art

The Tree Hugger

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This is a poem for Oakland, for the fallen brothers, for the fallen trees —
and for the good men in my life. The Tree Hugger
his skin is brown
limbs long, he is lanky like me
but still: strong arms, thick spine
he is an oak
tree rooted in the Town
find him from Lower Bottoms
to top of the hills
from Berkeley border to Deep East
he is a tree and we
have never spoke,
clapped hands, dapped it up
i barely look him in the eye
* * *
i remember the first time
someone asked me to hug a tree
DC, 10th grade
field trip for all the city kids, all boys,
took us all the way past the suburbs
to the mystical land of West Virginia
Appalachia:
land of miners and mountains
union bumperstickers and a Confederate flag
sharing the same Chevy in front of our bus
poor white folks and the richest forests
my greedy eyes had ever seen
i loved climbing trees
used to race my brother to the top
like we were running from the cops
which he was,
sometimes,
but no sirens singing out here in coal country
just pines and firs and miles and miles of
oaks: thick, brown, and beautiful
with green goatees and high-top fades
like Will Smith from the ’80s
hiking through the woods
in our oversized Timberlands
that actually made sense for once,
we reach a green meadow
and in the middle:
a single, giant oak. Mr. Jeffries, biology teacher
in khakis and a comb-over, says
“Alright, boys. One by one,
I want everyone to go hug that tree.” What?

Judaism

1. A Brief Meditation- Between Yom Kippur and Sukkot 2. The Social Space of the Sukka

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A line in Neila caught my attention at the end of Yom Kippur. It reads:
“our remains will be naught but dust, thus God has given us many prayers”. Recognizing the emptiness of the confrontation with that void, that abyss of non-existence, we are given the chance to utter words which suggest a meaning for existence, prayers for life, for the existing world and the people which inhabit it. We know we are alive because we can still pray, still dream of beautiful things. This brought to mind R. Pinchas of Koretz’s line, that it is our swaying during prayers which cause the winds to blow (the winds which then cause the grass to grow).

art

It's Personal: Filmmaker Documents Father's Survival

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When I think of my parents’ tale of survival, and what they lost, the Holocaust becomes personal. It also has occurred to me that my father was never more savvy nor persevering in his life than when leading his young wife and her widowed aunt to safety in the United States: through countries under attack (Yugoslavia and Greece) and in rebellion (Iraq) to the other side of the world (British India), and back around the horn of Africa, up to the Americas and to New Jersey where they first settled. Sept. 28 marks the commercial debut of “Six Million And One,” David Fisher’s true-life depiction of his Israeli family coming to grips with how the Holocaust affected them. Twelve years after his survivor-father’s death, he discovers his diary of remembrances from his months of captivity, first deported from his home in Hungary to Auschwitz and then to the slave labor camps of Mauthausen-Gusen and Gunskirchen in Austria.

Culture

Video Critique of UC Report on Anti-Semitism

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Students and community member express their deep concerns with HR35, a resolution passed by the California State Assembly that targets groups like Students for Justice in Palestine and the Boycott and Divestment Sanctions movement, framing them as the main perpetrators of anti-Semitism.

General News

Scott Brown's Racial Stereotyping of Elizabeth Warren

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Disturbingly absent from the analysis of Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown’s rebuke at last week’s debate of Democratic challenger Elizabeth Warren’s claim that she has Native American ancestry is any reference to the racially insensitive nature of his reproach. After noting that “Professor Warren claimed she was a Native American,” he added pointedly, “And as you can see, she’s not.” Which raises the obvious question: which of her facial features alerted Brown that she has no Native American blood coursing through her veins? Surely, if she possessed whatever tiny fraction of one’s DNA must trace back to an indigenous tribe before he or she is deemed to be Native American, she’d have shiny, jet-black hair or a tan complexion. Or was it the absence of beads or a feather and a headband that tipped Brown off?

Judaism

Swimming The Ocean of Night: Welcoming the Fall Season

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We are entering the time of dreaming, of storytelling, of playing with the landscapes of the imagination, the fabric of our own subconscious. As we harvest the bounty of the summer growth, we each have our own personal harvests to gather in, internally pulling on the threads of our own being, reflecting on memories from the season that has just finished. The gates are open for all memories, and it is usually the ones we try to push away which will arrive the loudest. It is in the darkness of night where we meet our own reflection, our own shadow.

Judaism

Yom Kippur: Time and Teshuva – A Place for Healing

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I. Time and Teshuva
In the shiur regarding Rosh Hashana, we saw how the shofar connected us to a moment outside of time. This radicalization of the perception of time bears an even more immediate relationship to the concept of Yom Kippur and its central component, Teshuva, repentance, as the word teshuva is roughly translated. We will argue that Teshuva means a whole lot more, a restructuring of one’s narrative, an ability to step outside the linearity of experience in order to set things right in one’s life and in the world. The un-linkage of our normal perception of the flow of time to the Yom Kippur experience is present in the original verse describing the day, as summarized in BT Pesahim 68:
Mar son of Ravina would fast on all the days of the year except for Purim, Shavuout, and the eve of Yom Kippur (the ninth of Tishrei, as opposed to the tenth, which is Yom Kippur), since it says (Vayikra 23:32) “v’initem et nafshotayhem batisha’ lahodesh”- “and you shall deprive yourselves on the ninth of the month”- Is the fast actually on the ninth?

Judaism

Was Prophet Isaiah a Yiddishe Mama?

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During text study at one of our meetings of OS JUSTICE, the social justice committee I chair at Or Shalom Jewish Community in San Francisco, we discovered some secret verses of a not-so-minor prophet named Yiddishe Mama Isaiah. I’d like to share a little bit of it from chapter 58.