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December 2011/Kislev 5772
A JOURNAL OF JEWISH RESPONSIBILITY
Walking on a
Jewish Path
Marci Shore
The Birth of a Rootless
Cosmopolitan . . . . . . . . 1
Shmuly Yanklowitz
A Floor and Not a Ceiling:
My Religious Practice . . 2
Shulem Deen
Ex-Hasid at Rainbow:
Memories of a Hasidic
Tisch. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Tobin Belzer
Fluid Identification:
San Francisco’s
Mission Minyan. . . . . . . 5
Shani Rosenbaum
Good Inclinations
Gone Wild .......... 7
Ben Dreyfus
Outside the Box:
DIYJewish .......... 8
Noam Pianko
Does it Matter if
Authenticity Is
Authentic?. . . . . . . . . . . 9
Stuart Z. Charmé
The Spiral of Jewish
Authenticity. . . . . . . . . 10
Bruce Weinstock
Sharing a
Divergent Path . . . . . . . 11
Lizzi Heydemann
A Personal and
Professional Journey:
Mishkan Chicago. . . . . 12
Discussion Guide. . . . . 13
Danya Ruttenberg
V’Ahavta: Prayer
and Parenting . . . . . . . 14
Erica Lyons
A Jewish Home
in the Far East. . . . . . . 15
Rachel Klinghoffer
Practice, Practice . . . . . 16
Jacob Fine
Farming in the
Creator’s Image . . . . . . 16
Aryeh Ben David, Adam
Eilath, Alison Laichter,
Eliana Jacobowitz
NiSh’ma . . . . . . . . . . . 18
Shai Gluskin
Sh’ma Ethics . . . . . . . . 20
his month, Sh’ma focuses on how we walk in the world as Jews, the multitude of paths
that lead us toward deeper Jewish commitment — or away from it; our journeys, few
finished, few triumphant. We explore how Jews invite in and sometimes intimidate
seekers. Many of the personal stories in this issue express the fluid nature of identity, belief,
and practice. For some this involves moving away from home, and distinguishing oneself, often
sharply, from family; for others it is more of a negotiation within family. For still others,
meandering along the Jewish road is a challenge determined by one’s life stage, profession,
peer group, or emotional inclination.
In addition to expressing personal reflections, several of the essays seek to frame the
conceptual terrain of present-day communal engagement. A couple of writers, for example,
examine what the term “authenticity” really means today. Other writers speak to the
significance of language or place. Together, these essays offer a glimpse into life’s mysteries,
our sometimes messy experiments and counter-experiments, and our achingly and also
wonderfully non-linear trajectories.
T
—Susan Berrin, Editor-in-Chief
The Birth of a Rootless Cosmopolitan
MARCI SHORE
Iwas a 10-year-old girl sitting in Hebrew school in the basement of a Conservative synagogue in Pennsylvania. It was 1982, the
era of Ronald Reagan and the Evil Empire, of
demonstrations by American Jews in support of
refuseniks. The teacher was showing us a film
about an Israeli kibbutz. The sunniness of communal life. Everyone equal, everything shared.
A wonderful world.
And suddenly the question came into my
mind. I raised my hand.
“Isn’t that just like in Russia?” I asked.
I knew that under communism there was
no personal property, that everything was shared. And I remember
the teacher’s anger, and my
humiliation.
“They have nothing at all to do
with each other!”
Fifteen years later, now as a graduate stu-
dent, I sat in the library of the Jewish Historical
Institute in Warsaw, on the site of the destroyed
prewar Great Synagogue on Tłomackie
Street, reading the postwar Zionist newspapers.
And now I saw that, on the contrary, the kib-
butzim and the collective farms had everything
in the world to do with each other.
It was in Eastern Europe — in East
European archives — that I began to absorb
what would later seem obvious: that communism, socialism(s), and Zionism had grown up
side-by-side in the Russian empire. The Zionist
propaganda posters from the 1930s were
nearly indistinguishable from the Stalinist collectivization posters. They shared the same
aesthetic — socialist realism.
In some ways it was only in Warsaw, as a
graduate student reading those postwar Zionist
What I found in the archives was an indomitable
spirit of contestation, a passionate conviction
that the world had to be radically remade.
newspapers and moving backward in time, following in the archives the impassioned debates
among the Orthodox and the assimilationists, the
Hebraists and the Yiddishists, the communists
and the Bundists, the Zionists and the diaspora nationalists, that I began to feel closer to a certain Jewish — and “non-Jewish” Jewish —
