In this Moment: The Color Purple; The Kiddush Cup Craftsman; Jew By (Whose) Choice

In This Moment

Shabbat-O-Gram, January 29, 2021

Scenes from Tu B'Shevat...

Tu B'Shevat Adult Seder

Tu B'Shevat Family Seder

   

   

This week is Shabbat Shira (the Sabbath of Song), when we read the portion Beshallach, featuring the crossing of the Red Sea.  Here's a unique midrash on that Red Sea passage, from Manga Mutiny, a Biblically-accurate retelling of Genesis through Exodus 15:27 presented in the authentic Japanese Manga style.  

(Thank you to Ethan H for sharing this - and happy birthday next week!)

  

See the bottom of this email to find out what happens!

Shabbat Shalom!

We begin with some sad news.  The name Gene Wendell probably does not ring a bell to most of you, but he has a special place in many of your homes.  You see, Gene, who passed away this week, has been engraving kiddush cups for TBE B'nai Mitzvah for 67 years.  That means that if you are 80 years old or younger, and your Bar/Bat Mitzvah was here, that kiddush cup that you use on Friday nights or Pesach, or had under your huppah, or that just gleams proudly from your mantle - well, it was lovingly engraved by Gene.

He took the job very seriously, although there were times (many) when he would knock on my office door just before Shabbat, right under the wire, to deliver the goods. He always had a question about Judaism or a story to share - about his involvement at his synagogue in Norwalk or other things going on in his life.  You can read his obituary here.  

I'll miss Gene. I'll think of him every time I lift one of "his" cups under a huppah.  There's a lesson here for us.  Behind every treasure you own, every book, every car, every piece of jewelry, every hand-made bagel - everything - there is a Gene Wendell. Often many of them.  You will never see most of these faces, but they are connected to us in the deepest possible manner.  

This Shabbat, let's raise our glasses - our cups - to Eugene Wendell. In fact, if you are coming to Friday night services, bring your TBE cup with you, we'll lift them all together, and I'll send the photo to Sue, his wife.

On to other matters of great urgency....

- These days, it seems like the forces of hope and despair are engaged in an all-out war, especially regarding Covid-19.  Israel is being touted for being way ahead of the curve regarding vaccinations, yet as the chart below shows, the crisis of infections is not abating.  

  

You would think that with so many having been vaccinated the infection rate would be going down much more. In his weekly newsletter, Marc Shulman looks into these sobering trends.  Meanwhile, if you are looking for an uplifting moment, yo've got to listen to this new "We are the World" style song created by Israel's most popular musicians (thank you to Aviva Maller for sharing):

Katan Aleinu (קטן עלינו, "We Got This") with English subtitles

- Remember when I spoke on Rosh Hashanah about the regal nature of the color purple and how it connects to the ancient history of the Israelites and the Curse (and Blessing) of Canaan, as well as the African American experience?

Well this week sent us major news on that front, an unprecedented archaeological discovery:

 

Ancient cloths with royal purple dye found in Israel, dated to King David's time (Times of Israel) This is a big deal. Israeli researchers have found three textile scraps near the southern tip of Israel colored with the biblically described "argaman" royal purple dye, and dated them to circa 1,000 BCE - the era of King David. The earliest ever such finds in this region, the vibrant cloths add tangible weight, in particular, to the Bible's account of an Edomite kingdom in the area at that time.

Here's the front page story in today's Ha'aretz: 

More recommended reading....

- Enough for a minyan: A Jewish who's who of Biden's cabinet (Forward)

- Reform Jewish Institutions Affirm IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism - 

The challenges posed by rising antisemitism are so great that we need all people of good will to join in the fight against it.

- See my featured Times of Israel op-ed on how Holocaust denial is the canary in the coal mine of Big Lies, Fake News and American white supremacy

 

- Over 1100 Jewish clergy from around the country have come together to impress upon the Biden Administration and 117th Congress the urgency of addressing the rights and safety of refugees and asylum seekers.  Here's the letter - I'm proud to have signed it.

- I'll be moderating a panel discussion on Climate Change next Thursday. An in-depth conversation with national leaders, the Rev. Lennox Yearwood, founder of Hip Hop Caucus, and Dr. Katherine Hayhoe, a leading climate scientist. The event is co-hosted by the Hartford Seminary and the Interreligious Eco-Justice Network.  This paragraph from an op-ed from the NYT, "Let's Say Goodbye to Normal," by Roy Scranton, was particularly alarming.

 

- Our growing partnership with the Black community, and in particular members of Union Baptist Church, has borne tremendous fruit - last week's shared cooking experience was just another example.  SAVE THE DATE of Feb. 21 at 5:30 PM for a panel discussion involving the two congregations, along with the AJC, JCC and others from the community.  The focus will be the film, "Shared Legacies: The African American-Jewish Civil Rights Alliance.  See the trailer here.  This groundbreaking film will be made available for viewing before the program.

- If you missed my talk last night on Jewish views on "The Good Life," as part of the Interfaith Council's Midwinter Theological Seminar, here's the Zoom video:

Rabbi Hammerman Midwinter Theological Study 1-28-21

- Another save-the-date.  We are doing another Zoom Seder, this time on the second night of Passover, Sunday evening, March 28.  

Jew By (Whose) Choice

I was fascinated by a story shared by Forward editor (and former Hoffman lecturer) Jodi Roduren, who wrote in her weekly email about an awkward moment that recently occurred.  The Forward wanted to honor Kamala Harris's blended Jewish family, and in particular her 22-year old stepdaughter Ella Emhoff, only to discover that she is not Jewish.  

Wait, what?

Didn't she come up with the name "Momela" for her step-mom?  Isn't her dad being called the unofficial "Second Mensch?"  Perhaps we should have understood the subtle difference between "Momela" and the more Jew-ish "Mamela."

According to Ella's spokesperson Joseph David Viola, "Ella is not Jewish."Ella's dad has been "celebrating Judaism for a few years now but out of an independent search," and Ella was living on her own in New York during this period. "It's not something she grew up with," he explained. "Ella truly has no qualms with the faith, but she does not want to speak on behalf of Judaism, as she does not celebrate herself."  

Funny that he used the expression "celebrate." Has he not read his Lenny Bruce?

Gentiles celebrate; Jews observe. If Ella celebrated Jewish holidays, she would be the first person to do so!

Rudoren then goes onto explore the implications of this surprise reply for our Jewish conversations on intermarriage and assimilation,  and the increasingly complicated world of Jewish (and Jew-ish) identity that we inhabit. (Incidentally, not to toot my own horn, but I think I was the first to employ the expression "Jew-ish", though I can't take credit for "Jewish-adjacent).

 
Basically, in a well-intentioned desire to be inclusive, combined with a not-as-well intentioned desire to add a few more trophies to our Jewish "who's who" treasure chest, we added Ella to the fold against her will.  It was all a misunderstanding, of course, but maybe we should have asked before assuming.  

Yes, her father is Jewish, but we really don't need to gerrymander Ella in. There are enough famous Jews to go around. There's a cottage industry of websites out there identifying famous Jews and half-Jews.

We've got plenty of unknown Jews to discover.  About a decade ago, a team of geneticists uncovered explicit evidence of mass conversions of Sephardic Jews to Catholicism in 15th and 16th-century Spain and Portugal. The study, based on an analysis of Y-chromosomes and reported first in the American Journal of Human Genetics, indicates that 20 percent of the population of the Iberian Peninsula has Sephardic Jewish ancestry. That's about 10 million people. So we can leave Ella alone.

But chromosomes don't make a Jew Jewish either.  Neither does having a Jewish father - or mother, for that matter.  Ultimately, we are all Jews by choice.  

This week I had the pleasure of performing my first (and TBE's first) Zoom conversion ceremony.  The candidate, who now lives in Boston, immersed in the safe, socially distanced warm waters of the progressive Mayyim Hayyim mikva in Newton, MA, while three Jewish clergy "witnessed" the proceedings from three remote locations in Connecticut.  So where did the conversion occur?  Who knows - but it happened, and it was very real and very meaningful.  We are all Jews by Choice.

And Ella Emhoff is a non-Jew by choice.  Some will consider this to be tragic news, claiming that another soul has been lost to the Jewish people.  I don't see it that way at all.  Certainly, it would be nice if more children with Jewish ancestry could have the positive, immersive Jewish childhood experiences that might lead one to answer the question differently at age 22.  But age 22 is a time of questioning for most people, so I don't hold that against her, not do I indict her father for her reply.  Maybe someday she will feel comfortable taking the same plunge taken by a Jew by Choice in Newton this week. It is never too late for an immersive Jewish experience.

Jodi Bromberg, who runs the interfaith outreach website 18doors (we have a close relationship with them), told Jodi Roduren, "I don't think we are good as a Jewish community at talking about the complexity and nuance of identity -- even the labels that we use don't always reflect our ongoing practices. We've got to embrace the messiness," she added. "Young-adult children are free to make their own spiritual and religious decisions -- and will whether we want them to or not. But that's not fixed for any of us."

Theodore Herzl was one of the most important Jews of all time. Yet none of his three children was Jewish and only one descendant, a grandson, was a Zionist - and he committed suicide. Nancy Pelosi has Jewish grandchildren. Eight of Moses Mendelssohn's nine grandchildren were baptized. Thomas Jefferson reportedly had Jewish ancestors (and we know of course about his African-American descendants). We've become the La Guardia Airport of faith traditions; so many coming in, so many going out.

Oh, and Fiorello La Guardia had a Jewish parent, in fact, as does Sean Penn.

The Herzl family history was tragic, but no more so than the ancestry of King David. His great grandmother was Ruth, a Moabite, whose on-the-fly conversion following the tragic deaths of her husband and brother-in-law is recalled every year on Shavuot. 

A Midrash states that every Jew was present at Sinai, including all future generations. If David and Ruth were there, what about Fiorello, Sean and Jefferson's progeny of all hues? What about 10 million Iberians, whose only crime was that their ancestors were forced to convert? We can't retroactively crop them out of the Sinai family picture.

 

And I won't cut Ella out either.  Nor will I paste her in against her will.  The lesson here is that nothing is static about Jewish identity.  It is always flowing, like the living waters of the mikva.  

Or the flowing, splashing waves of the Red Sea.

Shabbat Shalom

Rabbi Joshua Hammerman

 

 

Birthright Israel's Bar Mitzvah: Some Reasons to Celebrate

This month has been set aside by Taglit- Birthright Israel as a celebration of its Bar Mitzvah year.  Over 150 congregations from 42 states  will be participating in Birthright Shabbats, including my own, this evening.  It is an anniversary worth celebrating, because nothing has changed the landscape of Jewish peoplehood over the past decade more than these free 10-day trips to Israel.  More than 300,000 young Jewish adults from 54 countries have experienced Birthright Israel, and studies show that the impact of on their life trajectories has been profound, particularly among those from less engaged Jewish backgrounds.  Birthright alums are much more connected to Israel than their counterparts, much more connected to the Jewish community and about twice as likely to marry other Jews and have Jewish children.

I’m about to perform my first Birthright wedding. No, the couple didn’t meet in Israel – they weren’t even there at the same time.  But each of them came back so Jewishly charged that they signed up for Jdate, and, when they met, Birthright was that common emotional experience that propelled their relationship forward.  They followed the Birthright formula – the best way to fall in love WITH Israel is to fall in love IN Israel.  Even though they were back on American soil, Jerusalem had captured their hearts.

There’s something magical in the Birthright Kool Aid. It’s “Spring Break” for Jews, a ten day hook up party; only it’s free, Cancun has been transported 6,000 miles east, the hook up is with a country, and it’s not for one night, it’s forever.  Israelis love to make fun of the program and they’ve transformed the prevailing stereotype of the American tourist from a fat, ugly middle aged guy with a dangling camera around his exposed paunch, to a doe-eyed, wealthy Birthright coed, naïve and unschooled, easy pickings for soldiers, tour guides and fund raisers.  But whatever Kool Aid the Birthrighters are drinking, they come home and rave to about it to their friends and parents, the waiting lists keep getting longer and the kids just keep on coming.  And their elders are following suit.  Tourism to Israel hit record levels in April, a month that is not prime time for college students to travel.  Older adults have caught the bug.

While the program has no doubt increased the connection between American Jews and Israel, a significant majority of American Jews still have never visited the Jewish state, 59 percent according to the recentAJC survey.  But still, at 300,000 and counting, Birthright has reversed one of the many downward demographic trends in American Jewish life and it is changing the culture in numerous other ways.

Some of the ripple effects include:

• A Jewish renaissance on college campuses. Hillel’s growth has been fueled by the Birthright phenomenon, which has enabled Jewish organizations to reach beyond the core activists to students who previously would never have wanted to identify actively as Jews.

• Israel advocacy on campus has never been more vibrant and diverse, and despite the efforts of the BDS and “Apartheid Week,” never more successful. The growing presence of both AIPAC and J-Street on campus corresponds to the increased size of Birthright’s footprint.

• The Startup Nation has birthed a Startup Culture.  Birthright Israel was the ultimate startup by a Jewish community that had become overly beaurocratized and cautious.  This partnership of mega donors, federations and Israel was unprecedented, and it worked.  As result, other startups have addressed a variety of pressing needs.  The results have been mixed but the entrepreneurial spirit has changed American Jewish life, weakening and decentralizing the federations while encouraging the private funders to take more risks in backing worthy projects.

• The partnership with Israel in strengthening Diaspora Jewry barely existed before Birthright, and from a philanthropic standpoint, the program reversed the roles that had existed since the founding of the state.  The money now flows both ways.  Israel recognizes that a thriving Diaspora is essential to its long term survival.  American Jews, meanwhile, have come to recognize that the Israel experience is the only way to ensure a thriving Diaspora.

• Great PR for Israel.  Young adults are getting the word out through their social networks that Israel is a great place to visit and an amazing country, period.  The trips have more than paid for themselves in hasbara value.  When I first spoke about the program to my teens thirteen years ago, they were floored that Israel cared enough about them to invest 70 million dollars in their future. What better PR can there be than that?

• It’s hard to measure the impact on synagogue affiliation thus far, but millennials have never been joiners.  I am seeing an increased interest in community life and Jewish learning among young professionals, however, and Birthright has become a prime tool for recruitment.

• Hummus sales have skyrocketed.    Blame it on Bar Rafaeli, Sacha Baron Cohen or the Zohan, but I think Birthright is the biggest reason why Israeli culture and cuisine have never been so popular on this side of the pond.

But by far the biggest impact of Birthright Israel is that it has proven, once and for all, that no Jew should ever be written off.  Back in 1999, the organizers of the program debated whether to focus on those still in high school or those over 18. I was one of those who felt that a highly subsidized high school trip was a far better investment than a 10 day college quickie.  Catch them before they leave the coop, I figured, so that their parents and rabbis can reinforce the message of peoplehood when the teens come home. Once they are in college, it’s too late to reel them in, I thought.

I was wrong.

As I look down the list of my hundred plus congregants who have been on these trips, there are several whom I’ve barely seen since their bar mitzvahs and I assumed might be lost to the Jewish people.  They are precisely the ones Birthright was created for, not those “core” Jews who have visited Israel often.

Those who opposed Birthright bemoaned the fact that cheap Israel trips are no panacea for assimilation.  They appealed for caution before wasting so much funding on “lost causes.”  They saw periphery Jews as a bad risk.  Such people would likely have advised Ben-Gurion to cut his losses, hold off on statehood and send it to committee.  Rabbi Yitz Greenberg says that a leader should aim to be at most 15 percent ahead of his people. I sense that in this case, the proponents of Birthright Israel were way ahead of the Jewish establishment, and right in step with the times.

The “outreach” vs. “inreach” debate is over.  Game, set and match.  Outreach wins.

Ten days is all it takes.

Birthright is the 21^st century version of the sage Hillel’s conversion program.  He accomplished it all while standing on one foot. But then he added, “go and study.”

The challenge, then, is one we face after any Bar Mitzvah.  We’ve got to keep them engaged and interested.  But Birthright Israel has given the Jewish community a precious gift – just when we thought they were gone for good, we’ve got another chance to reach out to them and welcome them home.  Ten days can ignite a flame.

All we’ve got to do is keep it burning.

First published on the Times of Israel website.

The Aborted Israeli Absorption Ministry Ad: Some Reflections

Much has been written about the Israeli Absorption Ministry’s now-aborted ad, asserting that Israelis should not marry American Jews and reside in this country because their kids will grow up observing Christmas instead of Hanukkah. See my prior posting, including links to Jeffrey Goldberg's posting which exposed this quintessentially chutzpahdik ad. Following a nearly unprecedented avalanche of outrage from American Jewish leaders, including groups who typically give carte blanche to far greater affronts, the Netanyahu government wisely pulled the video from YouTube on Friday. As Akiva Eldar wrote in Ha’aretz:

For several long months, the (mostly self-appointed) "leaders" in the U.S. community have ignored the unbridled incitement launched by Israel against human rights organizations, the Supreme Court and the media. As far as is known, the federations have not sent protest letters to the prime minister to express dismay about the rise of violence and racism toward Palestinians in Israel and in the territories. The Anti-Defamation League has said nothing about the exclusion of women soldiers at Israel Defense Forces events. The pro-Israel lobby AIPAC passionately defends settlement policies which are shutting the door to a two-state solution. Thus everything is all right - until the ethnocentric wave which engulfs Israel crosses the ocean, and throws cold water on their egos. For many long years a group of Jewish philanthropists and activists - some of them with right-wing, conservative outlooks, others rank opportunists - has been throwing fuel on the fire of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute that threatens to extinguish Israel's democracy.

Although the offensive video is no more, here are some follow-up reflections:

At a Bat Mitzvah last Shabbat morning, I asked a random sampling of about 50 kids if they knew what Hannukah is. All did. So the fact that the kid in the video, when asked what holiday it is by the Skyping grandparents (with a lit menorah just behind them), said “Christmas,” is ludicrous. Not that I’m so thrilled at the excessive inflation of Hanukkah’s importance over here, but believe me, Bibi, Hanukkah is alive and well among American Jewish kids.

Assimilation does present challenges, to be sure, but growing up in America does not necessarily or even typically lead to a one way ticket out of Jewish identification. For that we can thank, in large part, the Israeli government itself, whose contributions to the successful Birthright Israel project have been crucial to furthering the cause of keeping our kids Jewish.

I thought we had gotten beyond the efforts to de-legitimize the Diaspora. But the culture wars that infect both America and Israel internally have also impacted the Jewish people globally. Israelis look at American Jews and fear the lethal impact of assimilation on their Jewish soul. American Jews look at Israel and fear that occupation has done the same. One side sees excessive tolerance, a fatal ecumenicism blurring the lines between Jews and the gentile world, and the other sees a fatal chauvinism, a triumph for an extremism fostering nightmares of a Taliban-like takeover of a faith tradition that was built on tolerance.

Also, who’s to say that Israelis are so Jewishly literate? We often have Israeli soldiers visit our community – they are the best and the brightest. As a matter of courtesy, we offer some of them aliyot to the Torah. Almost none accept. Very few know what an aliyah is or how to do one (and a few refuse to take one in a non Orthodox setting). If the situation on the video was reversed and an American Jewish grandparent Skyped a grandkid in Jerusalem, would that child know that in America, it’s OK for a woman’s face to appear on a billboard?

And how can the Absorption Ministry bemoan the Americanization of Judaism, when Israel has itself become so assimilated to American culture. Those ascending to Jerusalem for the first time are greeted by McDonalds golden arches glowing down from Mevasseret, miles before before the road grants them their first view of the other holy sites. When the biblical Jacob and his family became the first Yordim to return to the Land, they brought along Laban’s household idols; the purity of the indigenous faith was contaminated by diaspora syncretism long before McDonalds (granted, a Kosher McDonalds) opened at the Harel Mall. I can just imagine Rachel sneaking through the customs line at Ben Gurion with her imported goodies like so many returning Israelis have done since.

I follow the Religion and State in Israel blog, a weekly review of media coverage on issues of religion and state in Israel, unaffiliated with any organization or movement. Here are some of the headlines appearing in THIS WEEK’S digest. I repeat. These articles have come out JUST THIS WEEK.

High Court rejects petition over civil marriage

The High Court of Justice made clear Monday it would not accede to the petition filed by numerous progressive and pluralist groups asking for an injunction against the government to institute a framework for civil marriage in Israel.

Israeli women fight back against Jerusalem billboard vandals

Jewish women in the Britain and the US are being urged to send photographs of themselves holding signs saying "women should be seen and heard" in a campaign against efforts by the ultra-orthodox to remove female images from advertising billboards in Jerusalem.

In Israel, women’s rights come under siege

“In the past two years or five years, it’s just deteriorating,” said Shira Ben-Sasson Furstenberg of the liberal New Israel Fund, which has launched a campaign to combat the “erasure” of women from public advertising. “The Haredi are having more and more say about how our lives are in Israel.”

Clinton astonished by exclusion of women from public spaces; warns of Israel's eroding democratic values

Clinton related that she had read a day before in The Washington Post an article by Ruth Marcus, called "In Israel, Women's Rights Come Under Siege," which detailed examples of the exclusion or boycotting of women, including incidents where IDF religious soldiers have boycotted events in which women sang, and the segregation of women on some bus routes, in contravention of Supreme Court decisions.

Knesset committee to tackle IDF's gender issues

A Knesset committee will convene in the next few weeks to deal with the IDF's failure to implement a report calling for full equality between men and women in the military.

Women Barred From Funerals in Israel

The troubling phenomenon of excluding women from cemeteries in Israel appears to be getting worse.

Number of gender-segregated religious schools in Israel tripled during past decade

Gender segregation is in effect at 65 percent of the state-run religious elementary schools in Israel, according to data obtained by Haaretz from the Education Ministry's elementary school supervision department.

Love, Marriage, and the Israeli Rabbinate

For many Israelis, Tzohar is the spoonful of sugar that makes the bitter pill of dealing with the official rabbinate palatable. However, it seems clear that increasing numbers of them—including Orthodox Israelis—would prefer never to have to deal with it in the first place, even with Tzohar as a buffer: They would prefer, that is, to have the oppressive and despised rabbinate be removed altogether, whether because they do not share its values or its interpretations of Jewish law, or because they feel that moderns states should stay out of ecclesiastical business.

The people's IDF is turning into the rabbis' IDF

Haaretz Editorial www.haaretz.com December 1, 2011.
The decision by the Israel Defense Forces senior command to freeze implementation of the Segev Report, which recommended establishing full equality among men and women in the army is another aggravating example of the IDF's continuing capitulation to the demands of religious extremist rabbis and officers.

IDF freezes implementation of report calling for gender equality

The Israel Defense Forces has effectively frozen implementation of a report that called for full equality of service between men and women.

Jerusalem center goes to extreme measures to help Russian immigrants prove their Jewishness

Based in Jerusalem, the six-year-old [Shorashim center] serves as an international investigation agency, which, by doing intensive research and establishing a wide network of contacts, has helped hundreds of young people from the former Soviet Union prove their Jewishness to the satisfaction of the rabbinic courts, enabling them to get married without having to go through a conversion or marry abroad. …Rabbi Shimon Har-Shalom estimates [of the 750,000 FSU immigrants listed as Jews] between 150,000 and 200,000 will be forced to prove their Jewishness at some point, while some 20,000 of those with "no religion" are actually Jewish and would be able to prove it.

Past ARZA president, wife warn threats to Israeli pluralism

Resa Davids described how her granddaughter’s planned bat mitzva by the Dead Sea had to be moved because not a single hotel in the area would permit a woman to read from the Torah on their grounds. “The threat was if they allowed this child to read Torah, they would lose their hashgacha (kosher certification),” she said. Asked if she equated that to blackmailing the hotel owners, she replied, “exactly.”

I’ve experienced something similar.

When I was on the “March of the Living” two years ago, my mostly non-Orthodox group stayed in a nice Youth Hostel near the Biblical Zoo in Jerusalem. Our group arranged to have access to the hostel’s synagogue, a simple meeting room with an ark, for a private Kabbalat Shabbat service. No other group was in there at the time. The Orthodox members of our group decided to daven with a mechitza in another location in the building – it was an arrangement that worked well throughout our trip. About ten minutes into our egalitarian service, our group leader came up to me – as I was leading the service – and said that the hostel’s manager had told him that our service cannot continue unless we separate the boys from the girls.

Now this was a group of seventy teens who were, for the most part, experiencing Israel for the first time. Just days before we had cried at Auschwitz and stood silently by the remnants of the Warsaw Ghetto. They were exhilarated to be in Israel and I was trying not to douse their enthusiasm by interjecting the sorry state of Israeli pluralism into their experience. So rather than tell this group that this state-run hostel was hostile to the way they pray, I looked for an escape hatch – literally. There was a door in the back of the room, leading to a large outdoor patio overlooking the city. The weather was perfect, and I had planned to take them outside for Lecha Dodi anyway, so I stalled for time until we got there (as my group leader stared at me nervously, I stared back defiantly), and then, as we reached Lecha Dodi, we danced out the door and onto the patio, where we danced and prayed for the remainder of the service.

So I thank the Absorption Ministry, not for opening a wound, but for opening a dialogue on what kind of Judaism we wish for our grandchildren and where it is best being nurtured right now. My hope is that both America and Israel will be places where all our kids will be proud observers of Hanukkah, and where they will learn to love their neighbors as themselves.

The Forbidden Oreo® (New York Times Magazaine)

The New York Times Magazine (1998)

PDF of original article

The news came racing across the Internet with apocalyptic urgency. My rabbinical chat group was abuzz with incredible tidings. Could it finally be true? No, we don't have a Jewish president yet, but something almost equally astounding has transpired, a telltale sign that Jews have finally made it. After eighty-five years in the gentile larder, Oreos have gone Kosher.

With the possible exception of Santa Claus and the Big Mac, the self-proclaimed "King of Cookies" has long been the most infamous forbidden fruit from which observant Jewish children have kept their distance. As our mouths watered at the mere mention of this unsupervised delicacy, we assuaged our deprived taste buds with inferior sawdust-textured hybrids and swallowed our yearning for Oreo mix-ins at the ice cream parlor. Some kids dreamed of catching a Mickey Mantle foul pop; I fantasized about unscrewing an Oreo and licking the middle.

I called Nabisco to confirm the good news, and it got even better. Not only are Oreos now Kosher, but so are Ritz Bits, Honeymaid Grahams and many other products. In truth, these edibles could have passed muster a decade ago, when an increasingly health-conscious Nabisco began replacing animal fat with vegetable shortening in its products.

I should be thrilled at this news. If the cookie-moguls are finding it cost-effective to answer to a Higher authority, that's because more people are opting to bring God into the kitchen. And it's not just Jews. Kosher food is increasingly popular among Moslems (who have similar dietary laws), vegetarians, and undoubtedly many who wonder how U.S. government inspectors could have let so many tainted burgers make it to the freezers of Burger King last summer.

Domestic sales of products targeted to the Kosher consumer now exceed $3 billion annually, having achieved double-digit increases for each of the past five years. The Orthodox Union alone claims 250,000 products under its supervision. Kosher companies are being gobbled up as fast as their food. The corporation that owns Armour Bacon, Conagra, now also owns Hebrew National; Shofar salamis are peddled by Sara Lee, and Manischewitz is owned by Kohlberg and Co., whose president came from, of all places, RJR Nabisco.

Eating these days is an act of faith -- and fear. We can't understand most of what s on the label, but when we see a Kosher symbol, many naively assume that a pious old religious guy personally inspects and gives God's blessing to each item. While that myth is overblown and Kosher products might not always be healthier, Jewish dietary laws promote the type of self control that often leads to healthier living. They are based on a value system that sanctifies life, limits the pain of animals and views the body as a temple; all of which places these ancient principles in confluence with the current zeitgeist and has made the Kosher symbol into this generation's Good Housekeeping seal.

But now that Kosher is "in" and Oreos are O.K., I'm not sure I want them to be. Not that I want my children to suffer, but I know that in some perverse manner my Oreo envy kept me safely at the outer edges of middle America, shielding me from total absorption into the vanilla masses.

More than anything else, the Jewish contribution to American culture has been through communicating the experience of marginality, of having survived Otherness. Oreo denial was, for me, a direct extension of Egyptian slavery -- it made me uncomfortable enough to feel different and different enough to feel proud.

Even those Jews who always ate Oreos will now lose out. They have one less whopper of a sin to notch to their defiant belts ("Take that, Rabbi Marcus! And furthermore, we served 'em with shrimp at Joey's Bar Mitzvah!"). The news leaves us utterly confused, much as Adam and Eve would have felt had God suddenly appeared to them years later, saying, "You know that fruit, the one that caused all the trouble? Well, it's O.K. now. Here, unscrew it. Take a lick." Which taboo will be the next to fall? Bestiality? Murder? The Hostess Twinkie?

I can recall my first Twinkie: I was around eight; she was blonde, soft and spongy, sweet and sensational -- it just felt right. Mamie, my matronly Irish baby-sitter, knew little of the tribal taboos imposed on my home. Sure, she kept her ham sandwiches to herself and never fed me milk with meat. But how was she to know that this innocent snack was as verboten as a slab of bacon? It was just a Twinkie, and she offered it to me. So what was I to do? I was hooked. For weeks on end Mamie supplied me with Twinkies. Eventually, both Mamie and the Twinkies disappeared. She never had the chance to get me on to Oreos.

It is almost midnight. I'm sitting at my kitchen table, sampling my first batch of the previously prohibited cookie. Holding it up to the light, I scrutinize this marvelous black medallion with the embossed "OREO" surrounded by a wreath of posies. I feel so normal. So American. I shudder. Has the Jewish condition ever been compatible with normalcy? Can we survive this?

A more formidable dilemma lies before me: to dunk, bite or unscrew? As I hum, "A kid'll eat the middle of an Oreo first...," I begin to twist the top carefully with my left hand, holding the bottom cookie steady with my right.

The top breaks in half.

I eat the broken cookie. It's good, but I crave a Twinkie. The thrill is gone.

The Oreo, enduring symbol of hollowness for African-Americans, reveals the masks Jews wear as well. As noble distinctions continue to crumble and cherished customs gain universal appeal, I am beginning to understand that a faith community cannot live by food taboos alone. True, we are what we eat, but we must be more.