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The Best Year
By Emily Comisar
It wasn’t too long ago that I found myself telling someone: “My best Jewish year was 2006.” In 1999 I joined a synagogue, in 2003 I learned how to bake challah, in 2004 I attended Kabbalat Shabbat services every Friday night, and in 2009 I was hired to work at a Jewish organization. Yet 2006, the year that I stopped going to Hillel every Friday night and made the evening my own, remains my best Jewish year.
I don’t even remember what prompted the decision – maybe it was my return from a conference at Camp Ramah Darom in Georgia, or maybe it was just that my New York Times Jewish Cookbook had caught my friend Ian’s eye – but somehow the idea of hosting our own Shabbat dinner wormed its way into the backs of our heads and wouldn’t go away until we did something about it.
Our first Shabbat dinner was intended to be a one-time event. Ian played the role of welcoming host because his kitchen was better than mine. He prepared the dining room and did most of the cooking — I can’t take credit for much more than drinking wine, telling jokes, and maybe chopping a few vegetables. Little did he know that his home was about to become a Friday night revolving door as we quickly realized that the food and the adoptive family were too good to not replicate.
That was how the tradition began. The company constantly changed; significant others came and went, friends popped in and out. Some days we served a table of ten; one time the two of us dipped our bite-size chunks of challah into a giant bowl of guacamole and called it a meal. The only constant was that one thing to which you can never put a name. It was the thing that made you forget all your stress from the week behind and the hectic schedule of the coming weekend. It was that feeling that you were exactly where you were supposed to be. I cannot count how many Shabbat dinners we cooked that year – there were so many.
Upon my college graduation some months later, I relocated to Florence, Italy – a foreign town where I had no Jewish friends and couldn’t buy a challah in the supermercato. The dinners stopped and Friday night became just like any other night of the week. There was studying and celebrating, drinking and eating, sure. I chalked up my lack of that nameless something special to my immersion in a brand new culture. It wasn’t until I returned to the United States that I felt the big, gaping whole in my week.
Now I find myself in a city full to the brim with Jewish people where you can find challah in every supermarket. You can find Hebrew classes, JCCs, synagogues, temples, kosher restaurants, and Jewish colleges. I’ve tried a few of these things on for size, but they all fit a little long in the arm and short in the leg. All that I’m craving now is a home-cooked meal with a few of my friends. I think what I really need, again, is to reclaim my Shabbat.
Read more posts from Issue 18: Friday Night Lights.
Photo by roland, licensed under Creative Commons.
18: Friday Night Lights
This week we introduce Issue #18: Friday Night Lights
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It is more than just a mere coincidence that Alef’s 18th issue highlights the celebration of Shabbat. In Judaism, the number 18 has significant meaning. Based on the system of gematria (assigning numerical value to letters), the Hebrew letters of the word “chai,” meaning “life,” are quantified by 18. Chai, in turn, is an all-encompassing word that the Torah reveres.
Yet, as citizens of a modern society, it is rare to find a moment to just appreciate a weighted word for what it’s worth. Quicker than email replies or text messages, our minds are continuously scrutinizing and scurrying from one point in life to the next. Our work, families, and every external piece of our daily routines keeps us locked in an endless cycle of movement that makes it hard for us to just stop to take heed of our world.
So, in celebration of life, we look toward Shabbat. Not only is Shabbat a traditional day of rest, it is also a joyous occasion that reminds us of the simple goodness of our own lives. Whether you participate in a rich, cultural tradition of Judaism in Israel, or find yourself at home, alone with a deli-made challah, Shabbat is unique in its message of peace: It tells us that recognition of rest doesn’t detract from a fullness of life–it enhances it. Shabbat also gives us a designated time every week to be thankful for something as simple and abounding as life itself.
With all of this in mind we present Issue 18: Friday Night Lights, where we will share the sentiments of this sanctified day through stories from people who have found unique and personal ways to relate to Shabbat, even if that means developing some very non-traditional approaches. We hope that these stories serve as an inspiration to you to try to find some time in your own life to collect yourself, discover a sense of calm, and then carry on.
We should also add that if you are a Birthright Israel alumnus interested in transforming Shabbat into a new or revived tradition for yourself, please consider signing up to host a NEXT Shabbat meal through Birthright Israel NEXT.
- Alef
Friday Night Lights Posts
The Best Year
Photo by Jordan Chark, licensed under Creative Commons.
Extra special thanks to guest editor Katherine Bruce for her work on this issue.
Cartoons for Shabbat
By Dan Abrams
Ask any ten-year old, and they’ll tell you – weekday cartoons are fine, but if you want the good stuff, you’ve gotta get up on Saturday morning, and start flippin’ channels. And so, growing up, I found myself in the same fight with my parents every Saturday:
Them: Get dressed. We’re going to Synagogue.
Me: First Ninja Turtles, then Muppet Babies, Then Captain N: The Game Master, then Synagogue.
Them: You have ten seconds, or we’re throwing the TV away. Here are your pants.
Me: ….
Next thing you know I’m in pants and on my way to Synagogue. And, believe me, I’m not happy about it.
I don’t tell this story to demonstrate how much of a brat I was (And when it came to the Ninja Turtles, believe me, I was) but rather to explain how important Saturday morning cartoons were for me when I was younger. For a ten-year-old, it’s a no brainer – why would I go to Synagogue, when I could stay home with cartoons instead? My parents, on the other hand, didn’t see things quite the same way. And so, for years, I sat in my Synagogue’s youth services, bitter at missing the animated adventures most of my friends were enjoying from the comfort of their sofas.
To this day, Saturday-morning cartoons hold a special place in my heart. Maybe it’s a symptom of arrested development, but the idea of watching hours of cartoons on end, with no one telling me otherwise, is still a pretty powerful reason to get out of bed on a Saturday morning. Synagogue, not so much. So, when I saw these Shabbat cartoon dolls in my NEXT Shabbat Shabbox, I was pleasantly surprised; now my inner-child could be the one dictating who wears what pants for Shabbat. And, sure, they’re not the Ninja Turtles, but a cartoon is a cartoon, and as such, is inherently better than a not-cartoon.
Who woulda thought? 16 years later, after countless Saturday morning arguments, I’d get cartoons on Shabbat after all.
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Download your own Cartoon Shabbat Dolls here
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Read more from Issue 17: People of the (comic)Book.
An Unorthodox Coming Out Story
By Jessica Annabelle
Coming out can bring out a wide range of emotions – liberating, difficult, scary, fun, slow, sudden, not actually surprising to everyone but you, political, and super confusing.
For example, the first time I had a crush on a girl was super confusing. Rachel was, like myself, a nice Jewish girl and she happened to sit next to me in Modern Lit class. The important thing to know about Rachel though, was not only that she sat next to me, but that she often wore low cut and loose fitting shirts and sometimes they fell forward and I could see her boobs.
It was the best thing ever.
Simultaneously, it was weird and inexplicable and obviously didn’t mean anything. I had already been through a handful of boyfriends, so I was completely certain having a crush on Rachel did not mean I was a lesbian. On the contrary, I decided having a crush on Rachel meant I was totally normal, because she was hot and all of my guy friends had crushes on her. This weird thing, I decided, had everything to do with her shirts being irresistibly sexy and nothing at all to do with me.
I had successfully convinced myself I was into shirts, not girls. Several years later when I went on my first date with a girl, I explained to the few friends I told that I just “really liked her piercings.” And about a year after that, when I first slept with a girl, I realized that these sorts of explanations were probably no longer going to work.
Because I wasn’t sure how to tell my family and friends from home that I wasn’t straight anymore, after 18 years of evidence to the contrary, the first people I talked to about these new experiences and the questions they raised were my college friends at Hillel. When I tell other people in the LGBTQ community that the first place I came out was in my religious community, their reactions tend to range from surprise to disbelief. For many of my queer friends, religion is dangerous terrain, full of enemy soldiers laying in wait to attack with cures for homosexuality and promises of an eternity spent unloved. This hostile environment is not exclusive to Evangelical Christianity, but can materialize in the most liberal of churches, in small talk with a fellow member of the tribe, or in the mosque. I was blessed with an entirely different experience.
For me, Hillel was a safe place (looking back, even the safest place) to come out because my friends there were also family. We enjoyed each others company and conversation, but in addition to that, we were Jewish. There was a bond between us that could not be broken, and I held on tightly to that as I reinvented myself.
As I sorted through the new questions that arose with each of my new experiences with girls – like, was I interested in women romantically as well as physically? Is this whole thing really worth potentially upsetting my poor mother? And, am I allowed to call myself “queer” when most of my relationships until now have been with men? – I started to rely more and more on the ritual of Shabbat. Once a week, Shabbat allowed me to take a deep breath and set aside the uncertainties. For one day, I focused my energy on celebrating the answers I had found and appreciating the community that sustained me.
It’s been about a year since I first admitted to my best friend and fellow Hillel board member that I might be kind of into girls as well as guys. I’m definitely queer and Jewish and while my mother is not yet able to say LGBTQ three times fast, she has a pretty solid understanding of a few other new terms, including bisexual, Prop 8, partner, and dental dam.
One last thing – Rachel came out about six months ago.
Photo by Made Underground, licensed under Creative Commons.
The Accidental Bat Mitzvah
by Emily Comisar
It was the second Shabbat on my Taglit-Birthright Israel Trip in December 2006. I was twenty-one and the only member of the young adult generation of my family not to become a bar or bat mitzvah–a fact that I had already come to peace with years earlier. My Northwestern University bus had been traveling in caravan with a UCSD bus for days now and together some of our shared cohort was having a B’nai Mitzvah, an event not uncharacteristic of the trips, from what I hear.
I watched as the students were presented to the make-shift congregation and, donning kippot and tallit, each read an aliya, the blessing before and after reading haftarah. That was it. Within seconds, each had become a bar or bat mitzvah.
Not having known that this was all it took to become a Bar or Bat Mitzvah, I was stunned. Not only was this blessing one that I recognized, it was one that I knew forward and backward because I had recited it on my Hillel’s makeshift bimah every time I went to Saturday morning services. I was a bat mitzvah. I had been a bat mitzvah for nearly four years and had absolutely no idea.
My first reaction was to feel like a failure as a Jew. What kind of bat mitzvah doesn’t do a mitzvah project, make a speech, or worse, have any recollection of her Torah portion? I don’t remember exactly when it was, or who was there, or what I was wearing that day. My Bat Mitzvah was essentially meaningless. I’ve botched a few things in my life but this one, I thought, was a big time screw up.
I look back at that moment now and have to laugh a little. Many cultures have a coming-of-age ritual–the Bar Mitzvah is just one in a long list that includes confirmation, quinceanera, and rumspringa. Note though, that all of these rituals take place during the middle teenage years. All of them. Could I really expect to have felt as if I had come into adulthood at the age of twenty-one, by participating in a ceremony that is designed for budding thirteen year-olds?
The year I turned thirteen, I attended my third middle school (in as many years), made my first Jewish friends ever (some of whom I still have now), and became a full member of the community that shaped me into the person I am today. Doesn’t get much more Bat Mitzvah than that.
Photo by Chajm, licensed under Creative Commons.
Read more posts from Issue #13: Bar Mitzvah Season.
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