News, Views, and Shmooze....

Rescuing the Sacred

Rushing out early yesterday morning for jury duty, I had time for only a brief glance at the L.A. Times. On the front page was a color photo of a man wading through hip-high water in New Orleans, hands gloved, arms holding a Torah.

It wasn't until last night that I read Solomon Moore's story behind the photo:

Satisfied that most of his congregants were safe, the rabbi began to worry about the Torahs.

Rabbi Yisroel Shiff of Congregation Beth Israel in New Orleans hoped that his Orthodox synagogue's holy scrolls would come through Hurricane Katrina undamaged. But if not, he wanted them buried in the appropriate manner.

"We bury them with honor, as we would someone we care about — the Torah is the life's blood of our community," Shiff said.

The rabbi, who evacuated to Tennessee before Katrina hit, knew that the temple near the shores of Lake Pontchartrain had been flooded. But, he said, "we believe in miracles. Maybe the water didn't reach the scrolls."

He called Rabbi Isaac Leider, who had spent five years in Israel with the search-and-rescue squad Zak'a, performing sacramental cleanup duties at bus bombings and other sites. Leider — who also volunteered his services at the World Trade Center, the TWA Flight 800 crash site and other tragedies — now works with a Jewish ambulance service in New York City and New Jersey.

He had come to New Orleans to make sure that the bodies of any Jews who died as a result of Hurricane Katrina were treated according to religious law. But he also focused on the task of retrieving the congregation's holy scrolls.

Shiff said at least one of the Torahs had been there when he attended the synagogue as a child — he doesn't know exactly how old the scrolls are.

"We had them appraised and were told our scrolls are much older than 100 years," he said. "They must have come from Europe. The congregation is 101 years old, and they have been with them at least that long."

Often, Torahs are the most valuable artifacts of a Jewish congregation. A new Torah scroll can cost $50,000. Older scrolls — and many are hundreds of years old — often are worth much more.

But their value is not based on the material.

"The Torah is the basis of the Jewish religion," Leider said. "Last week, we were saving lives, but once that was done, this became just as important."

Said Shiff: "The Torah scrolls are particularly precious to people who live by their words."

The Torah tells the story of Moses as he led the Jews out of Egypt. The text, which Christians know as the Old Testament, also holds the most important laws of the Jewish faith.

"The Torah is not stored in a computer file; we don't copy them on copy machines," said Rabbi Shlomo Gertzulin, vice president of Agudath Israel of America, an association of several hundred Orthodox congregations that sponsored Leider's recovery efforts. "They are only written by the most devout and knowledgeable scribes."

A Torah is handwritten by a rabbinical scribe trained for years in the art of Hebrew calligraphy. There are centuries-old requirements on the exact size and spacing of characters, and special rites associated with words representing the Ten Commandments and Moses.

It can take as long as a year for a scribe — using a quill and sacred ink made from an age-old recipe — to complete a Torah. The scrolls must be made from cowhide, thinned to a leathery parchment, then woven together with leather thread to complete the text.

The scroll is then wrapped around wooden rods that often are capped with pure silver. Each Torah, the five books of the Jewish Scriptures, is then cloaked in purple velvet and stored in an ark, or cabinet; it is removed only for congregational prayers and on the high holy days of Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah.

And when they are damaged beyond repair — by fire or flood, for example — they must be buried according to Jewish tradition...

Read Moore's entire story.

A Drop to Drink

A few years ago in late August or early September, in one of the weekly Monday morning Torah study sessions given by Shira Smiles that I miss so much, we talked about the upcoming high holidays. Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur. A time for self-evaluation, for spiritual renewal, for growth, for atonement.

For new year resolutions.

Baby steps, Shira advised. Pick a blessing on food, she said.  Avoid reciting the blessing by rote. Focus on the gift you're receiving as you express your gratitude. Say the blessing with "kavanha." With concentrated intention, with meaning.

I have been thinking about Shira's words this past week, as I read with despair and horror about victims of Katrina, every time I fill a glass with water from my sink. It is not hard to find meaning as I recite the blessing.

The Nine Days

Tomorrow it begins.

The first of the Hebrew month of Av, the onset of the Nine Days.

It's a period of mourning commemorating the destruction of both Holy Temples in Jerusalem. I was going to blog about my feelings, but decided instead to post this excerpt from Blues in the Night, where Molly (and I) reflect about this sad time:

I dread the Three Weeks. They take place in the heat of the summer, beginning with this fast, and culminate twenty-one days later on Tisha b'Av, the ninth day of Av, a longer and more stringent fast that commemorates our national mourning over the destruction of both Holy Temples.

During the Three Weeks we refrain from luxuries, like listening to music, buying or wearing new clothes, cutting our hair, celebrating marriages, bar and bat mitzvahs, or other happy events. Within the Three Weeks are the Nine Days of Av, and they are even more somber and stringent. We don't swim or do laundry and, except on Shabbat, we don't eat meat or drink wine.

I'm okay with the stringency. I can survive for three weeks without Bloomingdale's or a concert at the Hollywood Bowl or the latest Kevin Spacey flick. And it isn't the solemnity that bothers me, or the fasting. I can certainly use an intense dose of introspection now and then, and I'll admit it's hard for me to feel the enormity of the loss of the Holy Temples when I have no concrete connection with either one. So the protocols of mourning help.

It's the unease that I dread. It's the apprehension that sneaks in and holds us hostage while we wait to hear of some tragic event -- and there is always one, usually more than one -- that will arrest our hearts and make us say, "Oh, of course, it's the Three Weeks." So we are grief-stricken but not really surprised when we hear, during these Three Weeks or Nine Days, that a driver lost control of his bus and plunged over the mountainside, taking thirty-one young campers to their deaths; or that a toddler drowned in his family's pool; or that a mother had a fatal fall when hiking with her family. Or that a lovely, sensitive, pious young woman, Aggie Lasher, was murdered.

And we hold our breaths, not wanting to hear more, anxious for these Three Weeks to be over so that we can cast off their pall and allow ourselves to relax our guard once again, to feel joy.

You're probably thinking, "superstition," and I can't prove you worng. But like most of my friends and family, during the Three Weeks I exercise caution. I don't use my cell phone when I'm driving, and I won't have elective surgery done, and during the Nine Days I try not to go anywhere that requires air travel. I am careful not to wave a red flag in Satan's face. I don't want him to see me.

Not much else to say.

LipsM.A.C.'d

Well, I tried.

I've been searching for years for a long-lasting, smear-and-food-proof lipstick. What's the big deal? you wonder. Well, it's convenient when you're going out to dinner or a wedding or book event and don't want to be bothered with reapplication.

More importantly, it's a necessity if, like me, you don't apply lipstick on the Sabbath. From sundown on Friday, for twenty-five hours. For two or more days on some Jewish holidays.

Not a life-threatening concern, I realize. But I feel bare without lipstick.

I've tested  "long-lasting" varieties from a beauty supply shop that come in yellow or a pearly white or brown and--miraculously!-- turn into hideous shades of tangerine or hot pink, depending on your body chemistry.

I've tried Shabbat-okayed lip powders that are dry and taste like, well, powder.

For the past few years I've been using L'Oreal Endless. It's advertised to last eight hours. It comes close. And unlike some other long-lasting lipsticks, it's creamy and doesn't feel like sandpaper.

Here's my routine: Just before I light the Shabbat candles, I apply lipliner, then the Endless. (I have it in eight shades.) Then I roll on Sealed with a Kiss, which stings for a few seconds.

Even with Endless and lip sealer, if I have a special event the next day (a bar mitzvah, lunch at someone's home), I eat carefully. Soups and drinks are tricky, and pasta.

So you can imagine my excitement when, two weeks ago, my friend Anita from New York phoned: She had Shabbat-tested a new M.A.C. long-lasting lipstick and was thrilled with the results. No smearing, no cracking. Twenty-some hours of color on her lips.

I drove to the nearest M.A.C. boutique. A helpful salesperson applied the color and, several minutes later, the special gloss.

I bought two shades of the lipstick.

One was Clingy Peach.

It didn't cling. Not for me.

So sad....

Birkonim

Nextbook has a link to an article in the Jerusalem Post about Birkonim, a film by two Orthodox Israeli women (Michal Brunschwig-Levi and Rivka Imbar) about an Orthodox divorcee who "becomes obsessed with collecting and destroying birkonim (in English, they're called bentchers), the booklets of prayers and songs many Jewish couples give out as souvenirs of their weddings."

(Another Nextbook link, supposedly related to the film, took me to UltimateWedding.com, and a glossary of Jewish wedding terms.)

Bentchers vary in price, depending on style, material, and size: The no-frills version offers simple text on pages stapled into a card-stock cover. (Moire is extra.) For a little more, you can get text bordered in metallic ink--silver or gold. Still more, text that's illuminated--the illustrations are beautfiul, but make it difficult to read the words. The Lexus of bentchers is oversized, its pages stitched into leather covers that will weather spills from wine and other liquids.

All bentchers have the basics: the name of the happy couple embossed in black, gold or silver or other exotic colors on the cover (Hebrew is read right to left, so the "front" cover is what most people would consider the "back"), the date of the wedding (usually in Hebrew and English), sometimes the wedding venue. Most bentchers also duplicate the logo from the wedding invitation--a couple's monogram or, more typically, an artistic rendering of that monogram (often the Hebrew initials) into a nuptial item or other object of Jewish ritual. A chalice, a ring, a chuppah, a Star of David.

Over the past thirty plus years, I've taken home at least two hundred bentchers from weddings I've attended. Maybe more. Some of them sit within easy reach in a holder on top of the built-in side cabinet in our breakfast room. Most of them are stored in the cabinet's drawers. Periodically, when the drawers become overly crammed, I weed out those bentchers that are no longer in good condition, those whose covers or pages may have been splattered with wine or grape juice or gravy, whose pages may have been torn, or may have fallen out. I give them to my husband, who takes them to the synagogue, where someone will place them in "sheimes" and bury them. (Prayer books or other writings with G-d's name cannot be trashed. They have to be handled with dignity.) But I'm sentimental, so I'll hold onto bentchersthat are falling apart if they're from family and close friends.

The weeding at times furrows my brow. Since most bentchers are stamped with the name of the couple -- i.e, "Mr. and Mrs. Jeremy Cohen"-- and many of the booklets have been there for decades, if the couple aren't close friends or children of close friends, and if I was invited by the parents of the bride, whose name doesn't appear on the bentcher, chances are I no longer remember the couple or the wedding. Those bentchers may be in pristine condition, but they're the first to go to the "sheimes" stack.

Other times the weeding elicits nostalgia, or melancholy. Or pain. Seeing the names of the couple can evoke remembered joy and laughter, the benign passing of years. It can also be a reminder of a friendship that has waned for no particular reason, of friends who have moved away, or those who have succumbed to illness. And some bentchers are souvenirs of loss, of marriages that, unlike the stitching holding the pages together, have unraveled.

My husband and I have only two bentchers from our own wedding over thirty years ago. (We think the waiters inadvertently trashed the two dozen or so extra copies we'd ordered and set aside.) The cover is a cheesy, nappy stained red--I can't imagine why I chose it. There is no logo, no bordered or illuminated text. Our name is misspelled.

It's perfect.

Playing Detective

The other day, when I was doing research for my short story, "Why Peggie Didn't Get Married," part of the Blog Short Story Project, I Googled "Los Angeles Police Department Auctions" and found PropertyRoom.com.

Read the FAQs. Cruised the site. Checked out some of the items being auctioned, including jewelry. Pages and pages of jewelry, some of them quite attractive, and with equally attractive prices--so far. Because the bidding is still in progress.

But what really intrigued me was the message, printed in eye-alerting red, by Auction Riot, the company handling the auction:

"This site will be closed June 13th and 14th."

Interesting.

June 13th and 14th happened to be Shavuot, the Jewish holiday that celebrates the receiving of the Torah at Mt. Sinai and during which dairy dishes are traditional.

A coincidence? I wondered as a I nibbled on a leftover blintz. (Made from scratch, following my friend Liz's recipe. The lemon rind rocks.)

But what were the odds that a company would choose those two dates to shut down?

So I placed a call to Auction Riot, heard a greeting recorded by someone whose voice sounds remarkably similar to the voice of Mary Alice, the (deceased) narrator on Desperate Housewives.

I left my name and phone number.

"Please call me," I said.

I am so curious.

From Synagogue to Saloon: Bar Mitzvahs and Cowboys on Television

Nextbook alerted me today to two fascinating essays. The first, by Mark Oppenheimer-- "From Saccharine to Satire"--explores the history of bar mitzvahs as presented on television:

In The Chosen Image: Television's Portrayal of Jewish Themes and Characters (1999), Jonathan and Judith Pearl argue that, although Hollywood movies tend to depict the bar and bat mitzvah as trivial or materialistic (The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, The Wedding Singer, the Ben Stiller role in Starsky & Hutch), television has taken a far more nuanced approach: "Often great pains are taken to explain the meaning of the ceremony, its importance to the family, and its significance in Jewish life." They're right, but that doesn't tell the whole story. For the first, say, 30 years of television, it was a far more cautious medium than the cinema. It either didn't treat the religious aspect of people's lives (there were no b'nai mitzvah on, say, The Goldbergs), or it treated religion with an earnestness that would make us squirm today. By the 1980s, it was acceptable to poke gentle fun at a rite like the bar mitzvah. And in the 1990s, when television shows like The Simpsons and South Park were fearlessly lampooning and satirizing everything, nothing was sacred, not even religious practices....

The second, by Stephen Vider, is titled "Riding Shotgun: Why Does Deadwood's Sheriff Wear a Six-Pointed Star?"

Born in Bavaria in 1840, Solomon Star was sent to live with his uncle in Cincinnati at age 10. But it wasn't long after his 21st birthday that he picked up and headed west. He wound up in the Dakota Territory, in a Black Hills gold mining camp called Deadwood, and rose from hardware store operator to mayor, serving from 1884 to 1893. "He was very concerned about the welfare of the community," says Jerry Bryant, research curator at the Adams Museum and House in Deadwood, South Dakota. "Most of us who research him call him Saint Sol...."

Both feature essays are well worth your time.

Let My People Go--Again

It's a week before Passover, which celebrates the Exodus of the Jews from Egypt and their independence, so I find the timing for this news story from the Provo Daily Herald somewhat ironic.

     In our view: Vicarious baptisms and the Jewish faith

     The Daily Herald


      For the third time in a decade, LDS and Jewish leaders are     discussing the practice of vicarious baptisms for Holocaust victims.

     Two Jewish groups claim the church has reneged on a 1995 agreement and a 2002 promise to stop church members from submitting the names of Holocaust victims and Jews for temple ordinances. The Holocaust victims are seen as religious martyrs and baptizing them as Christians, to some Jewish observers, belittles their deaths.

    The church has agreed to sit down and discuss the concerns and look for ways to improve the system to ensure that names aren't being submitted without the consent of relatives.

    It's easy to dismiss the Jewish groups as overreacting and taking offense where none is intended. After all, if you don't believe in the LDS Church's doctrine of salvation for the dead, then its temple ordinances could be taken as empty gestures with no significant meaning.

    LDS Church members do the temple work as an act of love and devotion. It's not an attempt to draft unwilling souls into the church. Church members believe that the dead still can choose their religion in the afterlife, and LDS temple ordinances merely allow them, if they choose, to enjoy certain blessings that are said to come from those ordinances.

   But the Jewish groups do have a point. It says the LDS Church agreed that it would remove the names of Holocaust victims from the International Genealogical Index and would restrict members to submitting only names of deceased relatives or those whose next of kin have consented. When those names appear again on the list, it gives the impression that the church is ignoring its agreements.

    From what we can see, the LDS Church has upheld the deal to the best of its ability. It has removed more than 400,000 names from the IGI, turning over genealogical data on Holocaust victims to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. The church also has issued directives to members not to submit the names of non-relatives for temple ordinances without permission from the next of kin.

   But when you're talking about a church of 12 million people scattered around the world, ensuring 100-percent compliance can be difficult, if not impossible.

   President D. Todd Christofferson of the church's Quorum of the Seventy, said the church will conduct an investigation and work with Jewish groups to improve the process without compromising church beliefs.

   There are a couple of ways the church could refine the process to screen out inappropriate submissions.

   One would be to tighten procedures for verifying permission from next-of-kin. The presumption is that members have that permission when they submit the names, and most church members do when they submit genealogical records for temple work. But more verification might give greater assurance to Jewish groups, rather than just taking someone's word for it.

   The church also might look for a technological safeguard to guarantee that people do not perform baptisms on behalf of dead Holocaust victims to whom they have no relation. Perhaps the computer software that reviews name submissions could be programmed to red-flag any requests that list the place of death as a concentration camp. Then, the person submitting the record could be asked to provide proof that the dead person is a relative, or that he has secured the requisite permission. Such a system would not prevent Jewish names from appearing in LDS genealogical records. It only would ensure that they don't appear by surprise.

   That is a position that should satisfy both church members and the Jewish groups.

 

It doesn't satisfy me. As a daughter of Holocaust survivors, I take great offense at the possibility that even one name of my many family members--grandparents, aunts, uncles, half-sisters, cousins--who perished in the Holocaust may have been appropriated by the LDS.

And I'm sorry, but I don't accept on face value the motives behind LDS's posthumous baptism of survivors' names.

Call me skeptical.

If you'd like to read more about the subject, here are some of the comments archived on the Daily Herald.

The X Factor

The New York Times article intrigued me when I read it on-line a few weeks ago: A thirty-six-year-old Japanese woman, Christine, had given up Broadway (she performed in Miss Saigon), converted to Judaism to marry her boyfriend Todd Factor, and converted again to Orthodox Judaism.

Christine, I learned, is now Rachel. Todd is Tovia. They live in Israel with their two young sons, and Rachel is touring the United States, hoping to raise funds to build a women's institute in Israel for the performing arts.

Then I heard that Rachel was coming to L.A. So Monday night I went with my daughter and daughter-in-law and a group of friends to see Rachel Factor's one-woman show at the Crown Plaza. In the hour-and-a-half long show (there is no intermission) Rachel recounts, through song and dance and an ongoing monologue laced with humor and poignance, her journey from Hawaii to Jerusalem.

Rachel is charming. She has a lovely voice, and her movements are lithe and graceful. She shares her pain about not fitting in as a child or young woman, about being unhappy with her Asian features (she is beautiful), about searching for something she couldn't quite define. She talks about resisting conversion and ultimately falling in love with Judaism.

Towards the end of the performance, Rachel describes the first time she lit Shabbat candles. She waves her hands around the imaginary candles and sings the bracha (blessing). In the row behind me, a woman whispered, "That's not what I do every Shabbos."

The woman spoke with longing, with a bit of envy. I imagine that she heard in Rachel's voice what I did: awe and reverence; an appreciation of the candles and the blessing that some of us may sometimes take for granted.

I went to see Rachel out of curiosity. I came away with inspiration.