This Hasidic guy with the hat, the beard, the robes, the whole deal is looking us over.  Back and forth between Abe and me.  I can’t figure out what this dude is up to.

Slowly, he starts to walk over to us, "Uh-oh," I think, "we’re going to be converted or something."

Now he’s right in front of us and is looking back and forth at both of us.  Finally he makes the decision to speak to Abe, "Which train do I take to Williamsburg?"

I realized that the whole stare down was that he wanted to make sure that he was speaking to a Jew and not some unholy outsider.  Well, he made the wrong choice.  He was speaking to an ARAB and when he got home I’m sure he was going to get one big spanking.  I started laughing and thinking, "Yo, bro, I’m the Jew here, talk to me…"

All this to say that every day I am dismayed by the ongoing subtle and not so subtle war between Arabs and Jews.  This has been bothering me for most of my life.  For some reason I know as many Arabs as I do Jews, actually maybe more, and no one has ever tried to blow me up–or whatever happens between these two peoples.  Yes we talk, yes we disagree, but we are closer than many of my American colleagues.  The sad thing is that we are more similar than we are dissimilar.

I wish we could fix this problem.  It would change the tenor of the world.  Yes, I know that it is easy to heap all the blame on one side, and yes sometimes I do that but that tactic hasn’t worked and isn’t going to work.  I’m not saying this to be all lovey-dovey.  I actually have no solution or suggestions other than to work on this one-on-one. 

In many ways I feel so bad for the Palestinians, not because of the so-called iron hand of the ‘oppressors’ but because of how they are duped by their own people.  The vast majority of people want to be able to see their kids happy and going to school, they want to relax after dinner with their family and maybe have a picnic and a color TV.  They need medication for their sick kids, they need money to eat.  No one talks about the roughly $20 million dollars a year that Arafat’s wife gets from the Palestinians while she lives in Paris (not the cheapest city on the planet) bathed in jewels and spouting crap that she would be proud if her daughter became a suicide bomber but girls don’t do that sort of thing.  What, she is certainly driven by a noble cause, with a deep heart for her people.  That 20 mil would build a school or two, start a new farm, buy people tools.  And that’s not a one time deal, that’s every year.  So while decent people struggle she goes shopping.

Yes, I know it’s all more complicated than this and yes, THEY should fix it and stop shooting missiles at Israel.  But sometimes you just have to try.  I always felt that the day that Bush took office he should have taken Arafat and whoever the Israeli guy was at the time into a room and said, "Look, this crap stops now, you all don’t leave here until we fix this."  But that takes leadership and vision and instead Bush got on his high horse and "refused" to talk to Arafat while casualties mounted on both sides.  I would say that this was not an effective strategy.  We could have made a difference or at least tried to make a difference and didn’t.  So more people died and on it went.

I know everyone will start barking over this and the volume will get turned up and fingers will start pointing.  But there just has to be a better way for all of those involved to lead decent lives and turn away from this makeshift war.  In my life, I always believe there is an answer for everything and a solution for every problem.  I know I have no suggestions but maybe someone smarter than me does because we all need to fix this not only for ourselves and for our children but for God as well. 

Philip Smith spent the last week guest blogging for Jewcy.  This is his farewell post.  Want more?  Check out his book, Walking Through Walls.

The post Muslims Vs. Jews: I Don’t Have the Answer, Do You? appeared first on Jewcy.

As I watched this movie, it hit me that much of the mysticism and the mythology have been drained from modern Judaism.  This is the rich texture, the essence that keeps religions alive and deep with meaning.  Raised as a reform Jew, I still have no idea as to where this form of Judaism stands on an afterlife or what happens after you die.  Do you go to heaven?  My understanding is that heaven is a Christian concept.  Do you become a spirit, do you become a cat, does God welcome you?  I profess to be ignorant on all aspects of Jewish theology due to my upbringing in the reform movement.  Perhaps this is why the largest number of American Buddhists are Jews who are seeking a more metaphysical approach to life.

My attraction to the more mystical aspects of Judaism and in fact, all religions, emanates from my father, a Polish immigrant who as a kid in the 20s, read books on Christian Science, Buddhism, Hinduism, magic and Judaism.

When he came to this country, they branded him "Smith" and our history was erased.  With that he became an American Jew, frequenting the synagogue on high holiday days with family gatherings for Passover. 

Then one day, everything changed.  He discovered that he possessed extraordinary psychic powers and could talk to the dead and heal the sick.  Again, from my limited knowledge of Jewish theology, there are no guidelines or precedents for this.  The rabbi at our synagogue had no interest in my father’s new found powers.  My father began to cobble together a philosophical structure to support his strange abilities wherever he could find it.  In short order he became a pan-theologist creating a stew of various concepts from every religion.

It is without question that my father was working with unseen powers that he attributed to coming from God.  I don’t think he was wrong as I witnessed daily miraculous healings of people who had been given up for dead by the medical profession.  Over the years, he healed thousands of people from every conceivable type of ailment.  And yet, he could not find confirmation or guidance from any of the rabbis he approached.

Just like life itself, religion and human experience are much broader, more complicated and mysterious than what we hear from our sermons and what we read in our prayer books.  The inexplicable should not be shunned but embraced as it reminds us of our own miraculous being and our unlimited spiritual potential.

Philip Smith, author of Walking Through Walls, is guest blogging for Jewcy, and he’ll be here all week.  Stay tuned.

The post When Mystery Transcends Mythology appeared first on Jewcy.

Please comment.

Philip Smith, author of Walking Through Walls, is guest blogging for Jewcy, and he’ll be here all week.  Stay tuned.

The post Is There a Common Jewish Denominator? appeared first on Jewcy.

I wanted to honor him with prayers for his soul, with prayers to God, with prayers to fill my empty heart.

This was my time as a Jew to become a man, an adult.  It is this moment that is truly the bar mitzvah of one’s soul.  I anticipated stepping into these shoes as everyone before me had done.

The first synagogue told me: No ticket.  No prayer. 

And again, at the next: No ticket, no prayer.

Finally the third told me: No ticket no prayer.

Three synagogues had turned me away because I was not a member and did not have a ticket to pray. 

I understand needing a ticket to see a movie, a rodeo, a boxing match, or a play, but not needing a ticket to talk to God, to beg God to lift my heart.  I don’t mind praying whenever, wherever.  I don’t need four walls to do so.  But that day I needed the ancient ritual to guide me through my grief.  I needed the community of others who had lost their world and cried with remembrance.

I was not a happy Jew. 

A friend said, "Try the gay synagogue in the Village."  Gay synagogue?  There’s such a thing?

On Bethune Street, I walked right in.  No one asked me for a ticket.  No one turned me away.  Instead I was handed a prayer book and a yarmulke.  I said kaddish for the first time in my life.  One does not forget such moments, just as one does not forget the fabled and by now banal question, "where were you when JFK was assassinated?"

Next, the Rabbi asked, "who would like to stand and say kaddish for those who have died from AIDS and have no one to say kaddish for them? 

Silently and immediately, the entire congregation stood.  I was honored to be amongst such people who would remember and pray for those that could easily be forgotten.

So, here was a group of people that were praying without tickets AND saying kaddish for total strangers.  While I am not a Talmudic scholar, this looked to me like God’s work in action.  What I was witnessing was Jewish nobility, the majesty of our religion to care for others, to be compassionate, to repair the world.  All without tickets. 

Were the synagogues that turned me away also praying for those who had suffered, who had died alone and were forgotten?  Or are people with tickets absolved of that responsibility? 

This is just my opinion, but I gather that God’s a pretty busy chief exec.  There’s a lot going on that requires his or her full attention–the sun needs to be lifted up and put in the sky every morning for every single person, bug, and bird on the planet, stars need to twinkle, babies need to be born and corn has to grow.  So given this kind of schedule, when does God have time to worry about tickets?

Given what I saw that night I said my first kaddish, I would like to assume that God was pleased.  So, if you don’t mind, I am going to just take a wild guess here and posit that God might not care that you turn on a switch on the Sabbath or whether you love men or women, as long as you love.  Instead, on the off-chance that God has a second to spare, I would assume that God would be more concerned with how you move through the world, how you express love, and how you contribute to others. 

It is sad that there is the necessity for a place where Jews can worship because they are not welcomed amongst other Jews and yet they themselves welcome all Jews without questions and without tickets.

If for one moment, I would ever dare to think like God, he or she might say, "Rabbis, heal thyselves." 

Philip Smith, author of Walking Through Walls, is guest blogging for Jewcy, and he’ll be here all week.  Stay tuned.

The post Rabbis, Heal Thyselves appeared first on Jewcy.

As I continued to tour the “museum” (as they call it) I walked into what looked like a bunker.  In the corner I saw a stack of grey blankets which I assumed were used by the prisoners.  I asked one of the guards about them.  I was told that they were made from the prisoners.  Pause.  I am now paralyzed.  This pile of blankets was made from human sheep, Jewish sheep.  That’s when the horrors of lamp shades from skin and medical experiments filled my mind.  For me, Auschwitz was not about the mass killing–that’s too abstract a thought for me to fully digest–but it was about the one-on-one inhumanity, the daily interaction between one person and another.  How do you look at a man, woman or child and see them only as a blanket or a conical lampshade that emits a certain type of filtered light?  It is this thought that has stayed with me for twenty years since that visit. On the train back to Lodz, I wondered why people hate us so much, since the very beginning.  Has there ever been a day in Jewish history where we have not been hated?  

Every group seems to get their turn on the wheel of hate but we seem to get our turn more often than others.
Because my father was dubbed “Smith” when he landed at Ellis Island at the turn of the last century, I have had a bit of a unique vantage point.  I’m kind of an invisible Jew.  Because my last name is not Bernstein or Rosenblatt, people feel a bit freer to unload their casual “Jew” remarks in front of me.  Growing up in the segregated South, I heard it a lot but surprisingly, just as much today.  I don’t know if this dislike for Jews is cultural, genetic or what.  And, in some ways, I think modern American Jews have internalized these ideas and therefore rushed to become mainstream and abandon their uniqueness, their religion.  I don’t have the numbers or the evidence, but I would bet that the vast majority of American Jews do not know much about their religion beyond Hanukkah and Yom Kippur with little interest in either. 

As a Chinese woman said to me years ago, “You Jewish people are crazy.  You come to this country and change your name.  We Chinese would never do that.  That is our family, our history.”  May I say that this woman makes a major point, as I am still not sure of my real name nor the real history of my family.  What does that do to a person, to make them history-less?  Once you push the “erase” button it is nearly impossible to reconstruct the missing data.  As American Jews, we are missing mountains of data. What’s interesting to me, is that if you want to talk about minorities, what are we, chopped liver?   We are THE microscopic minority.  Well, Jains and Zoroastrians are probably pretty small too.  In a way, I am grateful for Madonna and the far right in that both are raising the profile of Judaism beyond moneychangers, owners of the media, controllers of Hollywood and just plain dirty people.  For Madonna and the ultra right, Jews have something to tell the world, something rich and textured, something to be embraced not scorned.   So many Jews who immigrated to this country dumped their religion wholesale when they landed in this beautiful country of opportunity.  The only thing they passed on to their children was that it was OK to have a Christmas tree and the love of bagels. I fully understand that they wanted a break with the ugly past and looked forward to reinventing themselves free from persecution and hatred.  Who wants to live like that?   All this rambling leads to the point that sites like JEWCY are important.  It opens up the dialogue, raises the profile and encourages people to think, talk and embrace who they are.  Without this conversation, no group can survive.  With silence we disappear.  Keep talking.

Philip Smith, author of Walking Through Walls, is guest blogging for Jewcy, and he’ll be here all week.  Stay tuned.

The post Jews Have Disappeared into a Malady of Silence and Surnames appeared first on Jewcy.