lavendersparkle

I'm thinking of spending three weeks this summer studying at yeshiva, probably either the Conservative Yeshiva or Pardes Yeshiva.

Any views or advice?

Any tips for finding accommodation in Jerusalem for a month this summer?

As I said, kerrypolka and I have been learning Talmud together. I thought this section was screaming out of a Venn Diagram and was surprised I couldn't find one when I Goggled, so I made it myself.

( The Dangers of Entering a Ruin )

My following of liv's challenge, inspired by siderea's post about building community to post 10 linky posts, 3 diary posts and 1 long thoughtful posts by 15th May has resulted in precisely 0 comments. Maybe it's because the links I've been posting have been to websites rather than specific articles, or maybe it's because no one is reading this blog any more (cue violin music).

Today I move into dangerous territory by posting links to articles united by the theme of trans issues, which is particularly a bit of a mine field for unintentional FAIL. Hopefully I've avoided this by two of the articles being by trans women and the other one avoiding some of the most common sources of FAIL (correct pronouns, no pictures of the women pre-transition, no mention of their previous first names). Feel free to tell me about how wrong they are in the comments.*

First, 19 Terribly Interesting Tips On Raising A Trans Kid (From A Trans Kid) Does what it says on the tin. ᔥ Offbeat Mama

Secondly, a piece on two new memoirs by transsexual Jews in Tablet Magazine** I love the way it explores the use of Jewish and other ideas and mythologies to explore ideas of gender and identity. I think something that a lot of people don't realise about religion is the richness of the metaphors and frameworks it gives you to play with in making sense of life. As so often with these things, don't read the comments.

Finally, Political Conference Background Checks – Putting Our Case to the Lib Dem Federal Conference Committee explaining some of the problems background checks can cause for trans people. I think one of key things that is involved in combating "isms" is raising awareness of the experience of minority groups and how things which seem to be relatively innocuous to members of majority/privileged groups can be a massive problem for other groups. Lots of men don't get how women experience street harrassment, lots of non-Jews don't realise how prevalent antisemitic violence is, lots of cis people aren't aware of the problems background checks can cause trans people.

*Now I have an evil urge to post incredibly offensive articles in the hope of getting comments.

**Not to be mistaken with The Tablet.

At work we have just been through the PDE process. I have to confess that I'm not quite sure what PDE in this case stands for (and Wikipedia in this case wasn't much help). Basically at the start of the year we sit down with our line manager and set some goals for the year. These are divided between work type goals (I will deliver this set of National Statistics on time) and development type goals (I will improve my skills in verbal presentations). The form and how we fill it in are a bit clunky but we're supposed to narrow them down into SMART goals. Over the course of the year you review your goals every so often and they can be adjusted in response to changes in your role and circumstance. Then at the end of the year review how well you did at them and come up with a new PDE for the next year inspired by your review of the previous year.

I reflected last Yom Kippur, that Yom Kippur is rather like this process. You use Elul and the Days of Awe to review the year just gone and try to improve in the next year. It struck me that it might be useful to go through a similar process of setting myself some SMART goals for my Jewish life and even making a record of them to review every so often.

At Yom Kippur I just didn't really have the head space to do this. Settling into a new home, new job, new shul; my head was spinning too much to set myself those kinds of goals and try to achieve them. Now I'm finding that over the last few months my minds been thinking about Jewish observance in a bit more of a serious development way, so maybe it's time to have a go and setting some SMART religious goals in a mid-year PDE to be reviewed in Elul and Yom Kippur.

One thing I have been thinking more seriously about is Jewish Learning. Living in North London gives me a lot more opportunities than I'd have in most other places I might live in the next few decades. At first I started by just going to a lot of classes at my shul. Now I've started to think a bit more about what's manageable and what learning would be the most useful to me, not just what happens to be available and convenient.

Last year I decided to try to read the whole Tanach in a year. Well, I say the whole Tanach, I decided to make it easier on myself by calling the Torah done as I'd heard it all in shul. I stuck to just the Neviim and Ketuvim. I sat down, counted how many chapters there were in total and worked out how many I'd need to read a week on average to get through the whole thing in a year. I then set myself a schedule, dividing longer books into multiple weeks and grouping together shorter books into the weeks. It actually only boils down to an hour or so's reading a week, which I can do on my Monday commute. I've managed to keep to that schedule and I'll finish the Neviim in a couple of weeks.

I've started doing Talmud study. Studying Talmud is something I've always wanted to do and I've always seen as serious learning for serious Jews. Not just hearing the story of Honi the circle maker every Tu B'Shevat, but actually sitting down with a page of Talmud, with all the blocks of Mishnah, Gemara and commentaries on it, and going through it making sense of the argument. Luckily my shul has started a fortnightly evening class which does just this which I've started going to.

The Talmud class has made me realise a big area of need for Jewish development: Hebrew. I've learnt Biblical Hebrew at various places at various times but it's never been that amazing and it's certainly gotten rusty since the days a couple of years ago when I knew my pual from my piel. I can see that this is a barrier to Jewish learning and participation because I can't study texts in Hebrew and I feel a bit embarrassed about it. Answer: I'm spending half an hour to an hour a weekend working through The First Hebrew Primer which I already had on my bookshelf from a previous set of Hebrew classes. Once I get to the end of it I'll see where my Hebrew is and reevaluate where to go next. I might move onto another textbook or I might just sit with my BDB and some verb tables and try to translate a bit of Bible each week.

I think three ongoing Jewish learning projects at a time is probably just about right to keep things going and not get overwhelmed. If I have time I might post about ideas for goals in other areas of Jewish life.

Yesterday I discovered this amazing song.

I'll be honest, I discovered it because a bit of it is used in the Radio 4 comedy show The Secret World and I liked that clip and Googled to find where it came from.

I really like it and I realised that one of the things I like about it is that it reminds me of Megillat Esther, or more specifically the way we chant it. The don't sound similar but both of them do this thing, where they sound sort of superficially happy and then there's a phrase with a slight change in something (I don't know enough about music to know what) and suddenly it sounds so mournful and just as you think it's going to break your heart it lifts again.

It's like it says: This is a happy ending, as much as there are happy endings. We survived this time, but the world is still broken and perils like this will come again. All victories are partial and few can be gained without some kind of compromising of ones integrity. But still, we are alive now, so we shall sing in all of the ambiguity.

This post is a muddle of Christian and Jewish ideas about forgiveness because my life is a muddle of Judaism and Christianity and the experiences I'm particularly drawing upon involve Christians I know.

We are now in the month of Elul, the month when the Shechinah is said to be most accessible, the season of introspection, repentance and renewal which began in the darkness of the fast of Tisha B'Av and crescendos in the Days of Awe and the transcendent fast of Yom Kippur. My thoughts naturally turn to repentance and forgiveness, but as I mull over the events of the last year I can't help but think about the ways that the principle of forgiveness can be misused in ways which are incredibly harmful.

In my pootling around the internet I found a report on domestic violence presented to Methodist conference in 2002. I think that many people might be surprised by what aspects of Christian theology cause problems for victims of domestic violence. The report, as one might expect, found that Methodists tend to stay in abusive marriages longer because marriage is regarded as a lifelong commitment. A more unexpected and more troubling problem comes from a different theological source:
"Christian forgiveness was mostly seen to mean continuing to welcome an abuser as a member of the Church while an ex partner was excluded from Church attendance by fear."

This was very much the experience of my friend Ellie, and part of the reason for why she no longer feels comfortable worshipping Methodist churches (although her situation was complicated by the fact that her abusive ex-husband is the son of a senior Methodist minister, the Revd Peter Pillinger who is the District Chair for the Plymouth and Exeter District). Some members of her congregation would admit that the thought it was wrong that her husband beat her, but they refused to 'take sides'. They thought that it was wrong of her to get the police involved and, oddly enough, the forgiveness which poured out for her abuser was not forthcoming for her 'sin' of securing her protection.

I think that the difficulty is that humans have a tendency to distort religion to suit their own prejudices, whether that be an Orthodox Jew assaulting a woman for performing rituals which are halachically permitted or a liberal priest justifying sexually harassing a congregant on the grounds that G@d is very nice and only nasty bigots disapprove of his sexual behaviour. Generally people don't want to have to confront the reality of domestic violence within their community and so some Christians use doctrines of forgiveness to avoid confronting domestic violence, in ways which hurt victims within their communities. It's difficult to address but let's begin with talking about what forgiveness is and isn't.

Forgiveness is not saying that what the person did was OK.
Forgiveness is the opposite of that. There is no need to forgive actions which were not sins. Forgiveness requires confronting an action head on, in all it's horror, acknowledging that justice would require that this action resulted in punishment, and still forgiving.

Forgiveness is not saying that what a person did was justifiable or excusable.
Forgiveness should be available at all levels of culpability and so unless someone was completely not culpable, and therefore not in need of forgiveness because they were not to blame for what happened, excuses are not relavent.

Forgiveness does not mean putting the interests of the perpetrator above the needs of the victim.
Loving people equally, despite their sins, does not mean treating them all the same. People have different needs and sometimes those needs conflict and when they do you need to come to a solution which causes the least harm. Generally it is more harmful for a victim to be excluded from her community because they refuse to rebuke her abuser or take her suffering seriously, than for an abuser to be excluded for the safety of his victim.

Allowing an abuser to continue to abuse is not loving to the victim or the perpetrator.
Care must be taken to not make a situation worse and to respect the autonomy of the victim, but as a general principle, if it takes exclusion from his community, restraining orders, convictions or prison time for an abuser to stop abusing his victim, then that is better for the abuser as well as the victim. The abuser will one day have to confront his sins, in this world or the next. Better for him to have been stopped before his sins grew further.

Repentance is not just words.
Many abusers love to say sorry. They'll beat the shit out of their wife and then show up the next day with flowers and tears begging to be forgiven and promising they'll never do it again. How could a Christian wife refuse just because that's what he did the last x many times before when "love keeps no record of wrongs" (1 Corinthians 13:5) and she should forgive her brother "seventy-seven times" (Matthew 18:22)? Repentance is not just saying that you're sorry, it also resolving to not to sin again. Someone who is genuinely repentant should be willing to give their victim some space, seek treatment for any issues contributing to their abusiveness and allow their victim to be open about what she has experienced. Someone in a position of power should be willing to renounce it for the sake of their flock.

I think this long post was better summarised by Isaiah 1:16-20:
Wash yourself clean;
Put your evil doings away from my sight.
Cease to do evil;
Learn to do good.
Devote yourself to justice;
Aid the wronged.
Uphold the rights of the orphan;
Defend the cause of the widow.

Come let us reach an understanding,
says the L@rd.
"Be your sins like crimson,
They can turn snow-white;
Be they red as dyed wool,
They can become like fleece."
If, then, you agree and give heed,
You will eat the good things of the earth;
But if you refuse and disobey,
You will be devoured by the sword.
For it was the L@rd who spoke.

A while ago a friend of mine, who is sort of patrilineal, possibly matrilineal and either way planning to convert, asked whether I ever thought that being a Jewish convert was oddly like being transsexual. There's the feeling that ones internal identity doesn't match the way one was originally perceived; trying to convince big important gate keepers of the validity ones identity; holding oneself to behavioural standards far beyond those of people who had your identity from birth; trying to 'pass'; getting into pointless counter productive hierarchies over who's a 'better' Jew/woman/man based on (among other things): being a bit Jewish to begin with (based on ancestry), who was a bit male/female to begin with (based on hormone levels/physical characteristics), who's frummer, who's more feminine/masculine, who was younger when they made the decision; and finally, for some, there's the genital surgery.

Another way in which they're similar is in the importance of accepting and respecting people's identities and the labels they use for themselves. Every so often you get someone in a queer/progressive/feminist circle declare that gender is just imaginary and doesn't really exist and ze is going to only use gender neutral language from now on and anyone who thinks they're a particular gender is just a schmuck to patriarchy and actually reinforcing it through their actions. This tends to be responded to by a transsexual pointing out that she wouldn't have gone through all of the cost and pain and hassle and side effects and loss of cis-privileged of transitioning if gender didn't fucking matter.

Sometimes, in discussions of religious matters, I feel like the pissed off transsexual woman. Sometimes during cuddly, cotton candy, 'we're all the same really' interfaith dialogue I feel like screaming "No, no actually. We're not all the same. I wouldn't have gone through the expense, hassle and exposure to antisemitism of becoming Jewish if all religions were the same really and it didn't really matter. It matters a fuck load to me."*

Things get a bit more complicated because there are some people who are genderqueer/intersex/don't really care about gender, who have been really hurt by a binary system of gender. They need to advance a concept of gender which is more fluid and muddy and liminal. Similarly, there are people who come from interfaith families or have an interfaith religious identities who find the binary of Jew/non-Jew limiting and advance a more fluid concept of Jewish identity and claim for themselves identities such as interfaith/multifaith and half-Jew.

Ideally, this shouldn't cause problems. The fact that one person is genderqueer doesn't mean that another person isn't a woman, even if she wasn't identified as female when she was born. Just because one person is interfaith doesn't mean that another person isn't a Jew, even if she was born to gentile parents. The problem comes when that in our attempts to assert our own contested identities we can over step a mark and start denying each others identities. A Jew with a non-Jewish father might assert "You're either Jewish or you're not Jewish and I'm as Jewish as fucking Tevyeh". People campaigning for acceptance of interfaith and half-Jewish identities may sometimes claim people as the one of theirs regardless of how those people identifies themselves. I'm sure you can imagine equivalents for gender. It's further complicated because, simple as it should be to understand that people with similar backgrounds often have different identities, inevitably we're going to get labelled with each other's labels, even if we don't do it ourselves. That doesn't stop being mislabelled smarting. And of course there's the age old problem that we're all arguing over the scraps from the master's table and it's really tempting to try to get up the ladder by treading on each other's heads.

I don't really have a solution other than to appeal to us all being a little bit more careful and considerate with each other. I'm not perfect in this because my approach to Judaism is really binary and I struggle to fit half-Jews into it. I'm just saying that I'm not interfaith or multifaith or half-Jewish or Jewish identified or both, and I'm going to get pissed off if you call me those things. I'm a Jew and I'm a convert. I'm a Jew-by-choice but I'm going to get pissed off if you use that term and then go on to refer to Jews-by-birth as just 'Jews'. Now to the deliberate mistake in the title. Lots of women who are perfectly open about being transsexual get pissed off by the term transwoman because almost everyone who uses it doesn't use the term ciswoman when referring to women who aren't transsexual. If your fluid concepts of identity are contesting the identities of people whose identities are already marginalised and contested, more than people whose identities are reinforced by existing power structures, you're probably making a mistake somewhere along the line.

*There's a whole n'other issue about the way that so much interfaith dialogue relies upon ignoring differences between religions. Ignoring the ways in which I differ from you is no more accepting than ignoring the ways in which we're similar.

I have a friend who's going to become a priest. He's a liberal on issues of gender and sexuality. He believes that women should be ordained including to the episcopate. All the same, he's glad that he's going to get ordained before the first female bishop is finally consecrated within the Church of England, long after the majority of its members decided that such a thing could be G@d's will. He's glad because it means that he can have his cake and eat it. He can support the ordination of women and feel good about that but at the same time his ordination will be seen as valid by all of those who disagree with him on that issue. If he were ordained at some point in the future when he could have a female diocesan bishop, his ordination might be seen as no more valid than that of his female colleagues.

I mention this because I think a similar thinking runs through a lot of non-Orthodox Jews. Whilst they don't believe in Torah min HaShamayim and may scoff at some of the beliefs and practices of Orthodoxy, but they like to know that the Orthodox establishment views them as one of the tribe. They may even take measures to protect this recognition, such as marrying in an Orthodox ceremony so there's an Orthodox ketubah to act as a pass for their children into Orthodox institutions.

This reassuring confidence that we'll be accepted has allowed non-Orthodox Jewish communities to be dependent upon Orthodoxy. Who writes our Torah scrolls and mezuzot? Who bakes our matzahs? Who runs most of the British Jewish state schools? Who ensures that there's somewhere Jewish students can go for Shabbat dinner? Who inspects for kosher certification? Who circumcises our children? This works fine and dandy for most non-Orthodox Jews because they're Jewish by Orthodox standards and the Orthodox are willing to cooperate, either for the money or the sake of ahavat Israel.

A bigger problem comes from those of us who can't ride on Orthodoxy's coat tails. People who have to find a mohel willing to circumcise a baby with a Jewish father and non-Jewish mother. People who want to give their children a Jewish education which won't teach them that their mother's conversion isn't valid. People who want to immerse in a mikvah to purify themselves for their non-Jewish spouse.

I think if we want the conversation about how the Jewish community can serve Jews in interfaith families to move beyond talk of welcoming or performing weddings, we need to actually notice the things we take for granted which are inaccessible to a larger and larger proportion of our communities.

Last weekend I ended up mooching about in an Early Learning Centre. A friend was having her hair done and I decided to pootle about the shopping centre rather than sit and watch. I headed for the ELC for a number of reasons. One is that I am a creepy crazy broody lady. I more respectable reason was that several blogs I read, which combine my love of babies and grumbling about the patriarchy, had talked about how children's toys are becoming increasingly gendered and girl's toys are becoming increasingly sexualised and promoting the idea that women's primary roles in life are to shop and be pretty.

Surely not the ELC, I thought. I remembered it from my own childhood. A haven of sensible educational toys, usually with a big wooden train set in the middle you could play with whilst in the shop. I remember the adverts they used to run featuring a Barbie and an action man trying to break into the shop because they weren't the sort of things ELC would stock. I walked through the door into a world of pink and blue. Again and again I saw the same toy in two versions: one pink (and possibly green) and one blue (and possibly red). Separate pink and blue vacuums. Separate pink and blue toy cash registers. Separate pink and blue paddling pools. No other colour options; just pink or blue. The boxes helpfully tell us who the toys are meant for. The blue toys have pictures of boys playing with them on their boxes and the pink toys have pictures of girls on the box playing with them. I spotted one girl on the box of a boy toy, but no boys on the boxes for pink toys because you wouldn't want them to catch teh GAYZ! The item which really took the biscuit: gendered stacking cups. Heaven forfend that a six month old might because confused about their gender identity by stacking and blue cup (if a girl) or even worse and pink one (if a boy). Stacking cups! For fuck's sake!

I wonder about whether it's a cunning way to get parents to buy even more stuff. With three older brothers, I played with a lot of Lego* and star wars toys as a child. I had some 'girl's' toys: some dolls, some My Little Ponies**, a dolls house. However I also had a lot of hand-me-downs. Maybe ELCs cunning plan is to get parents to buy completely new versions of everything if their second child appears to be a different sex to their first.

Anyway, here are four toys I would like to get if (G@d willing) we have children, regardless of their gender assignment at birth:
Non-gendered stacking cups
Sophie the Giraffe. Sophie's made of natural rubber and painted with non-toxic paint. She's designed to be grabbed and chewed by babies and squeeks.
Uncle Goose Aleph-bet blocks. I'd like to be an anti-consumerist parent but I think my weakness will be Jewish/Hebrew toys. I guess I can justify them as I'd be growing up outside of a large Jewish community. Uncle Goose make blocks in lots of different alphabets, as well as ones with presidents and insects on. They're made in the US from farmed wood and child-friendly non-toxic inks.
Kathe Kruse Ikibar Dragon. He's made of 100% organic cotton and is machine washable. He also rattles. I like the idea of a cuddly dragon because I'd like a Puff the Kosher Dragon themed nursery, with a big mural of Puff's bar mitzvah in the middle, filled with mythical animals wearing kippot and tallits (yes, I am trying too hard at this Jewish thing).

*And not the special girls' Lego.
**However, my My Little Ponies were roughly pony shaped unlike the deformed anorexic horse whore shaped ones they sell today.

A Christian friend of mine asked me about the book of Ruth and this is what I wrote. I apologise if bits of it aren't quite accurate.

I did this with my Sunday school kids the week before last. The book of Ruth is read as part of the Jewish festival of Shavuot (Pentecost). The book has three themes in common with the festival. The first is that the spring harvest plays a crucial role in the plot of the story, and Shavuot was originally a spring harvest festival. The second is that the story ends with the genealogy leading to King David, and according to Jewish legend King David died on Shavuot.

The third similarity is that Shavuot, as well as being a harvest festival, is the celebration of the giving of the Torah at Mt Sinai. I'm trying to think of the best way to explain the next bit because it's a bit thelogical. There's an idea that all Jews became Jews at Mt Sinai. Before then there were individual covenants with the patriarchs, but it's at Sinai that the people present agree to the covenant, which is the covenant which Jews today view themselves as part of. There's an idea that in some spiritual way, every Jew who would ever live was present at Mt Sinai and agreed to the covenant. The rituals one goes through when one converts to Judaism today are still based upon the model of what the people did at Sinai. Ruth is viewed as the archetypal convert, so her story is read at the festival which celebrates the conversion of all Jews into the covenant.

Actually, the book of Ruth in general can be seen as a rather politically pro-convert book. Some biblical scholars place the authorship of the book at the time of Ezra. Ezra demanded that all of the Israelites who had married non-Israelite women should divorce them and send them away. The book of Ruth may represent a counter to the Ezra view of marrying non-Israelite women. In the book a non-Israelite woman integrates into the Israelite community, is a model of virtue and commitment to her new people and goes on to be the great-grandmother of King David, the greatest king of Israel and the ancestor of the future messiah. The pro-convert agenda is even more emphasised by Ruth’s nation of origin. According to the bible the Moabites are the descendants of the incestuous coupling between Lot and his eldest daughter (Genesis 19:37). The king of Moab employed a soothsayer to curse the Israelites (Numbers 22-24). Immediately after that some Israelite men began to have relationships with Moabite women and worshipping their idols. G@d punishes this by sending a plague upon them which kills twenty-four thousand and further deaths are only averted when Pinchas skewers two of the most flagrant offenders (Numbers 25). So Moabites are just about the least suitable people for Israelites to marry. The book of Ruth argues that anyone from any background can become part of the covenant with G@d.

One of the things which plays a crucial role in the story are Israelite inheritance and marriage law. One the major problems Ruth and Naomi face when they return to Bethlehem is that unmarried and widowed women can’t inherit land. In Number 27 the daughters of Zelophehad argue that they should be able to inherit from their father, as he had no male heir. Moses agrees that they should. However, in Numbers 36 some of their male relatives complain that if they are allowed to inherit and then marry men from other tribes, the land will permanently move out of their clan. (This is important because the set up seems designed so that every Jubilee year the land all returns to its original families and clans.) So a compromise is devised whereby women can inherit if there is no male heir as long as they marry within their father’s tribe. A protection for widows was the institution of levirate marriage. If a woman is widowed without children, her brother-in-law is obligated to marry her and provide her with children (Deut 25:5-6). In Ruth 1:11-13 Naomi is referring to the fact that she has no other sons to marry them, so they should go back to their parents and marry someone else. When Boaz is referred to as a ‘redeeming kinsman’ it means that he is a relative of Naomi’s husband, and therefore has an obligation to marry Ruth so that she can provide an heir and inherit the land which belonged to Naomi’s husband. At the start of chapter 4 Boaz must first give a closer male relative the option of marrying Ruth and inheriting the land. This relative refuses his obligation in a public ceremony allowing Boaz to marry Ruth instead. Interestingly the ceremony by which a man refuses to marry his brother’s childless widow is still practised today in some Jewish communities and involves the brother having to take off his shoe.