Fun times, back on the couch:


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Most people are familiar with the Ten Commandments. You know the story: Moses, tablets, Mount Sinai, etc. Well, throughout the Torah (that's the Jewish Bible, also known somewhat pejoratively, as the Old Testament or Pentateuch) there are actually a lot more Commandments listed. Christians, for a variety of reasons, ignore most of the rest of these Commandments, although they seem to think some of the ones that pertain to sex are of particular importance and should still be enforced (homosexual sodomy bad!). But since us Jewish folk haven't had our Jesus come along yet and make himself the new covenant, those people who are more observantly Jewish tend to follow every single one of the Commandments. The standard counting is that there are 613 of them in the Torah. Everything from "Learn Torah" to "Not to wear 'Shaatnez', a cloth woven of wool and linen". Personally, I happen to love a good wool/linen blend. By the way, the Hebrew word for Commandment is Mitzvah, so Bar/Bat Mitzvah means Son/Daughter of the Commandments, and marks the point in time when Jewish children are supposed to be responsible for following these rules, whether or not you have a party and read a little Torah to commemorate that particular moment in time. [And I should probably eventually write something up about why I had a bar mitzvah two years ago since I had technically already been responsible for keeping the mitzvah for the previous 8 years anyway.]

Currently, a number of these 613 Mitzvah are no longer applicable, and no one, not even the Jewiest Jews still follow them. Many of these anachronistic Mitzvot (that's the singular) have to do with our Temple procedures. The Temple used to to be the central part of Jewish ritual, but after it got destroyed the second time, Judaism switched from a Big T Temple religion to a Little T temple (read synagogue) religion, and we stopped following all the Mitzvah related to the Temple. There are also some Mitzvah that apply only to Israel, only to specific people, such as the Priestly class, known previously as a Kohain. (A lot of people with the last name Cohen are descendants of this line of Priests and are sometimes called on to play a special role during Jewish religious services). There is a particularly interesting dispute about a Mitzvot regarding locusts. The Torah goes into some lengths about which food is permissible to eat (kosher). And it mentions that there are a couple of locusts that are okay to eat. But since most people stopped eating locusts for a long time, they forgot which kinds are kosher, and since they can't tell the acceptable ones from the unacceptable ones they couldn't eat any of them. Except for the Yemenites. The Jewish folks in Yemen have been eating locusts since the time of the Torah, and they claim to know which are the God-approved ones. This dispute eventually reached the head rabbinic authorities (as you can tell, after 3,000 years of arguing, we've dealt with all the really important questions already), and they ruled that a food is kosher if there is a continuous tradition of treating it as kosher within a particular culture, so the Yemenites can keep eating their locusts, but no one else is allowed to.

Aside from all the Mitzvah that no longer apply, there are also a bunch that I disagree with (for a variety of reasons). So I went through the list of all 613, identified the ones that I liked and laid them out in a way to represent my own personal blend of Judaism. I'm not going to list the ones I picked here, and I made some of them purposefully illegible in the painting, but if you're reading this and you're Jewish, I'd encourage you to look through the list and see which ones you like. And if you're not Jewish but you want to do good in the eyes of Judaism, we came up with some rules for all you gentiles to follow. They are called the Noahide Laws or Seven Laws of Noah and you can read them here.







I've got some other Mitzvah related ideas that I'll be working on soon. Plus, I've been neglecting my menorahs, so I'll be finishing some more of those soon.

I've actually been meaning to do this particular piece for some time, and I had held off on actually pulling the trigger for a variety of (mostly bad) reasons, so if I get around to it, I'll write something up about my artistic process, why I eventually completed this, and what I learned from making this.

I teach at a local Jewish shul, and I recently got to chaperone a ski trip to Hidden Valley. (By the way, shul is the yiddish word that can be used interchangeably with synagogue or temple, and since yiddish is awesome, I'm trying to use more of it.)

Now, I was actually really nervous about going. I haven't been on the slopes in probably around 10 years and I was mostly concerned about physically injuring myself, and just barely concerning about injuring my dignity by revealing to a bunch of 8th graders my completely inability to ski.

It was about a 45 minutes bus ride out to Hidden Valley, and I had a delightful conversation with two of the more swarthy jokesters on the bus, who spent much of the ride pretending to be terrorists. At one point, one of them said I didn't have the Jewish look, and asked if I was more of a chocolate milk kind of Jew...

We proceeded to check in to get all the skiing accouterments that we needed and I wandered outside, ready to face the mountain. The first confirmation of my sense of impending doom came when I realized that I didn't actually know how to put the skis on. I had the boot things on, but it wasn't clear how exactly to attach the ski thing to the boot thing. I awkwardly manhandled the levers and knobs through my think gloves until I figured it out, and took a moment to watch the people around me as if I could relearn to ski by observation along.

Finally, with nerves steeled, I took off down the beginner hill toward the chair lift where I spotted a gaggle of the 8th grade girls getting ready to ride up the hill. I aimed myself at them, and since I hadn't mastered stopping yet, almost crashed into one of the girls, who had sprawled herself out on the snow, and like a baby giraffe, had not figured out how to stand yet. In my current role as mother giraffe, I engaged in some heaving and hawing and eventually got her in a standing position and we got on the chair lift together, although it was obvious from our initial interactions that this girl was a much worse skier than I.

As it came time to get off the chair lift (which was much harder than the previous skiing I had engaged in) baby giraffe girl tumbled off the chair into a mound of snow, arms and skis all akimbo. Much cajoling proved unsuccessful, and she decided she was going to stay in her little ice couch while I headed down the slope with the other girls.

I knocked on the door of the little cabin at the top of the hill seeking some assistance, and a ski employee came out. I explained to him that although I was at the top of the mountain (read: tall hill) wearing a pair of skis, I didn't actually know how to ski. And while I knew an entire lesson on skiing was out of the question, I figured he might have some insight, and he said, "do you know about having your skis like french fried or pizza?" I did in fact, remember such a motto, from a ski lesson I had undertaken as a wee lad in California, and so I convinced myself that armed with my trusty pizza skis, nothing terribly disastrous could befall me.

I waited for other skiers to clear out, hoping to have as a big a gap between those skiing below me, and those who would come after me, because as worried as I was about hitting something (trees! chair lift supports! snow machine!), I was much more concerned about hitting another person. I pushed off, aiming just a few degrees off of completely perpendicular to the downhill slope, so that there would be little chance on my maiden voyage to gain speed, and careen downwards at an uncontrollable speed.

And it worked! I glided lengthways across the slope, where I ground to a halt at the far bank. And I wasn't dangerously out of control! In fact, it seemed remarkably like I was skiing, at least based purely on a comparison of the those around me. I decided that instead of aiming sideways, I could actually aim down the hill. I scoped out all the potential threatening objects, identified who else was on the hill (there were people everywhere! Children even, with seemingly no directional control or concern for the terrible skier at the top of the slope, much larger than them, without the ability to maneuver well), and located the best place downhill to either come to a controlled stop or else attempt a manual stop by flopping down onto the snow while still going relatively slowly.

I proceeded in this manner down to the bottom of the hill, skis never leaving their trusty pizza shape. And, shockingly (perhaps), everything went exactly according to plan. I joined up with a group of the boys (the terrorists and their friends) and I told them that although I didn't actually no how to ski, I would try to keep up with them down the hill. The second time, things went much better. Armed with my newfound, and completely undeserved self-confidence I spent some time in french fry mode. It was right at the bottom of the hill, I realized that I was going so fast that pizza wouldn't have stopped me even if I wanted to, so I did all I could to stay upright and not hit something. Those moments, when I realized I'd lost control of what was happening, were the best, in their combination of exhilaration, adrenaline, and fear as I hovered just on the edge of total disaster, knowing that at any moment catastrophe could strike. That I hadn't actually fallen yet only increased my fear, as a face first tumble into the snow surely wouldn't have been nearly as bad as I imagined it would be.

As the day progressed, and I continued to ski I realized that either my muscles had decided that with all the other important things going on in the world, they should definitely not forget how to ski in case such an opportunity might present itself again, or else I'm just a really talented skier-learner, 'cause I was zooming down the hill, french fry style the whole way. In fact, the only time I had fallen so far was when I was trying to put on or take off my skis. At one point, later in the day, I was attempting to disembark from the chair lift (quite a harrowing experience, I might add) when my skis got tangled up in a snow drift and I bailed headfirst into the snow. I started to get up, and then realized just in the nick of time that the next chair was heading ride toward me. I dove back into the snow, narrowly avoiding being whacked in the brain stem by the chair.

I wasn't able to keep track of the students we were with, as they aren't the group I normally teach, so I didn't remember what any of them looked like. I ended up mostly going up on the chair lift with other random skiers. At one point, from up in our perch, we heard semi-hysterical shrieking from below. The guy I was with said, "she doesn't sound very happy," and I jokingly replied, "I hope she isn't one of ours." I learned later that apparently baby giraffe was so lacking in confidence in her skiing abilities (probably rightly so) that she had decided to scoop all the way down the hill on her butt. Another girl had then run into her, badly injuring her knee.

Anyway, I've rambled on long enough, and shabbat is coming and I have to work, so I'll just note that skiing is awesomely fun, and I plan on going back soon, probably on a Wednesday when it is half off for anyone with a college ID and they are open until 9:30. Let me know if you're interested. We can race.

Not rain, not snow, not sickness stops Gay and Gayer. New episode below. Also, we have a Facebook group now, so if you like Gay and Gayer please join and help us get the word out.

Another new episode. Let me know if you have any thoughts as we're always looking for new topics and ways to improve.



It's about a holiday for gays, Heath Ledger, and bestiality.

Stuff we mentioned in the episode:
1) Fox News' John Gibson mocks Heath Ledger after he died: http://thinkprogress.org/2008/01/23/g...

Westboro Baptist Church to protest Ledger's funeral: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22813570/

Wikipedia on bestiality: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bestiality (less)

I wrote the Dvar Torah (literally, words of Torah) for the Hillel newsletter this week. This week's section is about the the trek to Mount Sinai and culminates with God delivering the Commandments to Moses. You can read the whole thing here, and I've included an excerpt below:

Finally, we see in this portion the importance of the Torah to the Jewish people. Previously, Moses has served as the leader of the Jews as they escaped Egypt and wandered in the desert. Moses is a tzadik among his generation, and he received assistance from God in overcoming the obstacles he faces. Finally, in Yitro, Moses appoints others to serve as judges alongside him, choosing people who do not have this personal relationship with God. Although at first it seems like they would not be as wise or fair as Moses, promptly after these judges are appointed, Moses goes up Mount Sinai to receive the Commandments from God. The link between these Jews being appointed as Judges and receiving the Commandments from God shows that all the wisdom these leaders need to help adjudicate matters correctly can be found in the Torah. Today, when we might not have direct instructions from the Lord on how best to handle problems that arise, we still have the Torah, which was used then as a substitute for God's wisdom in helping the new Jewish leaders serve the Jewish people.

Not to mention, last week apparently no one wrote a Dvar Torah for the newsletter, so they ran the one from last year, which happened to be the one I wrote. So if you want to see what I thought about Beshalach, which is about the escape from Egypt, some wandering in the desert, and then Moses leading the Jews in a battle against Amalek. You can read the whole thing here.

I recently slept through the opportunity to harass greet some Mormon missionaries who stopped by my house, although by not seeing them I got to imagine what sort of mischievous, but hilarious, conversations I would have had with them, and since I can often imagine things better than I can do them, I guess it was all for the better.

During my missed-visit considerations, I asked some Jewish friends how much rudeness I would be allowed in such a conversation, and during the course of a meandering discussion, I had a number of discordant ideas that I'm going to try to relate here. Our conclusion was that missionaries, by virtue of stopping by my house invite a certain level of mocking upon themselves, and as they have the ability to leave at any time, and as I'm nocturnal on weekends and would almost certainly have been woken up by them, could get away with whatever I wanted until I drove them away. That I actually know a fair bit about Mormonism, and hence could engage in, at least somewhat intelligent malingering, and also might succeed at being funny, only works to my benefit. Not that I think this is a particularly gracious, or Jewish, answer, but I'm often not a particularly gracious person, and who knows what it means to be Jewish anyway.

The issue I would have loved to have brought up with them, or future missionaries, because it's awkward and embarrassing, is Mormon baptisms of dead Holocaust Jews, as things that are awkward and embarrassing for the other side tend to help you win an argument. By the way, I often find myself in a position to win an argument through entirely disingenuous means, and I'm not sure whether it's fair or just or right to do such a thing. One of the benefits of four years of debating in high school and college is it makes me good at winning arguments, and I can often do so regardless of which side of the question I might be arguing, with effective, but totally dishonorable tactics. Not sure what I think about this... [For example, should I convince people not to vote?] I'll return to the Holocaust baptisms in a moment, but I want to meander first.

One of the easiest ways to mock the Mormons is with their secret magical underwear. In case you don't know about their secret magical underwear (and why should you... they're secret), you can read more about them here. They wear them all the time, there is some kooky backstory, they make Mormonism look wacky, and they don't like to talk about them. Making them the ideal topic of conversation. I'm actually not even sure if the missionaries would be willing to talk about them, but it's worth a shot. And yes, I'm aware that orthodox Judaism has it's own magical underwear. But as they say, "Use any weapon at hand, and stick with any weapon that works". The they in this case being John Searle, a rather interesting philosopher, and incidentally, a professor at Berkeley. [I only partially remembered that quotation, and being a particular type of stubborn person, spent ten minutes googling until I found the actual quote, which then led me to Searle, who I was quite happy to spend some time reading about.] And regarding the magical Jewish underwear (called a tallit katan, by the way), I think it's just as wacky as the Mormon version (technically called a Temple garment), although I consider Mormonism wackier than Orthodox Judaism, which I should probably elaborate on.

While I happen to thing that any religion which presupposes or requires some sort of all-powerful/sentient being is fairly wacky, there are degrees of wackiness. Now Mormonism is particularly wacky, and orthodox Judaism less wacky than average for two reasons in my mind. The first reason relates to the age of the religion. To their credit, when people were coming up with Judaism, there was a whole bunch of stuff that no one understood, and not really having science at the time, their explanations were seemingly as equally valid as any other. Could there have been a flood that covered the entire world? Well, there certainly wasn't such a thing as archeology to tell them differently! Conversely, by the time Joseph Smith came on the scene we had a whole bunch of sciences that directly contradicted what he was saying, so it becomes a lot wackier to put out such an easily refutable story and have a bunch of people start adhering to it. And since I can't imagine hardly anyone is practicing orthodox Judaism because of (as opposed to, in spite of) it's parts that might not be scientifically rigorous, it doesn't reflect that poorly on those followers, with the exception of believing in God, which isn't falsifiable, so again, not the biggest sin in the world.

The other factor that counts against Mormonism is it's high rate of conversion. I've heard it mentioned that Mormonism has one of the highest conversion rates of any religion (too lazy to look this up, and I'm not sure how accurate numbers on conversation are anyway). I give people more of a pass on believing something crazy if they were born into it and it was a big part of their early indoctrination upbringing. If you've grown up as a Mormon, or an orthodox Jew, I can almost understand not breaking out of the religion, especially if you're good at compartmentalizing, but converts (especially adult ones) really have no excuse. Any hardly anyone converts to Orthodox Judaism, especially considering they don't particularly want converts. And speaking of converts, I'd always known that Harry Reid was a Mormon, but I didn't realize until recently that he was a convert, and that his Jewish wife converted too (on his behalf, I believe). That's really not cool.

I would also like to make clear that I don't have any opposition to proselytizing and missionary work. In fact, I think it is all but required for Christians who take the viewpoint that a belief in Jesus is necessary for salvation. [For the Mormons, my understanding is that you need to be a Mormon to reach the highest level of heaven, which is also something that I think all but necessitates missionary work.] If there are Christians out there who have friends that they are going to Hell and don't try to save those friends from eternal damnation, then they are either bad friends or bad Christians (or both!) I've never understood people with beliefs that should be understood as a categorical imperative that don't feel the need to try to convert others, or even wackier, don't even think other people should have the same beliefs. You can see this in abortion:
Person A: I would never have an abortion, but I don't think it should be illegal. Everyone should make their own choice.
Person B: Why wouldn't you have one?
Person A: Because I think abortion is murder.
Person B: ?

You can see the same thing with vegetarianism ("Eating meat is murder, but I understand if other people want to do it"). I was reading a discussion recently about a Jewish father who married a Christian woman (who had converted to Judaism) and the dad found out his mother-in-law had secretly baptized his children. [I'll ignore for a second that Jews have our own covenant with God for our salvation, so said mother-in-law didn't need to do the baptism anyway, but since this isn't something that most Christians know much about, her ignorance, while embarrassing for her, isn't exactly surprising. I'd write something about Christians that don't know anything about their theology, but that happens to be a much bigger problems for Judaism at the moment, for a number of reasons, so I won't give the Christians too much grief. In defense of Jewish people, most of us are pretty aware of how little we know (has anyone actually read the Torah?), whereas Christians seem to be mostly unaware about how uninformed they are. In defense of Mormons, in this regard, they do a phenomenally good job of teaching the religion to their children.]

Anyway, back to the Jewish father and the surreptitious baptism. If you're a Christian that thinks people without Christ go to hell, I'm not sure how you couldn't baptize your grandchildren. I certainly wouldn't expect the dad to leave his kids in grandma's unsupervised possession again, but it's an understandable move from her perspective to do the baptism (although probably theologically meaningless for Christianity, and certainly so for Judaism).

For similar reasons, I don't object to Mormons baptizing dead Holocaust victims. [You need a Mormon baptism to accept the religion, and you need the religion to have the best afterlife possible, and such a baptism can occur even after you have died, because dead people can switch their religion, so Mormons are trying to baptize everyone who has ever lived. Typing that out, it sounds so crazy, I feel like I must have it wrong, but I'm pretty sure that's the story.] It's a baptism of choice, so they aren't claiming that the dead people they baptize become Mormon, just that they have the choice of doing so in the afterlife. So the Mormons were doing these baptisms for Jews that died in the Holocaust. They got caught (it's a very very secretive religion, more on that here), and a bunch of Holocaust survivors got really pissed off about it (and while I disagree with the anger, as I don't see a problem with baptizing dead people, I understand why this might be upsetting to survivors). So the Mormons promised to stop with the dead Holocaust Jews, and then they got caught breaking their promise. Now I don't think they should have made the promise in the first place, but once they did, then it reflects really poorly on them when they did the baptisms anyway. And certainly, from a public relatinos standpoint, the baptisms of Holocaust victims looked bad enough already... [Fun fact, they baptized Hitler too. No word on whether he converted, but he was a pretty laid back Catholic, so who knows...?]

I had a number of Mormon friends in high school (and at least one as a Myspace friend) so I wanted to make clear that I'm not as anti-Mormon as this probably makes me seem. I think all religions are wacky (even the one I identify with), and Mormonism isn't even the wackiest. Also, they're really nice people. It's just, if they come to my door, I plan on having some fun with them.

[In writing this, either explicitly in the above, or in my own internal dialogue, I had all sorts of tangential thoughts that I didn't include for the sake of brevity (and I realize how long this got anyway, but to quote someone famous, "I apologize for the length of this letter, but I did not have time to make it shorter.") I say someone famous, because when I googled the phrase, the top ten results had it being attributed to 5 different people. I've come to the alarming conclusion that writing takes a really long time, and I do it best at odd hours (it's 5:03am). Destructively for my future, I plan on doing a lot more writing, so we'll see how that all works out...]

Apparently two Mormon missionaries stopped by while I was napping today, and my parents sent them away without harassing them first. They were girl missionaries, which I didn't realize existed.

I would have really enjoyed the chance to talk with them and inquire about their special underwear, find out whether they have baptized any of my relatives that died in the Holocaust, and what I can do to help vanquish Lord Xenu from the earth.

Do they have Mormon missionaries in St. Louis?

[This was something I wrote a while ago, but I'm only getting around to posting it now. It's part of my effort to write more Jewish stuff, which will eventually find a home somewhere outside of myspace, but for now can go here.]

I have had very little formal Jewish education or Torah learning in my life (that I'm a Jewish educator myself is an absurdity that doesn't escape me), so I was looking forward to a session yesterday where I could do some rigorous Torah study. I happen to be at a giant Hillel work conference in D.C. at the moment, studiously ignoring the Rabbi doing a presentation for us. He's talking about how to determine what in our life is urgent and important, and how to focus on these things. (Again, I'm totally aware that what I'm doing instead-this-is neither urgent nor important, but that has never stopped me before, so why start now?)

The Torah learning session yesterday was about the sacrifice of Isaac, also known as the binding, or the akedeh (Hebrew for binding). That the title referred to the event as the Akedeh would have been a hint at what I was getting myself into, if I had been thoughtful enough about it, but it's been a long conference and I'm sleep-deprived, so I didn't give it any thought. Prior, I had a lunch meeting with the Executive Director of Berkeley Hillel, an old friend/mentor of mine and although I thought we would have a quick chat in the lobby and then move on, our conversation was so captivating that by the time I got downstairs the food had been carted off. (Incidentally, one of the more interesting topics we discussed was how much patience one should have in working towards progressive goals, and at what point a more confrontational approach might be suggested, something I'll have more to say about later. And as long as I'm being incidental, I should mention that I was ambivalent about missing lunch, certainly out of the ordinary for someone who likes food as much I do. The whole conference has been delicious, but extravagantly indulgently, so I had decided it might be better off to only eat two meals a day. And since I normally sleep through breakfast that was all well and good, but that was the one day I'd been up early enough to eat breakfast, hence missing lunch was totally kosher with me.)

Anyway, back to the story. I head to the after-lunch session on the Akedeh. I walked into a room full of old dudes wearing black with their Jew beards. Could have been 19th century Poland. These were some serious super-Jews, to the extent that we can misleadingly ethnoscape a diverse and complicated people into a single unrepresentative example and proclaim that they are the most Jewiest of all the Jews, which we can, but shouldn't. I had brought some snacks with me (they had all this fun Israeli food at the conference, including some lattke-style potato chips and grapefruit juice) and I was planning on sitting away from the table and munching on some snacks and using my laptop to surf the internet in case the discussion wasn't interesting. But as I attempted to duck into the back of the room, the session leader asked me to join everyone at the table. I paused, going through a list of excuses in my mind about why I didn't want to sit with everyone else, but I decided I didn't have the energy to argue (did I mention that I missed lunch?) so I sat down with them.

They were already involved in a discussion (I was late) but someone gave me the handout and I tried to follow along. These being serious Jew-folk they were doing most of the reading in Hebrew, which I don't know. There was enough English thrown in that I could follow the conversation, which revolved around the dilemma that Abraham faced during the sacrifice of Isaac. While most (non-observantly Jewish) people would probably assume the dilemma is whether Abraham should sacrifice his son like God asked, or disobey God's wishes (because it would be kind of lame to kill your own son) that wasn't what we were talking about. If the decision for Abraham was as simple as deciding whether or not to obey God, then of course he should have listened to what God had to say and killed his son is how observant Jews tend to see things. [If you don't listen to God, he makes you eat matzoh for two thousand years, so of course you listen to God, even if he tells you to kill your son.] The problem for Abraham was that earlier God had said that Isaac would provide the seed for the Jewish people, so when he then said that Isaac should be sacrificed, it was a contradiction, and what do you do when God gives conflicting orders? A tough question, and according to the most basic of Jewish principles, there is never an answer to anything, so people offered some different suggestions. Whenever things got too boring or full of Hebrew, I went back to snacking and doodling on my hand-out. At one point, I looked down and saw the page number was backwards, and realized that I had been staring at the Hebrew gibberish for the last ten minutes upside down. Oops.

At this point, the session leader talked a little about what to do in the face of divine uncertainty, and how Jews should deal with uncertainty in general, especially in light of the fast occurring that day. The what now?! I froze, mouth open, chip in hand, and did the classic, guilty-faced, shifty eyed thing, glancing left, then right as I realized what was going on. I remembered the mentioning yesterday of an early meal for people who were fasting, and how the session description had included something about discussing the fast for the 10th of Tevet. [Wikipedia interjection: "The Tenth of Tevet commemorates the onset of the siege that Nebuchadrezzar of Babylonia laid to ancient Jerusalem, an event that ultimately led to the destruction of Solomon's Temple (the First Temple) and Babylonia's conquest of southern Israel's Kingdom of Judah."]

Now I hadn't realized it was a fast day prior to the session because it's a minor fast day, and considering how much Jews love food and hate being observant, almost everyone was going to the meals that day. It's possible that most of the people fasting were actually in that room right then, trying to study Torah and avoid thoughts of being hungry, while I had spent the previous ninety minutes casually snacking. I was mortified, but mostly because of my stunning unawareness, and not the eating per se. If I had made a conscious decision to eat in front of them, I would have been okay with that, as my Judaism says you can eat on the 10th of Tevet, and if their Judaism says differently, then that is their issue. But to not even know that the fast was happening and I was breaking it was what embarrassed me. [This is how I feel about any kind of observance in Judaism, something I'll expound upon later.]

I eventually unfroze, and ate the chip in hand, but it tasted too much of shame and ignorance to enjoy.

I had a very interesting conversation yesterday with one of the staff people here at the Hillel Conference. (Here being D.C.) I'm not really sure what her official title is or what she actually does, but she is one of those fascinating people who helps you talk through your thoughts and discover things you believed or knew already, but hadn't examined in a meaningful way. (I'm trying to work on being better about being able to do that with myself, because there aren't always such people around, and I enjoy the process so much I should probably get good at it.)

Anyway, we had a rather meandering discussion, and one of the things we touched on was tradition. Tradition is obviously an important considering in a religion with practices that date back thousand and thousands of years. Whenever I am reminded that we are using a Torah that has been unchanged for thousands of years, containing the same wisdom, written on the same materials with the same process, I'm a little awed. And I think longevity can be an important consideration as to the value of something. "Because it's always been done that way" is a really stupid reason to do anything, but the Jews have been arguing and debating and discussing and analyzing the same book for thousands of years, and it's stood up pretty well to the rest of time. I certainly don't mean every part of it, or a literal reading of it, but the liberal progressive Jewish tradition has been served well to use it as their jumping off point.

But there is certainly a fetishization of tradition within Judaism (and probably everywhere) that I am uncomfortable with. There is a lot to Judaism that we simply don't understand as original explanations have been lost to time. It's unclear where and how the six-pointed Star of David originated. We have stories for most of these things, but they are usually apocryphal. I was told that the Star of David originated in ancient Israel when the Jews were being persecuted, and being found out as a Jew could mean death. When a traveling Jew came across another potential Jew he would draw a triangle in the sand. If the other man was also a Jew (And hence knew the code word) he would draw another triangle over it, completing the Star of David, and signaling they could safely acknowledge their Judaism.

And although in some sense I can understand traditions that date back to Biblical times (as the people that adhere to them are probably open to them originating during a period when God used to be a lot more vocal, and it might be something we are doing on his instructions), I don't understand the adherence to modern traditions as much. When people aren't even aware that the traditions they engage in are in fact modern, it's especially disturbing. I sometimes see this as part of a non-Orthodox understanding for Chasidic culture, when people don't realize that a lot of their outward customs and traditions only date back a couple hundred years. [They're emulating recent Eastern European customs, not biblical ones...] Similarly, at services, people will sometimes request a "traditional" tune for the prayers, when traditional means 40 years old instead of 20. Even the She'ma isn't as old as people think it is (at least used the way we use it today).

Now the meat of our conversation was about how to decide what traditions are right for each of us, in the context of a discussion of family. Eventually I'll want to settle down with someone (almost certainly Jewish) and we'll have to figure out how to run our home. And there is almost nothing to religious Judaism that I enjoy. I don't think I have ever been to a Friday service when there wasn't some level of coercion involved. On the other hand, I've picked up some traditions along the way, which I enjoy and associate with places and people that bring back enjoyable memories that I would like to relive through repetition. Chanukkah reminds me of home, when my mom used to make lattkes, passover Seders were one of my most enjoyable Jewish experiences at AEPi, much of the traditional Jewish Shabbat songs I learned at BCI, and on and on.

I realized that I have allowed my job to put my Jewish exploration on hold. I would have a hard time saying how I would live my life Jewishly outside of the Hillel world because Hillel has been such a dominating Jewish influence, that when I have the option to be not-Jewish in my personal life, I almost always take it because I face such an overdose at work. I participate in a lot of religion, tradition, and ritual which I find off-putting (at best) and it causes an overreaction that I think has warped some of the favorable impressions I have of Judaism. And what my conversation with Beth reminded me is that I enjoy and value those parts of my life, and I should devote more time to finding out which traditions to Judaism have meaning for me (not because of anything that happened before I was born), but because I experienced them in a way that wants to make me continue practicing them in my own life.