by Kung Fu Jew [➚] · Wednesday, October 12th, 2011
+972 Mag is a brilliant idea. Take a dozen lefty Israeli activists, freelance journalists and independent analysts who blog separately in English and then consolidate their personal bloggings together in a sharp, clearly organized portal for the Anglo-speaking world to read first-hand accounts of political action in Israel and the territories. Few blogs on Israel-Palestine are a majority of original reporting and even fewer are as politically diverse as they are. If they blogged about Judaism every once in a while, they may as well be Jewschool’s sibling blog.
Kol Nidrei service at Occupy Wall Street via The Jewish Week
This guestpost is by Mik Moore, a writer and campaign strategist, and the principal partner at Mik Moore Consulting LLC.
This morning I got up, poured myself a bowl of cereal and opened the NYTimes. Eventually I came to David Brooks’ column. A largely forgettable critique of the Occupy Wall Street protests for being insufficiently radical, it included this nugget:
Take the Occupy Wall Street movement. This uprising was sparked by the magazine Adbusters, previously best known for the 2004 essay, “Why Won’t Anyone Say They Are Jewish?” — an investigative report that identified some of the most influential Jews in America and their nefarious grip on policy.
This is classic Brooks. He writes something that appears innocent enough on its face, but is really underhanded, dishonest, and incendiary.
So, what’s going on here? In short, the right is looking for a way to discredit Occupy Wall Street, and so far nothing seems to stick. Hard to portray them as a mob when they are non-violent. Hard to portray them as just a bunch of hippies when so many different people are participating. Hard to portray them as radicals when their critiques are relatively mainstream.
Brooks has a different idea. Why not call them antisemites? Maybe that will slow them down.
For anyone who takes seriously accusations of antisemitism – and I do – this is dangerous. Crying “antisemitism!” when it isn’t there makes it more difficult to combat real antisemitism. It also makes young Jews cynical and older Jews scared.
Because Brooks thinks he’s slick, he doesn’t come out and say the protest organizers are antisemites. He just implies it. And if the tree (Adbusters) is tainted, don’t eat those apples (OWS)! Because what was the nature of Adbusters antisemitism, according to Brooks? “[A]n investigative report that identified some of the most influential Jews in America and their nefarious grip on policy.”
An influential elite! Controling policy! Hey, isn’t that what these folks down on Wall Street say they are protesting? It doesn’t take much to connect Brooks’ dots.
Don’t buy it? You must not listen to Rush Limbaugh. On his radio show, Rush picked up on Brooks’ inference. But unlike Brooks, Rush doesn’t beat around the bush. According to Rush, the 99% are the gentiles. The 1% are the Jews. Wall Street bankers is code for rich Jews. It all makes sense!
Brooks is counting on his well tended reputation to enable him to play the antisemitism card and get away with it. He shouldn’t. What he is doing is divisive. It diminishes real antisemitism. And it ignores the thousands of Jews who are active participants in shaping Occupy Wall Street.
This photograph (above) was taken for The Jewish Week during Kol Nidre services, held across from Zuccotti Park in support of Occupy Wall Street. Their presence alone should suffice as a rebuttal to Brooks’ insufferable insinuation.
Friday October 7th, 7:15 AM: I wake up to a text message. It’s Eli Kasargod-Staub. He wanted to see if we could get together a kol nidrei service like the one being planned in NYC by Mobius et al. We had less than 10 hours before sunset.
8:30am: The facebook invite goes up.
Mid-day: E-mails zip around, people keep inviting folks, RSVPs roll in.
5:30pm: People start rolling in. A torah arrives from the Religious Action Center. A table pops up from the AFL-CIO. Max Socol brings a table.
6:00pm: People are still streaming in as Alys Cohen starts to sing a niggun.
With just a few hours to prepare, like other OccupyJudaism events, we thought we’d be lucky to get a minyan. What ended up happening was truly shocking. Within a few hours 69 people RSVPed and roughly 200 showed up. The ages ranges from a baby (9-months) to many folks in their 70s (perhaps even 80s). We had professional activists, students, people living in the OccupyKst camp, Jewish communal workers, think-tank-types, and even a few corporate lawyers. Some donned kittels, white kippot and/or tallitot, others attended in none of the conventional trappings. Since we were in McPherson Square, a busy plot right, smack, in the middle of downtown DC, there was a lot of bustle around us. We drew in near around the table (thanks AFL-CIO!) on which the Torah (thanks Religious Action Center!) sat. Used to praying Kol Nidre in straight rows of chairs, being so closely packed, shoulder-to-shoulder, with fellow supplicants was a new experience.
The davening was powerful. We used much of the same material as the Kol Nidre service happening at OccupyWallSt (thanks team NYC!). Speaking personally, I think of Yom Kippur as a time to disrupt our lives so we can gain a deeper understanding. This Kol Nidrei did a lot to disrupt people’s understanding of Judaism and what it could mean in their lives. Many came up to me afterward and shared that it had been the most powerful, meaningful, exciting, or surprising YK experience they had everhad . It was certainly all of those things to me.
As the word spread like wildfire that a band of intrepid progressive Jews were organizing evening Yom Kippur services at Occupy Wall Street, there was some skeptical push back. “Politics doesn’t belong in religion.” “Will it be a scene?” “Sounds cool but services might be bad.” Even, yes, “I don’t want to get arrested.” But for those who stomached the risk all the same, Friday night in the plaza beneath ambient lighting through the offices of Brown Brothers Harriman appeared simple, even quaint. It was in people’s hearts that wonder and transcendence were found.
Organizer Daniel Sieradski, flanked by service leaders Avi Fox-Rosen, Sarah Wolf and Getzel Davis, huddled at the center of a crowded seated circle counting 500, 700, by some counts even a thousand people. At the same moment, friends in Boston, DC and Chicago’s solidarity camps were gathering simultaneously with unexpected hundreds more. Hollering announcements though the Occupy Wall Street main camp, I found dozens more last minute participants, “What? Really? Where!” What was intended to be a small and symbolic gathering of perhaps 10 men and 10 women, called barely a week ago, had become a phenomenon. More »
This guest post is by Alex Sugerman-Brozan. Alex is a labor lawyer and part-time activist and tries hard to be a mensch. Photos courtesy HowardC. (This is the second of two Occupy Boston reflections. See the first by organizer Jocelyn Berger.)
Tonight, I attended Kol Nidre services at the site of Occupy Boston. It goes without saying that of all the services, Kol Nidre or otherwise, I’ve ever attended, this was in the unlikeliest setting. Occupy Boston is situated at Dewey Square, a park near Boston’s waterfront, and in the heart of Boston’s financial district. It is right between on- and off-ramps to several major highways. At least 120 people davvened in the midst of rush-hour traffic, trucks honking, commuters streaming toward South Station, and the hustle and bustle of the experiment in radical community that is Occupy Boston.
Reciting the Vidui and the Al Chet has special resonance in light of the Occupy encampments. “We are the 99%” is the motto of Occupy Wall Street and its now-global offshoots. The 1% are the wealthiest in our society – the big banks, the investment firms, the global corporations and their CEOs – who possess an enormously disproportionate share of the wealth and who do not contribute their fair share to our common good.
But the confessional prayers of Kol Nidre reflect a different light on the 99%. These recitations of a litany of sins, mistakes and misdeed hold us all responsible, whether we partook in the particular act or not. When we read Isaiah on Yom Kippur, he inveighs against the sins of our society, in which we all bear a hand. As Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel said, “Above all, the prophets remind us of the moral state of a people: Few are guilty, but all are responsible.” The sins of Wall Street and corporations are all our sins – we buy the consumer products, we put our money in the banks and the mutual funds, we elect the leaders who fail to remedy corporate excesses. We are all the beneficiaries of these sins, even when we protest against them. Tonight at Dewey Square we inveighed against – and sought forgiveness for – and forgave sins like foreclosures, inadequate health care, cuts to social services, climate change, and countless other crises born of and worsened by corporate greed, we were forced to acknowledge our own role in them, and the benefit all of us derive from them (some of us much more than others — depending on the color of our skin, our gender, where we were born, our sexual orientation, and many other things). More »
My friend Getzel Davis, a fourth-year rabbinical student at Hebrew College in Boston, delivered a tremendous sermon at the Occupy Wall Street Kol Nidrei here in New York.
All English during the service had to be shouted in short phrases, then shouted back by the crowd. (This is in keeping with the protesters who also use this method because they have no sound permit.) I vote that all sermons should be delivered in this fashion from here on out. I’ve never been among a congregation paying such rapt attention to a sermon.
Anyway, presented here in its entirety is Getzel’s sermon. Just imagine what it sounded like broken into short bits, shouted out in a call and shouted back in a response.
Getzel Davis about an hour before Occupy Kol Nidrei (Photo by David A.M. Wilensky (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0))
Friends – we are here tonight to celebrate the holiest day of the year, Yom Kippur. Yom Kippur has been misunderstood to be a sad day. But really, an early rabbinic texts calls Yom Kippur one of the two happiest days of the year. What makes this day happy? It is the day of forgiveness. This is what Yom Kippor means “The Day of Forgiveness.”
According to our myth, Yom Kippur is the day that we are forgiven for worshipping the golden calf. What is the golden calf? It is the essence of idol worship. It the fallacy that gold is God. How do we become forgiven for worshiping gold?
I believe that G!d is infinitely forgiving. The harder question is how we forgive ourselves. How can we forgive ourselves for failing to live up to our own ideals? How can we forgive ourselves for failing to recognize others’ humanity? How can we forgive ourselves for remaining silent for so long in the face of injustice?
Forgiveness is important because once we can mourn our mistakes then we are no longer ruled by them. We are free to create things anew.
This is what Kol Nidreh is about. It is releasing ourselves from the oaths that we mistakenly took.
When people think about oaths, they usually think of verbal promises. In Judaism though, most of our oaths are “Chazakas” – or oaths taken through repeated action. By doing things again and again, we make internal promises about how we want to live. Other names for these might be habits, preferences, or addictions. These chazakas rule our lives, making things simpler by allowing us to live on autopilot .
The problem with this is that while chazakas are easy, they are often not skillful. It is easier to not make waves. It is easier to not make eye contact with those suffering. It is easier to trust others to run society. It is easier to sit on our butts.
Tonight, you are offered all the internal freedom that you can imagine. How do you want to live the next moments of
your life? Do you want to love more? Do you want to be more joyous? Do you want to speak your truth? What does
your truth say?
Yom Kippur is the happiest day of the year because it gives us the radical option of being here now. We don’t work. We don’t eat. We don’t drink. We don’t have sex. We dress in white robes.
We do these things because Yom Kippur is a ritual death. It is the way that we allow our old selves to die.
Tomorrow, when we break our fasts, we step into newness. We step into being the people we want to be and not just the people we have been.
You know friends, it is hard not to worship gold, or power, or any of the other idols that our society shoves down our throats. I believe that this is why the Torah tells us that there is something else created in the image of G!d.
Us.
In the first chapter of Genesis the first human was created in the image of G!d If we need something to serve here on earth, we are given humanity. Service to humankind is sacred and a reflection of service of G!d.
This guest post is by Jocelyn Berger, former Bay Area Program Officer for Pursue: Action for a Just World, a project of AJWS and AVODAH, is now a graduate student in International Affairs at The Fletcher School of Tufts University (orgs for identification only). Photo courtesy Dory Dinoto. (This is the first of two Occupy Boston reflections. See the second by attendee Alex Sugerman-Brozan.)
What do Yom Kippur and the Occupy Wall Street movement have in common? Both are about imagination. On Yom Kippur we imagine that a better self is possible. At Occupy Boston, we imagine that a better country, a better world, is possible. And although these are individual imaginings, we come together in community to make them collectively realized. By moving Yom Kippur from a sequestered, individualized experience in a synagogue out into the public square (literally!), we transform the purpose of the holiday from simply imagining a better self to imagining an whole better world.
Undeniably, one of the most exciting things about this movement is how democratic and collective it is. This rang especially true as we recited the Sh’ma together at our Kol Nidre service, proclaiming oneness – of our voices, of our values, of our aspirations, of Hashem, all one and the same, unified. My emotional climax occurred during the Al Chet – we invited folks to call out sins, personal, political, economic, social, all repeated through “the people’s mic,” adding even greater resonance: “Racism. Turning our backs on the old. Turning our backs on the young. Climate change. Defunding women’s health programs. Putting profits before people (aka capitalism). Citizen’s United. Private health care. Eroding the social safety net. Blaming victims. Katrina. Sexism. Homophobia. Anti-Semitism. Islamophobia. High interest rates. Student loans. Unemployment. Not taking responsibility sooner. Not speaking out sooner. Not showing up sooner.”
We concluded with the same reading as our sibling minyan at the Occupy Wall Street, and I felt the deepest sense of truly crying out to God, wailing for forgiveness, supplicating and begging – I burst into tears and saw that many in the crowd were similarly moved. Such immense sins, such huge problems – how can we ever forgive and move on and build something better?
We all said the Mourners’ Kaddish together for the values and virtues we’ve lost, for the American dream that now seems dead, for the lost livelihoods, safety nets, and security. For the victims who have been crushed by this oppressive and unjust system. For all that we’ve lost, individually and as a society. Adding on this additional level to the already solemn prayer further increased the deep meaning and significance. Yet with all the despair, the service left me with a distinct feeling of hope at what is possible. None of this existed before 30 hours prior, when a few of us starting getting in touch to organize the event. In such a short time, we convened a congregation and created a sacred space of prayer, repentance, imagination, passion, emotion, mourning, idealism, and hope. More »
The Facebook event had 600 by yesterday afternoon. So I figured a few hundred would actually show. Myself and others are now estimating closer to 700 or 750. This was one of the most moving experiences of my life. I suspect will shall be telling this story for many years to come.
In addition to the initial event in NYC there are also Occupy Wall Street solidarity Kol Nidrei services going on in Philadelphia, Boston, and DC. Spread the word to interested parties you might know in any of those cities!
In the period of self-reflection, I nonetheless feel obligated to share ugly events beyond our individual soul-searching. Last Friday, Israeli police stood by as a mob from the settlement of Anatot attacked nearby Palestinian residents and Israeli activists. The settlers were caught on film as they bludgeoned, threw stones, and even attempted stabbing while chanting “Death to Arabs! Death to leftists!” Not a single rioter was arrested. The case seems even worse, as Anatot was founded as a home for police and Civil Administration employees working in the territories; the rioters were the police. Full details on the Sheikh Jarrah Solidarity site.
As I said yesterday, there will be Kol Nidrei at Zuccotti Park among the Occupy Wall Street folks tomorrow night. By way of an update on the logistics, here is a message that went out to everyone who has RSVPed to the Facebook event (all links and strikethroughs inserted by me):
Friday night, Oct 7 @7PM
Zuccotti Park (Broadway & Liberty St.)
Exact location TBA
Look for signs
For your convenience, some notes:
It will be a traditional egalitarian service (Hebrew language with some English readings and an unseparated mixed-gender community, with both men & women leading prayers).
If possible, please bring your own Yom Kippur machzor. If you do not have a machzor, we will have ~100, graciously loaned to us by The Rabbinical Assembly for Conservative Judaism. If you prefer, you can download and print this PDF: d.1ski.me/3V2m263m460P1m0R3l0K. Save some trees by printing two-up, double sided. It is an Orthodox translation, as that was the only free one available online.
We could still use help getting a Torah and perhaps a folding card table to put it on.
No pre-fast meal is officially planned, but feel free to coordinate with others in the comments on the event.
No Saturday services are planned. If you will be in the area of Lower Manhattan, you are welcome to attend services at Battery Park Synagogue. Otherwise, CBST has welcomed all participants to join them for services at the Javitz Convention Center. There are also free services at the Brooklyn Lycaeum in Park Slope.
Expect another update that will repeat much of this information.
G’mar chatimah tova!
UPDATES:
A Torah has been secured, though I believe there is still a need for a folding table.
Someone I have just met on Facebook called Nomi Raye is trying to coordinate a pre-fast meal that sounds like it will involved trying to bring a bus down near the park and cooking vegan food in it. She’s looking for help coordinating that.
Another option (a better one, in my opinion) for printing out a service booklet for yourself is the PDF of the Kol Nidrei service from the new Conservative machzor available over here.
Leave a comment on the post if you’re coming! I’ll be wearing a big boring white and black talit and the jacket I’m wearing in the picture below.
However, I will not be wearing that sweater and my hair is a little shorter. And I will not have that odd green device with me.
Urgent question: Anyone out there have a concise statement about Occupy Wall Street that would be a show of solidarity with the protesters. I need one suitable for a rabbi to read to his/her congregants on Kol Nidre this coming Friday night. The Collective Statement of the Protesters is a powerful manifesto, but the strong tone of confrontation on a night that stresses self reflection does not feel in the spirit of vidui (confessing sins) and forgiveness. If a well crafted statement that acknowledges the galvanized efforts of people around the country around the issues of economic justice and corporate responsibility exists, it should find its way to many pulpits this Yom Kippur.
So far, Nobel week 2011 has been Good For The Jews, with Jewish scientists among the winners in 3 out of 3 prizes. Following Beutler and Steinman on Monday in Medicine, and Perlmutter and Riess yesterday in Physics, today’s winner in Chemistry is the Israeli materials scientist Dan Shechtman of the Technion. This is Israel’s second chemistry prize in 3 years; Shechtman follows Ada Yonath of the Weizmann Institute, who won in 2009 for her work on the structure of the ribosome.
What did Shechtman win for? He revolutionized the field of crystallography by discovering quasicrystals, crystals whose atoms form a pattern that never repeats. The story of the discovery is pretty amazing; I recommend reading the whole thing from the Nobel website.
An excerpt:
When Shechtman told scientists about his discovery, he was faced with complete opposition, and some colleagues even resorted to ridicule. … The head of the laboratory gave him a textbook of crystallography and suggested he should read it. Shechtman, of course, already knew what it said but trusted his experiments more than the textbook. All the commotion finally led his boss to ask him to leave the research group, as Schechtman himself recalled later. The situation had become too embarrassing.
In the coming days, we’ll see whether the sweep holds up for Literature, Peace, and Economics.
(cross posted to Justice in the City) After a few persistent weeks of peaceful non-violent protests, the “Occupy Wall Street” folks or the “99 percenters” as they are beginning to call themselves, are appearing on the radar of the mainstream media. After a few days of lazy journalistic descriptions of the protests and protesters as disorganized and unfocussed some reporters and columnists are beginning to ask what these protesters want. One of the more interesting answers to the question was given in an interview conducted by Ezra Klein of the Washington Post with David Graeber who was one of the initial organizers of the protests. His answer was that the protesters, rather than making specific demands of the existing institutions (which created the income inequalities and precipitated the financial meltdown and yet were still in their offices controlling vast amounts of wealth) were attempting to “create a vision of the sort of society you want to have in miniature.” This raises the question: What is the society that we want? What would a just society look like? At this moment, it seems to me, there is no more important question to ask. As it happens, this is precisely the question I seek to answer in my book “Justice in the City” — and since that book is not yet out, I will attempt the short form answer here. More »
Mazal tov to Saul Perlmutter (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory), Brian Schmidt (Australian National University), and Adam Riess (Johns Hopkins University; Space Telescope Science Institute) for winning the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery that the universe is not only expanding, but accelerating!
Apart from the Woody Allen clip, why is this story on Jewschool? Because Perlmutter and Riess are both Jewish! They are the first Jews to be awarded a Nobel Prize since… yesterday, when Bruce Beutler and Ralph Steinman z”l won the Nobel Prize in Medicine (along with Jules Hoffmann) for their work in immunology. They are also the first Jewish physics laureates since Roy Glauber in 2005. More »
Jewschool founder Daniel Sieradski is organizing a Kol Nidrei minyan in at Zuccotti Park, home base of the Occupy Wall Street folks, at 7 p.m. this Friday night.
I don’t believe it’s set in stone yet, but Rabbi Arthur Waskow may be delivering a devar and or leading the service. Sieradski is looking for knowledgeable service leaders. If you can help and you’re interested, get in touch with him on Facebook or twitter.
This will be a service, not to mention a Kol Nidrei, of once-in-a-lifetime coolness. Let me know if you’re coming so I can make sure we say get the chance to wish each other a Gemar Chatimah Tovah.
We always hear that one of the disastrous things about indie minyanim is that they will be unable to deal with life cycle events.
Yet this morning there was an email waiting for me that was sent out to the entire list of an indie minyan to organize shiva for one of the organizers; his father just passed away.
+972 Mag is a brilliant idea. Take a dozen lefty Israeli activists, freelance journalists and independent analysts who blog separately in English and then consolidate their personal bloggings together in a sharp, clearly organized portal for the Anglo-speaking world to read first-hand accounts of political action in Israel and the territories. Few blogs on Israel-Palestine are a majority of original reporting and even fewer are as politically diverse as they are. If they blogged about Judaism every once in a while, they may as well be Jewschool’s sibling blog.
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