http://youtu.be/JprQY2DJwFk
עברית בלבד כתוביות
נראה מעניין!
על פרקים אחרים, עבור ל-YouTube ונכנס “סרוגים”!
only Hebrew subs – looks interesting!
–for more go to youtube and enter srugim!

Oh, and it’s really nice to go and do things during Saints games because you have stores to yourself.

To be in full disclosure, I am on the Limmud New orleans Steering Committee, and I too love Limmud. Also, Shir Chadash was instrumental in the success of Limmud last year, and we thank you for that!

However, I couldn’t agree more with you about the absurdity of this article. In fact, I think it might do Limmud a dis-service in overstating its value. It shouldn’t be seen as a replacement for organized Jewish community, because, as you say “it is only once a year.” Many of the points Hazony makes are spot on about Limmud’s value, but those values can’t replace “institutions.”

Thanks for sharing this, and thank you for your continued support of Limmud. Hopefully, New Orleans Limmud can continue to be as successful as it was last year precisely because of support from “the apple cart of Jewish Life,” here in New Orleans: Shir Chadash, Beth Israel, Jewish Federation, etc.

I just got around to reading this, and while you have a very good point, I am not sure that the cult of the individual is a uniquely modern or a uniquely American trait. We have often glorified the leaders of a team to the exclusion of the team. Judah Maccabee and not the rest of the Maccabees; Joshua and not the rest of the Israelite army; George Washington crossing the Delaware and winning the revolution (even though the attack that he led that night was nothing more than symbolic); Lincoln winning the Civil War; the list goes on and on.

Red Badge of Courage, Crane
The Stranger, Camus
Emma, Austen
A Catcher in the Rye, Salinger
Siddartha (loved), Hesse
Demian, Hesse
A House of the Spirits (loved), Allende
The Red Pony, Steinbeck

Thanks for your article…I must say, though, that the decision for me to wear a white shirt and tie was for fun since that’s the Maccabeats’”uniform” rather than me dressing like a man…my 6 yr old did the same. i wore mine with a skirt because I choose not to wear pants, but I would have worn a red T-shirt if that was the Maccabeats’ uniform…it was meant to be fun, not gender-bending.

Women’s fashion in my lifetime has indeed included shirts and ties, and I honestly did not think of it as me ‘dressing like a man’…I appreciate your insight, and really hope I put a positive image out there for women in any denomination, since as a child in the Reform movement, I didn’t get introduced to Torah study as a way of life by men or women. I loved my upbringing and obviously am grateful to have had the opportunities I did. No disrespect intended!

Best
Mayim

http://articles.latimes.com/2011/nov/21/news/la-pn-fox-news-poll-20111121

Thanks for posting these and for all of your insights online.

A mutual friend Rabbi Perlo directed me to your website and as I read this piece I was struck by how similar it is to a piece by one of my teachers – Rabbi Aryeh Cohen – check it out…http://jewschool.com/2011/11/11/27310/on-the-culture-of-greed/

thanks for sharing,
Rabbi Oren

Such a community is not necessarily one affiliated with the Conservative Movement; it may indeed be more reflective of certain of the independent minyanim communities. But, be that as it may, the fact is that you are seeing such a community as as an ideal for the one you are creating at Shir Chadash. I am happy to be part of it and to have as my rabbi one who dreams of the kind of community described in the quote.

As someone who doesn’t follow baseball, is there still time to turn it around? Are they far back in the division?

More info at this link: http://www.humanesociety.org/news/press_releases/2010/12/smithfield_pigs_121510.html

Part of the problem is a lack of a definition of ‘what is Jewish music?’ Is being a Jew who makes music enough to be Jewish music? Does this make Van Halen Jewish because of David Lee Roth? JDub never addressed this very convincingy

Is there any good stuff written on this topic?

I could not open Ethan Tucker’s piece. But, if such a community can only exist in New York, Boston, Washington pr Jerusalem then serious non-orthodox Judaism will be lost and committed non-orthodox Jews will have to return to the 18th Century. This we must not allow to happen.
We can have sustainable communities in places like New Orleans, but they will be communities where Jews use their vehicles and electricity on Shabbat and otherwise are not halakhically Sabbath observing. Such communities will consists of seriously committed 21st Century American Jews who are committed to Jewish learning of a non-fundamentalist sort – the kind of community you are creating at Shir Chadash.
Rene

“the parties can mutually agree on an outcome which ends the conflict and reconciles the Palestinian goal of an independent and viable state, based on the 1967 lines, with agreed swaps”

and

“The borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states”

Now, if you can’t see the clear stark difference between those two statements, then you don’t deserve to know why people are arguing!

AH-HA! It is really so transparent that Mr. Camping doesn’t really believe the end of the world is niegh, but that telling people it is, is really profitable.

This is exactly like the Birther phenomenon, in that people are making lots of money in peddling ‘conspiracy’ theories.

This could become the single greatest set back to African American/Jewish relations, since the rise of the Black Power Movement and the Muslim Brotherhood.

Did they get Biggie too?

Are Jewish Rappers like the Beastie Boys or Shyne involved in this?

I couldn’t help but notice the similarities to New Orleans funeral traditions as well.

http://www.jews4neworleans.org/2010/03/visioning-cities-remembering-past/

Obviously New Orleans, Detroit, Cleveland, etc. are having significant population declines, but the quickness with which planners are embracing the idea of shrinking is alarming. There is no research to suggest that these shrinkings work…the article points this out, that is a relatively unexplored topic.

I am troubled because of the reason that you mentioned Ethan of who is going to benefit from this shrinking most likely? Also, the idea of shrinking is often disconnected from talk of increased density, but rather, just saying the city will have to shrink. Poor people will bear the brunt of this unfortunately. Also, does this strategy encourage continued sprawl? Also, what about all the young people who want to move to cities? We are hearing that cities are in decline and they will have to shrink, but we simultaneously are hearing stories about young people flocking to cities: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703787204574442912720525316.html

It is about creating cities that people want to move to. The cities that are declining are those that are too reliant upon the car, and are those that have no jobs and are perceived as dangerous and dying.

I’m a co-founder of thejmom.com. Thanks for giving us a shout out on your blog. One thing I want to clear up is the site “is not” for over bearing mom’s. It’s for moms, dads, aunts, uncles, anyone who cares enough about someone to set them up. It’s also just a suggestion and not an actual set up date. It’s up to the young adults if they decide to actually meet. It’s a new unique way to meet other like minded Jews.

Thanks for listening.

Brad Weisberg

When I wrote that part, I didn’t have money in mind. I was more thinking of the fact that an independent minyan participant who goes to a minyan that meets only on Shabbat morning might also daven with another community on Friday nights, and donate to AJWS and Mazon to support Jewish social justice efforts, and read Ha’aretz online to stay current on Israel, and participate in Hazon events for Jewish environmentalism, and buy their Shabbat candles at the local kosher store (or, if you live in my neighborhood, at the regular supermarket), and so forth. They don’t expect to get all these things under one roof.

For sure. But shul volunteers don’t tend to get called lazy slackers in print.

I think you’re right. This sentence, as written, doesn’t claim to be about all synagogues, and only refers to some synagogues (viz. the more hierarchical ones, which would see IMs as less hierarchical), but that may still be too limiting. So strike “more hierarchical”, and go with my original draft (before I was asked to be more specific): “Other synagogues are happy as they are and find minyanim entirely unappealing.” This covers more (but still not all) synagogues, since there are many different traits of minyanim that synagogues may find unappealing (depending on the specific synagogues and the specific minyanim), and allows more focus on my main point in this section: synagogues that prefer their current model to other models wouldn’t be happier if they got an influx of people who preferred other models, so they should be careful what they wish for.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts. I don’t have time for the video but here is a response to your written comments.

God interacting with the world as we now live in it is very troubling from the standpoint of science and morality. The scientific laws have proven to be immutable. However, related to religion, science continually teaches us about the awe-inspiring profundity and complexity of life and the universe.

If God could intervene without changing the nature of life on earth, why are there such awful castastrophes, human rights violations, sadism, and human mutations that cause horrible life-tormenting diseases?

For me, R. Harold Kushner provides the way out. Free will and life in which organisms are not just puppets demands that God not intervene once the mysteries of life were set in place. We pray and observe mizvot to strengthen us in our dealings with the challenges of life, to remember the blessings we have and beauties of existence, to note that we are just part of a huge spectrum of life, and to honor those to whom we can be connected who came before us, including those long dead.

Just my religious-lay, but scientist-associated, opinion,

Melanie Ehrlich

I have heard you say before that ‘failing’ at getting Jews to live lives defined by Halacha, is your greatest on-going professional battles.

I would argue that you aren’t failing, but that changing people’s practices concerning Halacha will take serious time. I can say that you have certainly sparked my brain to think more about the function and need for Halacha in my daily life, and how often, people speak in generalities about wanting to lead ‘better’ lives (myself included), yet undertake no plan to improve their lives. I can’t say that I am living a life defined by Halacha yet, but, I urge you not to see what you are doing as an on-going failure, but rather as ongoing. Also, know that you can only do so much to turn this tide by yourself, especially when you don’t have vibrant institutional structures to support you!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory

http://www.patheos.com/Resources/Additional-Resources/You-Will-Call-I-Will-Answer?print=1

Also, what is this argument that praying in public is offensive? It isn’t being forced on someone, like prayer in public schools. Praying in public and public displays of religion (prayer) are completely acceptable. There praying was in no way disturbing anyone on the plane, and if it was it was probably because the person complaining thought the Tefillin were a terrorist device!

However, it is nice to see that he is actually capable of apologizing, and I like that he said it was ignorant.

Also, the fact that Ayelet Waldman responded to Amy Chua’s initial column was an act of another MMM (Jews) weighing in. Both Jews and Asians are constantly held up as examples of successful American Immigrant tales.

Another layer to this is that both communities have love/hate relationship with ‘overbearing mothers,’ or at least, that is the stereotype.

Policies need to be implemented to curb wasteful water use, but this generally results in price increases which results in more social upheaval. Also, things like desalinization (one potential solution to water scarcity) is very cost and labor intensive which makes it hard for countries like Yemen, etc. to use such technologies.

I believe that food is probably only one of the reasons that people are unhappy and protesting, but I do believe that if the water situation isn’t handled properly there will be increased conflict in the region over access to water for drinking and agriculture.

This is also my (admittedly anecdotal) experience with independent minyanim as well: they are largely run and populated by Conservative Jews, most of whom had the benefits of one of the three youth experiences of the Movement or sometimes all of them: Schechter day schools, USY, or Camp Ramah. (In fact, my guess would be that the 46% number cited by Lurie is probably low for minyan attendees, and I would venture to say that the number is far higher for minyan leaders and organizers.)

I would suggest that the 46% figure (from the 2007 Spiritual Communities Study) is likely to be closer to correct for the set of all independent minyanim (founded after 1996), and your experience with independent minyanim may have a sample bias, since your experience seems to be focused on the traditional egalitarian variety. For some minyanim, the number is greater than 46% (as of a 2003 survey, 60% of Kehilat Hadar participants came from Conservative backgrounds, which is a majority though not a huge one), and for others it is less — this includes minyanim such as Kol Zimrah (where, according to the same 2007 survey, 24% were raised Conservative, and a plurality (44%) were raised Reform), and I fervently hope that it also includes the non-egal and quasi-egal minyanim (that is, I hope that most of their participants are from Orthodox backgrounds, so that their net effect is to move people towards more egalitarianism rather than less). The independent minyan landscape is diverse, and 46% represents an overall average. I wouldn’t expect it to be vastly different for minyan leaders and organizers – I presume that most organizers of non-egal minyanim are from Orthodox backgrounds, and speaking for myself (as a founder of Kol Zimrah and a current organizer of a trad-egal minyan), I cpme from a solidly Reform background with zero experience at Schechter, USY, or Ramah.

And the 46% overall (or 60% of Hadar, or 24% of Kol Zimrah) isn’t made up exclusively of people who have been active in the Conservative movement; it also includes people who went to shul twice a year, and the shul they went to twice a year was Conservative.

Furthermore, the nucleus of many of these independent minyanim can be traced by to a multi-year period at the Harvard Hillel when the Traditional Egalitarian Minyan (later the Student Conservative Minyan) attracted and then produced the best and the brightest of the Conservative Movement.

I went to Harvard Hillel during this multi-year period (though slightly later than the Hadar founders), and SCM was one of the multiple minyanim there that I attended regularly (and I wasn’t among the best and brightest of the Conservative movement, or even the worst and dimmest), and while SCM may have given people practical skills in how to run a minyan, I think the more relevant pieces of our Harvard Hillel experience were the community-wide discourse about Jewish pluralism, and the culture of empowerment where anyone could have an idea and put it into action.

And it’s not just the founders, leaders and organizers who are Conservative Jews. The content of these minyanim (at least the egalitarian ones) are Conservative as well. The liturgy is traditional, the participation is open to both men and women. That (brief) description of the core principles of these minyanim does not describe the Reform world, and it does not describe the Orthodox world. There is only one Movement in American Judaism that has tried (and often failed) to pursue the course of (mostly) traditional liturgy coupled with (mostly) increased openness to the participation of those who have traditionally been excluded.

Let’s try to categorize Canada as one of the three most populous countries in the world: China, India, and the United States. Canada is located in the western hemisphere, most people there speak English, they have a multiparty representative democracy with a regulated capitalist economy, and their currency is called the dollar. That (brief) description of Canada does not describe China, and it does not describe India. There is only one of the three most populous countries that fits that description, and that is the USA. So we can conclude that Canada is really American. Yet Canada is so focused on its own Canadian-ness, and so certain of their innate superiority to the saps south of the border. But just imagine the future if Canada were wedded to the institutional advantages of a truly global superpower.

Ok, stepping back outside of this analogy: my understanding of the Conservative movement is that it is supposed to stand for more than just a davening style. The Conservative movement also has a particular ideology about Judaism. Do independent minyanim (specifically those with a traditional egalitarian davening style) share this ideology? Well, some do and some don’t, and those that do do to varying degrees. Some independent minyanim subscribe to a view of the nature of halacha that is compatible with the Conservative view, while other independent minyanim (whether intentionally in order to be inclusive of a diverse community, or by default because the question hasn’t been asked yet) don’t subscribe to any particular ideology about halacha (beyond their own specific practices). As far as the nature of religious authority, the Conservative movement is by far the most centralized of the three major denominations when it comes to religious authority on the movement level, and has a doctrine about the mara d’atra’s supreme authority on the local level (regardless of how many Conservative Jews actually do what their mara d’atra says). By definition, no independent minyanim buy into the movement-wide authority structures of the Conservative movement. And almost no independent minyanim have any individual serving as mara d’atra (at least in a way that applies, even in theory, to the individual practices of minyan participants, as opposed to the communal practices of the minyan). These are ways in which independent minyanim are incompatible with Conservative Judaism even on paper.

With regards to getting a “taste of beauty [sic] of a committed, egalitarian community can look like, and they got that taste at one of the Movement’s youth programs”. For whatever it counts for, my memories of Camp Ramah are of a camper population that for the most part hated religion, and would do anything in their ability to get out of going to tefillot or classes. The peer pressure to not do religion at Ramah was tremendous. Almost no female campers lay tefillin, and a tiny portion of campers would voluntarily lead tefillot. Camp Ramah (Berkshires) was and is not fully egalitarian, with all older campers having the option of attending non-egal tefillot. In fact, many of the girls at camp chose to go to non-egal tefillot, not because they were ideologically not egalitarian, but because they disliked being asked to lead tefillot/take aliyot/read Torah. Campers complained vociferously about being forced to keep shabbat. Camp Ramah was a very unfriendly place to be an egalitarian woman who liked Judaism and halacha.

I agree with most of this, but one quibble. You wrote:

But for Lurie to claim that at its core the Independent Movement isn’t important because it’s really Conservative is breathtakingly condescending.

I haven’t read Elie Kaunfer’s book, so I don’t know how he presents the issue, but if the claim is that independent minyanim can radically alter Judaism as a whole, then M.L. has a point — especially if the argument is that these minyanim can have this revolutionary effect because they don’t belong to any particular denomination. The independent minyan movement may prove very important, but it will be important mainly for the segment of the Jewish community that identifies with ideals and practices characteristic of the Conservative movement.

Also, the original Po-Boy is with french fries and gravy. New Orleanians have been putting French Fries on thier sandwhiches long before the Permanti’s!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/05/dead-birds-fall-from-sky-_n_804591.html

Is this just alarmist? I am wondering if birds falling out of the sky is just one of the first examples of species destruction (other than Polar Bears and Whales) that might actually catch peoples attention. The Bee crisis seems to be getting some attention as well.

Another layer to add to Brooks’ comments, a Biblical observation in a different way.

David Brooks: And yet am a I rotten person for thinking some proper retribution has been inflicted upon the old man?

I point in particular to the verb. Is he a rotten person for THINKING something. Are we liable for our thoughts? Can we control them in the first place? If we can’t control them, are we being set up for failure? If we can, is that healthy? Where is door number three in all of this.

There is a category of Jewish law which states explicitly that we are, with regard to particular situations which are discussed over the course of the texts. The tenth statement/commandment of the Big 10 states that we shall not covet.

Whether indeed Brooks’ statement falls into any of the specific categories of “Sins for thinking” (hirhurei aveirah, for which we beat our chests during the vidui on Yom Kippur) is questionable. Perhaps it is an example of “lo tisna et achicha bilvavecha” (Do not hate your fellow in your heart, Leviticus 19). But the issue also exists on a meta-level. Should we put a check to our thoughts? For this case? For any case?

I would be fascinated to hear your thoughts as you read this–I’ve been in the same boat, encouraging kids to get to camp with MTD-ish salespitches, but deep down hoping that faith catches these kids and turns them inside out! (My books is from an explicitly Christian perspective, so I’m grateful you see resonances.) I’ll bet you’d have insights on the findings on Jewish kids in the National Study of Youth and Religion (statistically, a very small group–so the sociologists behind the study, who were blunt about what this means for Christians, were very hesitant to make assertions about other religious communities). You may know this, but just in case: The original book reporting the NSYR findings is Christian Smith’s *Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers* (Oxford 2004) – and two follow ups are now out as well, tracing the same kids through late adolescence and emerging adulthood: Pearce and Denton, *A Faith of Their Own* and Christian Smith, *Souls in Transition: The Religious Lives of Emerging Adults*. (That’s more reading than you bargained for, I realize…) Anyway, thanks for the shout out–and blessings on this holy season.

What I was pleased about was what you noted, which is that this group is building green even though they don’t believe in Global Warming. This is hopeful news for environmentalists because it means that we can convince people to be more energy efficient through their own frameworks. What I mean is: for some going green is about Global Warming, for some it is about caring for ‘creation,’ and for others it is about Patriotism: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/19/science/earth/19fossil.html
This is exciting.