(Ron Regé Jr.)

Yizkor, meaning “remembrance,” is a prayer said four times a year: on Yom Kippur and Shmini Atzeret, and on the final days of Pesach and Shavuot. On Yom Kippur you ask forgiveness of sin; on Shmini Atzeret you close indoors the New Year’s reflection, asking for a greater outdoors to come, for good rain ensuring good harvest; on Pesach—commemorating the Exodus—you celebrate freedom from enslavement; on Shavuot—commemorating the giving/receiving of the law—you celebrate the culmination of that freedom in a more positive indenture—to the commandments. After which, on all four days, you remember.

It’s a telling textualization of Judaism that it’s not a sacrifice or magical act but the embalmed formality of Yizkor—“May God remember the soul of my father/mother, who has gone on to his/her reward”—that has become the primary communication between a living person and his or her deceased. Talmud tells us that the soul, though eternal, is subject to conditions that can be bettered—death cannot be worsened—through two responsibilities undertaken by a surviving heir: charity and righteous deeds. Yizkor enacts one—prayer as deed—while promising the other: “I shall give charity on my father’s/mother’s behalf.”

Zealous in our memory, we should be equally zealous with regard to our memorious technologies. By which I mean we mourners assembled to pronounce this rare prayer should be more charitable toward the fate of the book from which we read it (the word for that book is Mahzor, meaning “cycle”). The quasicyclical scroll was cut for the supersessionary codex, or book, whose materials have been sliced free, into omnimateriality, for screens (whose ancestor, the parochet or “veil,” screened the offerings of Judaism’s first worship). For modern Judaism, however, the codex—which began mass production in the late 1400s, the period of Europe’s most extensive Jewish expulsions—must be the terminant technology, unless electronic tablets, on which all information is egalitarianly accessible and divinely transitive, are to be raised above the congregation. (more…)

Lorin Maazel conducting Mahler’s Eighth Symphony in Duisburg, Germany, 2010. (Patrik Stollarz/AFP/Getty Images)

My father was obsessed with Gustav Mahler. I grew up with the composer’s Second, Fourth, Fifth, and Ninth Symphonies blaring constantly from the living room stereo. My brother, Andy, and I were the only teenagers in America constantly yelling, “Dad! Turn that damn music down!”

My father loved Mahler’s emotionalism and range. He loved Mahler’s passion for atypical instruments: harmonium, glockenspiel, mandolin. He loved the way the symphonies incorporate snippets of bird sounds, unpretentious folk music, and Jewish ritual melodies. He loved the humor and intensity he found in Mahler’s work. Mahler’s music messes with people’s heads—the guy was a terribly polarizing figure, much like my father. Dad was a psychiatrist and enfant terrible who ran a community mental health center; he loved working with the mentally ill and loved teasing people who expected him to be a formal, cerebral figure. It delighted him that Mahler had visited Sigmund Freud, who wrote that he admired “the capability for psychological understanding of this man of genius.”

In Mahler Remembered, Norman Lebrecht quotes the 19th-century German conductor Oskar Fried on the composer:

He was a God-seeker. With incredible fanaticism, with unparalleled dedication and with unshakable love he persued a constant search for the divine, both in the individual and in man as a whole. He saw himself bearing a sacred trust; it suffused his whole being. His nature was religious thorough and through in a mystical, not a dogmatic, sense.

(more…)

An illustration from The Brisket Book. (Happy Menocal)

A buttery, rich madeleine you could understand. So French, so delicate, so, well—so Proustian: “Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy?” But why does a flaccid four-pound, gray-brown piece of beef, shaped roughly like the state of Tennessee, inspire Proustian prose, evoke the deepest pleasure, create indelible memories? I didn’t even know what a brisket was until I was about 25 years old. My mother never made brisket (she was Swedish, a Lutheran lover of lutefisk), but when I put the first voluptuous piece into my mouth, fork-tender, adrift in a rich, sweet onion gravy, accompanied by supernal mashed potatoes and roasted carrots, well—you had me at brisket. (Full disclosure: My father, Mannie, was Jewish, so clearly I have a strong brisket gene.)

Now when I hear that a friend is cooking a brisket for dinner, I get choked up. A brisket? For me? No, it’s too much. You don’t need to do that. We’ll order Chinese. One of my closest friends revealed the secret ingredient in her family’s brisket recipe, and I started to cry. That’s the moment I realized that I needed to get to the bottom of why so many of us have such a strong emotional attachment to this blah cut of beef that doesn’t sit on a steer anywhere near the sexy sirloin or the fancy filet mignon. Is it because even a pretty bad cook can turn a brisket into a pretty decent dish? Does brisket just scream “happy intact family,” even when it’s not your own family? Is it because while we have lost mother tongues, changed our last names, and moved all over the world, we have somehow managed not to lose our recipes for brisket—recipes that have been handed down and copied and emailed and tweeted? (Whose heart wouldn’t melt a little hearing about Aunt Irene’s New England brisket recipe with sherry and mushrooms, which was passed down to her niece Alice, who gave it to her friend Ellen, who shared it with her nephew John, who let his girlfriend—who had never even eaten a brisket—copy it for her mother so she could help her cook it?)

But our passion for brisket goes beyond the recipe or the result. I wondered if there is something to the fact that brisket is just so unpretentious. It has no airs. It has a pretty unimpressive provenance. It did come over early from Europe but is one of a very few not to claim that it came over on the Mayflower. Nor was barbecued brisket born with a silver spoon in its mouth. When the breast of a steer was first slow smoked in the hinterlands of South America and/or the Caribbean, it was by people more likely to be called “natives” than “chefs.” Or could it be that for years, brisket was so affordable you could serve your whole family, invite the neighbors, set an extra place for the rabbi and his wife, and still have leftovers for a week? (more…)

RustyBrick’s shofar app for the iPhone. (Len Small/Tablet Magazine)

Far from the sleek offices of Silicon Valley, a nondescript office building off the New York Thruway in Suffern, N.Y., just over the New Jersey border, houses the headquarters of RustyBrick, a modest web-development company with some higher concerns. Founded and run by brothers Barry and Ronnie Schwartz, 31-year-old fraternal twins, RustyBrick has cornered the market on iPhone and iPad applications for observant Jews.

The Schwartz brothers are tech-savvy Modern Orthodox Jews, which makes them well-positioned to forecast their customers’ desires. “Anything we find useful that we want in our phone, we’ll develop,” Barry Schwartz said. RustyBrick’s 25 Jewish apps include an iPhone Siddur, an iPhone Tanach, and a Shabbat app that provides candle-lighting times and has been downloaded more than 400,000 times. RustyBrick’s shofar app—a simple, free, and, it must be said, completely irritating application that plays the four distinct shofar sounds, was downloaded thousands of times in the days leading up to Rosh Hashanah last year, Barry said.

When the twins were in high school in Monsey, N.Y., the nearby ultra-Orthodox hamlet, Ronnie discovered a knack for design and software development. They formed their company in 1999, while they were both in college; today they have 19 employees. Barry, the charismatic brother, handles the business operations, while Ronnie, more reserved, oversees software development. “Anything not related to technology I do,” Barry said. “We overlap,” Ronnie corrected. Twins. (more…)

(Abigail Miller/Tablet Magazine)

Israel and the Palestinian bid for statehood have dominated this week’s news, and whatever happens at the United Nations, Jews around the world are certain to be thinking and talking about it during the upcoming High Holidays. There were other big stories this summer, too: the Arab Spring, for one, and what some see as a rejuvenation of Israeli civil society by the tent-city protesters. Tablet Magazine asked a range of rabbis from across the country—Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox; from New York to California, Florida to Illinois—what they’re planning to tell their congregations.

ON SERMONIZING

Rabbi Jack Moline
Agudas Achim, Alexandria, Virginia

I’ve been at this 30 years, and for 20 of them there’s been some crisis around the holidays that demanded our attention. In 1993 when they had the signing of the Oslo agreement on the White House lawn we all had to rewrite our sermons. But there are very few things in this world that you have to consider if you’re going to be a Jew. One is God, one is Israel, and another is your relationship to the Jewish people. So it’s my responsibility when the largest number of people come together to be Jewish to raise all of those issues. People come to synagogue on the holidays for strengthening and introspection. They don’t need my opinion. They want orientation.

Rabbi David Wolpe
Sinai Temple, Los Angeles, California

The Palestinian statehood issue is this year’s crisis, but I’m not sure it’s fundamentally different from anything that’s gone before. My father began the holidays with the state of the Jewish world on the first day of Rosh Hashanah, and I’ve repeated that. And it seems to me that a great issue for human beings individually and for Israel as a country is to what extent you act on your own interest, and how much you act based on what other people think of you. (more…)

Gundi, a Persian chicken soup with chickpea dumplings. ( Food of Life: Ancient Persian and Modern Iranian Cooking and Ceremonies by Najmieh Batmanglij, courtesy of Mage Publishers, www.mage.com)

When American Jews usher in Rosh Hashanah next week, most will dip an apple in honey for a sweet new year. Some will eat a date, and others will display a bowl of pomegranates on the table.

But when Persian-American Jews sit down to celebrate, their tables will be laden with an abundance of symbolic foods. In fact, they call the Rosh Hashanah meal a Seder, and the Aramaic blessings they recite follow a particular order. Cookbook author Reyna Simnegar, whose beautiful book Persian Food From the Non-Persian Bride and Other Kosher Sephardic Recipes You Will Love came out earlier this year, says these customs originated more than 2,500 years ago.

“We first dip an apple in honey, then we tear a piece of leek—meaning to rip the enemy apart—and then throw the leek over our shoulder,” she said. Included on the table is fried zucchini, black-eyed peas, lamb’s head, tongue or a fish head, roasted beets, and dates. “In Iran the cooked lungs of a cow or lamb were used,” she told me. “But here, we put something fluffy like popcorn on the table.” (more…)

The United Nations compound in New York City.(Stan Honda/AFP/Getty Images)

The 66th regular session (that is, year) of the United Nations General Assembly will formally open next Tuesday, September 13. It will be followed by two weeks of meetings, during which leaders from around the world will fly into New York, clog up midtown hotels, and tend to business in Turtle Bay. “General Debate” will occur on September 21-23 and again from September 26-30. This year, those periods are expected to be more eventful for Israel than usual, what with the Palestinian Authority’s fledgling but still apparently existing plans to push for some upgrade of status.

Which makes it especially inconvenient that, this year, Rosh Hashanah begins at sundown on Wednesday, September 28, smack in the middle of that second period of General Debate. Moreover, unlike most two-day Jewish holidays, of which Israelis celebrate only the first days, observance of Rosh Hashanah extends all the way to sundown that Friday.

What would happen should Israel’s diplomats need to be executing their jobs on the yom tov? “The Israeli government and its representatives observe all national and Jewish holidays,” Gil Lainer, consul for media and public affairs at the Consulate General of Israel in New York, told Tablet Magazine. “Any and all exceptions are made on a case-by-case basis when deemed necessary.” A couple weeks ago, Defense Minister Ehud Barak broke Shabbat to make a (successful) intervention into a burgeoning crisis with Egypt. One imagines a unilateral Palestinian statehood drive would qualify as similarly extenuating. And, anyway, we hear that it is the former period, from September 21-23, that is expected to be most eventful for the Jewish state.

Earlier: Palestinian Move a Go, Followed By …

The United Nations headquarters.(Wikipedia)

It was brought to our attention that United Nations employees in New York, that most Jewish of cities where the international organization is headquartered, will have the second day of Rosh Hashanah (Friday) off, but not the first (Thursday). Why? Because Friday happens also to be Eid ul-Fitr, the Islamic celebration of the end of the holy month of Ramadan, which is one of the ten official holidays for U.N. employees in New York. I looked into the matter a little bit further—driven, to be perfectly honest, in part by the U.N.’s less-than-stellar record on Jewish issues in recent years. But turns out this is kosher.

U.N. spokesperson Farhan Haq explained to me that, in each country, U.N. employees get ten paid holidays, with the ten days left up to the host countries (so in Russia, for example, they get Eastern Orthodox Christmas, or January 7, off). In New York, though, holidays have been decided by the votes of all member countries—in other words, of the General Assembly—and the ten holidays they have come up with are: New Year’s Day (January 1), President’s Day, Good Friday, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Eid ul-Fitr, Eid al-Adha (which commemorates Abraham’s refusal to sacrifice Ishmael—yes, to them it’s Ishmael, not Isaac), Thanksgiving, and Christmas (Western). No Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur, though—and this in New York, where even the schools (though not the city) have the day off!

Honestly, though, while the small number of explicitly Jewish nations (one) in the General Assembly has at various times led to some pretty nasty things, this clear is not driven by animosity. Anyway, Jewish employees will get one day of Rosh Hashanah off to spend in observance, and, like most other Jews, can take the other one off themselves. Muslim employees (like Haq, as he noted to me) get Eid to observe. And Christian employees? They just get the day off. But we’re used to them catching the breaks.

Children marking Rosh Hashanah in southern France last year. (Valery Hache/AFP/Getty Images)

The Jewish New Year is not about counting down to midnight and yelling “whoo!” before promising to join a gym.

Our New Year is about reflection and reassessment. Even those two words tell us we’re supposed to look back as much as we look forward—look at the “re,” telling us to turn around, to stop charging full speed ahead. And in another example of the way language informs what we do, we spend the holiday hoping to be inscribed in the book of life: two words—book, inscription—that speak of permanence. Inscribed books are weighty and lasting—they have historicity. They do not yell “whoo!”

On Rosh Hashanah, lots of us—even people who don’t spend a lot of time in shul or hunched over Jewish texts—make the effort to get to a synagogue. The tunes and prayer-poems are familiar; they’re the same every year. We sing Avinu Malkeynu, asking God to forgive our sins. The refrain is repeated so frequently that it’s easy to sing along. It’s repetitive and dirge-like, and you don’t need to know Hebrew to fall into its rhythm. We await the blowing of the shofar: The sound and the visuals couldn’t be more primal and ancient. Rosh Hashanah’s liturgy is full of descriptions of humans as meaningless little nothings cowering before the Almighty. Even if you don’t subscribe to the old-school version of the smiting Heavenly Father, the king on a throne of judgment, the text is consistent and almost reassuring. Here we are, standing with our community, sniveling in one voice. There’s no narcissism involved. (more…)

(Tablet Magazine)

The High Holidays are, almost reflexively, a time of introspection. But the soul-searching need not be limited to our private selves; as the rabbis teach, it’s not just our own ledger that needs to be checked but our communal one as well. This communal accounting assumed special urgency this year, after a proposed bill in Israel’s Knesset—one that would have changed rabbinical authority over conversions—inspired a combative but perhaps ultimately healthy discussion about the essential questions of Jewish identity. As both supporters and detractors of the bill would agree, what was at issue, at least in part, was the question of where the boundaries of our community lie: Who is a Jew? Or, put another way: What is Judaism?

Those questions may appear nebulous, simultaneously too elusive and too deep for anyone to attempt to answer seriously. But look at the landscape of Jewish life and two broad currents suggest themselves, two divergent agendas that address much more than the question of conversion alone. On the one hand, those who imagine Judaism as an exclusive enterprise advocate that the religion and its followers alike should move in ever-diminishing circles, orbiting around a small nucleus of rabbis entrusted with parsing the halachic laws. This approach is not without its merits; trying to make sense of an ancient faith in a modern world is a mighty and baffling task, and the drive inward, toward purity and certainty, is both instinctive and immensely reassuring.

But those of us who believe that Judaism’s survival also depends on its ability to adapt to the spiritual and practical challenges imposed by modernity must reject the urge to narrow our common horizons. Instead, we must examine our boundaries and beliefs and work to welcome new people, new traditions, and new ideas into the fold. To some, such talk may have the airy, hollow ring of universalist New Age spirituality. But that is not the case—as we think will be clear from the collection of essays by rabbis and writers, scholars and cooks, comedians and community leaders in Tablet Magazine’s High Holiday package. Some of these articles and essays are personal, others historical. In them, we hope each reader will find his or her own path toward answering Judaism’s essential questions, impossible and beautiful and all-encompassing—the only questions worth asking. (more…)