Me, MY DAD, and THE DIVA at his birthday party
Happy birthday to the best father I have ever had! Today you turn 70! Good news, you don’t look a day over 55. I hope that your day is filled with lots of fun, laughter, and smiles. It was wonderful to be able to celebrate you over the weekend. I love you very much.
Confession – I cannot do a pull up or a chin up.
Every year during gym class I felt like a failure because there was no hope for me doing a pull up as part of the government’s physical fitness test. According to “Why Women Can’t Do Pull Ups” in the New York Times there might be legitimate reasons.
In addition to the fact that I am 5’9″, today I confess that I am not in the best of shape. When I lived in the T-Dot I was working out regularly with a trainer and did countless repetitions on the assisted pull up/chin up machine. I did develop those muscles but I still needed to use the weights to help me. It is my own goal to work on that more seriously (yes I have a plan, no I will not share it here). In the mean time, I take some comfort in knowing that my lack of pull up prowess might be more complicated than I thought.
This post comes from the Women of Reform Judaism’s blog on October 24 found here.
Much has been written in recent days about the arrest of Anat Hoffman, executive director of the Reform Movement’s Israel Religious Action Center, at the Kotel while wearing a tallit and saying Sh’ma with Women of the Wall and Hadassah. There have been articles, websites, and petitions offered by many groups and individuals, each responding in their own way.
WRJ also has expressed our outrage at Anat’s treatment and joined the chorus of women’s groups and other progressive voices calling for a change in policy by the authorities who manage this historic site. Reform women want Anat and Women of the Wall to know that we stand in solidarity with them and will raise our voices on their behalf.
But we need to do more. If government officials in any other corner of the world tried to prevent us from praying in our own voice, wearing our chosen ritual garb or worshipping freely, we would not be silent. We certainly will not tolerate it from Jewish extremists who have been empowered by the government of Israel to wrest control of our holiest site. The Kotel belongs to the entire Jewish people: women and men, Orthodox and secular and everything in between. We will use every tool at our disposal to secure the rights of all Jews to pray freely wherever they are – including in Israel, including at the Western Wall.
So, I hope you will join women worldwide in the WRJ Sh’ma Smackdown. Create a video of you, your friends, or your sisterhood saying the Sh’ma. Take a photo with the words of the Sh’ma prayer. Send your videos and photos to us at womenofreformjudaism@gmail.com so we can compile them and post them on the WRJ Facebook page. Comment on this blog post, “like” our Facebook page, and forward this message to others.
Let’s make sure the women fighting for our rights in Israel as well as Israeli government officials hear our voices unified by this message: If anyone tries to diminish our rights or silence our voices, we will respond.
And our response is this:
Hear, O Israel. Hear our voices raised in prayer. Hear our voices declare that the God of Israel is our God. Hear our voices make known God’s message to the world. As long as there is breath in our lungs we will proclaim God’s name – out loud. We will not be silenced.
Hear us, O Israel. Through our tears of anger and anguish, with joy and love for our people, despite our outrage and indignation, hear our voice.
God says, “Cry with a full throat, do not hold back; let your voice resound like a shofar!” (Isaiah 58:1)
Jewish tradition that we have entered into mar Cheshvan, bitter Cheshvan (the new Jewish month that started Tuesday night) because this month has no holidays. Last night we entered mar Cheshvan because of the horrific events that occurred at the Western Wall.
From the stories I read, Anat Hoffman (who I wrote about here was arrested for reciting the Shema and wearing a prayer shawl. I don’t even believe the words as I type them. Anat was arrested for reciting the central text of the Jewish people aloud. The latest article I could find is here. There is also a report written by the Director of the Israel Religious Action Center including a video here.
Anat was treated terribly while in prison overnight. She is now at home recovering.
Now, more than ever, the Israel Religious Action Center and Women of the Wall need our support. I hope you will join me in giving them a gift to support the important work they do for all people.
Last night I went to the MDNA concert. It was AMAZING. Two hours of pure entertainment.
Most of the concert was music and dancing. There were a few moments when Madonna spoke. While she used more explicatives than I might prefer to listen to, she had a few important messages.
1) Madonna reminded the crowd of the importance of love. Loving our neighbor just as they are.
2) Madonna encouraged all audience members to celebrate freedom. The best way to do that (her words not mine) is to exercise the right to vote. If you are in California the deadline to register to vote is October 22. You can register online here.
_________________________
In other news, I’m working really hard at my not-so-new job at California Faith for Equality. More on that soon!
This past weekend I attended my elementary school reunion. That’s right, elementary school. I attended Baldwin Hills Gifted Magnet for all six of those years (until we moved from LA to MN). Thanks to the magic of Facebook. one of my classmates got enough of us together to make this amazing reunion happen!
Many people seem surprised that there could be a reunion from a LAUSD school. My class was different. Because we were in a gifted magnet program in a school essentially I went through every year with the same students. I believe in fourth and fifth grades we were in split classrooms but otherwise, many of the people in the picture to the left I knew for a long time!
Baldwin Hills was a really special place. Celebrating multiculturalism was a tenet of the school. We celebrated everyone’s holiday. We learned and performed an Irish jig, a Mexican dance and celebrated MLK day annually. 
Sitting around the fire pit at the reunion all of these years later, it was fascinating to hear how our collective experience at Baldwin Hills impacted our lives. We all feel so comfortable in multicultural settings.
I am so grateful that I got to attend this school. Grateful that one of my classmates organized this amazing reunion and that I got to be there! I am proud that each of these people were my classmates.
What was your elementary school like?
The Israel Religious Action Center is working on a petition to the Western Wall Heritage Council calling for diversity in the membership after four women were detained on Sunday morning for wearing tallitot/prayer shawls.
Here is a copy of the email I received…
Yesterday four women were detained at the Western Wall, each for wearing a tallit. The authorities say they were disturbing the public peace according to regulation 201 A4 of the Israeli legal code. The punishment for this crime is six months in prison. They also broke regulation 287A by performing a religious act that “offends the feelings of others.” The punishment for this crime is up to two years in prison.
When these four women wore their tallitot they challenged the division at the Western Wall. This is a place where men pray, dance, sing, sound the Sofar, read Torah, celebrate b’nei mitzvah, wave the lulov, and express their Judaism in any way they wish. Women, on the other side of the partition, stand silently in the little space that remains.
IRAC fights all layers of gender segregation in Israel, and I believe that the Kotel is ground-zero in the fight against gender exclusion. As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. taught us, one of the main strategies of non-violent struggle is to “dramatize” the injustice. There is a real need for drama to actualize how far the situation of women in the public sphere in Israel today is from the dream of the State’s founders. Israel’s founding document, our Declaration of Independence, had a vision of full equality for all the citizens of Israel irrespective of religion, race, or gender.
According to that vision, we are working to create a reality that is currently hard for Israelis to even imagine. In this we mean a Kotel where Israeli families will be able to pray together as a family, a Kotel where families can celebrate a bat mitzvah, a Kotel where egalitarian services can be held proudly, instead of hidden out of view from the Western Wall Plaza. I want to live to see it and for that I need your help.
The key to changing the status quo is in the hands of the authoritative that run the Kotel, the Western Wall Heritage Foundation. This is why IRAC and the IMPJ are about to go to Israel’s Supreme Court to demand a change in the make-up of the Western Wall Heritage Council, which is currently made up completely of Orthodox Jews. We want this body to resemble the real diversity of the Jewish people in Israel and the Diaspora.
Click here to sign our Kotel petition asking for the Western Wall Heritage Council to include a diverse membership. After you have signed it please help us collect signatures by forwarding this email, using our special tell-a-friend link, or by clicking here and then forwarding that link to as many of your friends as you can. We have over 10,000 names already, and we will reach our goal of 50,000 if everyone helps us get five more names. With that kind of support the Israeli Government will see that we cannot be ignored. Days like yesterday must stop.
L’shalom,
Anat Hoffman
Executive Director, IRAC
If your blood is not yet boiling, here is a video of one of the women being arrested.
Here are two news stories about the incident. Ha’aretz. Jerusalem Post.
Bald solidarity family photo
The above photo is one of my favorites because it accurately displays my family’s devotion to one another, our sense of humor, and our collective strength. This photo was taken when MY MOM was undergoing treatment for breast cancer. By a professional photographer portrait style. My family is awesome.
I want to be very clear, MY MOM WAS A BREAST CANCER SURVIVOR. Her death had nothing to do with breast cancer.
That being said, my friend LBN over at Freckles in the Fog posted about one of her friends who was recently diagnosed with breast cancer at age 29. Dena, whom I have not yet met, writes about the importance of young women doing regular self exams and how to do them here. She writes beautifully and thoroughly about why this is important and I encourage YOU ALL to read it, woman or man (Yes, men get breast cancer too).
I won’t promise that I will remind you every month to do an exam. I will tell you I am putting it into my calendar with an alarm for myself. Figure out what reminder might work for you. Do it.
________
Thank you, Dena for reminding me to be vigilant. May your strength and that shared by your family and friends continue to sustain you as you journey towards healing.
Is headed over to LBN for posting in her blog post about my new job and my recent publication. She is the best!
It might be only slightly hard to read, but I am published. My article, “The Stigma of Infertility” is in the Summer 2012 CCAR Journal: The Reform Jewish Quarterly (pages 102-110). The article is based onmy sermon from Rosh Hashanah several years ago. You can order your own copy of the journal, here. Happy reading!
Rabbi Eleanor Steinman 