, or did a translator exhibit significant editorial license? “Paying members” and the disclaimer about early havurot appear only in the English. The line quoted above about “traditional egalitarian” is even worse in the Hebrew: “DC Minyan defines itself as an egalitarian community, and therefore the men and the women sit side-by-side and without a mechitzah, but separately.”

Prediction

2010-10-03T17:37:00.001-04:00

(Crossposted to Jewschool.)

The holiday season is now over. And something about it may have felt a bit out of the ordinary, unusual, abnormal. And based on recent experience, that feeling is accurate. But in the 2010s, abnormal is becoming the new normal.

In the last decade, as often as not, the Jewish calendar has followed the pattern in which all the fall holidays (except Yom Kippur) fall on weekends. This pattern is both loved and hated. People who work for Jewish organizations and observe 2 days of yom tov (so that the holidays are on Saturday and Sunday) dread this pattern because (unlike in other years, when the Jewish holidays are days off) they go from workweek to holiday to workweek to holiday, without a break to do laundry. People who work and go to school outside the Jewish world, whether they do 1 or 2 days, find this pattern easier, since it doesn’t require taking any days off of work/school, except for Yom Kippur (but that’s the one that your boss has heard of, and is much easier to explain than Shemini Atzeret).

Love it or hate it, we won’t see this pattern again until 2020. This Mah Rabu post from a couple of years ago covers all the details.

In its place, we see a new popular pattern emerging. This year, Yom Kippur was on Shabbat, but all the other holidays were on Thursdays (continuing into Friday for the 2-day people). This means that the 2-day people got a string of what are colloquially known as “3-day yom tovs”: when a 2-day yom tov falls immediately before or after Shabbat, resulting in 72 straight hours away from whatever one doesn’t do on Shabbat or yom tov. People working in the Jewish world appreciate all the 4-day weekends. Other people have to miss a lot of work or school: 3 or 4 days for 1-day-yom-tov people (depending on their stance on Rosh Hashanah), and 6 days for 2-day-yom-tov people, and that’s not including travel days.

Love it or hate it, this pattern is here to stay. We’ll do it all over next year, and then again in 2013, 2014, and 2017: half of the years in the 2010s.

The other half of the decade will see a different pattern that we haven’t seen in quite a while: Rosh Hashanah on Monday, with all the fall holidays falling on weekdays. This pattern also includes Shavuot starting on Saturday night, leading to another “3-day yom tov” for the 2-day crowd.

All told, the half-decade from 5771 to 5775 will include a total of 14 “3-day yom tovs”, and the decade from 5771 to 5780 will include 21. (But don’t worry, there’s only 18 more to go!)

This leads to my prediction (awaited since the title of the post): This decade, and especially this half-decade, will see lots of 2-day-yom tov people switching over to 1 day.

In a few years, we can come back and check this prediction and see whether the 1-day majority has gotten any larger. In the meantime, back to work.

Jeremiah goes to Washington

2010-09-07T23:49:00.000-04:00

It’s (almost) another year on the Hebrew calendar, and that means it’s time for another cohort of DC Jeremiah Fellows. This fantastic program is run by Jews United For Justice, DC’s local Jewish social justice organization. If you live in DC and are in the right demographic, consider applying this year; otherwise, tell other people who might be interested. Shanah tovah!

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Access a dynamic network of activists, organizers, scholars, and religious leaders.
Develop new skills in community organizing, advocacy, and leadership.
Explore DC through the lens of social justice and Jewish texts, traditions, values, and history.
Build a lasting community of friends, colleagues, and mentors.

Jews United for Justice is thrilled to announce that applications are now online for the 2010-2011 Jeremiah Fellowship! Brought to you by a partnership between JUFJ and California’s Progressive Jewish Alliance, the Jeremiah Fellowship is an innovative program to train a select group of young adults (approximately ages 25-35) to become the next generation of Jewish social justice changemakers.

During the eight-month program, Fellows meet twice monthly on Tuesday nights to learn different techniques of putting values into action, for intimate conversations with leaders in Washington’s Jewish and activist worlds, and for intensive study of Jewish texts and traditions. Two weekend retreats during the year offer in-depth skills training, study of the Jewish justice tradition, and intensive community-building activities. Participants leave the Fellowship with concrete skills in community organizing, activism, grassroots fundraising, leadership, and other key areas, better equipped to pursue their own volunteer work and careers in the social justice field.

We are seeking dynamic and engaged young Jews (approximately ages 25-35) who are:

Already volunteer leaders or have leadership potential
Passionate about making our community better by learning about and acting on local issues
Actively interested in building community
Committed to using skills gained through the Fellowship

We are committed to the diversity of each cohort of Fellows and believe that a breadth of experience adds to the richness of the program. While most of our last cohort fell into the 25-35 age range, we also had a few dynamite Fellows on either side of that range. We encourage people of all Jewish backgrounds to apply, and no prior knowledge of Hebrew or Jewish texts is necessary. Retreats will feature kosher food and Shabbat-friendly activities.

Applications are due by Sunday, September 26.

For more information, go to http://tinyurl.com/JFinfo

Ready to apply? Go to http://tinyurl.com/JeremiahApp

Questions? Email Rabbi Elizabeth Richman at rabbi {at} jufj(.)org

Ptolemaic astronomy question

2010-08-18T21:53:00.002-04:00

Ok, hist of sci people out there, help me out:

In Hilchot Yesodei Hatorah chapter 3, Maimonides lays out the geocentric model of the cosmos, epicycles and all. At 3:8, he notes that Earth is about 40 times larger than the moon, the sun is about 170 times larger than Earth, the sun is the largest of the "stars" (a category that includes planets too), and Mercury is the smallest. Comparing this with the actual data we know now, the sun is of course larger than any of the planets, and Mercury is the second smallest of the heavenly bodies known at that time (the moon is smaller). The sun's radius is 109 times Earth's radius, so the Rambam's number is pretty decent, within a factor of 2. Earth's radius is 3.67 times the radius of the moon, so that figure is considerably further off (by an order of magnitude). The ratio of Earth's volume to the moon's volume is 49, much closer to the Rambam's number of 40 (and he doesn't actually specify which dimension he's talking about), though if we understand the Rambam's ratios to be about volume rather than linear dimension, then the sun-to-Earth ratio is thrown way off.

So my question is this: HOW THE HECK DID HE KNOW? (And by "he", I mean the Rambam himself, or ancient Greek astronomers, or medieval Arab astronomers, or wherever he's getting his data from.) Even if the moon number is considerably further off than the sun number, it's still an impressive feat to know that the moon is smaller than Earth (by any amount) even though the sun is much larger (by an amount that he basically got right) and the sun and moon are the same apparent size in the sky. He knew that the sun was farther away than the moon (which can be reasonably inferred from the sun's (apparent) orbital period being longer), which would mean that the sun is larger than the moon if they're the same apparent size, but it's not clear how he got any sort of quantitative relationship between those sizes (the ratio he gives between the sizes of the sun and the moon doesn't have any obvious mathematical relationship to the ratio of their orbital periods), let alone how he could compare either of them to the size of the Earth. (Did he have some version of Kepler's Third Law?) I know that Eratosthenes measured the circumference of the Earth, but did pre-modern astronomers have any sense of how far away the sun or other celestial bodies were? And as for the sizes of the planets (the ones we would call planets, not the sun and the moon), how could anyone resolve any finite sizes, rather than just seeing them as points of light? I can't blame him for thinking the moon is larger, but how did he know that Mercury is smaller than Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn?

Pardon me if these questions are ignorant; I would be fascinated to know the answers. Thanks!

The Wedding... Part 3

2010-07-22T21:51:00.002-04:00

Part 1 set the stage for the series, and Part 2 was an overview of Jewish marriage (kiddushin and nisuin); I recommend reading those first. This post zooms in on kiddushin bishtar, one of the three methods of effecting kiddushin, and the one that we used.

Once again, a sh'tar kiddushin is not the same as a ketubah, either in form or in content. A sh'tar kiddushin is written in the first and second person, written by the mekadesh/et to the mekudash/mekudeshet. A ketubah is written in the third person, "written by" the witnesses. We used a ketubah in addition to our sh'tarot kiddushin, and the ketubah will be discussed in Part 4.

What?

The active ingredient in the sh'tar is "You are hereby consecrated to me", or any of the other formulations that effect kiddushin. The mekadesh/et writes the sh'tar, and gives it to the mekudash/mekudeshet in the presence of two witnesses.

Unlike the other two methods of kiddushin, kiddushin shtar requires no words to be spoken, since it's there in writing already. We said "הרי את\ה מקודש\ת לי בשטר זה כדת משה וישראל" when we gave each other our sh'tarot, but this was cosmetic (both for the benefit of the assembled crowd, and to focus our intentions) and not a legal requirement. A couple who wanted to do the legal mechanism of kiddushin without the outward appearance of kiddushin (the opposite of what is typical, I know, but I know of examples of this too) could use sh'tarot, and either say nothing at all or say something else (e.g. biblical verses).

Why?

The primary advantage of kiddushin bishtar, as we saw it, was the ability to do kiddushin in a way that does not resemble acquisition. Yes, both kesef and sh'tar appear throughout the rest of Mishnah Kiddushin chapter 1 as means of acquiring property, but there are key differences. First of all, money is used for acquiring property and nothing else (aside from, arguably, kiddushin), whereas documents are used to do many different things, of which acquisition is just one, so documents don't have the same strong association with acquisition that money does.

An even stronger difference between kesef and sh'tar is found in the Gemara (Kiddushin 9a). The parallel between kiddushin b'chesef and acquisition is clear: the mekadesh/et hands over money (or an object of monetary value) in the same way that a buyer hands over money. But R. Zeira bar Memel points out that a sh'tar kiddushin is not parallel to a sh'tar of sale:

מתקיף לה ר' זירא בר ממל: הא לא דמי האי שטרא לשטר זביני. התם, מוכר כותב לו "שדי מכורה לך"; הכא, בעל כותב "בתך מקודשת לי" י

A document of sale is given by the seller to the buyer. It's basically a receipt, or a deed, stating that the property now belongs to the buyer. So a mekadesh/et, who writes and hands over (rather than receives) a sh'tar, does not resemble a buyer.

Thus, while the Talmud draws many parallels between kiddushin b'chesef and acquisition b'chesef in deriving the relevant laws, it explicitly rejects any parallel between kiddushin bishtar and acquisition bishtar. Instead, the laws of kiddushin bishtar are derived from another source. Kiddushin 5a says:

אמר קרא "ויצאה ... והיתה ..." מקיש הויה ליציאה: מה יציאה בשטר, אף הויה נמי בשטר

In the same way that kiddushin is terminated with a document (which we know from the Torah, Deuteronomy 24), it can also be enacted with a document. (As a side note, this means that kiddushin bishtar is actually on firmer ground than kiddushin b'chesef. The laws of marriage (the normal kind, not the levirate kind) are not laid out explicitly anywhere in the Torah, whereas the procedure of divorce, which is with a document, does appear in the Torah. Based on this, the Rambam (Hilchot Ishut 1:2) says that kiddushin bishtar is from the Torah, while kiddushin b'chesef is rabbinic.)

And thus the Talmud proceeds to derive various laws of kiddushin bishtar from the laws of gittin, so a sh'tar kiddushin is essentially a get in reverse. This may not be the happiest or most romantic way to think about marriage, but it's also not objectionable in principle. Framing marriage as the opposite of divorce fits our values much more than framing marriage as acquisition.

A secondary benefit to kiddushin bishtar is that we did kiddushin with conditions (as discussed below). This can be (and is) done with kiddushin b'chesef too, and the conditions are written into a separate document signed beforehand, and/or spoken at the time of kiddushin. But with kiddushin bishtar, the conditions can be written directly into the sh'tar. This both makes the ceremony less complicated and emphasizes the nonseverability of the conditions.

How?

The halachic sources (from the Gemara forward) have very little to say about kiddushin bishtar, probably because this method of kiddushin has not been commonly used for centuries. And the questions they do discuss aren't exactly the top questions we might come up with: what the sh'tar can be written on (answer: anything, and the paper or whatever need not be worth a perutah, though that's not quite the end of the story), whether the sh'tar must be written for the specific recipient (answer: yes), and whether the sh'tar requires the recipient's knowledge and consent at the time it is written (yes again). The classical and medieval sources don't provide any guidance on little things like, oh, WHAT THE SH'TAR SAYS, beyond the one active clause. (Perhaps sh'tarot kiddushin were originally one sentence long.) The Shulchan Aruch (Even Ha'Ezer 32:4) adds that "there are those who say" that a sh'tar kiddushin should include both parties' names, like a get. But that's it.

When the four of us decided to use kiddushin bishtar for our respective weddings, we initially thought that we were going to be the first two couples to do this in the modern period, but we soon found out that we're at least the second and third: AG and YK had done it before us. Their ceremony was somewhat different from ours: their wedding was in Israel ~~and rabbanut-approved~~, and did not include bilateral kiddushin as ours did, but the ceremony as a whole was bilateral. She gave him a sh'tar tenaim (document of conditions), and he gave her a sh'tar kiddushin stating that the kiddushin was contingent on those conditions, so both sh'tarot were necessary to effect the kiddushin. Pursuant to the discussion above in the Gemara, their sh'tar kiddushin was modeled on a get in reverse.

As discussed in Part 2, we did two separate acts of kiddushin, which means that we used two different sh'tarot, each written by one of us to the other. The texts of the two sh'tarot were identical to each other, except that the names were reversed and the grammatical genders were adjusted. Based in part on AG and YK's text, the texts of our sh'tarot incorporated the following elements from the text of a get:

The date
The location
The names of both parties (as mentioned above in the Shulchan Aruch)
A statement that we were acting of our own free will and without coercion
The active clause, "הרי את\ה מקודש\ת לי בשטר זה כדת משה וישראל" ("You are hereby consecrated to me with this document according to the laws of Moses and Israel"), which is the clause that effects kiddushin, but is also the reverse of the active clause of the get, "הרי את\ה מותר\ת לכל אדם" ("You are hereby permitted to any person").
Signatures of two witnesses, to testify that they saw us write the sh'tar and that we really did intend to marry the person named in it. (Each sh'tar had a separate pair of witnesses, who were not the same as the witnesses to the kiddushin itself, who witnessed us giving each other the sh'tarot under the chuppah.)

In addition, the sh'tarot included conditions, discussed below.

Modeled after the get, we handwrote our sh'tarot. This may or may not have been necessary. We wrote some of the text (including the conditions) beforehand, but saved a few pieces to write on the wedding day, at the public bedeken, with our witnesses watching: the date, the names, and "Harei at/ah...". Again, it's not clear which (if any) of these pieces had to be written at that time.

Some have suggested that this procedure would be difficult for many couples to replicate, since not everyone is sufficiently literate in Hebrew. But not everyone has to do it the way we did. First of all, at least some of the sh'tar (e.g. the parts that we wrote ahead of time, rather than on the day of) could probably be printed from a computer, like most legal documents. Second of all, whichever parts are written by hand are still totally kosher if written by a shaliach (agent) on behalf of the mekadesh/et (this is standard practice for gittin, which are not generally written by the actual parties), so the writing could be done by the mesader/et (officiant). Third of all, there's no requirement that the sh'tar has to be in Hebrew.

Kiddushin with conditions

There is longstanding precedent, going back to the Mishnah, for doing kiddushin with conditions. The conditions can be stated at the time of kiddushin ("You are hereby consecrated to me on the condition that ____"), or (as is more common now, to avoid having to say a mouthful under the chuppah) can be written in a separate document which is signed beforehand. As noted above, we wrote the conditions directly into our sh'tarot. The conditions may be about something that is or is not true at the present time (e.g. "on the condition that I am a kohein", Mishnah Kiddushin 2:3), in which case the kiddushin goes into effect if and only if the predicate is true, or the conditions may be about something that may or may not be true in the future (e.g. "on the condition that I give you 200 zuz in the next 30 days", Mishnah Kiddushin 3:2), in which case the kiddushin goes into effect in the future, at the time the condition is satisfied.

Our sh'tarot included two conditions: "on the condition that you accept this document of your own free will and without coercion" and "on the condition that you consecrate or consecrated me to you and that your kiddushin remain in effect".

The first condition emphasizes that the active participation of both partners is necessary for each act of kiddushin to go into effect; neither participant is passive.

The second condition ensures that the two acts of kiddushin are dependent on each other. Each kiddushin goes into effect only if the other one does. The use of both future and past tense means that the two sh'tarot can have identical texts and can be given in any order; there is no significance to the order. I honestly don't remember which order we gave them in. (EAKO and BZK did something very slightly different: they decided ahead of time what order the sh'tarot would be given in, and hard-coded this order into the sh'tarot, so that each one had either future or past tense but not both. But again, there was no significance to the order.) Thus we gave each other sh'tarot sequentially, but the two acts of kiddushin went into effect simultaneously, only after both sh'tarot had been given.

The mutual dependence also means that if someone thinks that one of the kiddushins is not valid (for whatever reason), then they must also hold that the other kiddushin is not valid. This is a feature, not a bug, since it means that, at least in theory, no one should require non-egalitarian divorce proceedings, since anyone who would require this probably also holds that one (and therefore both) of the kiddushins was not valid in the first place. I know in practice it's not so simple, and this will be discussed further in Part 5.

The dependence on the other kiddushin remaining in effect means that a single get (given by either party to the other, to terminate either kiddushin) terminates both kiddushins. These issues will also be explored more fully in Part 5.

***

Coming soon:
Part 4: ketubah
Part 5: divorce

The Wedding... Part 2

2010-07-18T22:08:00.002-04:00

Continuing from Part 1. This part is an overview of and reflections on the procedure by which Jewish marriage is enacted.

Classically, Jewish marriage has two parts: kiddushin (aka eirusin) and nisuin. In the old days, these steps could be temporally separated by as much as a year, but nowadays, with very few exceptions, they take place one right after the other. To this day, most Jewish weddings include both of these elements, at least superficially, even if they are not always conceptualized as separate processes.

Kiddushin/eirusin is often translated as "betrothal", but this is misleading: "Betrothal" implies mere intent to get married, whereas kiddushin is a sufficiently advanced stage of marriage that if kiddushin has taken place, a full divorce is required in order to terminate the relationship. (Adding to the confusion, le-hit'areis in Modern Hebrew means simply "to get engaged" the way we would use it in English, not the rabbinic concept of eirusin.) In light of this confusion, Rachel Adler translates kiddushin/eirusin as "espousal" (and, in a footnote, cites another author who calls it "inchoate marriage", though she rejects this as "rather a mouthful").

Nisuin is generally translated simply as "marriage". This is a good enough translation; the marriage is not complete until nisuin takes place.

Some Hebrew grammar

Active verbs:

Mekadeish (m.) / mekadeshet (f.) = the one who performs kiddushin

Passive verbs:

Mekudash (m.) / mekudeshet (f.) = the one to whom kiddushin is done

What do kiddushin and nisuin do?

Classically, kiddushin was unilateral and heteronormative. That is, only a man could be mekadeish, and only a woman could be mekudeshet. (On these formal grounds, albeit not on sociological grounds, same-sex kiddushin is actually less of a departure from classical kiddushin than is bilateral opposite-sex kiddushin (which we did, and which most liberal Jewish weddings include), since in same-sex kiddushin (in either combination), 1 of the 2 partners meets the classical gender requirements, whereas if a woman does kiddushin to a man, neither partner meets these requirements.)

The word kiddushin is from the root קדש, meaning "holy" or "sacred", or more generally, "dedicated" or "set apart". Kiddushin effects a change in personal status: the recipient of kiddushin goes from being single to being mekudash/mekudeshet to one individual, the performer of kiddushin. The recipient of kiddushin now has the status of an eishet ish (or ish ishah, or ish ish, or eishet ishah), and is forbidden by the Torah to have sex with anyone other than the mekadesh/et. If s/he does, then both s/he and his/her accomplice have violated the Torah prohibition of adultery. The recipient of kiddushin also becomes unable to be mekudash/mekudeshet to anyone else. (Not forbidden, but unable; if anyone attempts kiddushin on him/her, nothing happens.)

However, kiddushin does not inherently effect any change in the personal status of the mekadesh/et. In the Torah (and on paper in the Mishnah and Talmud, whether or not this was practiced in rabbinic times), it's perfectly fine for a man to have multiple wives (or for a married man to have affairs with unmarried women). This wasn't prohibited until the decree of Rabbeinu Gershom around 1000 CE, which is only a rabbinic decree (and only pertains to Ashkenazi Jews), not a Torah prohibition. It's still prohibited, of course, and the predominant view of marriage today in both Jewish and western civilization is that both partners are in an exclusive relationship, but this prohibition is not activated by unilateral kiddushin alone, and is not as severe as the prohibition that applies to the recipient of kiddushin.

The mekudash/mekudeshet is not only biblically prohibited from having sex with anyone other than the mekadesh/et, but is rabbinically prohibited from having sex even with the mekadesh/et (i.e. with his/her new spouse) until nisuin takes place. This is a prohibition that is activated at the time of kiddushin; there is no direct prohibition on sex between two completely unmarried individuals (though there are various fences around it). I speculate that the original reason was to deter deadbeat husbands. Nisuin entails various obligations, including financial support, and this rabbinic prohibition would have prevented men from obtaining an exclusive relationship with a woman (and taking her off the market, as it were) without supporting her financially.

An echo of this prohibition is preserved in the text of birkat eirusin, the blessing said before kiddushin, from Ketubot 7b: ואסר לנו את הארוסות והתיר לנו את הנשואות (and then Rabbeinu Tam helpfully added the word לנו lest there be any misunderstanding) / "who has forbidden to us those who have had eirusin, and permitted to us those who are married [to us]". Some people take issue with this wording, because they understand it as describing a general prohibition on sex outside of marriage. I don't think that matches what the words actually say: it seems to me that a plain-sense reading of the blessing is that it describes a prohibition (as discussed above) that lasts from the time of kiddushin to the time of nisuin. And it seems to me that in the present time, this prohibition should be unobjectionable regardless of one's general views on sex between two unmarried individuals, but is also irrelevant: now that kiddushin and nisuin have been consolidated into the same wedding ceremony, the time period in question lasts about 15 minutes, and no one is going to have sex anyway when they're under the chuppah and their family and friends are watching.

So that's kiddushin: a change in personal status for the recipient, along with the acquisition of negative prohibitions. Nisuin is different: it is the creation of a relationship between two individuals, along with the acquisition of positive obligations for both partners. After nisuin takes place, the two partners are fully married. They are now joined in a family relationship which entails mutual responsibilities, some of which may be spelled out in the ketubah (to be discussed in Part 4), and some of which take effect automatically whether or not they are spelled out.

As we understood it, both elements are necessary: both kiddushin and nisuin, both the individual status change and the formal creation of a relationship, both the negative and the positive obligations.

Understanding nisuin in an egalitarian context requires no major conceptual shift. Yes, the specific marital obligations described in the classical sources are very gendered; e.g., the husband is the breadwinner responsible for financially supporting the family, and the wife is responsible for household tasks. But it's easy enough (conceptually) to have both partners (of whatever gender) take on both areas of responsibility.

Kiddushin is somewhat more complicated, and is often disparaged for various reasons (some justifiable, some not), which we'll discuss throughout the rest of the series. It certainly has problematic aspects. But the bottom-line essence of kiddushin as marital exclusivity is uncontroversial to us and to most people. In fact, we thought it was so important that it should be multiplied by two, so that both partners are subject to kiddushin, and both partners have a requirement of monogamy at the level of a Torah commandment. Thus, even though kiddushin is a unilateral act, having two acts of kiddushin means that there is not a difference between the status of the two partners the way there is in classical kiddushin. (In the next post, I'll discuss how we made these acts of kiddushin interdependent and simultaneous.)

The formalist objections to bilateral kiddushin are 1) as discussed above, only a man can perform kiddushin and only a woman can accept kiddushin, 2) a concern that the two acts of kiddushin would cancel each other out. Within a broader context in which gender differences are insignificant in most areas of halachah, a non-gendered approach to kiddushin is consistent with the general halachic approach, and therefore #1 is not a concern in that context. (The question of why such a general approach is valid is beyond the scope of this series.) And #2 is a potential issue in primarily only one of the three methods of kiddushin (discussed below), and even under that method, there are ways of avoiding this problem (as we'll discuss).

How are kiddushin and nisuin effected?

Masechet Kiddushin begins with two very difficult words: האשה נקנית, "the woman is acquired". And looking at this mishnah in context makes it worse, not better. After explaining the three ways in which "the woman is acquired" and the two ways in which she "acquires herself", the Mishnah goes on to list the means of acquiring Hebrew slaves (or more accurately, indentured servants), Canaanite slaves, large animals, small animals, land, and finally movable property. Enough said.

But then the second chapter begins differently: האיש מקדש, "the man sanctifies / consecrates / sets apart", and that is the verb used throughout the rest of the masechet. According to those who are more scholarly than I, there is evidence that the first chapter of Mishnah Kiddushin is particularly ancient compared to the other chapters. Thus we see a conceptual shift regarding the nature of kiddushin even within the tannaitic period, shifting from an acquisition frame to something else.

Therefore, the way to be most faithful to the rabbinic concept of kiddushin is not to defend the idea of acquisition; the rabbis themselves moved away from this. Nor is it to maintain the superficial forms of kiddushin while disregarding the underlying meaning; kiddushin is meant to be a legal act and not merely a sentimental one. Rather, our place is to continue the movement that the rabbis began, moving our understanding of kiddushin even further away from unilateral acquisition.

(Similarly, many modern readers are distressed that the Torah's laws include slavery, but we can also appreciate that the Torah's laws on slavery were more progressive than those in preceding and surrounding cultures. Still, there is no question that the best way for us to live out the Torah's values in our time is to have no slavery at all, rather than to preserve the Torah's progressive-for-its-time system of slavery intact.)

Furthermore, many have pointed out that even the most primitive version of kiddushin was not exactly acquisition. When you acquire a piece of property, it belongs to you, and you are free to sell it, trade it, share it, lend it out, or rent it out. (The same was true for acquiring a slave.) A man who was mekadeish a wife, even in the earliest Jewish law, could not do any of those things with her.

Mishnah Kiddushin 1:1 lists three different methods of effecting kiddushin: kesef (money), sh'tar (document), and biah (sexual intercourse).

Kesef is by far the most common procedure in our time. In this method, the mekadesh/et gives the mekudash/mekudeshet either money or an object of value, which, according to Beit Hillel's position, must be worth at least one perutah (a coin of minimal value). This object is most often a ring, but other alternatives have been used (and at this writing, IKEA tupperware sets are selling for $4.99, so they would also be valid). According to Tosefta Kiddushin 1:1, the mekadesh/et must also say one of several formulations to indicate that the transfer of this object is intended to effect kiddushin: הרי את מקודשת לי (You are hereby consecrated to me), הרי את מאורסת לי (You are hereby espoused to me), הרי את לי לאינתו (You are hereby my wife), or anything that conveys this idea.

Kiddushin b'chesef has the unmistakable appearance of a purchase (even if, as discussed above, that's not what it really does). And this is part of why we didn't use it. But I also think there are other ways of looking at it that can redeem it. Some have suggested that the partners' giving each other objects of value can be viewed not as acquiring each other, but as investing in each other, a much more appropriate metaphor for an egalitarian marriage ("a marriage between subjects", to use Rachel Adler's phrase).

A more generalized objection to kiddushin b'chesef is that marriage shouldn't look like a financial transaction, because marriage should be about a committed personal relationship. But nowadays, you can have a long-term committed personal relationship without marriage, and many couples do, either leading to marriage or not. And for such couples, one of the largest practical differences between being married and being not married is indeed financial: as a married couple, they function much more as a combined financial entity. So I don't think this is inappropriate to invoke in the marriage procedure, but I also think that the more relevant financial transaction is a merger, not an acquisition. Thus, Rachel Adler's berit ahuvim procedure is based around creating shutafut: pooling resources to enact a business partnership. Early in our process, we considered the idea of reconceptualizing this as an egalitarian form of kiddushin b'chesef, but that wasn't the direction we ended up going (we lifted our rings in a bag as a symbolic gesture, but didn't incorporate this into the actual marriage procedure), so figuring out how this would work is left as an exercise to the reader. (To whichever reader attempts this: I'm sure no one will be more horrified than Prof. Adler herself, who goes to great lengths to emphasize multiple times that berit ahuvim is not kiddushin. However, I'll discuss in Part 5 why I think drawing this red line doesn't actually accomplish what it is intended to, and therefore why it's not a problem to blur the line.)

An objection that is sometimes raised against bilateral kiddushin b'chesef is that the two transfers of value cancel each other out: if I give you $10 and you give me $10, then no net amount has changed hands. (It should be noted that this objection can only be applied to kesef and not to the other two methods of kiddushin: two documents don't cancel each other out, and... so forth.) Some have come up with solutions that make the amounts intentionally unequal, to avoid this problem. I think these solutions are too clever by half (and, by definition, not egalitarian). A simpler solution is just to make clear that the two acts of kiddushin are separate acts, and not part of a single transaction. So I give you $10 and you are mekudeshet, and in a separate act, you give me $10 and I am mekudash. The $10 (or ring or whatever) that I gave you doesn't need to remain in your possession for you to remain mekudeshet; the Mishnah (Kiddushin 2:1) says that the object used for kiddushin may even be eaten afterwards (the example there is dates), and the kiddushin is still valid as long as it was worth at least a perutah.

Another objection sometimes raised against egalitarian kiddushin (by whichever method) is that, in addition to the list of formulations that effect kiddushin, there is also a list of formulations that explicitly do not effect kiddushin. This list (as it also appears in Tosefta Kiddushin 1:1) includes הריני מאורסת לך (I am hereby espoused [f.] to you), הריני מקודשת לך (I am hereby consecrated [f.] to you), and הריני לך לאנתו (I am hereby your wife). Some interpret this list of exclusions to mean that a woman (because of her gender) cannot be the active partner in an act of kiddushin. But that's not what it's saying at all: it's clarifying the structure of kiddushin and saying that the mekadesh/et, not the mekudash/mekudeshet, is the one who has to give the other partner the kesef or the sh'tar, and the one who makes the statement of intent. This structure is fully compatible with bilateral gender-neutral kiddushin.

Sh'tar is a document that the mekadesh/et writes and gives to the mekudash/mekudeshet that contains any of the phrases above that effect kiddushin. This is what we did at our wedding, and this will be the subject of Part 3. This document is not the same thing as a ketubah, which will be discussed in Part 4.

Biah is often misunderstood. There is an urban legend out there (perhaps from the same source as the idea of a "double mitzvah") that "there's no such thing as premarital sex in Judaism, because as soon as you have sex, you're automatically married". Not so! Quoting Tosefta Kiddushin 1:1 once more, כל ביאה שהיא לשם קדושין- מקודשת, שאינה לשם קדושין - אינה מקודשת: intercourse effects kiddushin if and only if it is done for the purpose of effecting kiddushin.

The Rambam (Hilchot Ishut 3:5) goes even further, requiring the same evidence of intent of kiddushin that is required for the other methods of kiddushin: the kiddushin must be accompanied by a statement of intent from the usual list (הרי את מקודשת לי, etc.) and must be witnessed by two witnesses (though they only need to see the couple go somewhere alone together; they don't need to witness the actual act!). With these requirements, it's difficult to believe that kiddushin b'viah ever took place. And maybe (like the ben soreir umoreh) that's the point.

So why was it ever on the books in the first place? (Other than "study, and receive a reward", of course.) Given the aforementioned antiquity of the first chapter of Mishnah Kiddushin, I wonder if it dates back to a time when the requirements for kiddushin were less defined. Perhaps the older situation was somewhere between the youth group urban legend and the Rambam, so that sex didn't automatically effect kiddushin, but there was also room to invoke this type of kiddushin retroactively, e.g. in the case of an unexpected pregnancy, and say that kiddushin had taken place.

Perhaps because it seems so absurd, kiddushin b'viah is sometimes the subject of various facetious proposals. For example, kesef and sh'tar are both listed as methods of acquiring various types of property in Mishnah Kiddushin chapter 1, whereas biah is not, so it has been suggested that biah should be favored, as the only method of kiddushin that bears no similarity to acquisition. Biah might also be the only way to effect bilateral kiddushin with a single act (rather than two separate transfers of kesef, or two sh'tarot). These suggestions aren't serious, of course!!! It's just a way to amuse ourselves the way the rabbis did. But as a practical matter, while kesef has been alive and well as a method of kiddushin for millennia, and sh'tar is going back into style (see Part 3), biah is long gone and is not missed.

So that's kiddushin, which can be effected in one of three specific ways. Then there's nisuin, which is much less sharply defined. The elements of nisuin are well-known from any Jewish wedding: chuppah, ketubah, sheva berachot, and yichud. Unlike kiddushin, which takes place at a clearly defined moment, there's no moment in the wedding ceremony that can be pinpointed as the moment when nisuin occurs. It's not clear which of these elements actually effects nisuin. Unlike kiddushin, nisuin is much more of a "common-law marriage": you know it when you see it. Some have suggested that this is intentional, to convey the idea that marriage, and a relationship, is an ongoing process.

***

In Part 3, we'll look at kiddushin bishtar in greater depth, both in general and in the specifics of what we did.

The Wedding Industrial Complex and Kant as viewed through the lenses of the various Jewish denominations from 1880 through today: Part 1

2010-06-21T23:08:00.001-04:00

The title of this post comes from this other post. Sorry it's so long overdue. And sorry that it won't quite live up to its title: I don't plan to discuss the wedding industrial complex, or the Jewish denominations per se, but Kant will make an appearance, and this will be Part 1 of at least 5.

EAR and I got married in August 2009. So did our friends EAKO and BZK, one week earlier. So we set up a four-person havruta to plan our wedding ceremonies together, so that we could share ideas, and so that each couple wouldn't be acting alone in whatever we ended up doing, but would be in good company.

This series of posts will present what we decided to do and why. (A very very brief description appeared recently in the June issue of Sh'ma, but a piece of that length isn't nearly long enough to even begin to explain.) This first post is an introduction to the general principles and goals that we worked with; later posts will get into the specifics.

[Disclaimer: Though the description of the final product will reflect what the four of us actually did, I am writing these posts alone, and my explanations of the thinking behind each element might not represent others' thinking 100% faithfully. In such cases, the views expressed are my own.]

***

We began by setting out some general principles that we were aiming to fulfill with the marriage ceremony we would select (and though we ended up doing something that probably hadn't been done before in this precise form, this wasn't a foregone conclusion from the start).

In no particular order:

It would be situated firmly in the ongoing conversation of Jewish tradition as it extends into the past and the future.
It wouldn't just be personal and idiosyncratic, tailored to these two couples, but would fulfill the Kantian categorical imperative. That is, it would be something that any Jewish couple could use, and something that we could support in good conscience if everyone chose to start using it.
It would be gender-nonspecific at its core. Though both couples involved were opposite-sex (or, as some would say, adjacent-sex) couples, we wanted something that could be used by partners of any gender. After all, the big step was from classical non-egalitarian marriage to modern egalitarian marriage; once that step has been taken, disregarding the genders of the spouses is simply a logical extension. (However, Hebrew and Aramaic are gendered languages, and we did not attempt to avoid this; we used the grammatical genders that were appropriate to each of us, with the understanding that couples of any gender combination could do the same. (We understood "chatan" and "kallah" in this light as different grammatical forms of the same word, even if they don't sound alike.) We also did some superficial things at the wedding that are culturally associated with gender, e.g., what we wore, who broke the glass; however, these were in no way essential to effecting the marriage.)
We would approach the non-egalitarian elements of our tradition from a Rawlsian "nearly just society" perspective. That is, we would not reject (e.g.) kiddushin out of hand as fundamentally and irreparably sexist, but neither would we accept it in its original form, whether as unchanging law or as mere "ritual". Instead, we would identify the underlying values and retain these in an egalitarian form.
Rachel Adler writes that "ritual should seem as if it has always been this way" (Engendering Judaism, p. 197). We would be attentive to this in determining the outward appearance of the marriage ceremony, and would make sure it flowed smoothly and authentically even if it was complex behind the scenes.
It would not necessarily need to be accepted as a valid marriage by everyone in the Jewish world, particularly since making it valid according to certain opinions would be incompatible with true egalitarianism. If we believed with integrity that we were validly married according to our understanding of Jewish law, that would be sufficient. For divorce (which I'll discuss later in this series), there are practical reasons (for you and your descendants) to make sure that the divorce is accepted universally, since lives can be messed up if it isn't. No such considerations apply for marriage. (And if someone doesn't consider you to be married, this does not mean that they will consider your children to be mamzeirim; this is a common misconception that stems from an imprecise translation of "mamzeir" to the English "bastard", which has a different meaning. A mamzeir is only a child of an incestuous or adulterous relationship.)

***

A look at the rest of the series (subject to change):

Part 2: an overview of Jewish marriage (kiddushin and nisuin)
Part 3: how we did kiddushin bishtar (document)
Part 4: how we did ketubah (the content, and the means of accepting it)
Part 5: provisions for divorce (not for us, but see above under Kant)

Stay tuned!

Doing the math so you don't have to

2010-06-18T17:27:00.002-04:00

Next Wednesday in the World Cup, the US plays Algeria, and England plays Slovenia. The US will advance to the next round iff any of the following happen:

USA wins
USA/Algeria tie, and Slovenia wins
Both games tie, and the tied score of the USA/Algeria game is greater than, equal to, or 1 less than the tied score of the England/Slovenia game
Both games tie, the tied score of the USA/Algeria game is 2 less than the tied score of the England/Slovenia game, and USA wins a coin toss with England

The The Bronx Minyan?

2010-06-15T17:46:00.002-04:00

(Crossposted to Jewschool.)

Everyone agrees that there was a wave of independent Jewish prayer communities founded in the 1970s, and another wave founded after 2000, with some but not nearly as many founded in between. And many attempts have been made to draw distinctions between these two waves, but they all fail in one way or another to capture the entire data set, whether it’s the use of the word “minyan” vs. “havurah”, liturgical choices, the way the chairs are set up, or membership vs. no membership.

But I think I’ve come up with a distinction between the two principal waves of independent Jewish communities that is 100% airtight so far (though maybe you know of an exception). There are a number of minyanim, old and new, that are called “[name of city/neighborhood] Minyan”. The test for whether such a minyan is part of the older or the newer generation is whether people use a definite article when using the name of the minyan in sentence. [UPDATE: To clarify, this hypothesis is intended to apply only to minyanim whose names fit the pattern “[name of city/neighborhood] Minyan”, not to other minyanim.]

Compare:

“I’m going to the Highland Park Minyan this Shabbat.”
“I’m going to DC Minyan this Shabbat.”

More examples:

Founded in the 1970s: the Highland Park Minyan, the West Side Minyan, the Newton Centre Minyan
Founded after 2000: DC Minyan, Cambridge Minyan, Mission Minyan

(Do you know of further examples that either support or disprove this hypothesis?)

Note that even for the minyanim that usually get a definite article, “the” isn’t part of the name. It’s not an integral article as in “I’m going to a The Newton Centre Minyan event * “. This is just a question of how the name of the minyan (which does not itself contain an article) is treated grammatically, like “Ukraine” vs. “the Ukraine”.

My sources in Highland Park, New Jersey, report that a new independent minyan is in formation there. So I suggested that, in keeping with contemporary trends, they call it “Highland Park Minyan”, to avoid confusion with the Highland Park Minyan.

Driving question

2010-06-04T16:07:00.000-04:00

You are approaching an intersection (where the other street has a stop sign and your street doesn't), and see another car ignore the stop sign and drive out into the intersection. Do you (a) slow down to avoid hitting the other car, or (b) keep going and collide, and then send around a YouTube video from your hospital bed to prove that you had the right of way?

We have nothing to lose but our paper chains

2010-05-17T21:39:00.002-04:00

(Crossposted to Jewschool.)

As we collectively get ready to receive Torah, it seems an appropriate time to put up some thoughts on Jewish education. I don’t have children yet (and if my parents are reading this, no, I don’t have any immediate plans to), but I’ve been thinking about the Jewish education I would want to provide my hypothetical future children, and which elements of this would need to be provided in an organized setting outside the home. (From what I hear, once I do have children, I won’t have the time to think and blog about these things, so I’m doing it now.) Specifically, I’m interested in exploring models of organized Jewish education that are alternatives to Jewish day schools and conventional Hebrew schools.

If the existing day school or Hebrew school models work(ed) for you or your children, that’s just fine; I’m not trying to take that away from you (and I couldn’t even if I tried). I’m not suggesting that the models discussed in this post are right for everyone. In particular, I’m assuming that my children will be growing up in an actively Jewish home and an active Jewish community. I know this assumption doesn’t hold for all (or most) Jewish children, but maybe (or maybe not) it holds for your (current or future) children too. If you have thoughts on how to implement and/or refine these models, or you’re aware of existing programs already operating along similar lines, or you’re interested in participating in these sorts of things, please post in the comments. If you want to argue that day schools are the only conceivable option for serious Jewish education (not only in practice, but in theory), or that conventional Hebrew schools are just fine the way they are (or would be just fine after incremental inside-the-box improvements), please save your breath.

Preschool

Hebrew immersion preschools exist in a small but increasing number of locations. This just seems like such the obvious way to go. Thanks to the magic of language acquisition, exposing children to a Hebrew environment at a young age will result in much more bang for the buck than any later attempts. Any Israeli 5-year-old has better spoken Hebrew than any American Hebrew school graduate and most day school graduates. I lived in Israel for two (non-consecutive) years and completed the highest level of ulpan, and my Hebrew still isn’t nearly as strong as my (native) English.

A Hebrew immersion preschool need not have any explicitly “Jewish” content; it can just be the regular preschool content, but in Hebrew, and this will contribute much more in the long run to a child’s Jewish education than a preschool with Jewish content in the vernacular.

Early Elementary School

So the usual argument in favor of day school (among the less problematic arguments) is that day schools simply have more hours available in the week for Jewish education than Hebrew schools and therefore can accomplish more. The response is: “But what if there were an after-school program that met for more hours than a standard Hebrew school? Then this, too, could accomplish more.” And the response to that is: “But that would never work: with homework and other extracurricular activities, kids would never have time for this on top of a full school day.”

Let us stipulate, for the sake of argument, that this is true for older kids (which we’ll discuss in the next section). However, someone with whom I have been discussing this recently pointed out that the opposite is true for students in the lower grades: they don’t have so much homework, they don’t have so many extracurricular activities, AND if they have two employed parents (or an employed single parent) they have a few hours after school every day when they NEED to be supervised (whether with an organized after-school program, day care, or a babysitter). This seems like the perfect time in life for supplementary Jewish education that meets 4 or 5 days a week, since the children have to be somewhere for those hours anyway, and they wouldn’t have the resistance that (e.g.) 6th graders would have. This could also be entirely or partially in a Hebrew-immersion environment, which would solidify the language learning begun during preschool. That would also mean that this program wouldn’t have to be all “school” all the time, since other activities (or supervised free time) would also be teaching Hebrew.

The more formal elements of this program could include learning to read Hebrew, which would occur not so long after the students learn to read English. This would go much more smoothly than in Hebrew school, since it would be learning to read a language that the students already understand, rather than learning to sound out meaningless syllables.

Late Elementary and Middle School

These years are the core of conventional Hebrew school. Again, let us assume (as discussed above) that a student at this age who is attending public school full-time has limited hours available for formal Jewish education. Is it possible to achieve a level of Jewish education comparable to day school (or better), in an amount of time comparable to Hebrew school? I think so, iff those hours are narrowly focused on what can’t be done at home.

The fundamental assumption of the typical Hebrew school is that it is the only source of Jewish education in its students’ lives. Therefore, when it’s not teaching students how to sound out meaningless syllables, it has to teach Jewish identity, Jewish culture, Jewish rituals, Jewish values, etc., and it spends multiple weeks around each Jewish holiday teaching about the holiday. So I would cut basically all of that. As I said above, my children will grow up in an actively Jewish home (as I did). When I was a kid, we made paper chains for our sukkah at home, so I didn’t need to go somewhere else to make more paper chains or find out what a sukkah was. We lit candles on Chanukah, and had a seder on Pesach, and said kiddush on Shabbat, and made hamantashen for Purim. Similarly, my children will learn about Shabbat on Shabbat, and will learn about the holidays on the holidays, so they won’t need to learn about them on Sunday mornings and Wednesday afternoons too. With all of this removed from the formal supplementary school and returned to the home and to the Shabbat/holiday community, suddenly lots of time is freed up for other things.

To be fair, I should note that Hebrew schools aren’t all paper chains anymore, and there are innovative developments going on in many places. But I should also note that these innovative developments, while they may be serving their target populations well, are going in the opposite direction from what I’m looking for. This is because they are premised on the same fundamental assumption noted above, which is indeed an accurate assumption about most American Jewish children, and they make the best of this situation. And so they focus on informal and experiential Jewish education (i.e. what my children will pick up anyway even if they’re not enrolled in any Jewish educational institution), and on using the children as a hook to get the parents involved (not necessary in my case or my wife’s case).

So what would I do with all the extra time, if the children won’t be learning to gamble? Study Jewish texts. In the original. This is something that would actually benefit from a classroom setting, and doesn’t just get picked up by osmosis. With the Hebrew language background outlined above, I’m sure students will be able to develop the familiarity and skills with texts at least at the level of their (non-Orthodox) day-school peers in the limited time they have (which suddenly seems like much more time, now that they’re not doing anything about holidays, unless they’re studying Seder Mo’ed).

High School

I have taught high school students in a number of settings, and know that they have much more intellectual capacity than most Jewish high school programs (including camp and youth group) give them credit for. This is the time when they can be gaining the resources to make informed adult Jewish choices. If they are treated like “teenagers”, they’ll act like teenagers; if they are treated like adults, there is at least a chance they’ll act like adults. (Of course, adult education isn’t so strong in most American non-Orthodox Jewish communities either; if it were, I’d say just open it up to high school students.) I have heard of proposals to have high school students take Jewish studies courses at nearby universities for college credit; does anyone know if this has been implemented anywhere? With or without that option, the Beit Midrash Program at Ramah Wisconsin has demonstrated that high school students (and not only day school students) are capable of intensive text study; this sort of program could be adapted into a year-round version.

Authentic "Thai Food"

2010-05-11T20:04:00.003-04:00

This is old news, but I only noticed it a few days ago, and it's almost as cool as getting linked from the official Talk Like A Pirate Day website:

One of the pictures I took in Chiang Mai, Thailand, in January has been featured on The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks! It wasn't the first time they had this particular phrase in quotes, but the first time that was actually in Thailand. We didn't actually eat at this place, so I can't comment on whether it was authentic.

None of the Thailand pictures I submitted have made it onto Papyrus Watch yet. (Papyrus is surprisingly popular there, for English signs attempting to look "Asian".)

Schachter: Better to die than to believe in God

2010-04-28T20:13:00.001-04:00

(Crossposted to Jewschool.)

Well, I agreed with Hershel Schachter, rosh yeshiva of Yeshiva University, last week, but unsurprisingly, this didn’t last long. Cross-Currents reports that, at this week’s Rabbinical Council of America convention, Schachter taught a class on why women could not be ordained, and said that ordaining women was a yeihareig ve’al ya’avor (i.e., in the category of violations that Jews are commanded to die rather than transgress), “because the Conservative movement had made egalitarianism a key plank in its platform”.

First of all, if Cross-Currents is reporting his statement accurately, Schachter is wrong on the facts, and giving the Conservative movement much more credit than it deserves. The Conservative movement has always been timid about egalitarianism, treating it as a leniency rather than as a principle, and certainly not as “a key plank in its platform”. There are still a number of non-egalitarian Conservative congregations, and the movement doesn’t seem to have a problem with this.

But let’s look at the general principle that Schachter propounds, that any key plank of the Conservative movement’s platform becomes a yeihareig ve’al ya’avor for Torah Jews. One of the things that Emet Ve’Emunah, the Conservative movement’s “Statement of Principles”, actually does say is “Conservative Judaism affirms the critical importance of belief in God”. Therefore, anyone following Schachter’s opinion must conclude that it is strictly forbidden to believe in God, and that this prohibition is so serious that it is better to die than to violate it. Yes, some (presumably left-wing fringe) Orthodox Jews and congregations still believe in God, but we can assume that they will fall into line soon.

I can see the scene now: Schachter and his students giving up their lives al kiddush [REDACTED], having their skin flayed with iron combs as they say with their last breaths, “Hear O Israel: There is no God!”

Taxonomy of Jewish pluralism revisited

2010-04-27T22:59:00.003-04:00

It's been almost five years since I posted the Taxonomy of Jewish pluralism. Since then, it has become the foundation for the influential Hilchot Pluralism series (of which I can't take credit for any of the content, only for writing the ideas up and disseminating them around the world). From the beginning, the taxonomy was identified as a "work in progress", so I'd like to make a revision, inspired by rethinking some of this material in preparation for teaching a workshop on Hilchot Pluralism at this past weekend's Independent Minyan Conference.

The stages of pluralism were originally modeled on Piaget's stages of cognitive development and Kohlberg's stages of moral development. (Thanks, NYC Teaching Fellows, for the free M.A. in education!) That is, the premise was that a community's discourse would advance from one stage to the next to the next (or at least that a community is primarily in a single stage at any given time, and this stage characterizes all of its pluralistic discourse).

Now I'm thinking the stages are actually more like Erikson's stages of psychosocial development (which have previously been mentioned in Hilchot Pluralism, but then I was referencing Erikson's actual content; now I'm just drawing an analogy). That is, even when a community moves on to a new stage, the previous stages remain present.

Even if a community functions primarily in Stage 3, the Hilchot Pluralism series has shown repeatedly that there are many cases in which a Stage 3 solution is not possible. A solution in which no one has to compromise is nice work if you can get it, but in the event that this is not possible, yet the community wants to both stay together and maintain some sort of pluralistic approach on the given issue, it must seek some sort of compromise. This often means functioning in Stage 2 despite its flaws. And there are even cases when Stage 1 is unproblematic even for a community that ordinarily operates in Stage 3. For example, the two-table system may represent a Stage-3 approach to pluralistic potlucks, but if a community is having a catered meal (so that the different approaches to kashrut in participants' kitchens are not relevant), the Stage-1 "common denominator" logic (leading to using a caterer under kashrut supervision) may work just fine. And if Stage 0 is non-pluralism, every community has things that it is non-pluralistic about.

***

So is it time for a Hilchot Pluralism Part VIII yet? If so, what belongs in it? One question that people asked repeatedly over the weekend is how to deal with "Who is a Jew?" issues, but I'm not aware of any satisfactory pluralistic approach to the question (beyond Stage 1, which is quite unsatisfactory in this case). All the Jewish denominations have official stances on "Who is a Jew", and independent minyanim have the luxury of not taking a stance until it arises as a practical question. This means that if anyone asks the question in theory, an independent community can honestly answer that it doesn't have any official position. But that is no help if and when the question arises in practice.

Hey Marge, remember when we used to make out to this hymn?

2010-04-26T00:05:00.001-04:00

(Crossposted to Jewschool.)

I got back today from Mechon Hadar’s Third Independent Minyan Conference in New York, where I was representing Segulah. The conference included leaders of independent minyanim around the world (including several Jewschoolers), and there’s a lot more to say about it, but for the moment, I’ll just blog on a tangential matter:

Yesterday afternoon, the conference events took place in Kehilat Hadar’s usual space at the Second Presbyterian Church. During mincha yesterday, we started hearing the church organ from upstairs. At first it was just background noise, but then I listened more carefully and thought “Wait a minute, I’ve heard that before.”

They were playing a Christian hymn called “The God of Abraham Praise”, whose story I had learned about in a class at the 2008 NHC Summer Institute. The melody was written around 1770 for the Hebrew poem “Yigdal” by Myer Lyon (Leoni), hazzan at the Great Synagogue in London. The Methodist preacher Thomas Olivers was inspired by this melody and wrote very different words to it, and centuries later, they’re still playing it in New York. This Yigdal melody continues to be well-known in the Jewish world. (Until I learned its story, I had no idea that it went back so far; I figured it was just one of those shul tunes from the early- to mid-20th century.) Except that Jews tend to sing it much much faster. Listen below and then imagine it 3 or 4 times faster, and see if you recognize it!

Aristotle vs. Newton

2010-04-04T09:31:00.002-04:00

I took a Shabbat nap yesterday afternoon, and once again dreamed about an analogy between physics and religion which made sense at the time, and which I am now trying to reconstruct. This time around, I was fully asleep, rather than in the liminal space between asleep and awake. I'm not claiming this is the next "Kubla Khan", but putting it out there anyway.

Background for people who aren't living inside my head: The Aristotelian concept of motion was that forces cause motion. In the absence of forces, objects slow to a stop. This was supplanted by Newton's Laws: In the absence of forces, objects at rest stay at rest, and objects in motion continue in the same direction at constant speed. Forces cause a change in velocity. Yet it is well-documented in physics education research that many people continue to hold Aristotelian conceptions. This is understandable, because from our experience of the world, we are familiar with situations where a force must be continuously applied to keep something in motion, and in the absence of that force, the object slows to a stop. The Newtonian response is that, in such situations, other forces (e.g. friction) are acting on the object to slow it down, and the applied force is needed to bring the net force to zero, so that the object can move at constant velocity. Physics education must bring students toward the Newtonian framework, but must do so in a way that helps them make sense of their phenomenological observations within that framework, and should avoid (as Edward F. Redish and David Hammer of the University of Maryland write) "the negative epistemological side effect that students learn to consider their intuitive knowledge and lived experience as irrelevant for physics learning; they learn to set it aside, rather than to draw on and refine it." Toward this end, curricula have been developed (at UMD and elsewhere) that focus on "refining intuition", to (e.g.) reconcile the Newtonian ideas with students' observations that appear to support the Aristotelian framework.

So in my dream yesterday, I drew an analogy between these two paradigms (and educational approaches that bridge them) and God's role in the world. On the one hand there is the "Aristotelian" idea that God must be continuously acting in the universe in order for the universe to keep going. On the other hand there is the "Newtonian" idea that God had to act initially to get the universe going, but then, in the absence of a net force, the universe keeps going on its own. So then the big insight (which I don't entirely remember) was how to reconcile the "Newtonian" framework that the universe keeps going on its own with our "Aristotelian" experience that God is continuously acting in the world... or is it the other way around?

More on "minyanim" vs. "havurot"

2010-03-21T16:43:00.003-04:00

I recently visited a partnership minyan that was founded in 2003 (and has full liturgy, straight rows, etc.). The person giving the d'var torah was comparing the structure of this community with the typical American synagogue, and said "From the perspective of the havurah movement in general and [name of this minyan] in particular..."

Linguistic excursus on the name "independent minyan"

2010-03-15T20:01:00.005-04:00

My last post, a review of Empowered Judaism, included some discussion of the meaning of the term "independent minyan", so this follow-up post is about the history of the term itself. (To be clear, we're only talking about the collocation "independent minyan" or its plurals "independent minyanim" and "independent minyans". Describing a community just as "independent" or just as a "minyan" doesn't count for the purposes of this post, nor does "This minyan is independent"; just the exact phrase "independent minyan".)

Last year, while working on Empowered Judaism, Elie Kaunfer emailed me and asked if I knew the origin of the term "independent minyan", and said that he had it in his head that I had coined it. My first reaction was complete disbelief - of course I didn't coin "independent minyan"! Whenever I started using the term, I was just using a term that was already out there. My second reaction was that I was unable to find evidence to disprove the claim that I coined it! (Isaac Asimov coined the word "robotics" based on the existing word "robot", but not on purpose -- he thought it was already a word.) I searched through my old email, and the earliest instance I could find was an email I sent on December 30, 2002 to MAIL-HAVURAH (the predecessor to the current NHC email lists), which began "I have been involved in the creation of Kol Zimrah, a new independent minyan in New York City (on the Upper West Side, so far)." (The rest of the email went on to describe and promote Kol Zimrah, and ask questions about how to find davening spaces in New York and how to get people involved in the community.) In Kol Zimrah's next announcement to its email list (sent on January 15, 2003, announcing its January 24 service), it described itself as "NYC's newest independent minyan".

In late January 2003, when Kol Zimrah set up its first website, it included a "Directory of Independent Minyanim in NYC", to keep track of all these minyanim that were sprouting up like weeds. It was an exciting time: at least 8 independent minyanim had started in NYC in 2001 and 2002 alone (4 of which still exist today). And I'll clarify here, since (whether or not I coined the term) it was my idea to start this directory (according to an email to the other KZ organizers dated January 30, 2003), so I have some idea of the original intent. "Independent minyanim", in regard to this directory, was understood in contradistinction to synagogues, or to non-independent (e.g., synagogue-affiliated) minyanim, not in contradistinction to "havurot". The directory didn't include any first-wave havurot, not because we didn't consider them to be "minyanim", but because, as far as I know, none (that qualified as "independent") existed in NYC at that time: the New York Havurah had long since gone the way of Radcliffe College (that is, I hear they still have reunions, but otherwise no longer function actively), and the West Side Minyan and its spinoff Minyan M'at had become part of Congregation Ansche Chesed (and were thus not "independent"). Likewise, the directory was not restricted to minyanim founded after a particular date, though most of the independent minyanim that existed in NYC at that time had in fact been founded after 2000 (the only exception, I believe, was KOE, which was not part of the new tidal wave of minyanim, but not generally considered part of the "havurah movement" either).

Kehilat Hadar's mission statement on its website describes itself as "an independent, egalitarian community committed to spirited traditional prayer, study and social action", so this may have gotten "independent" out there in regard to these communities, though not the exact phrase "independent minyan", since Hadar doesn't officially describe itself as a "minyan" (though its email address was egalminyan at hotmail dot com from before it was called Hadar until not so long ago, making them the last people in the world still using Hotmail). This is explained in Empowered Judaism: "We intentionally did not name the community Minyan Hadar, because we aspired to be something more than just a minyan."

Certain that I couldn't possibly have coined "independent minyan", I asked Facebook if they knew of any uses prior to December 2002, and sure enough, people with LexisNexis access came up with some earlier citations. The first was from the Philadelphia Inquirer on November 17, 1988, in an obituary for one Gerald Margulies: "Mr. Margulies also devoted time to being a leader of an independent minyan, or prayer group, that gathered at the Y.M.H.A. on City Avenue, and was a beloved uncle to his 15 grandnieces and grandnephews, family members said." (Does anyone know anything about this minyan? The Philly people I asked had never heard of it.)

The second was from an article about the Jewish community of Prague in the Jerusalem Report, August 24, 1995. Discussing people who are considered Jewish by Israel's Law of Return but do not have Jewish mothers, the article said: "These Jews are welcome in some of the Jewish cultural organizations and can even find a home in an independent minyan sponsored by the Reform movement called Beit Simcha." Of course, if it's sponsored by the Reform movement, then it's not considered "independent" the way we would generally use that term today. Based on the context, the apparent meaning is that it was independent from the official Jewish community institutions (not a concept that exists in the United States). The article goes on: "While synagogue buildings stand empty or underutilized, Beit Simcha pays rent for a basement room in an apartment building. The atmosphere is reminiscent of an American havurah-style minyan: comfortable chairs arranged in a circle, Zionist posters on the wall."

Still, I haven't found any instances of "independent minyan" in reference to the 21st-century phenomenon earlier than December 2002. The early articles on this wave of minyanim used other terms to describe them. For example, both the August 10, 2001 article in the Forward and the August 2, 2002 article in the Jewish Week referred simply to "new minyans". The former also called the phenomenon a "new havurah movement" (italics in original), and called the minyan that would later be named Hadar a "nondenominational minyan" and a "fortnightly minyan". The first 21st-century use of "independent minyan" in the media might be Jay Michaelson's article in the November 14, 2003 Forward, "A Prayer Group of Their Own: Kol Zimrah and Other Do-It-Yourself Minyans Unite the Independent-Minded", which uses this term repeatedly. As the title suggests, Kol Zimrah is featured prominently in this article.

So the evidence seems to indicate that Kol Zimrah was instrumental (as it were) in establishing the term "independent minyanim", completely by accident. But it's possible that there's still more evidence to be gathered. Do you remember when you started using the term "independent minyan", and where you first heard it? Do you have email correspondence using this term earlier than December 30, 2002?

Independent minyanim: the book

2010-03-09T00:33:00.000-05:00

(Crossposted to Jewschool.)

I’ve had the opportunity to lead rocking musical services in a number of great communities (such as Kol Zimrah, NHC, Limmud NY), and been asked “Can you come to my community and lead a service like that?”. And the answer, of course, is no, I can’t. What made that service awesome wasn’t anything that I did; it was the participation of the whole community, which isn’t something that one individual can just parachute into an existing community and create. Then there are other people who get that one person can’t do it alone, and instead suggest “If a bunch of you come to my community and sing loud, then maybe services will be better.” Sometimes this works to one degree or another, but sometimes this, too, fails miserably, because even bringing in a group of enthusiastic people to an existing structure can’t always overcome other entrenched factors.

Both in the specific case of prayer and in the more general case of building meaningful Jewish community, it’s not enough to have a leader, and not enough to have a group of committed participants. The answer is both more difficult (since it’s not as simple as hiring a new rabbi or “bringing in more young people” or whoever the target group is) and more accessible (since it’s about what the community does, not about who does it, so it’s available to any community that is truly committed to it). If a Jewish community is interested in beginning the process of self-examination and transformation to become fully empowered (both in prayer and in other aspects of Jewish life), I recommend starting by reading Rabbi Elie Kaunfer’s new book, Empowered Judaism: What Independent Minyanim Can Teach Us about Building Vibrant Jewish Communities (Jewish Lights Publishing, 2010).

Empowered Judaism is a book about the newest wave of independent minyanim, as well as about a larger vision for Judaism and Jewish community. It offers something to many different constituencies: independent minyan organizers seeking to read about best practices from other minyanim, people in other Jewish communities who want to learn what these minyanim are all about and how to incorporate successful elements into their own communities, and future historians of this period in American Jewish history who want something more in-depth about the early 21st-century independent minyan phenomenon than the many superficial articles that have appeared in the press.

Rabbi Kaunfer is a founder of Kehilat Hadar, Mechon Hadar, and Yeshivat Hadar, and shares his personal story in the introduction. This story adds valuable insight to the book: though Kaunfer went to Jewish day school, Hillel, etc. (scoring 100 on the Cohen scale), he also had a period of being entirely disconnected from Jewish community. Saul Alinsky said that there are no permanent enemies and no permanent allies, and likewise, the organized Jewish community would do well to remember that there are no permanent uninvolved Jews and no permanent involved Jews. They seem to be already aware that uninvolved Jews can become involved, and attempt (with varying success) to make this happen, but often assume incorrectly that involved Jews are here to stay under all conditions (and therefore aren’t an effective use of resources), when the truth is that even an Elie Kaunfer can slip away from Jewish communal life when failing to find a meaningful community (and I know this could have happened to me too if I hadn’t found and founded the right communities at the right time), and can’t be taken for granted. Another significant recurring character in the story is God, who is credited in the acknowledgements as “the source of all real empowerment, inspiration, and vision”. God rarely shows up in the big conversations about the independent minyan phenomenon, which tend to focus on communities and institutions and demographics and the mechanics of prayer (all of which are important topics), so it’s also important to have this reminder of that which is le’eila min kol birchata ve-shirata [above all blessings and songs].

The book also includes a firsthand history of the founding and early years of Kehilat Hadar, the Manhattan community that may be the most high-profile of the new independent minyanim. I was a regular participant in Hadar for 6 of the almost 9 years it has been in existence, and was present at a number of specific services and events mentioned in the book, but still learned a lot about the behind-the-scenes details that I wasn’t aware of at the time.

Hadar has always been many things to many people. When I first got to Hadar in 2002, I found a number of people there with whom I had gone to college; we had davened at 3 separate minyanim during college, and now we were all davening at Hadar. Contrary to media accounts that paint independent minyanim as homogeneous communities of “like-minded” people, my experience of Hadar was always that it was a Jewishly diverse group, with no universal common thread linking all of our Jewish ideologies and practices except the fact that we all liked Hadar. And we weren’t even all there for the same reason; like the midrash about the manna, we all saw in Hadar what we wanted to see, even seeing seemingly contradictory things. So you have people who appreciate that Hadar doesn’t identify itself with any denominational labels, people who identify as “observant Conservative” and see Hadar as a manifestation of that outlook, people who want an egalitarian service that feels “Orthodox”, people who appreciate that Hadar spends time on the prayers rather than zipping through, people who appreciate that Hadar keeps the service moving rather than plodding along, people who want full liturgy whether or not there’s good singing, people who want good singing whether or not there’s full liturgy, people who refer to going to Hadar as “going to shul”, people who appreciate that Hadar isn’t a shul, people who want a community with other people their age, people who want a community with a wider age range than they usually socialize with (what percentage of American 22-year-olds have friends in their 30s, or vice versa?), people who are there to meet other single people, people who appreciate that Hadar isn’t a singles scene, people who plan to stay in New York City forever, people who plan to move to the New York suburbs when they have children, people who plan to move out of the New York area entirely, people who appreciate that Hadar gives extensive detailed instructions to its prayer leaders, people who appreciate that Hadar gives no instructions to its participants, people who appreciate that Hadar services are led by volunteer participants rather than professional clergy, people who appreciate that Hadar services are led by skilled leaders rather than just anyone, people who (when Hadar was every other week) wished Hadar met more often, people who liked that Hadar was only every other week, people who like the church basement better than a synagogue sanctuary, people who are at Hadar despite the church basement location, people who want to hear a d’var torah, people who appreciate that the d’var torah is only 5 minutes, and so on.

Yet somehow it works for all of those people (while other communities might, instead, succeed in alienating all of those people). And this history of Hadar provides a window into how this success came to be. It’s also interesting to learn which of the traits associated with Hadar were intended from the beginning, and which came about by circumstance. For example, I already knew that Hadar had never explicitly identified itself with a particular age group (nor do any of the new independent minyanim as far as I am aware, despite how they are painted in the media and the organized Jewish community), but I learned from the book that Hadar “actually tried in the very early days to actively combat this ‘twenties only’ feel”, reaching out to people from other age groups.

The chapter on Kehilat Hadar, along with a later chapter on prayer, provides many concrete lessons for independent minyanim or for any other congregations. Topics include attracting volunteers, fighting Jewish Standard Time (”When everyone has an incentive to be the last person to show up, the people who show up on time are punished for their punctuality by having to wait around.”), “friendliness” (”Think about an inspiring experience that was also empowering — say, your first rock concert with fifty thousand people. Even though there are no greeters, and no one really talked to you, you would never claim, ‘Wow, that U2 concert was really unfriendly.’”), acoustics for davening (”why davening in an apartment or a low-ceilinged basement, while perhaps not visually pleasing, allows for the possibility of ‘good davening’”), and selecting appropriate melodies. Most important, these ideas are not presented as magic incantations to follow because Elie Kaunfer said so (”1. Don’t announce page numbers. 2. ??? 3. Profit!”), but rather, the reasons for and against each one is laid out (though there is no ambiguity where Kaunfer stands in each case), so as to begin a conversation rather than end it. So as the Torah reading coordinator for another minyan, I can come to a different conclusion about whether Torah readers should be required to read multiple aliyot, but I can do so with an understanding of why Hadar does things the way it does, and why other communities might do things a different way. And I had been totally agnostic on the question of whether the Torah reading should be from the front of the room facing the congregation or from the middle of the room (like the prayer leader), but now I understand why the latter might be advantageous.

Jumping off from Hadar, Empowered Judaism goes on to discuss the independent minyan phenomenon as a whole. Unfortunately, the book’s definition of “independent minyanim” includes “founded in the past ten years”. We’ve called them out on this before, and we’ll do it again. The independent minyanim chapter includes a version of the same bar graph we saw in the 2007 National Spiritual Communities Study, showing the explosive growth of independent minyanim (increasing from, by definition, 0 in the starting year to over 60 today). But the starting year is no longer 1996: you see, “the past ten years” is defined dynamically, so the graph now begins in 2000. The small number of communities founded between 1996 and 1999 (inclusive) used to be “independent minyanim”, but aren’t anymore. Mark your calendars for April 2011, when Kehilat Hadar will cease to be an “independent minyan”!

The stated reason for the 10-year cutoff is “distinguishing them from the havurah movement”, so that “the havurah movement” is also defined in a time-limited way. Later in the chapter, Kaunfer lays out some differences between “independent minyanim” (i.e. lay-led communities founded after 2000) and “havurot” (i.e. lay-led communities founded before 2000, especially those founded before 1980). And as a National Havurah Committee board member, I am keenly aware that there are generational differences between older and newer communities, when taking the ensemble average of each subgroup. But even if you think that worship styles are enough to define prayer groups of 10 or more Jews with no denomination/movement affiliation as something other than “independent minyanim”, creating a sharp cutoff in a single (moving) year is using a chainsaw when a scalpel is called for. Kaunfer cites “truncated services versus full services” and “circular arrangements versus rows” as examples of differences between “havurot” and “minyanim”. But equating these differences with the binary of being founded before or after 2000 ignores communities like the Newton Centre Minyan (founded in 1973) where they sit in rows and daven the full liturgy, or Tikkun Leil Shabbat (founded in 2005) where they alternate between row seating and circle seating (leading someone to quip that they alternate between being a minyan and being a havurah).

To be sure, Kehilat Hadar has distinguished itself from preceding lay-led communities in a number of ways, and Empowered Judaism, in detailing these ways, makes a solid case for Hadarican exceptionalism. But it would be more convincing to claim that Hadar is different from every community, founded before or since, than to claim that Hadar and all communities founded later are different from all communities founded earlier. Not every “independent minyanim” founded after 2000 does all the things that Hadar does; there are even communities with lineal descent from Hadar where they don’t start on time, or don’t think carefully about ensuring quality davening, or aren’t egalitarian. The 10-year cutoff may have been useful for a sociological study documenting a specific historical phenomenon, but now it’s time for all empowered participatory Jewish communities to learn from one another.

Despite this arbitrary chronological cutoff, Kaunfer’s stance toward the first-wave havurot is overwhelmingly positive: “The real surprise is not that havurot and minyanim share similarities, but that modern synagogues and other institutions of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Jewish life persist. Judaism has always been a religion of grassroots community organizing, and the rabbinic model of the twentieth-century synagogue is perhaps the most foreign to the traditional Jewish heritage. … The real question is not how are independent minyanim new, but how are suburban synagogues — a product of the early to mid-twentieth-century — a depature from a Jewish organizing heritage shared by minyanim, havurot, and dozens of Jewish communal structures of years past?”

In addition to Kaunfer’s own reflections from Hadar, Empowered Judaism also collects a set of short pieces from organizers of other minyanim, highlighting various lessons their communities have learned. So we hear about Tikkun Leil Shabbat’s approach to dishwashing and pluralistic potlucks, Altshul’s experience meeting in a synagogue, Shira Hadasha’s structure for supporting people in bereavement and illness, and more.

The last part of the book looks beyond independent minyanim and prayer, to a vision of the future. There is a chapter on Yeshivat Hadar and its model of educating empowered Jews, and a chapter on rethinking Jewish institutions. The final chapter is entitled “Pathways Forward: The Real Crisis in American Judaism”, likely intended to evoke the first chapter of Mordecai Kaplan’s Judaism as a Civilization, “The Present Crisis in Judaism”. And like Kaplan, who wrote about this crisis as a “spiritual cataclysm”, Kaunfer writes that the crisis isn’t about “Jewish continuity” or intermarriage, but rather that “two Jews can marry each other and have Jewish children without any connection to Jewish heritage, wisdom, or tradition.” He concludes with a call to “recognize that a new Jewish world is possible.”

While Hadar and the other minyanim discussed in the book each have their own Jewish approaches, this larger vision for Jewish life is laid out in a way that is independent of specific Jewish ideologies: “the Jewish community would be better served by connecting to the original ‘big ideas’ of our heritage: Torah, avodah, and gemilut hasadim, for instance.” This vision is thus accessible and applicable to Jews of any denomination or non-denomination. For its practical wisdom and its big-picture perspective, I recommend Empowered Judaism to anyone thinking about their own Jewish community or about “the” Jewish community.

Belated thoughts on Parshat Ki Tisa

2010-03-08T18:51:00.002-05:00

Was The Who's first rock opera, "A Quick One, While He's Away", based on the story of the golden calf? From "Her man's been gone for nigh on a year / He was due home yesterday, but he ain't here" to "You are forgiven", it all fits...

With all their beady little eyes

2010-02-28T21:33:00.002-05:00

I just noticed that the first six notes of the Olympic Hymn are the same as the first six notes of O Canada (and, except for the fourth note, even the same rhythm). No wonder they had an unfair advantage!

Decade In Review: Independent Minyanim

2010-02-11T21:29:00.002-05:00

(Crossposted to Jewschool.)

Jewschool’s decade-in-review series began with the best JewFilms of the 2000s, and continues with this roundup of the independent minyan phenomenon.

Though the independent minyan wasn’t invented in the last 10 years, this decade has seen the tipping point in the growth of grassroots Jewish prayer communities, both in numbers and in impact on the overall Jewish scene. These communities differ from one another in their approaches to Judaism and Jewish practice, but they share a volunteer-led structure and a participatory ethic, and they operate outside the denominational institutions. They range in size from 10 people gathering in a small apartment on a Friday night to 500 people crowding into a church basement for Kehilat Hadar’s Yom Kippur services.

It’s nothing new that many Jews feel alienated from establishment Jewish institutions, but the independent minyan surge has happened in the past decade because, now more than ever before, the means, motive, and opportunity to act constructively on that alienation are all in alignment. The means: More people are Jewishly educated, and come out of college with experience organizing Jewish communities through venues such as Hillel. In addition, the children of the first-wave havurah founders are now adults, and are well-versed in grassroots Jewish community. Furthermore, as this surge continues unabated, involvement in the newer wave of minyanim gives more people the skills and experience to start still newer minyanim when they move to new places. The motive: In the liberal Jewish world, educated laypeople don’t see a place for themselves in top-down synagogues where the rabbi is seen as the repository of all Jewish knowledge, and want other options besides becoming rabbis, becoming Orthodox, and dropping out of Jewish life. In a separate but concurrent development in the Orthodox world, many people want to see increased ritual participation for women in ways that have been deemed acceptable by halachic decisors, but not by longstanding customs of existing synagogues, leading to the creation of free-standing “partnership minyanim”. The opportunity: The Internet removes many of the barriers to starting new communities, making it possible to gather a large number of people with little effort, and freeing minyan organizers to focus on content rather than on getting the word out. The Internet also enables people to hear about like-minded communities in other places and be inspired to start their own, and enables communities to share best practices.

Each of these communities attracts people with a wide range of Jewish identities, and many of them have avoided making normative statements about which approach to Judaism is the correct one, and have instead developed various pluralistic practices to accommodate multiple identities within a single community. Many independent minyanim cannot be placed neatly into denominational boxes, and some have novel liturgical styles that defy easy categorization: Kol Zimrah uses musical instruments for an all-Hebrew service, DC Minyan has separate seating for men and women and egalitarian ritual participation, and Havurat Shalom and Zoo Minyan have been adapting the Hebrew text of the prayers to make them grammatically gender-balanced.

As the decade has gone on, a trend that began outside of formal organizations has spawned new organizations and transformed existing ones. At the turn of the century, the National Havurah Committee was an aging organization with a relatively static constituency; now, thanks to a culture of openness and the financial support of the Everett Fellows Program, the largest demographic at the NHC’s annual Summer Institute is people in their 20s, and the NHC network has been instrumental in linking and catalyzing many new grassroots communities. Kehilat Hadar began in 2001 as an apartment minyan, and it has since inspired Mechon Hadar, which organized a national conference for leaders of independent minyanim, and Yeshivat Hadar, the only full-time egalitarian yeshiva in North America. But these organizations are not new denominational movements, since there are no formally affiliated congregations; they simply offer resources and networks to any communities that are interested.

Over the course of the decade, there has also been a sea change in the stance of the establishment institutions toward (new and old) independent minyanim. Independent minyanim have gone from ignored (simply not on the radar) to reviled (and blamed for keeping young adults away from synagogues) to embraced (to the point that everyone wants a piece of the magic, and the Conservative movement is offering grants to minyanim that will partner with their synagogues).

What do the 2010s have in store for the independent minyan phenomenon? Contrary to some predictions, one thing that won’t happen is that this will all turn out to be ephemeral, that all the independent minyan participants will come back from their rumspringa and return uncritically to become passive members of the synagogues they once eschewed. (Some may join synagogues, but primarily synagogues that are open to change, and these synagogues will look very different a few years down the line.) The question of “What will happen when they have children?” is not a question for the future: not only have older grassroots communities been answering this question in various ways for decades, but the newer wave of minyanim are already answering it too. The 25-year-olds of the turn of the century are now 35; many of them have children, and many of them are still involved in independent minyanim. As time goes on, some independent minyanim will continue and evolve with their existing participants as they get older (just as older minyanim have done for 30 or 40 years), some will become more multigenerational, some will have a continuously cycling set of transient participants, and some will cease operation (as some already have) and make way for other initiatives. And new minyanim will be founded in new cities and new neighborhoods, with new populations and with new Jewish approaches. As this phenomenon becomes more multigenerational, it will become harder to dismiss it as simply a “young adult” thing, and it will have a more profound impact on the Jewish community as a whole. Tune back in in 2020 and we’ll see how this all played out.

Germany vs. Greece

2010-02-11T13:18:00.001-05:00

With all these news stories about Germany bailing out Greece, is anyone else reminded of this old Monty Python sketch?

The emperor penguin has no clothes

2010-02-05T09:18:00.002-05:00

Ok, fine, I'm starting to concede that there will be a significant amount of snow tonight and tomorrow here in DC. But the forecast for today, during the day, is only 4-6 inches. And yet the University of Maryland is closed today, all the Northern Virginia schools are closed today, DC and Maryland schools are dismissing early, the federal government is dismissing early, etc.

Like President Obama*, I come from Chicago, where snow is just part of winter, and where the culture is that life goes on even in adverse circumstances, and you do everything you can to make that happen. (In my whole school career, school was never canceled once for snow; the only weather-related cancellations were due to extreme low temperatures, I think the windchill was in the -30s.) So I'm still perplexed by the snow culture in the DC area, where snow is also a regular part of winter (it's not like when I lived in Jerusalem, where even an inch of snow was legitimately a freak occurrence), but the culture is that any amount of snow is a "snowstorm", and any amount of snow is a convenient excuse to cancel everything. (And there's enough crying wolf with minor snow that people like me get into the habit of scoffing even when the amount of snow is more significant.) I know the official response is that DC and surrounding jurisdictions don't have the same capacity to deal with snow that Chicago has, but that simply begs the question. If snow happens regularly, then they should have more snowplows and shovels on hand.

Back to the original point, even if it makes sense to shut things down tomorrow, there doesn't seem to be any justification for closing today. But I'm starting to see the underlying psychology: Washington is simply more susceptible than most places to the groupthink that Paul Krugman wrote about today, that facilitates the rapid spread of panic:

[T]he sudden outbreak of deficit hysteria brings back memories of the groupthink that took hold during the run-up to the Iraq war. Now, as then, dubious allegations, not backed by hard evidence, are being reported as if they have been established beyond a shadow of a doubt. Now, as then, much of the political and media establishments have bought into the notion that we must take drastic action quickly, even though there hasn’t been any new information to justify this sudden urgency.

So closing down all the schools in the area when not a single flake of snow has yet fallen comes from the same place as the Iraq war, the current deficit hysteria, the Social Security "crisis" of 2005, and all these other things that become unquestioned conventional wisdom inside the Beltway.

If it doesn't snow at all until tonight, will the people who closed schools and offices feel silly? Probably not.

* One quote that struck me from that article is from the Associate Head of School at Sidwell Friends: "No question, the president is right," Turner wrote. "The next time it snows, we would like to invite him to help us make the decision. His involvement will make it much easier to explain to our students why they won't be able to spend the day sleeping and sledding." I think this proves that private schools care more about fending off complaints than about education...

Happy MMX!

2010-01-03T18:08:00.001-05:00

Happy 2010! I did some long-overdue basic maintenance on the blogroll, so if you didn't post in 2009, you're gone. No hard feelings.

The winners: Oron and Rahav

2009-12-30T18:54:00.001-05:00

(Crossposted to Jewschool.)

We’ve been reporting about the contest to name the planets Uranus and Neptune in Hebrew, as part of the International Year of Astronomy.

As ADDeRabbi reports, the winners were announced today at a ceremony at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. (As a finalist, I was invited to the ceremony, but was unable to attend since I was in the wrong country.) And the winners are…. “Oron” for Uranus, and “Rahav” for Neptune! Mazal tov (as it were) to ADDeRabbi, who was one of the entrants who submitted Rahav! My submission, Shahak (for Uranus) had to settle for runner-up; I suspect that Meretz stuffed the ballot box.

To infinity and beyond!

A hill of beans in this crazy world

2009-12-28T20:58:00.001-05:00

(Crossposted to Jewschool.)

Before 1948, both the Jewish and the Arab populations of Jerusalem were scattered throughout the city. At the end of the War of Independence, when the city was partitioned into Israeli West Jerusalem and Jordanian East Jerusalem, a major population redistribution took place. The Jews in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City and the Arabs throughout West Jerusalem had to leave for the other side. As the old Arab neighborhoods in West Jerusalem were filled in with new Jewish residents, the municipality gave the neighborhoods new Hebrew names in an attempt to erase their history. So Talbiyeh became Komemiyut, Katamon became Gonen, and Baka became Geulim. Was this attempt successful? Yes, in the sense that the current residents of the old Arab mansions of Talbiyeh are still primarily Jewish. But in a linguistic sense, no: No one has heard of Komemiyut, Gonen, or Geulim, and everyone still uses the Arabic names (or Greek, in the case of Katamon).

And now history repeats itself. If you’ve been to Jerusalem in the last couple years, you’ve seen Rechov Yafo and other major streets all torn up for the construction of the new Jerusalem Light Rail, which runs through both West and “East” (actually north) Jerusalem. Now, as the project nears completion, and the engineering challenges of constructing new transportation infrastructure in an ancient and hilly city have all been met, the city faces what may prove to be a greater challenge: naming the stations.

The committee tasked with naming the stations received a proposal from linguist Dr. Avshalom Kor, who proposed giving all of the stations Hebrew names, regardless of how the locations are actually known. Haaretz reports:

The proposal most likely to prove controversial is the station in Shoafat, a neighborhood next to French Hill. The specific location of the station is known to the locals as Tel El Ful. Kor sneers at the name and proposes calling the station Givat Binyamin (Benjamin Hill), after the tribe of King Saul. Kor dedicates about half of his proposal to explaining the name change.

“Tel el Ful is the Arab name of our capital in the days of King Saul,” writes Kor, underlining the words “Arab” and “our”. “The Hebrew name was Givat Shaul or Givat Binyamin, after the king’s tribe. The name Givat Shaul is already taken by a neighborhood in West Jerusalem, therefore the station will be known as Givat Binyamin.”

Kor says that giving the station an Arab name would encourage illegal construction by Palestinians. “When we returned to this historic hill after the Six-Day War, it was bare except for King Hussein’s then unfinished villa at the top,” Kor says. “All the houses covering it now have been built, to my knowledge, illegally.”

He adds: “If it were not for the extensive illegal construction there, the hill today would bear the prestigious name of Givat Binyamin” - and he underlines the words “not” and “prestigious.”

Kor says: “Therefore, any potential request by the residents to give the station an Arab name would mean not just eradicating the Jewish past of the first capital of the Kingdom of Israel, but also acknowledging (yet again) the illegal construction in the area.”

We have obtained a copy of Kor’s memo, and he lists three more reasons for naming this particular station Givat Binyamin:

Lebanon and Jordan are known to the world by their biblical names, and not by the local names Lubnan and Urdun.
Quoting Genesis 26:18, “Isaac dug the wells which had been dug in the days of his father Abraham, and which the Philistines had stopped up after Abraham’s death, and he called them by the names that his father had called them.” (Is Kor going for a double entendre with the reference to Philistines?)
“In Paris, for example, they would clearly name a station after an early French king’s capital, and not ‘Hill of Beans.’ And likewise we will name the station in honor of King Saul’s capital, and not ‘Tel al Ful’.”

Though Kor appears to be drawing an incendiary contrast between the cultured Europeans (or fictional versions of them whose views on kings are different from the actual French) and the residents of East Jerusalem, even the Europeans are not spared in his crusade for Hebrew names. He proposes naming the station on King George Street “Bikkur Cholim”, after the hospital whose name means “visiting the sick”, “an important site in the city’s history and an important mitzvah in Judaism”, rather than naming it after a British monarch.

And if you thought these stations could have both Hebrew and Arabic names, Kor’s proposal rules out that possibility. The proposal begins by saying that the Hebrew name will also appear in Arabic and Latin letters. “This way it is easier for tourists to find their way. If a tourist asks a Jerusalemite, for example, about ‘Ammunition Hill’, it is reasonable that the Jerusalemite will not know how to direct him. Therefore, in the three languages will be written, for example, ‘Givat Hatachmoshet’.”

Will Kor succeed in occluding Jerusalem’s diversity (and Israel’s multiple official languages) in favor of a Hebrew-only light rail, or will the unveiling of this proposal prompt a public backlash?

Ride the Purple Line this Shabbat!

2009-12-28T20:56:00.000-05:00

(Crossposted to Jewschool.)

The short version: Segulah! DC’s newest independent minyan, with “full-liturgy, energizing, songful, and participant-led egalitarian davening in a warm and welcoming neighborhood community”. Shabbat morning services this week, January 2, 2010, 9:30 am, Shabbat Vayechi, Reamer Chapel at Tifereth Israel Congregation, 16th & Juniper St (7701 16th St NW; enter off Juniper), Washington DC, two-table potluck to follow at a nearby home. All ages are welcome. RSVP to segulahminyan at gmail or on Facebook, and/or join the email list.

The longer version:

All the way in the northernmost reaches of our nation’s capital, in the very last alphabet, is the neighborhood of Shepherd Park, and just over the Maryland line is the unincorporated urban area of downtown Silver Spring (home of NOAA, the American Film Institute, and the Discovery Channel). (The picture at right shows the north boundary stone marking the border between DC and Maryland.) This multistate (or one state and one something else) neighborhood is more affordable than central DC but more walking- and transit-friendly than the burbs, and therefore it’s no surprise that it contains one of the most diverse and fastest-growing Jewish scenes in the Washington area.

The Jewish epicenter of the neighborhood is upper 16th Street, or “Sheish Esrei Elyon”, where a single two-block stretch contains three congregations that are exceptional in different ways: Fabrangen is a historic first-wave havurah that started in 1971, born out of the activism of that time, and continues to this day. Ohev Sholom is an Orthodox synagogue that has reached out to the LGBT community. Tifereth Israel is home to JuggleK, a kashrut certification that certifies both conventional kashrut standards and ethical standards, whose first and only client is a vegan soup subscription service. Other Jewish highlights of the neighborhood include Moishe House Silver Spring, the offices of KOL Foods, and the former synagogue building that is now the Ethiopian Evangelical Church.

Segulah is the latest addition to this constellation, and meets in various locations on both sides of the state line. In addition to its other meanings, “Segulah” means “purple”, a reference to the Purple Line (pictured above) that will one day link Silver Spring to the other loose ends of the Washington Metro (and which Jews United For Justice is working on making fair). Attention New York: we challenge the Second Avenue Subway to a race!

In addition to being purple, Segulah is also a treasure! And we’ll be meeting this Shabbat to complete the book of Genesis, share song-filled prayer, and eat lunch. Details are at the top of this post. See you there!

It was 20 years ago today

2009-12-17T20:48:00.004-05:00

What were you doing 20 years ago tonight? I was watching The Simpsons Christmas Special, the half-hour episode that started it all. I was Bart's age in those days; now I'm closer to Homer's age. Twenty years and 449 episodes later, The Simpsons is still going strong. Congratulations on completing two decades!

Happy Chanukah!

2009-12-13T18:02:00.001-05:00

Over half of all Chanukah candles are used on the last three nights of the holiday.

Fisk

2009-12-09T23:10:00.003-05:00

I blogged previously about the URJ's Eilu V'Eilu series on independent minyanim. Now the series is complete. In week 3, Rabbi Sydney Mintz and Rabbi Elie Kaunfer responded to questions and comments from readers. Week 4, with their closing statements, was sent out on the email list but not (yet?) posted online.

In week 3, Rabbi Kaunfer responds to one question about education with an extended answer that appears to be an excerpt from his upcoming book. Rabbi Mintz responds to several questions, and one of them in particular highlights how many misunderstandings are still out there about independent minyanim and about Reform Judaism.

The questioner asks:

In general, Rabbi Mintz is right in saying that we need to blow our own shofar. But even a cursory look at the halachic think tank at Mechon Hadar demonstrates that some of the differences between the minyanim and Reform Judaism will make the gap somewhat hard to bridge.

The fundamental error here is assuming that structure and content are perfectly correlated, i.e. that because independent minyanim share an approach to the structure of Jewish community, they must also share views about Jewish ideology and practice. And I can see how someone might arrive at this assumption, since it's much more true in the synagogue movements. But as I showed in a recent post, "independent" Jewish individuals and communities come in all shapes and sizes, and as ZT showed, ideological categories and structural categories are often orthogonal. So comparing "the minyanim" and "Reform Judaism" is comparing apples and oranges, since the former is a structural category with diverse ideologies, and the latter (in the context it's being used here) is an ideological category.

The secondary error is the implied syllogism "Mechon Hadar sees itself as providing resources for all independent minyanim; Mechon Hadar holds X views on halachah; therefore, all independent minyanim hold X views on halachah." This is along the lines of the famous "All men are mortal; Socrates is mortal; therefore, all men are Socrates." Mechon Hadar is just one organization, and is doing good work in the world, but has no authority to speak for all independent minyanim, nor does it claim to speak for all independent minyanim (not even for Kehilat Hadar). It provides resources that are there for whoever finds them useful.

Among the many flavors of independent minyanim, there are in fact some that take approaches that can be characterized more as "Reform" (for various values of "Reform"). Of course, there are still significant differences between those minyanim and conventional Reform synagogues, but the "conventional synagogue" part is more significant to those differences than the "Reform" part.

The questioner continues:

Specifically, Reform Judaism is affirmatively not a halachic movement (even though our rabbis have the capacity to provide responsa grounded in halachah) and the Conservative Movement that minyanim members are fleeing in droves still claims to be halachic. The egalitarian nature of Reform Judaism will appeal to minyan'iks but they will ultimately reject our lack of halachah.

First of all, minyan participants are fleeing the Reform movement in droves too (survey results show that 44% of Kol Zimrah participants and 18% of independent minyan participants overall were raised with a Reform identity), and the Reform movement ignores these statistics to its peril. Fortunately, the existence of this dialogue indicates that some people in the Reform movement aren't ignoring it anymore.

Second of all, I have addressed the "not a halachic movement" claim in previous posts, so I'll just link there and not reinvent the wheel. All I'll say here is that this letter represents an extreme (small-c) conservative view of the nature of halachah. There is a growing grassroots movement out there to think about halachah as a "language of applied values" (or "critical common sense" or one of the other ways of referring to it). This approach positions itself in opposition to "formalism" -- viewing halachah as a formal system, focusing on the application of procedural rules and the "halachic process". So on the spectrum from critical common sense to formalism, the view of halachah in this letter appears to be waaaaay off the far end, past formalism. That is, the only way I can make sense out of "not a halachic movement (even though our rabbis have the capacity to provide responsa grounded in halachah)" is to understand halachah not merely as a process (which at least can continue to develop over time, even if this development is highly constrained) but as a fixed static set of legal texts. Thus, according to this view, Reform responsa can be "grounded in" that set of texts, but do not themselves constitute halachic works, and what Reform Jews do isn't halachic because it doesn't follow the conclusions of those texts. Of course, I think Reform Judaism should hold a progressive view of halachah, not an extreme conservative one. I hope I'm arguing with a straw man, but fear that I'm not.

On balance, then, I think Rabbi Mintz is correct that we should view and respond to minyanim as a challenge and an opportunity. One possible way would be to help unaffiliated minyanim with space and try and provide links for our members to participate in their worship. But here's an interesting thought experiment: Suppose a minyan wants to meet at our synagogue but refuses to count women as part of the minyan? What if it forbids musical instruments in the service? What if it wants to exclude our some of members from participation (or at least, from counting as part of a minyan) because they are Jews of only patrilineal descent? How would we deal with those issues?

This is neither interesting nor a thought experiment. It's not a thought experiment because it has been tried as a real experiment: Darkhei Noam and Kol Sasson are two examples of non-egalitarian independent minyanim that meet or have met in Reform synagogue buildings, successfully as far as I know. And it's not interesting because if an independent minyan (as distinct from a synagogue-sponsored minyan) makes an arrangement to meet in a synagogue (whether that arrangement includes paying rent or whatever other agreement they reach), the relationship between the minyan and the synagogue is one between sovereign entities, and therefore it shouldn't matter to the synagogue what exactly the minyan is doing as long as it doesn't interfere with the synagogue's own services or other activities. The independent minyanim that meet in churches are never asked whether their ritual practices conform to the church's principles.

The musical instrument question is particularly ill-posed (and I say this as a big supporter of musical instruments). "Forbidden"/"permitted" is almost never the right frame to think about musical instruments in services, since musical instruments played by people other than the service leaders are almost never "permitted". Generally, musical instruments are either used by the service leaders or not used at all. But if an independent minyan's practice is for the service leaders not to use musical instruments, this doesn't mean that the minyan holds that musical instruments are "forbidden". This is because independent minyan generally make decisions about policy (i.e. what they do), not about halachah (i.e. what everyone should do). There are all kinds of reasons why a minyan might decide not to use instruments, which need not involve taking a stance on whether instruments are forbidden. (For that matter, I suspect most independent minyanim don't have an official stance one way or the other on patrilineal descent.) And certainly, there is no fundamental Reform ideological opposition to having a service without instruments (I have been to many Reform services without instruments in my lifetime).

Yet this questioner seems to think there might be a problem with having a service without instruments using space in a Reform synagogue. What's the problem? They're not stopping anyone from using instruments in the sanctuary service. Is there a concern that the minyan participants are somehow going to take over the synagogue and mold it in their image? This is generally the last thing on a minyan's mind when it looks for space -- the minyan is operating much lower on Maslow's hierarchy, just looking for a place to hold services to maintain its existence, not thinking about future coups.

Independent

2009-11-21T22:20:00.002-05:00

(Crossposted to Jewschool.)

Blogging from the Bolt Bus on the way, appropriately, to the National Havurah Committee board meeting:

Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight wrote this insightful post last fortnight following the elections:

Why did Democrats lose in Virginia and New Jersey on Tuesday? Because independent voters moved against them, say the pundits.

This is true [... b]ut it doesn’t really tell us very much. It’s a lot like saying: the Yankees won the Game 6 last night because they scored more runs than the Phillies. Or: the unemployment rate went up because there were fewer jobs.

It’s worth a read in its own right, but I want to focus on one section and draw an analogy to the Jewish community:

Part of the problem is that ‘independents’ are not a particularly coherent group. At a minimum, the category of ‘independents’ includes:

1) People who are mainline Democrats or Republicans for all intents and purposes, but who reject the formality of being labeled as such;
2) People who have a mix of conservative and liberal views that don’t fit neatly onto the one-dimensional political spectrum, such as libertarians;
3) People to the extreme left or the extreme right of the political spectrum, who consider the Democratic and Republican parties to be equally contemptible;
4) People who are extremely disengaged from politics and who may not have fully-formed political views;
5) True-blue moderates;
6) Members of organized third parties.

These voters have almost nothing to do with each other and yet they all get grouped under the same umbrella as ‘independents’.

Similarly, many overlapping terms are used for Jewish individuals and communities who are not affiliated with any of the major denominations: independent, unaffiliated, nondenominational, postdenominational, Just Jewish, etc. Each of these terms connotes somewhat different shades of meaning, but even so, within each such category, and certainly within the union of all those categories, there are people who “have almost nothing to do with each other” except for what they aren’t. And so when we try to talk about people and communities outside the denomination, we suffer from the same confusion and conflation that Silver writes about, conflating essentially the same six categories that he lists (among others).

American political discourse often assumes incorrectly that all “independents” are in category 5, with positions right in between the Democrats and the Republicans (and so the way for a party to pick up these voters is to adopt some of the other party’s positions), when in fact there are other types of independents too. Similarly, until very recently, “unaffiliated”/”Just Jewish” was associated strongly with category 4: “People who are extremely disengaged from [Judaism]“. (It was recently enough that I had to write this article to explain to a mainstream Jewish audience that this isn’t always the case, though I think the other types of “independent”/”unaffiliated”/etc. Jews have gotten enough attention since then that maybe the points in that article are now obvious to everyone. But maybe not.) The survey results seem to indicate that this is still true of most people who check “Just Jewish”, though I wonder how much those results are contaminated by active independent/nondenominational/blah Jews who also think of themselves as “Just Jewish” and aren’t survey geeks and therefore don’t know that “Just Jewish” isn’t the option they’re supposed to pick.

Even worse, category 4 is sometimes conflated with category 3: Some think that people who are extremely disengaged from Judaism are on the extreme left! This is the idea behind phrases like “very Reform” and “ultra-Reform”. The analogy to American politics shows this conflation to be ridiculous: you can’t have extreme-left views if you don’t have fully-formed [political | Jewish] views. There are also people who hold extreme-left Jewish views (along one or more axes in n-dimensional space, some of which can be classified as left-right spectra), but this is a very different population from the apathetic masses.

Participants in independent minyanim and other unaffiliated/nondenominational communities are often mischaracterized as falling into just one of these categories, when the reality is that there is great diversity within and among such communities, so they can’t be neatly places into just one. One common characterization of independent minyanim, particularly those of the “traditional egalitarian” style, is that they are “Conservative congregations flying a Liberian flag”, i.e. Conservative in everything but name, placing them in category 1. Another common characterization is that they fit between two denominations on a linear left-right spectrum (category 5), e.g. “to the right of Conservative and to the left of Orthodox” or “to the right of Reform and to the left of Conservative”. (The former is wrong on the facts in many cases, while the latter is simply incoherent.) And indeed, there are some individuals who see themselves as Conservative (or Orthodox or Reform) in everything but name (or even in name too) and are involved in nondenominational communities, and other individuals who identify as “Conservadox” or some other hybrid of multiple denominations. But independent/nondenominational communities also include plenty of people from category 2: those whose approaches to Judaism can’t be placed on a one-dimensional spectrum.

In the comments, feel free to add to the list of types of “independent” Jews.