JustASC

I guess Noam Neusner, former George W. Bush speech writer and Forward columnist, is no fan of compassionate conservatism:

Obama speaks regularly of the need to make investments in America’s infrastructure and future, and I believe him. But in reality, America is not so much in the investing business as in the loss-covering business. Roughly $7 out of every $10 spent by the federal government goes toward cleaning up other people’s mistakes or problems: housing assistance, food stamps, free or reduced health care, free and reduced lunches in schools and other educational supports, and subsidies for farmers.

I have the same problem with Torah — always going on and on about other people’s mistakes or problems:

[God] upholds the cause of the orphan and the widow, and befriends the stranger, providing him/her with food and clothing. — You too must befriend the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.

If, however, there is a needy person among you, one of your kin in any of your settlements in the land that the Lord your God is giving you, do not harden your heart and shut your hand against your needy kin. Rather, you must open your hand and lend them sufficient for whatever they need. You shall not subvert the rights of the stranger, the orphan; you shall not take a widow’s garment in pawn. Remember that you were a slave in Egypt and that Adonai your God redeemed you from there; therefore do I enjoin you to observe this commandment.

Some new developments in the horrific-sounding attack on a Jewish Michigan State student, via the Detroit News:

Women of the Wall has posted a powerful piece by Vanessa Ochs about the oppressive, Orwellian, and maddening experience of engaging in organized prayer at the Kotel if you happen to have the wrong set of genitalia.

In a bizarre collusion between synagogue and state, Israeli police videotape women worshippers, determine whether their tallitot are likely to (according to the actual wording of the law) “offend the feelings of others,” and signal whether women should actually wrap them around their necks like scarves just in case.

Sadder still is Vanessa’s spirtual exhaustion about waging a fight that she and other shave been engaged in for decades:

[W]hen I first became one of the organizers of Women of the Wall, I had wondered if my daughters could celebrate their bat mitzvahs at the Wall. Each came of age and it was still not possible. I have a granddaughter now, and she will soon turn four. Will it be legal for Jewish women to pray as Jews at the Wall when she comes of age? I could only be optimistic about that possibility only if there were young people to develop new strategies for securing the rights of women at the Wall and beyond. What strategies did I have in mind? Not bringing the matter to the Israeli Supreme Court:  done, and dragged on over years.  International petitions, letter writing campaigns, done. Meeting with the Israeli Ambassador to the United States, with the leadership of Hadassah, the world’s largest association of Jewish women: done. Books written, articles in newspapers, magazines, CNN coverage,  social media, facebook:  done too.  I was looking for strategies that hadn’t yet been invented.

She also writes about her hesitation in approaching what has become “a giant outdoor gender-segregated right-wing Orthodox synagogue.” That’s exactly how lately I have come to feel about the Wall. On my last trip to Israel, in March, I was on a lightning archaeological tour of the digs at the rear of the Kotel plaza — and not once was I tempted to leave the tour and approach the wall itself. I found a lot more meaning in the excavations on the south side of the Temple Mount, where you can actually walk on the steps where pilgrims once entered the Temple compound, where you can see the stone market stalls where vendors sold animals for sacrifice — and, as far as I can tell, no cops or religious bullies pay you any mind at all. 

I suppose its feels like capitulation to surrender the Kotel to the haredi authorities, but sometimes a little Rabbi Yochannan-like reinvention is necessary to save  a Jewish soul.

Sam Freedman at the Times reports on a North Carolina law professor’s challenge to the Conservative movement’s requirement that affiliated synagogues hire rabbis from their pool of Rabbinical Assembly members:

“Professional cartels are in some ways even more pernicious than a cartel of manufacturers,” Mr. [Barak] Richman, 42, said in a recent interview. “There’s a degree of paternalism. On the one hand, it’s genuinely born out of concern. The rabbis who run the placement system really think they know what’s best for their congregations. But by controlling the marketplace with their ossified rules, they are doing long-lasting damage.”

Like Mr. Richman, I served on my synagogue’s rabbinic search committee. Unlike Mr. Richman, we never thought of going outside the Rabbinical Assembly rules — mostly because we are a very movement-conscious congregation, and partly because a lot of our congregants are leaders in the movement.  

I would also defend the rules as bringing sanity and decorum to an already fraught process. Rabbinic Assembly  membership (open, by the way, to rabbis not trained in Conservative seminaries) and USCJ rules assure quality control, and, like a union, protect the worth and value of a small pool of specially trained rabbis from being undercut in the marketplace by competitors who literally and figuratively haven’t paid their dues. It also protects the rabbis from synagogues that would use a wide-open process to deflate compensation, or wring changes out of the movement that haven’t been achieved through the current system of rabbinic authority, congregational input, and lay oversight. In other words, if you don’t like the current movement parameters on performing an intermarriage, you can tell your R.A. candidates that unless they are willing to buck the system the job is going to go to a non-R.A. member. At that point, you don’t have a movement.   

There are indeed strong arguments that denominationalism is dying or should be, but as long as it persists I understand why a movement would want to maintain its standards and hold its member institutions to a common philosophy and set of practices. Synagogues have the option of breaking away from this “cartel” and many do, by leaving the movement and declaring themselves independent or affiliating elsewhere – that seems the best corrective if they feel similarly constrained by the R.A./USCJ “monopoly.”  

Perhaps Mr. Richman has a point that opening up the movement to a larger pool of rabbis might foster creativity and competition, but his “cartel” analogy and First Amendment arguments appear to be a stretch, as my colleague Jared Silverman, himself a lawyer, explains:

As an antitrust professor, Richman should know that the definition of “market” is critical, the issue being competition in the “relevant market” and freedom of choice.  Obviously, a potential Jewish congregant has the choice of synagogue affiliation, and a congregation has the choice of whether to affiliate with a denomination.  In essence, Richman is arguing the that any fast food fried chicken place can call itself Kentucky Fried Chicken without adhering to the conditions of being a KFC franchise.  The First Amendment argument is a strawman.  The restrictions of the First Amendment are applicable to the government, not to private individuals or enterprises.

There is a very strange and interesting discussion going on over an article that appeared in the NJJN several weeks ago, about a Christian bus driver who was fired by New Jersey Transit because he wouldn’t work on his Sabbath. The article was apparently linked to a fairly conservative Catholic site, which drove a lot of the commenters our way. The readers seem most exercised over our characterization of Sunday as the “Christian Sabbath”; that leads to a debate over whether Scripture supports the idea that Christians must observe Sunday as the Sabbath.

Leading this Jew to wonder: Who knew that this is still a debate? Plus: If Sunday isn’t the Christian Sabbath, why won’t Bergen County, NJ,  lift its blue laws already?

Speaking of the Saturday vs. Sunday debate, Rabbi Evan Moffic has a piece on Beliefnet about the 19th-century Reform rabbi who moved the main day of worship from Saturday to Sunday — and then repented the move 18 years later.

The religion and media site ”Get Religion” often talks about “ghosts” – that is, religious themes in news stories that are in the background but somewhow ignored or unnoticed by the reporter or publication.

Here’s an example I found today, from the Times’ Advertising columnist Andrew Adam Newman. It’s about Goldenberg’s Peanut Chews, and its parent company’s attempts to undo the damage of a disastrous rebranding campaign:

A new wrapper introduced in 2004 not only significantly changed the logo and color scheme, but also removed the historically prominent “Goldenberg’s,” which was thought to sound too homespun for a national player.

Too “homespun”? Really?

I understand why no one at Just Born, the company that bought out the company, would have described the name as “too Jewish” — but you have to know that someone was thinking it. And not that there is anything wrong with that. I suppose if I were trying to bring a mostly regional brand to national prominence, I might have played down the Jewy, played up the chewy. Hell, an entire generation of Jews did just that. That’s how my grandfather got the last name “Carroll,” and why so few people remember Issur Danielovitch Demsky’s macho star turn in “Spartacus.”

So now Just Born wants to reclaim the Goldenberg’s name, and its mojo. Here’s the evolution of the Peanut Chews wrapper — the pre-re-branding version at the top, the updated deracinated one in the middle, and the new “old-school” makeover at the bottom (courtesy of SeriousEats.com):

But there appear to be a few other ghosts in the Peanut Chews rebranding story, if not of the religious than of the oddly ethnic variety. The new campaign for the candy at one point features this commercial:

After a middle-aged man wearing a button-down shirt tries the candy, for example, his outfit and mannerisms switch, and he wears a Kangol hat, baggy tracksuit and oversize gold chain and announces that the candy is “off the hook.”

The article doesn’t explain that the actor playing the man is Asian, and that he delivers the “off the hook” line with hip-hop gestures and a thick Asian accent.

This kind of ethnic mash-up can’t be unintentional. It sounds like someone at the ad agency, trying to reintroduce a product with an unmistakably “ethnic” name, wanted to emphasize that crossing religious and racial boundaries is perfectly acceptable in buying a candy bar. It’s how Levy’s Jewish rye bread joked its way out of the baked goods ghetto:

It’s a little curious that Newman doesn’t explore these ethnic themes, although if you don’t mention the Jewish thing explicitly it wouldn’t make sense anyway.

I’ve always felt a little proprietary about Peanut Chews. Years ago, when I interned at the Jewish federation in Philadelphia, baskets of Goldenberg’s Peanut Chews were placed on the table during fundraising drives, a gift of the local family that owned the company. I was thrilled, because I am lactose intolerant and the chews were some of the only mainstream candies that didn’t contain dairy.

And then — horrors — at some point in the 1990s Goldenberg’s changed its production methods and lost its “pareve” designation. As a company representative told a vegan web site in 2005:

The Kosher certification for Original PEANUT CHEWS was changed in the early 1990′s to OU-D [dairy], because they were and continue to be made on the same manufacturing line as Milk Chocolatey PEANUT CHEWS.

This was shocking news, akin to the hullaballo after Kraft changed the recipe for Stella D’Oro’s Swiss Fudge cookies — a popular pareve cookie. In that case, customer protests led Kraft to bring back the old recipe.

In the case of Goldenberg’s, let’s call it progress that a major company thinks a Jewish-sounding name has gone from liability to selling point. Although it is probably too much to ask reporters to call things as we obsessisiely Jewish Jews see them.

The Israel National Trail,  which extends up to 620 miles from southern to northern Israel, was named one of the World’s 20 Best “Epic Trails” Hikes by National Geographic magazine:

Passing through vast empty desert and winding into kibbutzim, the Israel National Trail (INT) delves into the grand scale of biblical landscapes as well as the everyday lives of modern Israelis (with opportunities to stop in the cities of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem). But beyond the immense sense of history and breaking news, the trail powerfully connects to something that often gets lost in all the headlines—the sublime beauty of the wilderness of the Middle East.

In March, I was lucky enough to bike and hike the sliver of the trail that runs along the lip of the Rimon Crater at Mitzpe Ramon:

A fun New York Times correction to this story about 127 Diaspora recruits who arrived in Israel this week to serve in the IDF:

Correction: August 15, 2012

An earlier version of this article contained an incorrect quote by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at one point. He said, “In previous times, for almost two millennia, the Jews could not defend themselves,” not “for almost two million years.”

(Although, in defense of the reporter, paleontologists have found evidence that  Homo erectus tribes in North Africa left behind stone tools, tanned hides, and cave drawings of cowering yeshiva boys.) 

But who are we to gloat? Just before publication, we fixed a typo that rendered “Anshe Emeth Memorial Temple” as “Anshe Emeth Monorail.” Ah, the magic of spell check.

From the Jerusalem Post:

Egyptians must have been surprised on Tuesday when they opened their newspapers to read that 127 North Koreans had immigrated to Israel to join the IDF.

Mistranslating a Jerusalem Post story, Egypt’s state news agency MENA mistakenly wrote that 127 men and women from Kim Yong-un’s totalitarian dictatorship, ­ instead of from North America, ­ had landed at Ben-Gurion Airport.

Unnoticed, the erroneous report was picked up by Egypt’s dailies, including al-Masry al-Youm, Shorouk News, and al-Mashhad.

When the writer David Rakoff died last week at age 47, I was struck by the fact that I never met him. Not that we travelled in the same social circles — as far as I can tell, my social circle is a closed loop. But having heard him on This American Life all these years, his gentle, precise, somewhat mournful voice in my head left a false memory of great intimacy.  He also spoke and wrote regularly about the cancer that would eventually kill him — inviting you into his private struggle in a way that many actual friends and aquaintances are loath or unwilling to do.

I also “bonded” with Rakoff over a shared experience — at different times but under very similar circumstances, we both found ourselves volunteering in a kibbutz chicken coop, or lool. He describes the experience  in his collection Fraud; I remember the shock of recognition when he first read an excerpt on TAL. It was as if someone had taken my own memories and made them their own:  About being selected to round up the chickens from midnight until dawn.  About the “snarling, saw-toothed, ammoniac, cheesy smell” of the immense corrugated coop. The instructions to “pick up four chickens in each hand…by grabbing hold of the birds by one leg.” (“If the leg snaps,” a kibbutznik tells him, as one undoubtedly told me,  “it doesn’t matter, just to get four in each hand. B’seder?”)

Rakoff writes of the moment when he and the other volunteers “walk out into the sea of chickens”:

I reach down and grab one, its leg a slightly thicker, segmented chopstick. I recoil and stand up. I take a fetid breath, regroup, and bend down with new resolve, grab the chicken by its body with both hands, thinking somehow that might be preferable. Although how I think I’m going to get eight of them this way, I’m not sure. Its ribs expand and contract under my fingers, a dirty, warm, live umbrella. I drop the bird as if it were boiling hot.

I remember this moment precisely, even the phrase I formed in my head: “Until now, I have been a person who never reached down and grabbed a chicken by its leg. After this, I will be a person who did that very thing.”

I crossed that threshold; the point of Rakoff’s story is that he was unable to.

I envied him his ability and opportunity to spin that night in the coop into an essay heard on TAL. It was a talent for humor, heartache, and somehow life-affirming cynicism that made me one of his regular readers and listeners, and led me to forgive him when his prose occasionally turned precious or mannered. We were both members of the Brotherhood of the Lool  – an exclusive fraternity.

May his memory be for a blessing.