The Book of Doctrines and Opinions:

Over a Rosh Hashanah dinner, a local community leader and CFO was complaining about day school tuition. (His kids are finishing day school) He asked why the community did not see the need for transparency, accountability, and the creation of endowments back in the 1990’s. As a CFO, he knows that one is always weighing cost benefits of outsourcing, joint purchasing, and cut backs. And he mentioned that like most non-profits, they only survive with endowments. What was the community thinking?

Here is a talk that was published today by Archbishop Dolan of NYC. It was published with several responses. It may provide some of you with some thoughts or at least quotes for speeches. Dolan points out the decline and current challenges especially the rising cost of salaries and he suggests to go back to the diocesan responsibility and in the Jewish case it would be back to the kehilalh system. (Parenthetically, I must point out that in Europe the members of the vaad arba Artzot, kehilah leadrs, parnesim and heads of school board were businessmen not rabbis.) Dolan points out the need to move beyond petty turf wars.

Maurince Halliman points out that parochial schools may no longer be better that public schools. We are not recent immigrants anymore in poor school districts and the results just give us a Lake Wobegon “slightly above average.” There may be a need for proper assessment of strengths and weaknesses? Know what your product is. How does it compare to the Tenafly school system?

Robert Sullivan points out that commitment is based on a still unquantified continuity of the parents attitudes. And that more creative working with public schools or creating day schools with a greater emphasis on secular studies may help the schools. (Several of the local Islamic schools are going that route. Lets not forget that Hirsch’s school system only had 2 periods of Jewish studies a day and Maimonides School originally had equal time for Latin and Talmud, one period a day.) And Patrick J. McCloskey leaves us with the exhortation to remember that there is “An abundance of brilliant leadership and expertise is available among top professionals, academics, CEOs, CFOs and so on in dioceses across the country.”

The Catholic Schools We Need
Archbishop Timothy Dolan
SEPTEMBER 13, 2010
But what of today’s Catholic schools that exist in a world largely free of those sorts of 20th-century threats? Are we not facing our own crisis of closure for the Catholic school in America?
The answer is yes. Statistics from the National Catholic Educational Association tell a sobering tale about Catholic schools in the United States. From a student enrollment in the mid-1960s of more than 5.2 million in nearly 13,000 elementary and secondary Catholic schools across America, there are now only half as many, with just 7,000 schools and 2.1 million students enrolled.
The most crippling reason, however, may rest in an enormous shift in the thinking of many American Catholics, namely, that the responsibility for Catholic schools belongs only to the parents of the students who attend them, not to the entire church. Nowadays, Catholics often see a Catholic education as a consumer product, reserved to those who can afford it. The result is predictable: Catholics as a whole in the United States have for some time disowned their school system, excusing themselves as individuals, parishes or dioceses from any further involvement with a Catholic school simply because their own children are not enrolled there, or their parish does not have its own school.
The truth is that the entire parish, the whole diocese and the universal church benefit from Catholic schools in ways that keep communities strong. So all Catholics have a duty to support them. Reawakening a sense of common ownership of Catholic schools may be the biggest challenge the church faces in any revitalization effort ahead. Thus, we Catholics need to ask ourselves a risky question: Who needs Catholic schools, anyway?
To re-grow the Catholic school system, today’s efforts need to be rooted in the long-term financial security that comes from institutional commitment through endowments, foundations and stable funding sources and also from every parish supporting a Catholic school, even if it is not “their own.” Catholic education is a communal, ecclesial duty, not just for parents of schoolchildren or for parishes blessed to have their own school. Surely American Catholics have sufficient wealth and imagination to accomplish this.
We cannot succumb to the petty turf wars that pit Catholic schools against religious education programs and other parish ministries. Pope Benedict XVI reminds us that the church is all about both/and, not either/or. Strong Catholic schools strengthen all other programs of evangelization, service, catechesis and sanctification. The entire church suffers when Catholic schools disappear.

Maureen T. Hallinan
In a society characterized by an intense interest in student achievement, many Catholics feel secure in the longstanding reputation of Catholic schools as providing an outstanding education. This positive reputation has been referred to as the “Catholic school advantage.” It is based on empirical evidence that throughout the second half of the twentieth century, Catholic secondary school students attained higher standardized test scores in reading and mathematics than public high school students.

Yet these findings are dated and may no longer accurately describe the academic benefits of Catholic schools. Recently, the federal government has taken aggressive steps to improve public school achievement…In light of these changes, it is important to determine whether Catholic school students still outpace public school students in terms of achievement and other student outcomes.

An analysis of nationally representative, longitudinal surveys allows for an evaluation of contemporary schools. A few studies indicate that at least at the high school level, students in today’s Catholic high schools, on average, still outpace those in public high schools. More research is needed to determine whether this is a stable pattern and whether it extends to earlier grades. A recent analysis of seventh and eighth grade students in middle or elementary schools in a large urban environment failed to find a Catholic school achievement advantage in reading and mathematics for the average student; but it did show evidence of a benefit for disadvantaged and minority students in these grades. Another study reports that children who attended kindergarten and early elementary grades at Catholic schools received slightly higher, though barely statistically significant, test scores than those in public schools. These findings provide evidence that while Catholic schools may not provide a strong academic advantage for K-8 students, it does benefit certain subsets of students, namely, those in most need of academic support to succeed in school.

Beyond Religious Education- Robert Sullivan
‘We need not think that our church will exist only if we push children through religious schools.’

What if, moreover, these schools deemphasized religious education? In so doing, the school itself—educating young people to be thinking, interested citizens, conversant in the arts and history, in addition to perhaps theology and philosophy—would be an act of social justice, and, as well, a continuation of the American church’s historic role as host to immigrant communities, especially in cities, but also in suburbs where immigrant populations have increased greatly over the past decade. There is historical precedent: in Reformation Spain, Jesuit schools exempted Protestant students from religious studies. Rather than act as evangelizing mechanism, schools might operate more on the model of Catholic hospitals, or even Catholic colleges, which accept and encourage the presence of a variety of religious beliefs, not to mention non-believers.

Yes, I recognize that some studies have shown that Catholic schools can be an effective means of passing on the faith. But I remain skeptical of the idea that young people who attend Catholic schools are more likely to attend Mass later on. In my own experience, the most important indicator as to whether or not the young person will or will not attend Mass is unmeasurable and mysterious and has mostly to do with the parent. (If you could plot it would have the parent’s own relationship with his faith on one axis and his or her relationship with their children on the other.)

Patrick J. McCloskey
Undoubtedly there are adequate intellectual, managerial and financial resources in the Catholic community to meet current and future challenges. An abundance of brilliant leadership and expertise is available among top professionals, academics, CEOs, CFOs and so on in dioceses across the country.

Also crucial is effective leadership from the hierarchy, as Archbishop Dolan demonstrates. The fierce passion, which characterized prelates and religious orders from the mid-19th to mid-20th centuries, needs to be recovered where lacking throughout the Catholic community.

Full Speech Here
Full Comments Here

This blog is one year old. The three month and six month markers were harder than this one. At this point, the practice of blogging is part of my routine. I started on September 10, 2009. Originally, the readership was limited to students and facebook friends. In mid December, the blog was discovered by several other blogs especially the posts comparing “Catholic Schools and Jewish Day Schools” “Post-Orthodoxy” “The Lubavitcher Rebbe on Transcendental Meditation.” On February 8th and then 25th the blizzard forced homebound East Coaster to look for something to do and they spent their time on blogs and my blog went viral. Popular springtime posts included the Art Green review, the Marryanne Robinson cycle, Rabbi Morgenstern and Meditation, and New writing of Rabbi Kook”

Some of the posts of the first three months that did not get the attention they deserve include:
The first Jewish reference to the Dalai Lama
Levinas’s Jewish Response to Nostra Aetate
Determine Your Rabbinical Age
Modern Orthodoxy- Modern meant Moral Self-transformation

I did a Tishrei cycle that was read but is timely to repost. The posts focused on the 9th to the 12th centuries of Unetaneh Tokef; Pesikta derav Kahana; Avodat Yom Hakippurim; and Geshem on shimini atzeret.

My post of this summer on “Rav Kook and Other Religions and Revelation” should have gotten readers but it received no hits.

I am willing to take suggestions for WordPress improvements-widgets to install or plugins. WordPress changed my theme without asking and erased all widgets this past summer and then reinstalled them a few days after a fashion. So there are some kinks from the summer.

My book “Judaism and Other Religions” came out in March. Despite the list price, the price on Amazon and Barnes & Noble fluctuates weekly between 57-73 dollars. Right now, both Amazon and B & N have it for 57. If you come to my house, then I can give it to you for 47.(No mail or shipping possible). It will jump back to 63, 68, or 73 in a week or two. I don’t have a date for the paperback but expect it around Dec 2011. I am told via the grapevine that the first academic review of my book is scheduled for November. The latest PR for the Book was in the Bergen County Jewish Standard last week.

Teaneck resident Alan Brill’s new book, “Judaism and Other Religions: Models of Understanding” (Palgrave MacMillan), is a sort of post-tolerance manifesto for a post 9/11 world. The humanistic approach to tolerance in today’s Western world treats “the other” as secular without requiring any understanding of the other’s religion, argues Brill…
Jews involved in interfaith dialogue since the 1970s have mostly come from the 1960s “universal, we’re-all-one perspective” that emphasized openness over exclusivism, says Brill. He felt that today’s realities called for a look at how classical Jewish sources could bring an old/new dimension to the discussion.

Read Entire Review Here

My next book Judaism and World Religions: Encountering Christianity, Islam, and Eastern Traditions [Hardcover] is already listed on Barnes and Noble for next March 2011. I have several semi-completed manuscripts for 2-3 more books to be pursued as soon as I am dome with the one on World Religions. So, I will likely be blogging for at least a few more years while I edit, edit, edit.

Blogging takes time and I try not to let it interfere with other projects. However, I take copious notes on books and articles that I read for work so I actually write more posts that get posted because it takes time to edit them for the blog. Once again, I welcome guest posts that fit into this blog. I also wish to remind people that I do not post comments that are Google searches of quotes, which add nothing to the blog and only show off google skills. If you link one of my posts here to Twitter & Facebook, let me know so I know where the traffic is coming from.

I wish everyone a Gemar Tov and Gut Gebentched Yohr

I know that I have people who sit on the boards of Jewish day schools among my readership. You liked my post comparing Catholic schools to Day Schools. Well, here is a model to take note of. Business Leadership Organized for Catholic Schools (BLOCS) is moving from creating scholarship funds to creating endowments for 7 Philadelphia Catholic Schools. They have put the businessmen and CEO’s in charge. Maybe you can give them a call and brainstorm together? From the list of donors, it seems they are going for corporate gifts from major national companies and from law firms.

A business group has pledged $4 million in matching grants to help seven urban Catholic schools create endowments during the 2010-11 academic year.
Business Leadership Organized for Catholic Schools (BLOCS) on Thursday announced that it had signed partnership agreements with the schools as it launches its urban endowment initiative.
The pilot program advances an approach to helping financially strapped urban parish schools that BLOCS officials have been discussing for the last few years.
Five of the schools are in Philadelphia, and one each is in Chester and Lansdowne.
Joe Garecht, BLOCS executive director, said in the past that the organization’s primary focus was on raising scholarship funds to help low-income students attend Catholic schools. He said the organization decided to broaden its scope to include helping to save Catholic schools, because so many were closing.
“Schools continue to close in places where they are needed most,” he said.
In the last decade, the city has lost 30 percent of its Catholic elementary schools and enrollment has dropped by 41 percent.
Under the initiative, each of the seven schools will raise money and BLOCS grants will match each dollar. The money will be deposited in individual endowment accounts managed by BLOCS that will help cover schools’ operating costs.
The schools’ principals and pastors have agreed to work with BLOCS for the next two years, Garecht said.
The ultimate goal, he said, is for each school to have a $7 million endowment in three years.
source

You can make the calls Tuesday. Have your secretaries arrange meeting for after holiday season. Here is the board of directors. And here are the donors. Notice the broad base of the donors.

When I turned to read this week’s Forward, I found a banner advertising the current issue of the journal Kerem. I used to receive Kerem in the 1990’s because my name was on some mailing list, but I was glad that it came because I always found it thoughtful and well edited. The journal sought to capture how people experience their Judaism. It was part dvar Torah, part first person narrative, part poetry, part midrash, and part liturgy. It stressed creativity and the renewal of Rabbinic life. I thought that it had ended in 2001 and had no idea that it put out four issues in the last decade. Well it is still around and promises greater web presence.

Here is the editors comments from this issue.

When we first founded Kerem in 1992, we aimed to address a striking paucity of journals reflecting upon the ways we think, live, and practice Jewishly. We envisioned Kerem then — as we do now — as a figurative vineyard (hence its name) whose fruits could be tasted and savored both immediately and over time. The varied genres assembled in its pages — divrei torah, rituals, mediations, midrash, fiction, poems — we hoped would both stimulate and serve as a resource. Over time, we added other features that enhanced our mission: art and photography,music.
Read the rest

They are offering some of their archives for free. They should really open it all up because no one buys back issues anymore, especially if one has access to an academic library.

Here is one of the free articles from the archives, an article by Professor David Stern from U of Pennsylvania explaining the history of vidui as the contingent combining of alternate texts of the vidui along with a narrative that such contingency precipitated his loss of faith. If the words of a prayer are only for the sake of an acrostic then every word does not count. This negates the preciousness of every word that he was taught in Yeshiva. Stern offers a nice parable he found in a kabbalistic prayerbook for the alphabetical form.

David Stern “ABC”S of Confession”
And now comes the other confession, the story of how I lost this perfect, innocent religious faith. It happened with a small, almost trivial, realization. As a born academic, I often tend to overlook the obvious. Sometime after I left the yeshiva, one Yom Kippur, as I was beating my breast
and repeating the Viddui, I realized that the Ashamnu was an alphabetic acrostic. Now, most people have probably always known this, but I hadn’t. It never even occurred to me. When I did see it, the recognition came as a crushing revelation, a terrible blow to my perfect religious faith.. It felt almost like a betrayal.

For all the time I had been reciting this prayer I had been assuming not only that every word counted, but that every word was there to cover a different kind of transgression, to make us confess and acknowledge a different species of shortcoming or sin. And now I realized that this was not so—that the reason you had bagadnu after ashamnu was not because devastation led to betrayal or that these were even different types of transgressions, but because you needed a word for sinning that began with a bet. And the same with gimmel for gazalnu, and so on.

To be sure, an alphabetical ditty is not one’s ordinary idea of a speech or an address to another person, but in that little mahzor of mine from my yeshiva days with a commentary on the Viddui there is a remarkable passage — quoted from a book called Sefer Etz haDaat Tov, The Book of the Tree of
Knowledge of the Good — that explains why the Viddui is in an alphabetic acrostic. The explanation is presented in the form of a parable about a king who had a terrible argument with his wife and banished her to a distant land. As the days of her exile in that land lengthened, the poor consort grew increasingly unhappy. What did she do? She returned to the king’s palace, took up the harp which the court musician had played on their wedding day, and she played it while weeping and lamenting, ever so plaintively, Thus and thus I rebelled against you, thus and thus I sinned against you. Finally, the king’s mercies were aroused, and he remembered the joy of his youthful love in the days of their marriage, and he took his consort back.

The meaning of this parable is clear: the king is God, the consort is Israel, the place of the consort’s exile is the place of our exile, and the harp is the letters of the Hebrew alphabet with which God composed the Torah that He gave to Israel on the day that He took Israel as His bride on Mt. Sinai.
Those letters now compose the Viddui that Israel makes to her estranged God. But as the parable makes clear, that Viddui is not a mere confession of sins. It is Israel’s love song to God, an artful, strategically conceived apology intended to win Him back, a siren’s song of apology whose real goal is to bring the redemption — as the Sefer Etz haDaat Tov concludes, bim’heirah b’yameinu, amen, kein yehi ratzon — speedily in our days, amen, so may it be His will.
Full version here

Another gem in the archives is this interview with Lawrence Kushner, one of the architects of the new Reform movement of the 1980’s and 1990’s. His first pulpit was as an associate to the outspoken Arnold Jacob Wolf in Chicago. The interview captures the gems from Arnold Wolf’s mouth about the rabbinate.

What are some of the things you learned from Arnold Wolf?
First, that you can survive in the rabbinate by telling the truth–not only in private, but also, and maybe especially, in public, no matter how embarrassing or frightening or funny your words may sound. Religious institutions are by nature prone to self-delusion, so a rabbi has a special responsibility to avoid sweet, platitudinous, feel-good talk and to speak with the candor of blunt, everyday language.

I also learned that a rabbi must not curry favor with the prominent or the wealthy–nor, on the other hand, with the modest or the weak. Therefore: no obsequiousness, no politicking, no baby kissing.

Another thing: the rabbi shouldn’t take himself or the congregation too seriously. “We are the wise men,” Wolf liked to say, “–of Chelm.” In an era when many rabbis wore black robes, had reserved parking spaces, confused their titles with their first names and in some cases actually had portraits of themselves hanging in the foyer, Arnold Wolf’s congregation called him “Arnold.” He worked without a secretary, and routinely confessed his mistakes from the pulpit.

And how did this go over with the congregation?

A lot of people were convinced the whole thing was an elaborate Machiavellian manipulation. They were wrong. Arnold Wolf demystified the rabbi-congregation relationship. He advised other rabbis to think of the congregation simply as the place where they worked, and not to hesitate to ask about such “mundane” considerations as the working conditions, the hours, the salary, the vacation. He would caution me against using the phrase “my congregation.” As he liked to say, “I only work here. Otherwise, I’d probably daven at a little Orthodox place downtown.”
He believed that rabbis didn’t own their congregations and shouldn’t try to run them. The congregation is owned by its members, the people who pay for it. It should never become an extension of the rabbi’s ego. Arnold believed that congregants should be free to make their own decisions, and that the rabbi shouldn’t even attend board meetings. He once went so far as to say that how a congregation gets and spends its money is none of the rabbi’s business–and I think he’s wrong about that. The rabbi’s business, he insisted–and continues to insist–is to teach Jews what he knows about how to grow in the service of God, and then get out of the way while they figure out for themselves how to make it all work.

Kushner’s next congregation was typical of how mixed in observance American congregations were in the 1980’s. Now everyone has been sorted out like metals, glass, and paper in a recycling bin, but thirty five years ago you still found congregations where some wanted Reform, some wanted Orthodox, ans some wanted Conservative.

What was in Sudbury when you arrived?
Chaos. A congregation of a hundred households had recently been through some major battles. Should the temple be kosher? Should it be Reform, Conservative, or unaffiliated? They had affiliated with the Reform movement a year before I arrived, but it was an uneasy truce. Of the 66 members who attended the meeting, 5 had voted for Orthodox, 11 for Reconstructionist, 19 for Conservative, 23 for Reform, and 8 for None of the Above.
The impasse was resolved when someone moved that the congregation should affiliate with the Reform movement, but would retain a kosher kitchen and observe the second day of Rosh Hashanah. They then hired a twenty-eight year-old rabbi whom they hoped would be suitable.

Kushner’s religious observance and experimentation with what works in observance created a broader spectrum of observance within Reform. He was also part of the generation that got rid of the organ high church and replaced it with the guitar, removed responsive readings, and brought in neo-Hasidism and niggunim.

Has your own religious observance changed much over the years you’ve been here?

In the years after Solel I was on a traditionally observant track, culminating in a couple of years of strict shomer Shabbos [Sabbath-observant] and strictly kosher. But I came out the other side. I remain very respectful of traditional observance, but I no longer think it’s the way for me, and I suspect it’s not going to be the way for many other Jews. Kashrut as it’s currently practiced is putting itself out of business.

Because it’s so extreme?

Yes, because no matter how kosher you are, there’s always someone who won’t eat in your kitchen. I’d like to see a reasonable standard of kashrut defined for liberal Jews. There is more than one way to be a serious and observant Jew

Was this something you learned at Solel?

No, Solel did responsive readings too. I thought they were dumb, and finally I said to myself, I’m a rabbi, I don’t have to do this. I feel the same way about the sequence of the wedding liturgy.

So what do you do about it?

I do a wedding in two acts. First we all gather around a big table, and the cantor or I will teach everyone a wedding niggun. And, as an inducement to get people to join in, we announce that we won’t bring in the bride and the groom until everyone is singing. We read and sign the ketubah, and then we have the bride and groom speak to one another publicly. It’s very powerful, and people usually cry. Only then do we erect the huppah at the other end of the room. It’s all intuitive. I don’t believe liturgy should require explanation.
Full Version Here

Here is a new video by National Jewish Outreach Program run By Rabbi Ephraim (Effie) Buchwald. He is mainstream Modern Orthodox and based at Lincoln Square Synagogue. They run Shabbat across America and read Hebrew America. When many of us knew Effie 35-25 years ago, the musical aspiration was Kingston Trio via Rabbis Sons. The new song is a remake of the Kanye West’s rap song Gold Digger (original is NSFW). In the episode “Showmance” of Glee, the cast covered and modified the song so that now even Jewfolk know the rap song.

But here in the NJOP version we have a new gospel choral added singing “repent repent repent.” We also have a neo-Calvinist message of cut your credit cards and start praying, give up greed and help the homeless.

This was so Evangelical that they issued their own statement in the Jewish Week. “when the first version of the lyrics came out, we questioned whether the repeating motif of repentance sounded too much like a church revival meeting. However, we realized that teshuvah (repentance in Hebrew) is one of the most beautiful and spiritual concepts in Judaism, far more so than any fire-and-brimstone idea that the word “repent” may conjure up.”

First Things summed it up “As proof that we Christians don’t have exclusive rights to the making of cheesy, religious-oriented videos, I give you the National Jewish Outreach Program’s reimagining of Kanye West’s “Gold Digger.”

Watch the whole thing it has different parts.

Any Thoughts or Comments? Ok now “make your soul bigger” sing along “Repent boy go ‘head Repent..Repent boy go ‘head Repent…”

h/t The Talmud Blog via FB

Yakir Englander says that he “grew up in the closed world of an ultra-orthodox Hassidic court, removed his head covering, but still defines himself as a secular Vishnitzer Chassid.” He is finishing a PHD at Hebrew Unviersity.

Englander just published an article on the Hazon Ish which differs with the extensive PHD thesis of Binyamin Brown on the Hazon Ish. I assume that everyone has read benny Brown by now. The new article views the Hazon Ish as driven by his anthropology in which people are sinful and depraved. Body, will, and imagination are all corrupted; even the intellect is not free of the effects of the evil inclination.

Humans do not have any naturally good state or inner goodness. Mussar wanted the person to cultivate their inner emotions and volition. In Englander’s presentation of the Hazon Ish, that would be like talking to an anorexic about her body. The goal of the anorexic is to beat up on the body, then paradoxically an anorexic spends all of her day on her body. The cure is a therapy that changes thinking or social dynamic. So too if the goal of baal mussar is to destroy their evil inclination, then spending all one’s day talking and thinking about it wont work. One has to entirely break one’s body and volition by submitting to Torah.

The Hazon Ish was against anything personal or existential because there is not any inwardness of value.

One arranges one’s life so as to avoid impurity to one’s soul. Englamder explains this concern with impurity using the categories of Mary Douglas in which impurity is based on fear of things outside one’s boundaries Most of society follows the evil inclination and lives a shallow life. One overcomes it by submission to halakhah.

Englander disagrees with Benny Brown over the role of mussr to the Hazon Ish. Brown considered hazn ish’s difference with mussar as an in-house debate. Englander thinks that the Hazon Ish held that the baalei musssar were naively running headlong into a bear hug with the yetzer hara

Engelard shows how mussar reasoning is rejected by the Hazon Ish and that the latter also lacks any ethic outside of halakhah. Musar definitions of theft like “stealing sleep of another” do not exist for him. And his view of learning does not give the credence to the intellect that Lithuanian learning does.

Mussar and Lumdut are both about cultivation of the self. The anthropology of the hazon Ish is to bypass the self entirely.
All the voluntary acts of piety in the Talmud and rishonim are not needed because they reflect the volunteerism and offering of the heart of piety The value is in the effort and the subjective. He also rejects them because of devolution of the generations- we don’t have pure volition any more.

I am not sure that every line is exact but his documentation is extensive. Some of the later mussar masters already had similar positions. But the article is definitely worth reading for its ideas and also for the extensive bibliography of the unpublished dissertations and articles on Mitnagdut of the last decade.

The question that I have now is how does the Centrist Orthodox idea of submission differ? On one hand it is the same submission and rejection of autonomy, values outside the halakhah, and distrust of the intellect. Yet, in Centrism one gets to live a life of the body, personal choice, emotions, and imagination so long as one does not apply it to Torah. Whereas the Hazon Ish expects one to reject the evil inclination every day of one’s life, Centrism identifies the evil inclination with the secular world, liberal Judaism, and individuality. As long as one buys into the Centrist version of halakhah, accepts the system a whole, and enters a Centrist enclave then one is free to spend one’s life on one’s body and imagination, one’s desires and inner life are good as long as they don’t effect Torah. Any thoughts?

HTML of article
Pdf of article

I came across this quote from The Rosh Hashsnah Survival Kit when I was goggleing for something else. i had never looked at the book before Does it sound like 1980’s new age to anyone else? This view of love is more Maryanne WIlliamson or 12 step than Midrash. Human Potential and life choices seem to be generic new age. Any thoughts? In midrash, judgment is tempered by love, or God takes out his anger and judgment on an intimate object, or God teaches us to recite the 13 attributes of mercy or God accepts bribes from us in His love for us. Lots of variants, but always two parts judgment and then mercy-love.

If Rosh Hashanah could be summed up in one word, that word would be; love, potential, and life.
Let’s take a look at each of these words and reflect on their meaning in the context of Rosh Hashanah. Follow me:

Love
On Rosh Hashanah, when we say that God “sits in judgment” what we are saying is that God loves us: He cares about each and every one of us, He cares about who we are, how we live, and whether or not we are actualizing the potential He gave us. That the creator of the universe actually cares about “little ‘ol me” is a remarkably empowering and life-giving idea. The reality that we confront on Rosh Hashanah is one that highlights the intrinsic value and preciousness of every life in the eyes of God.

Potential

Every Rosh Hashanah represents a vote of confidence from God in our individual, personal potential. Every Rosh Hashanah also presents us with a fresh opportunity to unlock more and more of that great God-given gift.

Life

Throughout the Rosh Hashanah prayers, we ask God to “Remember us for life” and “Inscribe us in the Book of Life.” When we greet one another we say “May you have a good year, and may you be written and sealed for a year of good life and peace.”

Our prayers for life are meant to be understood at face value—we want to live—but they also have a deeper meaning. Consider this: I once met a Holocaust survivor who said, “I would choose to go through all those years in Auschwitz again rather than spend one day of my life as a Nazi.” That is an incredible statement, and what it means, I believe, is this: one can be alive, strong, and healthy yet be “dead” at the same time.
On Rosh Hashanah, we not only ask for life, we strive to be people who embrace the kinds of values, ideals, and choices that will fill our days with life: With meaning, with goodness, with spirituality—with life!

Author of Rosh Hashanah Yom Kippur Survival Kit and Beyond Survival: A Journey to the Heart of Rosh Hashanah, its Prayers.

I have always though that most Centrist Orthodox Jews have a kitchen deity that comes to answer there needs to times of trouble. If the average American’s God is a cosmic therapeutic deism those more religious have a God who listens to prayers, gives remission from cancer, helps raise money for the building fund and is an all purpose household deity. What their God is not is the Mighty God of the Bible. Here is an evangelical making the same point.

The Small god of Modern Evangelicalism
from internetmonk.com by Chaplain Mike
Today’s post is by guest blogger Daniel Jepsen.

Yes, the non-capitilzation of the third word in the title is deliberate. I don’t think the god I am talked about deserves to be capitalized. For I am not talking about the God of the scriptures, but the god that is worshipped in much of modern American evangelicalism.
This god is good, but small and not very powerful. This god is not able to use the foolish, weak and lowly things of this world to shame and nullify the wise, strong, and powerful

This god and his message must be made appealing to the world, much like Mary Poppins made the medicine more palatable by a spoon full of sugar. The sweeteners of coolness, relevance and freshness coat the message of this god, while those doing the coating tell us it doesn’t change the fundamental recipe. Perhaps not, but the very fact that the sweeteners are added betray a lack of faith in the inherent power of the message, and the power of the god who gives it.

It is not that the followers of this small god don’t believe the message; they just don’t believe it has much power without their help. It’s not that they want to distort this message. It’s just that the don’t reflect on how its distortion flows naturally from the help they give it.
This is why we see increasingly that not only do many of the leaders have a small god, but so do the people in their churches. These are people who view god as some sort of personal life-enhancement, not the author and judge of their life. They obey his commands selectively, and feel free to ignore or re-interpret those that might cause too much change, or that conflict too fiercely with the spirit of the age. They view his church not as something they are deeply privileged to be a part of, but something they consume like any other form of entertainment, and that had better keep the goods coming.

The parishioners do their job on Sunday: they attend. They are happy that their kids enjoy the music, and that the sermon is not too long. The church is full, and seems to have energy, which further boosts their self-esteem for having chosen to be a part of such an excellent church. The message focuses on how God can improve their marriage, and they leave glad that God wants to help them. As one wife would say later in the week, “I just love God! He does so much for me.”
Is it even possible that the children of this church will ever view god as something more than a cosmic vending machine?
This is the morass into which we have sunk.

Rabbi Shlomo Aviner (b 1943), the head of Yeshvat Ateret Kohanim in the Muslim Quarter and rabbi of Beit EL aleph is known for having some of the most inflammatory rhetoric against Christianity. English wiki Extensive Hebrew Wiki

Rabbi Aviner retains all the medieval contemptuous rhetoric as contemporary reality and sees Judaism as still at war with Christendom for who is the “true Israel.” People in the establishment have contacted him to stop his rhetoric but to no avail. Aviner also makes up stories and conspiracy theories in which he reports on alleged meetings where the Church is plotting to regain Israel. These stories are then reported as true in the Israeli newspapers which support him. And depending on his need, he blinds himself Vatican II and the Fundamental Accord (the 1992 document in which the Church recognized the state of Israel) and speaks as if the rebuffs to Herzl’s proposals in 1904 were still operative.

One known Orthodox academic wrote him a letter asking him: Does Harav not know the changes in Church policy? Does he not know the events as recorded in the newspapers? Rabbi Aviner responded by FAX with a three word answer. “ zeh tahbulah sifruti” translated as “it is a literary strategy” or “it is a literary technique.” This message implies that he knows the truth but it does not serve his needs.
Normally, these diatribes are only available in his Hebrew publications, and he leaves them untranslated on his website. However yesterday he included this talk on one of his English emails and posted it to the web in English.

Rav Aviner on
On Accepting Contributions from Christian Groups
[Be-Ahavah U-Be-Emunah – Ki Tetzei 5770 – translated by R. Blumberg]

The Evangelical Protestant missionary institutions try to infiltrate anywhere they can by whatever means possible. Now they have found the golden pathway – financial support.

Financial support is their present method of slowly infiltrating us. It doesn’t happen all at once. Not everyone who accepts their money immediately becomes a Christian. Yet their influence involves a seepage process that can spread over years. Those people are very patient and gradually they make inroads.

When a simple Jew hears the word “Christianity,” he is filled with abhorrence. He immediately thinks of the blood of millions of Jews tortured to death by the Christians. He recalls the Inquisition. He remembers everything. Therefore, he will never want to listen to them.

They use data to infiltrate every community. For example, in order to penetrate the Charedim they dress up like Charedim and keep tabs on their poor. If someone falls ill or passes away, they come to visit, help out, provide money, offer an encouraging word – without a single word about Christianity, obviously. They come again and again until a connection is formed. They talk from the heart. When they see that the time is ripe, they say, seemingly as a side comment, “Certainly Christianity is something bad, but Jesus the Christian was all-in-all agood person.” In the first stage, that one sentence is enough. Later on comes another sentence, and then another sentence, via the slow-seepage approach.

In one place, a missionary dressed as a Lubavitcher gave some Chabad women a series of lectures on Tanach in a style that was totally Chabad. The series went on for two years without one word about Christianity, until one day he mentioned that “That Man” wasn’t so bad.

Don’t mistakenly say, “They’re Christians, not missionaries.” Every Evangelist Protestant is a missionary, even if he hides it. Also, we haven’t learned Greek, so we don’t realize that the word “evangelist” means “missionary.” At all the pro-Israel Christian marches and demonstrations, the Christian Lovers of Israel walk hand-in-hand with the missionaries. It turns out that because of the money that you receive, Jews become Christians!

There’s a settlement in Judea and Samaria that received a million dollars from them. Now, in that settlement there’s a Christian worship service in their Town Council building! A prayer service of Christian missionaries and Jews for J. – right there in the Town Council building! Nowhere is it written that the one was in exchange for the other, but that is precisely the result. Let’s not be naive.

How fortunate you are, through G-d’s grace, to have been born in Eretz Yisrael, such that you don’t know what Christians are, how they operate and how sophisticated they are. You should bone up on your history.

By the way, there are two other types of Christians. First, there are liberal Protestants. They are against the State of Israel, because we, allegedly, committed an injustice against the Arabs. Second, there are Catholics, who presently are not engaged in missionary work. Yet, they, too are against the State of Israel, because they think that they are the true Israel, and it was they who were supposed to have established the State. Right now we are talking about the Fundamentalist Protestants who love the State of Israel and who are associated with the missionaries. The common denominator is that we suffer fusillades from all of them, and not just today but throughout history.
Full Version here

Here is some of the material found in his parashah sheets that was left untranslated.

The Christian Enemy Shlomo Aviner in be AHavah ubeEmunah Av 11 5769, #727
We’ve got a long bloody score to settle with Christianity. It was Christianity that split the most Jewish blood throughout history – whether though pious Christians, less pious Christians or others infused with Christian culture. The Holocaust was the work of Germans who never denied their Christianity.
At the end of the Holocaust, the Pope turned to all the Christian rulers in the world to do all they could to prevent the establishment of the State of Israel because the whole fate of Christianity depended on this and not just his own position.
Their plans fell through but they recovered quickly. The reasoned “true, a state has risen up but it will certainly fall apart, and we will help it to do so by creating instability.
Rambam writes that the Torah consists entirely of a war against paganism (Guide to the Perplexed III:29). Christianity by contrast is pagan on the inside, Jewish on the outside.

The above stories about missionaries giving Chabad derashot as a ruse is probably fictitious, but the story below of Polish Bishops wanted to start a new papacy in 2000 is entirely fantasy.

Pope Benedict XVI’s Visit to Israel
May 12, 2009 [Talk given in the yeshiva during lunch]

But with Hashem’s kindness, we returned to Eretz Yisrael. In fact, before the establishment of the State of Israel, the Pope (Pius VII) sent a letter to all of the Christians in the world – Catholics and non-Catholics – urging them to prevent the establishment of the State of Israel because it would be the destruction of Christianity and a slap in the face to the fundamental theological principle of Christians that they are the Nation of Israel. Nonetheless, the State of Israel was established and was victorious. But they said that the State of Israel does not exist.

During the last visit of the Pope (John Paul II) in 5760, he already acknowledged the State of Israel, and many Catholic communities, such as in Poland, threatened him, that if he were to take another step in the direction of the State of Israel, they would disassociate from him and make a separate Pope.
Full Text Here

The fourth great awakening of the last 25 years led many to religion, but a religion that let you have your full secular suburban life at the same time. Evangelicals and Centrist Orthodox Judaism was in. Catholics did not become clergy and modern Orthodox Jews did not read the sections of the Miktav Mieliyahu against the bourgeois life. (Except for the more philosophic sections on free will).

But this year’s valedictorian at Harvard has decided to become a nun and advocates the religious vocation. Will she lead others in all faiths in the same path? Will there be a new American sense of vocation unlike the suburban models?And what effect will her exemplar play for Ivy educated Jews? I spoke at the Harvard Hillel a few years ago and there was a joint Catholic Newman society dinner with the Orthodox minyan. They shared common religious values. One of the Catholics had even listened to my revelation class online. Will she be the new Thomas Merton, or at least William F Bukelley, to influence people?

She has a nice snappy interview where she defends her decision. She notes the role her HS English teacher played as an example of synthesis and mentions that it was good that she learned the anti-religious arguments as part of her HS curriculum. (There is still the ongoing debate about the need to include Biblical criticism and arguments against religion in a Yeshiva day school curriculum, but she sees the inclusion as positive.) Is she an alternative to the Centrist Orthodox condemnation of Harvard and the ivys? This dread created alarmist warning against Harvard a few years ago which helped foster the culture of what one critic of the document called “fearful Orthodoxy.”

God and Woman at Harvard
A 2010 summa cum laude heads to a convent.

Don’t tell Mary Anne Marks the Catholic Church is an oppressive, misogynistic disaster. She knows better. And she’s got a Harvard degree, too.
Miss Marks, a native of Queens, N.Y., graduated from Harvard University this past semester with an undergraduate degree in classics and English, delivering her commencement address in Latin. This fall, she begins a new life, discerning her future consecrated to Christ as a Catholic religious sister with the Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist, in Ann Arbor, Mich.

KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: You are a Harvard graduate. Aren’t you surrendering all the possibilities that entails by entering a convent?

MARY ANNE MARKS: Yes, if one doesn’t see becoming a well-educated, intellectually alive nun as one of the possibilities.

LOPEZ: Your call was not a sudden one. You explained to a Harvard publication that you’ve “always thought about being a nun.” You grew up in Queens at the turn of the 21st century. How would you ever think of such a thing?

MARKS: Religious life is an institution thriving in our time and in our nation; go figure.

LOPEZ: Is the countercultural nature of your call important? Especially now, in this culture, in your generation?

MARKS: Absolutely. Religious are called to witness by their life and garb to supernatural realities: God’s existence, His immeasurable love for each person, and the fact that our duty and happiness lie in returning His love. This witness becomes increasingly important as a culture’s materialism and corresponding distaste for the supernatural increase.

LOPEZ: Was there anything at Dominican Academy that especially helped your spiritual growth and discernment?

MARKS: My English teacher, Mrs. Gunset, and her daily example of faith, joy, and charity inspired and encouraged me.

It is a tragic irony that Dominican Academy also helped my spiritual growth by laying before me in religion classes from the lips of my own teachers many classic arguments for relativism and Biblical fallibility. When I encountered these same ideas in college, I was prepared, because I had worked through counterarguments with my parents at home in high school.

LOPEZ: What are some of the most notable or revealing things that adults — maybe especially faculty — have said to you once they became aware of your vocational plans?

MARKS: Two of my professors told me they had siblings who had entered religious life. Another, a kind but thoroughly unsentimental professor who had been very encouraging of my intention to apply to graduate school, ended our discussion of my change of plans by opening her arms and declaring quietly, “I am going to give you a hug, because this is a big decision, and I admire you for it.” When I remarked to yet another professor on the many positive responses from faculty, he replied that he wasn’t surprised that academics could appreciate the appeal of a life of contemplation and of single-minded pursuit of a spiritual goal.

LOPEZ: Are you happy?

MARKS: Yes.

LOPEZ: For all those, younger and older than you, who are in pursuit of happiness or have given up on it: What is it and how do you hold onto it?
MARKS: Happiness is the sense of peace and joy that stems from knowledge of and union with the One Who created us and Who loves us infinitely. We will attain it fully in heaven, but we can achieve it to a significant extent beforehand by battling our desire to remain independent of God, ignoring the voices that label religion boring and unnecessary, and better acquainting ourselves with Truth through study and prayer.

— Kathryn Jean Lopez is editor-at-large of National Review Online.

Full Version Here

The current issue of Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory has a nice online review summary of the new book by Richard Kearney, Anatheism: Returning to God after God.
Kearney is a specialist in the post-secular return to religion in Continental philosophy. He is someone whom I always read and never actually quote since his best function is to let you know what people are thinking and what is said at conferences. He is good at spotting trends, seeing convergences and somehow places the ideas of Yale, Chicago, the Sorbonne, and Oxford under one roof. He lets one see how Levinas, Ricoeur, Kristeva, and Caputo are received in the literature. His prior works include The God Who May Be and Strangers, Gods, and Monsters.

In this new book, Kearney discusses how people return to religion after modernity with a neologism of Anatheism. His model for this return is hospitality- a theme of Levinas, Derrida, and especially Ricoeur. One can get terminology from Kearney to explain much of the modern turn to Zohar mediation, or Rav Nachman.

The seven page summary review by the reviewer John Burkley is especially lucid and detailed. Below are some excerpts.

Richard Kearney, Anatheism: Returning to God after God. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. $29.50

Anatheism is a fresh attempt to reconceive the possibility of the sacred for the 21st century, seeking a way, as the subtitle suggests, of “returning to God after God.”

So what is anatheism? Kearney describes it variously as a movement, a paradigm, an invitation, a wager, a drama; a position between, before, and beyond the division of theism and atheism; “another word for another way of seeking and sounding the things we consider sacred but can never fully fathom or prove” (p.3).
Yet it bids adieu to the God of metaphysics and traditional religion whose surname has long been “Almighty” taking seriously the critical and iconoclastic force of atheism.

Thus, anatheism works back from the experience of God-loss toward a genuine renewal of the sacred to recover forward a second, more mature faith. While insisting that anatheism is “nothing particularly new” (p.7), it seems to be of particular moment in this age where the gods have withdrawn. “Ana” – seeking ‘after’ (toward) God ‘after’ (subsequent to) the death of God.
Anatheism–seeking a rebirth of faith after the loss of faith.

The thematic core of Anatheism: Returning to God after God is the encounter with the Stranger and the event of hospitality/hostility. In this basket Kearney’s places all his eggs. While official theologies and the popular religious imagination typically emphasize stories of creation, salvation, miracles, power, or final judgment as inaugural solicitations of faith, Kearney takes up the neglected figure of the Stranger.

Abraham’s visitation by three desert strangers… an uninvited Stranger appears; in each case there is a moment of disorientation, perplexity, fear, perhaps trauma is not too strong a word; in each case the addressee must decide for or against the Stranger; in each case the host’s
welcoming of the Stranger opens from the Stranger a gesture for the promise of life, That, clumsily expressed, is the central dynamic of Anatheism, which “begins and ends with the epiphany of the divine in the face of the stranger (p. 149).

Mediation of these oppositions proceeds by way of five aspects of the anatheistic wager. One might call them interpretive attitudes or hermeneutical predispositions -imagination, humor, commitment, discernment, and hospitality–each crisply defined.

In each case, however, a reversal occurs… In the utter absence of a powerful and saving God a realization can occur that for God to be ‘we’ have to host ‘Him’, save ‘Him; if God is estranged and a stranger to this world ‘His’ coming depends our welcome.

Glossing on Ricoeur, Kearney writes, “The word of existence –which affirms the goodness of being in spite of its multiple estrangements….must be regrasped and reinstated.” The ambition of anatheism is “to disclose a site where the freedom of our will is rooted in a listening to a ‘word’ of which one is neither source nor master” (p.75).

The second half of the book (Interlude and Postlude) details the third moment of Anatheism: sacramental transformations in the everyday, mostly in secular scenes, specifically, at the levels of lived experience (Merleau- Ponty, Kristiva), literary imagination (Joyce, Proust, Woolf), and ethical-political praxis (Day, Vanier, Gandhi). Kearney puts on display a tapestry of anatheist or proto-anatheistic instances of mediation, acts of transformation, epiphanies where the secular and sacred mutually beckon and inform each other. Readers will find their own favorite and more illuminating examples.

The sacred for Kearney is “in the world but not of the world” (p.152). Hence the preference for the figure of the Stranger over a disembodied, otherworldly traditional Omni-God, and over the rather abstract and well worn master concept of postmodernism –‘the Other’.

He draws liberally on Ricoeur’s model of translation or “linguistic hospitality” defined as “the act of inhabiting the word of the Other paralleled by the act of receiving of the Other into one’s own home, one’s own dwelling.”2 Translation admits of no reduction of one language to another or to a third master language, but preserves the strangeness of the other while opening the host language to unthought possibilities.

Full review here

Any thoughts about applying anatheism to the post-secualrism all around us?
Any post-secular religious experience that you can think of that produces disorientation and perplexity?
Most important, how will the image of Abraham greeting the the visitor change religion as it replaces the sacrifice of Isaac imagery used by modernists?

For those who do not know:
Rabbi Abadi, renowned Posek, was sent at age 19 by the Chazon Ish to study in Lakewood, NJ, under the famed Rabbi Aaron Kotler. A few years after the passing of Rabbi Kotler, Rabbi Abadi became the Posek in Lakewood. And now his sons run a website Kashrut.org to answer questions- mainly of kashrut.

This past week he held four question and answer sessions in a Sephardi shtibl -Teaneck Sephardic Center/Lev Haim here in town. The turnout was surprisingly low. Mainly the Syrians of the minyan and a few old time Lakewood people. Either it was because of the poor publicity- I only found out an hour before Shababt. Or that it was not sponsored by one of the main shuls in town, or people really preferred to hear the second-tier Hesder Ram who was in town or it had no wider community support.

It was entirely q and a format but Rav Abadi managed to work-in or mention most of the pesak from the new second volume of his shut. People did not seem to know who he was. There was a clear discontent with his answers in both directions- whether lenient or strict. He told the women that they must pray 3x a day and one had a sense that they were going to go back to their own rabbis to have it reset as once a day. One Israeli of likely Moroccan descent who did not like any of this pesak – proclaimed out loud that he picks and chooses based on what he hears and finds. When Rav Abadie said that he does not allow any warming of a dry item on Shabbat even to return it to a warming tray (contra Rav Yosef), there was a clear turning away indicating that people where not going to listen.

In a conversation with a physician, Rav Abadi said that if the Talmud says that we can distinguish between blood and blood then it must be medically possible. The doctor was asking that between Rav Moshe and Rav Walenberg who both assume that there is no difference in blood and was cut off by the Rav who said of course we should be able to test.

Rav Abadi advocated his short version of Birkat Hamazon with a story under his breath about how Deal, NJ never used to say berakhot and how he got them to say it through his short version.

I was taken by his heavy Ashkenazi accent and then turned around when his citations of Mehaber were in Israeli Sefardi pronunciation.

I sat next to someone who had studied in Lakewood over twenty years ago and had remembered Rav Abadi as a caring and approachable soul. I also heard about how this former bachur went from his yeshiva life , to putting away his hat, and was now wearing a yellow sports shirt for Shabbat aft.

As a side point, someone asked about one of the less reliable hasgahahs on Manhattan restaurants. Rav Abadi obviously knew the person and deflected the question and refused to answer it. But it was interesting that in the period of deflecting hesitation over other 6 people called out that it was a Conservative rabbi so it was unreliable. Actually the rabbi in question went to all the right Ultra-Orthodox schools in Brooklyn, lived a Yeshivish life in Brooklyn, and is still Yeshivish. But it is interesting that anything that is outside the bounds of [Teaneck] Orthodox practice is called Conservative. The name serves as a demarcation of outside the lines “we wont even consider the hasgahah.” A form of assur or harem. It has nothing to do with the Conservative movement itself. The word functions like the word Gnostic in early Church writings or Papist in the mouth of Protestants.

No one in the room seemed to know of the website.

A forthcoming graphic novel about an 11 year old Orthodox girl who is a troll slayer.

The artist based his knowledge of Hasidic girl life on Liz Harris, Holy Days; Hella Winston, Unchosen: the hidden lives of Hasidic rebels; Ayala Feder, Mitzvah Girls: Bringing Up the Next Generation of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn; Stephanie Levine, Mystics, Mavericks, and Merrymakers: An Intimate Journey among Hasidic Girls.

The second reviewer here has a nice typology of three approaches to religion in fantasy literature. (1) Make it the point of the book like Narnia (2) Invent a fantasy religion (3) Ignore it. This book offers a fourth way – have the characters be religious but not make it the message of the story. This might actually resonate with the way people see themselves.

Spunky, strong-willed, eleven-year-old Mirka Hirschberg isn’t interested in knitting lessons from her step-mother, or how-to-find-a-husband advice from her sister, or you-better-not warnings from her brother. There’s only one thing she does want: to fight dragons!

Granted, no dragons have been breathing fire around Hereville, the Orthodox Jewish community where Mirka lives, but that doesn’t stop the plucky girl from honing her skills. She… boldly accepts a challenge from a mysterious witch, a challenge that could bring Mirka her heart’s desire: a dragon-slaying sword! All she has to do is find – and outwit – the giant troll who’s got it!

Fruma is Mirka’s stepmother. Even though Fruma is has the longest nose of anyone in Hereville, she’s not an evil stepmother. But she loves an argument! When she’s not making Mirka clean or set the table or learn how to knit, Fruma makes Mirka argue over every little thing.

Full version here

“Yet another troll-fighting 11-year-old Orthodox Jewish girl,” says the byline. Well seriously. How was I supposed to pass that up?
Mirka has a dream, but it’s not the kind of thing that gets a lot of support. More than anything else in the entire world she wants to fight dragons. The problem? She’s eleven, a girl, and she lives in the Jewish Orthodox town of Hereville.
Think about children’s fantasy novels and religion for a moment. Religion in fantasies for kids tends to skew one of three ways. You can incorporate it and make it the entire point of the novel (Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, the Narnia books of C.S. Lewis, or Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time series which is technically science fiction anyway). You can make up an entirely new religion of your own (as in the novels of Frances Hardinge, Tamora Pierce, Megan Whalen Turner, etc.). Or you just sorta forget about it. Remember, in the Harry Potter novels there may be churches and Christmas, but when wizards marry there’s only a vague representative of some unnamed religion presiding. And children’s graphic novels are in such an infant phase at this point that religion never even comes up half the time.
So Hereville is remarkable right off the bat because it isn’t afraid. It says, “Yeah, I’m gonna incorporate religion into this book. Heck, I’m even gonna TEACH about the religion of Orthodox Jews while I’m at it.”
From the different ways girls can be rebellious, pious, or popular in their near identical school clothes to Shabbos to what the three braids of the khale represent (truth, peace, and justice), it’s all in there without ever sounding like you’re being taught something. The religion is integral to the story and you wouldn’t want it any other way.

Full Version Here