I just wrote a guest blog post for Jewess , which I hope will be somewhat controversial - or at least lead to some spirited discussions. Here's what I wrote, and I hope you'll follow the link and leave a comment.
They first appear just after Hanukkah in my Jewish magazines and newspaper, and seem to peak at Purim - ads for all-inclusive Passover vacations at fancy kosher resorts. Even the seders are provided, either private for your family or with the other guests.
Unlike other travel ads, which provide a pleasant diversion, these Passover escapes fill me with a profound sadness. Why? Because their very existence shows that the preparation for Passover at home has become so onerous that Jewish women are jumping at the chance to avoid it entirely. It is a sorry commentary on Jews’ competition to be ever more zealous/obsessive that the work involved in koshering one’s home has become so oppressive that some women will give up and leave the burden to resort proprietors.
But what’s wrong with letting someone else do the work? Why should Jewish women be slaves to this increasingly heavy burden, especially for the Festival of Freedom? On the other hand, is it good that the customers of these resorts won't be sharing their seder with friends and elderly relatives; instead abdicating the quintessential Jewish home holiday into the hands of hoteliers?
"I grew up in a secular home, and we attended the seder of some religious friends of my parents. If they had gone on a Passover vacation, what would my family have done? Multiply this by all the folks who go away and what would be the consequences? If prosperous Jews go away for Passover, who will invite the poor, the single, the lonely, to their homes for seder? Who will say, “This is the bread of affliction that our ancestors ate in Egypt. All who are hungry, come and eat; all who are in need, come and join in celebrating Passover?”
I don’t have any answers to these Passover questions. And that’s what really makes me sad.
I’m confined to home for a couple of days following MOHS surgery this morning to remove a basal cell carcinoma from the side of my nose - one that reoccurred after the first removal in 2002 [that’s what happens when you grow up in Los Angeles, spending every summer at the beach before sunscreen was invented]. It took 3 passes to get it all, and I look like a battered wife, but Tylenol is controlling the pain and I’m relieved that it’s finally out of there.
I was catching up on Internet PR when I came across the most amazing set of posts on Facebook. The husband of one of my FB friends, Elianah Sharon Pugliese, went into heart failure on Tuesday, and then, no sooner did they stabilize his heart than his kidneys failed. Yesterday he was admitted for a heart transplant, last night the donor heart arrived and surgery happened, and this morning he is doing well. This drama was documented every few hours as Elianah updated her husband’s condition and all her friends commented with good wishes and prayers for his health. Believe me, it puts my puny surgery in perspective.
This week I had a surreal, and perhaps bashert, experience. I had just finished speaking to a class of educators and rabbinic students at American Jewish Univ and was heading to Professor Miriyam Glazers office. We were supposed to meet for lunch and her was open, so I went in. After a few minutes of waiting, I began checking out the many volumes on her bookshelves. Somehow I was drawn to her copies of Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies. Years ago I submitted an article about Rashis daughters to them, but it was rejected.
Among the recent issues was one whose them was Jewish literature, so it picked it up and began reading the essay, Binding Oneself to Judaism in Contemporary Jewish Womens Fiction by Judith Lewin of Union College. Lewin wanted to examine the difference between the new wave of Jewish authors, many of them female, who depict religious practice sympathetically, as opposed to those of the previous generation, epitomized by Philip Roth. Curious, I read about Allegra Goodman [Kaaterskill Falls] and Dara Horn [In the Image], and then, astonishingly, I was reading about myself.
There was the scene from Book I: JOHEVED where she puts on tefillin for the first time. As a discussion of tefillin as a recurring motif for women pushing the boundaries of their religion followed, I saw the relationship between Lewins title, Binding Oneself to Judaism, and her theme. It was a heady experience, finding my words in such a scholarly milieu, seeing my name included in the company of Goodman and Horn, along with Ruchama King [Seven Blessings] and Jonathan Rosen [Joy Comes in the Morning].
By the way, Happy Birthday to my sister Nancy and niece Adrienne.
I’m back from a week’s vacation with my family, sailing along what cruise salespeople like to call the Mexican Riviera. Some of it was work, since the copy-edits for “Book III:RACHEL” arrived in my inbox the day before we left, with a 2-week deadline. So along came my laptop, which I put to good use while supervising my grandson’s naps. So far I’m about two-thirds done, and the copy editor has caught some mistakes that escaped a dozen eyes earlier – like my writing Pope Gregory [who died in Book II] when I meant Pope Urban, who called for the First Crusade in 1095.
In other breaking news – technology marches on and you can watch me on YouTube . Gabor Por, the librarian at Cong Beth Ami in Santa Rosa CA, videoed my lecture about Rashi's Daughters there and edited over an hour’s worth of talk into six minutes. He even included me telling the world's only good Rashi joke. Whether this will propel me to stardom remains to be seen [as does the video], or if it will hopefully encourage other venues to invite me to speak. At least it better not discourage them.
After joining Facebook [and accumulating almost 400 friends in two weeks], I took my online PR campaign to a new level by creating a Wikipedia page for Rashi’s daughters . It took about half a day to write, and then two hours to figure out how to post. I put it up on Sunday and today it passed some sort of official Wikipedia exam, where a reviewer checked it out, made a few additions and commented, “good job.”
Now I can send people there when they want to know what references I used. And of course, there’s a paragraph about my book at the end with a link to my website, which I actually forgot to put in on the first draft.