how’s this for a mission statement?

I hope to explore the use of design and writing in encouraging global conversation, spreading knowledge and investigating alternative means of communication–food, religion, consumer products, and media (print and internet).

observed

I saw a woman walking her dog today. As they were walking, her dog took off from and started to dash around an oak beside the sidewalk. Instead of yanking the dog back to the sidewalk, the woman calmly stepped off the sidewalk (into the mud) and followed her curious dog around the tree.

Lesson? I want to step around more trees for people.

shoah

I’ve just finished my first week back at school, trying to figure out how to fit too many classes into a very tight schedule. Mostly, though, it’s what a friend’s mom would call a happy problem. The joy of a quarter system is this feeling three times a year that you get to start over, totally and completely. Like New Years. Every quarter you think–this quarter, I will do my reading on time; I will read the newspaper instead of watching TV; I will go to the gym more than once; I will be a more balanced and enlightened human being. And the fact that I seem to go into every quarter with a similar list of Self-Improvement Projects could be depressing, but it’s also a little reassuring. This process of self-evaluation and re-balancing should be a continual process.

So my big projects for this quarter? Eliminating the products of suffering from my life (no new boots…) and starting to confront the entirety of Judaism. Part of the AA program, the tenth step, is to take a fearless personal inventory and admit when we are wrong.  I’m nowhere near the tenth step (I still don’t have a sponsor) but in my journey with Judaism, I think it’s time I made a searching and fearless personal inventory, and settled down with some of the more unpleasant aspects of Jewish history and belief. Attitudes towards non-Jews. The Holocaust. Antisemitism today. The place of women in Jewish history, especially in the Torah.

Over the break, I read Sophie’s Choice. And I’m still reeling. I wish I had read this book in high school; I wish I had read this book in every class I’ve taken on American history. William Styron achieves a stunning level of brutal honesty that pulls at every part of your insides. I think, for me, it’s up there with To Kill A Mockingbird, in terms of the scope of themes, how Styron and Lee are capable of taking on both weighty moral themes, but also deeply human themes, without feeling didactic.

So I’m taking a Holocaust class. I’ve taken classes on religious violence, on violence specifically against the Jews, before–a class on pogroms, a class on genocide, a class on Polish-Jewish relations, a class on holy wars throughout history. And all of them have skirted around the Holocaust, too big to allow room in the ten weeks of a term for all of the other tragedies. So I thought it was time I took a class just on the Holocaust. My neighbor across the hall is also in the class, a sweet Conservative Jew. Already, I am excited for conversations I hope we will have. I know, that if, or when, I stand before the Bet Din, they will ask why I want to join a people so plagued by suffering, a people who have been party to some of the worst of humanity. And right now, I don’t have an answer.

kindling lights

Hanukkah has just finished.  All week, people have been asking me if I am celebrating.

“No,” I reply.  “The Hillel center at Stanford is closed, and I’m not part of a synagogue.”

All of which is true, but doesn’t tell the whole story.

So far, my exploration of Judaism has been mostly solitary. A lot of reading, a few Friday night services, and some downloaded podcasts. Judaism is, of course, about more than just reading; it’s about community and family and dialogue. Danya Ruttenberg, in her memoir, talks about the embarrassment of the convert, the overwhelming feeling of ignorance and shame. Thomas Merton also talks of it, recognizing the “tremendous, agonizing embarrassment and self-consciousness which [those new to religion] feel about praying publicly…The effort it takes to overcome all the strange imaginary fears that everyone is looking at you, and that they all think that you are crazy or ridiculous, is something that costs a tremendous effort.”

At coffee with two friends I was confronted by my shame. Both friends were raised Jewish. Somehow the discussion wandered to the short stories of Isaac Singer. Years ago, in a class on pogroms, I had read one, perhaps two, of Singer’s stories. My friends recounted their favorites–

“Yes the one with the goat–”

“The one about the little boy–”

The discussion wandered to Jewish humor.

“All Jewish humor emerged from the village of Chelm,” one friend pronounced.

I had no idea what they were talking about.

In a course I took last term, we discussed the idea of cultural capital, especially in relation to class. In that moment with my friends, I felt I somehow lacked a vital cultural capital, two decades behind on children’s stories, jokes, folktales and turns of phrase.

So, the real reason I’m not celebrating Hanukkah is because I’m ashamed, afraid to acknowledge publicly how much I don’t know. But shame is such a self-pitying emotion (more I, I, I). So, this is my public admission of how much I don’t know (an infinite, daunting and inspiring amount) as well as a promise to myself not to be ashamed of not knowing, only eager to learn.

Rereading: Surprised by God by Danya Ruttenberg

pleasantly surprised

Reading: Yes Miky, There are Rabbis in Montana

I love this story. I think I’ve told this story to about five people, just because it made me so happy.

how can we not be angry?

I was an angry teenager. I shaved off all my hair, wore thick eye-liner and big boots and started smoking clove cigarettes. I was the epitome of the angry, privileged youth—angry at my parents (whose rules, I can see now, kept me out of a lot of trouble); self-righteous but without a cause; flailing out, as if by hurting the people around me, it would somehow help me to better define myself.

As I got older, even towards the end of high school, the anger faded, cooled. I stopped blaming everyone around me for the things I wanted but could not have. And that calm lasted for years, carrying me through most of college, and then depositing me directly on the doorstep of Judaism.

Judaism is not always a calm faith—it is a human faith, a faith with a sense of humor as well as a temper. It is a faith that demands action, rather than simple acquiescence. And my relationship with Judaism has progressed much like my relationships with other humans: first, it began with flirtation, a sudden fluttering of the stomach, an inability to stop thinking of the other. Then, the voracious devouring of facts, learning a lifetime, a thousand stories behind scars and moles and the way they eat their hummus, as fast as possible, laying down the language in which to speak to one another.

Third came the star-gazing period, a time of long, philosophical conversations, poetic exchanges of deep, meaningful letters and mix tapes.

That is, perhaps, where my relationship with Judaism stands today.

Next, I imagine, will come the part where the flaws, the cracks in character, seem to threaten the structure of the whole relationship. And then, the realization of the other as a complete being, weaknesses and strengths both vital to the whole, without whom existence is unimaginable.

Now, though, in this star-gazing period of long, philosophical conversations, I have spent endless hours poring over a collection of essays by Dr Abraham Heschel. Dr Heschel escaped from Warsaw to New York mere months before the German invasion. He dedicated the entirety of his life in the US to expanding Jewish though, especially with regards to ethics and civil rights. He was an active participant in the anti-war movement of the sixties as well as the civil rights movement. The collection, which I bought on a whim, is titled ‘Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity,’ which comes from a telegram Dr Heschel sent to President Kennedy in 1963:

Demand of religious leaders personal involvement [with civil rights issues]. We forfeit the right to worship God as long as we continue to humiliate negroes…Ask of religious leaders to call for national repentance and personal sacrifice…I propose that you, Mr. President, declare a state of moral emergency…The hour calls for high moral grandeur and spiritual audacity.

Although he does not use the phrase as often as one might expect, what Dr Heschel was talking about was tikkun olam. Tikkun olam is a phrase that means ‘repairing the world.’ Tikkun olam is manifested in the mitzvot, or religious duties, of Judaism, These include not only following halachic law, but also performing ethical mitzvot, efforts geared towards creating a moral and religious world. To paraphrase a modern Jewish writer: What good is your personal revelation if it does not help the most retched of our society? “The urgent issue,” Heschel wrote, “is not personal salvation but the prevention of mankind’s surrender to the demonic.”

I had heard the phrases ‘mitzvot’ and ‘tikkun olam’ before reading Dr Heschel’s essays, but I don’t think I had understood them. The world I see around me, the world in which I participate daily, is one riddled with selfishness.  We (and I do mean we, myself included) are obsessed with ourselves, blithely turning our eyes in the face of immense suffering. The world measures success in material goods, in physical beauty and in power or triumph over others. Reading Dr Heschel’s essays, I felt as though I had been standing, for all of my life, on the top of a pyramid, without even knowing what it was below me. And what was below me was the suffering and mistreatment of others; I was standing on the suffering of others. Seeing this, how could I not be angry?

Judaism will not accept this. Tikkun olam demands action. Judaism will not allow me to sit calmly; Judaism will not allow me to surrender my anger.

I am not speaking of the undirected anger of my younger years, of the hot, untempered violence of angst. Instead, I am talking about the focused anger, the tempered anger of Judaism. It is an anger that sees wrongs and will not suffer them. It is an anger tempered by compassion, by love, by service.

I was attracted to Judaism at first by its love songs, by its smile, so to speak. But beneath that smile is a passion, is a will, a drive, and I want to be a part of that too. Choosing Judaism is choosing service, choosing participation and duty. It means joining a movement, a community dedicated to the remedying of the world. And it means leaving behind the comfortable, blind world in which I was raised. A friend of mine, a Christian, referenced the idea that “one of the greatest tricks in the devil’s arsenal is to make us concerned, but not moved.” His devil references may not be my favorite thing in the world, but the underlying message of his statement cannot be ignored.  The mitzvot of Judaism do not just apply to moments of ritual significance, they apply to all that we do. They demand us to go out and live an ethical life.

Reading: Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays by Abraham Joshua Heschel

bitter water

Moses had a difficult relationship with the Israelites.  He led them out of slavery; he brought them G-d’s law.  And they didn’t just complain that they should have stayed in Egypt—when Moses went to the Mount they lost faith and turned from G-d.  When he returned, Moses arranged for them to be slaughtered, all except his brother Aaron and their families.

Before the slaughter, before the golden calf, when the Israelites had been in the desert for three days, they came upon a well, at Marah.  When they tasted the water, they cried out that it was bitter, and berated Moses. G-d told Moses that there was a wood which, when he threw it into the well, would make the water sweet.

But the Rebbe of Kotzk, in commentary on this passage, suggests an interesting reading.

“It was not the water,” he writes, “but the people that were bitter.”

I sympathize with the Israelites too often: I hear not what someone is saying directly but a version tainted by my own feeling.

The Israelites were dehydrated and angry and when Moses offered salvation, both physical and spiritual, they would not accept it, they did not have faith in Moses or in G-d. The Israelites were so focused on their own suffering that they had an I-It relationship with Moses and with G-d.

Martin Buber, the Jewish theologian, explored how we relate to the world around us, and how those relations can be a parallel to our relationship to G-d. He wrote of two types of relationships, an I-It relationship and an I-You relationship. I-It relationships are dictated by goal-directed verbs—I want, I need, I sense, I feel, I think.  In an I-It relationship, the It is simply an object (whether it is a living or a dead thing or being).  I-You relationships are a set of relations, a way of perceiving, a relation based on reciprocity.  The You in I-You relationships is a whole being, defined by itself, rather than in relation to the world around.  The I-You relationship is the one we strive to have with G-d.

Almost six months ago I was diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder and atypical depression.  In some ways it was a relief—it was suddenly not my fault, that there was something fundamentally wrong with me.  It wasn’t my fault.

And for a while, that helped, relinquishing that responsibility. Looking back, though, I can see that I was wallowing.  Not in the way you wallow after a break-up, with chocolate ice cream and An Affair to Remember.  I wallowed in the way you wallow when getting out of bed is a monumental task, when the prospect of talking to another human being seems impossible, where each minute crawls by at the speed of molasses, and you simply accept that this is how life is.

I quit my job, candidly telling the family who ran the café where I worked that I was incapable of being a person and I needed some time. They nodded, eyes full of concern.

Some days I slept or watched bad daytime TV, incapable of anything more than eating cereal in my pajamas.  Some days I was bursting with nervous energy.  I spent hours feverishly working on graduate school applications and studying for the GREs.  At the end of every day, I dreaded going to sleep, desperately afraid of the moments where I would have to be alone with myself.

The point is this—my depression and anxiety, I carried them with me all the time.  Even when the medication helped me get out of bed, helped me call my friends, the sadness, the paralyzing anxiety, they hung over me like a veil I could not lift and no one else could see through.

Depression is a selfish disorder.

I am sad.

I am broken.

I, I, I.

It is as if the veil of depression transforms everyone around me into an object; they are there only to produce sympathy or comfort or love to give to me.  Through the veil, I am capable only of I-It relationships, so like the Israelites complaining in the desert. Through the veil, I am incapable of loving my friends, of listening to their hurts and joys, of extending a hand to those in need. The view through the veil of depression is a bitter one.

My depression is not my fault.

I did not choose this veil.

But now that I see it, now that I know it is there, tainting every interaction, I can choose to push it back.  I can choose to have faith.  I can choose to have I-You relationships.  I can choose to have faith that Moses will show me to the well, and G-d will provide the water.

And when I drink of it, I know I can choose sweetness.

Reading: I and Thou by Martin Buber; Wise men and their tales: portraits of Biblical, Talmudic, and Hasidic masters by Elie Wiesel

cups unbroken

There is a midrash that tells the story of a king with a set of fragile, glass cups. He knew that if he poured in hot water, the cups would expand and break, and if he poured in cold water, they would contract and shatter. So the king poured the hot and cold waters together and then poured them into the cups, which did not break. The lesson is that compassion and judgment are the hot and cold waters–either one alone would break us, and both need the other.

Thinking about compassion makes me think of my friend Stephanie. She’s this beautiful Polish-Colombian girl with thick black hair and a fast-draw smile and excellent taste in coffee. We met in Oxford and as soon as I met her, I wanted to hear all her stories. She is whip-smart and always ready for an adventure. If I had to name something wrong with Stephanie, I would say she is too compassionate. When I hear that sharp voice in my head, criticizing the pretty girl or the man driving too slowly in front of me, I like to think what Stephanie would say.

Something today reminded me of Steph and the picnics we took on our trips. We had the most beautiful weather for almost all of our trip to Scotland. In Edinburgh, we picnicked in Princes Gardens, near a group of pot-smoking yahs and we read our newly purchased Vacation Novels. Another day we climbed up Calton Hill and watched some poor model in a tiny dress fight the wind as a photographer snapped pictures. It was so windy that when we’d finished eating we lay down in the grass, as close as possible to the ground, and talked about how our hearts were broken while the clouds shuffled across the sky. Steph is the only person I can remember ever just looking at the clouds with.

In St Andrews we hiked back into Lade Braes, this creek-side walk. We found a place with mottled sunshine and sloping grass and ate stone fruits, fresh mozzarella, crusty white bread and individually-wrapped chocolates. There’s this drink in Scotland, Irn Bru–it’s the Scottish national soda, and I managed to live there for four months and not have it. So Steph and I bought cans of Irn Bru for that day in Lade Braes, and when she took a sip, she exclaimed–”This is Colombiana!” Colombiana is the same, sticky sweet bubble-gum flavored soda. “It tastes like home,” she told me. On the way back to the flat it started pouring, pounding hail and whipping wind, and we sat watching the weather in Fran’s flat.

Steph told me so many stories about her family and Colombia on our trip–how everyone dances, and when she was at a non-family wedding, she and her father were the only ones dancing with the new couple, because everyone else was afraid to join in. When Steph and I were traveling together, we were both claiming Scotland–her for the first time, me for the second or fifth or tenth time. No matter how much we talked about the men who’d hurt us, she refused to condemn what had been done to her.

“Steph, he was being a total asshole!” I’d tell her.

“Well, I guess,” she’d reply.

I’ve been working to balance all of these things in my head. I like to think that during the trip to Scotland, Steph and I rubbed off on one another a little–that she cooled down my hot water, and I warmed up her cold water. This lesson, in the greater sense, is one that permeates Judaism.  We are not meant to purge all of the ‘bad’ aspects of ourselves. The struggle, instead, is for balance.  It is balance that we seek to achieve. To become Jewish is not just about Friday nights or Passover Seder, it is about how we carry ourselves in this world, how we balance ourselves.

Reading: Everyday Holiness by Alan Morinis

a beginning of sorts

My favorite part of Friday night Shabbat service is the Amidah. The entire congregation calls out together, repeating over and over

Adonai, s’phatai tiftach, u’phi yagid t’hilatecha
G-d, open my lips, that my mouth may declare Your praise.

Together, the congregation repeats this until they are ready to go into silent prayer. During the silent prayer, you recite a list of blessings. Often, the congregation will move about, each person finding a place in the room to pray. And then, slowly, everyone comes back together and begins to recite again,

G-d, open my lips, that my mouth may declare Your praise.

I cried the first time I heard the Amidah. The entire Friday night service is, in its most elemental form, a collection of love poems to G-d. A group of people who gather together to celebrate a love of G-d.

I was not born into a Jewish household. My father is a lapsed, skeptical Catholic and my mother is a non-practicing Midwestern Methodist. I went to Sunday school when I visited my grandparents, but mostly so that they could show me off. I trundled along for nineteen long years without much thought at all about G-d.

And then I realized that, not only did I believe in G-d, I suddenly valued a good relationship with Him. I wanted to foster a good relationship with G-d and I had no idea how to go about creating that. And at that first Friday night service, to which a friend had invited me on a whim, as I cried at the Amidah, I knew that I had come home.

Conversion to Judaism is not like conversion to Christianity–there is no proclamation of sin, of repentance, and an immediate dousing in holy water. The holy water, that comes much later in Judaism. First, there is at least a year of study, of living as a practicing Jew, going to services and following the mitzvot, the religious duties.  Then, there is a panel of Rabbis who question the convert on matters of Jewish law and thought. Only then does the holy water come, in the mikvah, the holy bath. Soon after that first Shabbat, I began reading sporadically about Judaism.  And then, almost a year later, when I moved to Scotland, I realized that the hole I felt in my life was the hole where Judaism was meant to go. I read voraciously. The small town where I lived had no Jewish community, so I began emailing with a Rabbi in California who sent me lists of books to read. I read commentaries, theologians, essayists, histories, anything I could get my hands on. I felt as though everything I learned about Judaism only solidified my desire to convert.

Judaism is different from many other religions. To be a Jew is to be Jewish twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. You are not just Jewish on Friday nights. You are not just Jewish with regard to religious ritual. You are Jewish in how you speak to others, how you give to charity, how you prepare your food and how you spend your leisure time. Becoming Jewish means joining a family; you become a descendent of Abraham and Sarah. Moreover, becoming Jewish transforms how you live.

It’s not that my parents didn’t raise me to have morals, to live by an ethical code.  It is simply, as David Foster Wallace so eloquently put it, that “everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely talk about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness, because it’s so socially repulsive, but it’s pretty much the same for all of us, deep down. It is our default-setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth.” Becoming Jewish means learning to overcome this hard-wired selfishness.  Becoming Jewish means learning how to make every action a prayer.

I have not begun the formal conversion process, mostly because I will be moving away in nine months, and I would rather begin my conversion in a place where I will be living for a few years. But I think Judaism has already begun to convert, to change, me. In the essays that follow, I examine how elements of Judaism have resonated and altered how I think about myself and my relation to the world. I have a lot of questions still to ask–How will I deal with anti-Semitism? Will I keep kosher?

What does it mean to be Jewish?