It starts with a roar and then a solid wall of sound, pounding feet, voices raised in the production of what charitably could be called song but more accurately is described as pure gleeful noise.
Then there is the wind made by the rushing of many hundreds of bodies, the blur of brightly colored or piercingly pastel t-shirts and banners and flags and hats and costumes, and the onslaught of hormones so potent that a middle-aged observer starts worrying if she is late for homeroom.
It is the annual USY international convention, the huge, jubilant, incredibly noisy meeting that brings together the largest number of Jewish adolescents in any one place in the world. (USY is United Synagogue Youth, the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism’s program for teenagers.)
A Holocaust musical. Those words really don’t go together at all, or at least they shouldn’t (although we know that the Nazis demanded such monstrosities at Terezin).
But someone decided to put them together. Not just in the privacy of his own basement, either, but in public. On stage. For an audience, made up of people who pay money to see it.
And the someone isn’t Mel Brooks, and the butts of this exercise are not the Nazis but the Jews, and the humor isn’t over-the-top outrageously brilliant but nonexistent (despite the flop sweat it wrings from its hapless actors as they attempt to wring jokes from dust-dry straw), and the scheme isn’t sublime but jaw-droppingly offensive.
Before I ever had to say kaddish as a mourner, I was entranced by its music.
In 1934 the British writer Dorothy Sayers published The Nine Tailors, a fairly unconvincing mystery that provided a framework for a pastoral idyll. The book centered around bell-ringers who climbed up a church tower to pull the massive ropes attached to the brass behemoths that hung there. They were ringing the changes, following mathematical formulas that permitted subtle variations, playing the huge bells with paradoxical delicacy.
Just over a year ago, Leah Levitz Fishbane was 3' years old; happily married to Dr. Eitan Fishbane, an up-and-coming young scholar; the mother of nearly 4-year-old Aderet and about two trimesters away from giving birth to another baby. She was also an unusually promising graduate student, working under Brandeis University's Dr. Jonathan Sarna on a dissertation about young Jewish leaders of the 1880s, a group particularly relevant today. Her passions for Jewish living, her family, Jewish history, her friends, her life, and her work inextricably connected, she seemed destined for a life of love and leadership.
David Lissy, CEO of the Masorti Foundation, will speak in Ridgewood on Monday night.
There is a huge, pent-up demand for Jewish identity and spirituality in Israel, David Lissy plans to tell the audience at Temple Israel and Jewish Community Center in Ridgewood on Monday night.
Increasingly, he will say, some of those Jews are turning to the Masorti movement, the Israeli branch of what is called the Conservative movement in North America and Masorti Olami in the rest of the world.
That is a big change, said Lissy, who is executive director and chief executive officer of the Masorti Foundation for Conservative Judaism in Israel, in a telephone interview from its headquarters in Manhattan. "Masorti's message is that you can be spiritual and traditional and at the same time egalitarian, and deal with the modern world. This message is beginning to resonate with Israelis, who are increasingly disaffected — no, that is too mild a term — who are increasingly estranged from religious life because of the rabbinut," the offices of the Ashkenazi and Sephardi chief rabbis, who control much of what in the United States would be civil life.
On Feb. 3, 1943, an aging luxury liner, the Dorchester, was struck by German torpedoes off the coast of Greenland. Most of the young servicemen packed aboard, headed for the war in Europe, died, but '30 of them were rescued.
Among the 67' dead were four chaplains, whose quick thinking, level-headedness, goodness, and pure heroism saved many of those '30.
Among the four chaplains, like the army units in World War II movies, was one of almost everything — a Catholic priest, a Methodist minister, a Dutch Reformed minister, and a rabbi. The four met at a training program at Harvard Divinity School and are said by the survivors, who watched them go down, to have linked arms as they stood together on the deck of the sinking ship.
Exactly what is the halacha governing gay men and lesbians in the Conservative world?
Right now, the answer is fairly clear; it's basically a variant of "love the sinner, hate the sin." The movement welcomes gay and lesbian Jews as errant Jews, viewing what it sees as their breach of Leviticus 18:'' as no more or less reprehensible than breaking the Sabbath or committing adultery. Their lapses are deplored but do not place them outside the community.
After early December, when the movement's Committee on Jewish Law and Standards votes on four teshuvot, or responses, to the question, the answer is likely to be less straightforward. According to Rabbi Jerome Epstein, executive vice president of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, which represents the movement's congregations, the committee is likely to accept at least two of the four teshuvot they are considering. One of them is likely to be in favor of change, the other against it.
Rabbi Yehuda Krinsky speaks at Sunday's dedication of the library.
So why did Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg of Englewood, who died in April, give his parents' library to Chabad? On the surface it seems so unlikely.
Hertzberg, who for almost 30 years was the rabbi of Temple Emanu-El, then in Englewood, was famously liberal, a fervent Zionist but dovish on Israel, born Orthodox but ordained as a Conservative rabbi at the Jewish Theological Seminary, egalitarian, democratic, and Democratic, at least in theory, even if occasionally autocratic in practice.
Among his other attributes, Rabbi Arthur Hertzburg was a good friend, and he was a funny man.
Although we belonged to his shul, Temple Emanu-El of Englewood, we did not move to Bergen County until a few years after he became its rabbi emeritus, so I did not meet the legendary man, about whom polarized opinion swarmed, until I was assigned the task of writing a feature story about him for The Jewish Standard to mark his 80th birthday.
Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, scholar, author, activist, widely mourned
At the Kotel
Arthur Hertzberg of Englewood, who died Monday at 84, was not only a fiercely brilliant rabbi, scholar, and intellectual, but the physical embodiment of the tensions, challenges, contradictions, and glories of '0th-century American Jews.
As American as possible in his understanding of the role of democracy in governance, the Polish-born Rabbi Hertzberg was as Old World as possible in his understanding of the rabbi not only as his congregation's mara d'atra, or decisor, but as the sole arbiter of absolutely everything related to the shul. Born to an Orthodox family with deep connections to two chasidic dynasties, the son of a rabbi, Arthur Hertzberg got Orthodox smicha when he was 18 — and then received a bachelor's degree at Johns Hopkins, was ordained a Conservative rabbi at the Jewish Theological Seminary, and earned a doctorate at Columbia University.
