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Jewish Journal

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September 25, 2003

Bush Expands Mideast Agenda

Leave a Comment / Politics, Power, United States, Worldwide /

With the death toll mounting in Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian "road map" plan in tatters, the Bush administration and Congress want to put out other Middle East fires before they get out of control.

Administration officials and lawmakers recently launched initiatives to sanction Syria and Iran for links to terrorist organizations and plans to develop and obtain weapons of mass destruction. Lawmakers also have focused on Saudi Arabia, accusing it of supporting Hamas and other terrorist groups. Officially, the Bush administration regards the kingdom as an ally in the war on terrorism.

The United States has been keeping an eye on these three countries for years, but attention on them has increased in the wake of U.S. military action against Iraq.

"I think it’s all wrapped up with the Iraq war and concern about the riffraff of the world assembling in Iraq to attack American forces," said Edward Walker, a former assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs. Walker said some Bush administration officials want to take severe actions against Iran and Syria, including new sanctions made possible by the Patriot Act, passed over Sept. 11, 2001. The new actions could include cutting sources of funding for the three countries and their interests in the United States.

Lawmakers are already highlighting their concerns in Congress. A number of congressional hearings last week produced dire predictions about Iranian and Syrian capabilities and what could be the result if the United States fails to act.

Israeli and U.S. legislators said Wednesday during a committee hearing that Iran could be "weeks away" from achieving nuclear-weapon capabilities.

"If not efficiently tackled, in one year from now we may face a new world, a very dangerous Middle East and a very dangerous world," said Yuval Steinitz, chairman of the Knesset’s foreign affairs and defense committee.

Pressure on Syria has been mounting as well. John Bolton, undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, told a House subcommittee Tuesday that Syria is a dual threat because of its support of terrorist groups and the possibility that Syria could arm the groups.

"While there is currently no information indicating that the Syrian Government has transferred [Weapons of Mass Destruction] to terrorist organizations or would permit such groups to acquire them, Syria’s ties to numerous terrorist groups underlie the reasons for our continued anxiety," Bolton said.

Bolton also appeared to soften Bush administration opposition to the Syria Accountability Act — legislation backed by pro-Israel groups that would sanction Syria for harboring terrorists, seeking nuclear weapons and occupying Lebanon.

Bolton said Tuesday that the administration has no position on the legislation. The White House had previously claimed the legislation would tie up the administration’s hands in foreign policy. Sources say the State Department is using support for the sanctions act as leverage in discussions with Syrian officials.

Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-N.Y.) sent a letter to Bush on Tuesday calling for the United States to downgrade relations with Syria.

"Unless Syria changes its policies, no United States ambassador should be sent to Damascus, and the president should refuse to accept the credentials of any proposed Syrian ambassador to the United States," Ackerman wrote.

Walker said unilateral U.S. sanctions on Iran and Syria would have little effect.

"We already have unilateral sanctions against both countries, and it hasn’t really stopped them," said Walker, now president of the Middle East Institute, a Washington think tank. "Sanctions will only hurt American companies."

In Saudi Arabia’s case, the Bush administration and lawmakers remain miles apart. Lawmakers emphasize the link between the Saudis and terrorist organizations, including Al-Qaeda; the Bush administration says Saudis are aiding the fight against terrorism.

The New York Times reported Wednesday that American law enforcement officials estimate that 50 percent of Hamas’ budget comes from people in Saudi Arabia.

The Bush administration dismissed the report.

"The Saudi government has committed to ensuring that no Saudi government funds go to Hamas," State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said. "We know that private donations from people in Saudi Arabia to Hamas are very difficult to track and stop, and we continue to work closely with Saudi officials to offer expertise and information that can assist them in that regard."

Bush Expands Mideast Agenda Read More »

15 Years Ago: Cast Thy Sins Away

Leave a Comment / Holidays /

If you’ve ever been to Ocean Parkway — that long thoroughfare traversing all neighborhoods Brooklyn, connecting the BQE from “The City” (Manhattan), to the Belt Parkway from Long Island — you’d have seen the two “island” streets lining the two outer streets like an Israeli flag, where old men played chess, young mothers strolled their children and we teenagers hung out.

And one afternoon a year, when a tease of a chill hovered in the air, and the dark green leaves prepared to change into their red outfits, thousands of people would stream out onto Ocean Parkway and head en masse toward the center of the long thoroughfare, as if they were called by a Pied Piper or beckoned by an alien spaceship.

If you were Jewish — and who wasn’t in Brooklyn? — you were celebrating Rosh Hashanah, and you were going “to do Tashlich,” as we said in our Hinglish (Hebraicized English).

Tashlich, which means “you will cast away” in Hebrew, refers to the custom of throwing bread into a live body of water to symbolize ridding yourself of your sins.

The ritual — one of many steps of repentance beginning the month before Rosh Hashanah and culminating on the fast of Yom Kippur — has, in recent decades, grown so much in popularity that what started as a little-known custom with few historical sources has entered the mainstream: One of these years, on the High Holidays, Tashlich will be as ubiquitous as apples and honey.

If you want to see how Tashlich has gone mainstream, watch the beaches: Here in SoCal, from Malibu down to Manhattan Beach, on the first afternoon of Rosh Hashanah (or the second, if the first day of the Holiday falls on Shabbat), you are sure to find a crowd — one that is bigger than last year’s — heading toward the ocean, preparing to throw away their sins.

Surely, Tashlich has reached the tipping point because there is even a joke Tashlich e-mail circulating on the Internet:

“Occasionally people ask what kind of breadcrumbs should be thrown,” the e-mail reads. “Here are some suggestion for breads, which may be most appropriate for specific sins andmisbehaviors:

For ordinary sins………………White Bread

For complex sins………………Multigrain

For twisted sins…………………….Pretzels

For sins of indecision……………….Waffles

For sins committed in haste……Matzah

For sins of chutzpah…………..Fresh Bread

For substance abuse……Stoned Wheat…”

What’s the meaning of this custom? Where did it come from? And why the sudden surge in the practice?

“In recent years, for reasons that have nothing to do with the ceremony itself, Tashlich has become a very social mitzvah,” Rabbi Joseph Telushkin writes in “Jewish Literacy: The Most Important Things to Know About the Jewish Religion, Its People and Its History ” (William Morrow, 2001).

“People often descend on the same body of water from different neighborhoods, where they encounter friends and acquaintances they may not have seen since the preceding Tashlich. Partially for that reason, even though the ceremony itself is solemn — Tashlich has become more widely observed.”

We Brooklyn Jews, of course, were religious trendsetters, practicing a giant community Tashlich since the 1970s. Each Rosh Hashanah, at about 4 p.m., tens of thousands of people slowly inched along the parkway, making their way through the sea of black hats, knitted kippahs, wigs, and coiffed heads that stretched as far as Ocean Parkway could go. It was the height of fashion, literally: one year, The New York Times even sent a photographer for the Sunday Styles Section. Our accessories? A bag of bread and the Rosh Hashanah Machzor, which had the liturgy for the ceremony from the prophet Micah (7:18-20):

“Who is like you God? You forgive sins and overlook transgressions,

For the survivors of Your People;

He does not retain His anger forever, for He loves kindness;

He will return and show us mercy, and overcome our sins,

And You will cast into the depths of the sea all their sins;

You will show kindness to Yaakov and mercy to Avraham,

As You did promise to our fathers of old.”

While the first official mention of Tashlich only dates back to the 14th century, most commentators agree that the idea of Tashlich emanated from the same biblical passage that gave us the custom of the shofar, the ram’s horn blown on the High Holidays.

Both customs are performed in remembrance of The Sacrifice of Issac, the Genesis portion we read the second day of Rosh Hashanah. When God commanded Abraham to “take your son, you only son” Isaac and bind him and sacrifice him to prove his devotion to God, Satan was given permission to put obstacles in Abraham’s way in order to weaken his devotion. Finally, Satan placed an impassable river in Abraham’s path, but it did not stop our plucky forefather. With his son in tow, he entered the river, until it came up to their necks — and then called out to God for help, and the river disappeared.

The custom of going to a body of water, the rabbis say, is to remember Abraham’s perseverance and devotion to God, and in our time of repentance, we should exhibit similar devotion, no matter the obstacles.

At Tashlich, when we recite the prayer, “Grant truth to Jacob, kindness to Abraham, as you swore to our fathers from ancient times. In distress I call upon God, With abounding relief, God answered me” — we are recalling Abraham’s ancient cry for help.

By the 15th century, though, there was opposition to the practice of Tashlich. Some rabbis opposed it on religious grounds, because of the prohibition of feeding fish on a holiday. Yet fish are an integral part of Tashlich: The Kabbalah teaches that water symbolizes kindness and fish, with their ever-open eyes, are like the ever-watchful eye of God. (Today, many observant Jews perform Tashlich on a weekday, usually on the day before Yom Kippur, but even as late as Hoshanah Rabah, the seventh day of Succot, which is technically, the “extended” deadline for Tashlich as well as for the final closing of the Book of Life.)

Later, 18th-century maskelim (educated Jews) opposed Tashlich because they thought it primitive. But much of the opposition to Tashlich emanated from the fear of anti-Semitism: In the days of well-poisoning and blood-letting accusations, having a group of Jews walk en masse to a body of water to throw bread into it while chanting a prayer didn’t exactly help race relations. Some rabbis forbade the practice, others encouraged their followers to do it secretly, and some people just symbolically emptied out crumbless pockets.

In Brooklyn, we had plenty of crumbs to throw at Tashlich — just not a whole lot of water. Despite the proximity of the Atlantic Ocean at Coney Island, for some reason everyone made their way to this one landlocked yeshiva. You had to wait your turn — okay, it was Brooklyn, so you had to push your way — up to the black spike metal fence. After you said the prayers, you tossed your bread toward the center of the patch of grass, upon which stood a three-tiered bird bath. I hoped that if I made the shot, my sins would be cleansed.

But would they? Behind the bird bath, over the hundreds of pieces of challah littering the floor, was a sign that read, “Please Do Not Throw Bread.”

So how important is the bread throwing anyway? For that matter, why bother engaging in the whole repentance process if we can just throw away all of our sins in one fell swoop? (Okay, for some of us it might take more than one throw to get rid of our sins…)

Tashlich is not the only repentance custom that suffers from literalness (throwing out bread = throwing out sins); it is similar to kaparos (atonement), the ritual practiced on the day before Yom Kippur. During kaparos you wave a live chicken over your head and then slaughter it, saying, “This is my change, this is my compensation, this is my redemption. This chicken is going to be killed, and I shall enter upon a long, happy and peaceful life.”

The slaughtered chicken is then donated to charity. Today, many people wave a bag of coins over their head instead of a chicken, as they are discomfited by the voodoo-ishness of the ceremony, which has also drawn, at times, rabbinic disapproval.

Both Tashlich and kaparos, though, find their roots in the “Scapegoat for Azazel,” literally, the goat that Aaron was commanded to send off into the wilderness in place of the nation’s sins.

Here’s the thing, though. You’re not supposed to take any of these things literally: the bread we throw into the water, the chicken we slaughter, the goat which was sometimes actually thrown off a mountain to repent for the Nation of Israel — they are not our sins.

How can they be? Repentance, for us, is a complex process involving introspection, confession, apology and the pledging not to repeat your transgressions, not a simple equation of confession and absolution (“Forgive me father, for I have sinned…”). So the question remains, why bother with Tashlich at all?

“There’s something about the ocean,” mused Rabbi Steven Leder of Wilshire Boulevard Temple, when asked what the custom means to him.

“It’s always changing, reshaping and reforming,” Leder said. “It’s a powerful place to do a powerful thing.”

The Reform movement only recently adopted this custom. Even so, the Wilshire congregants have embraced the custom wholeheartedly.

“It’s an opportunity to do something concrete and symbolic in the same moment,” Leder said. “The best Jewish practices connect both symbolically and physically.”

Leder said some 500 people come to the beach, where everyone builds a long “wall of sand” which rises about 4 feet and stretches hundreds of feet down the beach.

People inscribe their sins on the wall of sand, and then grab fistfuls of the wall and toss the sand into the ocean.

“We want to do it in an ecological yet dramatic way,” Leder said.

Mishkon Tephilo’s Rabbi Dan Shevitz is also concerned with the environmental effects of Tashlich, which is why he makes sure his group of hundreds clean up after themselves and feed the fish in moderation. But for him, the main problem is the entire concept of getting rid of your sins, shrugging them off like yesterday’s outfit.

“We don’t throw our sins out. As we have learned from environmentalists, there is no such thing as out. One can no longer flush [bread] into the sea and pretend it’s not there anymore,” he said.

His Conservative temple has been practicing Tashlich since its inception in 1918, Shevitz said. But he tries to make it about feeding the fish, rather than unburdening yourself of sin.

“We don’t simply get rid of things, we have to improve them,” Shevitz said. Your sins are a part of you, and if you try to throw it into the ocean, the wind will just throw it back in your face, he said.

“Real transformation [recognizes] that you are who you are, you have what you have, and you improve incrementally.”

Can we get rid of our sins? Can we erase the past? Traditional liturgy seems to believe so. “Repentance, Prayer and Righteous acts temper judgement’s severe decree,” we say in the “Unetaneh Tokef” prayer.

“Repentance is not rational,” explained Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein of Simon Wisenthal Center’s Project NextStep.

“There is really no human way of undoing what you’ve done. It is counterintuitive. But the holiday season teaches us that if we take the first steps, God will take care of the rest. The scapegoat of Leviticus symbolized our ability to rid ourselves of sins simply by completely dissociating ourselves from them, by exiling them far from our immediate world. Tashlich tells us the same — that not all sins penetrate to the core, but we can change if we will it.”

This Sunday, when we stand at the water’s edge, the sun blinding us as it begins to gracefully ascent, we will rip off chunks of challah and cast it off into the tumultuous blue waters. Maybe a seagull will dive down and grab it, or a hungry fish will jump up in an arc and gobble it up.

Perhaps these creatures will have swallowed our sins, thus cleansing our souls, and ending the teshuva process.

On the other hand, having rid ourselves — symbolically or literally — of our worst transgressions, perhaps it signifies not an ending, but a beginning. After Tashlich, we are now ready to start anew.

For information on Tashlich services, see our Calendar on page 54.

15 Years Ago: Cast Thy Sins Away Read More »

Teachable Moment

Leave a Comment / Family /

The rabbis of the Talmud tell us that we are created with yetzer hatov (good inclination) or yetzer harah (bad inclination). And, like Harry Potter and the evil Lord Voldemort, they’re engaged in a never-ending battle. And have been since birth.

Indeed, with apologies to John Locke, the 17th-century philosopher who claimed that human beings are born a blank slate to be imprinted upon by family and society, I can tell you that my four sons emerged from the womb fully wired with good and bad proclivities and with essentially the same personality, and personality quirks that they possess today.

And while they didn’t arrive with an instruction book — only a no-exchange, no-return policy — they did come equipped with free will, giving them the ability to make decisions regarding their actions. Of course, not necessarily decisions that further their best interests, decisions that require harnessing, suppressing or redirecting their bad inclination.

But that’s our job as parents — to help our children make sound choices, control their bad inclination and become solid Jewish citizens.

“I thought your job was to make us happy,” Jeremy, 14, says.

“No, our job is to educate and civilize you,” I answer.

“You can’t tame us,” Danny, 12, protests.

“Maybe we should be reading ‘The Training of Wild Animals’ instead of ‘The Good Enough Parent,'” my husband, Larry, says.

Here’s my unscientific take on parenting: Kids are hard-wired at birth. We can do myriad things to mess them up — and a few things to improve them. But mostly they learn through example. Our example.

I also believe that kids are not innately bad, despite the fact that our family used to sing “Bad to the bone, bad to the bone, B-B-B-B-Bad to the bone” to Danny as an infant to calm him down.

Kids certainly act mischievously. In preschool, one of mine, who shall remain nameless, would check to see that his teachers weren’t watching and then slug his archenemy classmate. Kids also act selfishly, refusing to share their toys or snacks. And they act meanly, by boasting, teasing, hurling hurtful adjectives at each other and forming impenetrable cliques.

But I’ve also seen my sons spontaneously befriend a shy or less-popular classmate. I’ve seen them berate other children for their prejudiced or nasty behavior. And I’ve seen them collect food and clothing to give to the needy.

In my experience, when kids exhibit abnormally unkind or otherwise egregious behavior, it usually signals some kind of emotional or learning issue that needs attention rather than punishment.

Additionally, despite its name, the bad inclination is not an entirely bad thing. In one midrash, Rabbi Samuel bar Nachman even calls it “very good.” He says, “Without the yetzer harah, no man would build a house, take a wife, beget a family or engage in work.”

It energizes us. And without it, no person would appreciate or do good things.

And so, our goal is not to eradicate, but rather to monitor and master the bad inclination, which is not dissimilar to what psychologist Carl Jung calls the shadow, the unpleasant and negative side of the personality that we keep hidden.

But there’s nothing hidden about the bad inclination this time of year. For during this penitential period, which begins on the first of Elul and extends through Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we are commanded to scrutinize our behavior over the past year, especially confronting those instances in which our unattractive, antagonistic and animal nature prevailed.

“Have you done anything this year that you’re not proud of?” I ask my sons.

“A few years ago, I pushed a kid’s head against a brick wall,” Danny volunteers.

“What about this year?”

“I can’t remember.”

This is not an easy exercise for children. It’s even more difficult for them to ask forgiveness from people they have injured or harmed and from God for any promises they have broken.

But that’s how moral growth takes place, by confronting these issues step by step, year by year. And Judaism has granted us this phenomenal, what educators call, “teachable moment.”

Does it mean anything to kids that on Rosh Hashanah we are given an initial ruling — life, death or undecided? That we have 10 days to kick our good inclination into high gear and, through repentance, prayer and mitzvot, avert an adverse decree? And that if we are successful, we are inscribed in the Book of Life at the close of Yom Kippur and essentially given a year’s reprieve? No, probably not.

But this is an opportunity for kids to begin to reflect on their admirable and less-admirable actions. It is an opportunity for them to vow to live more virtuously.

As Mark Twain once observed, “There is a great deal of human nature in people.”

We Jewish parents have always known this. It’s the good and the bad news.


Jane Ulman and her husband live in Encino and have four sons.

Teachable Moment Read More »

Schwarzenegger Retracts Waldheim Wedding Toast

Leave a Comment / Community /

California gubernatorial candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger said that he regrets his 1986 wedding toast to former U.N. Secretary Kurt Waldheim.

“It was a mistake,” Schwarzenegger told The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles. “You can’t go [back]. It’s always easier to be smart in hindsight.”

Schwarzenegger spoke to The Journal during a press conference following a live Sept. 25 town hall meeting on the nationally syndicated radio program “The Sean Hannity Show.” The Republican Jewish Coalition, KABC and Fox News cosponsored the event.

Despite Schwarzenegger’s openness in addressing questions of his father’s Nazi past, the “Terminator” star had until now been less than forthcoming about repudiating the wedding toast he made to the former Nazi officer.

In a Sept. 19 editorial, Jewish Journal Editor Rob Eshman called on Schwarzenegger to “come clean on Waldheim.”

“It may not expedient,” Eshman wrote, but it’s right.”

Waldheim’s Nazi past came to light in March 1986 during his Austrian presidential bid; the former officer participated in an army intelligence unit that committed atrocities while stationed in the Balkans. In 1944, Waldheim approved anti-Semitic leaflets to be dropped behind Russian lines, one of which ended, “enough of the Jewish war, kill the Jews, come over.” During Waldheim’s tenure at the United Nations, the international body passed the controversial resolution equating Zionism with racism.

The revelations of Waldheim’s Nazi past led the State Department to bar his entry into the United States. Schwarzenegger, during his May 1986 wedding to Maria Shriver, a niece of John F. Kennedy, took time to toast the absent Waldheim, who had sent a gift.

Schwarzenegger addressed his father’s participation in the Nazi Party after a 1990 investigation by the Simon Wiesenthal Center. A more recent follow-up investigation by the center found nothing to link his father’s unit to Nazi war crimes.

Schwarzenegger has personally donated $750,000 to the Wiesenthal Center and helped raised up to $5 million over the years, the center said.

As far as outreach to the Jewish community, two-thirds of which are registered Democrats, Schwarzenegger doesn’t have a specific plan.

“I think that it doesn’t mater what your background or religion is,” he said. “I think the key is that everyone wants to have economic recovery in California.”wine tasting, boating on the Rio de la Plata and walking tours.
www.traveljewish.com

Schwarzenegger Retracts Waldheim Wedding Toast Read More »

The Blow by Blow on Shofarim

Leave a Comment / Celebrations/Simchas /

Yossi Mizrachi stood in front of a class of second-graders at Harkham Hillel Hebrew Academy with a dark, ridged, 4-foot-long buffalo horn in his hand.

"Can we use this for a shofar?" he asked the class, who started cooing in awe at the enormous horn.

"The buffalo is a kosher animal," Mizrachi said, before taking the horn and putting it over his shoulder so it looked like a shofar musket. "But did you ever see a rabbi carrying a shofar that looked like this to shul?"

Mizrachi was at Harkham Hillel with his colleague, Alti Burston, to teach the second-graders how to make shofars. The two men, both in their early 20s, have been traveling all over California for the past couple of weeks with a mobile shofar factory, stopping in different classrooms and synagogues to give people a chance to make their own shofars for Rosh Hashanah.

A shofar is a hollowed-out animal horn, that has a hole pierced through the cartilage end. When air is forced through the shofar, it acts as an instrument of sorts, emitting a plaintive wail. By controlling the amount of air going through the shofar, the wail can be manipulated to create different sounds.

Blowing the shofar on Rosh Hashanah is a mitzvah from the Torah, and, as Mizrachi told the class, the reason we blow it is because it acts as a spiritual "alarm clock," reminding us to wake up and to repent.

While most of the shofars being blown in synagogues are slick and shiny factory processed ram’s horns, the coarse prototypes produced in this makeshift factory (sponsored by Chabad Youth Programs) are just as kosher, and create a sound that is as sharp and clear.

In the classroom, Mizrachi and Burston use a display of pictures of different horned animals and two stuffed sheep busts on loan from the Museum of Natural History to tell the class which animals can and can’t be used to make a shofar. Animals like giraffes and deer are out because the protrusions on the top of their heads are not actually horns but ossicones (for giraffes) and antlers (deer). However, the kudu — an African animal with a long curly horn that Sephardic communities prefer to use as their shofar — the ram, the gemsbok and the ibex, all have the rounded horns that can be used as a shofar.

Despite its impressive size, the buffalo horn, it turns out, is not permissible to use as a shofar, because the buffalo is from the cow family. As Mizrachi explained to the class, we tend to steer clear of cow-related shofars because we don’t want to remind God of the sin of the Golden Calf on the day we are hoping to get into His good graces.

"The significance of the shofar being curved means that sometimes we take our will, and we don’t do only what we want to do, but we do what Hashem wants us to do," Mizrachi said. "We bend our will to do what Hashem wants."

To make the shofar, Mizrachi took a ram’s horn, which unlike the light yellow shofars seen in synagogues, was a blackish gray, and called for a strong volunteer from the class. A student named Amanda stood up to the challenge, and with Mizrachi assisting her, used a pair of pliers to extract the bone inside the wide end of the horn. The class gave her a round of applause.

Mizrachi called for more volunteers who took turns sanding down the horn with sand paper. Mizrachi then took a piece of plastic and stuck it through the wide end of the horn to measure for cartilage, noting where the cartilage began. He handed the shofar to Burston, who used a little saw to cut through the cartilage.

Then the drilling began. Mizrachi dressed Avi, another student, in safety goggles and a helmet, and together they held the electric drill, using the cone bit to create the mouthpiece on the shofar. With a great flourish, Mizrachi blew through the hole, ostensibly to see if it had gone all the way through. A cloud of keratin (the substance ram’s horns/shofars are made of) dust filled the air and the class clapped wildly.

Apparently, the hole had gone all the way through. Burston then used a mechanical sander to smooth out the rough edges, and the shofar was sprayed with varnish and left to dry.

Burston then taught the class on how to blow a shofar. He held his middle finger and his index finger together, and used them to cover three quarters of his lips.

"People think that you have to blow, but you really have to go like this," said Mizrachi, before forcing the air through the opening in his lip. Without the shofar at his lips, it sounded something like a whoopee cushion. With the shofar, it sounded religiously melodic.

The Blow by Blow on Shofarim Read More »

God, Prayers and Keeping the Faith

Leave a Comment / Celebrations/Simchas /

Rabbi Harold Kushner’s son, Aaron, died two days before he turned 14 following a battle with a rare and horrific childhood disease. The experience led the 68-year-old Massachusetts rabbi to write, “When Bad Things Happen to Good People,” a comforting and deeply insightful book on the nature of tragedy and evil. Kushner’s latest book is “The Lord is My Shepherd: Wisdom of the 23rd Psalm.” While in Los Angeles last week, he spoke with Rabbi Naomi Levy, author of “Talking to God: Personal Prayers for Times of Joy, Sadness, Struggle and Celebration” (Knopf, 2002), about the nature of God, the purpose of prayer, and the power of the synagogue on the High Holidays.

Naomi Levy: It seems that people are so much more interested in a relationship with a personal God today.

Harold Kushner: There are a lot of people who wish I had written a book saying, “God is in charge of the world, and everything that happens is for a good reason, and it will all work out in the end, and God is there to provide happy endings.” I wish I lived in that world. I wish I lived in a world where children would be healthy, and good people got what they deserved, and bad people would somehow get in a traffic accident on the way to commit a crime and never get there. I happen not to. And I can either hide from the reality, or I can deny God’s goodness, or I can do what I’ve done. And that is to say that God is not there to control, God is there to comfort.

NL: I’m thinking of words in the 23rd Psalm: “Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil for Thou art with me.” Yesterday, I went to visit a young woman in the hospital who is dying. She believes in God and knowing that God is with her is a comfort. My presence and my prayers for her were also a comfort. But ultimately she’s dying and there’s no comfort in it.

HK: You’re right. That’s the shadow of death. We are unsettled about the fact of mortality. I’m sorry, but it’s a fact. What my pastoral experience has told me is that people can accept mortality. It’s partly the pain of dying that they’re afraid of, the process of dying. And partly the real fear, I think, is not just that they won’t live forever. I think people are concerned about, and this is what I finally realized what the book of Kohelet [Ecclesiastes], is not that he’s going to die, but that death will nullify everything that his life has been. And so the reassurance for people who are intimidated by the valley of the shadow of death is to reassure them that their life means something.

NL: When you’re that young and you’re dying, there’s also a sense of being cheated.

HK: Absolutely. That’s one of the only consolations that you can give those people is that they’ve had an impact. I had to talk to my 13-year-old son about the fact that he wouldn’t live very long after that, and he felt terribly cheated. The only thing I could say to him, and it was around the time of his bar mitzvah is that, “Yeah it’s a rotten deal,” and it’s not anything he deserves. But the fact is that a lot of people live a whole lot longer than 14 years and don’t change other people’s lives the way he did. And that was even before I wrote this book about what his life and death has taught me.

NL: Why do you think the 23rd Psalm has been such a comfort to so many?

HK: One of the reasons we recite the 23rd Psalm at a bedside and the reasons it’s comforting is it says, there’s a whole lot of suffering and unfairness in the world, but I can handle it because God is with me and not on the side of the malignant tumor and not on the side of the criminal and not on the side of the accident. So that the woman who’s dying of cancer doesn’t have to feel that God has condemned her to this death, but that nature, mortality, human frailty, power lines, chemicals, genetics, has caused her to die young and God is there to ease the pain. To invest her all-too-brief life with meaning. To give her loved ones whom she leaves behind immense resilience to mourn for her and get over it and find their way through the valley of the shadow into the sunshine again.

NL: Do you think Christians and Jews respond differently to the 23rd Psalm?

HK: You know what the biggest difference I found is? Jews are surprised to find out it’s a Jewish prayer. Maybe some Christians see it differently in terms of a promise of the world to come more than Jews do. But I think in terms of its comfort it’s the same for all people.

NL: Yet prayer seems so difficult for so many Jews, for those who are not involved in Jewish life and even for the Jews who go to synagogue every week.

HK: I think you’re right to separate out the problem for the Jews who pray regularly from the Jews who don’t. For those who aren’t familiar with the service, I think the answer is obvious. They don’t know what the heck is going on. It’s like going to a football game if you don’t understand football…. A non-Jewish friend of mine asked me recently: What do Jews pray for? And I said I don’t think Jews really pray for. I think Jews pray to and I think Jews pray with. I think a lot of what goes on at a service is davening the liturgy without paying close attention to the meaning of the words, because I think there’s a difference between the meaning of the words and the meaning of the prayer. The emotional impact of the “Mourner’s Kaddish” has nothing to do with what the words are. I think part of the difficulty is that Jews haven’t quite figured out what they believe about God. It’s very hard to make sense of prayer unless you know what you believe about God.

The other part of the difficulty is that we have excessively bought into the Christian perception of prayer as begging. And either we’re not comfortable doing that or we have reason to believe it doesn’t work. Prayer is congregating. Prayer is affirming. Prayer is gratitude. If we understood that that’s what we’re supposed to be doing, I think it would be a lot easier for us to pray. I go to shul not because there’s something I need to tell God, I go to shul because I want to be with other Jews who are in shul. And one of the ways I achieve that is by reciting the same liturgy in unison, whether or not I subscribe to the literal meaning of the words.

NL: What I see outside of shul are many Jews who have a deep need for prayer who find themselves at the Zen center or at the local church precisely because they don’t find shul to be a meaningful spiritual experience.

HK: I can’t tell you how many Shabbats I do not find shul to be a meaningful spiritual experience. When you go to a bar mitzvah and half the congregation doesn’t know what’s going on and doesn’t care, it’s very hard to get that sense of tzibbur [community], and I think that’s one of the things we go to shul for. I think the purpose of the congregational service is to become part of a congregation. The need for personal prayer, a relationship to a personal God, I think that’s something you either do at home alone or you do in shul when you tune out from the liturgy.

NL: In your book you say that the line in the 23rd Psalm: “He leads me along straight paths” is actually an incorrect translation of the Hebrew. And that the proper meaning of the Hebrew is that God leads us along circuitous paths that turn out to be straight in the end. Are you saying that God leads along circuitous paths, and then that we’ll look back and we’ll realize that it all made sense?

HK: I’m saying two things. One, it’s possible the psalmist believes that’s what God does. Secondly, I think God’s role is that when our life become tortuous, which of course means twisted, God will sometimes intervene to show us the way through. For example, a woman is dumped by her husband for a younger woman, and she feels terribly rejected. I cannot believe that God puppeteered this to teach her a lesson or to cause her to grow spiritually, or to make sure she ends up with the right guy. I think it happened because her husband was selfish and inconsiderate. God’s role, I think, is to give her the strength of character not to let that event define her as an unlovable, rejected woman, but to make her the kind of person who will be able to love again and ultimately to find someone to share her life with. God is not stage managing the whole problem the way a scriptwriter does.

NL: You don’t read divine intention into the path that our lives take?

HK: No, I don’t. Because, you see, that would force me to say that God wanted my son to die a horrible death so that I would write a book.

NL: This book is also a book of comfort, with, it seems, something important to say as we enter Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

HK: I think there are two messages. One is, with every scary thing that’s going on in the world the message of the psalm is don’t be afraid. Not because this will be a year of good news. Don’t be afraid because whatever happens you’ll be able to handle it. Did you know the mitzvah most commonly repeated in the Torah is, “Don’t be afraid?” I think that’s what the psalm comes to tell us. Secondly, when at the High Holidays, at Yizkor time or at any other time, even though the shul is so crowded, we are painfully aware of the empty seats, the people who once shared the holidays with us [who] are no longer there. I think God’s message is that there’s a sense in which they are still there. Death can take them out of our future, but not out of our past.

What God calls on us to do if we’re still grieving for them is to find our way through the valley of the shadow back into the sunlight again. And I think the question is: “What can God do to help me in an uncertain and scary world?” The answer I find is God can’t guarantee happy endings. God guarantees that He’ll be there to help you.

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A Persian Artist’s Crowning Moment

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Yosef Setarehshenas wants to revive and introduce Jewish Persian art to the world.

And on the Jewish New Year of 5764, he plans to do it through a unique Persian calendar that will incorporate four different calendars: The Hebrew (Jewish); the Persian (Solar); the Arabic (Lunar) and the English (Christian), with complete explanations of Persian Jewish events for the past 126 years.

"Even the dates Jewish soldiers were killed in the Iran-Iraq war are mentioned," Setarehshenas said.

The calendar will be published by Iranshahr Association, a subsidiary of Sherkat Ketab, the biggest publisher of Persian books and text in Los Angeles. The calendar will be shipped to Persian communities in New York, Europe, Iran and Israel — and Reseda’s Ben David synagogue has ordered nearly 500 copies, said Setarehshenas, 41.

Art — and Iran — are in Setarehshenas’ blood: He only arrived in Los Angeles two and a half years ago. The eldest of five children, Setarehshenas’ mother, Malek Molayem, played the tar, a Persian instrument, and she took up the hobby of rug weaving.

From a very young age, Setarehshenas has been involved in writing and drawing; his short stories appeared in children’s newspapers in Tehran.

"Art is endless," he told The Journal. "Life without art is like heart without love."

Setarehshenas obtained a graduate degree in industrial design, and in his spare time he wrote poetry and played guitar.

Setarehshenas started to use his talents to serve the Jewish community. He designed copper plates of Moses holding the Ten Commandments, and donated several of them to the Iranian Jewish community to honor Persian students. His name, which means astrologist in Farsi, got him interested in the subject of calendars, which is the subject of one of his books, "Conformity of Seconds" (he penned other Jewish books such as "Haftara Treasures," a review of Jewish history, culture and philosophy).

Setarehshenas began in earnest to revive Jewish traditional works of art. He designed and prepared a silver pair of rimonim — the crowns that adorn the Torah scroll sticks — for a Sephardi Torah decoration. It took him almost nine months to produce both one-pound crowns made out of 90-carat silver. Each are adorned with beautiful Persian silverwork, as well as a small Stars of David, combining Persian and Jewish art.

"I have had the best Persian artists make these rimonim," Setarehshenas told The Journal. "Some parts have been done by the best silver-making firms in Isfahan."

"In Iran when I wanted to start making the rimonim or other religious works of art, I would explain the Jewish meaning of the object to the Muslim workers and artists who were going to do the job … they did the job with great appreciation and respect. Even when they wanted to put a piece of work down, they considered it a holy object and would do it very carefully," Setarehshenas told The Journal.

Setarehshenas came to Los Angeles in 2001, joining his wife, Hayedeh, and their two children, Shahrooz and Caroline. He runs a business in the Valley, and still spends much time in art and writing — including contributing to various Persian publications in Los Angeles.

He wants to use the same style of the rimonim to make more traditional Jewish silver objects such as mezuzahs and wine jugs. His latest work, inspired by his mother, was a Persian rug using the copper plate sketch of the figure of Moses holding the Ten Commandments on the rug.

He will stop at nothing to produce Jewish Persian art.

"I want to introduce Persian Jewish culture to those who do not know about it. My wish is to keep the rich Iranian Jewish heritage alive and pass it on to the next generations," he said.

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Bias Hits Rabbis on Mommy Track

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When Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (HUC-JIR), the Reform rabbinical seminary, ordained its first female rabbi, Sally Priesand, in 1972, the event was more inevitable than revolutionary. It had been 50 years since HUC-JIR had come within a whisker of ordaining faculty daughter Martha Newmark, and other women had attended liberal rabbinical schools since then.

Meanwhile, in 1968, the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College (RRC) opened, with women admitted from the first day. Priesand’s ordination — and that of the first female Reconstructionist rabbi, Sandy Sasso, in 1974 — were newsworthy, but they quietly found pulpits and began to build careers, the first of an accelerating number of women to join the rabbinate in American Jewry’s most liberal denominations.

Today, the 377 women in Reform’s Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR) constitute about 20 percent of Reform rabbis — closer to 25 percent when retired and inactive rabbis aren’t counted — up from about 10 percent in 1991. Currently, there are 246 Reconstructionist rabbis, 45 percent of whom are women.

Female rabbis serve synagogues, schools, hospitals and Jewish communal organizations in every metropolitan area; more than 20 women work in Los Angeles congregations, with possibly a similar number of women holding down other rabbinic jobs. Their ubiquity has had an effect on Judaism — but motherhood, a factor for most women in the rabbinate, may be keeping them from real power.

Transforming the Synagogue

Women in the rabbinate are widely credited with making rabbis seem friendlier and more approachable: the common buzzword is "accessible."

"We used to say that women’s presence has shifted the rabbinate out of the priestly, hierarchical model into a more egalitarian model," said Karen Bender, associate rabbi at Temple Judea in Tarzana, who was ordained at HUC-JIR in 1994, though she added that younger male rabbis strive for accessibility, too.

"Congregants want a closer, personal relationship with their spiritual leaders, and for many women this intimacy comes easily," according to Judith HaLevy, rabbi at Malibu Jewish Center and Synagogue, a Reconstructionist temple.

"Women are historically seen as good listeners," said Zoë Klein, associate rabbi of Temple Isaiah in Rancho Park. "I think all of those negative stereotypes from the past actually fit well with what people want from a rabbi: a gracious hostess, care, gentleness and strength."

Another rabbi said she thinks women are more comfortable talking to female rabbis about issues such as menopause and domestic violence.

"It’s important that girls are growing up with women rabbis," Mark Diamond, executive director of the Board of Rabbis of Southern California and a Conservative rabbi, told The Journal, adding that women bring "a keener eye and a fresh perspective [to Jewish texts]."

For many female congregants, there’s a comfort level in connecting with a woman rabbi when one is searching spiritually.

"Walking that path with another woman can be powerful," said Sheryl Nosan-Blank, a 1993 HUC-JIR graduate and rabbi of Temple Beth Torah in Granada Hills.

Some see women rabbis as an engine for Reform Judaism’s recent attention to traditional ritual. Male rabbis during Reform’s first 150 years were interested in shedding ritual, said Temple Judea’s Bender, but women, having been excluded from ritual for so long, don’t feel the same way. "For women, there isn’t meaning in shedding; women embrace ritual," Bender told The Journal. "They’re more, ‘Let’s make more ritual, let’s make new ritual.’"

And women have most definitely made new ritual. Laura Geller, senior rabbi of Temple Emanuel in Beverly Hills, who became the third female Reform rabbi in 1976, said at last November’s Reform Community Shabbat that women in the rabbinate have made it possible for women to mark the milestones in their lives in Jewish ways. They’ve created rituals for menarche, menopause, weaning, miscarriage and abortion, she said, and they are responsible for making the ceremony for bringing a new daughter into the covenant as prominent in rabbis’ manuals as brit milah.

She added, though, that this contribution goes beyond women’s ceremonies to "new rituals for men as well as women: rituals for retirement; new rituals for divorce; gay and lesbian commitment ceremonies; rituals for becoming a grandparent."

"The presence of women in the rabbinate opens up the perspective," Temple Beth Torah’s Nosan-Blank said. "It changes what we see and what we hear and therefore what we listen for and what we look for."

The Mommy Track

Bender, who works full time and is rearing two children with a female spouse, is active in the Women’s Rabbinic Network, a group of female Reform rabbis. Five years ago, she said, women attending the group’s convention would state guiltily that they were leaving congregational work; today, she said, they brag, "I’m pulpit-free."

"Most people are finding that the pulpit rabbinate is incompatible with being a mom," Bender said. When significant numbers of newly or recently ordained rabbis leave congregations or won’t go into congregations at a time of shortage, she said, "that’s a crisis."

"I don’t think I could have done this when my children were small," said Sheryl Lewart of Kehillat Israel in Pacific Palisades, whose children were 12 and 14 when she entered RRC and who was ordained in 1994. "I would not be a pulpit rabbi with children at home."

There’s wide acknowledgment of a "mommy track" in the rabbinate. "Certain [jobs] lend themselves to ‘mommyness’: those with clear hours, evenings and weekends off," Lewart said. Such jobs include teaching, Hillel work and administrative positions in Jewish communal organizations, though plenty of male rabbis do that work, too.

Women comprise the bulk of rabbis holding down part-time positions in Reform congregations and affiliated organizations, said Rabbi Arnold Sher, director of rabbinic placement for the CCAR. Even a "part-time" job, particularly in a congregation, often means working 40 hours a week for 20 hours’ pay, several women said. Some rabbinical mothers limit their careers to part-time teaching or officiating at weddings and funerals.

When Rabbi Karen Fox’s two sons were small, she worked a two-thirds-time schedule at Wilshire Boulevard Temple for five years except during the summer, when she ran the temple’s camps in Malibu. She brought her sons and a housekeeper to camp with her, but when one of the boys complained, "You’re not their mom, you’re my mom," Fox left Wilshire Boulevard and switched to education, teaching and then directing the middle school at Pressman Academy in Pico-Robertson.

"That allowed me to have structure as a mom and as a rabbi, and I was home for Shabbat," said Fox, who was ordained at HUC-JIR in 1978 and is back at Wilshire Boulevard as associate rabbi. "There were times when I thought I might be trading something away, [but] I don’t think I gave anything up; I allowed myself to have a soul."

Several rabbis mentioned the arrival of a second child as the breaking point at which full-time congregational work (which in a typical rabbi’s contract involves working six days a week, including Saturday and Sunday) becomes too much for many mothers. Temple Isaiah’s Klein, however, has had a son and a daughter since her 1998 ordination, and she embraces the rigors of the job.

"Being a rabbi is hard work, but I chose it because I feel called to it and I love it with all my heart," Klein said. "Sometimes, when my weekends are eaten away in service of families, I wonder if it is worth it, but … when my son runs through the halls of Temple Isaiah and then stops suddenly in his tracks, points up to my picture and says proudly, ‘That’s my mommy,’ I know it is worth it."

"The hardest thing about being a mother, a wife and a rabbi is that when most people have family time — Friday night, Saturday, and Sunday — that’s when I am the busiest," said Michelle Missaghieh, associate rabbi at Temple Israel of Hollywood.

Her decision to remain in full-time congregational life with two children under age 4, though, is a lonely one. Of the women in her 1996 ordination class at HUC-JIR, Missaghieh said, "they’ve either left congregational life, left rabbinical life and become mothers full time, they’re working part time or they’re lesbians and have a partner at home."

But she has no plans to leave full-time work.

"That’s the struggle, that I am so fulfilled in my work," Missaghieh told The Journal. "I would not be as effective as a full-time mother as I am as a full-time rabbi; I could not be the best Michelle I could be if I were a full-time mother."

Parenthood deepens experience and makes men and women better rabbis, several women noted. Sherre Zwelling Hirsch, a Conservative rabbi, said that as a young, single woman, she wasn’t taken seriously when she first came to Sinai Temple in Westwood, but during those five years, she met and married her husband, bore her first child and helped nurse her father through a terminal illness.

"People say, ‘I really didn’t support you when you first came here, but now I honor you as my rabbi,’" Hirsch said.

"I think that I am greatly aided by my role as a mother, especially in dealing with families," said Malibu Jewish Center and Synagogue’s HaLevy, who entered the rabbinate after her children were grown. "My son refused to wear anything but his favorite tennis shoes with holes in them to his own bar mitzvah, so I can relate to all those parents of 13-year-olds who wonder where the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel has gone."

The setting of limits on one’s time is crucial to keeping one’s sanity, several rabbis commented. "I have very strong boundaries: If I’m working at night, I make sure I’m home in the middle of the day; if I have to work all day Sunday, I’m home all day Monday," Hirsch said.

Bender is more skeptical that rabbis have the ability to say no.

"How much power do you have to craft a rabbinate that lets you have a family life?" said the Temple Judea rabbi. "Do I ask to miss that meeting, or do I just say I’m going to miss that meeting? I think rabbis are afraid: ‘If I keep missing meetings, they’ll fire me.’"

"My joke is, ‘And I have a wife,’" said Bender, whose partner works part time. "Just because I have a wife doesn’t solve the problem."

However, the presence of mothers in the rabbinate is credited with raising congregations’ consciousness that all rabbis need to set limits on the time they give their synagogues, though that may contain a generational element as well, as younger men assert a need to spend time with their spouses and children.

Janet Marder, who recently became the first female president of the CCAR, suggested that when women rabbis set the example of making time for family life, they put in motion a new way of looking at the rabbinate.

The rabbi who sets time boundaries and doesn’t burn out "is better able to serve because you have more to give," she said. And the need for rabbis to pull away from synagogue demands, Marder added, has led to the empowerment of laypeople, who develop ritual and administrative skills to pick up the slack.

The perceived need for boundaries for both men and women, however, has fed a shortage of rabbis willing to take pulpits, especially the senior rabbi positions at large congregations, which historically have been seen as the most prestigious jobs but are also the most demanding.

The CCAR’s Sher said that the aspirations of male and female rabbis are becoming "pretty equal," with fewer men going into congregational work than ever before.

While Missaghieh loves her present job, she isn’t looking to move up. "I’m not interested in being a senior rabbi…. I really want to spend time being a mom, being a wife, and exploring my own strengths and weaknesses." Marder, who became senior rabbi of Congregation Beth Am, a 1,200-household temple in Northern California, in 1999, said she probably would not have applied for the position when her daughters, now 17 and 20, were younger.

On the other hand, Temple Emmanuel’s Geller, who became the first woman to lead a large congregation when she took her current job in 1994, says that once the temple hired an associate rabbi six years ago, they were able to divide up Friday nights and otherwise share responsibilities.

"Generally, you have some control over your time," Geller told The Journal. "The reason many women choose not to pursue senior rabbi positions has less to do with the job than with the ability to see it in a different way."

From Influence to Power?

Power at work is generally associated with presence at the top of a hierarchy and the ability to dictate standards, and by that definition, women have a distance to travel toward power in the Reform rabbinate.

HUC-JIR ordained equal numbers of men and women this year, but Sher says the rabbinical program does not strive for gender parity, and he doesn’t expect women to comprise 50 percent of Reform rabbis in his lifetime.

The CCAR is currently conducting a salary survey; Marder said that there’s no pay gap between newly ordained men and women, but salaries may diverge in later years. Locally, the Board of Rabbis’ Diamond sees a significant pay gap and knows of synagogues that have offered women lower salaries than to men for the same position.

Not every congregation offers maternity leave, Marder said, adding that many temples are reluctant to hire women of childbearing age because they don’t want to deal with the issue, a situation driven more by tight finances, she said, than by sexism.

Wilshire Boulevard Temple’s Fox said that over 25 years, she expected women to have more effect on pocketbook issues.

"The time for change has already come," she said. "I never thought you would have to keep asserting those questions."

Women do not hold top executive positions at HUC-JIR or the national headquarters of Union of American Hebrew Congregations (UAHC), the Reform movement’s synagogue arm. However, women have become a much stronger presence among HUC-JIR faculty of late, filling 10 of the 17 tenure-track positions open during the past seven years, and six of the UAHC’s 14 regional offices have female rabbis as directors.

Women Reform rabbis also are beginning lead large congregations. Although it took 22 years for a large Reform temple to hire a woman as senior rabbi, Sher estimates that 10 women currently lead congregations of 1,000 families or more.

"It’ll be interesting to see what happens when a lot of women rabbis are empty nesters," Temple Beth Torah’s Nosan-Blank said.

And it may be that the real revolution brought about by women in the rabbinate is not about top-down leadership but about liberal Judaism in each synagogue sanctuary, where women have already begun to bring about change — and to represent normative Judaism.

"I’ve made a huge impact on the congregation as a role model for mothers and daughters," Missaghieh said. "A lot of congregants see me up there with my daughter on my hip, and she’s sucking her thumb as I’m telling a story, and that tells them, OK, this is what Judaism is about."

"I look forward to women rabbis being old and gray and creased and being emeritas," Klein said, "because I believe that once there are enough of us who are elderly, with white hair and thick glasses, we will start to complete the landscape of clergy."

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Part-Time Work, Full-Time Families

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Around the time Sally Priesand was ordained at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Conservative women began to press the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) to ordain women. In contrast to the matter-of-factness with which Priesand’s ordination took place, the ordination of women in the Conservative movement was accomplished only with a certain amount of kicking and screaming on the part of some JTS faculty and members of the denomination’s Rabbinical Assembly (RA). It took more than a dozen years from the first manifesto of Conservative women demanding equal status in the synagogue in the early 1970s to Amy Eilberg’s ordination in 1985.

Women form slightly more than 11 percent of the RA’s membership today, with both JTS and the University of Judaism (UJ) ordaining them as rabbis. They’ve had some of the same effect on the Conservative rabbinate that Reform women have had on theirs, though in some ways, Conservative Judaism has some serious catching up to do.

"The decision to work part time is not encouraged and not understood in the Jewish community," said Nina Bieber Feinstein, who in 1986 became the second woman to be ordained at JTS. She noted that the RA did not list part-time jobs in its newsletter until recently, and then only for the East Coast.

"I’ve been paying dues to the Rabbinical Assembly every month, and I’ve never received an iota of help," Feinstein said. "Every time I find a job, it’s on my own or through networking."

Feinstein, a mother of three whose eldest child was born before she was ordained, has never worked full time or held a pulpit at a mainstream synagogue; she’s currently associate rabbi at Beit T’Shuvah, the Westside congregation for Jews in recovery from alcohol and substance abuse, working three days a week.

She and her husband, Ed, associate rabbi at Valley Beth Shalom in Encino, decided early on that his would be the dominant career. The decision to stay with part-time work "has been one of the banes of my career, though it’s been good for my children," Feinstein said. "At least for myself, I know I made the right decision."

As in Reform circles, female rabbinical students and rabbis are seen as civilizing forces.

"I think women rabbis have had a profound effect on the demystification and democratization of the congregational perception of the rabbinate," said Tracee Rosen, a former rabbi at Valley Beth Shalom in Encino and current rabbi of Congregation Kol Ami in Salt Lake City, who was ordained at UJ three years ago. "My own experience was that we also had an effect of reducing the testosterone-laden competitiveness of classes in the seminaries."

Sherre Zwelling Hirsch, a Conservative rabbi ordained in 1998 who serves Sinai Temple in Westwood, remembered a prayer vigil held at JTS after an accident injured students at the school. During the event, she recalled, a male rabbi told her, "If there weren’t women here, this would never have happened."

Issues of balance between work and family life are present in the Conservative movement as well and are carrying over to men, with large Conservative synagogues having trouble filling pulpits.

"Traditionally, male rabbis gained status based on synagogue size: the bigger your shul, the more important rabbi you were," Rosen said.

"Now, I think there’s more of a realization … that for many of us, there are some positions that aren’t worth the personal sacrifices, no matter how much money they are willing to pay."

Mark Diamond, who administers the Board of Rabbis of Southern California, notes that the Conservative movement has yet to see a woman at the helm of a major congregation, though the first women were eligible for such jobs 10 years ago. Conservative Judaism eventually will view women rabbis as leaders, he said, "but it’s a very slow process."

Hirsch, the mother of a infant son who said she’s frequently called about positions that would represent steps up the career ladder, is more upbeat, saying that women will break through the glass ceiling and eventually lead large congregations. Male Conservative rabbis "want women to ascend; they know it’s deeply important to the Conservative future," she said. Conservative congregations are "not exactly where I want them to be," Hirsch said, "but they’re a long way from where they were."

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Just a Peace Rally? Read the Fine Print

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This Sunday’s "End Occupation" rally in Hollywood has led Jewish watchdog groups to be concerned about the increasing anti-Semitism of the antiwar movement.

"How did the antiwar movement become anti-Semitic?" asked Amanda Susskind, regional director of the Pacific Southwest Region of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). "I don’t think all anti-Israel statements are anti-Semitic, but I do believe anti-Zionism statements are anti-Semitic."

Antiwar rally organizers have struggled this year between anti-American and anti-Israel platforms and outreach to key leftist Jewish peace activists such as Tikkun magazine founder Rabbi Michael Lerner. Anti-war rallies have been by hosted virulent, at times profanity-driven, anti-Israel speakers, while an open split in the antiwar left began last January after San Francisco activists tried to ban pro-Israel Lerner from a rally speaking slot.

"Even someone as far left as Michael Lerner finds himself not kosher enough for the antiwar movement," said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

The "End Occupation" march on Sunday, Sept. 28, starts at noon at Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street, with a rally at 2 p.m. at Hollywood and Highland, as protesters denounce Israel plus U.S. policy on Iraq, Cuba, Syria and elsewhere. It is being organized by the Los Angeles chapter of International Answer, a far-left group closely tied to the U.S.-based, pro-North Korea Workers World Party; the chapter’s listed coalition or steering committee members include the National Lawyers Guild, the Palestinian-American Women’s Association, the Free Palestine Alliance and the local chapter of the American-Arab Discrimination Committee.

Rally endorsers do not include the Progressive Jewish Alliance but do include college student groups and a typical grab-bag of obscure, leftist or Israel-hostile peace groups such as the Coalition for World Peace and cultish Fidel Castro socialists. Also listed as rally endorsers are the Palestine Solidarity Committee, Al-Bireh Palestine Society and the Palestine Aid Society.

Some peace groups feel the anti-war movement has gone too far.

"We are uncomfortable with the strident, and I guess, over-the-top method of the ANSWER coalition," said Rabbi Haim Dov Beliak, a progressive Jewish Alliance board member. Beliak said that at a local ANSWER-Run Rally last spring, "Part of what they were doing was they were egging people on to get arrested."

He also said that PJA and Interfaith Communities United for Justice and Peace — another group in which Beliak is involved — did not endorse the rally out of respect for the Jewish Holiday.

The Palestinian activist agenda at such U.S. events seems to be, "to sort of push the antiwar movement [into thinking], ‘If people hate Bush, they should hate Israel,’" said Cooper. "It seems to have worked very well in Europe, it hasn’t gotten traction here."

Of growing concern to British Jews is the rally’s build-up event in London — a Sept. 27 demonstration marking the third anniversary of the Palestinian intifada. Alongside the British antiwar movement’s anti-Israel wing, a key event organizer is the Muslim Association of Britain; the group’s Web site recently promoted the Sept. 9 London lecture, "The Roots and Nature of the Zionist Project," by Abdelwahab El-Messiri, an Egyptian professor whose Arabic language books include, "Secrets of the Zionist Mind" and "The Invisible Hand: A Study in Secret and Subversive Jewish Movements."

Anti-war celebrities, notably Martin Sheen, spoke at U.S. peace rallies earlier this year, but generally did not distance themselves from the event’s harsher anti-Zionist speakers. Susskind said the ADL has not approached activist actors about what’s being said at the rallies.

"We could do more outreach to the celebrities in our own backyard," she said.

Coinciding with this year’s Sept. 11 memorial services, the ADL issued a separate report, "Unraveling Anti-Semitic 9/11 Conspiracy Theories" about Israeli and Jewish involvement being central to fringe thinking on the attacks.

The ADL believes that various conspiracy theories, "are essentially updated versions of classical anti-Semitic canards," focusing in part on supposed Jewish influence at the World Trade Center, on Wall Street and in geopolitics.

"The Big Lie has been repeated by imams, the press and government officials in the Arab world,"ADL national director Abraham Foxman stated in the report, "and is contributing to disturbing and dangerous mutations in global anti-Semitism."

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