Rabbi Jason Miller

Saturday, February 12, 2005

Death of a playwright

Michigan alum's passing seen as end of an era
Saturday, February 12, 2005
BY ROGER LELIEVRE
News Arts Writer

The death of Arthur Miller, University of Michigan Class of '38 and the man long considered the country's most important playwright, marks a milestone for American theater - and U-M.[...]

Growing up in New York, Miller worked between 1932 and 1934 at various jobs, including truck driver, radio singer and clerk in his father's warehouse, to earn money for college. According to a U-M biography, he came to Ann Arbor by bus with the $500 he had saved to attend college.

During a 2004 campus appearance he recalled that he was attracted to U-M because "this place seemed to me, because of the Hopwood Award, to take writing seriously. I wanted to be a writer in a vague way and thought this was the place to go."

As an undergraduate, Miller stayed in a rooming house at 411 N. State St., and wrote for the Michigan Daily. Another outlet for his writing was the student humor magazine, Gargoyle, where he used the name Art Miller.

Miller won two of U-M's prestigious Hopwood Awards for play writing. His first was for "No Villain," written in 1936 during a week's spring vacation from classes and produced in 1937 by the Hillel Players at U-M under the title "They Too Arise."[...]

Last November, a full house of 1,300 University of Michigan alumni and friends gathered at New York City's Richard Rodgers Theatre to honor Miller at "Michigan on Broadway: A Tribute to Arthur Miller," a revue-style homage by School of Music faculty and U-M alumni.

Planning continues on the long-planned Arthur Miller Theater, to be built on the University of Michigan campus (see related story).Meanwhile, Brater said Miller's legacy is secure.

"Plays like 'A View from a Bridge,' 'The Crucible,' 'All My Sons' and 'After the Fall' ... works like this will be done as long as theaters are functioning anywhere in the world. These plays are done regularly not only in the English-speaking world but they are done in Japan and China and Israel and all over South America and Europe.[...]
© 2005 Ann Arbor News

Friday, February 11, 2005

D'var Torah for Parshat Terumah

"Show Me the Bread"
by Rabbi Jason Miller

This week's Torah portion opens with the repeated instructions for building the Tabernacle, God's physical dwelling place among the Israelite nation. The detailed narrative calls for the creation of the contents of the Tabernacle (k'lei hamishkan), including the table that would stand across from the menorah in the inner court. Upon this table would be the lechem panim, the "showbread," or better defined as "the bread of display" that was to be before God at all times (Exodus 25:30).

According to Bible scholar Nahum Sarna in the JPS Torah Commentary, the Hebrew lechem panim has been variously translated, depending on the understanding of panim, which usually means "face, presence or interior." Commentator Ibn Ezra understood it literally that the bread was to be perpetually set out before the Lord. Rashi took the phrase figuratively as "bread fit for dignitaries."

There were to be 12 loaves (two rows of six) on the table at all times, perhaps symbolic of the 12 tribes of Israel. The Levitical clan of Kohathites were the ones to bake the bread and then arrange the loaves on the table, where they remained untouched for the entire week. On Shabbat the loaves were replaced by freshly baked ones and the old loaves were eaten by the kohanim (priests) in the holy precincts.

Even if you are on a low-carb diet and not eating bread, there are still several lessons for all of us to learn today from the ancient ritual of the lechem panim practiced in the Tabernacle and then later in the Temple. Everett Fox, in his commentary on the Torah, explains that the "table and its implements, like some of the other features of the Tabernacle, are holdovers from a more blatantly pagan model, where the gods were seen to be in need of nourishment." While our ancestors employed some of the conventions common throughout the ancient Near East, the fact that the lechem panim in the Tabernacle was eaten by the kohanim was a clear way of differentiating Israelite worship from pagan worship.

This is one unambiguous way for us to understand that God does not desire nor need our gifts of food. Rather, we can nourish God with our acts of lovingkindness, performance of mitzvot, tzedakah and prayer.

In Second Temple times, the baking of the lechem panim became the job of Beit Garmu. The Garmu family members were experts in baking this bread in such a manner that it did not become moldy, even after sitting out for six days. They were an interesting group who maintained a family policy to never eat fancy bread, so that no one would accuse Beit Garmu of feasting on the lechem panim that they made (Tosefta Yoma 2:5).

The Garmu family understood and was skilled at this tradition. However, they kept their expertise secretive, refusing to teach others how to properly prepare the lechem panim. The rabbis of the Mishnah include Beit Garmu among others who refused to pass along the instructions of Jewish ritual to future generations. The memory of these people was to be recalled for disgrace according to the Mishnah (Yoma 3:11).

The lesson for us is that no one person or group of people should hold a monopoly on Jewish tradition or the intricacies of Jewish rituals. We must keep our rich traditions from dying out by practicing "open source" Judaism, providing future generations with the recipe for Jewish living. If you know a great trick to blowing shofar, you should share that trick with a few other people. You should encourage your Bubbie to pass along her delicious gefilte fish recipe. Perhaps your family has some nice Pesach Seder innovations that you could teach to other families.

We are not a secretive religion, nor have we ever been. So when you look at the two loaves of challah sitting on your table this Shabbat, serving as memories not only of the double-portion of manna delivered on Shabbat in the desert, but also of the lechem panim, consider the importance of bequeathing your family's customs and traditions to the next generation.

What are ways that you and members of your family provide "nourishment" to God?

Are the rabbis of the Mishnah too tough on Beit Garmu and others for holding a monopoly on information?

What are customs (religious or secular) that you feel are important to pass on to your children and students?

Prepared by Rabbi Jason Miller, assistant director, University of Michigan Hillel

Thursday, February 10, 2005

Rabbi Ayelet Cohen speaks out on the Conservative Movement and Homosexuality

The Conservative Movement's Double Standard
By RABBI AYELET COHEN
FORWARD
February 11, 2005

For more than a decade, the Conservative movement has proclaimed its welcoming attitudes toward gay and lesbian Jews. As evidence, Conservative leaders have often cited the movement's 1992 "Consensus Statement," which affirms that "gays and lesbians are welcome in our congregations, youth groups, camps and schools."

They neglect to mention the other, less-than-inclusive portions of the statement - the portions of the policy that actually characterize the treatment of gays and lesbians within the Conservative movement:

"We will not perform commitment ceremonies for gays or lesbians. We will not knowingly admit avowed homosexuals to our rabbinical or cantorial schools or to the Rabbinical Assembly or the Cantors Assembly.. Whether homosexuals may function as teachers or youth leaders in our congregations and schools will be left to the rabbi authorized to make halachic decisions for a given institution within the Conservative movement.. Similarly, the rabbi of each Conservative institution, in consultation with its lay leaders, will be entrusted to formulate policies regarding the eligibility of homosexuals for honors within worship and for lay leadership positions."

These injustices and other halachic issues concerning gay and lesbian people, the leadership of Conservative Judaism has promised, will be addressed when the movement's top lawmaking body, the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards, convenes in April. But the committee is composed of Conservative rabbis, and gay people are prohibited from becoming Conservative rabbis. They are kept outside of the synagogues and other institutions of the movement, except at the discretion of individual rabbis.

The onus, then, is on heterosexual rabbis and laypeople who have full access to Conservative movement institutions to remind the movement that full equality for gay and lesbian people matters to us, too. The onus is on us to make clear to the movement's leadership that a double standard toward gay and lesbian people is unworthy of the professed ideals of a religious Jewish movement committed to the study of Torah and the relevance of rabbinic law.

I am proud that despite my recent struggle with the Conservative movement's Rabbinical Assembly, I can continue serving Congregation Beth Simchat Torah - the world's largest synagogue serving gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Jews - as a member of the Rabbinical Assembly. But let us not forget that the privilege of membership was only available to me at the outset because I am heterosexual.

Children who grow up to be gay and lesbian Jews are born into Conservative communities and named on the pulpits of Conservative synagogues. The movement educates gay and lesbian Jews in its Solomon Schechter schools and Ramah camps, sends them to Israel with United Synagogue Youth, encourages them to spend a year of serious study at the Conservative Yeshiva in Jerusalem.

And then, when they are open about being gay or lesbian, the movement tells them they are welcome - sort of. They can be members of Conservative synagogues, but cannot celebrate their marriage to another Jew of the same gender. They can pay membership dues at those synagogues, but not as a family, because their families are not recognized. They can study to be Jewish educators, but the movement allows its schools the freedom not to hire them because of their sexual orientation. They can continue to study Jewish text, but they cannot be ordained as rabbis or cantors. They can be active laypeople in Conservative synagogues, but the rabbis of those synagogues can prohibit them from leading services, being called to the Torah or serving on the board.

All this is prescribed by the Conservative movement's 1992 policy statement.

I have heard many times the claim that full inclusion of gay people in the Conservative movement and in Judaism in general is of concern only to a small number of "activist rabbis" and outsiders. These critics forget that the movement has made gay and lesbian people outsiders by closing them out of its institutions while offering them an empty welcome.

It is time for the "insiders," the heterosexual Jews whose participation in Jewish life is not called into question by the movement's policies, to raise our voices to call the Conservative movement toward justice. The Reconstructionist and Reform movements have moved more swiftly to embrace the diversity of our Jewish families and call for civil and religious equality for gay and lesbian people. The Committee on Jewish Law and Standards has the opportunity to do so this spring in a way consistent with the process of the Conservative movement. It is time for the Conservative movement to stand behind its promises of welcome within the movement's institutions and support for civil equality of gay and lesbian people in this country.

This week the parsha teaches that the mishkan was built using the gifts of each member of the community. The holiness of a community is determined by its capacity to recognize and celebrate those gifts. Twenty years ago the Conservative movement chose to strengthen itself by deciding to ordain women as rabbis. This year the movement has the opportunity again, to continue diminishing itself through the exclusion of gay and lesbian Jews, or to increase in holiness and celebrate and include gay and lesbian Jews in our sacred community.
_____________________
Ayelet Cohen is a rabbi at Congregation Beth Simchat Torah in New York City.

Wednesday, February 09, 2005

Meet the hacker who makes your home appliances right with God.

Great article from November's Wired Magazine that Jeremy Fogel just sent my way. We actually have a General Electric stove with the Shabbat setting. The first time I saw such a thing was at Rabbi Danny & Lynn Nevins's home a number of years ago on Shabbat.

Danny and I both delighted in the fact that Sabbath observant Jews seemed to "have arrived" as far as GE was concerned, but we were dismayed that the user's manual stated that the Sabbath function was "for Orthodox Jews who do not cook on the Sabbath" similar to the statement in the second paragraph of the article below. Should I be upset at the snub of non-Orthodox Jews observant of Halakhah like myself or, rather, should I only wish that it were true that only Orthodox Jews were forbidden from all the melachot of Shabbat?

The Geek Guide to Kosher Machines
By Michael Erard
Wired Magazine

Jonah Ottensoser leans over the white stovetop to tweak its settings, giving me a full view of the black yarmulke on his head. But he's not about to bake a cake. Ottensoser, a large genial man with a gray beard, is an engineer, not a cook, and he's brought me to the kitchen in his Baltimore office to show off his proud creation: a stove that Jewish consumers will buy just to please God.

From sundown Friday to sundown Saturday, Orthodox Jews are forbidden to work, write, and drive. In all, 39 activities are off-limits to those complying with the Torah's fourth commandment, to keep the Sabbath holy. In the home, that means no cooking or fire lighting - or its modern analog, moving electricity through a circuit.

For decades, observant Jews have found ways to work around Sabbath restrictions in the kitchen. They taped down the button on the refrigerator door frame to keep the light from turning on. Or someone unscrewed the bulb before Friday sunset. They turned on an oven in advance - that way, they could warm food on the Sabbath without altering temperature settings. In recent years, however, well-intentioned appliance makers have been installing safety features that automatically shut off ovens after 12 hours. That meant a unit turned on at dusk Friday would be cold before lunch on Saturday. When companies learned this was complicating dinner preparation for some Jews, they supplied an optional override. Thus, a rudimentary "Sabbath mode" was born.

But as appliances got more high tech - gel-pad touch controls; LED screens with temperature and burner settings; digital humidity gauges - creating a Sabbath mode became more difficult. Mayer Preger, a salesman at the Manhattan Center for Kitchen and Bath, noticed a problem when fridges started using sensors instead of simple light switches. "You can't hack the new refrigerators like you used to," he complains. "There's all these computer chips in them."

That's where Jonah Ottensoser comes in. He doesn't hack the fridges so much as work with manufacturers to give appliances a kosher seal of approval. A retired helicopter engineer who is himself Orthodox, Ottensoser teaches Sabbath law to technical teams at companies like General Electric, Electrolux, and Viking. His job: to guide them in building electronic brains and mechanical guts that are Sabbath-compliant.

Ottensoser works for Star-K, a nonprofit that certifies food products as kosher. Of several hundred kosher agencies in the world, Star-K is the only one that certifies technology, and Ottensoser is the firm's only appliance consultant. That makes him the world's lone kosher geek, the man tasked with certifying that the movement of every electron in an appliance is sanctioned by God.

Since he was hired seven years ago, Ottensoser has helped nine companies design Sabbath modes for more than 300 types of ovens and stoves, and dozens of refrigerators. When the feature is enabled, lights stay off and displays are blank; tones are silenced, fans stilled, compressors slowed. In a kosher fridge, there's no light, no automatic icemaker, no cold-water dispenser, no warning alarm for spoiled food, no temperature readout. Basically, Ottensoser converts your fancy - and expensive - appliance into the one your grandma bought after World War II.

One of the hardest parts of Ottensoser's job is explaining to engineers the intricacies of Jewish law. He starts by focusing on the concept of indirect action. Sabbath law prohibits Jews from performing actions that cause a direct reaction; that would qualify as forbidden work. But indirect reactions are, well, kosher. In Hebrew, this concept is called the gramma. There are two types of grammas, Ottensoser tells me. Say you hit a light switch, but it doesn't come on immediately - that's a time delay, a time gramma. There's also a gramma of mechanical indirectness, like a Rube Goldberg contraption in which a mouse turns a wheel that swings a hammer that turns a key that launches a rocket. You can't claim the mouse actually launches the rocket.

Ottensoser gets manufacturers to build the easier time gramma into their products. Rabbis differ on how much of a delay is required; the Star-K rabbinical authority, Moshe Heinemann, authorizes a 5-second lag. To be on the safe side, Ottensoser increased the delay to 15 seconds and a random wait of as much as 10 seconds. Why? "An indirect action is one where you can't predict what's going to happen," he says.

He explains it to engineers with the following example: Opening a fridge seems like a harmless action without consequence. But every time you open that door, you let warm air in and cold air out, changing the temperature inside. So the compressor switches on to compensate, and you've effectively turned on the appliance and engaged in work. Mechalel shabbos - you've desecrated the Sabbath. For a while, observant Jews tried a mechanical solution, putting their fridges on a timer. "But it killed the refrigerators," says Ottensoser.

Engineers at GE faced another problem: Their freezers have an auto defrost mode that switches on after the door has been opened a set number of times. That results in a direct reaction - mechalel. Ottensoser suggested that the engineers rework the controls to trick the refrigerators into emulating a model from the 1990s, when defrost modes were on a predetermined cycle. "There was no easy workaround," says Valinda Wagner, a product manager at GE. "We had to redesign the control algorithms."

With 900,000 Orthodox Jewish households in the US and millions overseas, offering the Sabbath mode makes good business sense. It's also part of a trend among tech companies, who are acknowledging cultural and religious values to tap emerging markets overseas and become more competitive in niche markets at home. GE offers a five-burner stovetop popular with Hispanics, who use the extra burner to warm tortillas. And Intel's smart home team has put ethnographers into Asian kitchens to look at technology use.

Aside from the coffeemaker, Ottensoser rarely uses kitchen appliances at home, where he leaves the cooking to his wife. "I'm kinda macho that way," he says. But not too macho to trade in a career building helicopters for fixing kitchen appliances. "From a technical viewpoint, there's not much difference," he shrugs. "Electricity is electricity, and mechanics are mechanics."

But back in the Star-K staff kitchen, where Ottensoser is demonstrating the Sabbath mode on a Kenmore stove, things aren't so simple. Holding a page of instructions, he pushes button after button and mutters to himself, "OK, so I hit this." Nothing. "OK."

Consumers who have bought high-end appliances in the last few years should be relieved by Ottensoser's difficulty in activating Sabbath mode, even though many modern ovens come with this feature. The functionality is buried in the appliance, well hidden behind a choreography of button-pushing. That means you're not likely to accidentally trigger it - and have to call for repair service when the oven light won't come on.

Finally, Ottensoser hits the right buttons on the Kenmore, and the LED display reads "SABT." Now it's a kosher oven. I ask if he has a Sabbath mode oven at home. "Three of them," he says. How about a Sabbath fridge? He scoffs. Who wants a fridge so high tech that it requires a Sabbath mode? "They're too fancy. Why do I need to know what the temperature is inside my refrigerator? Why do I need a light in my crisper?"

Monday, February 07, 2005

Our New Website is Up and Running!

University of Michigan Hillel's new website is up and running. I encourage you to check out www.umhillel.org.

And don't forget to shop our Michigan Hillel products online at our Jewish.com store.