Hell

Cassandra. People think she had it bad off. Well, I say, seeing the future clearly, that's not so bad off, and seeing it and having no one believe you - that's better off.
What's bad is seeing the present clearly.

My newest hat

My chaver and teacher just returned from Israel with a gift for me.



As he said, it's our team hat (Can you guess what we study? Yes, Emet v'emunah).
He has one too of course.

“The heart should be broken; both shoulders would be crushed and heaven and earth would be ground up and yet one must not depart from one’s own." -Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotsk
(trans R. Moshe Faierstein)

JTA Comments on its own new hires, goodbye to Jewschool ed, Dan "Mobius" Sieradski

OK, granted, it's a little bit navelly-gazey, but one does have to give them credit for whom they hired. Congratulations to my, well, we don't really know one another well enough to say friend, but it's more than just regular-old "I've heard of him," since I've been writing for Dan "Mobius" Sieradski's blog Jewschool for a few years now (as well as another of his blogs, Radical Torah).

The editors of Jewschool have posted this as our goodbye to our fearless leader Dan, and an explanation of who and what the current leadership of Jewschool will be.

In any case, congratulations Dan, you'll be fab in your new job as director of digital media for JTA, which I hope you enjoy.

As Dan says in his final post on Jewschool as editor,

The greatest gift I could hope to have given?

Who owns Judaism?

It’s like the old Zen kōan, “Who is the master who makes the grass green?”

The answer is “You.”

If I’ve accomplished anything meritorious in my tenure, I hope it has been imparting that knowledge to at least one person.

...Since December 2002: 12,552 posts. 38,959 comments. 78 contributors. 5 servers. 1 hell of a ride.

and we'll keep Jewschool fresh for ya'

Let me be the first to say...

MAZAL TOV
to my chavera and fellow blogger Danya Ruttenberg, who is getting married tomorrow. Wish I could be there chabiba!
A thousand years of happiness, and
אֲחֹתֵנוּ אַתְּ הֲיִי לְאַלְפֵי רְבָבָה וְיִירַשׁ זַרְעֵךְ אֵת שַׁעַר שֹֽנְאָֽיו
(Gen 24:60)

Beware waldemart, they've got your number

This reminds me of a bumpersticker I saw a long time ago equating a certain presidential candidate to Voldemort.

But seriously, this is a serious issue, well treated in a funny way. They who shall not be mentioned destroy economies, mistreat employees, and rip off our national support systems so that we can pay higher taxes for them to pay lower wages.




Hattip to Danya

Gonna soak up the sun...

Writing from the City of Angels, where I'm taking a break from the day to day to see my two friends (and one who was my doula) get ordained. I've had the side benefit of getting to catchup with others who have flown in to see the up and coming rabbis receive smichah, and to visit with those who never left. And I get to indulge in some very pleasant weather and trips to the beach as well (too cold for swimming in the Pacific of course, but no one swims in the ocean here anyway).
This is pretty much the last class where I know everyone being ordained - they were first years as I left - I don't know them all that well, except for a few, but I do know that most of the class will surely be a blessing.

The car we rented turned out not to be available, so we had to be upgraded to a red mustang convertible. Oh, yeah.

And now back to our regularly scheduled sunshine, jasmine, palm trees, rosemary, lavender, eucalyptus, and laden citrus trees.
Why did I move, again?

Shabbat shalom!

Baruch Dayan Emet

A friend informed me this morning that my former classmate Abby Spivak died. Abby and I weren't close - we knew each other from being in school together, from having mutual friends, and eating quite a few shabbat dinners together. Nevertheless, at a seminary as small as Ziegler, even people you don't know well, you know pretty well.

I have a class A bullshit detector. It's very sensitive. I can detect bullshit at 30 paces in a dark room of a perfume factory. Abby never set it off. Not once. Abby was one of the genuinely sweetest souls I have ever encountered. Sometimes things she said were naive, but her naivete was not the kind that comes from stupidity. Perhaps it was the Gillman second naivete. I'm not precisely sure, but I know that she spent a lot of her time as a rabbinical student - and long before- workingwith the very ill -AIDS patients - before AIDS was trendy, with children with very special needs, and with those who were ill.
Abby spent the last few years in and out of hospitals, having far too many surgeries on a body that she had struggled with even before she knew the extent of her illness. She was not, ultimately, able to be ordained, but Abby was certainly, and without question a rav.

In the Torah, Noah is described as an "Ish tzadik tamim b'dorotaiv" a righteous man, wholehearted in his generation. What is this tamim? Later, Jacob is described as an ish tam - a person unable to deceive - it seems to me that when we call a person "tam" we mean that they are undivided. Their insides match their outsides, they are genuine. Abby spent her life ministering to the very ill, to those who struggled to live, whose lives were difficult. Her own was no piece of cake, either, and she surely knew, after all that time spent with the ill and the dying, what the future held for her, but her soul was filled with light, and whatever has happened to her body, her "tam-ness," that wholeness that she brought to the world, continues to live and shine.