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.

Of dreams and disappointment: Oz at 70

In a recent interview with the Daily Forward, Israeli novelist, essayist, literature professor, and peacenik nanpareil Amos Oz describes eloquently the  inevitable disappointment inherent in the Zionist dream: "I have seen the age of monumental dreams, and I have lived through the morning after, and the morning after the morning after. Unlike other countries, Israel was not born through a historical evolution of a population. It was born out of a dream. This is why it is destined to be a disappointment. This is not about the nature of Israel; it’s about the nature of dreams. The only way to keep a dream intact and perfect and rosy and unspoiled is never to live it. The moment you fulfill a dream, there is a certain air of disappointment about it. This is true of planting a garden, traveling abroad, living a sexual fantasy, or writing a novel."

Read the rest of the interview and buy Oz's new novella: Rhyming Life and Death.

Don't tread on me

While I'm certainly no fan of Benjamin Netanyahu and his way-right-of-wacko coalition of dunces, while I remain convinced that implementing a fair two-state solution and returning the Golan to Syria are necessary steps along Israel’s path to justice, and while I make it a habit not to criticize others' religions, hearing the Pope—THIS POPE—push his vision of the Middle East the moment he landed at Ben Gurion made me even more grouchy than my usually grouchy Monday-morning self—and that, my friends, is pretty grouchy.

Here's what I know about Benedict XVI in general. He is a:

• Proud enemy of Modernity, which he terms "a dictatorship of relativism"
  
• Vociferous critic of using condoms to fight AIDS in Africa
  
• Homophobe, who declares discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation "not unjust" 
  
• Outspoken opponent of Muslim Turkey's entrance into what he calls a "Christian" European Union 
  
• Anti-Muslim ideologue, who challenged an audience to, "Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached"
  
• Neo-colonialist who justifies the conquest of South America as fulfilling the indigenous population's "silent longing" for Christianity and who argues "the proclamation of Jesus and of his Gospel did not at any point involve an alienation of the pre-Columbus cultures, nor was it the imposition of a foreign culture" 
  

Benedict's record on matters specifically involving Jews is no better. Ignoring his compulsory Hitler youth membership and service in the Nazi army, from which he deserted, he has:

• Allowed the reintroduction of a version of the Good Friday prayer that calls for Jews to "recognize Jesus Christ, the Savior of all men"—a version previously sidelined by Vatican II and rejected by John Paul II 
  
• Supported advancing the process of beatifying (making a saint of) Pope Pius XII, who outside of conservative Catholic circles is berated for having failed to speak out during and after the Holocaust
  
• Readmitted to the Church excommunicated Shoah denier Bishop Richard Williamson
  

Here's the nub. Israel can only fulfill the dreams of the both old-school religious Zionism and Herzl's political Zionism by ending occupation and withdrawing largely to her pre-1967 borders. It is the right thing to do, ethically, demographically, and (yes) militarily. But we don't need to be told to do it by the reactionary leader of the religio-political organization that practically birthed antisemitism, waged violent wars against both Islam and Judaism throughout the Middle Ages, and colonized much of the world in Jesus' name. Benedict, you clean your house; I'll worry about mine.