thinking jewish

Yiddishkeit in Darou Mouride

Fiddler on the Roof

Amidst the dew
And soup-thick humidity,
The sounds of roosters and people waking.
The muezin calls his people to prayer,
In a land devoid of color.

There, in the distance, is a yellow house;
The only color among miles of brown.

A woman comes out.
She cleans a mat and tends to her chores,
In poverty,
In filth.
She is so unlike me.

But there!
On the roof
Of the small yellow house.
Is a fiddler.

A man and his fiddle, sitting on the roof.

He fiddles away the morning,
With the tune of donkeys and cattle, goats and hens,
As the people come and go,
Doing their things,
Waiting for a better life.

He fiddles, she cleans.
The rooster welcomes the morning.

In an instant,
The fiddler dissapears.
But she is still there.

And so is her yellow house,
Surrounded by dirt,
In a land devoid of color.

A Week Ago, In Africa

Standing on a rooftop, I looked around, and felt anywhere but home. As far as the eye could see was a morass of concrete and dirt. The thick humid air smelt of smoke. The sounds of donkeys, and horses, and a muezzin filled the air.

I was surrounded by twenty four colleagues - fellow rabbinical students from throughout the United States - as we prayed the morning service from atop a building in downtown Dakar, the capital of the West African nation of Senegal.

For two weeks, our delegation joined the American Jewish Service to work with its grantee, Tostan, aiding in community-led development in rural villages facing extreme poverty throughout Africa.

No prior experience could have prepared me for what I saw in Senegal: children with flies in their eyes; distended bellies; open sores; bare feet; hunger; sickness; a land parched by drought. At first glance, the place seemed like hell. How could God allow such a place to exist?

For ten days we worked with locals in the villages of Darou Mouride and Keur Songo, building latrines and helping them in their daily chores. I swept, I tilled soil, I brought forth water from wells. All the while, I built bonds with people so different from me, and yet so similar. They love, they cry, they laugh, they play.

I played with many kids. Two in particular I will never forget, Tidiane Geye and Popmusonjop showed me firsthand the power of the AJWS and its grantees to bring positive change to the world.

As I butchered their names time and time again, the two kids laughed in a way that any would at a blubbering foreigner standing before them. "Tubob" they called me - white man.

Finally, Tidiane Geye crouched down and spelled out his name in the sand below him. In a country with almost no literacy, this defiant act writing was nothing short of miraculous.

But my new friends need far more than an education. They need food. They need mosquito nets. They need basic health services and access to a world which has left them behind. They need shoes.

They need an American Jewish community that remembers them, and does all we can to help the billions of people like them who live in abject poverty, trying to make ends meet on as little as a dollar a day in conditions more horrific than most of us could imagine.

I returned from Africa inspired by the work of the AJWS. I returned motivated by my new cadre of rabbinical students dedicated to bringing our message of social justice to our home communities. I returned ready for the hard work ahead.

The Wolof word used in response to a greeting is "mangifee," which translates literally as "I am here." The Hebrew equivalent is "hineini", the response by Abraham when God first calls out to him in service.

To all my brothers and sisters in this world stricken by the disease of poverty - to Tidiane Geye and Popmusonjop - to all of the communities where AJWS works and those yet to be helped, I cry out Mangifee. I am ready to help you. I am here to work on your behalf. Hineini.

We Pause for These Messages

In a few days I'll head with a delegation of rabbinical students and the American Jewish World Service to the West African nation of Senegal. We will spend two weeks building latrines in villages outside the regional capital Thies, and learn about the work of the NGO Tostan. The trip will conclude with a visit to Goree Island.

From there, I travel back to the States and, then, four days later, to Israel. Come July 1 I will have the time and the commitment to return to my writing.

I look forward to sharing the journey with you then.

-David

In the Meantime, This

The semester is finally over, and final papers are near their end. There is finally time again for the real work in life: travel to far-off places, relaxation and, of course, writing.

I have plenty of things that need commenting; many encounters which need to be explored on this blog: racism and anesthesia, autonomy and movementalism, social justice and earthquakes.

All this in due time.

Meanwhile, I give you two gifts before Shabbat.

First, two letters were written to "Plainviews" in response to my piece, "Turkey, Chaplaincy, and Pastoral Care." I encourage you to check out this thoughtful feedback, here (about a third of the way down the page).

And, second, after much anticipation, the text book I wrote last fall for Torah Aura Productions is being published. "Yisrael Sheli" teaches Israel to third and fourth graders through the Jewish heroes who have been connected to the land over the last few millenia. It will be in religious school classrooms beginning this fall. You can check out a preview of the textbook by clicking here.

Shabbat shalom,
David

My Work, This Shabbat

In the months preceding a move to the other side of the world, and with it the expiration of my all-encompassing, overly-expensive, perfect-example-of-America's-health-system-malfunction-disaster health insurance, I decided to take a trip early this week to the Allergist.

Since college I have struggled with my body's auto-immune response to problems non-existant. You're a fighter, David, I was always told. And so I am. In the absence of a real fight to pick, my body chooses to attack things like dust, and pollen, and pet dander.

Cue the histamine, the runny nose, the congestion.

In the fight against allergies, I buy pillow covers and mattress covers. I use air filters which suck all of the impurities from the air I breath at night. I flush salted water through my sinuses each morning with a bottle shaped to fit a genie. I vacuum and sweep and vacuum again.

It is a never-ending battle against a microscopic invader against which I am helpless. The evil fills every space into which I enter, floating harmlessly in the air, until I breath it in, and my body reacts, and, low and behold, my sinuses no longer function.

So I went to the allergist to pinpoint the exact nature of my allergies. Forty pricks on my back of forty common things on this planet later, my body was charted like a connect the dots picture yet to be used.

And within minutes, my back had exploded in redness. The itches could not be contained. Scratch me! Scratch me. I could not. Fifteen minutes of not scratching passed, as I awaited the doctor's eye.

Then came the moment of truth. The list of offending allergens was brought forth. Dust. No surprise. Cats and dogs and hamsters and cockroaches. There goes veterinary work. Olive tree pollen and some grasses and mold. Fair enough.

And then, there, at the end of the list, the one allergy I have to food. Screaming blatantly from the page, as if it were highlighted two times over and written in red-ink, circled around with arrows pointing to it: shellfish.

And not just a small allergy, at all. Rather, it's about as severe as any other allergy I have, a '4+' on a scale of zero to four.

Yet what exactly that means, I do not know. I will not know. I cannot know.

In the days of my youth, there were times aplenty when I dined on various parts of the swine. Bacon, pepperoni, sausage - all delicious delicacies which have found their ways into my mouth throughout the ages. To be clear, I never ate ham. No such goyisher item would be allowed near me. But derivations of the pig so delicious as these were never forbidden to me.

As much as I did eat pork, as I did not eat kosher, as I made little distinction between what is treif and what is not, I still never touched shellfish. Shrimp and crab and lobster and such, always seemed so not-Jewish, not to mention unappetizing.

I'll confess that I did eat clam chowder, but only because it was creamy and in a giant loaf of bread. Once I was old enough to realize that something called "Clam Chowder" has clams inside, I gave up that practice entirely.

And once I did eat shrimp. But only because it came deep fried and battered - there was more crispy goodness than pink living animal of the sea. And I was seven. Dinner called "Popcorn Shrimp" is much more appealing than grilled salmon.

That is all to say, that in the twenty six odd years of my life, shellfish has entered my lips maybe a handful of times, all of which the taste of the shellfish was so utterly covered and masked by some other delicious substance. And now it turns out that I am very allergic to shellfish. Very allergic.

Maybe so allergic that I would die if I ate it. Maybe not. Probably not. But I will never know.

I won't ever know what will happen to me if I eat it. I will never know the taste of these most-celebrated of dinner items.

I won't know. I cannot know.

I can't because my both my body and my God are in agreement that this is a forbidden fruit.

It seems that there is so much I can learn from that. There are so many good drashes to give.

What does it mean that my body seems to be screaming out in support of the halakha? What does it mean when the natural order and my religious system are in utmost agreement? And what if I were allergic to not wrapping tefilin, or allergic to putting a stumbling block before the blind.

I'll ponder that.

And what does it mean to be so removed and unable to know something as simple as shrimp, or crab, or lobster? All the more so, what if I cannot know God, or the meaning of the universe, or my place in this world?

I'll ponder that too.

Time to go start.

Rounding Error

A few Shabatot ago, I ran into an old friend at a new shul. It so happened that it was March 13, the day before March 14, Pi Day. And this friend was a student of math - read, nerd. That's the context.

Pi day, of course, is the annual event when the Gregorian calendar date - 3/14 - looks a lot like the first three digits of Pi - 3.14. Nothing to sacred there. (For the record, on March 14, 2015 the date will replicate five digits. Thanks to Mr. Jackson's ninth grade math class, I know Pi out to twenty digits. See nerd comment, above.)

And this Shabbat with the new shul and the old friend, it so happened that this old friend was doing some teaching at the end of Kabalat Shabbat. And he was a mathematician and it was almost Pi day. So this was the Torah about which he taught.

So often in this modern world of ours, we take for granted the ignorance and stupidity of pre-modern peoples. We know everything, they knew nothing. We have it sorted out, we are not blinded by baseless assumptions. We are Enlightened. We are rational. Boundaries no longer exist like they once did. Or so the line of thinking goes.

You see, the pre-moderns, in their Biblical lives of togas and scrolls and animal slaughtering, even they knew a bit of the world around them. If you study some of the parts of the Bible and Rabbinics dealing with the construction of the Temple in Jerusalem, you pick up very quickly that these men had full knowledge of such a concept as Pi. Yes, they knew, maybe more than we, that the diameter of a circle is always a little more than three times it's radius squared.

Crazy.

But, you say, Pi is not three times the radius of a circle squared. No! It is 3.14... times that square number! The Bible is wrong! The rubrics for the Temple are impossible! Mathematically!

Nerd.

In this moment of lucidity, you seem to have proven the Bible of God, and, through that act, one-upped God as well. But not so fast.

The rabbis saw this Biblical error. They knew well and fine that Pi was not three. And in one midrash, we gain the following insight:

Pi, the most abhorrent of numbers, a never-ending string of non-repeating digits that nonetheless represents one of the most stable constants in reality, is, in fact, they argue, only temporary. In our world, in this time, Pi is what it is. But one day, in the world to come, in the time of Messiah, Pi, like it's Biblical basis, will actually become three.

It seems, say the rabbis, that in this time yet to be had, Euclidean Geometry goes out of the world. The very nature of nature, then, will be fundamentally different. What makes Pi Pi, will no longer exist. Pi will be a whole number. The fractional difference will no longer remain.

I could not help, as I sat and learned this Torah, about some wider metaphors that this math may teach. Because that decimal difference of the Pi of now and the Pi to be seems so present in this world, the fractional differences that make all the difference between who we are and who they are, between what I am and what I am yet to become.

And one day, those differences, those schisms between us that seem unending and infinite, one day, those differences will be flattened, they will no longer remain. They are, in fact, a mirage.

The divisions, the labels, the barriers between humans are, it seems, the rounding error that prevents us from realizing a better world, a Messianic world.

And that's all well and good. It's a nice idea that makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside. But can it actually change my behavior? Can it infuse my being on a day to day life?

I walk down the street and ponder whether I can help to realize a better world just by realizing that the differences between me and my fellow - albeit important differences, ones that I will uphold as that which makes me unique in this world - are also only superficial, temporal markings of an imperfect world.

That man, over there, whom I hate, whom I find annoying, whose national existence challenges my own, whose politics are so abhorrent that I wish at times he did not exist, can I flatten the differences between us and approach him as another creation of God?

And in this time of our redemption, when I remind myself that I too was a stranger in the Land of Egypt, there seems no better a time to try.

This is the bread of affliction, let all who are hungry come and eat.

Whoever you are, it is for you. We all are afflicted. We all are slaves.

We are all strangers, and in that strangeness, one.