Tree Of Life

Shabbat Shalom from Shaare Shalom Synagogue in Kingston, Jamaica...

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 23:09:14 -0400

Shabbat Shalom from Shaare Shalom Synagogue in Kingston, Jamaica #jewish #synagogue #kingston #jamaica #torah

NY Times: Spain: Citizenship Process Eased for Sephardic Jews

Thu, 29 Nov 2012 16:36:00 -0500

NY Times: Spain: Citizenship Process Eased for Sephardic Jews:

By RAPHAEL MINDER

Published: November 22, 2012

Spain announced Thursday that it would grant automatic citizenship to Jews of Sephardic descent as a further gesture of reconciliation after their ancestors were expelled more than five centuries ago. Sephardic Jews already benefit from a preferential naturalization procedure that requires them to live in Spain for only two years before claiming citizenship, but the change means that Jews will have to present only a certificate confirming their ancestry to claim a Spanish passport. The government did not say how many Jews it expected to apply for citizenship, but it noted that a large number of Sephardic Jews lived in Turkey and across Latin America. While estimates differ, the number of Jews living in Spain — 25,000 to 45,000 people in a population of 47 million — is only a fraction of the number who lived in the country before 1492, when Jews were told to convert to Christianity or go into exile.

thewestostlicherdivan: Mi frente besó mi madre kuando...

Thu, 29 Nov 2012 16:07:41 -0500

thewestostlicherdivan:

Mi frente besó mi madre kuando nascí.
Entocando la dolor, me decía,

“Judía, judía será tu nombre.”

En mis ojos pretos, en mis pretos cabeyos;
Flamas de mi nación, briyan komo kandelas…

Truth & Love

Thu, 29 Nov 2012 16:01:42 -0500

There’s a wonderful story that imagines an all-knowing, infinite God, one who would surely have access to the Truth but who actually sees more value in the search. In this story, the God character wakes up on the sixth day of Creation with what may be the most creative idea idea ever: humankind. Full of wonder and excitement, God can hardly wait to get to work. As so many of us do before we undertake a momentous task or face a risky venture, God first asks for the advice of consultants, in this case the angels. But the anges are ambivalent, undecided, caught between Truth and Love. Truth argues against the idea of humanity, fearing that human beings will lie and kill in their pursuit of Truth. But Love understands that humanity will engage in great acts of altruism and self-sacrifice, and that God’s desire is born out of that most powerful of yearnings: the yearning to love.

-p. 5, Yearnings by Rabbi Irwin Kula, 2006.

“Mi Korason” by Yasmin Levy

Wed, 28 Nov 2012 14:51:00 -0500

“Mi Korason” by Yasmin Levy

Stella's Sephardi Table

Wed, 28 Nov 2012 14:42:00 -0500

Stella's Sephardi Table:

28 November 2012. 7:00PM.

Congregation Shearith Israel - The Spanish & Portuguese Synagogue

At the corner of 70th Street and Central Park West, New York, NY.

Author of Stella’s Sephardic Table, Stella Cohen will present on the traditional food of Rhodes as well as discuss the Sephardic community in her local Zimbabwe. Tasty treats and a book sale and signing will follow Stella’s presentation.

Historical introduction by Marcia Haddad Ikonomopoulos, the Director of the Romaniote Kehila Kedosha Janina Synagogue and Museum and scholar on the Jews of Rhodes.

In collaboration with American Sephardi Federation.

Free admission.

שלום

Wed, 28 Nov 2012 14:36:24 -0500

Haaretz: Yasmin Levy, though relatively unknown in her native Israel, is making global waves

Sat, 13 Oct 2012 16:10:00 -0400

Haaretz: Yasmin Levy, though relatively unknown in her native Israel, is making global waves:

By Ben Shalev | Oct.13, 2012

Yasmin Levy does not actually compose the melodies she writes. They “land” on her, she says, “like a gift from heaven. I can go to the grocery store to buy milk - and come back with milk and a melody.” These melodies, which come to her infrequently and number perhaps five per year, generally surface along with a word or a phrase, always in Spanish. Around all these Levy builds her lyrics.

Indeed, this is just what happened a few months ago when the words “olvidate de mi” (“forget me” ) suddenly came to her. Levy knew why at once: “My beloved aunt, who was my best friend, died 11 months ago. I’ve always been attached to people who were older than me. My aunt’s beloved husband died of cancer when I was 15 … Beforehand she asked him what to do: Should she die or go on living? She would have easily killed herself. He told her he wanted her to live, to forget him and find another love. She did not find love and 20 years after him, she died of cancer. When I heard these words, ‘olvidate de mi,’ I knew that it would be a poem that he would write her: ‘Forget me because it is my time to go, don’t die with me, forget me till we meet again.’

Not long ago, the 36-year-old singer-songwriter says, “we visited my aunt’s grave, and my mother, who is not a sentimental person, asked that we play the song at a high volume in the cemetery. Everyone stood and cried although I did not … That song was my grand finale to her.”

“Olvidate de mi” is one of the loveliest songs on Levy’s new album, “Libertad” and it does a fine job of capturing the uniqueness, power and beauty of this wonderful singer, whose work tends to encompass great human drama and a life story that involves love and loss, desire and death.

Levy performs the song on the album along with the excellent Spanish singer Concha Buika. The two women met a short while ago. Buika particularly bonded with Levy’s infant son. “But she took care not to touch him,” Levy recounts. “When I asked her why she didn’t hug him, she said: ‘Because he is pure and I am a sinner.’”

The two singers share the same stormy, emotional intensity. “I am not a pleasant singer,” Levy says. “You can’t listen to me on the radio and cook. Either people like me very much or they can’t stand me. I’ve heard stories about women who gave birth to the sounds of my songs, or about people who inscribed words from my songs on their bodies. Unbelievable stuff. People who wanted to commit suicide and said that my songs changed their minds.

“It’s weird. I sit in my little corner and spill my guts, and it becomes somebody else’s domain,” she adds. “For years I was asked why my songs are so melancholy, and I have even tried to change, but I’ve learned to accept myself. This is my essence. It may be that I’ve come to help people, to cleanse them, let them cry.”

As a little girl growing up in Jerusalem, Levy would listen with her mother to a tape of the great Persian singer Hayedeh. “She was a fat, beautiful singer, with a tremendous voice. We adored her, we would sing along with her,” Levy recalls. “And then, when I was 8, we lost the tape. But I did not forget her, and especially one song of hers - called ‘Soghati.’ I looked for it for more than 20 years. I didn’t know what it was called; I only remembered one phrase from it, and every time I would meet someone from Iran I would sing it to him in the hope that he would recognize it.

“Five years ago, I was recording my third album in London, and I had an Iranian driver. I sang him the phrase and he said: ‘I will bring you the song tomorrow.’ The next day he brought me a burned CD with the song. I listened to it for hours and cried - with me everything is crying - and when I got back to Israel I played it for my mother. It was like an epiphany.”

Big in Iran

According to her husband and producer, musician Ishay Amir, Levy is very popular in Iran, even though it is of course forbidden to play her songs in public because she is Israeli. Levy says people have come up to her after concerts in Europe and told her they came from Iran specially to see her. People have also written to her that they were interrogated after they were caught listening to her songs, she says, displaying emails from Iranian fans. One of them, Masoud, wrote: “I wish that someday we can come see you perform in Iran. Believe me, many Iranians feel as I do. I love your voice and personality. You sing no less good than Hayedeh, God bless her.”

Another Muslim country where Levy is popular is Turkey. She performs there regularly and is due to do so again shortly, during a two-week tour. She tells of a concert in Ankara at which a 500-strong audience sang along with her, word for word.

“At a certain stage I stopped singing, aimed the microphone at the audience and just listened,” she says. “I remember looking at Ishay in disbelief. This is a Turkish audience, they don’t understand a word of Spanish, but they learned the songs by heart. And my songs are not easy to digest.”

She sings a trilled and fiercely expressive phrase from one of her songs, and says: “Five hundred Turks shouting out a song in Spanish! I was stunned. This is me, little Yasmin from Baka in Jerusalem. You couldn’t ask for anything more.”

Levy, whose parents have Turkish origins, and who loves Turkish music with a passion, dreamed for years of enveloping her songs in the beautiful, overarching and one-of-a-kind sound produced by the string section of a traditional Turkish orchestra. “Ishay knew that this was my dream, and said: ‘Let’s get you the violins you’ve been dreaming of your whole life.’ This is really my essence, it’s like a Turkish movie,” she says. “Whenever I go jogging, ever since I was a teenager, I listen on headphones to Ibrahim Tatlises [one of the greatest Turkish singers]. The hardest-core depression songs. Three years ago, in the middle of jogging, I thought to myself: I wish he would hear me, Yasmin. A year later, I was onstage with him.

“My label in Turkey sent him a CD of mine and he invited me to sing with him, even though he never invites singers who do not sing in Turkish. I cannot describe how I felt during that show. Before I went onstage I cried for a quarter of an hour. I’ve ‘lived’ with him, with Ibrahim, since I was little.”

When the time came to record her latest album, Levy and Amir went to Turkey to watch as the Turkish studio musicians recorded her songs. Ten violinists recorded themselves several times over, so that between 40 and 60 violins are heard in a number of songs on the album.

“It just took my breath away,” Levy says. “I can’t describe the joy. It was even greater than I had imagined. I am very proud of the way we blended flamenco and Turkish. It’s a concept that has never been done before. Two worlds that are ostensibly unrelated to each other. I want to believe that we made it possible for people to connect to this, but even if I am wrong and am about to stumble, that’s fine, I only grow from that.”

Levy was not supposed to be a singer. Her father, Yitzhak (Isaac ) Levy, the great preserver of Ladino culture in Israel (he was director of the Ladino broadcasts on Israel Radio, the author of Sephardic romance and liturgical songbooks, and Yitzhak Navon’s collaborator in creating the musical “Bustan Sephardi” ), died when she was a year old. Before his death, he ordered that none of his children go into music for a living.

“He knew that a musician’s life is a gypsy existence, and he wanted us to have a stable life,” Levy says. “I see my kid now - Michael: He wakes up when it’s time for bed and sleeps in a different bed every night because his parents are musicians. Until recently I thought I was ruining his life. After one show I left the stage, sat in the dressing room, and [my son was backstage and] suddenly I heard him wake up and I began to cry: I thought that a child should not have to live this way. But then I heard my musicians, who were eating after the concert, calling to him, ‘Hey, Mikey, hey baby.’ He went out and started walking on the cajon [a Spanish percussion instrument ] and banging on the piano. I said to myself: ‘You’re not ruining anything. He is surrounded by love and music.’”

But that is something Levy did not grasp when she was young, she adds: “I did everything to avoid becoming a singer because I thought my father was right. I did not know him, but he was a very powerful and dominant figure. I was raised on ‘Yitzhak Levy said.’”

Levy’s mother, Kochava, also refrained from singing because of her husband’s wishes. She was 17 when they met; he was 44. It happened on a young-talent show on Israel Radio in the early 1960s: “They fell in love and when they planned to marry, Dad said, ‘I want you to choose between being my wife and being a singer,’” Levy says. “She chose him, and that same day she quit singing and became Yitzhak Levy’s wife, and devoted her life to him and to us. The dream of being a singer faded, but the sadness about it stayed with her for years. Dad promised to record an album for her once he retired from the radio, but he died when she was 31. Only recently, two years ago, Ishay and I produced an album of Ladino songs for her. Her dream came true after nearly 50 years.”

When Levy was 17 she went to stay with a singer friend of her mother’s in Spain. The friend asked her to record a few songs in Ladino on a home tape recorder. She reluctantly opened one of her father’s books of romantic music and sang. The friend declared that Levy was a singer, no matter how hard she had tried to escape that fact. But another few years would pass, during which Levy intended to become a reflexologist, before she was convinced.

That happened after she took part in a show in memory of her father, at the YMCA auditorium in Jerusalem. “I did one song and from then on my life changed,” she says. “Until then nobody knew about me. I didn’t know about myself. And at that moment, at the age of 22, I understood that I had to sing.”

Stirring controversy

Levy describes her first album - “Romance & Yasmin” (2004 ), which was recorded with funding from Israel’s National Authority for Ladino Culture - as “the album of an innocent girl who came from the tradition - from the kitchen.” And yet, within the Ladino community, it kicked up something of a storm.

“Ladino songs had always been sung in a very refined manner, with Western classical overtones,” Levy says. “Yehoram Gaon sings that way, and so did Avraham Perera, and so did my father. When I made my first album, I said: ‘Hang on, some of the Jews who were expelled from Spain went to Turkey and lived there for 500 years. That is what happened to my family. Do you mean to tell me that the enormous influence of Turkish music can be ignored? There is ‘Mizrahi-ness’ in Ladino, there is Turkishness, I can’t have it sounding Western-classical. And that is how I made the album.

“The Ladino community had a very hard time accepting that,” Levy continues. “They told me: ‘What, you are making Mizrahi music?’ They expected me, as the daughter of Yitzhak Levy, to carry on the tradition and not deviate from it. They wanted me to sing operatically, like Yehoram Gaon, and were disappointed by my interpretation, which had mawwals [musical elements characteristic of Arabic music] and trills. At first I was very frustrated by the response. I asked: ‘Why don’t you embrace me?’”

Levy’s second album, “La Juderia,” came out the following year, and did nothing to allay the criticism of the Ladino community in Israel - quite the contrary: “On the first CD, with all of its Mizrahi-ness, my singing was the traditional Ladino singing, which uses what is called a ‘head voice,’” Levy says, offering a demonstration (soft and subtle singing, without primal force ).

“But then I went to Spain and I heard the ‘chest voice’ of the flamenco singers” - she demonstrates a husky, powerful voice - “and my singing style changed. For the Ladino community it was like a second shock: ‘What is this, on the first CD she did Mizrahi-Turkish and now she makes a Christian CD?’

“But I came to understand their side of it,” Levy continues. “People were raised by their mother and grandmother, who sang in a particular way, and now this kid shows up and has the nerve to do something that verges on sacrilege. What did they take from Spain? The language and the songs. These are songs that helped them survive all the hardship, and suddenly Yitzhak Levy’s daughter comes along, takes this pure thing and makes it ‘Christian.’”

After the second album, her career began taking off in Europe. Tens of thousands of her albums were sold there, she was treated like a star at festivals, and her albums graced the end-of-year roundup lists in the most respected magazines of the world-music industry.

Levy, who today lives in Mevasseret Zion, has a lot of fans in France and Poland, in Turkey and Iran, as well as in England, where the European launch concert for her new album will take place this November (at the Barbican cultural center in London ). In Israel, too, she is highly acclaimed, popular with a relatively large public. She fills halls when she performs here and gets airtime on the radio that some would say is disproportionate to her true standing.

In Spain, of all places, however, Levy does not have a big audience. “Everyone thought I would do great there, and so did I,” she says, “but world music does not interest the Spaniards. Only pop, pop, pop.”

Levy will never be a pop singer, but on her new album - her sixth - there are one or two songs that come close to that genre. The title track “Libertad” even made it onto the playlist of Army Radio’s Galgalatz pop-music station.

Levy says that the album constitutes the closure of a circle that opened on her first album, and that her next recording will embark on a new path, the essence of which is not yet clear. But one thing is certain: She means to continue fighting against the generic label of “Ladino singer,” which she says does not describe her.

“I know that I am going to search, and I know that I am going to get clobbered for it,” she says. “Amateurs and critics of world music are very critical individuals. Today, I already hear voices that say, ‘Where have you gone? Come home.’ But I know no matter what they write, I have my public, the people who go with me through fire and water, and that knowledge gives me the strength to search.”

Up to now, Levy has hardly ever sung in Hebrew (she has only done so when singing piyyutim, liturgical poems, but that is in ancient, never contemporary, Hebrew ). Might she do so on her next album? “I have difficulty with Hebrew,” she confesses. “Something of the magic slips away, I don’t know why. Maybe because it’s the language in which I shop for bread and milk. Maybe because - this is a bit of pop-psychology - Spanish enables me to hide. I will record in Hebrew, but only to see if I can crack that nut. If I can manage to do it in a way that will keep Yasmin intact, I will release a CD. But that won’t happen before I feel ready for it.”

“Libertad” by Yasmin Levy, 2012.

Sun, 07 Oct 2012 01:57:00 -0400

“Libertad” by Yasmin Levy, 2012.

Sukkot Celebrations ( 1870 - 1950’s)

Fri, 05 Oct 2012 01:52:23 -0400

Sukkot Celebrations ( 1870 - 1950’s)

Wisdom of the Holidays: Sukkot זמן שמחתנו In preparation for...

Thu, 04 Oct 2012 16:13:00 -0400

Wisdom of the Holidays: Sukkot

זמן שמחתנו

In preparation for this week-long Festival of Tabernacles, sukkahs, which are temporary shelters topped with branches and decorated with harvest and autumnal themes, are built in order to observe the holiday. Whether rain or shine, families eat and spend time together under the sukkah, a symbol of the time Israelites spent traveling in the wilderness once freed from slavery in Egypt. These seven days are meant to serve as a reminder of “embracing the impermanence of life.”

“Love Song” by Ofra Haza שִׂימֵנִי כַחוֹתָם...

Mon, 17 Sep 2012 14:47:00 -0400

“Love Song” by Ofra Haza

שִׂימֵנִי כַחוֹתָם עַל-לִבֶּךָ, כַּחוֹתָם עַל-זְרוֹעֶךָ—כִּי-עַזָּה כַמָּוֶת אַהֲבָה, קָשָׁה כִשְׁאוֹל קִנְאָה: רְשָׁפֶיהָ—רִשְׁפֵּי, אֵשׁ שַׁלְהֶבֶתְיָה.

מַיִם רַבִּים, לֹא יוּכְלוּ לְכַבּוֹת אֶת-הָאַהֲבָה, וּנְהָרוֹת, לֹא יִשְׁטְפוּהָ; אִם-יִתֵּן אִישׁ אֶת-כָּל-הוֹן בֵּיתוֹ, בָּאַהֲבָה—בּוֹז, יָבוּזוּ לוֹ.

We Too Can Craft Worlds

Sun, 16 Sep 2012 19:01:04 -0400

This time of the year is called either the High Holy Days or the Days of Awe and they begin with Rosh Hashanah, the New Year, followed by the ten days of repentance, and then end with Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. There really are three basic questions that these ten days invite us to think about.

One is can I change as a human being? Can I really become better? Can I become more? Can I continue to experience, expand, and enrich. I think that’s a really hard question to ask. Can I become better or is this the way it is and am I doing the best I can, and that’s it? And the second question is, is forgiveness possible? Can I forgive other people, and can I feel forgiven? I think that’s also a very difficult question. We talk a lot about forgiveness and wanting to be forgiven and to forgive other people, but it’s far more complex process than we may choose to realize. And the third question that runs through all of these days is am I accountable for my behavior? And I think those three questions and themes run through the entire High Holy Day period.

There’s also a practice starting the month before Rosh Hashanah of blowing the shofar, which is one of the central symbols of the High Holiday experience, blowing the shofar at the end of the morning prayer service, and the shofar is just a blast of the ram’s horn, and it, in a sense, wakes you up. You’re not used to hearing a blast of a ram’s horn, and it is supposed to cause you to become more alert to your own behavior. Another year is about to begin; time to wake up to what this last year has been and to walk with intention into the new one.

* * *

Rosh Hashanah, the New Year, is a commemoration of creation and the beginning of life.

“In the beginning God created heaven and the earth –the earth being unformed and void, with darkness over the surface of the deep and a wind from God sweeping over the water…”

The poet who wrote this breathtaking narrative was someone just like us, someone who wanted to understand, to imagine the origins of life itself. And what a vision. The world began with an act of supreme creativity. Something was made out of nothing, and life began its glorious unfolding. There’s such a wonderful order to it all: each day yielding a new form of life; ever day seeming to reach such a satisfying conclusion; then humankind, created “in the image of the Creator.”

It’s no wonder so many people over so many centuries have wanted to take the opening of Genesis literally. How incredible to think the world emerged from a fourteen-billion year “week” of awesome power and sheer inspiration. How marvelous to imagine that humankind was in the image of an artistic genius we know as God. St. Thomas Aquinas called God “Artist of Artists.”

The first chapter of Genesis is a meditation on the yearning to create; a yearning, the Biblical author intuited, that is our very birthright. In Genesis human beings are invited into the creative process on Day Six, and time as we know it begins. After the rest of the world unfolds, human beings are created in order to tend and protect it. The world was left unfinished so that humans could have part in Creation.

These wonderfully poetic passages invite us to imagine that we too can create with purpose and intention; that we too can craft worlds. The Creation story is so powerful in part because it awakens this yearning. It taps into a basic human desire to connect with something larger than ourselves, to feel like we contribute to the continuation and evolution of the universe.

The poet understood that we are all world builders. When we write a poem, raise a child, build a home, or help launch a company, we are acting from that same God-inspired impulse. We are answering that overwhelming, wondrous yearning to be creative, to contribute something of value, to make a difference.

There are so many aspects of creativity and so many manifestations of the creative act and when we really think about it creativity entails a complex array of feelings: exuberance and anxiety; fear and hope; dissonance and harmony; discomfort and determination.

Creativity demands that we break from our habitual forms of thinking and acting. The conventions and rules we grew up with, the old solutions, just won’t suffice. And we must divert our energy from the known to the unknown. We must turn possibility into actuality. Nothing could be more daunting; which is why there is almost always a period of resistance, of self-judgment, of fear of failure. Maybe we’re not ready. Maybe we’ll come back to it. Maybe we’ll move on to the next thing. Inspiration can be that scary.

But when we decide to go for it, when we step away from our preprogrammed reactions to the world, we have the opportunity to launch ourselves into a whole new landscape, a new reality, whether in our work, our relationships, or the wider world.

Once in class while talking about Creation in the Genesis story, my friend, an artist asked a great question: “Where were the mounds of dried -clay thrown in anguish into the corner?” Creation seems so quick and effortless. Maybe da Vinci had to clean up after himself, but what about God? What kind of model for creativity did that Genesis poet create after all? It all seems so glorious, so neat, so perfect, so unrealistic, especially when seen in the context of our own creative experience. But there’s a story in the Talmud teaching that God created ten worlds, destroying each one, then trying again, until finally having that one wonderful, productive week. Earlier failures become the stuff of innovation

So many of the tensions endemic to creativity are captured in the story of the Israelites at Mt. Sinai. There are two paradigms of creativity juxtaposed in this one scene, one coming right after the other as if to invite our comparison. The first is the story of the golden calf, followed by the building of a tabernacle in the desert. That moment at the base of the mountain was wide open with possibilities for human expression and realization. Both stories have so much to teach us about our process, the dark side of creativity and the light.

As the ancient Israelites stood at the base of Mt Sinai, they experienced the full dimensions of the creative moment. Having been freed from slavery in Egypt, they were now free to create their lives. They were given opportunity to experience a new sense of their own capacities, which they simply couldn’t have had as slaves. They’d left their old identity behind, broken from their past, and now had to construct a new future. Meanwhile, on top of Mt Sinai, Moses received instructions for building a tabernacle, a temporary temple in the desert, a sanctuary for the divine presence.

Below, the people had an encounter with the Creator that was dramatic and fiery, as creative inspiration can so often be. Everything seemed altered. Time stood still, and everything hung in the balance. Their senses fused: We’re told they saw thunder and heard lightening. They were in a different reality. Then they heard the great silence and experienced the vast openness of life. The questions they heard in all that silence were, “What now? Who will we be?” The fear of the unknown is central to creativity. Will the Israelites be able to rise to the creative challenge? To follow the inspiration? To become a people? We, too, face similar turning points. We all have our Egypts. When we’re freed from the authority of our parents, the expectations of our bosses, the limitations of a dysfunctional marriage –what now? Do we really want the power to create our own lives? When it’s time for us to run the company, create our own family, construct a new relationship –are we up to the challenge? Or would we rather stay in Egypt, where the landmarks are familiar, if confining?

For the Israelites, the encounter was overwhelming. They shuddered, were knocked off their feet, and fell back from the mountain. They retreated from the questions. The problem of freedom seemed too difficult to tackle. And then they tried to fill the silence with their old script; to resurrect the past. Instead of building a tabernacle, they built the golden calf. At that moment of unprecedented freedom they engaged in what was a magnificent act of creativity and construction. But it was an old image, one that was worshipped in Egypt. Just at the moment when they were invited to create something new, they preserved a deadened form of the past. They literally recast it. They affirmed what they already knew rather than stretching into the future. Inspiration aborted.

Often, after we see the challenge, our first move is to retreat. Only then can we step forward. Sometimes we need to reach backwards before we can reach toward something new. The key is not to mistake our first move as our last. Just because we misstep doesn’t mean we preempt illumination. We can be loyal to our past and still transcend it. When Moses came down from the mountain and saw what the people had done, he was enraged. Is this what you do when you’re invited to create your own lives?! Moses destroys the calf, and then something remarkable happened. A different kind of construction began. It was the onset of illumination.

It was as if the people heard the question once again: What kind of world do you really want to create? This time they heard it as an invitation rather than a demand; an evolution rather than an abrupt break from the past. And the language in these passages is so markedly different than those which precede them. The construction of the calf takes only a few lines; you don’t need preparation and incubation if you’re simply repeating the past. The people bring Aaron their gold rings and the calf is built. But the tabernacle takes six chapters to build.

Before there are six chapters of instructions about how to build it and what it should contain. The people are to use gold once again, but hundreds of other materials to be combined in many new and intricate ways. This the information-gathering stage; now they are willing to jump in and learn. This time their response to the unknown, to the call of inspiration, has been to prepare. Rather than creating a solid idol, they construct a space, a safe place for creativity to continue, for the Creator to dwell.

Craft, design, make. These words are used eighty times in these passages describing the building of the tabernacle. They’re the same three words used to describe the acts of Creation in Genesis. Now it’s the people who are working hard to make a world; a house worthy of containing all that is.

The poet’s language so beautifully captures our creative yearnings. Everyone “whose heart so moves him” is invited to bring gifts with which to build. The Israelites contribute their gold and silver, their yarns and linens, and their oil and spices and wood as a “freewill offering” until there’s more than enough. The people are called “inspired artisans, cravers, designers, weavers.” They use their expertise to address their new challenge of freedom. The women spin blue, purple, and crimson yarns as the men build the grand tent in very specific dimensions, with silver sockets and bars of acacia wood and planks of gold.

One commentary describes a tapestry with a different scene on each side. When you’ve been inspired, prepared, and incubated there’s an element of impossibility to the nest stage –illumination. We can combine fragments of our imagination in untold ways. What a glorious world! What amazing creators! Miraculously, in the middle of the desert there’s a tabernacle: illumination in the midst of a barren landscape. Creation in the shadow of idolatry now becomes creation in the shadow of God.

The head architect of this monumental and complex structure is Bezalel, whose name actually means “in the shadow of God.” He’s “endowed with a divine skill, ability, and knowledge.” In Hebrew the word for knowledge is the same as that for lovemaking, intimacy. Bezalel combines materials both old and new to create. The sages say he pulled himself loose of all the forms of Egypt to build something new.

We are all Bezalels. We are lovers and weavers; architects and poets. The playwright George Bernard Shaw once said that life is not about finding yourself but creating yourself. Like the ancient Israelites, we always have a choice: Will we build golden calves or tabernacles? Sometimes it’s hard to know the difference. The good news is, and what the annual Rosh Hahshanah celebration reminds us, we can always start again.

From Yearnings by (my) Rabbi Irwin Kula

Sounding of the Shofar on Rosh Ha-Shanah in the Portuguese...

Sun, 16 Sep 2012 18:58:52 -0400

Sounding of the Shofar on Rosh Ha-Shanah in the Portuguese Synagogue

From Bernard Picart, Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde…
Amsterdam: J. F. Bernard, 1728

thewestostlicherdivan: “‘Et Sh’are Ratson” -Choir of the Bevis...

Sun, 16 Sep 2012 18:57:55 -0400

thewestostlicherdivan:

“‘Et Sh’are Ratson” -Choir of the Bevis Marks Synagogue, the Spanish and Portuguese Congregation of London

עת שערי רצון להפתח
יום אהיה כפי לאל שוטח
אנא זכור נא לי ביום הוכח
עוקד והנעקד והמיזבח

שנה טובה ומתוקה‎ Shaná Tova

Sun, 16 Sep 2012 18:56:00 -0400

Happy Rosh Hashanah, Happy and Sweet New Year to all!

Haaretz: A synagogue drawn in the sand

Tue, 11 Sep 2012 22:52:00 -0400

Haaretz: A synagogue drawn in the sand:

When I first came to Jamaica, in March 2011, community historian and patriarch Ainsley Henriques took me to see the synagogue in the historic downtown section of Kingston. Even though I knew the synagogue had sand floors, the actual visual image of all that sand shocked me momentarily. And even though I knew that Jews do not take off their shoes to enter synagogues, I nevertheless asked him, “Should I take off my shoes?”

The Shaare Shalom Synagogue in the Jamaican capital is one of five functioning synagogues with sand floors. The others are the Portuguese Synagogue of Amsterdam (also know as the “Esnoga” ), built in 1675 and considered the “mother synagogue” of Spanish Portuguese Jewry; the Snoa in Curacao (1732), Zedek ve Shalom in Suriname (circa 1735 ), and Beracha Veshalom Vegmiluth Hasidim in Saint Thomas (1833 ), part of the U.S. Virgin Islands. The Suriname synagogue was fully restored by the Israel Museum and is without a doubt the highlight of the Mandel Wing for Jewish Art and Life.

The term “sand floor” refers to what is usually a wood base with a relatively small covering of sand. In Kingston, there is a brick base which has an empty space of about 38 cm above it. On top of this space bricks there is a wood covering made from pine. The sand is then poured onto the wood base. A good deal of sand is lost through attrition and erosion, so the supply requires replenishing every five or six years.

David Matalon, the president of the United Congregation of Israelites in Kingston, arranged for about 10-12 bags of sand (each weighing between 27 and 31 kgs ) to be filled from Lime Cay and other offshore cays near the Kingston Harbor. The sand was transported to the synagogue and poured over the existing sand. Contrary to what you may imagine, the sand does not become dirty or unusable. The sole reason for bringing new sand is to ensure there will be enough to fully cover the wooden base. At any given time, there is about an inch and a half of sand on the synagogue floor.

Exile, not paradise

The current synagogue building in Jamaica dates from 1912, but previous Spanish-Portuguese synagogue structures in the country presumably also had sand-covered floors. The origin of the practice is shrouded in mystery, and the explanations offered range from practical to historical to midrashic.

The custom may have originated in Amsterdam, where sand was used to dry mud on people’s shoes. The Esnoga synagogue was near the edge of town, where most of the streets were unpaved and, thanks to the weather, often muddy. It was, therefore, practical to line the floor in the synagogue with sand to keep it tidy. There are a number of churches and taverns in the Netherlands dating to the 17th century that likewise have sand floors.

The most common explanation, however, is that the practice originated in the early 1600s in the northern region of Brazil, where Spanish-Portuguese conversos (forced converts ) who had returned to Judaism were trying to retain their ancestors’ traditions while subject to the hostile eyes of Iberian ecclesiastical authorities.

Because synagogues were not permitted to operate, the conversos who were still committed to practicing Judaism had no choice but to meet in private homes. Though these gatherings were an open secret, the Jewish community felt it was better to be as discreet as possible. As such, they put clay and sand on the floor of the prayer rooms to muffle the sounds made by the comings and goings of worshipers, and the prayers themselves. Regarding the midrashic connection, it is said that the sand symbolizes the terrain of the Sinai Desert, through which the Children of Israel wandered for 40 years after the Exodus. Among earlier generations, this may have been understood as emphasizing the idea that, even though they were living in a tropical paradise, they were still in exile.

On a more positive note, there are those who believe that the sand symbolizes God’s promise to Abraham to make the Jews as populous as the sands of the sea: “I will bless thee, and in multiplying I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is upon the seashore” (Genesis 22:17 ). This theme recurs throughout the Tanakh, like the verse in Hosea that says, “Yet the number of the children of Israel shall be as the sand of the sea, which cannot be measured nor numbered” (Hosea 2:1 ).

Though I have not been able to find sources that specifically suggest these verses as the theological justification for the placement of sand, it does seem logical. Of course, it is also possible that the decision was strictly pragmatic. Perhaps the original builders felt that since there was sand everywhere else, they might as well have sand on the synagogue floor, too. Perhaps they wanted to save money. It might also have been useful in minimizing the presence of small reptiles, bugs and insects of various types.

Whatever its source, one still wonders how the custom stood the test of time, how it prevails as standard practice so long after the original meaning and purpose has become obscured. I believe the answer lies in the dedication of the Spanish-Portuguese Diaspora community in the Caribbean. This group is perfectly reconciled with the fact that they may not understand what the tradition means or why it was developed, but are determined to perpetuate the tradition as faithfully as possible.

While customs relating, for example, to complex recitations of long Hebrew incantations are more difficult to preserve, practical traditions such as the appearance of the synagogue are maintained with great fervor and fastidiousness by each new generation. Even in generations where Jewish literacy was at a nadir, everyone would know about the tradition concerning the floor of the synagogue and would take the minimum steps necessary to perpetuate that tradition.

As such, the sand floors of Caribbean synagogues are not simply tread upon but cherished. They are part and parcel of Jewish life and observance in our corner of the world; they are our connection to Abraham and the generation of the Exodus as well as our unique take on Jewish tradition.

Dana Evan Kaplan is the rabbi of Shaare Shalom Synagogue in Kingston, Jamaica. He also teaches Judaism at the United Theological College of the West Indies, and is a widely published author.

“Psalm 29, Mizmor LeDavid” -John Levy and the Choir...

Sat, 18 Aug 2012 22:07:00 -0400

“Psalm 29, Mizmor LeDavid” -John Levy and the Choir of the Bevis Marks Synagogue of London. 1960.

New York Times: In Andalusia, Searching for Inherited Memories

Sat, 18 Aug 2012 15:19:00 -0400

New York Times: In Andalusia, Searching for Inherited Memories:

By DOREEN CARVAJAL

Published: August 17, 2012

ARCOS DE LA FRONTERA, Spain — I still wonder how I ended up living in a former medieval bordello on the brink of a sandstone cliff on the southern frontier of Spain.

It was 2008, the start of the Andalusian region’s economic meltdown, La Crisis, and anxiety spread like the Black Plague. But from the roof of my apartment in this ancient white pueblo, I plunged back in time.

The other world worried about bills, real estate values, tourism, lost jobs, the immediate future. In contrast, I retreated into my quest, hoping to take new stock of my identity by reclaiming ancestral memories, history and DNA clues that I believe had been faithfully passed down for generations of my family, the Carvajals.

They had left Spain centuries ago, during the Inquisition. That much I knew. We were raised as Catholics in Costa Rica and California, but late in life I finally started collecting the nagging clues of a very clandestine identity: that we were descendants of secret Sephardic Jews — Christian converts known as conversos, or Anusim (Hebrew for the forced ones) or even Marranos, which in Spanish means swine.

I didn’t know if my family had a connection to the white pueblo. But by living in its labyrinth of narrow cobblestone streets, I hoped to understand the fears that shaped the secret lives of my own family.

History is a part of daily life in the old quarter, where Inquisition trials were staged and neighbors spied on neighbors, dutifully reporting heretics — Christian converts who were secretly practicing Judaism. The former Jewish quarter, where white houses plunge down a steep, silvery lane, is still standing, though unmarked by any street sign. I wanted to understand why my family guarded secret identities for generations with such inexplicable fear and caution. When my aunt died a few years ago, she left instructions barring a priest from presiding over her funeral; my grandmother did the same.

There are scientific studies exploring whether the history of our ancestors is somehow a part of us, inherited in unexpected ways through a vast chemical network in our cells that controls genes, switching them on and off. At the heart of the field, known as epigenetics, is the notion that genes have memory and that the lives of our grandparents — what they breathed, saw and ate — can directly affect us decades later.

Recent studies in Sweden explore the effects of famine and abundant harvests on the health of descendants four generations later. That is not exactly what I am looking for: I’m intrigued by the notion that generations pass on particular survival skills and an unconscious sense of identity that stands the test of centuries.

The French psychologist Anne Ancelin Schützenberger, now in her 90s, has spent decades studying what she calls the ancestor syndrome — that we are links in a chain of generations, unconsciously affected by their suffering or unfinished business until we acknowledge the past.

In the 1990s Dina Wardi, a psychotherapist in Jerusalem, worked with the children of Holocaust survivors and developed the theory that survivor parents often designated certain children as “memorial candles” who took on the mission of serving as a link to preserve the past and connect the future. The children of survivors who actively struggled against the Nazis, she found, had a compulsive ambition to achieve.

A similar strategy existed among the forced converts, the Anusim: Usually older women were entrusted with passing on information about their secret identity to particular younger family members. In our family, the historian was my great-aunt Luz, whose name means light in Spanish. I lived for a summer in her house in San José, Costa Rica, but she never confided in me, and regrettably I was not curious enough about our past to ask questions.

But recently, my cousin Rosie told me that she had made it her mission to question Aunt Luz at a family gathering. Given our family penchant for secrecy, she taped the conversation with a hidden recorder.

“Luz told me that our family came from Spain,” Rosie said. “She asked me, ‘Has your mother ever told you that we are Sefarditas?’ Of course, when I brought it up with my mother, she refused to talk.”

My fantasy, of course, was that I could somehow tap these ancestral memories. I have recently made the acquaintance of another Carvajal in Spain, an actor who remembers that even though he was raised Catholic he always insisted to his mother that he was Jewish. He said he started making the claim when he was about 6 years old.

In the video game Assassin’s Creed, fiction provides a solution to this kind of riddle: Gamers plunge into the main character’s genetic memory archives to share vivid recollections of Jerusalem and Italy during the Renaissance.

Reality is even stranger. Dr. Darold A. Treffert, a psychiatrist in Wisconsin, maintains a registry of about 300 “savants” who through a head injury or dementia acquire skills they never learned. Conceivably, he says, those skills, like music, mathematics, art and calendar calculating, were buried deep in their brains. He calls it genetic memory, or “factory-installed software,” a huge reservoir of dormant knowledge that can emerge when a damaged brain rewires itself to recover from injuries.

“How is this possible?” Dr. Treffert asked in an interview. “The only way that knowledge can be there is through genetic transmission.

“In the animal kingdom, we accept without question migration patterns that birds are born with, which they never learned. The monarch butterfly makes a trip from Canada to Mexico to a 23-acre spot, and they take three generations to get there.”

I think about the flight of butterflies when I consider what has brought me back to southern Spain, where my own ancestors surely left for Costa Rica on a boat from the Bay of Cádiz, most likely with some of the early Spanish explorers, who carried converso Jews fleeing the Inquisition.

In the red leather folder where I keep my reporter’s notebook and business cards, I always keep a photograph of the old Inquisition jail in Arcos de la Frontera. It’s from that heady time when I first visited the pueblo and felt a powerful urge to stay and explore. The photo shows a splintering wood door, a cobblestone lane and a whitewashed box of a building with a glowing light and street sign with the word “leal,” for loyal. I have marked it with a phrase from T. S. Eliot: “And the end of all our exploring, will be to arrive where we started, and know the place for the first time.”

Long after I made my sojourn to Arcos de la Frontera, which is partly bounded by the Guadalete — named for the mythical Greek river of forgetting — I found out that Aunt Luz sometimes dreamed about Andalusia. It is too late to pose the question — she died in 1998 — but it haunts me that she told another cousin in Costa Rica that she often dreamed of a river that plunges into the bay where Columbus set sail for the Americas.

It could only be the home of our butterflies: the green river of forgetting, the Guadalete.

Doreen Carvajal, a reporter for The International Herald Tribune and The New York Times, is the author of “The Forgetting River: A Modern Tale of Survival, Identity and the Inquisition.”

Sabá Shalom שבת שלום

Fri, 17 Aug 2012 19:09:00 -0400