Our opponents claim that this bill which alienates the Diaspora, will unify Israel. We have a few questions as to how the Conversion Bill will help Israelis from the FSU whom MK Rotem assures me will all be converted within a year after its passage.

First, since the local courts created by the proposed law still find ultimate authority with the same rabbis, what will change?

Second, Members of Knesset tell me this bill is too little too late. In Israel’s free and open society where extremists have given Jewish religion a bad image, many young Israelis don’t care whether a potential spouse is halakhically Jewish. The coercive ultra religious system is a total failure that spends tens of millions of NIS to yield only 1500 converts per year. Of those, 200 are Masorti, who receive no funding. The way to really “solve this problem,” is to have options for multiple streams and for the indigenous Israeli expressions that will only flower in a non-coercive system.

Third, the newly revised bill includes a new provision that further strangles the Law of Return by explicitly defining the observance of mitzvot according to extremist rabbis who will now have sole legislative authority.

via TheTisch: Rabbi Menachem Creditor’s Blog: from the Rabbinical Assembly: “Open Letter to the Prime Minister from Rabbi Julie Schonfeld”.

I am fasting this year especially because of this terrible bill in the Israeli Knesset.  Read the article and text of it and send an email to Prime Minister Netanyahu.

Here are some readings:  one two

ERIC LESSER LOOKED out over the containers of Thai carryout, the bottles of wine and the Shabbat candles. “Should we do Shalom Aleichem?” he asked, and the whole table began singing a warbled but hearty version of the song that welcomes Shabbat. In Lesser’s group house of Obama staff assistants, Friday-night Shabbat dinners have become something of a ritual, a chance to relax and spend a few hours with friends, reflecting on the week. Sometimes it’s just the four housemates, sometimes it’s a large group from the campaign trail or the White House, sometimes it’s friends from college and people who happen to be in town.

Once it was even their bosses — “the Bosses Dinner,” they still call it. David Axelrod, Lesser’s boss, was out of town, but others came: Jake Levine’s boss, Carol Browner, the White House coordinator of energy-and-climate policy; her husband and her sister; and Ziskend’s boss, Jared Bernstein, the vice president’s chief economist, along with his wife and their two young kids. Linda Douglass, then the director of communications for the White House office of health reform, was also there.

Around the table on a late September night, the weekend of Yom Kippur, were the four housemates along with Samantha Tubman….

At the end of every Friday dinner, the tradition is that everyone goes around the table and says something from the past week for which they’re grateful. Over Whole Foods gingerbread and brownies, Lesser looked at his watch and announced, “O.K., we’ve got to do this and then get out of here.” They all had other friends they were trying to see that night.

….

… Lesser talked about going home for Rosh Hashanah and how it was nice to be reminded that “there are people there who I care about and who care about me and who don’t care about thestimulus package in Washington.”

Finally, they all finished saying what they were grateful for, and the group filed out of the house into the misty night….

via All the Obama 20-Somethings – NYTimes.com.

I enjoyed this little Easter Egg about Jewish holidays in the Obama Administration. Very nice.

His solution is essentially thus:  If the Orthodox get free access to the kotel at all hours, so should the non-Orthodox, at their own section.  If the Orthodox get equipment and prayer-related paraphernalia from the government, so should the non-Orthodox.  But, if it is an arrestable offense to pray in a non-Orthodox manner in the Orthodox section, what legal enforcement will there be to protect the non-Orthodox section’s right to prayer as they see fit?

(Though this still doesn’t address that Women of the Wall is an Orthodox group)

IS THE ENTIRE KOTEL PLAZA REALLY A SYNAGOGUE?

Volume 4, Issue No. 3, February 2010

Rabbi Prof. David Golinkin

….

a. the lower area near the Kotel will continue to serve as an Orthodox synagogue not because it was before 1948 – it was not - but because it has been one since 1967 and it will be impossible to turn back the clock after 42 years;

b. the upper plaza should be turned over to the National Parks Authority or the City of Jerusalem either by a government decision or by changing the law. Item II above serves as a good precedent for this. The Chief Rabbinate and the Ministry of Religion tried to prevent the Antiquities Authority from excavating the areas south and southwest of the Temple Mount. These areas were then removed from their hegemony and the result was the incredible discoveries of Prof. Mazar and others in the area which is now the Davidson Archaeological Park. The same thing should be done now regarding the upper plaza at the Kotel. It must be turned over to a non-partisan government body before the Rabbi of the Kotel, who is Haredi, turns it into a Haredi synagogue.

c. Robinson’s Arch was designated by the government in 1999 as a synagogue/prayer area for Conservative and Reform Jews and for the Women at the Wall. This should now be reaffirmed or passed as a law by the Knesset. The government should also provide Torah scrolls, siddurim andtalitot and allow use of the area at all hours of the day without paying an entrance fee after 9:15 am.

If this plan is adopted, both Orthodox and non-Orthodox Jews will be able to continue to pray in their respective areas of the Kotel and the IDF and all Jews can continue to hold ceremonies and public events in the upper plaza of the Kotel.

In this way the Kotel can become a source of peace which unites the Jewish people as envisioned in our ancient sources (see Berakhot 30a and parallels).

David Golinkin
Jerusalem
19 Shevat 5770

via Schechter Institute – Responsa in a Moment.

My question is born of my desire to not rely on non-Jews, within a halakhic framework.  If a hotel in Israel has a Jewish doorman, desk clerk, concierge,  janitor, etc. working on Shabbat, from a halakhic perspective, would there be a problem with making use of his/her services?  Is there an acceptable security / service solution that does not rely on non-Jews? (Or if the rooms use a keycard or the grounds have motion-sensor doors and lights…)

I’m not sure what the best solution is. It is certainly an inconvenient, but real, situation.

This is related to my questions about participating on Shabbat or Yom Tov in high-stakes politics for a Jewish civil servant, non-pikuah-nefesh military activity, something with a great hefsed maimon (economic loss), using a financial serve owned or run by a Jew that charges interest, putting in a financial share for an office party that includes non-kosher food, etc.

[T]he National Havurah Committee has just launched a Havurah Resources site to support new and existing havurot and minyanim by collecting and consolidating new and existing online resources. There’s a lot there already: Are you starting a new community? Exploring options for incorporation so that your havurah can collect donations? Interested inlearning to gabbai the Torah service at your minyan? Trying to figure out how to make decisionsin a non-hierarchical community? Looking for ways to plan a text study or engage your community in social justice? It’s all there, along with multiple collections of links to other resources around the web.

via Resources for your community | Jewschool.

Shabbat Parashat Bo

January 23, 2010 / 8 Shevet 5770

By: Reb Mimi Feigelson, Mashpiah Ruchanit

To Be A Temporary Resident of Mitzrayim (Egypt)

Torah Reading:  Exodus 10:1 – 13:16

Haftarah Reading:  Jeremiah 46:13-28

The first three Torah portions of Sefer Sh’mot (the Book of Exodus) are the three portions that invite us to exist in Mitzrayim (Egypt), and it is here that I would invite us to dwell one more moment, despite our natural eagerness to leave the place of our degradation and enslavement.

These three portions are bracketed with the word “Mitzrayim.” Let me explain: One of the best things that I remember learning in high school is what I call ‘bracketed reading’. (This is not a criticism of my teachers but rather a confession as to the frequency and quality of my presence in the classroom…). ‘Bracketed reading’ means, for example, reading the first and last lines of a poem and trying to encompass the totality of the poem through those two lines alone. I have learned to read differently because of this technique – not only to look at the center of the plot, but also what is holding the plot together.

There is an extreme form of this method that I’ve developed and that is to look at the last words of a corpus of writing and ask, ‘Why has the author left us here / lead us to here?’ If you do this with exercise when looking at the five chumashim you will find that God leaves us exactly where we need to be at that moment:
The last two words of Breishit / Genesis are “ba’aron b’Mitzrayim / in a coffin in Egypt.” The entire book of B’reishit, from creation through the establishment of the household of our patriarchs and matriarchs is to lead us to the most constricted, limited, confined place – a coffin in Egypt.
The last two words of Sh’mot / Exodus is “b’chol mas’e'hem / on all of their journeys”. The book of Sh’mot constitutes our journey out of Mitzrayim and toward establishing our identity as we journey through the dessert.
The book of Vayikra / Leviticus ends with “b’har Sinai / at Mount Sinai.” The book of Vayikra teaches us the content of our covenant with God, what standing at Mount Sinai really meant.
The book of Bamidbar / Numbers concludes with “Yarden Yericho / Jordan Jericho” – this book brings us to the border of the Land of Israel. We are not there yet, but we have almost made it, we can see it from afar.
And the last book in the chumash brings us to “kol Yisrael / all of Israel” – it is here that we have all come together, finally united.

When we return specifically to our Torah portion, to “Bo“, it will now be easier to track that the last word of our portion is “M’Mitzrayim / from Egypt,” and if we look at the three opening Torah portions as a complete unit of our life in Mitzrayim we can see that it’s held by the concept of “Mitzrayim”. The last word of Breishit is “b’Mitzrayim,” the last word of our Torah portion is also “m’Mitzrayim.”

The Ishbitzer rebbe, Reb Mordechai Yoseph Lainer of Ishbitza (1800-1853), asks a question that many before him have posed, and many of us continue to address. “Why is it,” he asks, “that we had to stay in Mitzrayim during the ten plagues? Why did we have to see it all and experience it? Why couldn’t the Egyptians have been punished for enslaving us after we had already left?”

His answer is on the one hand hard for us to hear, and on the other hand so psychologically astute that we dare not turn away. The Ishbitzer teaches that not only did we live in Mitzrayim, but we were “IN” Mitzrayim. What does this mean, to be “in Mitzrayim“? ‘Mitzrayim‘ is not only a geographical location. In the Kabalistic and Chassidic traditions it is also a state of consciousness – specifically, a state of contracted consciousness. ‘Yisrael’ like the letters of the words ‘li rosh / my head’ symbolizes expanded consciousness, awareness, expansive thinking, while ‘Mitzrayim‘ like the letters of the words ‘metzar yam / the straits of the ocean,’ symbolize contracted consciousness, limited vision and comprehension. For the Ishbitzer rebbe, we were literally enveloped with a state of ‘Mitzrayim‘, we were, so to speak, ‘in a coffin in Mitzrayim‘ and therefore we needed to go through the plagues alongside the Egyptians. We too needed to experience the awe, fear and trepidation so that we could be cleansed from those Mitzrayim parts of ourselves.

We are often in a rush to get out of uncomfortable situations. We want to solve problems as quickly as we can so that we need not dwell on them. But it appears that bracketing our stay in Mitzrayim with the word ‘Mitzrayim‘ functions as an invitation to actually sit in this space. It seems that the only way out of this constricted state of being is by going through it, not by circumventing it! We can’t overcome limitations that we’ve encountered unless we are willing to own our part in the situation: to be able to name and face our pain, to be able to claim our suffering, to be able to hold our loss. It is only then, when we see ourselves in the light of our darkness that we can truly leave it behind as we walk towards new horizons. We are being asked to dwell in our pain and discomfort so that we will be able to indeed move forward. Without this process, it would appear that we will never be free from that which enslaved us – we would carry it with us, creating new Mitzrayims wherever we journeyed next. We won’t be able to truly leave it behind us. We need to be able to name the emotion so that we can find a remedy to heal it.

It is with this in mind that I ask us all to sit one more moment in this discomfort, to own being a ‘temporary citizen of Mitzrayim,’ so that when we indeed do leave Mitzrayim we can be free. The one last piece, before willing to go back into our personal darknesses, is to also be able to name who the ‘holders of light’ are in our lives. In our story in the chumash we have Shifra and Puah – the midwives, we have Miriam, Bitya, Moshe and Aharon. In order to walk through this process it is imperative, as the Torah itself teaches us, to be able to identify those who hold on to our vision for us, those who see redemption and freedom on the other side, witnesses of true liberation. It is with their presence on the other side of the darkness that we are able to march through it.

This Shabbat is an opportunity to sit in our Mitzrayim one last time. In the presence of our bearers of light to own our darkness so that we will be free next week to truly exit that which has held us back for years and years in our own personal Mitzrayim!

Shabbat shalom