Yikes!

Quote of the Day

“The only way I wouldn’t see God is if I stopped looking.”
- Dvora Weisberg

Saving Darfur

I teach an 8th grade Hebrew school class on Tuesday nights.

Tonight, I was teaching about generosity and tzedakah. After discussing some text, I split the class into three teams. Each team was given a hypothetical $100. I asked them to, as a team, figure out a way to spend their $100 that would most help the world.

One group was discussing whether or not to donate some of their money to (in their words) "save Darfur." One of the girls in the group asked, "What's 'save Darfur'?" Another girl answers, "It's for black people far away."

Thank God another of the kids in the group was able to give a real explanation.

D'var Torah: Chayei Sara

Things might have been easier for Eliezer, Abraham’s servant, if he’d had the assistance of GPS.

He had a long journey to go on. He was a man with a mission.

GPS – which stands for “global positioning satellite” – is a technology that allows a device, which can be held in someone’s hand or mounted in a car navigation system, to communicate with specially designed satellites. Using trigonometric calculations, the device figures out your location anywhere on the globe, and can help you map a course to your destination.

I learned a lot about GPS this weekend, when Dan Medwin and I participated in a global treasure hunt called “geocacheing.” People who participate in the game leave “caches,” little treasure troves, in out-of-the-way spots around the globe, then post the GPS coordinates on a website. Using a handheld GPS, geocache hunters trek through wilderness, looking for little plastic boxes hidden under rocks.

Eliezer is on a mission, too. He’s taken an oath to his elderly boss to find Isaac a wife among Abraham’s own people. According to Midrash Rabbah, Eliezer isn’t on the treasure hunt we think he’s on. When he journeys to Aram-Naharaim and brings his camels to a well, he’s trying not to find a wife for Isaac. Abraham has given Eliezer an out. If he cannot convince a women to come back with him, “you shall then be clear of this oath to me,” Abraham says in Genesis 24:8.

Eliezer, seeing opportunity, is hoping that his journey will end a certain way. He hopes not to find a wife for Isaac, according to the midrash, because he wants Isaac to marry his own daughter. Eliezer is a man on a strange mission. He must fulfill his master’s wishes, but he’s hoping to fail.

When Eliezer arrives at the well, he prays to God, asking for a woman to present herself. But as he speaks, the word vayomer in verse twelve is marked with a rare shalshelet. According to Rabbi Lee Buckman, the shalshelet indicates how “apprehensive, how worried, how desperate” Eliezer is. He’s a man on a mission, and it’s a little scary.

On our treasure hunt, Dan and I embarked on a mission to find a geocache at the top of Cuyamaca Peak in eastern San Diego County. We trekked straight up the hill, gasping for breath as we approached 6500 feet above sea level. Using the GPS, we found the location of the cache, a tree on the hilltop, located a few feet from where a fire lookout station used to stand.

But the geocache wasn’t there. We dug around. We uplifted rocks. We reached under branches and leaves. The plastic container we were seeking was missing.

A similar thing happens to Eliezer. A moment after uttering his half-hearted prayer to God, Rebecca appears and gives him and his camels water to drink. The Torah recounts an interesting moment in Eliezer’s consciousness: וְהָאִישׁ מִשְׁתָּאֵה לָהּ מַחֲרִישׁ. “The man stared at her, silently.”

After our mission seemed to be a bust, Dan and I wandered around the mountaintop, hopelessly trying to not be failures. It was then that we found our treasure. It wasn’t the plastic box we were looking for, but a blind man named Crazy Dave. Dave, who has no eyesight at all, has hiked to the top of Cuyamaca Peak dozens of times. He told us that the mountains heal him, and he recounted stories about his life.

וְהָאַנָשִׁים מִשְׁתָּאוּ לוֹ מַחֲרִישׁים .We stared at him, silently

It was at that moment that Eliezer’s true treasure became apparent to him. His mission was not about marrying his daughter to Isaac, but about connecting Isaac with his b’shert, this woman of kind heart who just-so-happened to be from Abraham’s clan.

According to the Midrash, one lesson of Eliezer’s journey is that there are moments when you need to take a deep breath and realize that you might have to redefine your vision of success. For Eliezer, this meant fulfilling his oath to his master. For Dan and I, it meant meeting a clear-sighted blind man.

A Different Germany

Sitting in the Bundestag’s Paul Löbe Building, home to the parliamentary committees of the German government, the high-ranking political advisor was trying to be candid with us, a group of American Jews peppering him with questions on his party’s policies regarding foreign relations.

“We have yet to find a final solution to the oil crisis,” he said, innocently.

Twenty Jews sat around the conference table. Twenty jaws dropped.

Had an American politico uttered the same sentence, we probably wouldn’t have noticed. But in Germany, things are different.

The country has come a long way since the reunification of East and West more than 15 years ago, and an even longer way since the end of World War II in 1945. I was in Berlin as a participant in a trip through Bridge of Understanding, a German governmental agency which invites young Jewish Americans to make their own direct contacts with modern Germany in light of the fact that their feelings about Germany dominated by the overwhelmingly negative image of the past.

Germans don’t want to forget the past, and they’re in no rush to “move on.” It’s just that they’ve spent the past 60 years being ashamed of their culture and of their national pride. If they’re ever going to get that pride back, they need to show the world – especially the Jewish world – that they’re trying to make teshuvah.

So we heard from Israelis about how Germany is Israel’s second-best friend in the world. In Buchenwald, we heard about struggling to erect an adequate memorial. We went to Jewish community centers and old-age homes, and visited with young rabbinical students. We wandered through the new Jewish Museum in Berlin (meant to celebrate Jewish life in Germany), as well as the new Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (meant to mourn the loss of Jewish life in Germany).

The Jewish Museum is an interesting place. Its architect, Daniel Libeskind, is the child of Holocaust survivors. The building is shaped like a jagged zig-zagged line, with sharp turns and edges. Its windows look like giant gashes on the façade. Libeskind won’t let visitors ever forget his architecture. Inside the museum, the walls take sharp angles at every turn.

It’s a perfect metaphor for understanding Judaism in Germany. The museum is supposed to be about the thousand-plus years of Jewish history, but – like the architecture – you just can’t escape the Shoah.

I had this sickly feeling in my stomach every time I got on the subway and saw that the stop after mine was in Wannsee. And when someone yelled for us to get back on the train (even though it was just because we’d gotten off a stop early). And when a German politician innocently used an infamous phrase.

In Germany, things are different.

The Frankfurt Cemetery

One of my classmates, Miriam, has a grandmother who grew up in Frankfurt. Her mother (Miriam's great-grandmother) was Jewish and her father was Christian.

Miriam's grandmother spent much of the war in hiding. Her mother was sent to Terezin, a concentration camp near Prague. When the war was over, mother and daughter were reunited in Frankfurt, only to find that their husband/father was killed in an air raid in March of 1944.

Yesterday, we went to Frankfurt's central cemetery. We found Miriam's great-grandfather's family plot. He was not buried there. Rather, he was buried with victims of the air raid. It's a large area of the cemetery, covered in relatively non-descript graves (pictured).

Miriam's great-gradfather was buried in one of those graves, marked with a very simple stone slab.

Miriam's great-grandmother was not buried in the Jewish cemetery next door. Rather, she was interred next to her husband. A Jewish woman buried amongst German citizens.

As an American, it was strange. In a country full of memorials to the victims of fascism, here we were in a memorial for people killed by American bombs.

"War is hell, ya?" said the kind Frankfurt municipal worker who guided us around the cemetery.

Wursts Are the Best!

I'm in Germany right now on a trip with the Jewish communal service program.

They have a lot of Germans in Germany, most of whom speak German.

Also, it turns out that wursts are awesome.

More to follow, when I have a second to actually write something.

Ignoramuses Can Be Excellent Exegetes

Starting yesterday, David Plotz -- an executive editor at Slate.com who happens to be Jewish -- has undertaken a project "to find out what happens when an ignorant person actually reads the book on which his religion is based."

He's "blogging the Bible" by going verse-by-verse, and offering his own take on the stories. For the most part, he's asking a lot of questions.

Some over on Jewschool have derided this effort, calling it "intellectual laziness."

I think it's interesting. As another poster on Jewschool suggests, "We’re all amei ha’aretz these days anyway." I'm all for scholarly approaches to Biblical interpretation, but as a teacher, I believe in the democratization of text. We ought to encourage ignoramuses to read the Bible and ask intellectual questions of it.

So it was with great pleasure that I read today's installment, in which Plotz examines the flood, the Tower of Babel, and the first part of the Abrahamic narrative. Arriving at the Sodom story, he remarks,

After the attempted mass gay rape, the father pimping, the urban devastation, uxorious saline murder, it looks like Lot and his daughters are finally safe. They're living alone in a cave in the mountains. But then the two daughters—think of them as Judea's Hilton sisters—complain that cave life is no fun because there aren't enough men around. So, one night they get Lot falling-down drunk and have sex with him. Chapter 19 poses what I would call the Sunday School Problem—as in, how do you teach this in Sunday school? What exactly is the moral lesson here?

Mr. Plotz, if being a journalist ever bores you, I think you are now officially qualified to become a student at the RHSOE.

Gays Can Be Conservative Too?

If JTS decides to reverse its ban on gay ordination, how many HUC rabbinical students will consider transferring?

Just wondering.

Alumni Are Plural

I have a student who likes to correct grammar. People talk, and he corrects them.

On Sunday, I tried to explain to him that correcting people's grammar is a rude thing to do. Furthermore, his own grasp of the rules of English grammar is pretty tenuous.

That being said, I often find myself wanting to smack people around for their glaring inability to properly use the English language. I'm the first one to admit that my own grammar and usage is not perfect. But when the mistakes are so glaring...

It is physically impossible for someone to be an alumni of a school. No one person can be an alumni of a school. Alumni is plural. A group of people can, indeed, be alumni of a school.

The Rules of Alumni

1. The word "alumni" refers to multiple people who all attended a school.


2. "Alumnus" refers to a male individual (like Hebrew, Latin is a gendered language) who attended a school.
   


3. "Alumna" refers to a female individual who attended a school.
   


4. "Alumnae" refers to a group of females who attended a school.
   


5. In cases where a group is of mixed gender, use the male plural form, "alumni."

Talking about an alumni of a college is kind of like saying I got out of beds this morning, stepped into the showers in order to wash my bodies, and drove my cars to work.

God is...

...the classroom I'm currently sitting in.

Here in Cincinnati, the Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives has a new building called the Edwin A. Malloy Education Building, and in it is a classroom called "The Electronic Classroom."

The electronic classroom is God. I'm only being a little hyperbolic. It has wireless, all kinds of awesome presentation capabilities, video conferencing. Also, it juliennes fries.

I am very very happy. This is the most amazing learning environment I've ever sat in.