Sunrise, Sunset: an Amazing Day of Jewish Rituals

Images We all feel gratitude for the beautiful moments in our lives.  In the observant Jewish life we live now those moments are often built around life-cycle events, usually moving and sometimes profound.  Last week, we had a Sunday that brought the entire thing into broad relief.  It's taken me a week to think it through and write about it though.  It was just so huge.

We began early, at a bris.  That's the moment of circumcision, welcoming a Jewish boy into the covenant with God on the 8th day of his life.  This one was held at the parents' home, full of their friends and those of the grandparents.  The mother's mom and dad are good friends of ours, kind, generous, no nonsense people, a librarian and a doctor.  Like any mom, she was helping her daughter.  Like any mom, she was greeting guests with hugs and personal welcomes.  Like any mom, she was dashing from counter to table with salads, platters of food, drinks, desserts.  Unlike most moms though, she did it all with a "crew cut".  In the midst of chemotherapy for breast cancer, she's decided there was no sense in "wearing something silly" to cover her hair loss, so she didn't.  Watching her hold her new grandson, both of them reminding us of the value of life at its most basic, was amazing.  You can imagine how it felt to be part of this – new life, fighting for life, affirming life – all in one family in one day.   It was quite a thing.

Blown away, we set off for our second destination, far less nuanced and very sad. A young friend with a toddler, expecting her second child very soon, had lost her mother to cancer.  The funeral, filled with other young parents with infants in their arms, was sad as they always are, laden with the grief felt by both this daughter and her husband.  Her parents had long been divorced, her ailing father lives with them, and for her last months, her mother had as well.  It's a huge thing to be that responsible for each parent singly and still live with one's responsibilities for spouse and children.  This couple took the responsibilities on gracefully and willingly.  

It was heartbreaking to hear the impassioned tribute this young woman gave to her mother, to understand the depth of her loss.   Jewish funerals are immediate, simple and highly symbolic: the 91st Psalm recited as the procession stops seven times on the way to the grave to symbolize the reluctance to bid farewell, internment in a simple pine box, all attendees contributing to covering the coffin until the grave is full, shovel by shovel, to support the lost and the mourners.   I've always said that the way Jews deal with death is one of my favorite of its many beautiful attributes; it seems to add symbolism to the grief and meaning to the death.  

Deeply depleted, as if a gray cloud had descended on our day, we returned to the car and moved on.  We were late, but able to arrive midway through our next engagement – a wedding.  As you can imagine, it was tough to rally but we did our best.  The bride and groom are a lovely (and very tall!) young couple, with a combined sweetness and wry sense of humor that endeared them to everyone.  So we were honored to be there.  It reminds, too, that life is indeed a circle, as corny as that sounds, filled both with sadness and joy.

We ended this amazing Sunday with a kind of interim ritual – between the beginning of life and the rituals of adulthood: a bar mitzvah party.  The young man celebrating his Saturday Torah reading and entry into Jewish adulthood is a remarkable kid, and the joys of this celebration were compounded by the special nature of this boy and his family – all hugely active in the community – fun, scholarly and kind.  They were the first people we met when we moved to this aging community that has since grown into a thriving, intergenerational congregation.   Newly arrived from Boston, they had chosen it because it needed new members to replace those who had moved away or died.  When we got here, the "bar mitzvah boy" was a little kid.  Now he's a poised young man with legions of friends from age two (really) to 82.  We all consider them a gift.  It was wonderful to celebrate with them.

So that was our day: a journey through Jewish tradition, commemoration of joy and grief, birth and loss, life and death — and a reminder of what an amazing journey we all – Jewish or otherwise, travel together.

America’s Future Politics Panel

Off the Grid – Torah and A Major Light Show

Cheesecake I'll be offline until Sunday celebrating a somewhat (and undeservedly) obscure Jewish holiday called Shavuot.*  It celebrates the giving of the Torah on Mt. Sinai – a story I love not only for its religious importance but also because it sounds like such a wild light show.

16. It
came to pass on the third day when it was morning, that there were thunder
claps and lightning flashes, and a thick cloud was upon the mountain, and a
very powerful blast of a shofar, and the entire nation that was in the camp
shuddered.  

17.
Moses brought the people out toward God from the
camp, and they stood at the bottom of the mountain.  

18.
And the entire Mount Sinai smoked because the
Lord had descended upon it in fire, and its smoke ascended like the smoke of
the kiln, and the entire mountain quaked violently.  

You know I'm not a Bible quoter but this is just so great and dramatic – isn't is?  Anyway I'll see you Sunday.    

*OH and the cheesecake is up there because this is a holiday that is, traditionally, heavy with dairy meals. 

Sonia Sotomayor: A Blogger Tour (of Sorts)

Elle_Woods What do Sonia Sotomayor and Elle Woods have in common?  Plenty, according to a wonderful post by the ever-original PunditMom.  That's just one of many, of course.  I'm offering here a kind of tour – mostly of women whose views are notable in one way or another. 

At the ABA Journal, Debra Cassens Weiss offers – and debunks, the four most likely knocks on Judge Sotomayor.

We all love Culture Kitchen's Liza Sabater.  This time she's outdone herself in several intriguing (and some fun) posts on the nomination.  Meanwhile, Jill Tubman's post on "sexist attacks" appears both at New Agenda and Jack and Jill Politics.  There's a video conversation at Laura Flanders  among  Firedoglake's Jane Hamsher,  Lynn Paltrow, Executive Director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, and Jose Perez who's a lawyer with Latino Justice.

Thinking about the judge's environmental record?  There's a brief exploration by Karen Murphy at SuperEco.  Want to review more newsy discussion?  Professor Kim Pearson, at Professor Kim's News Notes, has a nice early review.  Jezebel has a survey with a little more attitude, too.

Jen Nedau provides a review of the record and some thoughts beyond and Jill Filipovic a nice exploration of differences of opinion and the judge's underlying value.

Finally, at Tech President, Nancy Scola offers, as usual, an original perspective: just how has the White House put the nomination out, and with what ammo?  It's pretty interesting.

This is just a sprinkling of what's out there; add your own in the comments and I'll include them too.

Sonia Sotomayor – Sharing the Obama, and the American, Story

It was striking to listen to the President and Sonia Sotomayor today.  Listen to her story, and think of his.  The parallels are striking.  Early "modest circumstances", early loss of a father, strong women supporting them (for Obama his mother intellectually and his grandmother in other ways, for Sotomayor her mom), and the power of – the huge, profound belief in — the power of education to change a life.  It is becoming a mantra of this administration – the President's speeches and appearances with young people, certainly those of Michelle, and, we see today, of his choice for Supreme Court nominee.  I was liveblogging with Kim Pearson at BlogHer and wrote that I believe Obama is "retuning the American sensibility." By "retuning" I mean returning us, like a tuner with a piano, back to the standards that  sustained us for so long.

My father made it impossible not to understand the value of education.  His father came here from Eastern Europe with nothing and my dad, with the help of several scholarships and three jobs at a time, graduated from Harvard and Harvard Law School.  He told me once we probably wouldn't inherit much – that "your education is your inheritance."  And so it was.

For much of the past couple of decades though, that belief has been blunted – by the tech revolution (even though much of it was produced by immigrants who also built a life here) and the greedy 80's, by the growing gap between the wealthy and even the middle class, and by what has felt to many like disproportionate power in the hands of business.  It has just looked harder to get from those humble beginnings.  Our values were so much more about money: the sports stars and rock stars and the Donald Trumps of the world than education and service and personal responsibility. 

Of course, the barriers are still devastating for many.  How does a child entering preschool with a 500 word vocabulary keep up with one entering with 15,000 words?  Research tells us that's often the difference between kids from well-to-do versus economically challenging households at preschool age.  There is a wealth of work to do to make it possible for us all to truly start out on a level playing field.

Even so, it's exciting to think about what happened today because the central players have "walked the walk" within their own communities and beyond, managing challenges in race, gender, ethnicity and class.  No matter how the nomination turns out, it's a reminder of what we want to – and often do believe about our country: that those dreams are still possible, that the stories with which many of us grew up are still true.  It's up to all of us to make sure that we continue to return to these beliefs, and where they are not yet true, work to make them so.

Maureen Dowd, Michael Wolff, The New York Times and Notoriety

Mwolff_pic I have been a fan and follower of Michael Wolff for years.  Read his stuff in the bubble and afterwards.  Even read Burn Rate, his lively, funny and very interesting history of the rise and fall of his Web company.  So I get his email every day, with links to his Newser columns. They're usually fine, when I have time to read them.  Today though, he's outdone himself so I wanted to be sure you knew.  The piece is called "Maureen Dowd is All in Your Head"

Given what Wolff writes about The Dread Plagiarism Incident, I'm not offering any of my own perspectives here.  I just wanted to take note of this very interesting discussion of journalist celebrity, aspirational followers and the New York Times in general.  Here's a sample:

Here’s my question: Why are boring people so interested in her? Ever since she began her column in the mid-nineties it has been de rigueur among people who, relatively speaking, have no opinions about anything
to have very firm opinions about Dowd. Among a great swatch of uninteresting people she is the officially sanctioned, government-approved lightening rod.

The role Dowd has played is striking.  Even in the context of being declared tiresome,  she evokes a pretty acid response from a pretty touch cookie.  Interesting, no?