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Jewish Journal

Connect. Inform. Inspire.

August 28, 2009

Tishuvah-Return

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We call the process of repentance tishuvah or “return”.  This is very telling.  The process we engage in during this Jewish month of Elul and through Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and Sukkot is not a process of becoming someone we are not, but rather a more organic process of getting in touch with who we really are -humans who are made in the image of God, who are at our core moral and good, and who are, even if it is difficult at times for us to connect to, spiritual, endowed with the ability to imitate and cleave to the infinite and harmonious Divine.

The process of tishuvah involves, according to Maimonides book of Jewish law, 4 stages.  First we must feel charatah, regret; then we must verbally confess our sins or lack of mitzvoth to before God; next we must ask and receive forgiveness from those we have sinned against, whether other people or God.  Lastly we must change, becoming people who are different than before, people who are not drawn to the sin in the same way as before.  Its not change from who we essentially are, rather change back to who we are and can be.  During the year lots of spiritually detrimental things cover over our Divine soul -money, desire, selfishness, ego, etc.  During this time of year we are challenged to slowly uncover our soul from under all those things that are not really us, that cover us over, to be able to let go of the sinful things that we have come to take hold of during the year.

My best wishes for much love, returan, inspiration and insight during this High Holy Day season.

Rabbi Hyim Shafner

Tishuvah-Return Read More »

The role of religion in kidnap case

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Talk about an unbelievable story:

A woman who was kidnapped as an 11-year-old in 1991 was reunited with her family on Thursday after the police here arrested two suspects in the case and discovered a hidden compound where she had apparently been kept for nearly two decades.

This is such an unbelievable development that I was planning on blogging about it even though I suspected it had any religious angle. But then I read down in the New York Times story and, sadly, I found this:

The break in the case came Tuesday afternoon when a University of California, Berkeley, police officer noticed Mr. Garrido trying to hand out religious literature on campus and asked him for identification. A check of police databases revealed that Mr. Garrido, 58, was on parole.

Passing out religious literature on campus … Whaaaaat?!

More on this later at GetReligion.

The role of religion in kidnap case Read More »

A New Life

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Misha Henckel is a Los Angeles-based personal and executive life coach. Her executive clients are generally leaders of entertainment and media companies who are focused on re-inventing themselves and re-envisioning their organizations. She is founder of Life Mastery Circles, a workshop series for women, and is co-founding a new organization for empowering and developing women leaders. She can be reached at A New Life Read More »

UN watchdog: Iran nuclear program has ‘military dimensions’

Leave a Comment / Iran /

A new report commissioned by the International Atomic Energy Agency says that Iran’s nuclear energy program may contain “military dimensions.”

In other words, the report states that Iran may be working towards acquiring a nuclear weapons capability. The report was issued just prior to the annual meeting of IAEA member states which is scheduled to convene next month in Vienna.

Read the full story at HAARETZ.com.

UN watchdog: Iran nuclear program has ‘military dimensions’ Read More »

Man on a mission to save the Jewish deli

Leave a Comment / Food /

Chicago and Cleveland have the best corned beef. Detroit is tops for rye bread. The best smoked meat is in Montreal, and for pastrami, you can’t touch New York and L.A.

When it comes to Jewish delicatessen, 30-year-old David Sax is the go-to guy. A longtime deli aficionado, the annoyingly trim Sax spent three years eating his way through more than 150 Jewish delis to research “Save the Deli: In Search of Perfect Pastrami, Crusty Rye and the Heart of Jewish Delicatessen,” a wistful, riotously funny paean to this quintessential slice of American Jewish history.

The book, which will be published in October by Houghton Miflin Harcourt, is a delicious romp through a fast-disappearing world.

In 1931, Sax reports, there were 2,000 delis in New York City, three-quarters of them kosher. Today, Sax says, his research turns up 25 Jewish delis in the city, two-thirds of which are kosher. A similar pattern has followed across North America, with city after city sounding the death knell for its last traditional deli. Sax guesses there are just a few hundred left worldwide, most of them in the United States.

“The Jewish deli is dying,” Sax told JTA. “Each time I hear a deli closes, something inside me dies.”

German immigrants brought the deli to New York in the 1820s, Sax reports. By the 1870s and ‘80s, German Jews had made their own, kosher modifications to the traditional treif recipes: schmaltz, or rendered chicken fat, instead of lard; ptcha, or jellied calves’ feet, instead of pig trotters. The origins of the first pastrami sandwich is shrouded in mystery, although writer Patricia Volk told Sax her great-grandfather was the first to slap pastrami between two slices of rye bread at his kosher butcher shop in New York in the late 1880s.

Sax chronicles the rise and decline of the “kosher-style” deli, an American innovation that originally differed from its kosher counterpart mainly in hours of operation (they did not close on the Sabbath) and lack of rabbinical supervision. Reaching its heyday in the 1950s and ‘60s, the kosher-style deli eventually succumbed to economic pressure and popular tastes and began putting cheese on turkey sandwiches, offering milk with coffee and using non-kosher meats. From there, it was an easy hop to serving bacon with French toast. Today few such delis use the term “kosher style,” preferring to call themselves Jewish or New York delis.

Sax bemoans the rise of glatt kosher a stricter standard for kosher meat that demands round-the-clock oversight by a mashgiach, or kosher supervisor. He says it puts financial demands on deli owners that most cannot meet. That’s why most new delis are not kosher, he claims—it’s just too expensive.

“There’s a lot of money in hechsher,” he says, using the Hebrew for kosher certification. “It’s a turf war that uses religion as leverage.”

But most of this book is about food, the gloriously fatty, heart-stopping Ashkenazi cuisine that is the signature of the Jewish deli: braised brisket in wine sauce; pickled tongue; cabbage rolls in sweet-and-sour tomato; matjes herring; and, of course, the litany of “k’s,” the knishes, kreplach, kugel and kvetching.

He saves his highest praise for the deli meats: corned beef pickled and boiled in vats of brine; pastrami, lovingly rubbed with secret spice mixtures, then smoked and steamed to perfection. The way to suss out a good deli, he says, is to order the matzah ball soup and whatever deli meat the city specializes in, be it corned beef, tongue, pastrami or smoked beef, a softer, gentler Canadian variant.

Although delicatessen originated in Europe, American Jews put their own stamp on it. Pastramia, for example, was in its native Romania a method of preparing any meat or poultry, and was in fact originally used most often for duck or goose. In the United States, Romanian Jews applied the same technique to beef, which began pouring in from the great Western plains and was much cheaper than game poultry.

“The Jewish deli is rooted in the flavors of the Old World,” Sax says. “Some things are the same, like the chopped liver, the chicken soup. Others are amalgamations, like the sandwich, an American thing that the Jewish delis appropriated.”

A big part of Sax’s mission is to encourage young Jews to take over delis at risk of closing or open new ones, a goal that might seem counterintuitive in today’s economic climate. But he insists the market for deli food is there, as a new generation looks back nostalgically to a cuisine that represents an earlier, simpler, more comforting era.

“People aren’t really looking for innovation in deli,” he insists. “The best things I see in the new delis are a return to tradition.” His favorite new Jewish delis are taking advantage of the organic, do-it-yourself movement that is influencing the country’s restaurant scene. “It’s ‘innovative’ today to pickle your own meat or make your own kishke.”

In his effort to give props to these newcomers, Sax glosses over the sad but very real possibility that the Jewish deli may not survive outside a few key cities. New York’s deli scene has imploded, he says, and new delis in Portland, Ore. and Boulder, Colo., may be just flashes in the matzah brie pan.

His hopes for the San Francisco Bay Area seem particularly Pollyannaish. Two of the four Jewish delis he describes in his book have closed since he visited them, and of the remaining two, only Saul’s Deli in Berkeley rates as a real destination; David’s on Geary St., near San Francisco’s Union Square, is a dilapidated version of its former self.

Two delis to serve a region with more than 350,000 Jews? It’s a shanda.

Man on a mission to save the Jewish deli Read More »

A certain magic

Leave a Comment / Entertainment, Fall Preview, Music /

Chasidic reggae and rap singer Matisyahu just released his fourth album, “Light” — his first full-length work in three years. He discussed his new music, God, spirituality, sex, drugs and Israel in a phone interview with Rabbi Naomi Levy, spiritual leader of Nashuva and author of “Talking to God” (Knopf, 2002)  and “To Begin Again” (Ballantine Books, 1999). A longer version of the 45 minute interview will appear here shortly.

Naomi Levy: I was just really impressed to see the variety of people who listen to your music at a concert and how you’re able to reach so many different sorts of stereotypes of people, from surfer dudes to rap fans to hip-hop and reggae, and clearly ultra-Orthodox people, all in the same room together. How do you think you’re able to achieve something like that, which very few people are able to achieve?

Matisyahu: I guess in general reggae music is a type of music that people listen to regardless. It’s kind of like a universal kind of style of music. And, then, I’m not specifically just producing reggae music. I definitely cross over into different genres. I’m 30 years old now, but the younger generation, and also my generation, we grew up listening to a lot of hip-hop music, to rock, to different stuff. And then there’s the message, and I guess the spirituality behind it, which is also kind of like that — crosses over into all different types of people.

NL: Yes, I’m curious how you think your words affect Jews and non-Jews.

M: Well, I think there’s definitely a certain kind of pride that Jewish kids get from my music, but I think everyone’s going to come to it from a different place. There’s definitely a large amount of young, Jewish kids out there that might be affiliated, [or] might not be, and the music is their kind of bridge into combining their Jewish identity with mainstream culture. When I was a kid, there was never anything really like that. There was never really any kind of a bridge between those two things, and they were always kind of at odds with each other, coming from a secular background. So I think for those kids, it’s a beautiful thing to have those feelings and that pride.

NL: Most performers, even if they are Jewish, they’re not out there being Jewish while they’re performing. With you it’s so out there, which gives your audience a different kind of connection.

M: Yeah, totally different thing altogether. And then for people that are not necessarily Jewish, you have to give people credit. People, when they’re into music or into something, they investigate it, they study it, they just feel the way it resonates inside of them, and it’s just as powerful for a non-Jew as it is for those kids.

NL: So what is your hope for how your music can affect people, Jews and non-Jews? What would be your dream of what your music could do for people?

M: Obviously I want to be able to sell out stadiums and to sell millions of records and all that and have all those opportunities, but for me the vision part of it is really about being able to really make something happen, something real, and then everything that would come along with that, it would be a reflection.

NL: What would be that thing?

M: It’s like a certain magic that happens sometimes on stage or in the studio, and it’s when you have that moment. It’s this kind of real emotional experience that takes place where it’s kind of a unification, that’s sort of a transcendent experience.

NL: Is it God?

M: No. I mean, I think it has to do with … I mean, it’s all God, you know? But I wouldn’t say that it’s God. I’d say it’s really a musical thing, and an interaction between the musicians, myself, and the people that are there. It’s all from within.

NL: What is the relationship in your mind between your music and prayer?

M: It’s sort of having an emotion or a feeling and then expressing it, and then in the expressing you kind of get caught up in it and you put it out there.

NL: And so, it’s similar in some ways to prayer.

M: Yeah. And then there are those moments in the show that I feel like I’m actually addressing God. I feel some moments of the songs are me speaking to God.

NL: When is that?

M: I think it happens more in the improvisations than anywhere else, when something is happening fresh, when something is happening new for the first time.

NL: What does it feel like at that moment to jump into a crowd? What does that feel like?

M: Well, it’s awesome…. There’s actually a song about it, like going over the wall. Instead of trying to go around the wall, go over the wall, and I think that … in some ways it’s almost like a shortcut, or it could be that I have the feeling for the crowd of people and then that draws it out of me, and then it’s like a climax by jumping in.

NL: As somebody who’s Chabad — or not Chabad or wherever you are with your religion now — have you taken heat? How do you feel about the whole connection between your music, sexuality, gorgeous girls throwing themselves at you and all of that?

M: It’s funny. I have a certain thing inside that it’s almost like a block, and it’s my own trip. When I look out into the audience, I feel like the women that are out there, they don’t want me to hit on them.

NL: They do. Trust me. They do.

M: Well, that’s funny … because that might be the case, but I get this feeling that that’s not really what they want from me, and that I feel like they want to trust. They want to trust me like I represent myself, as a religious person having certain beliefs, and I don’t think that people want me to compromise that. I kind of don’t allow myself to get lost in that.

NL: Your attire, the way that you look, in what ways is it a hindrance to you; in what ways does it help you?

M: In terms of the beard, it keeps me a little bit less focused on how I look, you know what I mean? I want to look good, but it kind of makes me less focused on that a little bit. And then I guess when I get into the music and I’m moving around or I’m singing or whatever it is, it’s like there’s a lot in it, a lot of emotion, and there’s excitement and there’s love, you know what I mean? And I guess all those things can be translated as sexy. But I won’t go out there and sort of like … I’m not looking to be sexy. I’m looking for this kind of spiritual experience.

NL: It seems like in reggae music altogether, the connection to pot is so intrinsic to the music. Do you have an objection to that?

M: I have feelings about it. For me, myself, I used to smoke a lot, and I used to experiment with a lot of hallucinogens and stuff, and I had experiences where I feel that it really completely opened me up to deeper dimensions of reality, and then I’ve had experiences where I felt it really hindered me and kind of distracted me. So, at this point in my life, spirituality for me, it’s kind of work, and it’s kind of about trying to get to those places without the substance. In terms of other people that are at my show or that are listening, I don’t have really an objection to it. I think that’s for everyone to figure out for themselves, and I think that music in itself is kind of like a high….

NL: And your song “One Day,” speaking of [Bob] Marley, it just seems like in one way it’s a slight departure for you in terms of being much more like a very singable anthem. I think it’s an amazing song, but it’s a much more commercial song than anything that I’ve heard of yours so far.

M: Yeah. It’s basically like exactly what you’re saying. It’s basic, just like really the theme, it’s something that I relate to, that I think pretty much everybody can relate to, and it’s the theme, the lyrics, the music, it’s just accessible. I wanted to write a song like that. I wanted to try to sum up some very basic idea about faith and about staying positive and kind of just create a song about exactly that. You don’t have to think too much. You can just put it on and feel those feelings and relate to that part of yourself.

NL: I do have one more question. Since so many kids from L.A. go to the Alexander Muss High School in Israel, how did that place affect you?

M: Well, I would say it was more about being in Israel than specifically that place, but that was when I was 16, and that was when I was just really starting to figure out ‘who am I?’ — and identity — and then being in Israel, I was able to make that connection between my Judaism being relevant to me and informing who I am, my history and all of that. So it was pretty massive for me.

A certain magic Read More »