Alef: The NEXT Conversation
8 Days of Action
By Sarah Kornhauser and Leilani Love
Hanukkah is about a light that was supposed to last only one day, that lasted one more day, and then one day more, and so on for eight days. Miracle or not, there was definitely a collective effort for conservation. Out of that effort, we as a Jewish people were able to keep moving forward. This Hanukkah, do your part to conserve and keep our world moving forward. Follow these simple steps for each day of Hanukkah…
Day 1: Replace an outdoor light fixture with a motion detector.
Day 2: Commit to public transportation today! Make a plan to reduce car use all year long.
Day 3: Make your own Hanukkah gifts. Knit a scarf. Build a picture frame. Make a headband.
Day 4: Take a day off meat. Buy local, organic produce and go veggie for the day.
Day 5: Get your furnace serviced to keep it running at high efficiency.
Day 6: Create Hanukkah cards online and save a tree.
Day 7: Do a full load of laundry in cold water instead of a partial. Each load of laundry uses between 32-60 gallons of water. Using warm water requires lots of energy to heat the water.
Day 8: Buy your self a present: a reusable water bottle! Commit to giving up plastic water bottles.
Interested in doing more? This year, Repair the World presents 8 Nights of Service. Follow along on their blog for a new service idea for each night of Hanukkah.
Photo by chidorian, licensed under Creative Commons.Dispatches from Moishe House: Meet Joshua in Hoboken
by Joshua Einstein
My name is Joshua Einstein and I have been a MH (Moishe House) Hoboken resident for almost 5 years. It has been an incredible adventure in friendship, programming, and community building. When I first applied I was post collegiate and as an only child I really needed to get out of my parents’ house. As things worked out I would land a job and an MH in the same week. Most residents move into pre-existing houses, my roommates at the time and I were new to Hoboken and had to build an indigenous social network from the ground up. Sure, Hoboken has a shul and sure that shul had a Jewish club that was focused on social events in bars but we weren’t there just for drinks and shul just isn’t my scene.
See, I’m not against the concept of god. I believe there probably is a god. It’s just that as an agnostic I know there is no way for me to confirm that god exists. Moreover, the secondary questions of whether or not god gave anything to any group of humans seems rather pedestrian. Every religious group thinks god spoke to them and gave them something unique. As such, religion matters not to me, nor does theology, services, spirituality, the soul, prayer or religious tradition. In my almost 5 years in town I have been to the shul less than a dozen times, Baruch Hashem.
So what makes me Jewish? The answer is simply our people, history, and shared culture. The religion element is a historical addendum. Religious Judaism has been a convenient vehicle for the transmission of our shared culture, the propagation of our amazing experiment through history, and for the inculcation of Jewish peoplehood. In and of itself, religion has no value, that doesn’t mean I’m against people having religion, nor that religious people are inherently anti-intellectual or unintelligent. It does mean I do not plug into the religion of the Jews – Judaism.
When we moved to Hoboken I wanted to create a new Jewish community rooted in Jewish history and interested in exploring the world intellectually. We were in Hoboken to make a new Jewish scene and we were here to do it deliberately. To some degree we have succeeded. Part of intellectualism is a healthy dose of skepticism and the community we have built and been built by is definitely skeptical. Perhaps it’s our Greater Hoboken Area (GHA) origin’s (most of our community is from New Jersey with many others from the tri-state area), that comes with some inherent cynicism genetically pre-programmed into those in our region. It may be an outgrowth of the Jewish neuroticism that requires we look for a motivation behind mere meaning or the minority status of outsiders that makes Jews supra-naturally inquisitive. I know not the reason, but whereas many Jewish groups are obsessed with defining themselves by action, by posting a thin film of Jewish identity over the broad agenda of making the world a better place, we are just the opposite. The community we have created (and been created by) in Hoboken is in command of its Jewish identity, knowledgeable of our shared history, fluent in our culture and without the larger agenda of transforming the world.
As a contrarian and agitator I am naturally unsatisfied. It is as if my MH community has settled in an unhappy medium in which it is comfortable with intellectual challenges but uncomfortable when considering turning those challenges into actions. That the intellectual world does not exist in the abstract makes this a fundamentally untenable position. Moreover, it is also an anti-intellectual position because it is inherently and patently false. The question is how to connect our community’s inquisitive minds and intellectual notions with actions? How do we, at MH Hoboken, connect our salons, facilitated discussions, informal and impromptu debates regarding the economy, politics, homelessness, security, inflation, Israel – the Jew and the world around her/him, to some sort of action?
To this I do not have an answer. I welcome any and all suggestions.
Photo by pauldwaite, licensed under creative commons.
The Language Barrier
By Ruvym Gilman
This post originally appeared on Alef on 11-30-2009.
“Dai,” she said, giving me that exasperated look I had such a knack for eliciting. But I kept at it, being playful while she tried, unsuccessfully, to wash the dishes.
“Dai!”
I stopped, acknowledging the little bit of Hebrew I had managed to learn from her during the course of our relationship. She was a New York-bred Jew, Manhattan raised, and yet she used this language with me, all the while knowing that my foreign linguistic skills ended with the Russian I got from my family and six years of failure in high school and college Italian.
“Mi scusi, mi scusi,” I wanted to reply. “But why can’t you just speak English?”
We had, what you might call, a rocky relationship, the kind saturated with an on-again, off-again, up and down, yes and no sort of instability that I couldn’t totally rationalize or explain to myself. When I tried sorting through it all in my head, tried making sense of our inability to just be a normal couple, the Hebrew was one of the issues I couldn’t help but come back to. It made me feel like an outsider, someone who would never really get her because I had no way of communicating in a language she valued so highly. Add to that my sense of guilt – the constant, nagging feeling that I was less of a Jew because I didn’t know Hebrew – and you had me, disconnected from the beating heart, the life blood of my own people, disconnected from her.
When I came over her house for dinner with her family, she would sometimes absent-mindedly slip into the ancient semantics, seemingly forgetting that I was even there. As the two of us crossed Upper East Side streets, maneuvering between waddling old ladies, I would walk alongside as she had phone conversations I couldn’t understand. I wondered whether she was speaking about me, whether she was relaying some secret she didn’t want me to hear.
I saw how her face lit up every time she got the chance to speak it, how once when we ran into her friend at Max Brenner’s, after an introduction I quickly found myself excluded, unable to follow them, and so I wandered off to look at the overpriced chocolate. Half an hour later, when her body language said that she was ready to go, I came back over, gave the friend a cold handshake, and walked out. We argued about it outside, about how I had left her by herself, how I made no effort to even pretend I was interested in sticking around.
“I didn’t know what the heck you guys were saying!”
I got frustrated and jumped onto the subway, feeling bad about everything as soon as I was on the train, when it was already too late to crush her in an embrace and beg forgiveness by making her laugh. When I got above-ground, I called. I tried to keep my voice low while sandwiched between people. She sighed through the receiver, little exhales of disappointment coming through as static.
“You just don’t get it, do you?” she said.
There was always seemed to be something I wasn’t getting. Over the bad connection, I could feel her shaking her head at me.
I tried to be outspoken about how I felt, maybe a little more than I needed to be. But the language, it was just too much a part of her to ignore. She seemed almost incomplete without it, how could I ever fill that need?
I’d shrug.
She’d look away.
We’d repeat it all.
Maybe the real problem was me, my insecurity, my trying to justify the finale, the ultimate conclusion of our relationship. Nothing had ever come easily for us, nothing was ever second-natured in the way I wanted or would have expected. And so I needed reasons, real, tangible things to point to, to grasp and display so that I couldn’t simply say, “oh, we just didn’t work out.” The Hebrew was an easy excuse, something that we didn’t share and which contributed to the sense that we were very different people. Maybe it was just easier to write my own ending than to have one thrust upon me.
And then there was the sad irony, that months later, after the fact, I found myself signed up for Hebrew classes, studying to learn the same thing I never gave a chance when it might have mattered the most. I wondered at my stubbornness, my insistence at seeing the language as a contributor to our distance rather than what it could have been – an opportunity to grow closer to each other. Or perhaps it was also that same opportunity, the chance to get that closeness, which scared me enough to avoid it altogether.
Photo by Ed Yourdon, licensed under Creative Commons.
Graffitti Photo by Skinned Milk, licensed under Creative Commons.
Keeping the Faith
by Shauna Ruda
When I was 20, I decided to spend my spring break in Moscow, Russia
with NCSJ: Advocates on Behalf of Jews in Russia, Ukraine, the Baltic States & Eurasia, learning about the (re)emerging Jewish communities of the Former Soviet Union
On Friday afternoon, before Shabbat, I went with a group of 4 other young people to visit Olga, a 76 year-old woman left home-bound on her 10th floor walk-up apartment. Olga is visited every Friday afternoon before Shabbat, as a recipient of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee,or JDC’s, Hesed program.
We sat with Olga for an hour as she reflected on her life. In the end, she thanked us for coming. She told us that she was grateful for the food each week, but more importantly, she was grateful that the program restored her faith. “Faith,” she said, “is what keeps me alive.”
That moment was profound for me.
As humans, living in a world of material goods, some that really do sustain us, some that don’t, it’s hard to think in terms of our souls and what our souls need to continue moving forward.
So at that moment I decided that giving Jewishly was important.
Initially it was because of guilt:
There are nearly 200, 000 impoverished elderly Jews and 30,000 Jewish children in the Former Soviet Union who rely on critical nutritional, medical, and other assistance every year.
36,000 Jews impoverished by Argentina’s 2001 economic crisis.
25,000 Jews in Turkey who want to continue Jewish life by sustaining their Jewish education centers.
Over 90 Jewish communities across the world need to sustain themselves somehow and cannot continue without the help of the rest of the Jewish community
We are a community that makes up 0.2 percent of the world population. When I looked at Olga, I saw my own family – and the families of all of my Jewish friends: the new immigrants struggling to survive, or the people devastated by the Holocaust or pogroms or economic failures or failed governments. It was only through the little extra help of Jewish organizations that they were able to live and survive in this world.
And then, I thought about what Olga said – that faith kept her alive – and reflected on what that really meant.
Faith connects us, as Jews, to a 4,000 year-old history. The fact that we have even made it this long and gone so far says something about this religion – about our resilience. And if ever we feel weak, we can rest on the fact that Jewish people have been surviving for centuries.
And of course, there’s a deeply personal side. Being Jewish gives meaning through its purpose for each individual. In Judaism, we are all connected – regardless of the rules we create for ourselves. And maybe at times it’s hard to find a connection to each other – but deep down we feel it and we know it and feel the pain and the joy of each other.
My basic desire to give rests on my faith. Judaism says that we should choose life – to live in this world as much as we possibly can and so I try to. Judaism says be kind to your neighbors. Judaism says that we should give, that we should be aware of those less fortunate than ourselves, that we should never envy and always be thankful. So I learned to give, because I am Jewish.
There are a lot of people who need help in the world. I believe deeply that people should give based on what they feel moved by, and what they’ve experienced and seen. And, I experienced this woman – 76 years old, Jewish, in her apartment, sick – but moving forward.
It’s not the blood in our veins (we have converts), or a common language (modern Hebrew is only a century old) or land (we went through the bulk of diaspora without a Jewish state) – it is faith that has enabled us to continue as a Jewish people no matter are struggles. So I give Jewishly, because I believe in the power of faith.
For more on Jewish giving and tzedakah, read the other posts in this series: Tzedek in Parashat Ki Tavo and Supporting Jewish Causes.
Photo provided by the author.
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