My (So-Called) Jewish Life

“The Jewish problem is not at all political…What a Jew, marooned on an island and looking into his innermost self, discovers to be his Jewishness—this and this alone is the Jewish problem.”

–Martin Buber, trans. by Joachim Prinz, The Dilemma of the Modern Jew (161-62).

I visited my ex yesterday.

That is, Dana and I and grandpa Dave attended a Bat Mitzvah at my ex-synagogue. I say “ex” because changing synagogues is not like changing Internet providers, you know. If I ever do finally switch from Earthlink to BellSouth or Insight cable I don’t expect to feel that hollow sense of relief mixed with regret, like you get with lover-like institutions such as colleges and synagogues.

Amidst the familiar camphor-smelling hallways, dingy walls, narrow, long sanctuary with the narrow windows way up there (my wife says it’s a little bit like praying in a bomb shelter), the cantor-congregation interactive tunes I know by heart, the pageantry of community-wide attendance that rivaled the High Holy Days, complex emotions swirled, not just within me, but around the sanctuary. I could taste them, smell them. Read the rest of this entry »

The whiteboard idea was a hit with Dana, and my friends Leigh and Russell. They started probing the idea, and it wasn’t long before the notion of a shrinking Jewish population got questioned, too.

“You and Dana moved to Louisville from elsewhere,” Leigh said.

“That’s true.” Add +2.

“So did you and Russell,” Dana said. Hmm. And their two kids. +4 = 6

Cantor and her daughter. +2 Husband from here but moved back: a wash. = 8

But former cantor left with former part time rabbi and three kids, also former full time rabbi, wife and I believe 3 children, not quite offset by new rabbi and the fiancee snapped up from the Louisville unmarried pool, but who also relocated to town  for -5, -5, +2 +8 = 0 – a wash so far.

A Rose baby, a Goldstein baby, 8 Weiss children, AJ’s cantor child, 4 new Grossmans (for the time being) = +15 – 1 Grossman to be followed in due course by 5 Grossmans (carry the five for now) = +14.

The return of the Davises = +2, plus kids, = +4 total. Then they left again, but one remained = +1

Today’s Jewish Louisville whiteboard = +15

You too can play!

On another note – DM already drafted a Purim play, so it looks like I won’t be doing that (duh). But might be helping ojut with the revisions. At first I was kind bummed, though I should be relieved, really, because who has the time? Not I.

I was reading the birth/bnai mitvah/wedding/death section of Community today to my wife when an idea hit me of how to keep track of Louisville’s shrinking Jewish community. What the Louisville Jewish community needs is a big whiteboard, like they have on the sci-fi series Battlestar Gallactica.

On this sci-fi show, humanity’s planets have been nuked by the cylons–cybernetic “skin jobs” that look and act (mostly) human. A small band of survivors is on the run, and the president keeps a tally of this remnant of the human universe on a whiteboard in her office. The count now is somewhere around 38,000.

A large electronic whiteboard on the JCC’s roof would do the trick. For exampoe, this week, according to Community: 3 deaths (-3), 2 weddings, but the spouses raised in Louisville won’t live in Louisville (-2), two births, but the newborns, born to families originally from Louisville, won’t be raised in Louisville (+0). We just need a way to track families moving in or out, and we’ve got our instant demographics.

This week: Louisville: -5.

Yep, it looks like I’m going to be writing a script for Purim. Actually, I’m cautiously excited about it. It will be work, but the ideas are good (I think a lot of them were my ideas, which I guess makes me a pleased egotist).

Meanwhile, while I was at shul meeting with the “Purim Braintrust” as the rabbi called it, my wife was at her buddy’s house going over last minute details for the Rosh Chodesh women’s service they’re putting together on Sunday. Or as they call it, “The men had their turn; now it’s our turn” (we had men’s Mishna and football night at the rabbi’s house, which I managed to get to one time before the semester’s teaching started. There were also snacks). Read the rest of this entry »

I’m off to evening minyan, then to meet with the rabbi and some other folks about Purim planning. I’m not sure what I’m gonna get tapped to do – but I think it involves writing or editing a Purim script of some kind. It will be interesting to find out what plans the synagogue has and how I might fit in to that. I’m pretty independent when it comes to writing assignments, and teaching four college writing classes, time is the one thing I have nothing of. So the, I guess, parameters, will be a factor of whether or not I take on this Purim script initiative.

Who am I kidding, I’ve been asked, and so I’ll probably not find it in me to opt out.

So far I’ve done a profile of the new rabbi, and am working on one for the new cantor. I’ve written one column on spirituality that I was invited to do. That wasn’t published–for reasons of, I don’t know, diplomacy, I think–you know, now that I think about it , I really don’t know why. I understood the explanation at the time, but I can’t seem to make sense of it now. Like the time I got all the information from my credit union about a new car loan, and driving back from the meeting, called my wife to tell her all the terms, and then realized on the phone I didn’t remember half of it, and the half I did remember, I didn’t understand.

I love evening minyan – it’s…relaxing, and I never have time to relax. I can go just for the peace even more than the prayer. At 5:45 in winter it’s already getting dark, and there’s a–well, there’s a line in an old Herman Hermits song, “there’s a kind of hush all over the world tonight.” That’s how it feels, and even though the next line of the song is, “You can hear the sound of falling in love,” that’s not what I mean. Or is it?

Speaking of peace, the hazerai (sp?) over the two conservative shuls merging is over – now that my shul’s board voted not to accept the proposal. At least it’s over for this week. In my so-called Jewish life, nothing is ever over or forgotten.