And the winner is…
#HanukkahHoopla
The amazing and incredibly creative Bible Belt Balabusta!!!
Her comment over here was chosen at random by random.org.
What did she win??
- Mama Doni’s 2011 Parents’ Choice Award-winning CD, Shabbat Shaboom
- a Mama Doni poster
- a Download card for free Mama Doni songs (1 Chanukah song and 1 Passover song)
- a Bag of Streit’s chocolate Hanukkah gelt.
HUGE thanks to our sponsors, Streit’s and Doni Zasloff Thomas a.k.a. Mama Doni, the lead singer/songwriter of The Mama Doni Band.
And even more thanks to Renee from Lessons from Teachers and Twits for dreaming up this whole thing. Not only did we spread a bit of #HanukkahHoopla around the web, but I acquired a bunch of new Jewesses (the one Jew is already a friend) to follow!!!
Grateful
She is a creative woman, an energetic mother, an engaging rabbi, and a loving wife.
And she knows scads and scads of people.
And because she loves and appreciates all those in her {{extremely}} large circle, she is constantly finding ways and reasons to bring them into relationship.
Thanks to her, I acquired several new friends. And have been introduced to many others.
She is…a connector.
And it is her birthday.
Today I celebrate all that she has brought into my life — including the many people who continue to enrich my daily experience.
Ad meah v’esrim to Ima on (and off) the Bima.
Bah Ch-ch-ch-ch-chumbug!
I. Hate. Chanukah.
I do.
I really do.
Call me a Scrooge. Or a Grinch. Or whatever.
This holiday has become a shameful mockery of what was intended to be an important message about religious identity. A polemic against assimilation.
Instead, it has become a poor imitation of someone else’s holiday.
What bothers me the most is that Chanukah provides a prolonged opportunity for some of the worst behaviour from our kids. It seems to highlight kids’ tendencies towards greed and ungraciousness. We try to keep the emphasis off the gifts and keep it on the candles, the Chanukah story, dreidels, but with little success. They tear into each night’s gift as though they have lived lives of material deprivation. No amount of lecturing manages to alter their attitudes.
And because we have a child on the autistic spectrum, all of the hullabaloo sets up the conditions for a perfect storm: Late nights, overwhelming sensory stimulation (sights, smells, etc), and the constant danger of disappointment at not receiving what he really wants — video games. Kids without autism, neuro-typical kids we call them, are also challenged by the above changes in their routines but possess the coping mechanisms to handle such changes. A kid on the spectrum, however, can be thrown by any one of them. And as much as the loving adults in his life want to believe that “he needs to learn to cope with disappointment,” for example, insisting that Beernut acquires what at this point appears to be beyond his developmental grasp does little to create peace and harmony here at Beit Frummie.
Oh, how I wish I had possessed the strength to have established better ground rules prior to kids. ZaydeGiraffe has the right idea; some nuts, an orange, a dreidel, and, if you are very lucky, a shirt or something equally practical and call it a day. Or, in this case, a Chanukah present.
Already set apart from their Christmas-observant friends, the Frumettes would stand outside our communal norm. But at least we could focus on the meaning of Chanukah, free of the other shtuss that seems to accompany it.
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And, on that happy note…
#HanukkahHoopla
I would like to thank Streit’s and Doni Zasloff Thomas a.k.a. Mama Doni, the lead singer/songwriter of The Mama Doni Band for providing each of the 16 bloggers involved in #HanukkahHoopla with a little cyber-swag. Their cross-promotional alliance is designed to celebrate Jewish culture with the young generation, a mission of both Mama Doni and Streit’s.
- Mama Doni’s 2011 Parents’ Choice Award-winning CD, Shabbat Shaboom
- a Mama Doni poster
- a Download card for free Mama Doni songs (1 Chanukah song and 1 Passover song)
- a Bag of Streit’s chocolate Hanukkah gelt.
How can you win? Leave me an awesome comment. On December 29, 2011, I will select one winner at random. Be sure to subscribe to my blog or subscribe to comments on this page so you can find out if you are the winner! If I don’t hear from you within 48 hours, I will select another winner.
Prefer to be contacted via Twitter? Leave your Twitter handle in your comment and I will tweet you if you win.
Not interested in winning? You can still leave a comment! I love to read your words. Just write: “No prize necessary” in your comment.
Please don’t make me work too hard to find you. That will make me kvetchy. Oy.
===> Please head over to Aprons & Blazers who is co-hosting this eighth, and final, day of #HanukkahHoopla with me.
And a huge shout-out to Lessons from Teachers and Twits for pulling this all together.
Teaching Tolerance
Courtesy Microsoft Office
Does anyone know what a rabbi is?
My opening question to the entire third grade at Poppyseed’s school. After a great amount of thought, I arranged to go into the school and give an explanation about Chanukah.
Does anyone know what a rabbi is?
The first thing that I learned as a rabbi was to make no assumptions about what people do and do not know. I figured, correctly as it turned out, that a room full of third graders in the midst of the corn fields of Pennsylvania was likely to yield more than a few kids with no working knowledge of what a rabbi is.
Does anyone know what a rabbi is?
- A Jewish person?
- Oh…I know! I know! Someone who can tell the future!
- Sorta like…you know…a religious teacher.
With that out of the way, I proceeded to teach about religious pluralism and freedom. Using The Latke Who Couldn’t Stop Screaming: A Christmas Story as a framework allowed me to show a menorah and explain its historical significance, explore how and why Chanukah is not the Jewish Christmas, and leave the kids that a significant message of Chanukah is about respecting that which makes us different.
And then…I passed out the dreidels and gelt. See, dreidel is just a game if not put into proper historical context. Explaining the rules of the game after going through the story turned the dreidel into an object of reinforcement.
The best part of the afternoon came in the form of a question that was asked so sweetly.
Um…so let’s say that your family is Christian and celebrates Christmas but we want to play dreidel. Is it OK if we use candy canes instead of gelt?
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#HanukkahHoopla continues!!!
Candle 4:
Lessons from Teachers and Twits
Head on over to those posts and leave comments for a chance to win an exclusive #HanukkahHoopla gift package, courtesy of Streit’s and Mama Doni, the lead singer/songwriter of The Mama Doni Band:
- Mama Doni’s 2011 Parents’ Choice Award-winning CD, Shabbat Shaboom
- a Mama Doni poster
- a Download card for free Mama Doni songs (1 Chanukah song and 1 Passover song)
- a Bag of Streit’s chocolate Hanukkah gelt.
Rewriting History
I don’t know about other homes, but this time of year seems to inspire a lot of religiously-oriented conversations.
In a chaotic and confusing world, we make impose our own sense of order by naming things. By attempting to define them. To put them, things and people, into compartments as a way of making sense of that which often confuses us.
And, it seems, we attempt to understand our story in new and…ahem…interesting ways.
Which is how Batman ended up in the Chanukah story.
There has been much discussion, at least among my colleagues, whether to diminish, if not dismiss entirely, the oil miracle in lieu of the military victory miracle. I, for one, maintain that they can, and should, coexist. Side-by-side. Enhancing, rather than detracting from, the whole point of this commemoration. Just as I am sharing the mysterious, and rather awesome, account of a tiny jar of oil that managed to keep the lights on in the House, so too am I describing the fight for religious assertion and victory that could not have been ours without help from Above.
Peach, just four years old, loves this story. Both aspects. And, like many kids his age, understands the notion of good guys versus bad guys. He talks about “the mean Greeks who wouldn’t let us be Jewish” (yes, I know they were Syrian-Greeks, but he’s only four) and the brave Maccabees who made them go away. The story has captivated him and provided a new backdrop for his creative play.
And, after much thought, he has wisely determined that the Maccabees would have won a whole lot faster if Batman had been there.
He’s probably right.
********************************
#HanukkahHoopla continues!!!
Candle 3:
and, because I didn’t get my act together yesterday,
Candle 2:
Head on over and leave comments for a chance to win an exclusive #HanukkahHoopla gift package, courtesy of Streit’s and Mama Doni, the lead singer/songwriter of The Mama Doni Band:
- Mama Doni’s 2011 Parents’ Choice Award-winning CD, Shabbat Shaboom
- a Mama Doni poster
- a Download card for free Mama Doni songs (1 Chanukah song and 1 Passover song)
- a Bag of Streit’s chocolate Hanukkah gelt.
Can We Talk?
Where do we find community?
Or is it just faster to ask where can we not find community?
As social beings, we yearn for companionship. In an age of instant communication, we can discover community in places heretofore improbable, if not impossible.
Are online relationships preferable to those face-to-face interactions? Of course not. But with our ever-expanding social networks erasing miles, time zones, etc., it isn’t possible to have IRL (in real life) contact with each and every person. The internet has the ability to protect connections that in earlier times would have been severed out of necessity.
I remember MamaBear, z”l, telling me that she knew nothing about her grandparents. When her parents came to America, they said good-bye to more than an environment hostile to Jews. They left knowing that they would never again see their parents in this lifetime. As one of my RWB colleagues concluded in yesterday’s session on Technology and Community, that with the exception of death, there is no reason to say good bye. There is an expectation of ongoing connection.
Much time is spent decrying the potentially destructive effects of social media. Let’s not overlook the constructive ways in which sacred connections are strengthened.
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It is time for #HanukkahHoopla!!! Head on over to Leah’s Thoughts and Ima on (and off) the Bima for Day #1.
Seeking Resolution
When our loved ones die, we don’t leave the burial to strangers. Because to participate in the act of burying our dead is considered a chesed shel emet — the ultimate and enduring act of lovingkindness. We do it knowing that the person whom we’ve buried can never repay the mitzvah to us. We do it hoping that others will treat us with the same lovingkindness.
DadGiraffe taught me: just as our parents pull up the covers and tuck us in before we go to bed so do we place earth into the grave and tuck in Ploni-ben-Ploni for his Eternal Sleep.
So accustomed to this and our other rituals in the face of death, the inability to participate in the mourning of a relative or friend leaves us with a lack of closure. As if he or she just simply went away. On an extended trip, perhaps.
Going out to California to help bury my friend was simply not possible. Mourning the loss of this remarkable person away from those who best knew him felt as though I was experiencing the loss in a vacuum. PC and I could talk about him, but I needed more. Texting, emailing, Facebook — they all helped soften the torn edges.
One hundred eighty-seven miles.
Each way.
To be with our classmates, our friends.
To hear from your congregants what you had meant to them.
Sudden memories came flooding back.
Snow globes.
Crazy-informative and impromptu tours of the Old City.
The “word-of-the-day” in a certain American Jewish History class.
It was worth every minute of the long drive to physically connect with others whose lives are now diminished without you.
Forty-nine years.
And then nothing.
An unresolved coda.
Shver Zu Zein Ein Yid (It’s Hard to be A Jew)
Everything here is different.
Or, at least, it seems that way. At times. To all five of us.
December is proving to be particularly difficult for Poppyseed. It wasn’t that Christmas was ignored back in California. In fact, it certainly seems as though it was everywhere. If only we had known…
When I was a congregational rabbi, parents would often ask me what to do about the overwhelming number of Christmas songs in the annual “Holiday” concert. Or wonder if I was going into my kids’ classrooms to teach about Chanukah. I had my own beliefs about how to handle the “December Dilemma” as a Jewish family and felt secure with our choices.
But Poppyseed is right; things are different here. There is Christmas music playing in the lobby of Poppyseed’s elementary school. And on the daily morning announcement.? And in the classrooms. Christmas trees are all over the school. Yeah, we had them in high school. But Poppyseed is only in the third grade.
Now Poppyseed wants me to ask the teacher if there can be a menorah put next to the tree. And I so desperately want to say, “no.” No, we cannot ask for a menorah to be placed in the room because religious symbols do not belong in the public schools. And just because the United States Supreme Court has determined that neither the tree nor the menorah are religious objects when placed in a predominently secular setting, doesn’t mean that they aren’t religious. No, we cannot try and create parity where there is none just because we are feeling as though everyone was invited to THE party…except for us. No, because our Festival of Lights commemorates the belief that we are different and have been willing to sacrifice our lives to protect our right to be different.
And then I look in her tear-filled eyes. The pressure of being one of the few Jews in a new school, in a new town, and without a spiritual home is weighing her down. She didn’t ask to be removed from the warmth of our former community. Or to be brought to what must feel to her like galut.
What happens to my principles if I am willing to push them aside, albeit reluctantly, for the sake of my child? Not to save her life, but to make her feel more comfortable? What am I teaching her by standing my ground?
Shameless Self-Promotion Plus One
I’m not very good at this part. The tooting of my own horn. Or pipes, in this case. It just feels so…so…self-aggrandizing.
What am I going to say?
Hey, my CD is so fantastic that your life will be immeasurably enhanced after just one listen.
Or something equally obnoxious?
It’s just not in my nature. Never has been.
But if you happen to be looking for a Chanukah gift that will be enjoyed long after the lights have been extinguished, it just so happens that Soul’s Delight might be the perfect gift.
*****
So while I am on the topic of promotion, I cannot help but recommend the debut recording by my cantor, Jennifer Duretz Peled, entitled Tehila. An incredibly talented musician and composer, Jenn’s voice is full and sweet and filled with genuine kavannah. I have been listening to Tehila non-stop since I got it a few days ago. It is that hypnotic.
In a good way.
TheSmartly: Under Pressure
Looking for me?? I’m over at The Smartly today.
Frume Sarah is Shabbos-observant -- in a Reform way, that is. Please note that from Friday afternoons until one hour after sundown on Saturday evenings, Frume Sarah will be unavailable, in observance of the Jewish Sabbath.
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