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meirmakesstuff · 4 years ago

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Hello! My group of Wayfarers has now built themselves a building which serves as a general meeting place, as a prayer space, and a last resort retreat in case of monster attacks. Which, if wikipedia didn't lie to me, is not unlike a Synagogue. So I was wondering if men would wear a kipah/other hat inside even if they're just gathering to eat. There're also strangers regularly entering the same space to eat. Would that make a difference?

Oh, spectacular. I love this question because it has so many different layers to it. Once again you’ve asked a deceptively simple question that’s going to take me several paragraphs of background to address, and I’m going to expand it to include Jewish head covering practices other than men wearing kippot while we’re at it, as well as touching on the nature of Jewish sacred spaces.

First of all, congratulations on naming your Jewish-coded culture! Wayfarers is a fascinating name and opens interesting implications about your world. I remain incredibly curious about the story you’re telling.

Second of all, my usual 2J3O (Two Jews, three opinions) disclaimer applies, especially this time, because I’m going to be talking about a lot of different Jewish practices with regard to head coverings, and while I’ve spent some time in a wide variety of different Jewish spaces and movements, I’m not deeply immersed in all of them, so for Jewish readers, if I make an incorrect generalization about practices in your movement I’d love to read your corrections. I’d also like to point anyone reading this toward Kermab’s previous ask for context on this conversation.

As it happens, two years ago I conducted a series of interviews across denominations about head covering practices and feelings for a book I used in my fourth through sixth grade classroom. While I don’t have legal permissions to share those interviews for any purpose other than classroom teaching, I’ll be referencing them as we go along here.

The first and most basic question is who covers their heads, and when. Your ask shows some basic and reasonable assumptions: men cover their heads in the synagogue. That’s not untrue, but it doesn’t tell the whole story.

You might remember from the other ask that rabbinic Judaism, which most of us practice today, didn’t develop until the sacrificial system was becoming unfeasible and eventually impossible to maintain. At that point, it seems that a cultural convention was for men and women to cover their heads at all times, with the similar explanation of modesty. Modesty seems to take on a different connotation when we’re discussing men or women--avoiding self-aggrandizement for men, sexual rectitude for women--but in essence covering one’s head was universal. I haven’t made a particular study of the shifts in this custom over time, but I can note that many examples of historic Jewish women’s costume from different regions includes one or another type of head covering--as did the non-Jewish women’s fashions of many of those places. At some point it became accepted that only married women needed to cover their hair, that since a woman’s hair was to be understood as a symbol of her sexuality, an unmarried woman’s visible hair was a way of communicating her availability. Men’s headwear meanwhile shifted as well, as did other religious wear such as tzitzit and tefillin. Tefillin settled into a tradition of being only worn during weekday morning prayer. Tzitzit developed into two garments: a tallit katan worn under a boy’s or man’s clothing at all times, and a tallit gadol worn over the clothing only during the morning prayer service. In communities where it was becoming uncommon for non-Jewish men to cover their heads, especially in places where the Christian convention was to remove one’s hat upon entering their houses of worship, it became expected in a synagogue that men might need to be told that the convention was to cover their heads, and kippot began to be provided to them there.

However, the convention isn’t actually to cover one’s head out of respect for the building. As you learned in your research, a synagogue building isn’t a locus of holiness but a location where holy activities take place. The expectation that developed was that men should cover their heads when engaging in religious activities. What are religious activities? Prayer, certainly, but also any activity that includes prayer, such as lifecycle occasions, home rituals, and eating.

There’s a memorable scene in George Eliot’s famously well-researched novel Daniel Deronda in which Daniel sits down to a Shabbat meal with a Jewish family. Eliot describes the family and their guests pausing before they ate, the men putting on their hats, and a benediction Eliot and her character do not understand taking place before the meal is eaten. From my perspective as a modern American, it was notable to me that they didn’t put on kippot but resumed the hats any Victorian man would take off upon entering their home, which these men had apparently also taken off, but put back on for the brachot before eating (Eliot doesn’t specify, as far as I can remember, whether they kept them on through the meal).

Daniel Deronda makes passing reference to the split that was already underway at the time in European Jewry, the development of the Reform movement. Early Reform practice developed out of a desire to be as little distinguished from the surrounding Christian culture as possible without actually worshipping a tripartite deity. Changes included, among others, abandoning all unique cultural garments, including tefillin, tzitzit, and any indoor covering of heads. At the time Eliot was writing, “Reformed” and “Rabbinic”--now Reform and Orthodox--were the only two distinct movements of European Judaism, though Hasidic groups, under the heading of Rabbinic Judaism but each having developed unique traditions, were many. My knowledge of what non-European Jews were doing, sartorially, at the time is very slight and I would welcome knowledgeable input.

The development of the Conservative movement is generally credited to the 1880s, when a disagreement within the Reform movement about how far to assimilate and which traditions to abandon culminated in the famed “Trefa Banquet” at which those who wanted to conserve practices such as keeping kosher are said to have walked out due to the flagrantly non-kosher menu. The symbolic incident speaks to the differences in practice between the movements: Reform Judaism in the 19th and early 20th centuries might have been indistinguishable from Christianity in all but theology, while Conservative Judaism would have been indistinguishable from Orthodox Judaism in all but a few liturgical and practical leniencies. Today, Conservative Judaism is dwindling due to a lack of clear leadership or identity, while the Reform movement rediscovers practices they had once abandoned, and certain Orthodox communities make motions of various kinds toward the center as well; nothing is simple in the story of Jewish life, and nothing is ever finished developing.

Here’s where the gender thing complicates, because in the mid to late 20th century Jewish practice began to egalitarianize in Reform and Conservative Judaism. I won’t go into the step-by-step development of women’s prayer attire and the path to women’s ordination and full inclusion from a historical perspective, but my own experiences are pretty illustrative about the development of practices from the 1990s until today:

I grew up in an Orthodox congregation, a university Hillel, a Conservative congregation, and a Conservative parochial school. The Conservative congregation was the only one of these that owned its own building; the school rented the top floor of the JCC and both the Hillel and the Orthodox congregation met on Saturdays and holidays in all-purpose rooms on the university campus, and when those were unavailable in whatever spaces they could secure. In all of these communities, boys were required to be wearing kippot at all times; in the Orthodox congregation men sometimes wore hats, while in the school there was a clear distinction between hats, which were impolite to wear indoors as a function of 20th century American culture, and kippot, which boys were required to be wearing at all times on school property; a boy who forgot to bring his own kipa had to walk to the office, deposit 25 cents in the tzedakah box, and take a plasticky black kipa to wear for the rest of the day. In the conservative synagogue, men were required to wear kipot, and women who were taking an active role in the service of any kind were required to cover their heads as well, with a kipa, a hat, or a provided lace doily. Women in the pews were permitted to make that choice themselves.

As a girl*, I was and remain uncomfortable with that dichotomy, in a way that is separate from the fact that I turned out not to be a girl after all. An Orthodox adult offered the paltry reasoning that women were simply closer to God than men, and that being thus not required to take part equally they were therefore barred from doing so, which at eleven already read to me as Victorian essentialist nonsense. As an adult I know women for whom that reasoning or a softened version of it is spiritually meaningful but I have also known many, so many women for whom that logic was a source of frustration and hurt. 2J3O.

I began wearing a kipa at the age of eleven, at first only as a form of protest against the principal’s daily “We will begin; all boys put on your kippot,” and later because wearing it became meaningful to me in ways I still struggle to put into words. I began to wear my kippot at all times that a boy was expected to do so: at all times on and around the JCC where the school was, on school field trips, at the synagogue (we had by that time tapered off participation as a family in the Orthodox congregation and were splitting our attendance between the Hillel and the Conservative synagogue: I later learned that this was because my mother was concerned that my brother would adopt the sexist attitudes she had overheard from men in the campus Orthodox group; all I knew at the time was that the communities I was in were struggling with how much and in what contexts to adopt egalitarian practice.

I was not the only girl* who formed our small brigade of kipa-wearing heritors of our mothers’ feminist battles, but we were not many. At school, the principal still opened the prayer service with a reminder that all boys were required to put on their kipa--and as we moved up into middle school, tallit and tefillin--and every day I stood up with the crowd of grumbling boys and wrapped myself in the tallit I had sewed and tied with my mother’s assistance and the tefillin my parents had bought me at my request. Once or twice I forgot my bag at home and went without, and the principal said nothing, though boys would have copped a lunch detention. Once I lost my kipa somehow on the bus to school and marched myself to the office to put my quarter in the tzedaka box and take my shameful plasticky kipa; the office manager watched me and said nothing. Boys struggling to put on their tefillin began to ask me for help rather than other boys or the principal; I was the only one in my grade clearly doing this by choice; I got an early taste of what it is like to teach and began to learn to lead without judgement or blame.

My bat* mitzvah celebration took place on a Sunday rather than a Saturday. I wore my tefillin with a fluffy floral, crinolined Easter dress and a kipa my mother decorated with fabric flowers. I spoke in my sermon about feminism, about equality, about arguments for a gender essentialist practice that I had heard and rejected already as I took the traditional first steps into Jewish adulthood. Besides me, men and women participated equally in the service: the Hillel rabbi shopped around among the Jewish professors in my parents’ social circle and created a breakdown that satisfied us all. A few of my father’s cousins declined their invitations, but no one I was actually acquainted with.

I went to public high school and for the first time was spending my every day in a context where boys’ heads--and therefore mine--were uncovered and Jewish topics rarely came up in conversation. I made close friends, I dated Jewish boys my friends recommended, that I should have instead made friends with, and I wondered who I was. The summer before Sophomore year I came back from a week at Jewish teen camp and did not take my kipa off. I have worn it every day since then, for more than twenty years.

My mother, who had been my model and cheerleader in exploring my Jewish, feminist development was initially uncomfortable. I remember a morning when her discomfort escaped in the form of snark: “[Meir] thinks she’s* going to a religious occasion.” I snarked back, adopting a theatrically pious tone for my “Life is a religious occasion,” but snark aside that’s actually the way I experience it. Wearing the kipa every day, whether I’m teaching Hebrew or taking out the trash, is a way of expressing that my religious life is not compartmentalized in certain actions and locations: I am the same Jewish, trans, complicated me, wherever I am and whatever I do.

In graduate school I worked in a Reconstructionist synagogue, and I do again now, and the practice in the school I taught in then was to require all students to wear kippot at all times in the synagogue: that’s been the case when I’ve taught in Reform congregations as well. When I taught in a Conservative congregation I was permitted to encourage but not to require girls to wear kipot, but I was asked to require the boys to do so. Since that wasn’t a community where I felt I could be transparent about my trans identity, I wasn’t able to bring my personal experiences to use there, and that’s what set me on the road to creating my book of interviews with as many different kinds of Jews as I could gather.

My interviews with other Jews about their head covering choices revealed a wide diversity of feelings. I had a cis male Conservative rabbi/professor tell me he only covers his head when he is specifically teaching on religious subjects (he also teaches history, I believe), and that when he was a child in an Orthodox parochial school his rabbi advised the boys to wear baseball caps to cover their heads on the subway so that if they misbehaved it wouldn’t reflect badly on the Jewish community. I had the son of the same rabbi tell me he wore his kipa at all times as a matter of habit, but his fiancee had asked him to pocket it or wear a hat if they were going to a restaurant on Shabbat, because that was contrary to the practice of both of their youth (traditional Shabbat practice forbids using money and cooking or instructing someone to cook for you). I had a cis male Reform rabbi tell me that he wore a kipa at all times because, although he didn’t keep kosher and didn’t refrain from going out to restaurants on Shabbat, he wanted to make the point that those too were legitimate practices of legitimate Jews. I had a cis male Conservative rabbi tell me that he preferred to wear a bandana rather than a kipa unless the occasion was too formal to allow it. I had a Lubavicher woman talk to me about the deep and the practical meanings she found in different methods of covering her hair and why she had shifted those practices throughout her lifetime; I had a non-Hasidic ultra-Orthodox woman say almost identical things, and I had a third Orthodox woman tell me she had worn hats that covered most of her hair when her children were young so that they would be able to fit in, but now that they were adults she wore the smallest hats she could find without actually being a kipa, to the mild agitation of her community. I had a hospital chaplain, not a rabbi, tell me that he used his kipa with a team logo on it to connect with patients, but that he rarely wore it outside of work situations. I had a gender-fluid person talk to me about different ways she has covered her head, or her hair, at various times in her shifting personal identity, to fit in with various different communities. I had so many women clergy and lay people tell me about harassment they had experienced from ultra-Orthodox men and non-Jews for wearing a kipa in public that I couldn’t use all of them. Some of the women talked about having given up covering their heads except in the synagogue or Jewish holiday meals. Some talked about wearing hats to look more like Orthodox women, or wearing beaded kippot that could pass as hair accessories. Some talked about defiantly wearing their kippot despite the aggression of Orthodox men demanding that they conform to Orthodox proscribed gender performance or non-Jews demanding that they engage in discussions of Israel politics while grocery shopping, or using public transportation. I had a Black Lubavicher woman tell me that when she wore a tichel (headwrap) she was frequently mistaken for Muslim, but that when she wore a shaitel (wig) she was frequently mistaken for Christian. In particular my students were moved by that tension: for so many of the interviewees in the book, the benefit and the drawback of their head covering choices was being identifiable as Jews, and here was someone covering in extremely mainstream ways and going unrecognized even within her own community.

Every single person I interviewed who was in any way a parent, teacher, or community leader talked about the hope that, whatever their practice was, it would inspire children who look to them to do the same.

Among interviewees who wore a kipa as part of their practice but not all the time, there was a general agreement along the lines of “I wear it when I engage in prayer, learn or teach Jewish subjects, or eat with a Jewish group.” The practice isn’t tied to the location but the activity. However, there are some locations that are so strongly associated with those activities that one might be expected to cover one’s head there regardless of the specific activity.

Looking specifically at the Wayfarers’ gathering-house (a literal translation both of the English term “Synagogue” and the Hebrew “Beit Knesset”), I would certainly say yes that they would cover their heads in one way or another when sitting down to eat; you can make a call about whether they would do so to engage in community politics or conduct diplomacy, and I would imagine there might be other priorities on their mind in the event of a monster attack. I will say that the border between religious practice and cultural practice, when it comes to Judaism, is not really meaningful, so if the community comes together for, say, a wedding or a holiday party, modern Jews who wear kipot would almost universally put on a kipa for such an occasion. It’s your call as to whether the gender divide is a meaningful factor in your imaginary culture; I will say that from Rashi’s daughters wearing tefillin to Rabbi Regina Jonas tending to her community in Nazi Germany to the ordinations or admissions into rabbinical school in the past few years of openly nonbinary clergy or prospective clergy in the Reform and Conservative movements, it has never been truly black and white. The choices you make in that regard will tell a story about who the Wayfarers are and how they fit into the larger history of your world.

*A note on gender: like Jews, trans people have a wide diversity of opinions and attitudes, including toward their childhood selves. What is comfortable for me is not necessarily comfortable for other trans people. Referring to myself as having been a girl is honest with regard to the way I experienced things then; referring to me as a woman now would be an aggressive act of rudeness. Referring to someone as their assigned gender when speaking about their childhood is not and should not be the norm unless the person has specified that it’s their preference: I only do it in certain contexts and do not prefer that others talk about me as having been a girl. I chose to do it in this context because I was discussing choices I made at a time when I would have described myself as a girl. Today my pronouns are exclusively He/Him and it is not my practice to reveal my previous name.

#Meir makes stuff #Meir Makes Long Posts #kermab #answered ask #Judaism #jewish representation #Jewish fantasy writing #Fantasy Writing #fantasy fiction

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jewishandmore · 5 years ago

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Truth, God, and Community

Truth, God, and Community Erev Yom Kippur - Kol Nidrei 5780 Tuesday, October 8, 2019 Temple Beth Zion, Buffalo, New York

by Rabbi Jonathan Freirich

A dark moonless night near a small, Jewish village, somewhere in Eastern Europe, sometime in the 1500’s.

The Jewish villagers were restless and worried. They heard from their cousins nearby that a mob in an anti-Semitic fury had been rampaging through the countryside. They had seen this before and worried that their village would be next.

The rabbi from the village, desperate to protect the people, worked on the banks of the river, in the dark. Fashioning a rough statue of person from the mud, turning it into a clay imitation of a person, the rabbi said a prayer and then a mystical formula. In the dim light of dawn, the rabbi inscribed three Hebrew letters into the forehead of the statue, writing the word “EMeT”, truth. Once completed, the word sunk deeply into the clay and transformed the statue into a Golem, a nearly indestructible magical creation that would defend the Jews of the town. The Golem would fight without tiring and would save our ancestors from the mob, from another pogrom.

The word that animated the Golem is “truth”.

Truth brings life. Truth protects us.

What is truth and what is true?

There is the scientific perspective. Truth is measurable and observable. A thing is or is not, it is this thing or that thing. This is Hydrogen and that is Helium. The temperature can be measured and is described as truly seventy degrees, no matter how it feels. A color can be measured as a wavelength, and is thus one thing or another. A fact, is a thing that is observable and measurable, and used to be something that most of us could agree upon. We used to be able to say: this is true, and that is the truth.

Now we can argue about everything.

Remember way back when, four years ago, when we were arguing over the colors of a washed out photo of a dress on the internet? Was it blue and black or white and gold? Turns out that the actual dress was in fact blue and black in a clearer photo, a surprise to me, I could have sworn it was white and gold, but this accelerated the idea that all truth is debatable.

While we may see colors as different based on our eyes and our brains, there are in fact “true” colors. They are measured in wavelengths. They can be described mathematically. There are objective truths to color that we rely upon, just as there are objective truths to everything around us that we must agree upon in order to do anything.

Truth is taking a beating.

Science is no longer accepted as reliable. Statistics are used merely to make a point and seldom to describe anything in a way that we can all agree about. Everything has become a matter of opinion.

We regularly validate our own perspectives as if they cannot be reconciled with someone else’s. Bias, individual brain chemistry, different ways of seeing blue and black and white and gold - we separate ourselves out from each other the more we think we can’t see eye to eye about anything.

We are in total agreement about a number of things that are only true because we agree about them.

Take time. We accept time as a standard that we create and uphold together. It is an agreed upon “fiction”. There is no objective nine o’clock. There is only the one that we say is nine o’clock, whether it is “Verizon Standard Time” or Jewish Standard Time - we have to agree upon when in order to all be there at the same time. I had a running group in Cleveland that met at 5:50 AM. They would say, “if you’re there, you’re there”. If I was late, I would be running fast to catch up. We set 5:50 AM by Verizon’s time on our phones.

Truth is the source of life.

And truth is dangerous.

After the Golem saved the small town, it eventually got out of control. A nearly indestructible protector become trouble-maker. When the rabbi admitted defeat at trying to make the Golem work after the crisis, the rabbi erased one letter from the Hebrew word for “Truth”. Rubbing out the ‘alef’ the word “truth” is transformed from “EMeT” into “MeiT”, “death”, and the Golem fell to dust.

Like the Golem, there can be too much truth. We can say too much, share too much of our feelings, and destroy the people around us by being overly truthful and lacking in compassion and kindness. Revealing things that need to be kept concealed can harm people, communities, and nations. Concealing too much that needs to be out in the open can do the same. Truth is like fire - the right amount warms, too much burns, and without it we are left in the dark, defenseless.

A seventh grade class once argued that all religion is just an opinion. Since it can be argued it can’t be a fact.

I asked them whether or not laws were facts or opinions?

Is “Thou Shall not Kill” only an opinion?

Eventually they were convinced that when we agree to hold something as truth - like a law, or an ethic, or a teaching, then it becomes truth, that is it is more than just an opinion.

That we can agree to make truth as a community means that we can agree to unmake it too.

Truth is fragile. Erasing only one letter erases it entirely.

When we attack the truth, claiming that there is no truth, we begin to destroy the common area that we hold together as a community. When that place between you and me comes under attack we not only stop sharing truth, we stop sharing common cause. We need that “true” place in the middle. This “truth” is not so simple.

In this shared space, we need to be kind and caring and we need to figure out how to tell the truth and how to preserve a relationship at the same time. No relationship can handle everything that we think, every truth that we observe. We must filter our thoughts and emotions so that we can get along, so that our relationships will survive and thrive.

The great Jewish sages Hillel and Shammai argued about truth. They argued about what we should say to a bride at her wedding.

Shammai was a stickler for the truth and insisted that we should describe her as she is - truth must prevail and anything else would be lying.

Hillel countered, that we must always say that the bride is beautiful.

The rabbis almost always agree with Hillel and remind us that we should always be sympathetic - meaning that we should say that a bride is beautiful.

[Babylonian Talmud, 17a-b, adapted]

Judaism teaches that a bride, and a groom, are beautiful because that is what defines them on that day. To get married is to be beautiful and our sympathy for the couple helps determine our presentation of the truth.

Truth is important and getting along with people is as well. We can even create a truth that we all agree on for the sake of getting along better. And yet we can destroy truth so easily that it will also destroy any sense that we have sympathy, that we are connected at all, with other people. We show our love for one another by calling all babies beautiful - it is absolute truth that there are no ugly babies. Who will argue with that?

And here we stand, on the evening of Yom Kippur, baring our souls before God, stripping away all of the filters all of the trappings so that we can be true to ourselves, true to our Creator, and then, hopefully, true to each other.

We declare truth a vital and central Jewish idea every time we recite Sh’ma and V’ahavta.

Most of you are familiar with these paragraphs that start: “Listen up Israel, Adonai is our God, Adonai is One!”

What then follows is the commandment to love God and all the things that will help us behave in ways that show how we love God. We are supposed to make all the teachings of Judaism into everyday parts of our lives, speaking about them in our homes and when we are traveling, teaching them to our children, writing them on the doorposts of our houses. V’ahavta tells us that we do this so that we will always remember the place of God in our lives, to do the things that show that we love God, that elevate our behavior and our thoughts, that remind us that God brought us out of Egypt, and then we conclude with the statement, “Adonai Eloheichem Emet”, three words that we can translate as, “Adonai your God is truth.”

We tie the mandate to behave well with the idea that God and truth are the same. We come together to understand what God asks of us and we come together to declare truth to be a shared idea and value.

Good conduct, ethical behavior, and truth, are linked in our prayers, and linked in reality. We must agree upon truth in order to get along.

When we allow our conversations with each other to devolve into a debate about whether or not something is true we have left behind civil discourse. Without a reasonable agreement to talk about things in an area of agreed upon truth we are competing bullies, yelling at each other because the louder person wins since they must have a stronger feeling about their own sense of truth.

In the heat of the moment, I feel all sorts of things are true. If I give heed to these feelings then I might be both unkind and disrespectful to the shared space in which we decide upon truth together.

I want to be a good person all the time even when I don’t feel that way. I want to be kind and loving even when I am occasionally, admittedly, tired and irritable. So which is true?

I am what I do.

I practice the truth that I want to live.

I try to build habits that create a “me” that is truer to the person I want to be.

This evening, Kol Nidrei, when we disavow the promises that we made to ourselves that we haven’t kept, when we confess our flaws and mistakes out loud, to our selves, to our families, to our community, this is our moment of truth. When we strip away all that we have aimed at over the past year and missed, we find the core of our beings, all those values that we work so hard to uphold, and we return to that place of truth within ourselves.

In that place of truth we begin again.

From this evening we start again on our true selves.

I must work on my truth, my sense of truth, refine my true self, and try again by putting it out there, better than last year. Both more loyal to the truth and kinder than before.

Remember the truths we share - from time, to wedding couples, to babies. This is easier than we think.

Truth is the source of life for the Golem, and it is the source of life in Jeremiah, who wrote:

Adonai, God is truth, the God of life… [Jeremiah 10:10]

And truth can burn too brightly, too hot, and destroy as well.

Are we ready for the truth?

We come here tonight to find out.

The true self within each of us longs to evolve, to get better, to be the better person that Judaism and God asks of us, that we ask of ourselves.

Will we hold ourselves to a higher standard, a more truthful and more compassionate standard, a shared standard that lives in the intersection between our inner convictions about right and wrong and the communal lives that we must build together?

Can we set down the burdens of the past year? Can we leave behind the things that we thought were true that turned out not to be? Can we set down our pride in arguments offered in passion, and our self-interest, and admit that there is truth to be found between where we stood then, and where we might go together tomorrow?

The truth is out there and in here, in our hearts and minds and souls, and most importantly in the immense places in between you and me. Between us is something bigger and better than either of us could only do by ourselves. Between us is God who is truth. God who is asking us to love the world by doing with our best selves.

As we do at every Kol Nidrei, we start tonight, united as seekers of what is good and what is kind and what is true, together to uncover truth and build a better tomorrow.

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