Israel

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Passover Seders without your grandchildren? Coronavirus crisis forced painful changes

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Passover Seders without your grandchildren? Coronavirus crisis forced painful changes

Passover Seders include one moment that is especially poignant for grandparents.

Early in this ritual meal they look on as one or more of their grandchildren sing or recite the "Ma Nishtana," the "Four Questions" that frame the lessons Israelites learned from their bondage in Egypt and Exodus to freedom.

The first line echoes from generation to generation: "Why is this night different from all other nights?"

This year, Jews everywhere are wrestling with the fact that -- in a world wracked by the coronavirus -- this Passover is radically different from other Passovers.

"There's no way to replace having Passover with your parents, your grandparents, your friends and loved ones," said Rabbi Yaacov Behrman, founder of the Jewish Future Alliance and director of Operation Survival, a drug abuse prevention program in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn.

"A grandmother looks forward to seeing her grandchildren at the Seder. Fathers and mothers look forward to seeing their families around that table. … There's no way to ignore the pain of what is happening this year."

Prayers and symbols describing suffering and liberation are at the heart of Haggadah (Hebrew for "telling") texts that guide the Seder meal and interpret the eight-day Passover season, which began this year at sundown on Wednesday, April 8.

Why is matzo the only bread at Passover? Because the Israelites didn't have time to bake leavened bread as they fled Egypt. Why dip bitter herbs into chopped apples, dates, nuts and wine? Because this paste resembles the clay Hebrew slaves used to make bricks. Why dip parsley into salt water? This represents new life, mixed with tears.

One ritual will have special meaning this year, as the leader of the Seder prays: "Blessed are you, Lord our God, King of the universe, who has sanctified us with His commandments, and commanded us concerning the washing of the hands."

Some secular and religious Jews are creating digital windows from one table to another, following how-to guides for "online Seders" using Zoom and similar video programs.


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Stories near you? Ultra-Orthodox Jews making news in a time of coronavirus self-isolation

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TV binge-watching has emerged as a primary coping strategy for — I’m estimating here — the gazillions of people tired of 2,000-piece puzzles and cleaning their homes, but who still find themselves indefinitely sequestered because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Dare I say, thank God for cable streaming?

I’d include in my moment of praise the new four-part Netflix series “Unorthodox,” the story of a young Jewish woman raised in the ultra-Orthodox, Hasidic Satmar community in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood who runs away because, as she says, “there are too many rules.”

Click here to view the show’s official trailer. The dialogue is in Yiddish, German and English — a linguistic stew that my late in-laws also spoke, often in the same sentence. They also added some Hebrew and were particularly adept at mixing curse words. But I digress.

The show is based on the real-life story of Deborah Feldman. As with virtually all such shows, some details of Feldman’s best-selling (according to Amazon) memoir were changed or invented for dramatic impact.

Media depictions of insular religious communities — be they polygamist Mormons, as in HBO’s TV series “Big Love,” or the Amish in the Academy Award-winning Harrison Ford film “Witness” — require unusual sensitivity.

Journalism, regardless of the form taken (I’m including here cinematic documentaries), requires an equally deft hand. One reason is that the most insular religious groups are notoriously mistrustful of outsiders, making them difficult to penetrate. That in turn often leads to innocent misunderstandings that undercut credibility. (I’ll leave intentional distortions and sensationalism for another post.)

I’ll get back to the how-to issue below. But first let’s give “Unorthodox” a deeper look. This is a topic that could point to news stories linked to other tight-knit religious communities, here in America and around the world.


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Looking ahead: What Super Tuesday means for American Jews, Israel and Bernie Sanders

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One of my wife’s cousins, a guy who has spent his life on a kibbutz in northern Israel, telephoned last week to ask what I thought of Sen. Bernie Sanders and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg.

I have strong reservations about both men, I responded.

But that’s beside the point, which is: What could I tell him about the two Jews vying for the Democratic presidential nomination (following Super Tuesday it’s now down to one, with Bloomberg having wiped out). Being Israeli, what he really meant was, what did this mean for the Jewish state?

I’ve had permutations of that conversation — on the telephone, via Facebook and in person — with a number of Jews, both American and Israeli, of varying political persuasions. Both the American Jewish press and Israeli news media binged on the Sanders-Bloomberg intra-tribal political slugfest, and I gorged on that as well.

My takeaways?

Sanders scares the #@*% out of most Israeli Jews and more than a few American Jews. But the latter will likely vote for him anyway should he grab the nomination.

Why? Because priority No. 1 is defeating President Donald Trump in November. (More on this below.)

In this regard, the situation is akin to when many traditional Christians, for whom blocking abortion was the deciding issue, held their collective nose and voted for Trump because they could not abide voting for pro-choice Hillary Clinton. How ironic is that? (And no, I’m not saying Sanders is as bad to my mind as is Trump. Not even close.)

Bloomberg, on the other hand, scared no one, except for Bernie Bros.


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Mainstream journalists should pay attention if American Judaism gets into serious trouble  

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How many articles have we read about the inexorable demographic slide of U.S. “mainline” Protestantism, difficulties lately hitting “evangelicals,” declining Mass attendance for Catholics and the growth of religiously unaffiliated people (“Nones”) who forsake all religious ties that bind?

There’s been far less media attention to the state of Judaism, the nation’s second-largest religion though Islam is moving up. It faces far worse prospects, according to premier chronicler Jack Wertheimer, a historian and former provost at Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS).

Reporters — if American Judaism is in serious trouble, that’s a big story by any definition.

This dire, developing story is a good example of the way scholarship that deserves media coverage can be mostly hidden for an extended period yet remain pertinent and newsworthy. Wertheimer’s “The New American Judaism” (Princeton), published two years ago, only caught The Guy’s eye when boss tmatt noted a review in the current edition of the Orthodox Union magazine Jewish Action. (The Guy has not yet read the book but that lengthy review provides ample substance and quotes.)

Wertheimer sees a “recession” — if not a great depression.

More than 2 million people of Jewish parentage “no longer identify as Jews.” Many others do not see themselves as part of the Jewish religion and define themselves only in cultural or ethnic terms. Rising intermarriage means fewer Jews tomorrow. Birth rates among the non-Orthodox are so low one wonders “who will populate Jewish religious institutions in the future.”

If the religion atrophies,  can non-religious communal life thrive?


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Darkness returns -- Rabbi Lord Sacks on new wave of anti-Semitism in Europe and America

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Darkness returns -- Rabbi Lord Sacks on new wave of anti-Semitism in Europe and America

Andrew Neil of BBC kept asking Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn the same question -- over and over.

"Eighty percent of Jews think that you're anti-Semitic," he stressed. "Wouldn't you like to take this opportunity tonight to apologize to the British Jewish community for what's happened?"

Corbyn would not yield: "What I'll say is this -- I am determined that our society will be safe for people of all faiths."

The Daily Express called this late-2019 clash a "horror show." This BBC interview, with surging fears of public anti-Semitism, lingered in headlines as Brits went to the polls. Corbyn's party suffered its worst defeat in nearly a century.

Meanwhile, in America, a wave of anti-Semitic attacks left Jews wondering if it was safe to wear yarmulkes and symbols of their faith while walking the sidewalks of New York City. In suburban Monsey, a machete-waving attacker stabbed five people at a Hasidic rabbi's Hanukkah party. Finally, thousands of New Yorkers marched to show solidarity with the Jewish community.

The NYPD estimates that anti-Semitic crimes rose 26% last year. Anti-Semitic hate crimes in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago are expected to hit an 18-year high, according to research at California State University, San Bernardino. 

No one who watches the news can doubt that "the darkness has returned. It has returned likewise to virtually every country in Europe," argued Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, who led the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth from 1991-2013. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 2005 and entered the House of Lords.

"That this should have happened within living memory of the Holocaust, after the most systematic attempt ever made … to find a cure for the virus of the world's longest hate -- more than half a century of Holocaust education and anti-racist legislation -- is almost unbelievable. It is particularly traumatic that this has happened in the United States, the country where Jews felt more at home than anywhere else in the Diaspora."

Why now?


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A religion question and so much more: What is Judaism?

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A religion question and so much more: What is Judaism?

THE QUESTION:

What is Judaism?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

How are we to comprehend the series of attacks on American Jews during the holiday season? Why were there 1,879 anti-Semitic incidents in the U.S. during 2018, by Anti-Defamation League count, which was double the 2017 total and the third-worst year on record?

Whatever the explanation, the three-word question above was the headline and subject of an online article just before the recent repellent events. Author Dennis Prager is a religiously and politically conservative Jew whose talk show airs on many “Christian-formatted” stations in the Salem Radio Network.

Prager said he raised this very fundamental question because “fewer and fewer Jews know anything about Judaism,” and many non-Jews “erroneously identify Judaism with what most Jews believe,” namely some vague secularized outlook.

This is no easy question because Jewish identity has a dual nature, religious and ethnic. Many Americans who consider themselves Jewish may be religiously Buddhist, or atheistic, or could care less about any religion and see their identity only as a cultural heritage. Also, unlike Christianity, Judaism is not a religion with defined creeds and confessions.

The Jewish Encyclopedia of 1906 told us Judaism is quite simply “the religion of the Jewish people,” which doesn’t get us very far.


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Category: Game shows. Question: How did Jeopardy! stumble into the Israeli-Palestinian quagmire?

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The mega-hit TV game show “Jeopardy!” is not my thing; I can’t recall ever watching it for more than a few minutes. But chances are that more than a few GetReligion readers are fans. Some undoubtedly were among the approximately 15-million viewers who tuned in to the show’s prime time “The Greatest of All Time” competition.

In the world of TV game shows this was, I understand, a big deal. As such, it constituted legitimate entertainment news and has been extensively covered the past several days. Some of this is, of course, linked to legendary host Alex Trebek and his battle with stage 4 pancreatic cancer.

The wave of news about “The Greatest” has not been the only recent “Jeopardy!” encounter with the news. And while the headlines generated by “The Greatest” episodes were a public relations gold mine, the show’s second news media spotlight was anything but.  

Rather, the second “Jeopardy!” story was a public relations disaster on an international scale. (I’m guessing here, but I figure the old show business adage, “say anything you want about me as long as you spell my name right,” longer boosts ratings in the #MeToo era.)

Why was it a global downer? 

Because the show was caught rewarding an incorrect answer to a geopolitically fraught question. And because the error concerned the always incendiary Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the incident went viral. 

As is the norm these days, the flub ricocheted around the web, garnering attention way beyond any rational measure of its real-world importance. 

Here’s the top of a Washington Post story on the brouhaha to get those of you who need it up to speed.

The “Jeopardy!” category was “Where’s that Church?”

The clue, for $200, was about an ancient basilica, “built in the 300s A.D.," in the West Bank city of Bethlehem.

And the answer? That might depend on whom you ask.


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End of the year 2019: Trying to understand the blitz of anti-Semitism that's shaking New York

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Here’s what I saw, two days before Christmas, when wrote my “On Religion” column about the Religion News Association’s poll to pick the Top 10 religion-news stories in 2019.

I saw this item: “A gunman kills 51 worshipers and wounds 39 at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. An Australian linked to anti-Muslim and white-supremacist statements faces charges. New Zealand quickly enacts new gun restrictions.” That ended up being the No. 2 story of the year.

But I also saw this: “Gunmen kill one person at a Poway, Calif., synagogue; two others outside a German synagogue; and three in a Jersey City kosher market. Other anti-Semitic attacks and threats increase, particularly in New York City.” That ended up at No. 10 in the poll.

I also saw this: “A terrorist group in Sri Lanka, claiming loyalty to the so-called Islamic State, kills more than 250 and wounds hundreds in suicide bombings at churches and hotels on Easter Sunday.” That slaughter on Christianity’s holiest day fell all the way to No. 17.

Of course, there were other attacks on believers in other sanctuaries during 2019 and I had no way to know what would happen in the next few days — especially in Texas and New York City. In the GetReligion podcast about the RNA poll, I tried to connect all of those blood-red dots (including the role anti-Semitism played in British life in 2019).

I knew that the #MeToo crisis among Southern Baptists was a huge story. Ditto for the concrete signs of schism among Southern Methodists. Still, in my column, I said:

As my No. 1 story, I combined several poll options to focus on the year's hellish uptick in attacks on worshipers in mosques, Jewish facilities and churches, including 250 killed in terrorist attacks on Easter in Sri Lanka.

What is there to say, less than two weeks later, as the sickening attacks on Jews shake New York City?


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What's a bus got to do with religion? A whole lot when it comes to violating the Sabbath in Israel

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As I noted here at GetReligion, I traveled to Israel earlier this year with a group of about a dozen U.S. religion journalists.

I wrote about a missile attack that occurred while I was there. I discovered that it was really no big deal.

I also gained a fuller understanding of the cozy relationship between Trump-supporting American evangelicals and the Jewish state. (Hint: Theology is involved.)

And I filled up my notebook with a lot of insights and questions that haven’t made their way into a published form. At least not yet.

During my weeklong experience through the American Jewish Committee’s Project Interchange, we stayed a few nights in Tel Aviv and the rest in Jerusalem. I was fascinated to learn of the stark differences between those major cities — one (Tel Aviv) a gay-friendly cosmopolitan metropolis and the other (Jerusalem) an old-time religious mecca still influenced by ancient Scriptures.

Suffice it say that since my trip, I’ve paid more attention to headlines from Israel, particularly those delving into the secular-religious divide that stresses modern-day Israel.

Speaking of which, maybe you saw The Associated Press story the other day on public buses running on the Sabbath in Tel Aviv. Or maybe you missed it during the Thanksgiving holidays. In either case, the AP story is worthy of note.

Read it carefully for a better understanding of the politics and religious divide in Israel:


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