(You have just no idea how difficult it is for me to read real, colloquial Hebrew. I can't figure out what "hudim" are, that you are putting in the same basket with datiim. I realize I could get up and get my Alcalay dictionary, but I'm pretending that I'm only online to do work--since it's 9 Av. So if I get anything wrong here, forgive me.)
It's always been interesting to me that so many Jews are named Cohen or Levi. I think a lot of people maintained Jewish identity because they knew they had that special status. I also suspect that the decision of the Jews in the Babylonian exile to remember that status was the reason that we became the Jews we are today.
But, your sweet shtetl fantasy aside, I don't think it was a historical reality that a bat cohen would have had a better shidduch. My maternal grandfather was a cohen, and told me a sad story when I was a child (I think he was taking valium at the time, so that might have made him sadder in telling it!) about how, in the first decades of the 20th century in New York, his father was prevented from teaching him to do duchenen (the birkat cohanim) because he regularly worked on Shabbat.
Which makes your story about your dad and your brother doing it kind of strange, but whatever. (This is the same brother who told me he thinks that it's possible Hadrian proposed building Aelia Capitolina in response to the Bar Kochba rebellion instead of the other way around? Very interesting.)
I have a much stronger response to the destruction of shtetl life than I do to the destruction of sacrificial Judaism, but the same historical nostalgia motivates both. At the time of the writing of Jeremiah and Lamentations (and some of Isaiah, which we read this morning in Shabbat services) the Israelites had social critics pointing out the crazy inequities in the society. In the period of the flourishing of E. European Jewish culture in the shtetl, there were also social critics, from both the left and the right.
Somehow I look back on that cultural unity and feel impressed by the capacity of Jews to be self-critical of social injustice. It's not that I don't see the problems in Jewish religion (which is, after all, a facet of Jewish culture, or at least you can think of it that way.) It's that I look back to greater unity and to the social critics of yesterday, who were our precursors.
When I was trying to describe this holiday to a non-Jewish friend earlier, I said it could have been the one Woody Allen was talking about with his line, "the holiday celebrating God's reneging on every promise"--though of course, if that's what it is, how are you going to fast if you live in Israel? On the other hand, if it's a day when we fast because we lost our sacred places due to internal strife, the so-called "causeless-hatred"--well, I could fast for a week about some of the stuff that's going on in the Jewish world right now. Probably I'll fast until minchah, though, as that's my husband's family custom.
no subject
It's always been interesting to me that so many Jews are named Cohen or Levi. I think a lot of people maintained Jewish identity because they knew they had that special status. I also suspect that the decision of the Jews in the Babylonian exile to remember that status was the reason that we became the Jews we are today.
But, your sweet shtetl fantasy aside, I don't think it was a historical reality that a bat cohen would have had a better shidduch. My maternal grandfather was a cohen, and told me a sad story when I was a child (I think he was taking valium at the time, so that might have made him sadder in telling it!) about how, in the first decades of the 20th century in New York, his father was prevented from teaching him to do duchenen (the birkat cohanim) because he regularly worked on Shabbat.
Which makes your story about your dad and your brother doing it kind of strange, but whatever. (This is the same brother who told me he thinks that it's possible Hadrian proposed building Aelia Capitolina in response to the Bar Kochba rebellion instead of the other way around? Very interesting.)
I have a much stronger response to the destruction of shtetl life than I do to the destruction of sacrificial Judaism, but the same historical nostalgia motivates both. At the time of the writing of Jeremiah and Lamentations (and some of Isaiah, which we read this morning in Shabbat services) the Israelites had social critics pointing out the crazy inequities in the society. In the period of the flourishing of E. European Jewish culture in the shtetl, there were also social critics, from both the left and the right.
Somehow I look back on that cultural unity and feel impressed by the capacity of Jews to be self-critical of social injustice. It's not that I don't see the problems in Jewish religion (which is, after all, a facet of Jewish culture, or at least you can think of it that way.) It's that I look back to greater unity and to the social critics of yesterday, who were our precursors.
When I was trying to describe this holiday to a non-Jewish friend earlier, I said it could have been the one Woody Allen was talking about with his line, "the holiday celebrating God's reneging on every promise"--though of course, if that's what it is, how are you going to fast if you live in Israel? On the other hand, if it's a day when we fast because we lost our sacred places due to internal strife, the so-called "causeless-hatred"--well, I could fast for a week about some of the stuff that's going on in the Jewish world right now. Probably I'll fast until minchah, though, as that's my husband's family custom.