Learning schedule

I've finally decided (b"n, of course) to get together a real actual study schedule, in hopes it'll make me more inclined to study instead of using all my free time to play basketball or pick my nose or read such mussar classics as "Coming Up From the Down-Low," by JL King (which, don't get me wrong, I really enjoyed and thought was meaningful). But it's time to get on the bus. The Daily Daf bus.

MONDAY NIGHT:
-- daf yomi, which currently means Yevamot, which I hate, but I'm going to be brave and also try to find a chevrusa. So. Does anybody want to learn Yevamot with me?
-- a couple pages of Mesillat Yesharim
-- a couple pages of the parsha, with my chumash

TUESDAY NIGHT:
-- daf yomi
-- Mesillat Yesharim
-- parsha study with my chevrusa!

WEDNESDAY NIGHT:
-- daf yomi
-- Mesillat Yesharim
-- parsha

THURSDAY NIGHT:
-- daf yomi
-- Mesillat Yesharim
-- parsha study at the Chabad!

!SHABBOS!
-- anything and everything

SUNDAY NIGHT:
-- daf yomi
-- Mesillat Yesharim
-- parsha

It's not super-ambitious-- I'm not doing Rambam or Tehillim, and I could be doing more-- but I think it's a good start. Maybe it's a good start because it's not super-ambitious. Mitzvah goreret mitzvah, etc.

"All of the things we want each other to be, we never will be, and that's wonderful, and that's life."

It's Akon. You can bank on it.

Can somebody tell me why the filthiest filthiest hiphop songs make really good tunes for "Lecha Dodi"?

Akon, "Smack That." You know the part where he goes "Smack that, all on the floor / Smack that, give me some more / Smack that, till you get sore / Smack that, o-o-o-o-oh"? "Lecha, lecha dodi / likrat, likrat kalah / p'nei, p'nei Shabbat / Shabbat nekabela."

Beenie Man, "Dick." The part that's all "They don't know dick like you know dick / Dick is your dearest friend / They don't love him when he's in bed / Kiss him and play with his head." "Lecha, lecha, lecha dodi / likrat, likrat kalah / p'nei Shabbat nekabela / p'nei Shabbat nekabla." Or even "Lecha dodi, likrat kalah / p'nei Shabbat n'kabla / lecha dodi, likrat kalah / p'nei Shabbat n'kabla."

Oh my.

How Beautiful

As should be obvious from the blog title, if nothing else, I'm a Jew.

So why do I still love Christian music so much?

Songs that I have missed, and that I sang today:

1. Of the Father's Love Begotten
2. O G-d, You Search Me and You Know Me (dash not in original title) -- by Bernadette Farrell, who is a nun, for crying out loud.
3. How Beautiful, by Twila Paris ("how beautiful the heart that bled/that took all my sin/and bore it instead")-- and I cried, for real, while listening to it.
4. Angels We Have Heard on High (sing with me, now: "Gloooo-ooooo-oooo-oooo-ooo-ooo-ria! in excelsis Deo!")
5. Jesus Christ Is Risen Today (need I say more?)
6. I'll Fly Away
7. By and By
8. Abide With Me ("hold thou thy cross before my failing eyes/shine through the gloom, and point me to the skies")
9. Write Your Blessed Name
10. Were You There When They Crucified My Lord
11. Ave Verum Corpus Natum (ooo! Latin dead-Jesus imagery!)
12. Give Me Jesus
13. Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing
14. Lift Every Voice and Sing
15. You Never Let Go
16. like everything Yolanda Adams ever recorded.
17. Wayfaring Stranger
and the list goes on.

Is it because when I start feeling stuck or shut off, I revert to familiar ways of feeling . . . well, feeling anything about Hashem? Am I drawn to the drama of my former Christianity? Or is it the sound more than the words, what I'm used to, what has emotion associated with it, a history?

I know my brother char beautiful, marked mortal on his forehead, and I know my father jumpy-broke in the back pews, all his candles in the box in the back of his closet, his black-bead rosary glossy dark, his statues all with the hands snapped off, and I know my mother kneeling, skeptical, hair going gray, then white, without change, decision for belief or un-. I know a beautiful woman whose baby in her belly kicked at the sound of my singing from the choir loft above, who made me wise and made me worry and made me her wife, who's never been inside my shul and who raised that baby, our son, unbaptized but in my Church and my church, till we left-- churches, each other, our senses, briefly. I made promises to her and to trees and to G-d and to Jesus, and never stood under a chupah.

I don't know tallitot, really, the same way I know albs, and Aleinu's familiar but foreign, a learned quantity that maybe comes from my blood but wasn't taught. The first time I heard Shema, I fell on my face-- first time I heard Our Father, I was fetal. What's real to me? What I know from reason, revelation, or what's intuitive by now, invisible, what I'm used to, what still stirs me up, pushes buttons the other doesn't even know about? I feel known inside my Catholicness, and strange, sometimes, in what I've chosen for myself. I am, after all, a ger, in Torah's own words-- a newcomer, stranger, sojourner. I can still go back . . .

And other days I'm convinced I'll flip out Chasidish-style, go straight, shake off my girlfriend, marry some beautiful man named Yossi and have fourteen babies.

Extremes, is it maybe, the pull of the outsides and the fringes?

I can see why tzitzit go where they do.

Crooks beware

Beautiful slogan on a rock out front of one of the houses near 5th and Constitution, the one where the inhabitants publish "G-DS VERIFIED NEWS-- Hot! Comprehensive!" (minus a dash) every morning, give or take, on a plywood sign in their front yard:

G-d and ammo
will reveal crooks.

Something Real

That's what she's looking for, she said.

Read Torah, I suggested.

You read Torah to me.

English or Hebrew?

Hebrew.

You don't speak Hebrew.

I don't need to, she answered. I just want to hear it. To hear you.

And we were working our way through Melachim, breaking idol altars, when it got quiet, and she laughed, and she looked at me, and I smiled and she looked soft and she said Are you going to come over here and give me our first kiss?

Now I blush like fire every time I look at her.

Does a person say "Chag sameach" on Lag BaOmer?

If so, chag sameach to you.

If not, happy Lag BaOmer, or good yontif, or whatever it is a person says to another in order to recognize happiness of a day along with continued good wishes for the other person's well-being.

Entropy

I do some minor maintenance work periodically for my landlord and landlady-- watching out for suspicious characters, changing locks, picking up trash, etc.-- and I just wrote them a note to say that everything appears to be in order. In other words . . . kol b'seder.

Do you think English got this phrase from Hebrew? Vice versa? Is it just part of a universal human longing for things to fit, to be arranged or categorized, to make sense?

In other news, my back hurts, a lot, and my neck muscles decided, over Shabbos, to start doing this weird contracture-y thing where I couldn't lift my chin more than about three inches off my chest without stabbing pain, and I'm still feeling the aftereffects. Am I "out of order," simply in need of the physical equivalent to Dewey Decimal? Can my body just not find the right system to organize all the mess of me?

The thought occurred to me that perhaps this was my reminder that Shabbos is really for Torah study, not rereading Harry Potter books 1-5. Or even that if I'm going to read Harry Potter books 1-5 on Shabbos instead of devoting all my time to Torah, I should at least not spend the time trying to find a textual basis for Harry Potter hooking up with Professor Snape in book 7 as a logical character-continuous plot twist. (sigh) Then I collapsed into bed about fifteen minutes after havdalah with my neck still stiff and jolting me every time I moved, and promptly passed out and forgot to count the Omer.

Boruch Hashem for my Chasidim who brought me into practice, and whose practice is that a person can still count, albeit without the blessing, after an entire day of forgetting.

Do you sometimes feel the law of entropy is at work, large-scale, in your life?

No hay mal que por bien no venga

Well, it's true, isn't it?

Morasha kehillat Yaakov

Tomorrow night, bs"d, we will be having a tzitzit-tying party at our shul. I organized it, and I'm making the Frito pie, and anyone reading this who will be in New Mexico should email me for details if they're interested.

I belong to a Jewish Renewal-affiliated shul, and I'm starting to notice that by and large, the leadership consists of individuals who grew up da'ati, found that experience unsatisfying, and are interested in reviving an emotionally-connected spiritual practice. By and large, the individual congregation member is more likely to be someone who grew up with little or no formal Jewish education, in a household that was not traditionally observant. This is an interesting gap, I think.

Similarly, I am someone who grew up nominally Catholic, with a fiercely-atheist father and a agnosticky mother, and entered Judaism primarily through my experience with frum Jews. I have since been educating myself primarily through solitary Torah study and book-reading. If I'm not careful, I tend to frum myself out a little more than is healthy for me, and start viewing kiruv work with my "poor uneducated Jewishly-thirsty friends at my shul!" as my primary purpose in life. "Yes, little red-diaper-baby tikkun-olam-trench-fighting hippie-Jews. Kiss the mezuzah. It all starts here." (insert creepy laugh)

So let me say a little something to myself as well as all the other liberal Jews out there:

This is ours too.

Tzitzit, tefillin, eating kosher, havdalah, covering our heads, davening shacharit, saying mi shebeyrach like it really changes things-- this, and so much more, is ours too.

Chukim, mishpatim, retzuot and batim, they're ours too. Frum Jews are beautiful. So are we. It's different kinds, more than worse or better. We have a right to the mitzvot just as much as they do, and they just as we. It's not a progression where people are "more Jewish" at this shul as "less Jewish" over here. It's a range, it's a rainbow, promising us the world will never be destroyed by flood again. We should not allow ourselves to be isolated from Jewish learning, to view it as "that intimidating (worse yet, stale) stuff the religious folks do." You don't have to be Rashi. You don't have to hold by Rashi. You don't even necessarily have to know who Rashi is, although it's nice to be acquainted with the people you argue with.

You don't have to kasher your whole kitchen, eat nothing that's not kosher, hechshered or fresh, refrain from chalav stam. You don't have to wear tzitzit all the time if you're a man, skirts only if you're a woman, don't have to hop in the mikveh every month if you're married. You don't have to lay tefillin every morning, guys, and you don't have to say she'asani kirtzono, gals, but what you do have to do is understand that this is yours too.

You can rush right out after our tzitzit party, folks, and find or make yourself an arba kanfot and say al mitzvat tzitzit every morning. You can stop by the Chabad, ladies, and draw stares by borrowing a tallis off the rack. You can decide you're going to make your own personal rainbow tzitzit set with cheap yarn from the dollar store, or color-code some for football fans. Orange and brown-- go Bengals! You can make your own bracha as you tie -- "she'asani a liberal Jew whose views on the optionality of mitzvot make me more acutely aware of the ones I do perform." You can step foot out the door and never think about tzitzit again your entire life. It's your choice. But that's the key, isn't it? This is yours. It's the inheritance of the congregation of Yaakov. Which means you, Jews, no matter where you are, who you are, how you are.

You can read parshiot like Tazria-Metzora, which we just finished last week, and toss figurative Torah out the window of your life. You can get mad about it. You can read commentaries and engage in discussion with other. You can learn to leyn if you're a woman, not learn to leyn if you're a man. You can hold by kol isha, ask for a mechitza, create the concept of "kol ish," decide the only way to be egalitarian is to have gender-mixed seating, decide the whole issue is unworthy of brain space. You can argue or anger or ignore, but the thing you absolutely must do is accept that this is yours, to take or to leave.

It's not the sole province of bushy-bearded men and their hair-covering wives, their peyes-ed boys and their modest daughters. It's not the sole province of rabbis or chazanim or sofers or mashgichim or shochets or shadchanim or any other official anybody. It's not the sole province of anybody at all, really, but those Jews who choose to be aware of it, regardless of what that awareness means in their daily lives.

Which is why we're having a tzitzit party, when it comes down to it. Free piece of Jewish education, to take or leave as you see fit, giving instruction in the traditional practical and esoteric parts (which you're free to take or leave as you see fit) of a chok you're also free to take or leave as you see fit. You can ignore it. You can accept it. You can redefine it. But all of these options are available to you because, and only because, of the fundamental fact that this. Is. Yours. No one can take it away from you. And I hope that we may all merit to see it bear good fruit in our lives, in whichever form that takes.

Can I get an amein?