Happy birthday, Ben Stiller!

The actor and comedian turns 49 today, and I’m using the occasion as an excuse to post this amazing clip from Keeping the Faith (2000), in which he demonstrates his Jewy bona fides as the Hip Young Rabbi who hires a gospel choir to invigorate his stodgy congregants. (Quick refresher, for those who didn’t waste their precious adolescence memorizing B-grade film plots: Stiller plays a rabbi unwittingly caught in a romantic rivalry with his childhood friend, a priest played by Edward Norton. The object of their affection? The very gentile, very verboten Jenna Elfman.)

As far as rom-coms go, it’s no Annie Hall, but I’d give it a solid… B minus, I guess? I mean, the plot is absurd—the entire film pivots on the notion that religious leaders will actually feel guilty about succumbing to sexual temptation, which, LOL—but it’s fun, kind of? Jenna Elfman in her prime!

Now also seems like an apt moment to remind you all that when Ben Stiller’s band performed “Hey Jude” at his bar mitzvah, Jerry Stiller got upset and rushed the stage because he thought they were singing “Hey Jew.” Halevai.

Until 120, Ben!

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Jews aren’t good proselytizers: circumcision, long prayer sessions, kosher dietary restrictions—not to mention a few thousand years of persecution—do not exactly endear Judaism to strangers. But what Jews are good at is writing comedy. In the quirky new web series Jewvangelist, creator and actor Becky Kramer explores what it would take for a young rabbi to recruit new members to the Jewish faith.

The show focuses on Rabbi Leah Levy’s campaign to refresh the family synagogue, which is rapidly losing members. After an almost too coincidental bicycling accident with a Mormon missionary, Levy (played by Kramer) realizes that promoting conversion is the key to replenishing her congregation. Levy is joined by her goofy cantor friend, and along the way they pick up a hodge-podge of friends from various religious backgrounds. Our heroine has a villain, of course—her ridiculously evil twin brother Asher, who is a rival Rabbi and wants to sell the building.

While the plotline may pique your interest, there are some flaws that should be addressed: the acting is weak at times, and the story relies on a number of absurd coincidences. There is an excessive amount of sexual innuendo and it tends to be a little out of place.

But all that is ok. After all, Jewvangelist is only a short web series. And what the show does right, it really does right. The writing is witty and the production quality is flawless. Each episode is about 12 minutes long, which means the entire six-part first season can be watched in a little over an hour. I rarely found myself heartily laughing at the jokes, but the characters are loveable and I found myself rooting for them to succeed. The show also promotes religious and cultural tolerance—a message we need to keep hearing.

As with many Jewish productions, you’ll laugh a little, cringe a little too, and wonder why you’re still there halfway through. But when it’s all over you’ll leave feeling warm and satisfied, even if you’re not entirely sure why.

Watch the first episode here:

Related: New Web Series Celebrates Poutine, Lactaid, and Jewish Angst—in Yiddish

(Image via Kickstarter)

The post Jews, Proselytizing, and Comedy Collide in ‘Jewvangelist’ appeared first on Jewcy.

I own hardly any white clothes, a fact that took me by surprise, once again, last Kol Nidre.

This is equal parts vanity and common sense: white is a color that highlights your shape; it emphasizes largeness and form. And in New York City, where I live, every surface is dusted with low-grade filth.

I owned one pair of white jeans that rode too low and never came out clean, no matter how I washed them. I had one sheer jersey dress, an ill-fitting gift that I couldn’t face throwing away. So come Yom Kippur morning last year I trotted them out, cobbling together an outfit. My giant tallit covered the rest. I looked ridiculous, but that was the price I had to pay for my failure to plan, I told myself. Next year, I promised, I’d get my act together in advance. I made a lot of promises that week.

Draping oneself in humble whites on Yom Kippur has been a traditional Jewish custom for millennia. It’s also the custom of the exuberant, neo-traditional-hippie Jewish community that I gravitated towards in adulthood. While I do not own a kittel (the white burial robe that men traditionally wear on their wedding day and Yom Kippur), I like the gravity of donning a garment with the weight of death; the effacement of self-expression when approaching divine judgment. But the notion of purity—so central to the Yom Kippur prayer service—that’s harder for me to swallow.

Last month, I listened to one of my favorite rabbis singing selichot, the penitential prayers offered before the high holy days. With his studied persuasiveness, in a gravely voice that gets me every time, he offered his annual plea: Do something to prepare yourself for the Days of Awe. Don’t let the holidays creep up on you. Do the spiritual work.

I do not believe that the work he envisioned was online dress shopping, but that is exactly what I did as soon as I got home—until 1AM. I was dismayed to find scores of white dresses at full price after Labor Day. (Are no sartorial traditions sacred anymore?) I recalled my ambivalence while white dress shopping for my wedding, the appalling 600 percent markup on anything a bride might consider wearing. Same symbolism: death, rebirth, purity, humility. They are very expensive symbols.

And there were so many ways to sort and filter the results! White, of course. Not short, maybe long or mid-length? The thought floated through my mind that this was perhaps not the type of work that would best serve my most sincere repentance. But imagining myself embodied on Yom Kippur was weirdly helpful. What would it be like to slip this dress over my head or zipper it up? How would the fabric feel on my skin? I rejected outfits if I didn’t think I could move freely in them, or ones that looked itchy. With this time investment, at least I’d get to skip the nagging guilt of failing to prepare.

Except that I found nothing. I filtered until there was nothing left. Everything was too short, or too cleavage-enhancing, or made of some unearthly polyester. These dresses were not designed for a solemn occasion, for beating one’s chest or praying through tears.

I thought about the time a few years back when I tried to do the Great Aleinu—the full prostration—in high heels and a very reasonable skirt. I remembered being totally distracted by my clothes, and how I had obviously not done the work—the unglamorous, practical work—of making sure that I could pray the way I wanted to. My body’s shelter, inside my community’s shelter, was totally ill-suited for the task.

One Yom Kippur when I had just moved west, I attended a Jewish Renewal service in Oakland. One congregant in particular caught my eye. She was standing up, swaying, arms pointing heavenward, and full-throat singing literally the whole time. I don’t know what she was on, but I wanted some. Her flowing caftan housed her corpulence, and I realized that she was free to really be in her body. It was hers—and God’s—to see. I wondered if that was what it was like to be invisible and also really, truly seen and present.

With no acceptable white dresses online, I went to H&M, and was immediately overstimulated by the ritual thud of dance music. But in the clothing-to-junk cycle of seasonal fashion, there were no more white dresses. I had not prepared early enough. Thumbing through racks, I thought about how nobody seemed interested in selling women clothing for solemn occasions; clothing for simply being present in our bodies—as opposed to being gazed upon by judges, male and female. It seemed so obvious. Obviously nobody wants to sell me that.

When I was a kid, we looked really nice on the High Holidays. This was my mother’s rule, and her mother’s. No runs in stockings. Nothing scuffed or stained or ill-fitting from last year. The clothes weren’t white, but they were pristine and considered in advance. It wasn’t spiritual per se, but it was a big deal and the community custom.

I remember visiting that congregation during college. A teenager was wearing a barely-there fuchsia and black party dress with spaghetti straps. She looked miserable. I preferred to imagine that the misery preceded the dress, a spirited teenage protest. She wasn’t allowed to skip services, but she could wear that dress. Or perhaps she felt miserable because she realized she’d committed an etiquette misstep.

I was not offended by her dress or her body, but I wondered how she felt, if she was conscious of others’ eyes on her, or perhaps blissfully unaware. I wondered if her dress helped her get what she wanted out of that service or that day, if it helped her do her work.

I was never much moved by the soul of that suburban temple. But I did notice that we’d all shown up, even those of us who probably would not return for another year. The room contained a kernel of somber optimism, a desire to hold for a moment the belief that with the work, one can find in oneself a fresh heart. That our days can be renewed. God knows, we can’t do it alone.

Back on the internet, I lowered my standards. I found myself considering my shopping filters and realized that they described some odd form of modesty, a concept I hold with profound suspicion. I think of modesty as a construct, a matrix of community norms—people looking at other people, and women worrying about what other people think we look like. There is so little I can do about this. I can maybe control my own feelings, and I can learn better not to project a bunch of baloney onto other people. But my tools to resist unreasonable standards—the same standards that demand me to wear clothes I can’t do my work in—are limited, because I’m a person. I wanted a modest uniform for this day of extreme humility, not to serve someone else’s needs, but to do my work. It’s not exactly that I wanted to be invisible. Rather, I wanted an outfit in which I felt safe revealing the innermost core of myself, beating my chest, shedding my tears, whatever that looks like.

I filtered the results again, optimistically. Mid-length, sure. White or off-white. Natural fibers or natural-looking. The results that popped up were mostly sheer, with peek-holes, or sundresses that would give me a chill. There was nothing left.

The part of me that wanted to look polished, like my mother would strongly recommend, that part of me was not on good terms with the part of me that would like to not be seen, to just buy the damn kittel already. But I couldn’t look good and be unseen at the same time. Wearing the men’s uniform wouldn’t solve this dilemma. It wouldn’t undo the tensions between seeing and being seen, by community, by God, by myself.

So I just bought a dress and accepted its imperfections. It’s not designed to solve my problems. No dresses are. It’s too big. It’s 80/20 cotton/polyester. It was on sale, but not by much. But it has pockets and falls to a comfortable length above my knee. It’s like a boxy house, though it looked more like a stylish and modern house on the model than it does on me. The fabric is thick and spongy, and I’ve been added to the store’s email list, from which there is apparently no unsubscribe. I’m more terrified than ever about my limited capacity to do this work—the real work under the clothes—but this feels like a durable shelter, a start.

(Image by Vanessa P., via Flickr)

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An editor once told me that divorce “fractures the narrative of childhood,” a phrase which has stuck with me ever since. But does growing up in a broken family or single parent household similarly impact the way a person experiences religion?

A recent study suggests that it does. Researchers studying Christian children found that a child of divorce is less likely to be religiously engaged than a kid who hails from a two-parent household. “Youth who experience parental divorce,” the researchers conclude, “report lower religious involvement and identity than their peers from intact families.”

Over at Slate, Amanda Marcotte took issue with the study—not with the findings, however, but with how the researchers interpreted their results. “I find it simultaneously amusing and disturbing how assured the researchers are that people like myself—I’m both a ‘child of divorce’ and an outright atheist—are a problem to be fixed,” she writes.

Like Marcotte, I am a child of divorce who experienced marked declines in religiosity as I grew older. And though I’m not an atheist, I don’t take kindly to the presumptions of the researchers that the possible fallout from a divorce—decreased religious engagement—is necessarily cause for alarm. (I am far more concerned with other measures of psychological well-being post-divorce.)

Perhaps I’m particularly sensitive to this sort of assumption because when I was growing up, I consistently heard it repeated by teachers who faulted divorce for all sorts of things—general misbehavior, rebellion (you know how I feel about that word), and of course, religious transgression.

‘I’m sitting right here,’ I’d want to shout as yet another teacher, seemingly oblivious to the diversity of her students, described my family situation as though it was the root of all evil.

Unlike the families described in the study who became less likely to attend religious services after a divorce, my family’s religious practice wasn’t drastically altered after my parents’ split. My mother, my sole caregiver, remained steadfastly Orthodox. We attended synagogue just as much as we had before, which is to say every week. My sister and I continued going to yeshiva. We still kept kosher.

If the researchers had been studying my family’s religious engagement after the divorce, they probably would’ve found nothing to support their conclusions. Yet upon closer examination, they may have been able to detect small fissures in our observance, minor shifts that might have predicted my future choices.

At our Shabbat table, ritual functions my father had previously performed now trickled down to us, three females. Though we blessed the wine and challah in his stead, we did so with the full awareness that we weren’t observing in an optimal fashion, which made us feel uncomfortable.

At school, we had learned that ideally a man should say these blessings, and in my friends’ homes, that was exactly what happened. When these same friends came to our house for lunch, I felt embarrassed as my mom stumbled over the liturgy. They, too, looked uncomfortable.

I noticed other things. I saw how as a single woman, my mother had no counterpart on the other side of the mechitzah, which meant she had no true say in synagogue affairs, and no one to say kaddish for her on behalf of my maternal grandmother.

My mother would complain about this—not angrily or in a way that suggested she thought things should be different. While she identified as a feminist (and was the reason I was pro-choice before I knew what that meant), her feminism was the type that stopped at Orthodox Judaism’s door. She never expressed a real desire to see her status and role changed.

Through my parents divorce, I was getting a glimpse of how truly unequal women were in the observant community. My friends, whose childhood narrative hadn’t been fractured as mine had, weren’t noticing these inequities.

It was as though my family’s “untraditional” structure conferred on me a sort of superpower (honed by many trips to the therapist), allowing me to notice what was wrong with the community. I felt like the kid in The Sixth Sense, who can see dead people when no one else around him can. (Spoiler alert: Bruce Willis is dead in that movie.)

I think of divorce as a storm that not only causes its own damage but also reveals other problems lurking beneath the surface. It’s sort of like what happened in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy (and before that, Katrina), when the existing poverty of the hardest hit, most underserved areas is exposed. The storms didn’t cause poverty; they simply highlighted the problem. In Judaism, divorce definitely isn’t the cause of gender inequality—but in my experience, it made its existence all the more glaring.

Divorce, of course, isn’t viewed as some naturally occurring calamity. It’s viewed as a choice—a bad one. Traditional Judaism, like other organized religions, is arrayed around the family unit. The researchers acknowledged this issue, stating, “Many congregations hold traditional family models as the normative ideal and explicitly or implicitly discourage divorce.” Undoubtedly, this will make some kids feel like outsiders.

Given the centrality of the two-parent family in religion, divorce fractures more than just the narrative of childhood. It disrupts religious ideals, too. But the religious response to divorce shouldn’t be to uphold those ideals at the expense of those who fall short. Take it from someone who knows: that approach might do more harm than good.

Previously: Don’t Call Me a Rebel
The Problem With Modesty Blogging

(Art by Margarita Korol)

The post The BallaBuster: A Jewish Childhood After Divorce appeared first on Jewcy.

I want to get close to Laney, to hear her say my name slo-wly. She is petite but taut-bodied in a yellow sundress, fabric so invitingly thin and wispy I wonder if I could blow it off her torso with a well-timed breath. She is telling me her fingers tremble when she drinks coffee, and that is why she has tiny green glops on the skin between the toenails she’s painted. Her small blue eyes twinkle, and I hold her gaze as if I’m spinning plates on my index finger: the longer I do it, the more likely she might be to applaud, take my hand, and invite me to rest my palm on the small of her back.

“Have you ever eaten at Belle Luna?” she asks me as we stroll the streets of downtown Knoxville, Tennessee. We’ve just eaten crepes at a French café: it’s our first date. “Nope,” I say, walking a little behind her to admire her bronzed legs. “Have you ever had a drink at Sapphire?” she asks. “No, but I’d like to, sometime,” I say. “Have you ever gone inside Sterchi Lofts?” “Well,” I say, laughing. “What?” she asks. “No,” I say, “I haven’t been there either.”

Outside of us both being law students and laughing at Will Ferrell movies, Laney and I don’t have much in common: it’s not just that we haven’t frequented the same bars or restaurants; it’s that we don’t like to visit the same regions of human experience. I love reading novels; she doesn’t care for them. She loves shopping; I get headaches at T.J. Maxx. But she’s a sweet girl, and that body…

I sit her on a bench and tell her I can read palms—“because my parents are Russian”—and she either buys my line of reasoning (Russian parents = metaphysical insight) or she accepts that I’m inventing a way to get my hands on hers. I disclose to her a future of three children, a husband, and good health. “Cool,” she says. “Oh, did you see the Christmas lights all along this street last year?”

“Yeah,” I say. “They were really cool.”

“Did you decorate your house for Christmas?”

“No,” I said. “I’m Jewish.”

“What?”

“I’m Jewish.”

“Seriously?” Laney registers my Jewishness with a squirrely wiggle of her nose.

“Yep,” I say. “So no Christmas.”

“Are you joking?”

I laugh aloud. “Why would I joke about that?”

“Okay,” she says. “Okay.”

“Have you ever met a Jewish person before?”

Laney is from a tiny Tennessee town where controversy can break out if a Baptist considers going to a Methodist church. She thinks to herself and answers no, she’s never met a Jew before. “Do you go to church?”

“Sometimes I go to synagogue.”

“Is that Jewish church?”

“Basically, but it’s called synagogue. Sometimes I’ll go on Friday nights.”

“So you don’t go to Jewish church all the time?”

“Synagogue,” I say.

“Oh, sorry!” she says. “Do you eat special foods?”

And that’s when it hit me: I, a man who has never fasted on Yom Kippur, who has not read the Torah since his bar mitzvah, and who has eaten pork and assorted trayf by the boatload throughout his life, is to be the Spokesman of the Jews for an inquisitive girl from Small Town, Tennessee. Her curiosities and judgments about the whole of the Jewish people will likely be filtered through me in the future; me, the first Jew she’s ever known. I feel underqualified for the job and eerily aware of its weight: I can picture Laney at a dinner party, maybe five years from now, and the talk shifting to something or other related to Jews and Laney saying, “Ya’ll, I know one.”

In my life, I have been cocooned: I went to Jewish Sunday school until my bar mitzvah, I went to a private high school that, while not predominantly Jewish, had its fair share of them, and then I attended a university with a largely Jewish student body. Though I lived in places where Jews were the minority, I had never before been put into a position where I was to be quizzed (in the nicest possible way, of course, because Laney’s smile was very nice) about my faith, identity, culture, and religion. I even feel presumptuous using the possessive “my”: who I am to feign expertise on such a rich, complicated people, for the very word Jew unfurls into thousands of connotations depending on what books you read, who you talk to, and what you experience.

“Some people eat special foods,” I tell Laney. “Kosher.”

“What’s kosher?”

“Well, you can’t eat pork…and certain foods have to be treated a certain way.”

God. It was as if I’d sped-read Judaism for Dummies.

Even though I tell Laney that holidays like Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are more significant in the Jewish calendar, Laney wants to know about Hanukkah. “Is it like Christmas?” she asks.

My Sunday school education, long warehoused and growing musty with disuse, was suddenly called upon. I deliver what I know in fragments: the story of the noble Maccabee warriors, how they thought they had oil to help them survive one cold night, only to discover that the oil, miraculously, would last them eight. “So that’s why we light the candles on eight nights,” I tell Laney. “On this candelabra-looking thing.” I forget to tell her the candelabra-looking thing is called a menorah. “Have you ever eaten potato pancakes?”

“No…” she says, as if she thinks I might offer her one from my pocket.

I am lucky Laney is asking me about Hanukkah, because if she had asked me a broader question like, “What is a Jew?”, I would be flummoxed. The History of the Jews: a history of faith and strength and perseverance over oppression, of tradition and literature and art and family and. And and and. I wasn’t getting to the ands: I was only talking about Hanukkah. But then again, what else could I tell her if she did ask? Where would I start?

Talking about some of the basics of Judaism made me keenly aware of the scattershot knowledge I had of my own Jewish identity, and how difficult it would be for me to explain to a person who had no familiarity with it. My Jewishness has been passed down from my parents, Russian Jews who came to the United States as political refugees in 1979. On their Soviet passports, their nationality was listed not as RUSSIAN, but as JEW. They fled to America for the reasons so many flee: opportunity, freedom, both economic and religious.

In my family, I was a first-generation American Jew, born in Omaha, Nebraska and raised in Memphis, Tennessee on the soothing storyteller sermons of my Reform rabbi and the sing-song cadence of my cantor. However, my day-to-day Jewishness, especially past my bar mitzvah, was molded more by cultural than religious forces: Jerry Seinfeld’s nasal twang, Adam Sandler’s “The Hanukkah Song.”

Hanukkah again. “The potato pancakes are called latkes,” I tell Laney.

I don’t ask Laney if she’s ever heard of Moshe Dayan or Philip Roth or Larry David. I don’t try to present and flatten the contusions of the word Jew itself: is it a signifier of identity? Race? Religion? Culture? All of the above? How much do such distinctions matter when, in the dark pages of history, those who hate don’t care if you’re Orthodox or Reform or Conservative or culturally Jewish, or a Jew for Jesus, or an atheist Jew, or a Jewish Neurotic. For those who hate them, a Jew is a Jew—period. And while many Jews may be reluctant to define their people, even in defiant pride, with the same vocabulary that their enemies use, I am reminded of an Israeli speaker who hated the word “Jewish.” “Why,” he said to me and my fellow Birthright trip travelers in a hotel conference room in Jerusalem, “are you Jew…ISH?” He stressed the palms-raised-in-the-air nebbishness of the ISH. “No, you’re not Jewish,” he scolded us. “You can’t ish your way out of our family. You’re a JEW!”

I am a Jew. This is what I had told Laney, the shiksa goddess from the Tennessee country, and she had asked me if I was kidding. If I had been kidding, what was the joke? What was its set-up, its punchline? What comic ammunition would I have gotten out of pretending to be a Jew?

With the fearlessness of an Israeli commando and the calm dignity of Moses, I ask Laney, “How would your dad feel if you, say, married a Jew?”

She turns her pillowy lips to me. “I think he’d be okay,” she says. “But he’d be mad if I married a black guy.”

Oy.

(image via Shutterstock)

Related: I Hid My Non-Jewish Boyfriend From My Family For Over A Year
Did My Commitment to Dating Only Jews Make Me a Racist?

The post Jewish Law Student Seeks Blonde, Southern Belle appeared first on Jewcy.

Last year, I compiled a list of literature I felt appropriate for the introspective nature of the High Holidays. Throughout the year, I shul hopped my way around the tri-state area and found a surprising form of synagogue worship: reading throughout the service. Everywhere I went, I found a steady group of people who came to synagogue to read. While some might find this offensive, I found it encouraging. The shul environment is tranquil, calm, and conducive to letting words wash over your mind. In that vein, here are eight more books—new and old—that I find transplant me to a more receptive mindset during these reflective days.

Fiction

Scenes From a Village Life, by Amos Oz

Oz, the elder statesmen of Israeli writers, writes this slim, beguiling state of the union address in the form of interconnected short stories about a fictional town in Israel. Death, decay, and loss pervade these stories that manifest an Israel uncertain of its past and frightened of its future. Yet despite the many dire situations, Oz evinces an infinite love for his homeland, albeit a homeland he sees as lost. Beyond their statement about the health of Israeli culture, these beautiful stories confront essential questions of family, loyalty, and the nature of commitment.

Love’s Executioner, by Irvin Yalom

Yalom is an interesting species of writer. Born Jewish, turned atheist and secularist, Yalom still displays an abiding spirituality in his embrace of existential thinking in psychotherapy. In his most famous book, Love’s Executioner, Yalom shares 10 stories from his therapeutic practice that allow the reader to explore personal fears and insecurities. The introduction itself, a pitch perfect summation of existentialist therapy, justifies the hefty price of the book.

Sense of an Ending, by Julian Barnes

Barnes’ meditation on memory and missed opportunities will entrance all types of readers. In this short book full of crystalline prose, Barnes weaves the story of Tony, a man in his sixties, looking back and questioning the tidy narrative of his life. In a time devoted to reflection, seeing Tony mine his experiences to understand how he got to the exact point he’s now at will open even the most cynical heart to the possibility of redemption.

Wise Blood, by Flannery O’Connor

One of the legends of 20th century fiction, O’Connor tends to get more notice for her short stories than for her novels. With her characteristic charismatic southern humor and darkness, O’Connor explores religious crises in an often surprising manner in her first novel. Though rooted in Christianity, the story of a young person returning home only to find himself struggling with his religious heritage will appeal to people of various persuasions. O’Connor, in her often mysterious way, makes the case that those who rail against God and those who live with doubt are some of the most religious people.

Gilead, Home, by Marilynne Robinson

Robinson represents one of the last bastions of religious writers. One of the best writers of our generation, she manages to combine some of the finest writing with the deepest religious sentiment. In Gilead, an aging pastor writes a letter to his son about the nature of faith, devotion, and the challenges of modern life. Robinson’s portrayal of religious life represents a true understanding of spiritual struggles and motivation. Home, a sequel of sorts to Gilead, tells the story not from the perspective of a dying pastor, but from the perspective of the prodigal son returning home. Any of her books, whether essay or fiction, would foot the bill for these introspective days, but this one-two punch captures the range of today’s religious experience.

Nonfiction

The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism, by Deborah Baker

Baker writes a stunningly brilliant biography of Maryam Jameelah, previously known as Miriam Marcus, a secular Jew who converted to Islam and became a famous writer of anti-American books in Pakistan. Baker weaves Jameelah’s story from her letters to her parents and others, but eventually Baker widens the book’s scope to investigate the charismatic leader that guided Jameelah’s transition, Mawlana Mawdudi, the divide between Islam and the West, and ultimately, an exploration of Baker herself. She questions her own assumptions about life, civilization, and the limits of knowledge—all while pushing the boundaries of a biography considerably beyond what we may expect from the genre.

In the Valley of the Shadow: On the Foundations of Religious Belief, by James Kugel

Kugel, a renowned biblical critic, explores his beliefs through his experience with cancer. Never one to shy away from the struggles of contemporary Judaism, Kugel seeks, with the mind of an academic and the heart of poet, to find “the starting point of religious consciousness.” He also takes the reader on a journey into the depths of religious experience.

HHhH, by Laurent Binet

We focus so much on the Jewish experience in the Holocaust that we risk forgetting the larger context of the war. Binet masterfully explores a secret mission to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich, the Butcher of Prague, while considering the nature of courage, heroism, and meaning—crafting an exciting, dramatic, true story. Binet also sheds light on more recent histories of war, genocide, and heroism, acknowledging that these episodes can make us feel our lives are a bit, well, mundane. Binet acutely taps into this epochal insecurity of ours. Often our lives can feel small and insignificant compared to those heroes of previous generations, but Binet also finds redemption in our ability to learn from history.

Previously: Days Of Awe(some) Books: A High Holiday Reading List

The post Days Of Awe(some) Books: A High Holiday Reading List, Part II appeared first on Jewcy.

This was the first Rosh Hashanah I didn’t go to shul. I still saw friends, went to meals, dipped the apple in honey more than once, yet I never entered any one of the several minyanim I’ve frequented in the past. I never opened the machzor I’ve been using for years, the one I received free in the mail for a hoped-for donation that I didn’t send. And I never heard the shofar blasts calling me to repentance.

Does this mean I was blameless all year, that I had nothing to repent for? Hardly. It’s just that despite the myriad of rituals, the primary way the Jews I know mark Rosh Hashanah is with an extra-long synagogue service. And I don’t enjoy prayer.

This is not merely a sign of how degenerate I’ve become since leaving Orthodoxy. Prayer, even when I was a full-on believer, was always the most difficult part of Judaism for me. I’ve never been able to sit or stand still and even the most vigorous shokeling, the ritualistic swaying that the religious set do while davening, was never enough to keep boredom at bay. As a child, I was able to leave services without glares of disapproval and would spend hours in the ladies’ room with a friend, swinging from stalls (though I never did giant swings like John Cage did on Ally McBeal) and giving bubbies the scare of their lives when I popped out.

As I got older, I was expected to stay in the women’s section for even longer periods of time as though age had miraculously reformed my twitchy nature. It did no such thing. Throughout the practically daylong Rosh Hashanah services, I’d alternate my foot tapping from one leg to the other and then back again. I would leave my seat as often as possible to get sips of water from the fountain or to visit the restroom. I no longer attempted acrobatics in the stalls. Rather, I engaged in the more teenage-appropriate behavior of checking my hair in the mirror. But after five old ladies entered the bathroom and then left, I felt obligated to return the sanctuary.

Despite these stratagems, there was still left ample time to stew in my seat. Or stand and pray. The worst was mussaf, which translates to “additional service.” The first part is recited to oneself and I did my best to complete it as quickly as possible in order to get a chance at sitting before the even longer repetition portion began. (Woe unto me when I learned at school that I wasn’t supposed to sit down in front of a person still engaged in prayer. I’d stare angrily at the woman behind me who seemed to be taking her sweet time communing with God and seeking blessings for her family. I hated her so much.)

I also engaged in “machzor math” by flipping to the end of the mussaf service to figure out how many pages were left until the final shofar blasts of the day. (As a math-phobic person, this remains the only type of arithmetic I’ve ever been any good at.)

At times, however, I took a grim satisfaction in surviving the service as though I had run some sort of liturgical marathon. Back at school after the holidays, we’d boast to one another about how long our davening lasted. The winners (and losers) were the ones who didn’t get to eat lunch until it was practically time for seniors in Florida to get their early bird specials. (This same sort of competition was applied to Passover seders. Eating dinner before midnight was a sign of impiety.) In Orthodox Judaism, as in my beloved sport of gymnastics, your grit is measured by how much suffering you can endure.

As an adult, I stopped attending Orthodox services. I found congregations that shared my values, from egalitarianism to social justice. There is just one problem—these guys use a liturgy very similar in content and length to the service of my youth. And they really like to sing it out.

Again, I found myself resorting to the same time-killing strategies I used as a kid. I showed up late, got up often to go to the bathroom and get sips of water. I found people to speak to. I rose and sat with the congregation. And I counted how many pages we had to go until we would be free for the day.

When I woke up on Monday morning, I was ready to go through all of it again. I’d show up late and then distract others with mindless chatter. And then I’d distract myself when they’d finally shush me. I’d rise and sit in accordance with the script. Once again I’d hope that instead of ten or twenty minutes of connectedness with the material and the songs, maybe I’d get half an hour this year.

Then I decided to go back to sleep. Perhaps it was pure laziness that kept me in bed for hours with a book and a cup of coffee until it was time to meet my friends for lunch. And it was that, at least in part. But it was also me finally recognizing that prayer wasn’t meant to be my form of spiritual expression and engagement.

On some level, this is surprising. I’m a writer and rabbinic Judaism (as one good rabbi friend once pointed out to me) is a verbal culture. I enjoy text study and can argue for hours. You’d think that prayer, being comprised of a lot words written into books, would also thrill me. But when confronted with the liturgical text, I rarely feel anything in the recitation of it, even amongst a group of friends I love and respect. It mostly leaves me cold.

So what’s the difference between the intellectual discussion that excites me and the prayers that bore me to distraction? It is, in part, the demand for stillness. I’m not a meditative sort and I feel most connected when I’m moving and dancing. But it’s also the rote nature of these lengthy services. What I cherish about literary analysis and debate is that though we are working from a static text, we’re improvising as we argue. For me, spirituality is achieved, however briefly, from constant shifting and changing. I can’t work from a script. (Or remember a beam routine much to my former coach’s chagrin.)

This reminds me, like virtually everything else in life, of a moment from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. When Werewolf Oz is asked about Sunnydale High School’s marching jazz band, he explains, “Since the best jazz is improvisational, we’d be going off in all directions, banging into floats…scary.”

Similarly, a standardized davening keeps the congregation together. The unity and cohesion of many voices joining together, saying the same words, is for some an incredibly spiritual experience. I have friends who find great fulfillment and connectedness in the traditional service.

Thankfully, these folks mostly indulge me and my inability to daven. After two years of living in Los Angeles, my friends hosted a Shabbat lunch to bid me farewell. When it came time to bench after the meal, one announced, “I think that because it’s Dvora’s last Shabbat here, we should bench quietly and to ourselves, the way she likes it.” It was one of the nicest things anyone has ever done for me.

Though undoubtedly these friends also find Rosh Hashanah davening overly long—I’ve spied others doing machzor math—they enjoy a good sing-along and get into it. I wouldn’t want anyone to cut it short on my behalf.

Besides, the longer they spend in shul, the more time I get to spend in bed or dancing around my apartment before I meet them for the most Jewish act of all—eating.

(image via Shutterstock)

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On the first anniversary of Amy Winehouse’s death, her family lit a yahrzeit candle as fans, fellow artists, and media outlets alike paid tribute to the powerhouse singer and her soulful legacy.

In a moving, picture filled article on Winehouse, who died of accidental alcohol poisoning at age 27, The Guardian‘s Tim Jonze writes:

[Bill] Ashton thinks the biggest contributing factor to her talent was the fact that her father, Mitch, was a Jewish taxi driver. “They’ve got the best musical taste of anyone,” he says. “They’re extremely discerning, and their taste runs through very good singers. When NYJO [National Youth Jazz Orchestra] did concerts at the Barbican, accompanying people like Buddy Greco, Rosemary Clooney or Peggy Lee, the entire audience was Jewish taxi drivers.”

In April 2011, three months before Winehouse died, Dvora Meyers wrote presciently about the troubled singer in Tablet Magazine, articulating the strong influence Winehouse’s Jewish upbringing had on her music. “Though she cloaked herself in the style and sound of girl groups from 40 years ago, Winehouse brought a thoroughly modern—and Jewish—sensibility to her lyrics and performances,” Meyers wrote. “She spoke not of love and romance, as her predecessors did, but of addictions, sex, and every Jewish girl’s favorite emotion: guilt.”

Meyers, who once dressed up as Winehouse for Purim, even compared the regretful, if inevitable, lyrics of “You Know I’m No Good” to the intense, methodical chest-pounding of Yom Kippur synagogue-goers:

And for the sin of cheating on my boyfriend.

And for the sin of thinking of you when I’m trying to please a new guy.

And for the sin of cheating. Yet again.

Image credit: Harper Collins

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