Yom Kippur Recap

You might recall that last year was my first foray into hazanut when I did neilah. This year, I added mussaf to the repertoire. Not as good as I would have hoped, but not bad considering I have no formal training. Even knowing about this CD didn’t help because the library’s audio desk was closed for the month and isn’t opening until Monday.
The timing was a little better this year. We started at 8:30, mussaf was finished at around 2:00, minha was at 5:00, neilah at 6:15 and we were finished with some time left over. This might seem a little quick compared to your typical shul. The major difference is that we cut out most of the silly hazzanut – the superfluous ay nay nay’s. It also helped that we didn’t have to wait for an absurdly long time for a rabbi to finish davening.1 There was still plenty of singing, but almost no draying or wasted time. People davened with kavvanah, said every word,2 and we still had a lot of time for reflection. Actually, I’d like to see more shuls adopt a model like this and cut down on the silliness which can actually get in the way of a meaningful service.

1. One year at YU, during the waiting for hazarat hashatz and other down time on Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur I started and finished Mishnayot Sanhedrin.
2. Minus of course, several hafsakot piyutim.




Mea Culpa

Et hata’ai ani mazkir hayom.
I stand before you embaressed at the lack of posting and the near extinction of this blog. The past summer has been a whirlwind in my personal and professional life, and it’s far from over. I’m going to try to write what I can when I can, but the real world must take precedence over the virtual one.




Rabbi Week On YUTOPIA

Introduction
For most of my life, I have been involved in the rabbinate. I grew up with a father who was a pulpit rabbi for almost 20 years. I was in the YU system for 7 years, studying with many rabbis-in-training and eventually becoming ordained myself. Most recently, I served as intern for at the “Bridge Shul” in Washington Heights.
Between my varied experiences with the rabbinate, my studies this year, and the evolving nature of the profession, I have been constantly refining my thoughts on the rabbinate. This week, I?ll be posting a series of essays about the rabbinate based on my studies and experiences from just about every perspective.
I have decided to organize my thoughts into three or four posts. The first will be about the Rabbi as an abstract institution, focusing on the halakhic role and authority of a contemporary Rabbi. Then I will address the realities of the current state of the rabbinate, including the nature of communities and how it effects the future of rabbinical schools. Finally, I?d like to elaborate on the existential side of being a rabbi while maintaining a personal identity (such as it is). If there is time or interest, I might add in a post on why I made the educational decisions that I did. I?ll probably conclude with a post responding to comments.
Disclaimer: Although I will focus on the pulpit, I will not be referring to any specific community or congregation in particular, but to my collective experiences.




You Say It’s Your Birthday

I did some searching of who else has a birthday on August 4th. I expected an eclectic group of people, but this is a bit much:

Of course, with only 366 possible days from which to chose, there’s bound to be some important people or events that happened on any given day which could give it more significance. I mean, it could be the day Congress authorized the first U.S. Government securities, or who knows what else may have happened.
Yes, even on this hallowed National Chocolate Chip Day.

1. I’ve been told that this is innaccurate. However, I can’t help but find ironic that his Chineese sign is “snake” and his Feng Shui element is Earth.




We Are Leaving To Mother Russia

The Moscow Times is reporting about a wave of Russians moving back from Israel. What’s really ironic is that they’re moving back for economic reasons as well as social and religious acceptance. Some stories are unfortunately old:
“One of them is that most highly educated immigrants have to take blue-collar jobs in Israel. “Doctors, physicians and mathematicians were cleaning the streets,” Gorin said.”
Personally I find the social and religious tensions more upsetting. I heard a line once where a Russian said, “When I was in Russia, I was a Jew. When I was in Israel, I was a Russian.”

    Another reason for returning was what Dzhadan called the “sectarian” structure of the society. In order to rent an apartment or find a job, a person has to operate through members of his party or immigrants from the same country or area.
    “I didn’t like it,” he said. “I’m used to operating in an open society where people don’t ask you to what community you belong.”

In another context, I once complained that for all the efforts put in to people making aliyah, there is relatively little effort in maintaining the people who are actually there.
Think about how bad it is when someone can seriously write, “Russia’s capitalist economy ‘allows you to exist regardless of your religious beliefs.'”
“Olam Hafuch Ra’iti” – (B. Pesahim 50a).




Year In Review (Abridged)

Yes, today is my birthday. I’m now 27, and over the hill. But, it’s a good time to start looking over at the year in retrospective. Most normal people do this around New Years for their respective calenders, but considering I’m still on an academic schedule, I get to go in the summer.1
It’s a little easier this year thanks to this blog. I’ve never kept a diary or a journal, but now I can actually look back at what I wrote and sometimes see a different person. Also, it’s been roughly a year since I started blogging. The very first posting on the old site was on May 15 2003, but things didn’t really take off until I moved to YUCS on October 20th. So as it turns out, August 4th is close enough to splitting the difference.
Right now, I’m not in the mood for anything shticky2 like top 10 lists or major meta-analysis, but I have been thinking about what this past year has meant to me, and the blog is a nice reminder of things. In the FAQ I explained “I started blogging primarily to improve my writing skills with minimal accountability. Meaning, I felt I needed a non-threatening public forum where I could speak my mind and not get vilified. (yet).”
I think this has happened to some extent. I’ve been getting better at writing out my thoughts, and perhaps as a consequence, I haven’t been lynched (again, I stress, yet). But in my creation of a personal forum something really strange happened:
People started reading the damn thing.
I’m not just talking about friends from the heights or YU, but completely random people. Even stranger is that these people actually like reading this blog, to the extent where on more than one occasion I’ve had IM’s pop up from people I didn’t know asking me when I was going to post something new. What has happened is that I’ve been able to not only maintain a semblance of contact with older Friends of mine, but I’ve some wonderful people through this. As sappy as it sounds, all the people who have commented or IMmed me to shmooze have had a profound impact on me this year3.
For one example, here’s a beautiful e-mail I got a while back from a fan of the chord collection:

    Greetings from Brooklyn, NY. I would just like to thank you for posting the guitar chords and transliterations of various Jewish songs on your website. I am a Catholic-raised gentile currently working for the Heritage for the Blind; my employers and many of my coworkers are Jewish. Since coming on board here a year and a half ago, I have begun a love affair with Jewish music. There is something about the music that speaks to me, despite the fact that I don?t speak Hebrew or Yiddish, and I don?t “understand” 99% of what I?m hearing. But…my soul gets uplifted at the sound of many of these songs. As a musician, I know that music can often bypass language comprehension, and speak directly to hearts. Five Towns Radio (www.fivetownsradio.com) has replaced Lite FM as the choice of listening music on my computer.

    I play piano, guitar, and sing. I?m often frustrated by my desire to play and sing various Jewish songs — because I don?t speak Hebrew or Yiddish, and I don?t want to mispronounce everything, I refrain from singing. I thought it would be easy to find a website or two that would translate/transliterate the lyrics to these songs into English. (A lyrics page in Hebrew won?t do me much good.) I spent some time looking for pages that transliterated the lyrics into English, and luckily I found your blog through Google.com. It is, as far as I know, one of the only sites online that provides guitar chords and transliterated Hebrew music. I?d like to thank you for posting the guitar chords and transliterations to songs such as Ana Hashem and Shiru Lamelech. I can strum away on my guitar, and sing, and feel that I?m not butchering the Hebrew words to death. Please continue to post chords and lyrics. Your hard work is deeply appreciated. Have a Kosher and Happy Pesach.

This entire year has been extremely important in my personal and intellectual development. I left a two-block ghetto in New York, and took several risks in moving out to Chicago. As a result, I’ve expanded my mind, met so many new people, forged countless positive relationships while reinforcing existing ones. I’ve been thinking in ways I haven’t thought before and I done things I’d never would have tried before and I’d like to think it’s had a positive effect on me.
Overall, this has really been a wonderful year for me, While hardly perfect, I will never regret my decision to come here. For those of you who follow my intellectual and emotional exploits, I thank you for your interest, feedback, and in many cases, friendship. All readers, be it fans or critics, have been of invaluable for helping me refine and articulate my ideas and feelings.
As far as what you can expect for next year, I have no idea4, but I’m certain it’s going to be interesting. For the growing collection of loyal readers, I will try to continue doing whatever it is that I’ve been doing up until now. From simple musings to academic discourses, this is a and will always be a window to my increasingly strange and ever changing world, my personal YUTOPIA.5

1. And Rosh Hashana is coming up….
2. Must be getting grumpy in the old age.
3. Some positive, some not yet positive.
4. Seriously, I really don’t. Job leads are better than no leads, but leads alone don’t pay rent.
5. With footnotes where applicable, and sometimes where they’re not.




A Time To Love

Maariv reports on Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics releasing statistics (PDF) on the average age of men and women at the time of their first marriage.

1970198019902002
Men24.124.826.026.9
Women21.422.023.224.6

So it seems the average age for marriage is increasing; I’ll leave the speculations as to why to others. In the meantime, I have 3 days to get married before I’m officially over the hill.

Or I suppose I could just be “above average…”

Thanks to Danny for the link




World War Blues

In probably the most shocking display of chutzpah in recent times, Germany is seeking compensation from Poland.
Specifically, there are calls “for an admission of the wrongs done to Germans at the end of the war and for some form of material compensation.”

    Some 12 million Germans were kicked out of central Europe, many of them killed, at the war’s end, when Europe’s borders were redrawn by the allies. Poland, in particular, was literally lifted from east to west and transplanted on to territory that for centuries had been peopled by Germans.

So let’s recap here:

  • Germany invades Poland, starting WWII.
  • The Nazi regime murders hundreds of thousands of Polish citizens, spreading death and destruction across the country.
  • Germany loses the war it started.
  • Germany then complains about the treatment it gets after the war by the country it decimated, and seeks restitution.

And this is ignoring the millions of lives lost worldwide because of Germany’s actions.
I’m still appalled at the absurdity of this and that people are able to suggest this with a straight face.




Slow Fast Week

In case you missed it before, you might want to check out my post from last year The Historical Meaning of Tish’a B’av (9 Av).
Aside from that, not much else is going on this end aside from schoolwork and job hunting. Which reminds me, if anyone out there has job leads for :

  • Rabbis
  • Academics
  • Think Tanks / Policy
  • Government
  • Jewish Federation
  • Non-Profits
  • or Computer programming

Please drop me a line.