Orthodox women rabbis or "rabbis"?

A Forward follow-up on Yeshiva Maharat, the planned school for women Orthodox "rabbis." Includes further insight from heavyweight academics, including Sarna and Greenberg.

Certainly worth a read.

What type of friend would you rather have?

Ex-Shimon Peres aide Gideon Levy penned a great op ed for today's Haaretz. Here's a snippit: 

"It's already clear: the U.S. president is a great friend of Israel. If Barack Obama continues what he started this week, he might prove to be the friendliest president to Israel ever. Richard Nixon saved Israel from the Arab states in 1973, and Obama is about to save Israel from itself. Nixon sent us arms and ammunition at a critical time, and Obama is sending us, at a time no less critical, the substance of a complete peace plan, a plan that would save Israel."

The type of friend who lets you know when you're out of line, who gently forces you to make what seem like hard choices, is always the best type to have. As Levy points out in the full piece, A Friend of Israel, Bush was never that type of friend; perhaps he was no friend at all.  

Good Shabbos.

A new dawn for Orthodox women?

A must-post shout out to Rabbi Avi Weiss of the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale in the Bronx, NY. Per the JTA, Rabbi Weiss has launched Yeshiva Maharat, a school where Orthodox women can train as rabbis. Read the whole story now.

Online shul "opens doors"

I haven't had time to explore and play with this, and I'm not smitten with the c.1999 look, but CyberJudaism.org has great potential and solid organizational backing. Learn more about this experiment now.

I'm zipping up my boots...

I don't know if it's age, sentimentalism, the way the wind's blowing, or a return to the orthodoxy of my early childhood—okay, that's not likely—but I've rejected for good having to suffer through English-language and bilingual Jewish services. 

Finished. 

Done. 

I've survived my last ersatz-Joni-Mitchell version of the Sh'ma. Maspik k'var—enough already!

I know the objections to monolingual Hebrew prayer. None seems particularly Jewish and none is more oft repeated than, "Congregants need to understand what they read." Sadly, such condescension is not new. The growth of Reform was driven in part by a wealthy, assimilated leadership's embarrassment at the appearance, customs, and manners of poor immigrants from the East, not by concern for their ability to read Hebrew—which, as it happens, was often strong. In rejecting traditional prayer, and so putting aside ancient tunes, gestures, and emotions, the reformers also cut us off from our linguistic spring and thus narrowed the stream that is our collective memory. Where they might have introduced teaching services, during which one could learn Hebrew as he or she prays, they created insipid, vernacular liturgies that helped further dilute our identity into America's Christian mainstream.  

Here's my point. A more traditional Hebrew liturgy:

• Makes my past present: it re-members for me my grandfather, the beautiful Egerton Road New Synagogue he'd pray in, and the old Jewish men he'd hang with after services in front of the cinema on Stamford Hill—the cinema that's now a cut-price supermarket 
  
• Binds me with all Jews, both through time—back to my East European ancestors and forward to my sons' yet-to-be imagined children—and across space
  
• Allows me to "communicate with" the Imminent/Transcendent in the people Israel's lashon kodesh, our holy tongue    

From now on, I'm praying only in Hebrew. What about you?

(By the way, the modern appeal to the vernacular is rooted in Luther's rebellion against Rome—yes, that Luther, the one who called us teufelsdreck, Satan's shit. His actions comprised the politically motivated rejection of someone else's "dead" foreign language, not the inexplicable throwing away of his own heritage.)

Who is Benjamin Netanyahu?

Shavua tov.

Couldn't help posting this link to the Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg's op-ed piece in today's Times. It lends brilliant insight into the psychodamics undergirding and therefore driving Netanyahu's role in Israel's history—Israel the place and Israel the people. If you are at all interested in Israel, peace, the Middle East, and American foreign policy, it's a must read.