Davening While Lost

As I was sitting in bed reading The Kosher Pig And Other Curiosities of Modern Jewish Life by Richard J. Israel, I came across a quote in the chapter “Speed Davening” that really stirred me and has moved me to blog.  It reads, “The best we can do is initiate prayer in our bumbling incompetent ways and, like the illiterate little boy in the Hasidic story who offers G-d the letters of the alphabet, hope that the One who is the Source of all words, will rearrange them in the way that seems best.”  I just love this.  It’s frankly the way I feel sometimes when I daven.  Sometimes I know that I want to daven, and I want to daven sometimes for something in particular, but I just can’t find the right words to express it.  It’s those times when I feel like I’d be better off to be like that little boy – just throw whatever letters or words I can at G-d and hope that he somehow knows what I’m driving at.  It’s at these moments that I can believe that G-d knows what is in my heart, knows what I am trying to say, like some cosmic mind reader who just knows.  It’s these moments that I believe that G-d can pull emotions and wishes and dreams, fears and hurts and wounds, straight from my heart to his.  Somehow he knows.  We throw words out there, sometimes we even throw just letters out there, and somehow he can unscramble them and put them back together into our desires and prayers.

Happy Hanukkah!

Well everyone, tonight begins Hanukkah, the festival of lights!  I am more excited for this holiday this year than I have been in a long time.  Why?  This Hanukkah marks my husband’s first Hanukkah as a Jew.  He hasn’t technically completed his conversion yet, but he has a Jewish grandfather and has decided to live his life as a Jew, so I’m counting him as a Jew.  Although we were together last year, he hadn’t really assumed an identity as a Jew, but this year he has.  I have spent time carefully choosing his Hanukkah gifts (in my family we do one gift each night, building up to the biggest present on the last night) and I can’t wait to give them to him.  Happy Hanukkah everyone!!!

P.S. Got a great laugh out of this blog post this morning!  If you want a chuckle check it out!http://judylobo.wordpress.com/2009/12/11/hanukkah-shmanukkah-5770/

Hair Covering: My Journey

On Thursday I recieved my first headband fall (see picture of the product at the left, although that’s not me wearing it) which I wore when my husband and I went to see the Trans-Siberian Orchestra on Friday night.  I never in my life thought that I would buy anything that I bought off of a wig website. Then again, I never thought I would be covering my hair for religious practice either. As a figure skater for 14 years, I was accustomed to wearing hairpieces for things like competitions and testing and whatnot; I also have worn hairpieces (a very long ponytail) for things like sorority formal to make myself look prettier (below) and once I even wore a long wig on Halloween as part of my costume (my boyfriend at the time said I looked so different that he felt like he was cheating on me).  I’ve always used them strategically to achieve a certain look that I couldn’t otherwise because my hair was short.  I remember very well an incident at a synchronized skating competition where my team was doing a certain move and someone hit me by accident in the back of the head, right where my hair piece was; I thought that the hairpiece I was wearing to make me look like I had a bun was going to go flying off and skittering around the rink like a ferret (thus the nickname my team gave my hairpiece).

Me at my 2006 sorority formal wearing a long (fake) ponytail.

I have never, however, worn a hairpiece in order to hide my own hair due to religious reasons. I never even considered it growing up. Then, after I met my husband and started rediscovering Judaism, I read a lot of articles and blogs about hair covering and something about it just spoke to me on a deep level. I’m still trying to figure out why, and I’m not sure I’ll be able to. I believe that my observance on this part is twofold: one is that I like the idea that there are things that are specifically reserved for my husband’s eyes (I’m not so sure how sensual my hair is though) and two is that I am just getting very, very tired of the superficiality of the American culture. I hate being overlooked or looked down on because I’m overweight; I can’t stand how everything nowadays is advertised using sex; I really despise with a passion how women are objectified in the media and advertising world. It really just drives me up a wall.  I want to throw something at my TV every time I see a GoDaddy.com commerical and I flat out refuse to watch rap videos because I am so disgusted with the way women are portrayed.  I will admit, I have used my sizeable *ahem* assets to my advantage in the past and frankly I usually have a pretty tough time de-emphasizing them (not that I really want to most of the time) as they are pretty good sized.  However, I have always gotten more of what I wanted due to the fact that I have brains rather than just a chest.  I am very proud of my intelligence and I am extremely saddened by how women are portrayed in society.  Anyway, I think part of my desire to cover my hair is because I choose to focus on intelligence, logic, my studies and things that are far less superficial.  It’s difficult in a city like Miami where people are so focused on the superficial, but I do manage to do it and I feel that covering my hair helps me focus on what really matters.

Nathan (my "Big Brother"), my husband Andrew and I at a University of Miami basketball game.

Anyway, I’ve been covering my hair with tichels since I started covering my hair and I managed to have about 30 of them I believe now so I manage to match them to just about everything I wear (including my orange one that perfectly matches my UM shirt in the picture at the left) and if all else fails I just throw on a black one and call it a day.  They’re quick to put on, comfortable and cover a multitude of hair sins, including the fact that spiral curls + humidity usually leaves me looking like a Jewish version of Bozo the Clown.  I also happen to really like the way they look on me and they usually let me feel like I have hair, like if I leave them tied with the tails hanging down instead of twisting them into a bun, I can let the tails hang in front of my shoulders or I can flip them back over my shoulders just like I would with hair.  However, there are times when I struggle with what to do with my hair – I want to look pretty for an event, so I want to have my hair down, but how do I do that without showing my real hair?  Well, I found my answer – a headband fall.  It lets me cover my hair while still looking normal and it makes my life a lot easier because my hair has a nasty tendency to frizz up as soon as I’m done straightening it (my fall, of course, does not frizz because it’s synthetic hair).  So how did it go, you might ask?  It went fairly well.  I felt like I had long hair again while still keeping my hair covered, which was a great thing.  However, it was not the most comfortable thing in the world.  The wefted cap has to be tight to stay on properly and the headband has to be right too, so, as you can imagine, this caused a headache for me.  Yeah, it looked pretty, much I’m pretty sure I will be sticking with tichels and maybe some snoods and whatnot in the future.  I’ll probably wear it every so often, but, given the choice between looking like everyone else and being comfortable, but not looking like everyone else, I will take the latter any day of the week.  This is where I’m at right now, but who knows, it may change in the future.

Where I Fall on the Jewish Spectrum

Judaism, like anything else in the world, is not black and white.  There is a spectrum, from liberal to conservative and everything in between.  I took the following from http://www.jewfaq.org/movement.htm, an article titled Judaism 101: Movements of Judaism.  It’s much more complicated than just three paragraphs can explain, but I wanted to put these three paragraphs in so everyone knows what definitions I’m working with here.  The paragraphs are as follows:

“Orthodoxy is actually made up of several different groups. It includes the modern Orthodox, who have largely integrated into modern society while maintaining observance of halakhah (Jewish Law), the Chasidim, who live separately and dress distinctively (commonly, but erroneously, referred to in the media as the “ultra-Orthodox”), and the Yeshivish Orthodox, who are neither Chasidic nor modern. The Orthodox movements are all very similar in belief, and the differences are difficult for anyone who is not Orthodox to understand. They all believe that G-d gave MosesTorah at Mount Sinai. The “whole Torah” includes both the Written Torah (the first five books of the Bible) and the Oral Torah, an oral tradition interpreting and explaining the Written Torah. They believe that the Torah is true, that it has come down to us intact and unchanged. They believe that the Torah contains 613 mitzvot binding upon Jews but not upon non-Jews. This web site is written primarily from the modern Orthodox point of view. The 2000 National Jewish Population Survey (NJPS) performed by the Council of Jewish Federations found that 10% of American Jews identify themselves as Orthodox, including 22% of those who belong to a synagogue.

Reform Judaism does not believe that the Torah was written by G-d. The movement accepts the critical theory of Biblical authorship: that the Bible was written by separate sources and redacted together. Reform Jews do not believe in observance of commandments as such, but they retain much of the values and ethics of Judaism, along with some of the practices and the culture. The original, basic tenets of American Reform Judaism were set down in the Pittsburgh Platform. Many non-observant, nominal, and/or agnostic Jews will identify themselves as Reform when pressed to specify simply because Reform is the most liberal movement, but that is not really a fair reflection on the movement as a whole. There are plenty of Reform Jews who are religious in a Reform way. The NJPS found that 35% of American Jews identify themselves as Reform, including 39% of those who belong to a synagogue. There are approximately 900 Reform synagogues in the United States and Canada.  For more information about Reform Judaism, see The Union of American Hebrew Congregations.

Conservative Judaism grew out of the tension between Orthodoxy and Reform. It was formally organized as the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism in by Dr. Solomon Schechter in 1913, although its roots in the Jewish Theological Seminary of America stretch back into the 1880s. Conservative Judaism maintains that the truths found in Jewish scriptures and other Jewish writings come from G-d, but were transmitted by humans and contain a human component. Conservative Judaism generally accepts the binding nature of halakhah, but believes that the Law should change and adapt, absorbing aspects of the predominant culture while remaining true to Judaism’s values. In my experience, there is a great deal of variation among Conservative synagogues. Some are indistinguishable from Reform, except that they use more Hebrew; others are practically Orthodox, except that men and women sit together. Some are very traditional in substance, but not in form; others are traditional in form but not in substance. This flexibility is deeply rooted in Conservative Judaism, and can be found within their own Statement of Principles, Emet ve-Emunah. The NJPS found that 26% of American Jews identify themselves as Conservative, including 33% of those who belong to a synagogue. There are approximately 750 Conservative synagogues in the world today.”

So, where do I fall?  It’s mildly complicated.  I was raised in a Reform Congregation, but my mother was raised in what was basically an Orthodox shul.  My mother didn’t have a bat mitzvah, there were no women clergy (and still aren’t to my knowledge in that shul, although they have gotten more liberal), and men and women sat separately.  But there was always a seed of rebellion in my family.  My mom always told me the story of how, even in a shul where women and men sat separately, her Zady (grandfather) would always have his family around him – his wife, his sons and daughters, and all his grandchildren.  Now, why was I raised Reform?  My mother married my father, who is not Jewish.  He was raised Catholic but has a a serious aversion to organized religion, so my mother raised my sister and me as Jews, but we weren’t able to join a Conservative synagogue because my father was not Jewish.  Beth Chaim, our synagogue in New Jersey, was a Reform synagogue and would accept my father as a member without conversion.  Currently, my husband and I are members of a Reform shul as well, but we are more Conservative. Why?

Well, let’s take a look at the definition.  They believe the truths and scriptures come from G-d but that there is a human element in them beacuse they were transmitted and written down by humans. That’s precisely what I believe.  I also believe that Law (Halacha) should change and adapt.  Just for me personally, I believe religion is a very personal thing, something that is quite literally between you and G-d.  If you do something without understanding or when you disagree with why it is done, then that observance, as far as I’m concerned, is meaningless.  I’m not impressed by blind faith and I’m not a believer in doing something “because that’s what we’ve always done” or not doing something “because we’ve never done that”.  Judaism is a religion based on knowledge and study and reading, so I take that to heart.  When  I began increasing my Jewish observance, I read and as I did, I started to do what made sense to me to do.  What doesn’t make sense to me, I don’t do, but I always keep my mind open.  However, what is at the core of everything for me in Judaism and being a good person.  I try to follow the guidance given to the Jewish people by G-d but in a way that makes sense to me as a Jew and as a woman.  This is my journey.