HEY JEWS

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.

2 live jews

s1ocki, i'm also secular--i'm an athiest actually--but somehow i still feel very "jewish." i suppose it's because it feels good to imagine yourself part of a group.

i feel like i mentioned this on ilx recently, but there's a famous rumor about a particular pre-War Yeshiva where the students were all brilliant, but didn't have a lot of faith, and they'd hang out on Shabbos smoking cigars and learning Talmud.

search inside the amazon link above for "mashiah" and read one of the most wonderful things about the relevance of Jewish practice I've ever read.

ah yes 2 live jews. i guess that was early 90s rather than late 80s.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=at8hZpXyykM

that Waskow piece is really beautiful, silby!

Mordy, I would definitely read anything you wrote about Charedi pop music.

s1ocki, i'm also secular--i'm an athiest actually--but somehow i still feel very "jewish." i suppose it's because it feels good to imagine yourself part of a group.

― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Wednesday, June 20, 2012 2:43 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah i guess so? or maybe more like... a tradition? i dunno

an imagined tradition, for the most part. in my case. the elements of jewish tradition that were consciously passed down to me in ritualized fashion are useless to me.

in that case then you might as well say an imagined group as well, i don't think i really share more in common with your average jew than your average other person in my city/class/constellation of interests

I'm at a level of engagement and observance (and I could detail exactly what that entails) that is comfortable for me

I am interested in the details of what that entails!

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.

^^^

totally agree with this, and reflects my own engagement with my cultural heritage as a Jew. I haven't been to synagogue since my rabbi died (altho I would probably go to one if I could find a decent one to join in SF). I go to seders and light the candles on Hannukah and um get drunk on Purim ... otherwise I feel like a lot of my "Jewishness" is bound up in the things I read (recently read an abridged version of Maimonides "Guide for the Perplexed, for ex.) and, to a certain extent, the way I think about cosmology and the structure of reality and other sort of high-falutin abstractions. I get very testy about the argument that all grounds of authenticity must be ceded to the most fundamentalist branches of a tradition, it's just not borne out historically, and that goes for other traditions besides Judaism as well.

i dunno

i think if you have a science-informed, reason-based view of the world, i'm not sure what the difference is in believing in some religious practice/theology and not others

science can't address everything

anything made-up can address anything, it doesnt mean its right or reasonable to believe in it

well I'm not really gonna argue that Jewish theology/cosmology is somehow superior or more accurate or more believable than others - I just find it helpful in framing my own ideas. there's stuff in there that makes sense to me, it's a point of view I'm comfortable with.

I guess to some extent a fair amount of it comes down to simple tribalism - I can find value in and have been fascinated by stuff in Buddhism, sufiism, the tarot/magick whatever, but I wasn't raised in those traditions, they don't feel like they're *mine* in the sense that I grew up learning about them and thinking about them with my family and peers.

i'll argue that Jewish theology/cosmology is much more appealing to me aesthetically, emotively and intellectually than other theological practices i've investigated. particularly kabbalistic/gnostic/chassidic theologies are incredibly dense + satisfying to study + meditate upon. i could probably talk about this for hours and hours tbh to get into why i find it so satisfying. i think it's just very well developed philosophically, as a kinda of parallel intellectual practice to trad continental or medieval phil or whatever.