Mail.Liberal-Judaism

• Daniel Faigin <faigin@aero.org>

• Daniel Kodmur <dkodmur@ocf.berkeley.edu>
• Daniel Faigin

• dxs@evolving.com

• Thomas Drucker <SPIELBER@dickinson.edu>

• CARIAN@american.edu (Rabbi Charles Arian)

• Daniel Kodmur <dkodmur@ocf.berkeley.edu>

Date: Thu, 24 Sep 92 07:27:40 PDT
From: Daniel Faigin <faigin@aero.org>
Subject: *Administrivia*


Just a short note; this is a full issue. I would like to wish all list
subscribers a very Happy New Year, L'shana Tovah. Whether you attending
synagogue for one or two days, or just observe alone, this is an important
time of year to reflect on what is to come, and what has passed. I have done
my best on this list to encourage stimulating Jewish discussion while not
trampling on beliefs. If, while doing this, anyone has been offended or
angered, I am sorry. 

Please take time during the high holidays to reflect on your relationships: to
yourself, to your family, to your fellow humans, and to G-d. Remember that all
of these things are partnerships and require a certain amount of effort to be
successful -- they don't succeed on their own. Take time for yourself and let
the child in you play. Don't let economic concerns make you forget the joy you
can find in your family. Don't forget that we all have a responsibility to our
fellows; and that if we have it "bad" (whatever that it), someone else has it
much worse. Lastly, don't forget that for some miraculous reason we are here
on this planet (be it the small odds that resulting in intelligent life, or
divine chance), and that we must respect and honor whatever it is that got us
to where we are today.

L'Shana Tovah. I hope you find this issue of interest.

Your Moderator, Daniel.

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Date: Tue, 22 Sep 1992 01:35:05 -0700
From: Daniel Kodmur <dkodmur@ocf.berkeley.edu>
Subject: Re: A Personal Loss

Your posting moved me deeply.  Though I did not know Rabbi Soloff, I have had
the great privilege of knowing Alfred Wolf most of my life, and it touched me
to have him mentioned in such a public context.

His modesty is so pronounced, and his overshadowing by Magnin was so complete,
at least in certain senses, that I do not think even people in his own Temple
are aware of how wonderful he is.

For me to tell him would embarrass him, and yet I do not want to wait for a
eulogy.

I was very happy to hear positive things about Wilshire, even somewhat
tangentially, since I had to take so much abuse as a kid for going there.

I have written an essay about WBT and Rabbi Magnin; if it would interest you,
I would be happy to e-mail it to you. [Please feel free to share it with the
list -- Yr. Mod.]

In any case, after reading what you had to say, I very much regret not having
known Mordechai Soloff. I am sure you consider yourself lucky for having known
him, and I hope those memories can comfort you even as you are saddened by his
loss.

Danny Kodmur

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Date: Wed, 23 Sep 92 07:28:45 PDT
From: Daniel Faigin
Subject: Re: A Personal Loss


The following is the obituary for Rabbi Soloff as it appeared in the Los
Angeles Times:

	     Rabbi Mordecai I. Soloff, 91; Author of Jewish Texts

Rabbi Mordecai I. Soloff, who served Reform Jewish congregations in Culver
City and Westchester and who was known nationally for his trilogy of Jewish
history, has died in Rancho Mirage.

A family spokesman said he was 91 when he died Friday while on vacation with
his daughter, Tamar Brower.

His books, published in the 1930s and '40s, became standard texts for Reform
and Conservative Jewish religious schools. More recently he had published a
new series of textbooks for Jewish schools and was working on a second series
at his death.

His works included the trilogy "When the Jewish People Was Young", "How the
Jewish People Grew Up", and "How the Jewish People Lives Today."

Soloff immigrated to the United States from Russia with his family in 1910. He
held degrees from City College of New York, Columbia University and the Jewish
Theological Seminary.

He was a Hebrew school principal in Baltimore, New York City, Chicago and
elsewhere before deciding to become a Reform rabbi.

Before coming to Westchester in 1952 he led temples in Wisconson, Virginia,
New York, and Maryland and after his retirement, was an interim rabbi in
Perth, Australia from 1983 to 1984. At his death he was rabbi emeritus of
Temple Akiba in Culver City, which had merged with his old Temple Jeremiah of
Westchester. 

Besides his daughter, he is survived by a son, Rabbi Rav Soloff, a brother,
seven grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren, who ask donations in his
name to the Jewish National Fund in Los Angeles.

Los Angeles Times, Wednesday, September 23, 1992.

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Date: Tue, 22 Sep 1992 09:30:29 -0600
From: dxs@evolving.com
Subject: Alzheimers Disease

I am interested in peoples insights into the following situation: I have 2
friends who I will call Ralph and Alice.  Ralph has been married to Alice for
about 40 years.  Ralph has Alzheimers Disease (AD) is in a nursing home and at
this time has no idea who Alice is, and is in the advanced stages of the
disease.  He is cannot feed himself, cannot communicate, etc.  Through a
support group, Alice has met Norton whose wife Trixie, has had Alzheimers
Disease (AD) for even longer than then Ralph and is also in the advanced
stages of the disease.

All four of them are Jewish.  Alice and Norton have started seeing each other
and are now sleeping together.

My question is this.  What does Jewish law say about this situation.  are
Alice and Norton commiting adultry?  I am interested in peoples opinions about
this, as well as Jewish legal opinions.

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Date: Wed, 23 Sep 92 8:34:05 edt
From: Thomas Drucker <SPIELBER@dickinson.edu>
Subject: Credal Requirements for Jewish Identity

   I am grateful to Rabbi Leon Rogson for his response of 14 September to my
comments about Jewish belief.  Perhaps an analogy would make my point clearer.
If someone were to claim that he did not believe that 2 + 2 = 4, you could
choose between questioning the person's sanity or examining how the person was
using the words 'two', 'four', 'plus', and 'equals'.  The latter alternative
would seem the more helpful unless you are interested in curtailing discussion
immediately.

   In the same way, when a congregation wants to call itself Jewish and wants
to say that it does not believe in God, I think what is called for is an
inquiry about how they are using words like 'belief', 'Jewish', and even
'God'.  If their understanding of those words combined with their statement
can fit into some ways of reading Judaism, I think they should be so
understood.  One learns early in many disciplines not to trust the explicit
statements in prefaces about the author's beliefs but instead to see how those
beliefs are used in the course of his work.  My plea was that before rejecting
certain believers out of hand, we try to understand what their beliefs amount
to.

Thomas Drucker

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Date: Mon, 21 Sep 92 18:55:59 EDT
From: CARIAN@american.edu (Rabbi Charles Arian)
Subject: More on Jewish Missionaries

I want to recount a disturbing incident which occured this past Thursday
evening.

I am teaching a conversion course at a Northern Virginia Conservative
synagogue, along with the rabbi of that congregation. This past Thursday
evening we met with the students in the course and asked each of them to share
with the group their reasons for taking the course.

One of the students is a non-Jewish woman married to an Israeli man. She told
us that she had approached two Reform rabbis and each had essentially told her
not to bother converting because "we accept intermarried couples and your
children will be Jewish anyway because we accept patrilineal descent."

I hasten to add that I have no verification that this woman was told what she
says she was told. Perhaps she misinterpreted the statements of the two
rabbis. But I must also say that I find her statement believable in light of
the fairly well demonstrated fact that conversions are down in the Reform
movement subsequent to the adoption of the patrilineal principle, and the
increasing attention being paid to the situation in which non-Jewish spouses
are accepted into leadership positions in congregations without any sort of
conversion process.

I hope that the UAHC will help emphasize the fact that conversion is still the
most desirable outcome in cases of intermarriage.

Rabbi Charles Arian
CARIAN@american.edu

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Date: Wed, 23 Sep 1992 17:51:41 -0700
From: Daniel Kodmur <dkodmur@ocf.berkeley.edu>
Subject: Rabbinical Odyssey

Since I was little, my Jewish identity has been a source of great struggle and
strife for me. As the descendant of both devout Jews and anti-clerical
atheists, I was never sure which camp I belonged in. Out of respect for my
grandmother and perhaps out of guilt for their own fairly secular lifestyles,
my parents first decided that we should belong to our neighborhood shul. I
soon discovered that Orthodoxy was not for me; the shul was decrepit, and the
teachers threw strange guilt trips on me. For example, every October, they
would rake me over coals of hellfire for daring to participate in Halloween,
which was, after all, nothing but a filthy pagan holiday.  I was too busy
trying to have a decent social life, too worried about how my life as a
disabled child would turn out, to worry my head over the theological
implications of trick-or-treating, so I decided I wanted out. Though I don't
remember finding out about them, I suppose my parents had their own
dissatisfactions with the congregation, and we decided to go elsewhere. I was
ten years old, and I was about to embark on a cultural adventure that would
consume several years of my life and nearly cause me a multitude of nervous
breakdowns.

We joined a major Reform congregation. Not just a, but the major one in Los
Angeles. The senior rabbi was someone I idolized. He had been a friend of
Presidents and a pioneering figure in twentieth- century Reform Judaism. He
would regale us youngsters with tales of cycling in Santa Barbara with
Einstein and of being offered an MGM producing job by L.B. Mayer himself.
Though I loved the stories because I knew all the names he was dropping, I
also enjoyed them because the rabbi was old and famous enough to say whatever
the hell he wanted. With one curmudgeonly phrase and a flourish of his hand,
he could demolish every sacred cow in sight. He would always tell us that he
held nothing in higher esteem than the value of reason and the power of the
individual human mind.

It was certainly a great shtick, but it was all for show. The synagogue had
taken on many of the rabbi's own characteristics, but they were mostly the
wrong ones. Instead of mimicking the conspiratorial sense of fun with which he
befriended so many of us, the temple seemed to be doing everything it could to
alienate the students in its religious school. Rather than putting into
practice something of the rabbi's feistily anarchistic spirit, the synagogue
seemed obsessed with the glories of its past and the power of its image, two
signs that it was not willing to recognize the implicit challenges of the
future. Students dropped out of religious school with a speed and a
frustration that would make Berkeley's retention rate seem miraculous by
comparison. I stayed, because I was enjoying myself, and because even then, I
realized that I believed in a Judaism built on a set of conscious, informed
choices. Just because so many of my fellow students were using the concept of
choice as an excuse for jettisoning everything did not mean the ideal was less
valid for me. So I pressed on, but life was not getting any easier.

As I grew older and found out more about my synagogue, even some of my few
remaining illusions faded. I began to realize that the old rabbi's
anti-establishment rhetoric was merely agitation, a way of continuing to
matter to others by keeping them amused and irritated.  In reality, he was the
establishment, and the only establishment he was against was anybody else's.
All the stories I loved were totally canned, replicable at a moment's notice.
These revelations were not crushing disappointments to me, however harshly I
might be remembering them now. They made me sad, not because our rabbi was an
inferior human being, but because he had changed with age.  Though there had
doubtless been many decades when he had thought in terms of raising hell and
moving forward, now he acted mostly as a living reminder of a distant era, a
time of power, prestige, and omnipresent high spirits.

Ironically, just when I was learning about the complex and ambiguous reality
behind the image of my rabbi and my synagogue, I became one of my temple's
most stalwart defenders. You may ask, how does such an ambivalent Jew become
such a cheerleader? That I can tell you in one word: anti-Semitism. Did I go
to a school in Bed-Stuy or Harlem, surrounded by the progeny of the Nation of
Islam? Try a high school smack in the middle of the most Jewish neighborhood
in Los Angeles. No non-Jew has ever called me a name because of my religion;
that signal honor has been left to some of my fellow Jews.  Because I was
proud of my synagogue, with all its manifold faults, I was held to answer for
its supposed crimes against Judaism by my Conservative and Orthodox
classmates. They brought out all the garbage that had ever been dredged up
within the Jewish community against my temple. Much of it was true, but it was
the kind of truth that would have required an explanation of how such negative
things, however irresponsible, had been part of a particular moment in the
history of Reform Judaism. My friends at school had no desire to hear any
mitigating tales about the development of a faith they considered
illegitimate. The ones I got along with would only tease me periodically about
being a goy; the others would look at me with profound suspicion, especially
after I was elected President of the school's Jewish Student Union. Each time
I would forget a fast day, they would look at me with shock and then say,
"Well, of course, why should you know?"

It bothered me that during the same time I was taking such abuse on behalf of
my temple in high school, the temple itself was treating me like some kind of
undesirable agitator. It hurt me that at the same time I was trying to make
the place live up to its ideals and its responsibilities as an arena for
meaningful Judaism, my affiliation and my identity were being derided as
meaningless by the members of my other community. By the end of high school, I
had had enough.  I wanted to take a vacation from Jewish activism for a while.
My synagogue had taken a lot out of me and my family; it had given back much
in return, especially through its summer camp, but it still wasn't enough. I
was burned out. I resolved that I was never again going to get involved in
Jewish religious politics. I no longer wanted to be in the middle, taking heat
from both sides. This was my commitment as I went off to college.

Self-imposed apathy was a condition I found almost distressingly easy to
maintain as an undergraduate. Most of the people active in Hillel at my
university seemed so consumed by it that they had no discernible other lives.
As for campus Zionist activities, the clarion call from the Israel Action
Committee to defend the integrity of the Jewish State did not reach me at all.
Much as I tried to, I just could not get upset every time some impassioned
Palestinian advocate wrote a biased editorial for the school paper. If Israeli
integrity was indeed under attack, it had much more to fear from the actions
of Ariel Sharon and his cronies than it did from anything printed in a
self-important yet mostly ridiculous campus newspaper.

Amidst all this jaded bitterness my decision to go to Israel junior year might
seem strange, but it had its own kind of logic. What I was sick of was not
Judaism and Zionism, but America's responses to and versions of them. I wanted
to go to the source and see what all the fuss was about. You think I would
have learned from experience that believing in images and propaganda was a
recipe for disappointment, but nooooooo! I bought the Brooklyn Bridge again;
when I boarded that plane for Tel Aviv in July of 1985, I thought I was in an
El Al commercial. I thought I was going home.

A lot of people have told me that being in Israel had helped them figure out
who they were. That happened for me too, but in a more indirect way. Israel
allowed me, in typically affirming fashion, to figure out who I was not. Far
from feeling secure in the homeland of Judaism, I found myself back in the old
high-school defensive mode; religious and secular Israelis alike found Reform
Judaism bizarre and ridiculous, the former seeing it as a perversion, the
latter viewing it as a weak, gutless, and therefore typically Diaspora
compromise with the forces of reaction.  I had expected hostility from Arabs,
but instead I got it in my own backyard.

One good thing emerged from my trip to Israel. I had spent so much time
defending the validity of Reform that I found my belief in it had redoubled. I
felt within me a fervor that had been dormant for years. I wanted to be a part
of it. I wanted to prevent Jewish apathy and Jewish burnout. I wanted Jewish
children of the future to end up wiser and more committed rather than becoming
lost and embittered souls. Basically, I wanted to be Holden Caulfield in a
synagogue.  After all, I thought to myself, the rabbi was everything I wanted
to be. A writer, a teacher, a public figure, an actor, a counselor, a rabbi
has many hats, and I was so afraid of limiting my future that I wanted a
career whose possibilities were wide-open. I was considering graduate school
in history, but I did not know how Jewish my life would be if I were teaching
about Henry James or Henry Adams. Inside my head, the teasing epithet goy
echoed constantly. I saw in my mind the faces of all those youngsters who had
ditched religious school for Little League or AYSO, and I resolved not to be
among them. So I applied for rabbinical school, plunging ahead with bounding
energy and total honesty about my struggles with my religious identity.

The weeks passed, and I waited. The response came: a form rejection letter,
with a warm and kindly personal note from the dean of admissions, letting me
know he was available if I wanted to talk. We did talk, and though I disagreed
with him at the time, in the intervening years, I have come to recognize how
right he was. He told me, "Look, being a rabbi is not an excuse to do a bunch
of things. It is a very specific job, and you don't have that specific
commitment. It seems as if you are hoping that the job will help you structure
your life, when you should really come to the job as a structured person and
make of it what you can. In spite of what you might think, it is not all fun
and games. Being a rabbi is very tough work."

A few summers ago, I worked at my synagogue doing research. I was able to
observe my rabbis at close range, and I now realize that, far from being the
wide-open job I had envisioned, being a rabbi at a major congregation was very
much like being part of a corporation.  Not all rabbis are the famous or
infamous celebrities about whom stories will be told for generations; many of
them are hyperdedicated, overcommitted public servants who must balance their
personal lives with a job that threatens to swallow up their identity and all
their time.  Though my old rabbi made his life seem like an effortless party,
I know now that he could afford to look like he was having the time of his
life because he was surrounded by hardworking colleagues and aided by a truly
superhuman secretary!

Knowing what I know now, I do not think I would so rashly throw myself into
pursuing a rabbinical career. Ironically, however, my major motivation for
becoming a rabbi has evaporated. I no longer feel that a Jewish career is the
sole path away from an overly secular lifestyle.  Haunted by ghosts of
alienation and fears of assimilation all my life, I now realize that a Jewish
life is not what others say it is. It is what I make it Whether I am working
at my synagogue as a historian or being an active part of JSU here at Cal, I
am leading a Jewish life. My parents need not have worried about my drifting
away from Judaism. I may have been hibernating for a while, but I have never
been away.  As I finish writing, I wonder what my old rabbi would think of my
life now. Whenever he would see me, he would bellow goodnaturedly, "There goes
our little Laurence Olivier [or alternately, F. Lee Bailey]!"What would he
think? Would he be scandalized by some things? Probably. Would he be proud of
other things? Definitely, for he was above all an individualist, someone who
passionately carved his own path and his own meaning out of the heritage he
had been given. I hope the same might be said of me someday, and it is a
destiny I wish fondly on all of us.

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"It is not our task as liberal Jews to complain about the Orthodox attitude or to be bullied by it, but rather to choose our legitimate path according to the inner logic and development of liberal Judaism" (Rabbi Walter Jacob)

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