Just a plug

Plugging my friend JK's excellent blog Cat Flight of Fancy in honor of unexpectedly running into him at lunch yesterday.

Summer's always hard

Summer is always hard, and I'm not talking about the extreme heat index numbers. For me, summer is the time when I lost those most important to me. Summer is the time when I read about the camp I used to attend and mourn that it is so heteronormative as to verge on homophobic, and is certainly institutionally transphobic. Summer has also become a time where I feel rather lonely.

Last week, the anniversary of my love's death hit pretty much as hard as it ever does. And all I wanted was to be back at OSRUI, taking refuge in the Tzofim Beit Teva or Tiferet's Ski Chalet. (Those who call it the Beit Am are being brainwashed by an attitude of Hebrew language supremacy at camp that I find detrimental, but that is perhaps for another post). I remembered one night in 1996. It was the first year of Tiferet workshop and the Ski Chalet did not yet exist. Tiferet used Metros and showered at Chalutzim. On this particular night, we had programming in the Art Center, not yet widely called by its Hebrew equivalent. The skies turned black all of a sudden and it started pouring. The lightning was very close, and we could not return to our cabins. We were preteens (that was the word before tweens for all you youngin's) not all scared but not too comfortable either. However, the songleader Josh Rabinowitz and the unit head Danny Maseng had their guitars and played us music until we fell asleep on the dance studio floor. And I found myself listening to my recording of Danny playing B'shem Hashem on loop not because his music is so amazing as to eliminate the pain of loss, but rather because at least I wouldn't be scared. His voice and that Carlebach tune combine in a way that still puts me at ease fifteen years later. And I missed camp, even its heteronormative aspects.

The most ironic element of missing camp wasn't its heteronormativity. It was that when I received the letter from my love's parents telling me of her death, the last place I wanted to be was OSRUI, where I had no access to modern conviences like the internet and the telephone. When I was in Chalutzim I spent half my camp summer cursing that I went to camp in the first place. Now when I have to deal with what happened, camp is the first place I think about, and I remembered writing my love a lengthy letter from Tiferet in 1996 describing what an amazing storm had rumbled through camp and how Danny and Josh had distracted us with wonderful music ranging from the chasidishe to James Taylor.

My Machon year at camp, I had a terrible time. I couldn't be out to staff or to campers, and I found myself much more aware of the institutional aspects of camp's homophobia and transphobia. I am told by those who have been there more recently that the situation is getting better, but I don't really believe them. The evidence is in the programming offered to campers, but that doesn't really help if counselors are still discouraged from coming out or discussing their own personal experiences of queerness as an identity. Obviously discussing personal sexual experiences with campers is bad, regardless of the genders of those involved. I resolved then not to go back until camp started moving rapidly in better directions of inclusiveness. My year on staff was my worst year at camp ever, mostly because the place I called home more than home for 10 years became a place that deliberately marginalized people like me.

But somehow, despite all this current animosity, OSRUI is still home for me. It's still the place where I first thought about becoming a rabbi. It's still the place where Judaism started making sense as a practice in addition to whatever religion was. It's the place I learned the power of music and art, not just from Ohad and Danny, but from the devastation my counselors experienced when Jerry Garcia died. (You may think I'm joking, but I'm not.) OSRUI is the place I learned about supporting my friends, and it's the place I learned how to give back massages. OSRUI is the place I learned that it's ok for a Jew to be an atheist, and it's also the place I learned to relate to God. OSRUI is the place I learned conflict resolution, but also the place I learned about solidarity. 70 Chalutzimniks chanting around the Migdal because there was no Israeli dancing our first Shabbat that summer may have been my first act of civil disobedience. OSRUI is the place I felt most alienated growing up with one Jewish parent (although there were lots of campers like me in that regard), but it is also the place where I first divulged my queerness to another person, a counselor whom I knew to be gay even though he never came out to me. My friends and even some former counselors and faculty from OSRUI populate half the contacts in my cell-phone, and I know that the bonds I have with old camp friends will last for longer than I can manage to keep in contact with those friends, although facebook has been a great help. But it pains me that I call a place that marginalizes me by omission home.

Of course, it's easier to talk about camp than loss. But what can I say about losing my love that I haven't said about a million times before?

Indepence Day

I narrowly avoided an argument with my roommate yesterday. The ginkgo girl moved out in the middle of June and one of my other friends moved in with me. There are very few arguments I do not wish to have. There are very few arguments I do not wish to have, but there are three or four that I cannot have and be civil at the same time. One of those is about the founding moments of the United States of America. When my roommate suggested that celebrating Independence Day was irrelevant to modern American life, it took all my strength not to go ballistic. I wanted to throw it back in her face and say that her being able to say that without fear of repercussions is reason enough to appreciate our freedom and form of government. I wanted to say some choice words too, but I simply suggested that I didn't want to have the argument and moved on.

We take our freedom and the struggle for our independence for granted now, perhaps because we feel historically removed from the situation. None of us were there for the continental congress when the Declaration of Independence was signed. We are so far removed from these struggles that when a survey was conducted in the 1960s asking people to identify the source of the first line of the Declaration of Independence, most thought it was from the charter for the radical organization Students for a Democratic Society. The line reads: "When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a descent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation." Usually, this confusion is used to point to the failures of American e ducation, which it certainly points to. However, the sentiments of revolution so eloquently captured in Thomas Jefferson's words are relevant not only to the American revolution, but to many subsequent ones.

I don't think the USA is the best country in the world, or that we always live up to the ideals that we have as a nation. But I do know that we are always expanding those ideals: voting is no longer restricted to rich white men, and we abolished slavery. And after the civil war which split our nation in two, President Lincoln assured "malice toward none" who had been in the confederacy. We are in struggles to expand equality further in this country. So, today, I will try not to take the freedom I enjoy for granted, and renew my commitment to helping expand the rights of those who live around me.

Parashat B'Chukotai: Doing Honest Business With God

Parashat B'Chukotai is the last Torah Portion in Leviticus. It starts with a discussion of reward and punishment based on whether the Israelites follow the laws about the Sabbatical and Jubilee years. Then it moves toward laws that seem even more egregious than consequences of bad behavior and our failure to be adequate stewards of the earth. The Torah discusses the various worths of different sorts of persons in the context of vowing the value of a person. As modern readers, we get bogged down in the difference between personal worth and economic worth, and the gender discrepancies involved. It is bothersome, understandably, that young able-bodied males are worth 50 shekels whereas females are only worth 30 shekels. However, often our conversation gets bogged down in the gender discrepancies, and once we have resolved them theologically or historically.

If for some reason, we get past the gender issues in our analysis, and in a 5 to 15 minute d'var torah they make an easy target, we then throw the entire situation out because this ritual was associated with the Temple cult. It's easier to call a whole practice outdated than to wrestle with what is good or bad inside the practice.

Once we get past these issues, a clear moral question comes to mind. Can we really put a price on any human life? In this sense the passage is inspiring of - what's the word? - righteous anger. How dare my precious scripture put a price on any human being? What does it mean to say human beings made in God's image are worth some sort of finite monetary value? This train of thought is important to consider. Is Torah contradicting itself here? And if so, which value supersedes the other? I say the value of humanity created b'tzelem elohim trumps all.

But this moral question is still a too-easy answer for what Torah is discussing here. Individuals are making vows worth a person to God, but doing business with a non-corporeal entity always requires a human broker. In this case, the priests act as brokers between God and humanity. Emotions run high if you have vowed the value of a spouse at war for her safe return. Torah recognizes that the practice of the business of vowing the value of a person is tempting but dangerous. People who have been gifted the safety of a loved one are in a vulnerable place. Priests may have been tempted to extort monetary amounts much greater than those outlined in parashat b'chukotai for these sorts of vows. The monetary amounts outlined ensure that no greater price may be demanded in such a situation, protecting society's most vulnerable from predatory practices. While the specifics may need to be left to their historical context, I believe this practice is a form of God using honest weights and measures in business. As remarkable as it seems, God is committing to following God's own holiness code.

Naivete

The first time I said "I love you" I was fourteen and I was late in saying it. My love had been saying it creatively for a few months, and I knew I loved her, but I was a little dense and didn't realize that she was saying "I love you." When I did finally realize it, I felt even more loved by her than I had before, mostly because of her enduring patience.

My fourteen-year-old self had no idea how my life would turn out, and assumed that we would last for ever. Death cannot stop true love. I was naive then, but I am disillusioned now. Honestly, I'm not sure which is better.