HEY JEWS

I don't care who that guy is, really, but who PUBLISHED his bullshit whining, anyway?

these guys: http://amimagazine.org/

it's a frummie magazine

wow. this isn't the standard dynamic of employment in haredi communities, is it? on reflection, i definitely see more women than men working in the communities near my neighbourhood but i can't imagine that this situation is the norm...

definitely not the standard, and not the standard (afaik) in most chassidic communities. i could be wrong about this, but i think it's a uniquely non-chassidic right-wing charedi phenomenon (and really probably only among certain students attending probably 2-3 dozen schools throughout the country).

From this Tablet Mag interview with Sam Harris:

Well, that’s the kind of uniquely distorting lens of Judaism, because only a Jew could say I am an Orthodox Jew but I don’t believe in God. That is not an oxymoron in the same way as it would be to say I’m a devout Catholic who doesn’t believe that Jesus was the Son of God, or I’m a devout Muslim who doesn’t believe the Quran is the word of God. Judaism is, in every form, the least committed to a clear otherworldly vision of what happens after death. You can be a Jew for whom all of the trappings of Judaism, the religion, are very important, and yet there’s absolutely no content to your religious beliefs. You like the food. You like the music. You like the clothes. You like the ethical strictures and the weird rituals, and the limitations on your freedom that can only make sense based on some kind of theology that you now no longer endorse.

Uh oh!

Yeah, so what? It's fun to do those things! That's basically the mission statement of Reconstructionist Judaism right there.

I would sort of like to see the rest of the context of that statement.

I don't think he's entirely wrong, but I think you'd find a lot fewer atheist jews in an orthodox synagogue than in a reform one, and I also find the statement about afterlife kind of a non-sequitur -- I don't understand why believing in god is necessarily linked with an afterlife.

there's some story that i don't remember clearly at the moment about someone smoking a cigar on shabbos while learning talmud, and when they ask him why, he says, "because it's geshmak!" also, i guess there was a rumor that some students at Slobodka yeshiva used to smoke on Shabbat:

"Their studies were not limited to mathematics. Often before class they would engage in deep Talmudic disputation, "…often without yarmulkes, on Shabbos, smoking cigarettes. They just loved to learn Talmud. It is hard for us to understand that frame of mind. We only associate ‘learning’ with the religious experience, while they learned purely for intellectual motives," Rabbi Wein observed in one of his taped "Biography" lectures."

nb i have no idea how true this is (i don't even know if rabbi wein said it was true in that 'lecture')

oh, forgot to post the link above, it's here:
http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-life-and-religion/100757/qa-sam-harris/

other interesting stuff in the interview too

Harris makes this point again in a debate alongside Christopher Hitchens with two Jewish scholars: Youtube (go to 1:25:00). Hitchens quips that Jews have a "gene for atheism."

I have no educated opinion one way or another.

http://www.haaretz.com/weekend/magazine/when-you-re-on-the-path-of-truth-you-don-t-care-what-others-say-1.419078

what path is this guy on:

http://2012.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/06/kosher-sex-celebrity-rabbi-shmuley-boteach-wins-nj-9-gop-primary.php?ref=fpnewsfeed

hey jews

http://www.1-800-dreidel.com/images/products/detail/ShalomanHanukkahCollection.jpg

cool

can we talk about how insanely fucked up bar mitzvah parties have become?

i went to my cousin's kids bar mitzvah last week. the service is at a conservative temple, long and boring obv. at one point my yarmulke falls off for the 3rd time so i just give up on it, until some lady pokes me in the back and says "cover your head". And then the party part was insane! 1) 13 yr old girls wearing the shortest skirts i have ever seen, like beyond prostitutes on street corners. 2) there are people paid to lead the kids in dancing and playing games. 3) WTF at 13 year olds passing around a mic talking about how great the bar mitvah'd kid is like he has just come back from iraq or something. the ego stroking is insane. 4) the dance games consist of a musical chairs type thing except when the music stops the girls and boys have to hug each other(!) and if you don't have a boy/girl to hug, you are out. 5) they are serving bacon at brunch -.-

Most of that sounds roughly like when I was on the bar/bat mitzvah circuit a decade ago. Never had bacon at a bar mitzvah function though.

I'm pretty sure that when you get up into quid/ag territory the parties get a lot scarier.

By the way the one time I kissed/made out with my middle school girlfriend was in the coat closet at the synagogue during her bat mitzvah party.

A couple years ago I was at a cousin's bat mitzvah and they were handing around lamb chops as hors d'ouerves, that was an amazing innovation imo. Had like twelve.

one for each tribe

tell me what u guys think: http://chakira.org/2012/06/14/jewish-gothic-horror-stories-from-lakewood/

wow, what a fascinating and bizarre story.

i feel like i am missing a lot here.

but i'm intrigued, gonna read your urban legend piece.

cat in the cholent, eh?

Awesome I'm so glad you picked up on the old-west ghost-story feel of that particular legend!

hey s1ocki -- it was kinda written for a maybe more insider audience. what kind of stuff did you feel like you were missing? i'll clean it up in the original

oh i don't think it's really missing anything, it just sort of takes place in a context way more "deep-jewish" than i'm used to!

oh yeah, lakewood is hardcore

also the whole idea of invoking hell and eternal punishment is so alien to me in a jewish context

after many years of searching, i finally got a digital copy of this album:

http://static.mostlymusic.com/media/catalog/product/cache/2/image/250x/9df78eab33525d08d6e5fb8d27136e95/1/9/197_3.jpg

sorry image quality is terrible. it's by a group called Black Hattitude and the album is called R.E.L.I.G.I.O.N.

it borrowed a bunch of Tribe Called Quest among other 'classic' hip-hop beats and then rapped about Jewish themes on top of it.

for example "The Infamous Date Rape" became "Shidduch Date"

anyway, i listened to this all throughout Yeshiva high school. it was kinda popular for the more moderate/open-minded students to listen to and a lot of the album deals with trying to reach troubled religious kids ("the pshat ain't glatt so your ears don't rot" aka the message isn't totally 100% kosher so that you can enjoy it too). from what i understand the two guys who made the album later became more religious and repudiated the whole thing - one moved to Lakewood IIRC and the other to Israel. which is why it's basically impossible to find but a good friend of mine found an mp3 copy on an old computer and graciously sent it to me.

i'm thinking that if anyone is interested in hearing it (and i'm willing to accept that this is only super interesting to me), maybe i'll grab an outloud room one evening and play the whole thing. let me know.

whoa. i'd be more interested in just hearing your comments about it tbh!

on their way, tbh. once i've got a free moment i'm going to do a loose history/article about it (i want to do a larger piece about American Charedi Pop Music, still working out the kinks + placement)

Mordy do you have a thing you wrote somewhere on ILX or elsewhere abt your current relationship w/ charedi Judaism? Like I'm curious abt what I sort of assume to be yr movement away from it but I'm sure you've talked about it before.

i would be interested in knowing more myself

i kinda talk a little bit about it on this thread in bits and pieces: Ask a Rabbi

after work (which will be really late tnite bc after daytime work i have a lot of editing to do) i'll write a little bit more about my current relationship w/ charedi Judaism.

atm, tho, i'll mention that i sat in a super super religious lecture last night given by R' Adin Steinsaltz, who was the first Rabbi to translate the Talmud into English. It was in honor of Gimmel Tamuz, which is the day of the lunar/Hebrew calendar that the Lubavitcher Rebbe (R' Menachem Mendel Schneersohn who u might know as the Rabbi that Chabad ~believes is the Messiah), passed away. anyway, he was talking a lot about how Judaism is at root an intellectual religion.

he was really funny. he kept saying that Americans are stupid and that even Americans pursuing intellectual careers aren't real intellectuals, and that the Rebbe was bummed while he was alive bc none of his chassidim would talk intellectually with him (but that R' Steinsaltz would). he's super old and wrinkly, but hilarious, he kept saying, "i do not want to offend anyone here, but Americans are not intellectual. they are even anti-intellectual," and then he was like, "maybe you will go home and open a book and start to learn to show that i am wrong. look at how wrong he was! look at how i am learning. that is fine. if you go home and learn to prove me wrong, that will be a result that i am happy with. you should all go home and learn to prove that i am wrong." it was lol. the lecture was ostensibly about why it is important to study the Rambam (Maimonidies).

anyway, i mention all of this bc in the middle of his lecture i was thinking about my relationship to charedi judaism -- like this was a crowd dense w/ black hats, jackets, beards. i went with my father who is still totally charedi in every way. anyway, i scribbled this note on my iPhone which i thought summed up a lot about my faith, tho it's more complex and i could probably shed a million words discussing it (nb i should mention i was inebriated during the lecture and penned this in that state):

My observance is not a function of my level of belief, but a function of the level of compromise within my mind and body that I think I can sustain. Faith is unlimited by behavior is biological.

By which I think I mean that I'm at a level of engagement and observance (and I could detail exactly what that entails) that is comfortable for me. This is not generally okay within charedi orthodoxy, you're always supposed to be trying to become more religious. but it works for me, and obv i'm very invested in Judaism as practice/idea/intellectual movement (Steinsaltz would be proud! Maybe), but i mention this story bc a) i think it's entertaining + tells u something about american right-wing community and b) bc i think maybe it's telling about me too? like, i'm willing to go to an extremely religious lecture event for a very specific memorial, but like, i feel a part from most of the people there, and what i end up thinking + writing about is my own distance/nearness to charedism.

tldr version: it's complicated, more to come later?

that's a good story and thanks for the link to the Ask a Rabbi thread.

I should talk about what the Reconstructionist shul I grew up going to was like sometime. Nobody really knows what Reconstructionism is outside of the movement.

i went to a reconstructionist synagogue once! i was 12 and it was during Yom Kippur. a bunch of us kids played dungeons and dragons in the other room while the adults wore white and gave each other blessings.

thanks mordz

I never played Dungeons & Dragons at shul though I did play one session with a friend from there.

In fifth grade I wrote an awesome original song about the ten commandments and sang it into my tiger talkboy for torah school.

your thoughts actually brush up against something i've been thinking about lately, which is... as a totally agnostic jew, is it possible to retain any of my jewish identity in any kind of good faith at all?

i almost have this all-or-nothing feeling, that is, if i were to believe any of it, then wouldn't it only make sense to believe/practice all of it? in any religious continuum, aren't the most devout/fundamentalist thinkers always going to, ultimately, win the argument?

it's the 21st century, identity is your playground and tribalism is getting redefined.

I'm a non-kosher, goyish-mother, non-synagogue-attending, non-god-believing, bacon-cheeseburger-eating Jew, but I'm a Jew dammit, and I defy anyone to take that away from me or deny me that part of myself and my cultural history.

sure but doesn't that make being jewish no different than being like, 'i'm a goth!'

i mean i'm actually totally like you... completely secular, and yet jewishness is always ~there~. im just trying to figure out what it means.

i used to feel that way, but there are so many agnostics + moderates in jewish history stretching all the way back to the beginning (practically) that there's a whole jewish tradition you can latch onto and feel rooted in authentic practice. i look a lot to ppl like shalom aleichem, spinoza, isaac bashevis singer, moses mendelssohn (bff's with Kant), even the lubavitcher rebbe who (this is controversial + maybe apocryphal) attended the Sorbon w/ Rav Solevetchik (iirc). so there's room to mediate + modulate + stuff, it's just that things for historical reasons (the massive immigration of chassidim from europe to the US following the Shoah) seem particularly dogmatic + strict atm. like either all or nothing. i think that Chabad's current form tho, where ppl at varying levels of practice can participate and do what feels comfortable without being ostracized, is going to be dominant mode in next 100 years, and i think it was dominant mode pre-1940, even in Europe. lots of those really religious looking Jews in the shtetl had various levels of observance, and 'Orthodoxy' as a term didn't exist until Reform + the haskalah began. before that you did what you did and you were a part of the greater community.

like, why can't u be a radical intellectual jew? or whatever kind of jew you want to be? it's not like wearing a big fur hat is more legitimate. it just feels more legitimate in 2012 bc they have developed a monopoly on 'authentic' religious practice. but it's not a historically or even intellectually valid monopoly.

good answer!

and yes the truth is i am way more comfortable identifying as jewish than i think i would be if i was from a different background (as hard as that is to imagine) because of the culture's history of dissent, debate, intellectual engagement.

sometimes i feel that a lot of that has been completely thrown out the window in the mainstream not-so-orthodox community, especially as pertains to israel, but what the hell.

this is a primary source anthology I read stuff from in one of my two Jewish studies classes in my first year of college; really fun and recommended

http://www.amazon.com/The-Jewish-1960s-American-Sourcebook/dp/1584654171

Nobody really knows what Reconstructionism is outside of the movement.

i was bar mitzvah'ed at a reconstructionist synagogue and neither i nor my mom have any idea what distinguishes it from conservative judaism aside from a vague commitment to "social justice" and thus a generally more lefty/crunchy congregation.

also i remember there being a few parody jew-rap albums in the late 80s. even back then i was too sophisticated to bother with them.