So here are some basics to the background of the project.
Jews have followed the same rules for centuries upon centuries. Some of the practices that some Jews still keep (take the Sabbath day, for instance) are literally ancient.
The world that we live in now is so, so, so different than the world that these ideas were originally put together in. Why do we still follow them? (and by we, I don't really mean "we" - I certainly don't follow them). Are they still applicable today? Do we help or hurt ourselves and others by following the rules (and maybe even by following them to different extents).
I think that who I am (as a half-er, as I usually say) says a great deal about where the Jewish community in North America is. Alan Dershowitz argues in The Vanishing American Jew that intermarriage and assimilation are ending Judaism in America. So really, these two trends (upon which my existence is dependent) are killing Jewish culture in (North) America, according to Dershowitz. I own the book but I haven't been able to actually read it past maybe the first 20 pages because it makes me too angry. Anyways (as far as my understanding goes), he is saying that since Jews are accepted in general (North) American society (e.g. there isn't any systemic discrimination anymore - discrimination in employment, social club participation, and that sort of thing) we have begun to lose our roots. I have to say that I wouldn't be surprised if I could never finish his book because that idea makes me so frustrated. It makes me feel like I am unwanted in Jewish society, which I think is opposite to how I've felt about it being raised the way I was, even at arm's length of any Jewish community.
Enough about me though. How the project will work is that I will look into one (or a few - if they really go together) commandment and try and see how one might practice it and try and figure out what the point of it might have been originally. And then I will try and theorize to see if and how it can address issues that are going on today.
I would also like to see if I can get some other people to weigh in about what I'm talking about. I might be able to ask some questions of a few Rabbis, friends and family members who know about Judaism, and who knows who else!
Hopefully I will figure some things out and provide some interesting (and maybe even helpful) commentary. I would really appreciate that if you stumble across any of my thoughts and would like to leave a comment - please do! I would love to engage in some discussion about this because I really don't know what I'm doing or what I'm talking about.
With that, I'd like to leave you with a quote that I found in a great book today (Hope, not Fear: A Path to Jewish Renaissance, by Edgar M. Bronfman and Beth Zasloff). I started reading this today on the train and after about 15 or 20 pages I had already highlighted two passages and had goosebumps about a million times.
(In the preface to the new edition, page xi)
"The signs that the American Jewish community has indeed begun on a path to Jewish renaissance can be read not in the financial health of Jewish organizations, but in the energy and commitment of Jewish youth"
I would like to see us (young people, but specifically young Jewish people) take charge of our own destiny and do what we can to make this world what we think it can and maybe should be. I think that we have great potential and we often waste it, so I suppose this blog is my way to see if any of these ancient Jewish ideas (ideals?) can be translated into action that helps us make this world a more amazing place. We've inherited a lot of good and a lot of bad from our parents. Let's see if we can do a little better than they did, shall we?
Wish me luck folks - and keep me posted about your thoughts in the comments section.
Saturday 31 March 2012
Who am I?
Firstly, when I say "who am I?" in the title of this post, I do not mean it in a philosophical way. I just mean that this post is a way of me to share what events have happened in my life that I feel have led me to this project. I really hope that I will answer the "who am I?" question in more philosophical detail a little bit by doing this crazy project, but I'm trying not to expect it.
This project is very close to my heart. And to who I believe I will be one day.
I just wanted to give this project as honest and comprehensive an introduction as I could muster so that you, my hopeful potential readers, have a decent understanding of where I'm coming from.
To start with, my father was raised Jewish and my mother Christian. My whole life I've been "half-Jewish" (whatever that actually means) or Christian or Jewish or somewhere in the middle. I know little about either of these religions, at least from my parents. I did attend a Lutheran church for about five years when I was a teenager, so I have a decent understanding of Christianity from that point of view, but Judaism is far more difficult to learn in a way that you can really understand it, from my point of view. Really, it's not that difficult to walk into a church and get what I always viewed as the main thing to know about Christianity. Accept Jesus Christ as your Saviour and you are saved; you are a Christian. The rest is really details, as far as my understanding ever was (although attending other, more traditional churches may give a different understanding, I might think). Judaism, especially as a religion (less so with the cultural aspects, I find) is much more complicated: there is always so much more to learn. I feel like these details, when summed up, give more of an idea of what religious Judaism is about. I don't mean this as a compliment or a sick burn to either; it's no better, no worse, just different (like a nominal variable, for those of you who took Social Statistics with Dr. Linda Henderson).
Anyways, that is all to say that I don't understand much about religious Judaism. I separate this, in my mind, from the cultural aspects of Judaism because I am a cultural Jew. My mother, even, is a cultural Jew. This is far harder to explain, but easier for me to understand. Also something I will address a little later in this introduction.
So, back to religious Judaism - I have had little experience in synagogues, only having gone to actual religious services three or four times for High Holidays (Rosh Hashanah/Yom Kippur - the Jewish New Year and the Day of Atonement), and never understood much of what was going on. Essentially, my synagogue experience is not eating for a day for reasons I do not really understand and trying to follow along as best I could with the Hebrew (there is always an English translation, but that doesn't make you any less lost), standing up when other people stood up, sitting down when other people sat down.... I'm sure you get the picture.
Anyways, I have a Bachelor of Arts degree in Sociology, and in my third year I started to become interested in the sociological study of Canadian Jews because of some papers I wrote for a couple courses, namely on Diasporic and Transnational communities in Canada. Some background - the word "diasporic" or "diaspora", for those of you who do not already know, refers to an ethnic community that is spread all over the world, or at least away from their "homeland" (I use the word homeland in quotation marks because in some cases, like with Jews before 1948, the homeland that is referred to - Israel in the Jews' case - may not exist politically). In any case, Jews are the original example of a diaspora and since then most ethnic communities also have diasporic elements as well.
Part of my journey here has included a great deal of reading about Jews and as many assignments as I could make about Jews in Canada. Through all of this, I started to realize a constant name in the authors' lines of most of the articles I was reading. Dr. Morton Weinfeld is a professor at McGill University and studies North American Jews as his research interest. One very important book to me, written by Dr. Weinfeld, is Like Everyone But Different: The paradoxical success of Canadian Jews. This wonderful book has quite literally changed my life. I would recommend it to anyone on earth, but especially Jewish Canadians. Another book that led me here is called Stars of David, and it is written by Abigail Pogrebin. I'll spare you the reading list, but I just really need to share those two, because it is really where I came to this whole thing from. I will hopefully mention many more along the way of this project, but I would highly recommend those two as a starting point if you're wanting to get inside my head a little.
In the interests of keeping this post a near reasonable length, I will also quickly mention that I live in Calgary, Alberta. Calgary has a fairly small Jewish community. Both of my parents are from Winnipeg, Manitoba (which has the third largest Jewish community in Canada), where we spent a lot of time while I was growing up. That is where my Jewish roots are.
I would be extremely happy to answer any questions you might have about me or this project or really anything, so just comment and let me know.
Thanks so much for stopping by; I hope you take a look through my posts in the future as well.
Next up: what is the project then?
Cheers, L'Chaim,
-L.
This project is very close to my heart. And to who I believe I will be one day.
I just wanted to give this project as honest and comprehensive an introduction as I could muster so that you, my hopeful potential readers, have a decent understanding of where I'm coming from.
To start with, my father was raised Jewish and my mother Christian. My whole life I've been "half-Jewish" (whatever that actually means) or Christian or Jewish or somewhere in the middle. I know little about either of these religions, at least from my parents. I did attend a Lutheran church for about five years when I was a teenager, so I have a decent understanding of Christianity from that point of view, but Judaism is far more difficult to learn in a way that you can really understand it, from my point of view. Really, it's not that difficult to walk into a church and get what I always viewed as the main thing to know about Christianity. Accept Jesus Christ as your Saviour and you are saved; you are a Christian. The rest is really details, as far as my understanding ever was (although attending other, more traditional churches may give a different understanding, I might think). Judaism, especially as a religion (less so with the cultural aspects, I find) is much more complicated: there is always so much more to learn. I feel like these details, when summed up, give more of an idea of what religious Judaism is about. I don't mean this as a compliment or a sick burn to either; it's no better, no worse, just different (like a nominal variable, for those of you who took Social Statistics with Dr. Linda Henderson).
Anyways, that is all to say that I don't understand much about religious Judaism. I separate this, in my mind, from the cultural aspects of Judaism because I am a cultural Jew. My mother, even, is a cultural Jew. This is far harder to explain, but easier for me to understand. Also something I will address a little later in this introduction.
So, back to religious Judaism - I have had little experience in synagogues, only having gone to actual religious services three or four times for High Holidays (Rosh Hashanah/Yom Kippur - the Jewish New Year and the Day of Atonement), and never understood much of what was going on. Essentially, my synagogue experience is not eating for a day for reasons I do not really understand and trying to follow along as best I could with the Hebrew (there is always an English translation, but that doesn't make you any less lost), standing up when other people stood up, sitting down when other people sat down.... I'm sure you get the picture.
Anyways, I have a Bachelor of Arts degree in Sociology, and in my third year I started to become interested in the sociological study of Canadian Jews because of some papers I wrote for a couple courses, namely on Diasporic and Transnational communities in Canada. Some background - the word "diasporic" or "diaspora", for those of you who do not already know, refers to an ethnic community that is spread all over the world, or at least away from their "homeland" (I use the word homeland in quotation marks because in some cases, like with Jews before 1948, the homeland that is referred to - Israel in the Jews' case - may not exist politically). In any case, Jews are the original example of a diaspora and since then most ethnic communities also have diasporic elements as well.
Part of my journey here has included a great deal of reading about Jews and as many assignments as I could make about Jews in Canada. Through all of this, I started to realize a constant name in the authors' lines of most of the articles I was reading. Dr. Morton Weinfeld is a professor at McGill University and studies North American Jews as his research interest. One very important book to me, written by Dr. Weinfeld, is Like Everyone But Different: The paradoxical success of Canadian Jews. This wonderful book has quite literally changed my life. I would recommend it to anyone on earth, but especially Jewish Canadians. Another book that led me here is called Stars of David, and it is written by Abigail Pogrebin. I'll spare you the reading list, but I just really need to share those two, because it is really where I came to this whole thing from. I will hopefully mention many more along the way of this project, but I would highly recommend those two as a starting point if you're wanting to get inside my head a little.
In the interests of keeping this post a near reasonable length, I will also quickly mention that I live in Calgary, Alberta. Calgary has a fairly small Jewish community. Both of my parents are from Winnipeg, Manitoba (which has the third largest Jewish community in Canada), where we spent a lot of time while I was growing up. That is where my Jewish roots are.
I would be extremely happy to answer any questions you might have about me or this project or really anything, so just comment and let me know.
Thanks so much for stopping by; I hope you take a look through my posts in the future as well.
Next up: what is the project then?
Cheers, L'Chaim,
-L.
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