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Putting local food on your plate … when you can

July 31, 2011 / gurevitzr

I’ve just recently returned from a Summer vacation in Ireland (hence the lack of blogging for a while). As I so often do when I’m away, I took advantage of eating local foods whenever I could. Its part of the joy of visiting another place to not only sample the regional cuisine, but to look for locally grown ingredients in the food too – its always the freshest and the flavors are almost always vastly superior. In Ireland that included eating some of the juiciest, sweetest strawberries I’ve had in a very long time, from a local Kerry farm. And it included the joys of eating fish that had arrived at the dock of the very town we stayed in (Dingle) the very day we were eating it.

Arriving back in Connecticut, its the heart of the Summer farm produce season. The tomatoes on our own deck taste so much better than anything available in the supermaket, and the fresh basil and parsley is now in abundance. Living on the second floor of an apartment, we’re not able to grow very much more of our own food at the moment, but we are not short of local places to buy. There are farmer’s markets every week, plus local farms (especially in Easton) where you can go straight to the source. There are also independent small stores near our home, like A and J Farm Market in Southport or the Double L Market in Westport. Some people plan ahead and sign up to CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) programs where they receive a weekly or bi-monthly delivery of fresh produce from a farm either delivered to their home or to a local pick-up point. Its probably too late for this season, but you can learn more about these at local harvest (which also provides info on local farms and farmers markets in States across the country).

Buying local food is seldom the cheapest option, because we’re usually dealing with small scale producers that cannot compete with huge agribusiness. But I find that the intensity of flavors and overall quality makes me much more appreciative of what I’m putting inside of me and, subsequently, I eat less and more healthily. It also encourages more creativity at mealtimes with meals based on what is in season and what was coming from the farms this week. At eatlocalchallenge.com they have a top 10 list of reasons to eat local.

There’s a lot of attention in the Jewish community these days to expanding our consciousness about food ethics. I was reminded by a Jewish Youth Worker who I met at the URJ Kutz Camp this Summer who was from London that I’ve been teaching about Eco-Kashrut since the early ’90s. (It turned out, as we introduced ourselves, that she realized that I had been her Religious School teacher when she was 10, 20 years ago, and this was one of the things she remembered about my classes!). I was inspired by teachers like Rabbi Arthur Waskow at The Shalom Center, who had been writing about it even earlier than that.

Today inspiration comes from organizations like Hazon and programs for Jews to learn about sustainable farming in the context of Judaism at places like the Adamah Fellowship program at Isabella Freedman Center or the Kayam Farm at the Pearlstone Retreat Center in Baltimore. Many Jewish organizations and schools expose their children to Teva, which provides residential courses for youth to learn about Jewish environmental awareness and sustainability.

The CCAR Press (the publishing body for the Reform movement’s Rabbinic association) recently released ‘The Sacred Table: Creating a Jewish Food Ethic‘, edited by Rabbi Mary Zamore. It is a wonderful collection that takes spiritual consciousness and ethics around issues of food from many different angles, offering a contemporary lens through which we can all think more deeply about the consequences of our day-to-day food decisions. At B’nai Israel we are looking forward to welcoming Rabbi Zamore at our Shabbat author’s series next Spring.

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A Pride Shabbat to Remember

June 26, 2011 / gurevitzr

As a congregational Rabbi, I don’t have that many opportunities each year to visit at another congregation’s services. This year, after receiving an email from a friend who sings in the choir at Congregation Beit Simchat Torah – the LGBTQ congregation in New York City about their Pride Shabbat service, I found myself able to attend this year. And what a year to be in New York City on the Friday night of Pride weekend. To begin, the Shabbat service was quite wonderful. The music is always something special at CBST, with the wonderful Joyce Rosenzweig (who also teaches at HUC) as music director. The cantorial intern this past year was an incredible talent, Magda Fishman, who has just been invested as Cantor at the Jewish Theological Seminary. Add to that the lovely, smart, funny, and passionate Cynthia Nixon, who was their Pride Speaker this year, and the Shabbat service itself was quite wonderfully crafted.

But of course, this year there was much more. CBST adds in psalms of Hallel for their Pride Shabbat, recognizing the annual festive nature of the weekend. This year the energy was one of anticipation and excitement that took the festivities to a whole new level. It had become clear, just as services were beginning, that a vote on marriage equality in New York would take place in the NY Senate in Albany that night. Toward the end of the service we’d received an update that the vote was likely to be approximately 30 minutes after the end of our service.

Outside the Stonewall Inn, waiting for the vote

And so, at its conclusion, many congregants gathered together to walk down to the Stonewall Inn. We joined about 1000 people gathering in the street outside the bar, arriving just 10 minutes or so before the vote was taken. Looking around, and speaking to the people around us, I was struck by the incredible diversity. Many LGBTQ-identified people, but also heterosexual friends and allies who were there to share the moment. And, the annual Drag Parade had finished just a short while earlier, so there was plenty of additional color and glamour added to the mix.

When the news came in, the crowd erupted in cheering and hugging and crying and laughing. The celebratory atmosphere was incredible. In the mix, the Jews who had walked down from CBST started dancing and singing ‘Siman Tov u’mazel tov’ and other Jewish wedding tunes. A couple of Latino gay men came over to us, taken by the joyful sound and said, ‘this is so wonderful – I wish we could be your friends’. One of the CBST congregants took them by the hand and said, ‘You are our friends’ and they joined in the dance.

As one who wasn’t even born at the time that the Stonewall Inn first came to fame in much darker times, it felt quite magical to be standing there at the moment that NY voted to give equal civil rights to homosexual couples. Instead of police with batons, the police around the perimeter were friendly and smiling. The feel-good on the streets and in the bars of Greenwich Village as people passed each other with smiles, cheers, and high-fives was a moment of feeling the community togetherness that can sometimes shine through in New York City.

The prophet, Isaiah (58:13) coined Shabbat as a time of oneg – pleasure, delight – a time to enjoy good food, to dress up, to enjoy each other’s company, and to celebrate. Last night was surely a pure and holy expression of Oneg Shabbat and it is one I will never forget.
Rabbi Rachel Gurevitz

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Why we eat cheesecake on Shavuot (funny)

June 7, 2011 / gurevitzr

As my erev Shavuot posting, I wanted to share with you something deep and meaningful, about the essence of our holy festival … Cheesecake! (or, if you prefer, blintzes). Last week I was invited to offer my thoughts on any number of Shavuot-related questions for the Connecticut Jewish Ledger, and I chose to address the ‘Why do we eat dairy?’ question. I wanted to take advantage of the opportunity to add my own spin on this question, partly because I’ve never been satisfied with any of the more ‘traditional’ answers and, partly, because I believe its possible to make something meaningful out of each and every moment and, therefore, each and every Jewish food, cheesecake being no exception.

So, what does a more traditional take on this question look like? Check out the short video answer provided by the United Synagogue of Great Britain (Orthodox):

To read my take on the background to eating dairy on Shavuot, the Ledger link is here (Scroll down for my answer on eating dairy).

But the best answer I’ve read this year was the one I received from my father. Encouraged by what is clearly the Jewish tradition of having an endless number of answers to this vital question of Jewish practice, he decided to add a few more of his own. Enjoy!

Qu: Why do we eat cheesecake on Shavuot?

A: There are many answers, most , if not all, of them wrong. Perhaps the most credible answer, in the traditional Yiddish style, is “Why not?’ Always answer a question with a question. This sharpens the mind and frays the nerves.

Another answer is that one day it was Shavuot and Rev Nachman was standing before his students wearing a white robe. With his pale skin he was barely identifiable against a pale background. One of his students was heard to remark: “Doesn’t he look just like a bit of cheesecake” and this memory has been preserved ever since.

There is a lot more to Rev Nachman than a chair.

Another answer is that in olden times the harvest at Shavuot was celebrated by eating doughnuts. These doughnuts were the original kind, with a ring of dough sprinkled with sugar and a hole in the middle.Our sages and thymes tells us in an unconvincing, yet mystical, way that the ring represents all the Jews in the world and the hole ( which is not only in the middle but also occupies the surrounding space) is where God lives.

So no matter where you are, if you look, you will find God.

One day, around 1400 CE, a woman was buying doughnuts for Shavuot and said in a feigned middle-Eastern voice: “Ach, these fried doughnuts gives me heartburn; same with KFC. Haven’t you anything else”

“How about a bit of cheesecake?” replied the baker. “Ok, I’ll try a piece” said the lady.

And she never had heartburn again, dying peacefully the following day.

“A miracle” exclaimed the baker and Jews have been eating cheesecake on Shavuot ever since in the hope that they, too, might be delivered from heartburn.

Although this rarely happens, they have not stopped trying.
Simon Gurevitz
(Not a Rabbi)

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The Weiner Saga – what it can teach us about ourselves

June 7, 2011 / gurevitzr

There’s a lot of online chatter, blogging, tweeting, and more about Anthony Weiner’s use of the social network to communicate with women via lewd photo. If you need an update on the full story, here’s a piece in the NYTimes, and another on The Huffington Post.

So, I want to get my 2 cents in? Well, yes and no. I don’t think I have much more to add to what has already been said about the unbecoming behavior, the lying, the damage to Weiner’s family (and, particularly, his wife) and friendships, the analysis of his confession, etc. etc.

But I want to look at another aspect of the chatter online. Because expressing our disgust, our disappointment, and our judgment, while appropriate, is the easy part. Especially when it involves a public official or celebrity. The much harder part is to look at our own lives and ask ourselves some of the really tough questions that emerge from stories like these.

Unless you happen to hang with a particularly angelic crowd, how many of us can say that we don’t know someone among our friends, our congregation, or community, who has done something deceptive or foolish in their lives? How many of us can look in the mirror without feeling embarrassment for a poor judgment of the past? Whether it was behavior while drunk or high, a lie that had consequences that we’ve never owned up to, an email that should never have been sent, a touch or a kiss that betrayed the trust between committed couples, a full-blown affair or a criminal act … Weiner can be a painful reminder of our own faux pas, or remind us of the pain caused by a friend or family member who did something to cross the line.

I remember that, as a very young child, perhaps no more than 6 or 7, I had a teacher who supervised a sewing activity with my class each week. We had learned different stitch styles and were making a bookmark. One week, I made a mistake. I was so embarrassed by my mistake that, instead of going to the teacher for assistance, I tried to fix it myself and created a big knot in the middle of my fabric. Then I panicked. I thought she’d be furious with me if she saw the mess I’d made instead of getting help when the problem was still small. So I started to feign sickness right before her class, and my grade teacher would allow me take some time out in the fresh air and miss her class. After a couple of weeks of this, they caught on. When the confrontation finally occurred, the teacher was mortified that I’d been too afraid to ask for her assistance; with one snip of the scissors she removed my knot and helped me get back on track. We had a great relationship from that point on.

Ok, so its a pretty innocuous example, but I offer it more for symbolic value. What Weiner did was very human. He messed up. Yes, he should examine what created his desire to exhibit such behavior in the first place – that is different from my accidental stitching mistake. But what followed is where the commonality lies, and is not at all uncommon. Once we’ve messed up, we’re embarrassed and ashamed. We’re fearful of what people will think and say. We’re fearful of the consequences. And so we do things in a vain attempt to try and control the situation. This usually involves a lie. Sometimes its a total cover-up lie (no, I didn’t do that; my account must have been hacked), and sometimes its a lie disguised as a partial admission of a lesser crime to try and divert attention from anyone discovering the true depths of our deed. When it looks like we’ve got ourselves into an almighty knot, we try a different strategy, perhaps feigning illness – ‘I wasn’t in my right mind’; ‘I was under a great deal of stress at the time’, ‘I hadn’t gotten over the death of my father’ …

Only when we find ourselves cornered and out of options might we finally come clean and confess. And we tell people how truly sorry we are. And its not a false confession. It might look that way, because it looks like we’ve been lying and were hoping to get away with it. Would we have confessed if we hadn’t been found out? Probably not. But the lack of confession until there was no other choice does not necessarily indicate lack of authenticity. We are ashamed, we are embarrassed, we hate ourselves for our poor judgment and the hurt we have caused to people we care about, the trust we have lost, and we are disgusted by our flaws and inadequacies that have caused so much harm. It was all those feelings and emotions that led us to try and cover things up in the first place – out of our desire to nullify the harm and make it all go away. Hindsight is 20/20, as they say; we did not have the foresight to consider how much worse we were making the knot by our avoidance.

What is true of ourselves also plays out in our dealings with others. When someone you love is guilty of an act of hurt, or poor judgment, how do you respond? When they show true remorse and want to do whatever they can to bring some healing to the situation, do you push them away or do you try to make a path for them to do teshuvah – return/repentance? There are no easy answers; sometimes we have to separate ourselves from an abusive or narcissist personality. Sometimes we need time to mourn what has been lost – love, trust, friendship – before we can forgive. But it is always worth taking a breath and a step back and asking ourselves if there is any room for compassion alongside our judgment of the sins of another.

Rabbis, as with all clergy, find ourselves engaging pastorally with people in every aspect of life’s journey. We seek to help those who have been hurt by another to find peace and to heal, and we seek to listen and help those who have sinned to do the inner work of true repentance, taking responsibility, but also the ability to heal and to move on rather than to carry the weight of their error forever.

So, yes, Anthony Weiner has messed up and, yes, he has more work to do. But there’s a spiritual lesson here, and its a lesson that requires deep contemplation … for each and every one of us.
Rabbi Rachel Gurevitz

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Clergy speak out for Gay Pride month

June 1, 2011 / gurevitzr

June is Pride month. These days my attention is turned much more to highlighting and celebrating the diversity of all kinds within our Jewish communities. In the past, some of our Jewish communities have specifically addressed the inclusion of interfaith families and GLBTQ Jews in their midst. In recent months I’ve learned a great deal from my colleague and friend, Rabbi Ruth Abusch-Magder, Rabbi-in-Residence for Be’chol Lashon, that recognizing and responding to diversity goes far beyond these categories, to the inclusion of Jews of every ethnic background. Our worldwide Jewish community has always been diverse, but our US-based community is becoming increasingly more diverse from immigration, adoption, conversion and the coming together of more mixed-ethnicity couples in marriage. A new video from B’chol Lashon, featuring Y-love (below) shares this message:

But one of the important aspects of being a welcoming and inclusive community is not simply to acknowledge, welcome and celebrate the diversity that makes up our Jewish communities today. If we really care about inclusivity, we need to be responsive to the hurts, the needs, and the injustices that may be faced by one part of our community. For just as we cannot claim to be an economically diverse community that welcomes everyone to belong regardless of financial means if we do not make it possible in reality and do not see it is as our duty to provide additional support to our families in times of struggle, so we cannot claim to be truly inclusive and welcoming of any group if we are not responsive to their needs.

I recently heard a story of a Rabbi who had delivered a sermon on a Pride Shabbat that highlighted some of the injustices and inequalities still faced by loving same-sex couples because they cannot get married or their marriages are not federally-recognized. Couples who are still faced with crippling financial ramifications when one dies and their partner inherits; couples who cannot gain access to each other when one is in the emergency room, and cannot make decisions on behalf of an incapacitated partner; couples who struggle to find affordable health insurance that is available to them as a family unit. And the list goes on. While the overwhelming majority of the community responded with compassion, recognizing that the Reform movement has long stood behind civil rights equality for same-sex couples, and recognizing the holiness of being a community dedicated to that work, a small minority felt it inappropriate material for a Rabbinic sermon. But the wonderful ‘It Gets Better’ campaign this past year has helped us all understand that silence on the pain and inequalities facing GLBTQ people is more than just an omission of words; by making the individuals and the issues invisible in our communities we are failing in our duties to literally save the lives of some of our youth who don’t know who to turn to and what wonderful possibilities might lie ahead. I spoke (and subsequently published in my blog here) about this specific issue some months back, and recently a colleague, Rabbi Andrea Myers, published an article on the Huffington Post entitled ‘It Gets Beautiful’, which I highly commend to you.

The seminary of the Union for Reform Judaism, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, created their own ‘It Gets Better’ video, providing inspiring leadership. More recently, the students at Yale Divinity School created a similar video project, reaching out to Christians who are looking for their spiritual home in a place that doesn’t require them to leave a piece of their soul at the door. Both videos are below.
Blessings for a Pride month filled with inspiration, affirmation, and action.
Rabbi Rachel Gurevitz

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Jewish History, Torah, and Rabbis in the Twitter Age

May 12, 2011 / gurevitzr

This is Jewish History Month. As a High School student, History was always something that I loved to know and hated to learn. What I mean by that is that I was always fascinated by the unfolding of events and the significance that one thing could have on another. I always loved social and cultural history especially – the way that people used to live. But I’ve never been very good at remembering the facts. In fact, one of my repetitive stress dreams used to be that it was just a few days from a major High School history exam (A levels – the exams in the UK that determine where you will go for University) and I am faced with two extra-thick lever files of handwritten notes that I have to memorize that consist of endless lists of dates and European wars.

We are blessed to live in an age when engaging with our history, learning, exploring, and studying, is more accessible than it has ever been.

This past week I have been having fun learning a great deal of history, and helping to share the amazing resources of the Encyclopedia of the Jewish Women’s Archives. The full archives are online but, in a wonderful, innovative project using technology at its best, a team consisting of anyone who chooses to participate have been tweeting individual entries of the encyclopedia this month. For those already using Twitter, just follow #jwapedia and you’ll be able to tune in to the entries being shared, re-tweet them to share them with your followers, and explore the encyclopedia yourself to take part in this community educational project. If you don’t use Twitter, keep reading! I want to make the case for why you might want to get into Twitter, but first, here’s another great upcoming project to wet your appetite.

In the 24 hours leading up to Shavuot (which begins in the evening on June 6), many individuals are planning a mass Tweeting of verses and teachings from Torah. As with any topic that you want to follow on Twitter, you’ll just be looking up #Torah. The goal is to Tweet Torah to the top of the things that people are sharing on Twitter, just as we prepare for the peak experience of Receiving Torah again at Sinai when we reach Shavuot. Its a great way to be reminded of the ‘greatest hits’ of Torah, and be introduced to lines, stories, characters, ethics and ideas that you might have never known were in Torah.

Here’s my case for why Twitter is something that might be for you (and at the bottom of this post will be some instructions to help you get started if you are new to this medium).

There are a number of organizations and publications whose materials I like to read online. Some of them I receive via an email directly from them. Others are things that I have ‘liked’ on Facebook and so, when they post something new, it will appear on my Facebook wall. There are other great articles I am introduced to when Facebook friends post the links with words of encouragement about why others might want to read them too. But the other way that I get great information is through the links to news, blogs, articles and TV interview clips that individuals and organizations post on Twitter. It would be overwhelming for me to try and follow every single blog or publication that sometimes posts a particular piece that catches my attention. But by following them on Twitter, I can log on, skim through the brief headings and descriptions that have been posted in the past couple of hours within a couple of minutes, and perhaps find 3 or 4 online articles that I’d really like to read. Think of it as subscribing to a magazine where you are the Editor – you get to decide whose content you want to include. Of course, as the author of a blog and local newspaper articles, its also a way to distribute things that I write more widely, but you can still get a lot out of Twitter even if you just want to be reader.

When you first open up a Twitter account, you can search for potential individuals or organizations to follow by general topic, but the best way to go is to zero in on someone who shares similar interests to you and then look at who they are following (much in the same way that you build up Friends lists on Facebook). To make it even easier, many of us have created ‘Lists’ of categories of Tweeters. So, for example, if you follow me @RabbiGurevitz, you’ll see that I have a list of Jewish organizations that I follow and Jewish professionals. I also have a list of interfaith resources. There are also several online resources that will tell you who some of the ‘top tweeters’ are in a particular field of interest, helping you to build your network of individuals and organizations that are of particular interest to you.

So, give it a go! See below for more info on how to get started. Join the Jewish Women’s Archive #jwapedia project this month and learn about some fantastic Jewish Women who have done astonishing things. Follow #Torah in the first week of June and immerse yourself in our Holy text and heritage to help get into a Shavuot state of mind. And go and explore the great network of Jewish individuals and organizations who are sharing great ideas, great teaching, and great commentary on our community and world affairs on Twitter.

There are a number of good online tutorials for using Twitter.
http://mashable.com/guidebook/twitter/ takes you through every aspect, step-by-step.
If ‘seeing’ it done via video is more helpful, then check out the video below:

How To Use Twitter on Howcast

And, if you are a ‘local’ at B’nai Israel, and would like a personal demo, drop me a line and I’ll do what I can to help you get started.

Rabbi Rachel Gurevitz

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Reacting to the Death of Osama Bin Laden

May 2, 2011 / gurevitzr

This is a cross-posting of an article written by Rabbi Rachel Kahn-Troster at the blog of Rabbis for Human Rights – North America. Many pieces have been posted online today, reflecting on the news of the assassination of Osama Bin Laden. Rabbi Kahn-Troster’s review of these messages, and her own reflections resonated most deeply with my own thoughts today. I highly recommend her article to you. Rabbi Rachel Gurevitz

Photo by by Zola via flickr.com. Creative Commons License.

I was checking my email late last night when I noticed a headline on the New York Times website: “President Obama to address the nation.” “They’ve caught Bin Laden,” I said to my husband. “There is nothing else urgent enough for an instant press conference on a Sunday night.” As I waited for the President’s speech, I realized I really didn’t know how I felt. Relief? Renewed sadness over 9/11? How are you supposed to feel when your enemy falls?

For me, as for many Americans, this is not a theoretical question. I was in New York on 9/11 and watched the Twin Towers get hit. Even though more than 10 years have passed, there is part of me that is still back on that day, under attack and scared. I’ve long viewed my work at RHR-NA fighting torture as my patriotic response to what I experienced. The best way to beat the terrorists was to uphold America values about freedom and the rule of law. I felt that the most fitting end for the search would Bin Laden would have involved a fair trial in an American court room, with the terrorist locked up for years and years. As the wrangling over Guantanamo intensified, it became clear that such an end for Bin Laden was unlikely. Rabbi Arthur Waskow described Sunday’s results, Bin Laden’s death in a firefight, as a “sad necessity.” But the scenes of unbridled celebration outside of the White House seemed at odds with the solemnity of the moment. I watched them and was deeply uncomfortable. For me, they transformed the moment into one of revenge. Maybe I am overreacting. Surely, those of us on the left tend to have a knee-jerk reaction to moments of patriotism. But I don’t think I am wrong. I cannot celebrate the death of another human being.

I’m not alone in my ambivalence. A quick survey of my friends shows that many of them are quoting the midrash about the death of the Egyptians at the Red Sea, when the angels are chastised for celebrating the death of God’s creatures. To actively celebrate over the death of another human being (sacred and created in God’s image) feels wrong, no matter how evil or how much they are our enemy. But others of my friends pressed that the celebration of the death of an individual enemy was different than rejoicing over the killing of innocents. The joy they felt was not one of revenge but of relief that evil had been overcome. As Rabbi Morris Allen posted on Facebook, he spills wine at seder for the suffering of the Egyptians during the plagues but not for the Pharaoh who caused their deaths. Osama Bin Laden was such a Pharaoh.

The President’s somber tone in his announcement should give us guidance for the national mood. It was not a time for rejoicing–the death of Bin Laden will not bring back the lives that were lost. It was our job as a nation not to pursue revenge but to seek justice. As activists, we translate tzedek as righteousness when we said “tzedek tzedek tirdof” and seek a more equitable world. But today we are reminded that justice is one of the pillars on which the world is built. God demands us to seek out justice.

Reflecting over the strange coincidence of the death of Bin Laden being announced on Yom HaShoah, Rabbi Menachem Creditor reflected:
I’m not sure what I mean right now. I’m relieved that an evil has been eliminated from the world. I’m mourning our lost Six Million. I’m watching the crowds on Pennsylvania Ave and Ground Zero, weeping at all that happened and is forever changed, aching for some healing and some small amount of hope. I’m still hearing the testimony from a Shoa survivor shared less than three hours ago echoing in my heart, proud to have joined as a large Berkeley Jewish community to bear witness to our collective pain. I’m lost right now. That’s all I think I can mean at the moment. We do not rejoice at the death of our enemy. The implementation of justice is not a joyful celebration. As Rabbi Cohen writes of watching the recording of Eichmann’s trial, “In this man’s eyes are reflected the ghosts of his uncountable victims…and also nothing at all.” I am riveted by the face of Bin Laden. I do not want to look into his eyes. Those eyes witnessed the snuffing out of so much life; those eyes remained willfully blind to the pain and loss he caused. I believe justice has indeed been served today. Joylessly, as is appropriate.

The reaction of the religious community has largely been along those lines as well. The Vatican called on Catholics to not rejoice but reflect on the death as an opportunity for furthering peace. The New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good reminded us: “Our response is disciplined by belief that war itself is tragic and that all killing in war, even in self-defense, must be treated with sobriety and even mournfulness. War and all of its killing reflects the brokenness of our world. That is the proper spirit with which to greet this news.” Two of the major Muslim organizations, the Muslim Public Affairs Council and the Islamic Society of North America, have framed Bin Laden’s death in terms of justice for victims of 9/11 and repeated President Obama’s call for national unity. Like the President, they also took the opportunity to remind American that the radical terrorist did not represent or speak for Islam.

My friend Rabbi Noah Farkas wrote: “It’s not the celebration on the day of the death of an enemy that exemplifies justice, but how we choose to live the day after.” Repairing the broken world is not about what someone else might do, it is about us and how we bear the responsibilities given to us. Treating every human being as created in God’s image is difficult. Feeling compassion for the stranger, because we were strangers, is not an easy choice. The Talmud (Sanhedrin 65b) insists that the responsibility for healing is in our hands, if only we could overcome our own limitations: “Raba said: If the righteous desired it, they could be creators of worlds, as it is written, “But your iniquities have separated between you and your God [Isaiah 59:2].”

Today is the day after. Let us create a world of peace.

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In every generation – Maggid 2.0 at our Seder

April 24, 2011 / gurevitzr

This year we tried something a little different at our Seder. We were so pleased with the result that I wanted to share it here – an idea to store away for next year. It won’t work for everyone – certainly not for Jews who do not use additional power or technology on the festivals – but that still leaves a lot of Jews who might want to try something new.

We began our Seder fairly conventionally, following our Haggadah through the festival candle-lighting, first cup of wine, and so on, through to Yachatz – the breaking of the matzah. But when we arrived at the heart of the haggadah (and the longest section) – Maggid – telling the story, we put down the haggadah. First, we performed what has become a family ritual over the years – the Passover story in rap, with costumes and movement. That story in its entirety, from Moses’ birth to the crossing of the Sea, is rather difficult to find in a traditional haggadah, but we like to cover the basics.

What we do find in the haggadah is a confusing mix of conversations from generations ago – Rabbis talking all through the night, fantasies about multiplications of plagues, four questions (some of which are never answered in the text of the haggadah), four children who respond to the whole Seder experience in different ways, and so on. Its a rather strange hodge-podge if you think about it. I’ve always regarded it as something of a ‘teacher’s manual’ – it gives you ideas of how to engage in the storytelling, but it doesn’t work so well as the storytelling itself.

If it is the case that, ‘in every generation’ we must have an experience that gets us back in touch with what it means to experience slavery and what it means to seek and gain freedom, then how might we tell that story today? This year, we used visuals and video to help us access that story in ways that deeply tapped into our own experiences and understanding, challenging us, moving us, and inspiring us.
We began with a video of a new song out of Israel, entitled ‘Out of Egypt’, by Alma Zohar.
She reminds us:
Chorus:
Don’t you know that each day and in every age,
one and all must see himself as though having escaped Egypt
So he won’t forget how he fled, how he was beaten, bled, left dead
How he called out to the heavens

The song concludes:
There’s always war in Africa
What luck that it’s so far away
We don’t have to see or hear the screams

The video can be viewed here.

This was how we began to think about Avadim Hayinu – we were slaves, but now we are free. If the spiritual message here is to remember in order to empathize, in order to be moved to action when we remember what slavery was like, we cannot simply ritually recite the words, but must look at the world we live in today. Zohar’s video powerfully engages us. The words at the end of the youtube tell us:

Since 2003, an estimated 10,000 immigrants from various African countries have crossed into Israel.
Some 600 refugees from the Darfur region of Sudan have been granted temporary resident status to be renewed every year, though not official refugee status. Another 2000 refugees from the conflict between Eritrea and Ethiopia have been granted temporary resident status on humanitarian grounds.
In 2007, Israel deported 48 refugees back to Egypt after they succeeded in crossing the border, of which twenty were deported back to Sudan by Egyptian authorities.

An Israeli looking for something more from her people and her country.

From here, we looked at the ‘Pharaohs of today’. These are included in the video of the powerpoint presentation below. As we followed the slides, the storytelling took us from reflecting on some of the worst dictators and their oppression of their people, to a call on each of us to reflect and discuss how we use our power. The image of the scallion and the staff represent enslavement and freedom-fighting – that which we do to others, and that which we do to ourselves. Why the scallion? Because it is a Sephardi Jewish tradition to take a scallion and beat the person next to you with it when telling the story of enslavement and hard labor in the Pesach story.

Just as each of us has the ability to use our power to oppress or to free, so each of us contains something of each of the four children. A small selection of the images used to illustrate these children in haggadot over the ages gave us an entree to discussing what these had to teach us.

Then we moved to the moment of freedom. With several artist’s renderings of the crossing of the Sea, we pondered whether the experience was one that was awesome, fantastical, celebratory… its not so easy to leave behind the known for the unknown, however bad it might have been. The emotions that accompany us are complex.

Finally, many of our guests brought their own image of freedom. The range was diverse – abstract, specific, political, inspiring, peaceful, spiritual… each image birthed a story or description – just a minute or two each, to enable us to engage with the deeper meaning and experience of freedom.

All of these sections are reflected in the video below:

One contribution was in the form of a video:

In truth, time did not allow us to discuss each section equally fully – we could easily have been like the Rabbis of old, up all night, to really do justice to this much material. But we certainly had one of the more meaningful experiences of engaging with the Passover story that I can remember.

We closed out the section with a couple of videos that have done the rounds this year and in past years – The Fountainheads ‘Dayenu’, and Michelle Citrin’s wonderful ’20 things to do with Matzah’.

Our Seder is conducted in our living room space and not seated at tables, so the logistics of this way of doing Maggid were relatively simple – a laptop plugged into a projector pointing at the wall. It might easily have been done by plugging into a flat-screen TV.

But even a ‘low-tech’ version of this mode – photocopies or photos of images passed around a table – would achieve a similar result; like the chalk pictures on the pavement in the movie ‘Mary Poppins’, they provide a portal and, when we jump right in, these images offer a different way of accessing the journey from slavery to freedom.
Rabbi Rachel Gurevitz

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Top tips for an engaging Seder

April 11, 2011 / gurevitzr

I’ve led or co-led several workshops or conversations with parents over this past week on ways of engaging children and adults alike in the Passover Seder experience. The following is not a comprehensive list; rather, a sharing of some of the top tips that I have found excite parents and children when we introduce these possibilities to Seder night. Keeping with the Passover format, here are 4 suggestions:

1) Involving children in the preparations. Building the anticipation by having our children prepare some things for Seder night is key. This can include more traditional tasks, like helping to make the charoset, and searching for the last pieces of chametz (bread, cake, etc.) that a parent has hidden on the last morning before Seder with a feather (bedikat chametz). But it can also include preparing some acting of the story, songs, decorating pillow covers (thanks Rabbi Nicole Wilson-Spiro, who runs our Young Families Chavurah, for this one), matzah covers, place settings etc. If you clean out your kitchen but don’t empty every cupboard, have the kids design the ‘Chametz – Keep Out!’ and ‘Kosher for Pesach’ signs to put on the cupboard doors.

2) Logistics and lay-out. This is one of the most overlooked elements of the Seder but one that I have come to appreciate as crucial. While not every home has the space to accommodate some creativity in this department, we have found that sitting on sofas, cushions and chairs in concentric circles around a coffee table in a living room to be much more conducive, at least for the pre-meal part of the Seder, than sitting still around a formally-laid table. Young children can get up and move around more easily without being a distraction, and the atmosphere engenders more conversation and interaction between the adults too. At our Seder we often hang colorful fabrics in the room to create the feeling of sitting under a tent. In previous years, we’ve moved to tables in another room for the meal, but this year we’ll be using our dining room table as the buffet table, and will continue the informal feel as we eat in this more informal setting too.

3) While some observe the tradition of reading from the beginning to the end of the Haggadah, I regard it as more of a teacher’s manual. There are steps – 15 of them to be precise, listed at the beginning of most haggadot, which make up the Seder – the order – of the service. Most of these steps are short (washing hands, dipping karpas into salt water, breaking the matzah and hiding the afikoman, etc.) The largest section is Maggid – telling the story. In this section we find the debates and conversations of several generations of Rabbis recorded. But for the story to come alive for us so that, as we are commanded, we experience the Exodus as if we ourselves left Egypt, we have to find our own way to tell and respond to the story.
– That might mean acting it out (have the children walk around the room with sacks over their shoulders while you sing; when the music stops, ask them a question: Who are you? Where are you going? What are you carrying? What will you eat? etc.).
– You might use songs to tell the story.
– You might have the children ask questions (not just recite the Ma Nishtanah, which are just your starters for 4, not meant to be the totality of questions for the whole night!)
– You might ask guests to bring their symbols of Freedom for a second Seder plate, to be shared during the course of the evening (thank you to Rabbi Phyllis Berman, from whom I learned this one).
– When it comes to the praises we sing to celebrate our freedom, you might get up and dance! With fabric, you might ‘split the sea’ for people to pass through as they sing and celebrate.
– For an adult crowd, you might seek out challenging contemporary readings on themes of freedom to discuss around the table (see haggadot.com for an amazing selection of potential readings).

4) Finally, I really recommend doing some of the Seder after the meal. Traditionally there is still the Grace after Meals, more praises, two cups of wine, and Elijah’s cup to go, plus some closing songs. I know that many families skip the post-meal Seder, but there is something powerful and pleasureable about taking even 15 minutes to offer thanks and close with some fun songs (the traditional ones like Chad Gad Ya, or some contemporary fun songs set to familiar tunes – see here, for example).

There are many more links, and some fun Passover youtube videos, as well as more information and recipes, at Congregation B’nai Israel’s Passover Page.

Have some great ideas for the Passover Seder that you’d like to share with others? Please add them to the comments section here!

Many blessings for a wonderful, engaging, meaningful Passover!
Rabbi Rachel Gurevitz

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Israeli Women Win European Basketball Championship!

March 25, 2011 / gurevitzr

Just wanted to share a feel-good story today. Anyone who knows anything about Connecticut know that we are very proud of our Huskies – the UConn basketball teams. Basketball is pretty much the only US game this (British) Rabbi follows, and only because congregants (thanks Val and Linda!) initiated me a couple of years back with some live games watching a truly outstanding team. But today I found myself cheering for another Women’s team when I cam across the following news:
Israeli women’s basketball club Elitzur Ramla beat France’s Arras 61-53 last night to capture the EuroCup. Their amazing run makes them Israel’s first women’s club to capture the European Championship.

It is the first time that an Israeli team has won this competition since the guys did it back in 1977.

You can read more of the story at the IsRealli blog.
Go Team!

Rabbi Rachel Gurevitz

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Rabbi Rachel Gurevitz

Page 13 of 26

Putting local food on your plate … when you can

A Pride Shabbat to Remember

Why we eat cheesecake on Shavuot (funny)

The Weiner Saga – what it can teach us about ourselves

Clergy speak out for Gay Pride month

Jewish History, Torah, and Rabbis in the Twitter Age

Reacting to the Death of Osama Bin Laden

In every generation – Maggid 2.0 at our Seder

Top tips for an engaging Seder

Israeli Women Win European Basketball Championship!

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