Rooftop: the fugu of davening styles

(Alternate titles for this post: "חרות על הלוחות" ; "ועשית מעקה לגגך")

Fugu

Fugu is the Japanese word for pufferfish, a fish that is said to be tasty when prepared correctly, but lethally poisonous when the poisonous parts are not removed. Many American audiences (including my 11-year-old self) were introduced to it through the classic Simpsons episode "One Fish, Two Fish, Blowfish, Blue Fish", in which Homer eats fugu and then believes that he has 24 hours to live.

Rooftop: The Origins

It started in September 2003. A few of us were feeling disgruntled with the Shabbat morning options in New York on non-Hadar weeks and wanted to try something completely different, so we threw together a non-minyan (i.e. there were intentionally fewer than 10 of us, so we didn't have to worry about reading Torah or any of that) in Central Park. We liked it so much we did it again a number of times, often on one of our roofs. (This combined the advantages of being outside with easy access to bathrooms and food for the potluck lunches that often followed.) When the weather was inclement, we'd take it inside into a living room, but the name "rooftop davening" (or "rooftop-style davening") had stuck.

Rooftop: The Style

On paper it's simple: there is no leader. Anyone should feel free to start any melody for any prayer.

Beyond that, the ground rules are fluid. Sometimes, instead of a Torah service (in the absence of a Torah or a minyan), we would read and discuss the Torah portion. But we would often start at times that were moral (i.e. late), and rooftop (when done well) can be a prescription for long davening, so that by the time we got through pesukei dezimrah and shacharit, we'd decide that it was time for lunch, and reading the Torah portion and/or musaf could happen after lunch. Sometimes that would actually happen after lunch, sometimes not. Sometimes an actual minyan would show up at some point in the morning, at which point we would appoint a sheliach tzibbur for the parts that require one, and continue rooftop-style for everything else.

Rooftop: The Advantages

I'm not sure anyone would want to pray this way every week, but as an occasional alternative experience, it has a number of things going for it.

• In the absence of an organized Friday night option, anyone can throw together a Friday night minyan in their apartment. Not so for Shabbat morning. Shabbat morning minyanim have significant costs in capital (a sefer Torah) and labor (Torah readers, who need to prepare beforehand). This is one way to put together a low-cost Shabbat morning prayer experience in the absence of that capital and labor.
• It's an opportunity for free experimentation with the liturgy - a space to test out new melodies or new text-melody pairings before they're "ready for prime time". Some things that I now use when leading a minyan originated in rooftop.
• Formal teaching of melodies is acceptable, whereas it wouldn't be in many genres of minyanim.
  
• When you're doing a full-liturgy Shabbat morning minyan, pesukei dezimrah necessarily gets short shrift, because you're trying to get through everything by a reasonable hour. Rooftop has no time limits, so it's an opportunity to focus on the many parts of pesukei dezimrah that are often mumbled through in 20 seconds. To generalize, normal davening has to strike a balance between kavanah and efficiency, and rooftop removes efficiency from the picture so that the kavanah side can get full attention.
  
• When done right, it's a grassroots bottom-up experience: everyone in the community participates equally in making the service happen. No one is more or less important than anyone else.
• Since multiple people are each leading small parts, this gives people who might not be ready to lead an entire service the opportunity to lead something, and ensures a diversity of styles within one service.
  

Rooftop: The Pitfalls

However, casting off the wise restraints that make us free can have many deleterious unintended consequences. As with fugu, opportunities to be poisoned lurk everywhere.

1) Awkward silences. If no one jumps in with a melody for a given piece of liturgy, what happens next? How long does everyone look around at each other awkwardly before concluding that this thing just isn't going to be sung out loud, and it's time to do that prayer individually? At this point, the aforementioned radical egalitarianism may start to buckle, because people feel varying degrees of responsibility for the awkward silence - some think "It's my problem and I should do something", and others think "It's somebody else's problem", or even "It's Ploni's problem." As a result, Ploni may find unwanted leadership thrust on him/her, or in the absence of a Ploni, everyone may be confused for a while.

One solution we found was to appoint a "pacesetter", or "sheliach tzibbur of last resort", for each section of the service. (Recruitment of pacesetters can simply happen at the very beginning, and doesn't need to happen in advance.) The pacesetter's job is to shoulder the burden of looking around awkwardly so that everyone else can be relieved of this burden. If nothing happens for some length of time (as determined by the pacesetter), the pacesetter steps in and either starts singing something or starts mumbling loudly to signal that it's time to move on.

The existence of the pacesetter may cut into the leaderless ideal, but transparent leadership is still more egalitarian than leadership by default.

2) Out of sync. The flip side is that instead of awkward silences, sometimes if nothing is happening, people will plow on ahead on their own, until something happens. If this goes on for a while, then by the time someone starts in with something, everyone is in vastly different places, and people are forced to jump ahead or jump back. (Plus there is the potential for additional awkward looking-around, as people try to ascertain where others have gotten to, to figure out whether they're ahead or behind or what.)

This can also be remedied in part by the pacesetter, if the pacesetter's responsibilities also include signaling the end of each unit of liturgy, to keep people in sync.

Ironically, the necessity that everyone be in sync only pertains to the supposedly structureless rooftop style, because everyone has the right and responsibility to lead parts of the service, and therefore everyone has to be aware of where everyone else is. In a conventional minyan, only the leader (and perhaps a critical mass of participants) has to be maintaining the tempo of the service; everyone else can go freely at their own pace.

3) Macroscopic liturgy mismatch. The group needs to agree beforehand on the rules of the road, in particular on assumptions about whether or not the service is full-liturgy. If some people assume that it is, and other people assume that it isn't and jump ahead and start things further along, then that's not cool. And even if the group agrees that the service doesn't have to be full-liturgy and skipping is ok, if I jump ahead to prayer #9 and you had something you wanted to do for prayer #8, then that's still not cool.

As I see it, there are three options that allow for democratic (but not chaotic) leading: a) full liturgy (and, of course, the group agrees on whether this means Ashkenazi, Sephardi, etc. -- they differ vastly for pesukei dezimrah); b) non-full liturgy, in which everyone agrees in advance on which prayers will be included (or, equivalently, everyone agrees to follow the same siddur); and c) non-full liturgy, in which any departures (or at least deletions; insertions shouldn't be an issue) from the full liturgy require asking for consent ("Is it ok if I skip to prayer #9?" "No, wait! I had something for #8!").

4) Too many people, or an uncohesive group. Rooftop works best with a small group of people who know each other, and who ideally have experience davening together and a common frame of reference. Among unfamiliar people, people will feel inhibited about stepping up and starting something. Among a group above a certain size (analogous to the rule of 150, but much smaller), people will feel inhibited and won't feel a sense of responsibility for jumping in because the group is large enough that someone else can do it. (Insisting that rooftop groups be less than a minyan is a useful rule of thumb, but not strictly applicable all the time. I've been to rooftop services that had a minyan and worked successfully, and rooftop services that had less than a minyan that fell flat.)

5) The guest list. Even worse than an inhibited service where no one takes initiative: Because everyone at a rooftop gathering is fully empowered, someone who doesn't understand the group or doesn't understand when enough is enough has the power to wreck it for everyone. This is why I've never been to or heard of a rooftop service that was announced in a public forum; they're always by invitation only (though the answer to "Can I bring a friend?" is usually "yes").

6) Confusion. By its nature, rooftop is best suited for people with a strong familiarity with the liturgy. That in itself isn't a flaw; no davening style is for everyone. But, unlike other genres that are also best suited to a similar crowd (in which the worst-case scenario is that someone won't be into it), this can lead to spectacular flameouts. In rooftop, someone might make a major error (e.g. starting entirely the wrong prayer -- similar to scenarios discussed in #3 above, but unintentional), of the sort that wouldn't happen in a minyan with a leader where the leader prepared beforehand, leading to awkward interpersonal situations. The group has to make a spontaneous decision about whether to say something or to roll with it. Saying something is problematic, because of the "anything goes" atmosphere of rooftop (especially if ground rules haven't been laid down as in #3 above), and the distributed nature of leadership (whose role is it to say something?), and the possibility of personal embarrassment. But rolling with it is also problematic, because the group has to spontaneously come up with a graceful way to smooth things over logistically (again, difficult when leadership is distributed), and the possibility of personal embarrassment still exists if the person in question figures out what happened.

7) Friday night. There is a common line of thinking that if we can do rooftop for Saturday morning, then kal vachomer we can do rooftop for Friday night. This line of thinking goes like this: If we can do rooftop for pesukei dezimrah, when we ordinarily don't sing that much and coming up with creative material is a challenge, it should be much easier to do rooftop for kabbalat shabbat, when we always sing a lot and everyone is very familiar with kabbalat shabbat and knows lots of tunes. If we can do rooftop on Shabbat morning, when there's not otherwise a culture of pickup apartment minyanim, kal vachomer we can do rooftop on Friday night, when there is a strong culture of pickup apartment minyanim.

I think this thinking is flawed, and Friday night rooftop's supposed strengths are actually its weaknesses.

Because everyone knows lots of tunes for each unit of kabbalat shabbat, this paradoxically inhibits people from coming forward. Jumping in with something you just thought of for Psalm 33 (in pesukei dezimrah) has no cost, because if you hadn't done it, no one else would have done anything for it, whereas you're going to feel like you have to be damn sure of yourself before you start anything for Lecha Dodi. And there are some tunes that are relatively "standard" (in the sense that they're the default), but not completely so (because there are alternatives), for example, the Carlebach Psalm 96. And so no one wants to be That Guy (or Gal) and start up the "standard" tune when there are other alternatives, leading occasionally to the improbable result of doing Psalm 96 silently. (In a milieu where the standard tunes are completely standard, e.g. straight government-issue Carlebach, Friday night rooftop is smoother, but is also pointless. If everyone knows what's going to happen, then what difference does it make if one person is leading it or everyone is?)

Because kabbalat shabbat is often entirely or mostly sung, it benefits from having a leader who can think in advance about the overall plan and ensure an appropriate balance between upbeat and mellow, between singing and (if desired) not-singing, between "standard" melodies and new ones, and who can create smooth transitions between prayers for a seamless flow. Rooftop services are spontaneous and disjointed by nature; they have no advance plan and (other than in exceptionally awesome cases) no coherent flow. That's true for Shabbat morning rooftop also, but no one has any expectations of coherent flow for pesukei dezimrah, so nothing is lost.

8)"Let's just do rooftop." This is another problem characteristic of Friday night rooftop. Shabbat morning rooftop is so different from a typical Shabbat morning minyan that if you're doing it, you know you're doing rooftop. In contrast, because there is already a culture of informal Friday night apartment minyanim, rooftop looks superficially similar to a conventional minyan, and the differences are easy to overlook. But we overlook these differences to our peril.

A common scenario is "Ok, I'm having a bunch of people over for dinner. Where should we daven? Let's just daven in the apartment. [no problem so far] How should we daven? Let's just do rooftop." In this scenario, sometimes the participants are informed in advance, and sometimes they find out when they arrive. In both cases, there may be participants who are just finding out what "rooftop" is. In the latter case (no advance notice), participants are not psychologically prepared for a service that they're all responsible for making happen (they've just gotten to the end of a long week and thought all they had to do was show up), and so people are reticent to take initiative. And it's even worse for people who show up late and miss the "We're doing rooftop" announcement, and thus don't even know that they're authorized to take initiative.

Even if participants know in advance that it's going to be rooftop, it is a mistake for the host/convener to simply say "Let's do rooftop" and assume that everything will magically sort itself out. As outlined above, there needs to be a pacesetter (yes, even for kabbalat shabbat -- as discussed, one can't assume that kabbalat shabbat will be free of awkward silences), and there also have to be a committed core of people who are sold on the idea of doing rooftop and not merely showing up to someone else's event.

9) Decision points. One time I went to a Friday night rooftop service. We reached the end of kabbalat shabbat, and then someone immediately started up with ma'ariv. I think this was a breach of etiquette. They shouldn't have gone ahead without seeking the consent of the group and/or the host. When kabbalat shabbat came to an end, the group and/or the host should have actively made a decision about whether to continue rooftop-style for ma'ariv, to have a conventionally-led ma'ariv, to say that anyone who wants can have a few minutes to do ma'ariv on their own, or to go straight to dinner. And these decisions need to be made explicitly by the group or an empowered individual at each major decision point (or in advance), rather than one participant deciding unilaterally on the group's behalf.

***

So that's all I have for now. In your experience, what are some other pros and cons of rooftop? What ways have you found to achieve the pros while neutralizing the cons? When is rooftop worth the risks?

City, County, and State

It turns out New York isn't the only City, County, and State. There's at least one other: the City, County, and State of Oklahoma.

Are there any more? If so, then we can pinpoint the location of the next major terrorist attack and take preventative measures.

Deadly enemies

As promised, I looked through all the issues of the CCAR Journal from 1973 to 1979, and didn't find a review of The Jewish Catalog, by Rabbi A. Stanley Dreyfus or anyone else. However, I did find a review of The Second Jewish Catalog in the Summer 1978 issue, by my fellow Chicagoan Rabbi Arnold Jacob Wolf. The highlight:

But bar mitzvah needs, in my view, not merely to be described but to be opposed. The American ceremony is one of the deadly enemies of Jewish education, and there is no way to bypass its malignant effect on growing up Jewish. To prettify the issue is, I believe, a disservice to the true needs of our community, which require its abolition instead.

Sefer Ha-Bloggadah!

Sefer Ha-Aggadah (The Book of Legends), the collection of thousands of stories from the Talmud and rabbinic literature compiled by the Hebrew poet Hayim Nachman Bialik and the editor/publisher Yehoshua Ravnitsky, was first published in 1908, and is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year. In celebration, people around the world will be reading and discussing Sefer Ha-Aggadah from start to finish, beginning in just a few weeks and completing it in two years.

Everyone is invited to participate! All you have to do is obtain a copy of Sefer Ha-Aggadah in Hebrew or English, and follow along each day with the schedule. It’s about a page or two each day. You can join the email list to keep up with administrative announcements.

We’ll be discussing each day’s reading on the blog, Sefer Ha-Bloggadah. We have an amazing and diverse team of bloggers who will be blogging each day, and all are invited to join the discussion in the comments. In addition to the blog, in-person discussion groups are being organized in some cities, and you’re invited to organize one in your area.

The Sefer Ha-Aggadah project will formally kick off on Shabbat afternoon, August 16 (Tu Be’Av), at the National Havurah Committee Summer Institute, and then the schedule begins on Monday, August 25.

We look forward to creating Torah with you!

On a personal note, I'll be using the copy of Sefer Ha-Aggadah that belonged to my grandfather, Rabbi A. Stanley Dreyfus z"l, and dedicating my learning in his memory. One of the many things we found in the apartment was a collection of papers that he had written as an undergraduate at the Hebrew Union College (which used to have a joint undergrad program with the University of Cincinnati). Among these, he had translated a chapter of Sefer Ha-Aggadah into English. (This was in 1939, long before any English translation had been published.) I looked at the schedule to see when we would be reaching that chapter (the one about the destruction of the Second Temple, including the story of Kamtza and Bar Kamtza), and fortuitously, it turns out that it will be the week of his birthday. So we'll have an opportunity to remember him then, and perhaps compare his translation to the published edition.

Rabbi A. Stanley Dreyfus on the Jewish Catalog: unpublished notes

Since my last two posts were about my grandfather Rabbi Dr. A. Stanley Dreyfus and the Jewish Catalog, it makes sense in this post to combine them.

My grandfather had an incredibly extensive book collection, which includes an original folio Vilna Shas (i.e. printed in Vilna), a Hebrew-Latin Bible printed in Venice in 1551, and an edition of the Mishnah printed in Germany in 1814 with vowels and a translation and commentary in German written in Hebrew characters (not Yiddish, German) handwritten in the margins by Solomon Eppinger of Cincinnati (an original faculty member at the Hebrew Union College) around 1870. But I was mildly surprised to see that this collection also included The Jewish Catalog. But not so surprised, since many different views are represented in this library. It was located on the shelf with books about minhagim, marriage, and mourning.

Inside my grandfather's copy of The Jewish Catalog is a sheaf of small sheets of paper with his notes written on them. It appears that these notes may have been intended for a review of the book. I don't know whether this review was ever written or published (though I could check out whether the CCAR Journal ever ran a review of The Jewish Catalog when I'm back at the apartment -- I'm sure he had a complete set). I'm guessing the notes were written soon after the publication of the book, though there's really no way to know.

So here are Rabbi A. Stanley Dreyfus's notes on The Jewish Catalog (to my best ability to read his handwriting), with my attempts at commentary on this raw primary text. I wasn't surprised that his reaction was critical, but I was surprised to find myself, a do-it-yourself-type Jew, agreeing with many of his criticisms. I've never read The Jewish Catalog cover-to-cover, but this inspires me to want to write my own critique from a 21st-century grassroots-Judaism perspective.

The Jewish Catalogue [sic - of course he would go for the more British spelling], A do-it-yourself kit
Richard Siegel
Michael Strassfeld
Sharon Strassfeld

"A compendium of tools and resources for use in Jewish education and Jewish living in the fullest sense of those terms"

This is a direct quotation from the introduction, p. 8.

Expression of Jewish countercultural activity of late 60's in secular and Jewish world
Move toward communal living
Returning to the land
Relearning joys of "making it yourself"
Voicing social and political concern

This book undertakes
1) to provide immediately useful information
2) to direct those interested to additional resources
3) to present traditional dimensions of each subject covered
4) to open options for personal creativity and contemporary utilization

Ideal: personal responsibility
physical participation

These are also direct quotes and paraphrases from the introduction (p. 8-9), and the relevant paragraphs are marked off in pencil in the book. Here, he was just summarizing. Next, Rabbi Dreyfus's own reactions begin:

Disturbing aspects of book -- immediate hostile reaction

= Errors of fact

Tenaim תנאים - get
Tallit - worn by all males past age of B/M in Conservative & Reform syn, & by married men in Orthodox syn. p 52
Lulav on Shabbat

Responsibility of teacher

Here's what The Jewish Catalog has to say about tenaim (p. 162): "1. The betrothal is created by the writing of tenaim -- a legal document binding on both parties. 2. Because the tenaim are as binding as a marriage contract -- that is, they are dissoluble only through divorce or death -- the custom of signing tenaim a year before the wedding has, in general, given way to the custom of signing them immediately before the actual wedding takes place." And there isn't a section about divorce or gittin (until the second volume).

So I can't tell what Rabbi Dreyfus is getting at in his laconic note. Perhaps he's saying that a get is in fact not necessary for the dissolution of tenaim, and tenaim can be dissolved by other means? I don't know enough about tenaim to understand which part he's claiming is a factual error.

On p. 51 (not 52), it says "The tallit is the prayer shawl worn by married men in Orthodox synagogues, and by all males past the age of Bar Mitzvah in Conservative and Reform synagogues." Now which part is Rabbi Dreyfus taking issue with here? There are so many possibilities. First of all, the tallit is certainly not universal among post-bar mitzvah males in Reform synagogues, and was considerably less so in the 1970s. As a Reform congregational rabbi, this could not have escaped Rabbi Dreyfus's attention. Second of all, the custom of wearing a tallit only after marriage is not universal in Orthodox communities -- in particular, I believe it is specific to Eastern European communities. As an uber-yekke (at the very least by marriage and disposition, but his Alsatian-born father also spoke German), Rabbi Dreyfus would not have let this omission of German minhag go unaddressed. Finally, I don't know whether tallit use among Reform and Conservative women was common yet in the 1970s, but it may pose another problem with this sentence. (The Catalog takes the interesting position of "Women are not obligated to wear a tallit, nor are they prohibited from wearing one", leaving out any differences of opinion for either clause.)

On p. 73, the Catalog says "It is a mitzvah to wave the lulav on each of the first seven days of Sukkot. The proper time is in the morning -- either before the Morning Service or during the service immediately before the Hallel." (The first sentence sort of contradicts the next part about Shabbat, and the second is another factual error: according to the Mishnah, the proper time for lulav is all day.) P. 75-76 says "The lulav is not shaken on Shabbat -- because perhaps you may carry it (e.g., to the synagogue) and thereby violate the prohibition against carrying an object more than four amot (approximately eighty inches) in the public domain during Shabbat." Now this is an oversimplification of a complex issue, but I don't entirely see how it's an error. Thoughts?

I'm not sure what "Responsibility of teacher" refers to. There is a section called "Teachers", beginning on p. 292, which includes a list of "good people to talk to" ("a list of people whom the editors of this book coincidentally know"), but it doesn't say anything about teachers' responsibilities. Perhaps Rabbi Dreyfus is referring instead to p. 282, in the "How to Start a Havurah" section. This is a fascinating passage that raises questions about how truly egalitarian the early havurot were -- both in the unselfconscious use of the masculine pronoun and in the idea of a singular leader that seems to contradict havurah ideology. I'm not sure what the factual error is (or what Rabbi Dreyfus would have taken issue with, given that his own milieu at that time also consisted of Jewish communities with a singular rabbinic leader who was generally male), but it's a fascinating passage nonetheless:

"If at all possible, the group should have a committed, Jewishly learned leader
"a. whose leadership role is accepted;
"b. who fosters leadership potential among other members so as to eventually minimize or eliminate the need for his own leadership role;
"c. who does not have a holier-than-thou attitude toward other members and is thus open to criticism.
"Such a leader may be found among Jewish professionals in the city, or may be found in a nearby city. This leader should work directly with
"a. aiding work-group chairmen;
"b. changing community coordinators;
"c. teaching the entire community.
"As a teacher he should give members a sense of the geography of Jewish values as embodied in the tradition, as well as methods of access and inquiry into Jewish source material. Thus some members can eventually become teachers themselves."

Errors in balance, proportion

My own Judaism

a) kingdom of God on earth
Before Abraham, God only in heaven
Messianic era

b) Achieved by obedience to commandments
do justly
love mercy
walk humbly

c) advanced - made vivid by Jewish life style - poetry of life - & sancta as sign posts

As far as I can tell, this is in fact Rabbi Dreyfus outlining the ideas of his "own Judaism", in order to set up a contrast between his understanding of Judaism and what is presented in the Catalog. I feel like doing a much deeper analysis would be out of my league. Does anyone with a background in Jewish thought want to weigh in and place this section in context?

Part a is reminiscent of a midrash in which Abraham (and the generations until Moses) brought God's presence from heaven down to earth. I don't know whether this is an intentional allusion to that midrash. But the general idea seems to be that human action (exemplified by Abraham) establishes the kingdom of God on earth and brings the messianic era (which doesn't necessarily include an individual messiah -- a distinction that has long been present in Reform Judaism ever since ומביא גואל / "brings a redeemer" was changed to ומביא גאולה / "brings redemption").

This leads into part b - God's kingdom is achieved by obedience to the commandments, exemplified by Micah 6:8 (the haftarah from the week that Rabbi Dreyfus died, and the distillation of the 613 commandments into three according to Makkot 24a). Let no one (especially Reform Jews) make the claim that Reform Judaism is a non-halakhic movement, or doesn't believe in obligation: here we have a luminary of the Reform movement (and very much of the old guard) identifying obedience to the commandments as the essence of Judaism. Yes, the definition of which commandments are significant may differ from other Jewish movements, but that's just quibbling over the details. Doing justly and loving mercy are halakhah (not merely aggadah) and are obligations (not merely choices).

Part c: I don't think "advanced" is used here as an adjective (as in what comes after "intermediate") but as a verb -- i.e. "this is advanced by...". (What is advanced by the Jewish lifestyle, etc.? The kingdom of God on earth? Perhaps.) "Sancta" sounds Kaplanian, but I don't think that's entirely what he's going for - I think he's talking about "such ceremonies as elevate and sanctify our lives". This is where the role of ritual comes in: it is the "poetry of life" and the "sign posts", and not classified with the "commandments", which are ethical.

Not as ends in themselves
Must be rationally acceptable

I.e. rituals should not be ends in themselves, but are a means towards living an ethical life and making vivid the kingdom of God on earth.

But I have to say that this "rationally acceptable" standard leaves lots of open questions. It seems that there is plenty of room for cultural relativism here. Who is to say that wearing a three-piece suit and tie is rational, and wearing tzitzit (see below) isn't? Cultural norms may be different in different cultures, but one isn't more or less rational than another. Particularly if we're talking about the "poetry of life", poetry isn't always rational.

Tallit knots
7 windings
8 "
15 = יה
וה = 11
אחד = 13

600 = ציצית
8 threads
5 knots
613

p. 53

These numbers indeed appear on p.53, and it looks like Rabbi Dreyfus was doublechecking the arithmetic. He appears to be presenting this as a counterexample to "must be rationally acceptable". I would respond by saying that, rational or not, tzitzit knots aren't hurting anyone. But this is listed as an error in balance/proportion. And it's true that the Catalog focuses much more on ritual than on doing justice. Perhaps the explanation is that there was less need for a gujde to doing justice than a guide to tying tzitzit knots, because the former can be obtained from sources that aren't specifically Jewish. But there are specifically Jewish perspectives on justice that, as Rabbi Dreyfus points out, don't get much attention in the Catalog. (It's the same problem as A Guide to Jewish Religious Practice, which should be called A Guide to Jewish Religious Practice, Volume I: Bein Adam Lamakom.) This was remedied in the sequels, particularly The Third Jewish Catalog.

Must be relevant: justice, honesty, decency

I don't know. Tallit knots may not represent any of these qualities, but they are neither unjust nor dishonest nor indecent. And the social conventions of Classical Reform decorum didn't represent justice, honesty, or decency any better; what was important was that they were meaningful to their adherents.

This book -- Orthodox -- generally ignoring Reform

This is an interesting point, and I think it reflects the demographics of the 1970s havurah crowd, which primarily came from Conservative (and some Orthodox) backgrounds. One of the standard creation myths of the havurah movement is that it was created by people who came back from Camps Ramah and were empowered to start their own Jewish communities. Unfortunately, I don't think the Reform movement's educational system at this time was sufficiently empowering people to do this, so people who were disaffected with their home congregations either dropped out, frummed out, or became rabbis. More recent waves of havurot/minyanim have greater representation from people who grew up in the Reform movement, though the recent independent minyan survey shows that Reform self-identification is still low among this crowd. (In this post I tried to grapple with the frictions between Reform identity and grassroots communities.)

So it's interesting (and worthy of further study) that Reform cultural influence was lacking in the early havurah movement. So there has been a sort of convergent evolution -- if we look at communal prayer as one example, you have the older generation of havurot incorporating more English into the service than they grew up with in their Conservative and Orthodox upbringings, and you now have Reform-identified communities incorporating more Hebrew and congregational participation than were common in the Reform movement 30 years ago, leading to services that might look similar on paper or to someone looking in from the outside, yet sufficiently different (due to vestigial features left over from these very different evolutionary processes) that they appear unmistakably alien to each other's practitioners. (Then there's informed autonomy. The Reform movement talks about it but doesn't do it; havurot do it but don't talk about it.)

takes accepts every least custom uncritically
as if it were on par w/ Decalogue Except in dealing w/ women

Though it would have been anachronistic to use this term at the time (and Rabbi Dreyfus probably wouldn't have used the term more recently either, since that wasn't his frame of reference, though he did know the founder of Artscroll, whose brother is/was a Reform rabbi), Rabbi Dreyfus is seems to be accusing the Catalog of what I would call Artscrollization. This process does not belong exclusively to the Orthodox world; I have accused the contemporary Reform movement of engaging in Artscrollization by (for example) conflating kipot and tallitot into the same category.

Note the use of the word "custom". It is clear from this word, and the examples below, that Rabbi Dreyfus is not taking issue here with the idea (found to some degree on Berachot 12a, and the reason the Ten Commandments aren't included in the daily liturgy) that all 613 mitzvot are as important as the Ten Commandments (though, if asked, he probably would). He is taking issue with the implication that peripheral customs are as essential as the fundamental elements of Judaism. And the Catalog doesn't always make this distinction clear. However, to be fair, the Catalog has many authors, and some chapters do a much better job than others at making this distinction.

The comment that I have rendered above in italics was written in a different pen, and seems to have been added in later.

By today's standards, The Jewish Catalog really isn't so gender-egalitarian. God and people are referred to with masculine pronouns. On p. 111, a minyan is defined as "a quorum of ten men", and the description of the wedding ceremony on p. 161-164 is the traditional unilateral procedure without exception. Alternatives are presented in a separate section called "On mutualizing the wedding ceremony", and the possibility of egalitarian minyanim and such is mentioned in the chapter titled "A guide to Jewish women's activities" (p. 252ff.), but this is not included as part of the mainstream text. Still, I suppose this is sufficient to make these issues an exception to "accepts every least custom uncritically".

a) Trivia: Candy & raisins at aufruf - sweet life
fertility: but nothing said

Page 162, discussing the "oyfrufn" (Rabbi Dreyfus has emended this to the German spelling) says "After the groom [sic] recites the final blessings, it is the custom to throw candy and raisins at him to insure a sweet life to him and his bride." So I'm guessing that Rabbi Dreyfus is taking issue with the language of "it is the custom", which implies that this is the only custom and ignores the existence of communities where this is not the custom.

The second line seems to be saying "Actually, this custom is about fertility, not just a sweet life; why are they whitewashing the origin and leaving this out?". I've never heard that explanation before, but it's not surprising.

b) Hallah - sensitivity - cover during kiddush
as against
Cover knives at table
Pass bread on plate
But meaningful only if constantly reviewed

Page 38 says:
"10. Knives on the table may be covered before this blessing. There is a tradition not to use a hallah knife at all on Friday night as a reflection of Isaiah's prophecy: 'And they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks' (Isaiah 2:4). In addition, the stone altar consecrated to God was not built of hewn stones, 'for by wielding your tools upon them you have profaned them' (Exodus 20:22). Rather than cut the hallah with a knife -- a weapon of war -- which thereby profanes the altar and the offering, the custom has developed to break the hallah apart with your hands.
[...]
"12. There is a custom not to hand the pieces of bread directly to those at the table, but rather to put them on a plate and pass the plate around, or to place each piece of bread on the person's plate. It is not from man that we receive our bread.
"13. When the blessing is made over the wine, the hallah should be covered. It is sensitive and may be offended by being placed second to the wine. A story is told about a famous rabbi who once visited a man for Shabbat. The man, trying to impress the rabbi, set out an elaborate meal in honor of Shabbat. He became annoyed when he noticed his wife had forgotten the hallah cover, and he began to berate her. The rabbi turned to the man and rebuked him, saying, 'The purpose of covering the hallah is to shield its sensitive feelings. This teaches us concern for the feeling of even inanimate objects. How much more so should we be sensitive to another human being!'"

(This last story brings to mind a great moment of bitter humor from Yisrael Campbell's show. In recounting the story of his journey towards converting to Judaism, Campbell tells about the time he first learned about this custom, and says that he thought "Wow! If Jews are this sensitive towards the feelings of the bread, imagine how they must act towards people!")

The phrase "as against" seems to be suggesting that the idea of protecting the hallah's feelings, even with the attached story, is rather tenuous, compared to the idea of eschewing weapons of war or remembering that our sustenance comes from God.

I'm not sure if this is what Rabbi Dreyfus is getting at, but I get annoyed with these sorts of explanations of the origins of customs (even if the ideas are nice) being presented as fact, since they are often post-facto explanations, and the customs often developed as mimetic traditions rather than as a drash.

So I'll take a middle position on whether these customs are "meaningful only if constantly reviewed". If they are in fact mimetic traditions, then they don't need to be either substantively "meaningful" or "constantly reviewed", since they are harmless. But if they are picked up from a book rather than received mimetically, then these (probably post-facto) meanings become more relevant. Still, the meanings are, in some sense, just mnemonics, and reviewing them by talking about them isn't necessarily the most effective way to achieve meaning. Rachel Adler writes (Engendering Judaism, p. 79), "The performative character of liturgical language (a notion that Reform Judaism in particular has found difficult to grasp) explains why 'Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Hosts' is effective as liturgy while 'Through prayer we struggle to experience the Presence of God,' however morally edifying, is liturgically inert. In the performative 'Holy, holy holy,' the congregation has the power to make God's holiness present by naming it in a threefold incantation. 'Through prayer we struggle to experience the Presence of God' rationally describes the goal of prayer, but offers no process for achieving it."

c) Tumah/taharah

There is a chapter called "Tumah and taharah - mikveh" (p. 167-171), which offers anthropological and midrashic explanations of tumah and taharah, and a section on "Laws and customs" that focuses on niddah and mikveh. (The Catalog notes "NOTE: I have not discovered any book in English on the laws of niddah and mikveh which was written for people above the intellectual level of a cretin.") Without any further comments, it's hard to guess what Rabbi Dreyfus specifically had in mind in regard to this section, since there are so many possibilities. This chapter commits the common error of classifying contemporary hilchot niddah under tumah/taharah (which is not observed today, when everyone is permanently tamei) rather than under arayot, but I doubt that that was his concern.

d) Mystic mishmash

I think the next few items (which are on another page) are intended as subheadings under this heading. But Rabbi Dreyfus also underlined the paragraph on p. 146 that talks about understanding the days of the omer as combinations of sefirot. I suppose getting annoyed at this runs in the family.

1) Gematria
2 candles as groom led to huppah
2 x [neir] = 250 =
500 = [peru urvu] = 500

(Note: Rabbi Dreyfus's original notes rendered those words in Hebrew, but I couldn't get it to align properly with the numbers in the Blogger window, so I gave up and transliterated.)

Page 46 says "The attendants who bring the groom to the huppah should hold in their hands two lit candles -- because the word נר --candle-- in gematria, doubled, is equivalent to the numerical value of פרו ורבו 'be fruitful and multiple.' And this is a good sign." Here and below, Rabbi Dreyfus has done the math for himself.

But to take it seriously!

Yeah. It's hard to see how anyone can say some of these explanations with a straight face. Clearly most of these customs had non-gematria origins, and the gematria is a post-facto game (but a much less interesting one than midrash halacha, and I say that as a "math person"). It can be entertaining, but I wouldn't go much further.

Some don't eat nuts on RH because
[egoz] (17) + 1 for word =
18 = חטא sin

There is a whole page on gematria (p. 210), describing it as "one of the haggadic hermeneutical rules for interpreting the Torah". (I missed that one on Rabbi Ishmael's list.) This page says "Sometimes when this does not work out exactly, you have the option to add 'one' for the world itself. Example: Why some do not eat nuts on Rosh ha-Shanah -- because אגוז (nuts) equals (almost) חטא (sin)." Come on. If there are people who don't eat nuts on Rosh Hashanah, that can't have been the original reason.

2) Scribal arts

There is a whole chapter on scribal arts, much of it practical in nature, but I'm guessing that Rabbi Dreyfus is taking issue with the part that gives kabbalistic explanations for each of the basic strokes. Example: "In Kabbalah, the yod is the symbol for the origin of light in the world, a pinpoint, a nekudah, a beginning musical note of a niggun, a fine point within the human being that lives in the Holy Image, the pintele Yid." (p. 187)

3) tie/mattress symbolize God's arms

I'm not sure what this is, or where to find it. (Did I mention that The Jewish Catalog doesn't have an index?) Help?

Counter culture

Picture of stiebel
vs elaborate [illegible] in Sed. Terumah

On p. 7, before the introduction, there is a full-page picture taken inside the Havurat Shalom building. Is this what he's referring to, or a picture elsewhere in the book? He seems to be contrasting the simplicity of a shtiebel (of either the older or the newer variety) with the elaborate design of the mishkan/tabernacle described in Parshat Terumah. Is this comparison made explicitly anywhere in the Catalog, or is this Rabbi Dreyfus's own comparison?

Attack on institutional Judaism

Guilty as charged. :) Except not really that much. There is a chapter called "Using the Jewish Establishment -- a reluctant guide" (p. 262-274), which begins by explaining why it's reluctant, but then doesn't really attack the Jewish establishment as much as one might expect. It says "One of our assumptions is that hardly anyone should have to resort to organizations, professional 'experts,' or service agencies in the normal course of creating and enjoying a fulfilling Jewish life. With this book, a teacher, friends (perhaps in a real community), study, and imaginative effort, almost anyone can create a richer and more satisfying Jewish life than any organization offers. There are, however, many Jewish organizations, agencies, congregations, associations, and the like which offer access to tools and resources useful in the creation of a Jewish life....." I don't read this as an attack, but just as a statement that people should be empowered to create their own Jewish lives, which is a goal that Jewish institutions should also be supporting.

Well, ok, there are some jabs as the chapter goes on. "Many pulpit rabbis are disappointing people, but if one looks he will find some who will be helpful. If one is looking for deep religious experience, it is generally best to avoid large synagogues. Like anything else, there are good and bad synagogues. If you don't like any in your area, you and your friends should start your own congregation." (p. 264) But maybe the institutions in question should see this as an opportunity for self-examination (and some have, in the intervening decades).

Self righteousness - see Waskow p. 250

P. 250 is a chapter called "How to bring Mashiah." Parts of it seem to be intended whimsically. At least I hope so. Rabbi Dreyfus has underlined two paragraphs:

"3. 'The nations ... shall beat their swords into plowshares. ... They shall never again know war' (Isaiah 2:4).
"THEREFORE: Get together a minyan and travel up to West Point. Take along ten swords and a small forge. Put the small forge in the main entrance, start it glowing, and beat the swords into something like a digging tool. Dig holes for ten trees, and plant the trees in the roadway. Meanwhile, sing 'Lo yisah goy' and 'Ain't Gonna Study War No More' alternately, and if any West Pointers stop to see what's going down, offer them a reworked sword to dig with.
"4. 'Mashiah will come when one generation is either wholly innocent or wholly guilty' (Talmud, Sanhedrin 98a)
"THEREFORE; Analyze the tax system of the United States, and publish a detailed answer to these two questions: (a) Are United States taxes used largely for purposes prohibited by Torah (e.g. oppressing the poor, destroying trees, etc.)? (b) Are any Jews in the United States successfully avoiding payment of all taxes? If the answer to (a) is 'Yes' and to (b) is 'No,' proclaim that the entire generation is guilty in fact, regardless of their personal opinions. Ask all shuls to include the proclamation in their Shabbat prayers with strong kavvanah: 'HaShem, we are at last all guilty: send him!'"

I would like to think that progressive activists (including Waskow) have gotten smarter about their tactics over the last 30 years. Somewhere between Vietnam and Iraq, we learned that blaming the troops, rather than the government who sent them into war, is unfair and unproductive. The West Point cadets are not the problem. "Support the troops -- bring them home."

And is Waskow really advocating tax evasion??? The answer to (b) is certainly yes, and they don't tend to be the Jews who share our values. To the extent that ordinary citizens bear blame for oppressive government policies, it's not because they paid their taxes (after all, we've seen during the Bush administration that the government will spend money destructively without regard to whether there is tax revenue to pay for it) but because they voted for the elected officials who implemented these policies. Any responsible progressive should be supporting the idea that taxes are the dues we pay to live in a civilized society, rather than reinforcing the Republican talking point that taxes are evil.

Values of book:

Here we get to the positive parts.

Caste system
[le?] rabbin [fait?] tout

I can't read this. Is it French? "The rabbi does everything"? Is this an allusion to something? Google isn't helping. I guess he's saying that it's a value that the book is encouraging people to do things for themselves rather than depending on the rabbi to do everything for them.

Involvement
Tallit/weaving
bake hallah
make candles
build sukkah

Again, Rabbi Dreyfus finds value in the nuts-and-bolts how-to sections that constitute much of the book, which empower people to do things for themselves.

Devotional guide

The last chapter is called "A first step: a devotional guide" and is by Rabbi Zalman Schachter.

Havurah

There is a section called "How to Start a Havurah" (p. 280ff.). It says "You begin with a shared dissent from existing Jewish institutions and their modes of participation, and a group decision to initiate an alternative model." What did Rabbi Dreyfus, who was committed to existing Jewish institutions, see in this? Unfortunately, we'll probably never know. These somewhat cryptic notes give us but a small glimpse into how much we have lost. For everything that he wrote down, there was so much that Rabbi Dreyfus knew and thought that was never written down, and now we can never ask him.

For now, if you have additional interpretations of anything here, please post it in the comments.

Rabbi Dr. A. Stanley Dreyfus z"l

My grandfather, Rabbi Dr. A. Stanley Dreyfus, died on Tuesday. The funeral is this afternoon in Brooklyn. Several reflections by his students have appeared on the blogosphere already, including two posts by Rabbi Andy Bachman and a post by Ravaj.

UPDATE: Other links include a response on Mixed Multitudes, a brief obituary in the JTA, multiple death notices in the New York Times, and a press release from HUC-JIR. The press release quotes his ordination address from June 1979, the day I became the first fetus in history to be ordained as a rabbi.

The 21st-century Jewish Catalog (alpha version)

The question is often asked, "I want to start an independent Jewish community in my city. How do I do it?". And in this age of social networking, there are certainly networks of people who can be of assistance with this. But there is no written repository of information I am aware of that meets the needs of today's independent Jewish communities, just a lot of oral Torah drawn from what we've learned through our experiences. Oral Torah is a wonderful thing, but there's a reason that the Talmud eventually had to be written down, and a reason that the printing press was so influential.

Another question often asked is "What will be our generation's Jewish Catalog?"

Perhaps the answer to both of these questions isn't necessarily a book, and isn't necessarily a single static document. Maybe the Jewish Catalog of the 21st century already exists in some sense, but is more like the British constitution (comprising multiple documents written at different times) than like the United States Constitution (a single document). To put these into a usable form, I'm collecting links to blog posts and other documents that could be considered to constitute the 21st-century Jewish Catalog. Perhaps the online format is preferable to the paper format, because it allows for rapid publication, frequent editing, and a dynamic conversation (for a number of the blog posts linked below, the discussion in the comments is at least as important as the post itself).

This is just a first stab at collecting this information into one place. This list focuses on topics that are relevant to running a grassroots Jewish community. The original Jewish Catalog and its sequels also contained lots of other content about Judaism and Jewish life in general, but that sort of information is generally available already in various places, so there's less of an acute need for it.

Please post in the comments if you have suggestions of other posts/pages that should be linked, and I'll add them to the list if I agree. Please also post suggestions of other documents that don't yet exist but should be written, and then our grassroots out there will take responsibility for writing these posts. The preponderance of Mah Rabu posts on the initial list isn't because I think Mah Rabu is more important, but simply because it's what I'm most familiar with off the top of my head; together, we can index the whole Internet.

Remember that the authors of each of the linked posts retain all rights to their work. All are welcome to read these posts, implement the ideas within them, and quote them within fair use, but not to republish them without the authors' permission.

Pluralism:

• BZ, Taxonomy of Jewish pluralism
• BZ, Hilchot Pluralism series: I (the two-table system), II (more philosophical underpinnings), III (prayer, including the trichitza), IV (liturgy), V (counting a minyan), VI (the limits of pluralism), VII (musical instruments)
  

Potlucks:

• EAR, The twoheadsoflettuce Guide to Delicious, Sustainable, Efficient, and Pluralistic Potlucks

Prayer engineering:

• Two different views on seating configurations for prayer, from ZT and BZ
• BZ, You Kant always get what you want - after a lengthy theoretical introduction, there is practical commentary on prayer space, prayer times, and volunteer-led communities
• ZT, Preparing a prayer space

Prayer melodies and texts:

• from Kol Zimrah, a collection of melodies for Friday night services
• from Mechon Hadar, a collection of resources for minyanim, including printed documents and recordings of nusach
  

Starting a community:

• Elie Kaunfer, Attracting Young People to Jewish Life: Lessons Learned from Kehilat Hadar

That's just a very basic start. What else goes on the list?

Henry Winkler... covered in bees

I have an apartment! So as promised, I'm returning to blogging, though other things are still in limbo, so this isn't quite a full return yet.

Last week we saw part of Little Nicky on TV. It may not be Adam Sandler's best movie, but it's certainly his most underrated; few people have heard of it. (Though maybe I'm biased because this was the movie that led to my 15 minutes of fame. Sorry, Jewish Week, but the Village Voice is way cooler.) It's also the movie that contains the best Hebrew subtitle ever. The line "Popeye's chicken is the shiznit" is rendered as "Popeye's chicken yoteir tov mi-schnitzel" ("Popeye's chicken is better than schnitzel").

This was my first time seeing Little Nicky since moving to New York 6 years ago, so I caught a lot of things that I missed the first time around. For example, the subway train that hits Nicky multiple times (in his travels between Earth and hell) is the K express. Now I understand that there is no K train. (The other letters not currently used in the subway system are H, I (for obvious reasons), O, P, T, U, X, and Y.)

So let's use the comment thread to think of analogous examples of nonexistent (but real-sounding) geographic features in New York or other real cities appearing in movies (or books, TV, etc.). The Royal Tenenbaums (another movie that I first saw in Israel -- the theater audience giggled at every mention of the bird named Mordechai -- and should really see again now that I'll get the New York references) is a gold mine, including the 375th Street Y (based on the 92nd Street Y; the highest numbered street in the Manhattan street grid is 263rd, and that's in the Bronx) and the Irving Island Ferry (based on the Staten Island Ferry; there is a real Irving Island, but it's off the coast of Antarctica).

Change of continent

Oh right. I suppose I should mention that I'm back in North America, viz. the City and State (but not yet the County) of New York. I'll return to more frequent blogging after I find an apartment. If you'd like to help speed that along, please send apartment leads my way.

Future posts:

• More pictures from Israel, the West Bank, and Jordan
  
• More in-depth analysis of the Reform and Conservative teshuvot about 1-day vs. 2-day yom tov (now that we've obtained the full text)
  
• Egalitarianism = halacha l'Moshe miSinai, and electricity = kitniyot; or, the other "Jewish continuity" (continuity of Judaism, not of Jews): toward resolving the contradictions between (ethnic) Reform Jewry and (ideological) Reform Judaism
• "Rooftop": the fugu of davening styles
  

Endorsement: Obama in '08

Ages ago, I posted that I voted for John Edwards in the New York Democratic presidential primary, and then, after Edwards ended his campaign, I didn't endorse a candidate in the primary. (Well, none in the Democratic primary anyway.)

As promised, now that the primary is over, and everyone in the reality-based community acknowledges that Barack Obama will be the Democratic nominee, Mah Rabu is ready to make an endorsement:

BARACK OBAMA FOR PRESIDENT


"We look back on the past [seven and a half] years with hearts nearly breaking." And after all of the destruction that the Bush administration has wrought for America and the world, we have a choice. We can circumvent the 22nd Amendment and extend the Bush administration for another four years by electing a candidate who is indistinguishable from Bush, all the way down to painting himself as a moderate during election season. Or we can elect a progressive who will truly restore honor and dignity to the White House.

Combined with the anticipated massive gains in the House and Senate (with the possibility of a filibuster-proof and even a Lieberman-proof majority in the Senate), electing a Democratic president will provide a window to pass progressive legislation that will shape the country's future for decades, like the New Deal and the Great Society. (And if you're not into government programs, vote for Bob Barr!) John Paul Stevens isn't getting any younger, and electing a Democratic president will ensure that the next generation of Supreme Court justices (and federal judges across the country) will defend our civil liberties; electing McBush to a third term will guarantee more Robertses and Alitos who will sit on the Court for decades to come.

The primary season has been long, but I have to say that I got everything I wished for, along with some things I would have rather done without. I think it's wonderful that voters in all 50 states (and 5 territories) had the opportunity to cast votes that mattered, rather than letting Iowa and New Hampshire decide the nomination for everyone. And it's great that millions of new Democratic voters have registered, and that Democratic infrastructure has been built in all 50 states, including states that the Democratic Party previously ignored. But I do wish the campaign had proceeded with a more productive tone, with each candidate promoting their strengths and aiming the attacks at the Republicans, rather than attacking each other in ways that will be used against them later. With that modification, I'm all in favor of a primary season that reaches as many states as possible before crowning a winner.

The procedures and rules of the Democratic primary will certainly have to be revisited and revised between now and 2012. But I think that's something that we can save for after the election, rather than undermining the legitimacy of the nomination now. But first of all: Smokey, this is not Nam. There are rules. Whatever rules are decided -- superdelegates or no superdelegates, primaries or caucuses, nomination decided by number of delegates or by nationwide popular vote or by rock-paper-scissors-couch -- all of the candidates should be expected to agree in a public forum to the legitimacy of the process, down to all its details, at the beginning of the campaign, and not to challenge the process until it's time to think about 2016. This is a league game. This determines who enters the next round robin. Am I wrong? Furthermore, the dates of the primaries/caucuses/tugs-of-war/whatever should be set from on high by the national party committee (which has members from every state), with individual states having absolutely no say in the timing of their nominating contests (beyond, perhaps, choosing a date from within a very short range of dates dictated to them). This is the only way to avoid anarchy, and an election season that is nasty, brutish, and long. (And I'm not just talking about what happened with Florida and Michigan; I'm also talking about the race for Super Tuesday, and the duopoly of Iowa and New Hampshire.) Any pledged delegates selected at any time outside of the date range decided by the national party will not be seated at the convention, and no appeals will be heard (and all the candidates will agree to this in advance). Mark it zero!

Now that the primary is over, let's unite in supporting our nominee, Barack Obama.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention: This campaign represents a lot of firsts, but among everything else, let's welcome our first president from the South Side of Chicago!!!

Moses went walking with the staff of wood

The nine-year wait is over! This Friday is the Jerusalem premiere of the Automatic for the People kabbalat shabbat! Email mahrabu at gmail to find out where and when, and read on to find out what it's all about.

Has the patent expired?

Someone got to Mah Rabu via a Google search for "what year was pluralism invented in" (without the quotes). Anyone out there want to field this question?

Welcome, Jewish Week readers!

If you found your way to Mah Rabu through the URL in the Jewish Week article, welcome! Here are information and links for the other things in the article if you're looking.

Here is the world-famous Hilchot Pluralism series. Reading in order is recommended, and there are some great discussions in the comments.

Here's Jewschool.

Kol Zimrah meets once a month for musical Friday night services and a potluck Shabbat dinner, and the next one will be on Friday, June 13, in a Manhattan park to be announced.

The 2008 National Havurah Committee Summer Institute, a multigenerational nondenominational egalitarian pluralistic gathering of Jewish living and learning, will be August 11-17 at Franklin Pierce University in Rindge, New Hampshire (90 minutes from Boston). And yes, there are significant scholarships available. Register now!

Here's a piece about why Kol Zimrah, the NHC, etc., are important.

Sefer Ha-Bloggadah will begin this summer at the NHC Summer Institute and continue until the 2010 Institute. All are invited to take part in this international virtual group study as Sefer Ha-Aggadah celebrates 100 years, and you're also invited to start a non-virtual participating group in your community. To get updates on what's happening next, join the email list, and then starting in August, there will be postings and discussion every day on the blog.

Here's Twizzlers Pull-N-Peel, an important educational tool.

Lag Ba'omer clarification

I wrote a post a few years ago about why I don't observe Lag Ba'omer. But I should clarify: I do in fact count the 33rd day of the omer. I don't skip straight from 32 to 34. (If I did, I would be observing Shavuot a day earlier than everyone else.)

One-day yom tov: Beyond "Israelis are lazy"

Here at Mah Rabu, we also spend a lot of time talking about one-day yom tov. And the halfway point between two yamim tovim seems an appropriate time to do some more of that. This post will look critically at some of the ways that the 1-day vs. 2-day yom tov question is framed, and (if you want to skip ahead to the technical parts) culminate with a list in progress that you're invited to add to.

It is a little-known fact that the Conservative movement's Committee on Jewish Law and Standards (CJLS) passed a teshuva in 1963 saying that observing 1 day of yom tov is a valid option (along with other teshuvot saying that it isn't). So consider this a public service announcement for anyone out there who accepts the CJLS as an authority (and sees him/herself as a mara d'atra, or doesn't buy into the whole mara d'atra thing): you now have 1 day of yom tov as an approved option.

I can't find the actual teshuvot online anywhere (including the RA website), but one site has summaries of the conclusions. And the conclusions are the important part: the set of classical sources about the essence of yom tov sheini is very limited, and familiar to anyone who has looked into this issue, so it's unlikely that the teshuvot disagree on which sources they cite or what the sources say; their disagreement is surely about what to conclude from the sources. So the most pro-1-day teshuva, by Rabbis Philip Sigal and Abraham J. Ehrlich, says: "We declare that yom tov sheni is not a hok, a permanent enactment, but a minhag, a custom. Congregations need not feel compelled to observe other than the second day of Rosh Ha-Shanah. On the other hand, those who still desire to maintain it as an expression of personal piety, as a chumrah, might do so, vetavo aleihem berakhah, may God bless them."

I hear that Rabbis Sigal and Ehrlich went on to say: "People need not feel compelled to put more than four fringes on their tallitot. On the other hand, those who desire to wear five fringes as an expression of personal piety, as a chumrah, might do so, vetavo aleihem berakhah, may God bless them." But seriously, come on! If someone has a personal minhag to observe 2 days and is in a community that observes 1 day, I can certainly empathize with their decision to uphold their minhag, since I've been in the reverse situation many times. But I don't understand the perspective that affirms keeping one day, but then says that keeping two days is praiseworthy. Would they hold that it's even more praiseworthy to observe yom tov for three days, or to observe yom tov for the entire year and never do any work? As I alluded to with the tzitzit analogy, observing a non-yom tov day as yom tov is not meritorious; rather, it may be a violation of the biblical commandment of bal tosif. If you have a minhag that that day is yom tov and act on that minhag, then that's just fine, but then you're not displaying "personal piety", you're just being true to your understanding of the calendar. (One could make an argument that it is "personal piety" to refrain from work on the 2nd day of Pesach or Sukkot, since it's chol hamo'ed, but that argument wouldn't apply to the 8th day of Pesach, etc.)

Furthermore, it's not entirely true, on a technical level, that keeping two days of yom tov is a chumra. We'll get to that later.

My thinking about how to frame the 1-day versus 2-day options is much more in line with a 1999 CCAR teshuva that doesn't rule out observing 2 days, but advises extreme caution. It says in part: "For when we declare a second day of yom tov, we are not simply making a statement of identity, planning a creative worship experience, or arranging an experiment in spirituality. We are declaring a festival. When we say that a day is a yom tov, we mark it as holy; we transform it from ordinary time into sacred time; we make kodesh out of chol. We arrogate to ourselves the power of the ancient Sanhedrin to announce to the Jewish world--indeed, even to God--that such-and-such a date shall be a festival. And when we declare a yom tov sheni, that is, a festival day on a date that according to the Torah is not a festival at all, we create an actual festival day with all its relevant duties and restrictions."

(Read on for even stronger language, which I'm not quoting only because it applies mainly to the specific case. The question at hand was about "stretching" Shavuot to two days when the "2nd day" is on Shabbat. But the CCAR's rebuke should also be extended to those Reform and Reconstructionist congregations that generally observe 1 day of yom tov but then celebrate "Simchat Torah" on 23 Tishrei, to be cool like the cool kids. Of course, "Simchat Torah" has no fixed date and can be celebrated on any day of the year (yom tov or not), though doing it on 9 Av might be tacky. But, for the reasons stated in this teshuva, it is problematic to treat 23 Tishrei as a yom tov, in a milieu that does not otherwise recognize two days of yom tov. I don't care if everyone else is doing it. As I've said before, unity should not come at the expense of authenticity.)

The (summaries of the) other CJLS teshuvot make it clear that (at least based on these teshuvot, not looking at actual practice) the Reform movement takes the concept of yom tov far more seriously than the Conservative movement does.

The second teshuva, by Rabbi Wilfred Shuchat, calls for keeping 2 days of yom tov, and makes a slippery-slope argument: "If, however, the second day of Yom Tov were eliminated, it would not be long before the first day would fall into desuetude. We have living proof of this contention. A large and influential religious movement in Judaism has eliminated the second day of Yom Tov for the past two [sic] generations. De facto, if not de jure, the first day no longer exists as a significant factor in that movement." Rabbi Shuchat appears to believe that leaping from correlation to causation constitutes "living proof". I won't deny that both claims are true (the Reform movement has eliminated the second day of yom tov, and yom tov is not a "significant factor" in the practice of many Reform-identified Jews), but the causal link between them is without basis, and smacks of the usual intellectually lazy "If we did that, we'd be Reform" argument. Even the correlation can be knocked flat with a simple and significant counterexample: has yom tov "fall[en] into desuetude" in Israel?

The summary continues, "Rabbi Shuchat concludes by saying that he would agree to the elimination of Yom Tov Sheni if it were to come from a recognized halakhic body in the land of Israel." Don't hold your breath for any halakhic bodies in Israel to say anything one way or the other on this topic. They are, of course, already observing 1 day of yom tov, and don't generally make pronouncements about what people outside Israel should be doing. Rabbi Shuchat appears to believe that, when it comes to issues such as this, Israeli rabbis have jurisdiction in the Diaspora, but Diaspora rabbis don't have jurisdiction in the Diaspora. EV has a new comic out about this phenomenon.

The third teshuva, by Rabbi Aaron Blumenthal, says "that it would be tragic for us to initiate a program which must lead inevitably to the abandonment of the second day of the festivals. Let those who have no alternative... not feel that they are in violation of halakhah if they observe only one day. But we cannot condone the initiation of discussions about the second day in those Congregations which do have regular and meaningful services on it." The last sentence highlights a major failing of American liberal Judaism. Its emphasis is not on whether we should (as the CCAR teshuva says) declare a festival and "transform it from ordinary time into sacred time", nor on whether individuals and families should observe the positive and negative mitzvot of yom tov, but rather, on "services" in "Congregations". The implication is that regular people are insignificant sheep, with no independent motivation to pursue Jewish observance, and what really matters is what goes on in the synagogue. And of course, there is nothing preventing a congregation from having "regular and meaningful services" on 7 Sivan if it wishes (regardless of whether those services use the yom tov or the weekday liturgy), or any other day of the year. If congregational services are held up as the reason for keeping 2 days of yom tov, then this exactly is what the CCAR teshuva warns about when it says that declaring a day as yom tov isn't only about "arranging an experiment in spirituality" (even if the Conservative movement of the 1960s wouldn't have used the word "spirituality").

Neither of these CJLS teshuvot takes yom tov very seriously if they're willing to declare a day as yom tov in order to achieve short-term public policy objectives (maintaining "meaningful services" or, based on dubious evidence, preventing the apathy towards yom tov found in the Reform movement).

Furthermore, an underlying assumption in all three teshuvot is that keeping one day of yom tov is doing less, while keeping two days is more machmir (stringent). The argument in support of this assumption is self-evident, but I want to present some evidence against it (in addition to the bal tosif argument above). I've started making a list of ways in which keeping one day can actually result in practices that are more stringent than keeping two days, and you're invited to add to the list.

• The most significant one for me (albeit less technical than the ones below) is that "ששת ימים תעבד" (six days you shall work) is a positive commandment, and observing 1 day of yom tov means working on more of the six days of creation. Getting up at 5:30 AM (after staying up all night and then squeezing 2 nights' worth of sleep into a 22-hour period) to take the train back into the city from the Shavuot Retreat and go to work on 7 Sivan doesn't feel like leniency to me.
• Tefillin is the canonical example that comes up in discussions of 2-day yom tov observers visiting Israel. For those who wear tefillin, it's required on 23 Tishrei, 22 Nisan, and 7 Sivan for 1-day yom tov observers (and possibly on 16 Tishrei and 16 Nisan, but it depends on one's minhag), but not for 2-day yom tov observers.
  
• When the first day of Sukkot or Pesach falls on Thursday, two-day yom tov observers may cook on Thursday for Shabbat (provided that they have set up an eruv tavshilin in advance), while one-day yom tov observers may not. [UPDATE: Never mind. See comments.]
  
• If someone is buried during chol hamo'ed, the shiv'ah clock begins ticking (for everyone) at the end of the biblical festival (i.e. the 7th day of Pesach or the 1st day of Shemini Atzeret), but mourners who observe 2 days of yom tov don't begin actual mourning until the end of the 2nd day of yom tov. Thus, 1-day yom tov observers observe an additional day of shiv'ah in this case.
• (This came up on the Hadar Shavuot Retreat last year.) At the conclusion of the 1st day of yom tov (assuming that neither day is Shabbat), 2-day yom tov observers may start ma'ariv earlier (to bring in the 2nd day of yom tov early), while 1-day yom tov observers have to wait until later. (The precise times are a matter of disagreement, but I think the relative times are accurate.)
  
• (One-day yom tov observers may be obligated in lulav when the 1st day of Sukkot falls on Shabbat, but that's a controversial position.)
• What else belongs on the list?
  

The one good thing Bush has done in 8 years

The shuk was much less crowded than normal today, since no one can get to it.

במשך היובל המה יעלו בהר

Here at Mah Rabu, we spend a fair amount of time on Hebrew calendar minutiae because, well, we can. But I'm sure the other calendar geeks out there can identify with the feeling of the excitement level of this stuff reaching a plateau. Once you think you know all the fun facts -- that July 4, 1776 fell on 17 Tammuz, or that the Hebrew and Gregorian year numbers will be equal starting in the year 317,760,208 (on both calendars!) -- it seems like there aren't going to be any more surprises.

On Sunday, I found out I was wrong. It's still possible to blow my mind about this stuff, like finding out that there was a solar calendar (though not a very good one) that was fully compatible with the biblical holidays.

I heard a lecture on Sunday by Dr. Michael Segal, author of a new book about the Book of Jubilees. The Book of Jubilees is a Jewish sectarian text from the 2nd century BCE. It was written in Hebrew, but only fragments of the Hebrew original have survived (at Qumran). Since the book is part of the canon of the Ethiopian Church, the only language in which the full text has survived is Ge'ez, and it has since been translated back into Hebrew and other languages.

The calendar in the Book of Jubilees is a solar calendar, with a 364-day year. This means the year divides exactly into 52 weeks, so a given date falls on the same day of the week every year. Furthermore, the year is divided into 4 quarters of 91 days, or exactly 13 weeks. Each quarter is divided into 3 months, of 30, 30, and 31 days. Thus the calendar of each quarter looks exactly the same!

You're probably wondering what happens to the extra 1 1/4 days every year. And it's a good question; we're all worried about the Hebrew lunisolar calendar because it's off by 1 day every ~200 years, but an error of more than one day every year has to be much worse! But the answer is that no one really knows. It's an important feature of this calendar that dates fall on the same day every year, but they can't simply add a day or two at the end of the year without a day of the week (as in the proposed World Calendar), because we would have heard about it if there had been Jewish sects observing Shabbat on a different day! That would make Shavuot (a major concern for the rabbis) look like peanuts.

Like the rabbinic solar calendar which we use to determine the date of birkat hachamah, the Book of Jubilees solar calendar relies on the fact that the sun was created on Wednesday (the fourth day of creation) in the biblical narrative. Unlike the rabbinic solar calendar, you don't have to wait 28 years for the anniversary of the sun's creation to cycle back to Wednesday; since the year is a whole number of weeks, it happens every year! Nay, every quarter! Thus, the first day of each quarter falls on Wednesday, corresponding theoretically to the solstices and equinoxes (but, I imagine, having little resemblance to astronomical reality after a very short time, thanks to the aforementioned 1 1/4-day error). So the 1st, 4th, 7th, and 10th months always begin on Wednesday; the 2nd, 5th, 8th, and 11th months begin on Friday; and the 3rd, 6th, 9th, and 12th months begin on Sunday; and that's all you need to know.

Now let's look at the holidays. Rosh Hashanah (1st day of the 7th month) is always on Wednesday, and Yom Kippur (10th of the month) is on Friday. That has to be annoying. (Our calendar is rigged so that Yom Kippur can never fall on Friday).

The 1st month (what we would call Nisan, but the Book of Jubilees, like the Torah, refers to the months only by number) begins on Wednesday, so the first day of Pesach (15 Nisan) is also on Wednesday. So when does the omer begin, to count 7 weeks toward Shavuot? The Torah says "the day after the sabbath", but what day is "the sabbath"? The Book of Jubilees agrees neither with the rabbis/Pharisees ("the sabbath" = the 1st day of Pesach, 15 Nisan) nor with the Sadducees/Boethusians (the Shabbat during Pesach, whatever date that may be); it understands "the sabbath" as the Shabbat after the end of Pesach, which is always 25 Nisan. So the omer begins on Sunday, 26 Nisan. Add 7 weeks (recalling that the 1st and 2nd month both have 30 days), and Shavuot always falls on Sunday, 15 Sivan! So all three pilgrimage festivals are on the 15th of the month! Ironic that this only happens in the solar calendar, in which the 15th of the month has no astronomical significance. BTW, the Book of Jubilees also has Shavuot as both the agricultural festival of the first fruits and the time of receiving the Torah, and is the earliest extant text that explicitly links Shavuot to the revelation at Sinai.

Yosef Caro was one clever bastard

The section of the Shulchan Aruch dealing with public fasts called for various emergencies, on which the shofar is sounded, is Orach Chayim siman 576 (תקעו).

ברוך שכיונתי

A while ago I said:

You might say that an inverse-square force is infinite when r=0, but I would respond that classical electromagnetism doesn't really allow point charges, but only finite-density charge distributions. This probably means we should be a little bit more careful about using point charges in all our examples, but they're useful approximations if we don't think too hard about it. But point charges can't exist because they would result in infinite electric fields, which results in infinite energy density, and if you integrate the energy over any finite volume containing a point charge, you get infinite energy.

So I certainly wasn't the first one with that idea. The Feynman Lectures, volume II chapter 8, does the same integral, gets an infinite result, and concludes:

We must conclude that the idea of locating the energy in the field is inconsistent with the assumption of the existence of point charges. One way out of the difficulty would be to say that elementary charges, such as an electron, are not points but are really small distributions of charge. Alternatively, we could say that there is something wrong in our theory of electricity at very small distances, or with the idea of the local conservation of energy. There are difficulties with either point of view. These difficulties have never been overcome; they exist to this day.

I'm going to go with choice B ("there is something wrong in our theory of electricity at very small distances"), where "our theory of electricity" means classical electromagnetism. In quantum mechanics, even "point charges" aren't really localized at a point. But then I wonder what Feynman meant when he said "these difficulties ... exist to this day", since he himself was one of the main people responsible for quantum electrodynamics. So I'll have to learn QED one day and get back to you.

Nothing in the streets looks any different to me

(Crossposted to Jewschool.)

As Israel prepares to celebrate 60 years of ambiguity in this department, it’s been a big week for issues of religion and state. And here’s the latest news:

Israel’s Reform Jews dedicated the first non-Orthodox synagogue to receive state funding on Monday, after a long court battle that accented the rift among streams of Judaism in Israel.

The Reform Yozma congregation fought for the better part of a decade for state funding equivalent to what Orthodox congregations receive. After arguing their case twice before the Supreme Court, they got what they wanted: a prefabricated, two-room building on a plot of land in the center of Modiin, a new town between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

“This is a substantial step in recognizing different streams of Judaism in the state of Israel,” said Rabbi Kinneret Shiryon, who leads the 240-family congregation. The government has long funded Orthodox synagogues, even paying rabbi’s salaries.

The Reform movement is trumpeting this as a huge victory. And I can see why it would feel good to finally get a piece of the pie. But I’m not feeling so great about it. I want to see a thriving liberal Jewish culture in Israel, but I fear that this development, insofar as it sets a precedent, is dangerous for liberal Judaism in the long run. (And if it doesn’t set a precedent, then it’s an insignificant anomaly.)

Yes, there are some potential positive results, even for those of us who want to see separation of church and state in Israel. The Supreme Court ruling could set a legal precedent that leads to other rulings weakening the Orthodox monopoly over government functions (e.g. government recognition of non-Orthodox Jewish marriages, or even better, establishment of civil marriage), and could sow seeds of chaos among the Orthodox factions (e.g. if they can’t countenance being part of an apparatus that funds Reform Jewish institutions, and decide to take their ball and go home) leading also to the weakening of state-sponsored religion. But these outcomes seem indirect and unlikely.

Suppose this ruling isn’t a freak occurrence, but rather leads to further funding of liberal Jewish institutions. Then a more likely outcome is, at best, that the Reform movement will find itself in the role of propping up a corrupt system. Yes, the Reform movement might continue to pay lip service to separation of church and state, but deep down, it’s going to have a vested interest in the continued existence of the institution that gives it its funding, so the Reform movement will wake up one morning and find itself allied with the forces of antidisestablishmentarianism.

At worst, the Reform movement itself will become part of the corruption. As liberal Jews, we can read every day in the newspaper about the unethical activities of the Orthodox establishment, and pat ourselves on the back for being untainted by these transgressions. But the real reason that liberal Judaism has steered clear of this rampant corruption isn’t because liberal Jews are congenitally predisposed to be better human beings, but simply because we haven’t been in power. The purpose of laws and governments is to protect us from the darker side of our human nature, and likewise, one purpose of separation of church and state is to protect us from the perversion of religion that inevitably occurs when religious authority is entangled with political authority.

Our tradition is full of warnings about the dangers of mixing religion and state. In the ancient Israelite monarchy, the king was NOT the religious authority; the prophets (who transmitted the words of God) were independent from the king, and were free to criticize the king openly when he went off the right path. One reason the rabbis of the Talmud couldn’t stand the Hasmoneans was because they combined the priesthood with the monarchy, leading to corruption in both religion and government. And it is the prophets and rabbis who are our models today, not the kings.

And now in our time, the Israeli rabbanut has become a latter-day Hasmonean dynasty. If the Reform movement wants to maintain its moral authority, it has to steer clear of this system. A great and knowledgeable prophet (in another tradition) once warned that “all knowledge seeming innocent and pure becomes a deadly weapon in the hands of avarice and greed”. The motive of promoting liberal Judaism in Israel may seem innocent and pure today, but if it becomes entangled with the political authority that has thus far been under Orthodox monopoly, it will become just another deadly weapon.

Taking the high road and avoiding getting mixed up in the mess of established religion seems to me not only to be more moral, but also more convenient. Despite this groundbreaking ruling, the Reform movement’s quest to get government funding for more synagogues is going to be an uphill battle. Instead of starting this fight for funding, wouldn’t it have been a lot easier to just declare victory and go home, and score points with the public by saying “We don’t want any of your dirty money”?

It is no coincidence that liberal Judaism has prospered the most in the United States, where separation of church and state is enshrined in the Constitution. And it is no coincidence that the US is one of the most religious countries in the world, while European countries with established churches have populations that are apathetic to religion, and most Israelis are more interested in New-Age spirituality than in Judaism. Religion is most successful as a moral voice when it is decoupled from coercive governmental authority and patronage machines, and the liberal movements in Israel should be leading the fight to make that a reality, rather than simply trying to be admitted to the club.

As Israel celebrates 60 years, we can dream about what Israel can and should be. I want to see an Israel where Jewish culture is the majority culture (Jewish holidays are national holidays, Hebrew is spoken, etc.) and Jewish values are actualized (society doesn’t stand by while its members are living in poverty), but religion is not legislated or funded by the state, and people are equally free to pursue any religion (or no religion) and any religious stream without government interference.