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Jewish Journal

Connect. Inform. Inspire.

December 8, 2011

Peres promotes Israeli moon probe

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Israeli space enthusiasts are taking part in an international moon-probe competition.

President Shimon Peres cut the ribbon Thursday on Space IL, a nonprofit group that will compete for the international Google Lunar X Prize. The challenge is to become the first team to successfully launch, fly and land a robotic spacecraft on the moon. The team also must operate the spacecraft, which will carry an Israeli pennant, across the lunar surface and relay back video.

The first prize is a $30 million grant, which has has stirred dreams in Israel of mounting a manned moon mission.

“The time has come to fly Israel’s flag on the moon,” Peres said at the ceremony, which took place at the Israel Aerospace Industries campus near Tel Aviv.

Peres promotes Israeli moon probe Read More »

Will Sasson Gabai hit the stage for ‘The Band’s Visit’?

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The Israeli film “The Band’s Visit” is expected to open on a New York stage next year.  The leading role has reportedly been offered to ” title=”Haaretz” target=”_blank”>Haaretz.

“The Band’s Visit” was awarded multiple awards including 8 Ophir prizes with Gabai taking home the European Film Award for Best Actor. The film is currently being adapted for stage and is still in the fundraising phase but producers hope to start rehearsals in a few months.

Will Sasson Gabai hit the stage for ‘The Band’s Visit’? Read More »

Can movies bring light into the world?

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Laments about the lost luster of movies are common these days.

A few weeks ago, New York Times film critic A.O. Scott declared, “Film is Dead? What Else is New?” in an essay about the diminishing enchantment of modern moviegoing.

“It can be hard to escape, and even harder to argue against, the feeling that something we used to love is going away, or already gone,” he wrote. “Does whatever we have now…represent at best a pale shadow of bygone glory?”

The question is a relevant one. And it resonates as a nostalgic longing not just for better movies, but for the idealism of youth—the days when everything was possible.

When I read Scott’s piece I remembered how movies used to be, for me, a way of coping with the strangeness and suffering in the world. As a teenager, my immersion in Hollywood fantasy was sustaining through all the disillusionment and despair that comes with being an adolescent girl. In the movies, things were usually better than they were in real life—and if they weren’t, there was comfort in their definite end.

Movies are a way of escaping the world. But they’re also a way of responding to the world, a tool for filtering life’s ineffable beauties and its heavy, burdensome baggage. The characters that fill the screen a model for how to cope. And somewhere in there, the fantasy of ideals imprints upon the brain and you start believing that every love should be a “Titanic” love.

But those moments when the projector could run admission into another universe has become more difficult in today’s world of constant connection. The dark, quiet refuge of a theater isn’t exactly so—last week, while watching “Shame” a young boy sitting beside me couldn’t resist the temptation of text messaging. So I had to endure the light of another screen, luring me back to the real world as I wondered what waited on my phone. As New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote earlier this week, there is no escape from reality when your smartphone literally functions as a tracking device.

As fiendish little gadgets conspire to track our movements and record our activities wherever we go, producing a barrage of pictures of everything we’re doing and saying, our lives will unroll as one long instant replay.

There will be fewer and fewer of what Virginia Woolf called “moments of being,” intense sensations that stand apart from the “cotton wool of daily life.”

The same is true of literature, of course, which has also been a mode for deep, absorbing reverie. But rather than treating that immersion as an escape, the lessons of film and literature can sometimes illuminate reality, providing relief from our internal incarceration.

In a review of a new dual volume of letters by T.S. Eliot in The Weekly Standard, Edward Short notes that Eliot’s escape from a tumultuous marriage was in letters and literature. He notes how even Eliot’s wife, Vivien, knew this, and said, “poetry and literature are the very only things Tom cares for or has the faintest interest in”. Short adds, “it is as if he can only approach the ruin of his marriage by resorting to literature.”

Then he excerpts the following passage, written by Eliot:

In the last ten years—gradually, but deliberately—I have made myself into a machine. I have done it deliberately—in order to endure, in order not to feel—but it has killed V. .  .  . I have deliberately killed my senses—I have deliberately died—in order to go on with the outward form of living—This I did in 1915. What will happen if I live again? “I am I” but with what feelings, with what results to others—Have I the right to be I—But the dilemma—to kill another person by being dead, or to kill them by being alive? .  .  . Does it happen that two persons’ lives are absolutely hostile? Is it true that sometimes one can only live by another’s dying?

We have all been made machines by the technological triumph of convenience. Dowd acknowledges the irony that a silent film—“The Artist”—is making a comeback in the 21st century.

In the case of “The Artist,” silence is not only golden, it’s a reminder of how much you can articulate without words. If you take away the language, green screens and 3-D glasses, the feelings — pride, vanity, envy, fear, love — can be more primary and fascinating.

Even in an age when “Hollywood rarely makes great movies anymore” a film can still scintillate and inspire. She notes a scene in “The Artist” in which the film’s starlet, Peppy Miller, tries to connect to the man she loves by canoodling with his empty jacket as it hangs on a rack in their dressing room. For Dowd and for others, that quiet moment of closeness and longing, the simple pleasure aroused by a lover’s apparel, proves there is still glamour, there is still romance, there is still hope.

Can movies bring light into the world? Read More »

No Apologies. Just True Torah, by Rabbi Asher Lopatin

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In the past few months, forces have made my good friend and inspiration, Rav Hyim Shafner, apologize for several things he has said.  I do not begrudge him those apologies, if it helps him navigate the political world we live in.  But I do want to set the record straight:

1) If a couple – whether they be same sex, other sex, intermarried, etc – are part of the community and they adopt a baby, or celebrate that child’s birthday or bar mitzvah – that child deserves to be celebrated.  Celebrating the Bar Mitzva or the adoption of a child just – with a cake at kiddush, or with the entire kiddush – just means that Judaism is happy for kids to have loving and caring parents.  It does not mean that the parents are a good match, a halachic match or even bashert.  It is just a celebration of a family.  Families come in all shapes and sizes – some halachic, some not.  Our responsibility is to make sure that the kids see Judaism as beautiful and as compelling as possible.

2) Rav Hyim’s hypothetical case of a non-Jew getting an aliya may happen all the time in today’s world when we don’t examine people’s pedigree before they get an aliya.  We do check before we would marry them, but not before an aliya.  If we know that we accidentally gave a non-Jew an aliya, – even if there is a doubt – we can just add an acharon and still have 7 aliyot. 

3) Are the Batei Dinim that are dragging conversions out over several years, making potential converts miserable actually violating the prohibition of “innue hager”?  Rav Sha’ar Yashuv HaCohen paskined that they are considered geirim once they are involved in the conversion process.  So it would seem that our Batei Dinim are at list happy to risk violating this Torah prohibition, in order to be extra extra sure that they follow the strictest opinion possible to convert people.  Frequently they process conversion candidates inefficiently and painfully by making them have to face a bunch of rabbis who are not trained in the field of conversion, and are not doing it professionally.

No more apologies when it comes to values like welcoming Jews to shul, or making people feel comfortable in a Beit T’fila – a place of prayer and Torah – or when it comes to treating those who want to be Jewish with dignity.  The Torah asks us to stand up, and Morethodoxy is about standing up for these Torah values.

Rabbi Asher Lopatin

No Apologies. Just True Torah, by Rabbi Asher Lopatin Read More »

Kosher Club to close its doors after 30 years

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Kosher Club, a warehouse-style kosher market on Pico Boulevard, near La Brea Avenue, will close its doors on Friday, a victim of the competitive kosher retail industry in Los Angeles.

“After 30 years in business, the Kosher Club has decided to close its retail operation,” management wrote in an email sent to customers Wednesday. “As many of you know, we have struggled these last few years, and we decided to make a change.”

Owner Daryl Schwartz was not available for comment Thursday morning, but customers and employees at the market said they were saddened but not shocked to hear the news.

Kosher Club lies proximate to, but not within, the heavily Orthodox neighborhoods of Pico-Robertson and Beverly-La Brea. While loyalists insisted the easy parking and friendly service were worth the drive – less than 10 minutes from both neighborhoods – most customers preferred to patronize markets closer to their homes, which have proliferated in recent years.

Additionally, some customers agreed that prices at Kosher Club were slightly higher than at kosher markets on Pico, most of which also offered a lusher produce section than Kosher Club.

This week, prices for all merchandise (except the meat) were marked 30 percent off to clear the shelves, which by Thursday morning were mostly empty. A Chanukah display held only a few remaining puzzles and some chocolate. The bakery shelf offered some day-old loaves of bread and bags of pita. The meat case – renowned among kosher connoisseurs—sat nearly empty, opposite shelves with a jarringly sparse selection of wines.

Loyal customers, many of whom found out about the closing when they showed up to shop on Thursday, were distressed by the closing.

Meat cases were empty at Kosher Club, which has served the Los Angeles community since 1987.

“I come here once a month from South Bay to do all my shopping. I’m just devastated. Where will I go now?” asked one customer, who identified herself as M. Averch.

“This is home to me,” said Baruch Littman, a long-time customer and friend of the owners. “When I leave my house to go to a kosher market, I have never gone anywhere but here. Never. They have the best meat case in the entire city. Rosie is the best butcher in the entire city.”

Littman, vice president of development at the Jewish Community Foundation, said when he opened a restaurant in 1981, Mickey Schwartz, father of owner Daryl Schwartz, was the only one to extend him credit. Schwartz and a partner owned West Pico Foods, Inc., a distribution company. When they sold the company, Schwartz opened Kosher Club at the property in 1987.

Kosher club was early to develop online shopping and home delivery, but that wasn’t enough to compete with stores farther west on Pico Boulevard. Three large kosher markets and a handful of smaller ones do a brisk business on the stretch of Pico between La Cienega Boulevard and Roxbury Drive.

Angel Soto, who has worked for the Schwartzes for 30 years, most recently driving the home-delivery truck, witnessed the volume of customers at other kosher markets, and said he was concerned about Kosher Club.

Soto, along with about a dozen other employees, were told of the closing this week. Soto said customers have already offered him jobs, so he’s not worried about himself.

Averch, from South Bay, stood talking to other customers, extolling the service and products at Kosher Club, and wondering where she would shop now.

“And,” she added, looking at the newspaper rack near the register, “now where am I going to find my Jewish Journal?”

Kosher Club to close its doors after 30 years Read More »

After The Angel

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As Jews, we are told to take the Torah and “turn it and turn it again.” This can result in the proverbial, “2 Jews and 3 arguments” experience, but can also provide a whole new perspective on an old text.

For example, I recently learned that Jewish tradition teaches us that Jacob, as a result of his wrestling with an angel, ends up with a dislocated hip and was physically disabled for life with a permanent limp. Who knew? I always thought it was a description of a metaphysical experience, with Jacob confronting his “darker” side and having emerged victorious, is given a new, stronger name, “Yisrael”

In a new book titled, Esau’s Blessing: How the Bible Embraces those with Special Needs by Ora Horn Prouser, the author explores how this disability impacts the rest of Jacob’s life, resulting in a more passive and vulnerable personality.

She writes:

“…Jacob seems far more subdued than his (new) name might suggest. When Jacob’s daughter, Dinah is raped, a devastating affront not only to Dinah but to the honor of her whole family, Jacob refuses to take any stand without his sons present (Genesis 34:5)”

As a Jewish educator, Prouser has worked with many Jewish children who had special needs and hopes that by using a disability lens to re-examine the lives of such Biblical notables as Moses, Esau and Samson, it will result in a kinder, more compassionate Jewish community.

One of most intriguing profiles she writes is the chapter devoted to Isaac, and her hypothesis is that he was mildly mentally retarded, the same conclusion drawn by Rabbi Judith Z. Abrams in her 1990 article in the Reconstructionist magazine, “Was Isaac Disabled? “

Here’s the facts:
• Isaac is born to older parents (Sarah was supposed to have been 80!) who are themselves close relatives.
• When his father, Abraham almost sacrifices him, why doesn’t he protest or fight back? Why does it take him so long to figure out was going on?
• He is easily tricked by Joseph into giving him the blessing instead of to Esau

I’m not fully convinced that these facts, plus other textual nuggets, truly add up to a definitive DSM diagnosis, but it’s pretty intriguing to think about.

I urge Jewish professionals and parents raising children and teens with special needs to take the time to read this new book, available at www.BenYehudaPress.com

 

After The Angel Read More »

Rabbi ‘not ashamed’ to take on Rick Perry

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This past Tuesday, Rick Perry released a controversial new campaign video, apparently reaching out to Conservative Christian voters.  Since its release, several video spoofs have been popping up around youtube.  Here’s one by a Rabbi.