The transition from the warm bosom of the Seventh-Day Adventist church to the cold secular world of public school was difficult and I spent much of 1980-1981 breaking out in severe cases of hives.
Now they’ve returned for the first time in almost 30 years. I’m gonna cut out the tomatoes, citrus and chocolate and see if they go away. If they don’t, my anxiety must be running at record levels.
I’m going to opera tomorrow night at Disney Hall. We’re going to see The Elixir of Love. My date says: "Please consult your advisory group re: proper Opera etiquette although I am not entirely convinced of their suaveness due to prior email content. Luckily, this is not the MET in NY, where formality is more de riggeur. Please do not bring any reading material. If you would like, it is always nice to print out a synopsis of the opera’s plot. Opera glasses will not be necessary because we have very good seats."
Khunrum emails: "Opera! zzzzzzzzz! Definitely a chick thing. Ever hear straight guys say "why don’t we go to the opera"? No way. "Let’s go to the Astros game"… "Let’s to the movies"…My first wife took me to the opera back when we were still married and didn’t dislike each other. It was boring as &#@%…I fell asleep, chin nodding on my chest, about a quarter of the way through. Hetero guy’s only go to the opera if the lady bought the tickets and they think there’s some "boomsing" at the end of the evening. I have two valid questions. What are you going to wear? That black suit, from way back when, can’t possibly fit your new "full figured" persona (are you going to rent a tux)? And question number two is, "why does she want to go to the opera with a guy who looks like Fidel Castro"?"
Chaim emails: "Do you own any sunglasses? Because you might want to wear them to be doubly sure nothing on stage interrupts your nap.”
I got sick last Sunday, the second day of Rosh Hashanah, and came home after just an hour at shul, barely enough time to daven and look at the pretty girls.
I spent the next three days in bed and then, feeling better, tried to resume a normal life.
It has not worked. I’m still feeling wiped out. My get-up-and-go got up and went about a month ago. I’ve dragged through all of September. Oh, to feel energetic again!
I made it through Yom Kippur but I was dazed.
I afflicted my soul on Yom Kippur by reading a couple of very dull, poorly written academic books on Judaism.
The first one had the exciting title: Between Redemption and Doom: The Strains of German-Jewish Modernism.
I gave up on it after three chapters.
The next one was: Speaking of Jews: Rabbis, Intellectuals, and the Creation of an American Public Identity.
It has a fascinating premise but its execution was worse than Jim Zorn’s Washington Redskins offense: "Lila Corwin Berman asks why, over the course of the twentieth century, American Jews became increasingly fascinated, even obsessed, with explaining themselves to their non-Jewish neighbors. What she discovers is that language itself became a crucial tool for Jewish group survival and integration into American life. Berman investigates a wide range of sources—radio and television broadcasts, bestselling books, sociological studies, debates about Jewish marriage and intermarriage, Jewish missionary work, and more—to reveal how rabbis, intellectuals, and others created a seemingly endless array of explanations about why Jews were indispensable to American life. Even as the content of these explanations developed and shifted over time, the very project of self-explanation would become a core element of Jewishness in the twentieth century."
Jeff emails:
Hey, I’ll buy that German modernism book off of you. I am totally in to that stuff, it was one of the most interesting Jewish communities and most productive, producing a body of literature, art, and music unparalleled by any other. Perhaps Alon’s “The Pity of it all” might have been a better place to start. I have a whole set of books, in English and German, on those days. Perhaps having some of the music of the period in your head would have made it more meaningful, I can give you Gideon Klein or Victor Ullman’s work (I have his Thereisinstadt choral settings of Hebrew prayers for children’s choir that will bring tears to your eyes, they are so beautiful). And of course, all that Walter Benjamin material. I once had a wonderful Rosh Hashana in Berlin, the shul there was very welcoming.
>Do you encounter Jew-hatred in Germany?
It doesn’t exist, one feels it more in other countries, such as France. It is an interesting paradox that the safest country for Jews in Europe now is almost certainly Germany. You can buy Jewish newspapers and magazines (Aufbau is a very impressive magazine, for example http://www.aufbauonline.com/) at street vendors. The old synagogue on Oranienbergstrasse is accessible to all, right on the main drag where the state protected prostitutes march around in their distinctive boots, and there’s a nice coffee house. I actually really like going to Germany. Of course, I‘ve only been to Berlin, Frankfurt, and Freiberg, what the situation is like in small towns I can’t say. But keeping in mind that there are very few people walking around actually from the Nazi era, and that its one of the more liberal countries now in Europe, it shouldn’t be a surprise.
While everyone else was davening Neilah, I was reading the chapter on Marilyn Monroe’s conversion to Judaism and trying to shade the sexy pictures of Marilyn away from the eyes of the Orthodox rabbi beside me.
Reform rabbi Robert Goldburg met with Arthur Miller and Marilyn before the wedding. He assigned her a list of books to read, the same books he assigned to other potential converts.
He later described Marilyn as "not an intellectual person" with only a "limited" attention span. Despite this, he felt confident she understood and accepted the basic principles of Judaism.
On the day of the wedding, Rabbi Goldburg lectured Marilyn for two hours about Judaism and then signed the conversion certificate and performed the religious wedding (two days after the secular one).
Marilyn wanted to be thought an intellectual and becoming Jewish was one attempt.
There was little that was Jewish in her life after her conversion and nothing Jewish in her burial.
Lila writes: "[Arthur] Miller believed that, in trying to become who she was not, Monroe had lost her sense of self. Her conversion to Judaism was only one small piece in her struggle to reinvent herself and in her ultimate alienation from herself."
I have a hard time staying patient with love. If a woman is dissing me, and I can’t recall a relationship where the woman has not constantly challenged me by not returning my calls and doing other things to cut my balls off (denying me the driving wheel, cutting me down in front of others), and it makes me want to walk away and look for a more reciprocal relationship. But there aren’t women who don’t constantly challenge you. I have to learn to hang in there, and when my call isn’t returned, pick up the phone and call again. When she disses me, I have to learn to hang in there and not respond in kind but stay steady with my love.
I am having similar problems with the Dallas Cowboys. They won tonight but played poorly. They’re just not impressing me. I love them but they treat me trivially. They diss me and makes it want to walk away from them.
Yom Kippur, the holiest and most somber day of the Jewish calendar, is a time for repentance, traditionally reserved for fasting and intense prayer. But scores of Iranian American Jews in Los Angeles, many of whom congregate in just a handful of synagogues across the city, aren’t just looking for forgiveness on the Day of Atonement.
They’re looking for love.
Facing enormous pressure from their families to marry within the community, many of these young people — and their matchmaking relatives — say they use the day to scope out potential romantic interests and tap into vast social networks to get the scoop on prospective candidates.
The irritability and less-than-fresh breath that can accompany the 25-hour fast don’t seem to stop many of them from dressing up and synagogue-hopping from the San Fernando Valley to the Westside in search of a soul mate.
"If you go to the mall a few days before, everyone’s looking for an outfit for Yom Kippur," said Dalia Azizi, 25, of Beverly Hills. "Every year the skirts are getting shorter. They’re going to temple and they look like they’re going to a club."
Still, Azizi, who like most in the community prefers to be called Persian instead of Iranian, said pressure from her relatives to marry had ramped up recently. The aspiring physician’s assistant said that for now, she is focusing more on her studies than on romance. But, asked if she was hoping to meet someone this Yom Kippur, she quietly assented.
The Jewish high holidays — which end today on Yom Kippur — are a time when many are called upon to repent and seek forgiveness from others.
But in a world where the Internet has increasingly become a way to communicate, some are replacing one-on-one apologies with Facebook and Twitter updates during the Jewish holy days.
That concerns Rabbi Jason Miller of Congregation T’chiyah in Oak Park, who sees some using the impersonal nature of the Web as a way to avoid real interaction.
He plans to talk about the issue today to his congregation during services on what is known as the Day of Atonement.
"We’ve lost the personal touch," said Miller, who also is the rabbi of Tamarack Camps in Michigan. "There should be an effort, a little challenge to go up to another person and seek forgiveness, to admit our wrongdoing."
Miller often uses social media himself and blogs at blog.rabbijason.com, but cautions against overdoing it.
He notes one Facebook update he got Friday morning from a person who wrote a generic note to several people at once, saying: "Whatever I said, I didn’t really mean it. Please forgive me. It won’t happen again."
The one-size-fits-all confession misses the mark in keeping with the spirit of repentance, Miller said.
From the Fort Worth Star-Telegram:
Around here, football is a religion ? at times the only religion that matters. With its own codes and customs, its power to lift and to humble, football ? especially Cowboys football ? can be awe-inspiring or drop one to his knees.
But what happens when real religion butts heads with pigskin piety?
With creative planning involving a single-engine plane and police escort, revered Dallas Cowboys play-by-play announcer Brad Sham will serve two kinds of deities today. He will carry on traditions with two "congregations," fulfilling his obligation to his faith on the holiest of days and to his profession on a big Monday night when doing both hardly seemed plausible, or even possible.
Yes, the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur and Cowboys football can coexist.
By late Monday afternoon, Sham will engage his Temple Emanu-El congregation in North Dallas with the traditional telling of the biblical tale of Jonah and the whale, and by nightfall his familiar voice will take to the airwaves as he arrives at the Cowboys Stadium radio booth just in time for kickoff.
"This will knock me a little bit off my routine, but that?s nothing," Sham said with a chuckle. "Believe me, God is more important than my routine."
The NFL scheduling gods have been kind to Sham over his 30 seasons calling Cowboys games. Remarkably, he?s never missed one due to a religious conflict.
Had the Cowboys played Sunday night as they did last week, Sham, 60, said he would have sat it out. Since Yom Kippur ? a holiday not of celebration, but of observance, contemplation and introspection ? started at sundown Sunday and ends at sundown today, Sham knew he would call tonight?s Cowboys game against the Carolina Panthers.
A friend emails: "I saw this soup mix in Shop Rite yesterday–if it hadn’t been erev yom kippur, and in a Jewish neighborhood where maaris eyin is a problem, I would have grabbed some."
I wonder if this book and these three articles will now become required reading for animal lab technicians and researchers at Yale University and graduate students at Columbia University.
