U-Cef ft Black Tip

Bocelli-- Santa Lucia Luntana

Neil Young-- Like a Hurricane

Van Morrison-- Days Like This

Akasha-- Brown Sugar

Tinariwen-- Assouf

Swell Season-- When your mind's made up

Boolandrix (a birthday party in Gambia)

Crystal Castles-- Not in Love

Twin Shadows-- Forget

Local Natives-- Airplanes

Catherine Deneuve-- Umbrellas of Cherbourg

Villagers-- Twenty Seven Strangers

Rebbe Soul-- Sephardic jam in kitchen

George McCrae-- (early disco)

Love Like Blood-- Angie

Hold Your Horses-- 70 Million

Amos Lee- Flower

Why Do Jewish?

My column this week in the Jewish Journal:

Can Orthodox Jews learn something fundamental from unaffiliated Jews? That is, can Jews who practice Torah rituals learn something from Jews who practice virtually none? This question was on my mind recently as I attended two events representing the polar opposites of Jewish life.

The first was the annual West Coast convention of the Orthodox Union, where the theme this year was “Keeping Our Values for the Next Generation.” I attended several of the events and moderated a closing panel on “Values for Our Future.” While the overall theme was values, the underlying mission of the convention was how to strengthen the Orthodox movement, and, in particular, how to keep the next generation from straying from the Modern Orthodox derech (path).

In the same way that the broader community constantly talks about “Jewish continuity,” the Orthodox community is also very busy these days with “Orthodox continuity.”

This idea of Jewish continuity played a big part of the second event I attended,  “Funding Your Passions: A Breakfast With Harold Grinspoon.” Grinspoon, a renowned philanthropist, talked about many things, but one subject in particular put a twinkle in his eyes: The PJ Library, a 5-year-old initiative that has already distributed more than 2 million children’s books to thousands of Jewish families across North America. For many of these families, who are unaffiliated, these colorful and engaging bedtime books have become their major connection to the Jewish tradition and their entrance to the Jewish community.

What I found remarkable about the books is that while they are fun to read, they don’t dumb down Judaism. One of my favorites is “The Only One Club,” a charming and intelligent primer on one of the philosophical dilemmas of modern Jewish life — how to balance the particularity of the Jewish tradition with the universality of humanism.

It is books like “The Only One Club” that made me think of how programs for unaffiliated Jews might help programs for Orthodox Jews. The Orthodox community spends a lot of time on the who, what, where, when and how of Jewish rituals, but not as much, it seems to me, on the “why.” We study Torah commandments from all angles, but rarely will we ask: “Why should I do this in the first place?”

“Because God and our Sages said so” and “because our ancestors did so” are easy and powerful answers, but they are not the only ones. For the Orthodox community to thrive, it will need to open up to the kind of “why” questions outreach groups like the PJ Library routinely ask: “Why is Judaism good for me? Why do I need it? Why is it meaningful?”

These are not the kinds of questions my grandparents asked in their cozy Orthodox neighborhoods of Casablanca, but they are questions that are sneaking up on the Orthodox world and in our Modern Orthodox shtetls like Pico-Robertson.

While outreach to the unaffiliated deals more with identity — “Why be Jewish?” —outreach to the Orthodox must deal more with activity — “Why do Jewish?” Both questions are fundamental. They both ’fess up to the reality that in today’s world of nonstop distractions, we can’t assume that Judaism of any denomination will simply sell itself.

The good news is that if we use our imaginations, we can come up with great answers. One answer I give to my kids for “Why do Jewish?” is that a mitzvah is not something that boxes you in, but rather, a gift box from God.

Open the mitzvah box and create your own personal meaning. For example, kissing the mezuzah reminds me to show love to my friends and family. Separating meat from milk reminds me to separate work from play. Making a blessing on food reminds me to show gratitude and help the hungry and less fortunate. Putting on tefillin reminds me that God is a filter between me and negative forces. Lighting Shabbat candles reminds me that I must aspire to be a shining candle in the world.

At Passover time, cleaning out the chametz from my house reminds me not to meddle with my neighbor’s chametz; in other words, not to do lashon harah. The possibilities are endless.

Every mitzvah is a gift box of personal meaning. The real gift we get when we do the mitzvah is that we start to own it. It becomes ours, not only God’s. There’s nothing like a sense of personal ownership to deepen your attachment.

This is what I learned from a program like PJ Library that is geared to non-Orthodox and unaffiliated Jews. It’s always a good idea to start at the beginning and ask, “why?” It’s a question that works for everyone — either as an entry door for the beginner or as a source of personal renewal for the observant. It’s the kind of no-nonsense approach that can only bring out the best in us.

Jewish leaders of all denominations shouldn’t be afraid to “sell” Judaism. Even an Orthodox convention can permit itself to show how Torah rituals can help make Jews better and happier people.

Seriously. If Coke Zero can sell happiness and a bank can sell meaning of life, so can we. 

Lauren Zoeller-- A Song for You

Pete Yorn-- Life on a Chain

Ella Fitzgerald-- Black Coffee

Mat Kearney-- Nothing left to lose

Debbie Friedman, R.I.P.

Iron and Wine-- Love Vigilantes

Leona Lewis-- First Time

MED feat. and Aloe Blacc-- Where I'm From

So Long, Eva

My column this week in the Jewish Journal:

So Long, Eva

It's not easy to handle death. It's so naked and finite. No matter how much we talk about the spiritual journey to the next world, about legacies that never die, about a life well lived, there's really no consolation for the pain of missing someone - really, really missing someone.

I will miss Eva Brown, a Holocaust survivor who passed away last week at the age of 83 after a three-year fight with cancer.

What I will miss most is the sparkle in her eyes. She seemed to always have it - when she first told me about her cancer; when she'd listen to me complain about stuff in my own life; when someone would let her down; when things were really good or when things were really bad.

She even had it a couple of weeks ago, when I brought my kids to see her one last time to say good-bye. I had a premonition it would be the last time, because my friend Marci Spitzer had left me a message that "Eva would like to see you very soon." When I got to Eva's house in West Hollywood that Sunday afternoon - where we'd once been neighbors and where she had lived for nearly 60 years - Eva told me the doctors had said her long battle was over. By now, her two surviving daughters and her granddaughter were there with her around the clock. She was taking painkillers. It was just a question of time.

But she still had the sparkle in her eyes, the sparkle that said, "I'm still here."

She mentioned that for the past few days she had been having visions of her father and husband walking through her room. They were the two men closest to her. She lost 59 members of her family in the Holocaust, but her father, a prominent rabbi, miraculously survived. They had moved to America after the war, and she never lost her attachment to him. She spent many hours at our Shabbat table telling us stories of what it was like to grow up as the daughter of the chief rabbi of a little town in Hungary, when there was plenty of love but no running water.

She had a 50-year love affair with her husband, Ernie, who passed away about 10 years ago. But they had different outlooks on life. Her husband could never get over the pain of the Holocaust and the bitterness in his heart. She once shared with me that on his deathbed, he confessed to her that he regretted having been bitter most of his life.

Eva, somehow, managed to avoid bitterness. At the age of 16, she was sent to 10 concentration camps in just one year. Her signature story, captured at the beginning of Thomas Fields-Meyer's book, "If You Save One Life," describes her encounter with an American soldier, who rescued her from a long death march. He asked her, in Yiddish, "Who did this to you?" and she didn't have it in her heart to point her finger at a German soldier. She believed in justice, but not revenge. She also believed, as her father taught her, that every life was worth saving - hence the title of the book.

This ability to be positive and look to the future was almost inexplicable, because she spent so much of her time talking about the pain of her past. For many years now, she has been part of the family at the Museum of Tolerance, where she has spoken regularly to various groups about her Holocaust experience. The last few years, as if she could sense the clock ticking, she increased her appearances at schools, churches and colleges. El Camino College in Torrance even set up the Eva Brown Peace and Tolerance Educational Center in her honor.

I attended many of her talks. The extraordinary thing about Eva's message is that even as she talked about death, murder and pain, she always ended up in the same place - with an intense love of life. She left Holocaust theory to the intellectuals. Her specialty was living.

It was as if her years in the pits of darkness had led this tiny woman to reveal herself as an emissary for the celebration of life. She saw this as a very Jewish thing - savoring every breath of life that God gave her. She loved going out. When I would take her as my "date" to the Maimonides Academy trustees dinner, she'd put on a nice dress and perfume and would ask to go in the sports car, even if she had trouble getting in.

Her sparkle attracted a "circle of love" from Jewish women in the community, among them Sara Aftergood, Lesley Wolman, Marci Spitzer and Kathy Barnhard, who constantly brought her the soup she so loved and invited her for Shabbat and holiday meals. When Rabbi Shawn Fields-Meyer visited her a few days before she died, Eva didn't want soup - she wanted to hear the song, "Eshet Chayil." She soaked up pleasure until the very end.

One of those pleasures was taking pictures. Her house was full of them.

On that last Sunday when my kids and I went to say good-bye, after we all shared kisses and sweet words, she asked me in a weak voice: "Can we take a picture?"

We took a couple of great shots with the kids. If you look carefully, you can still see that little sparkle in her eyes.




To see a memorial for Eva Brown, visit evabrown.net.

Everything But The Girl-- Missing

Jimmy Hendrix-- All Along The Watchtower

Over the Rhine-- Desperate for Love

Zaz-- Eblouie par la nuit (blinded by the night)

Burqa Woman-- Not seeing is believing