I found out about Leiby Kletzky’s death when I was settling into a yoga class. The instructor dedicated the class to him, adding that he had been found, and that he was not alive. She cried a little, and moved along. I didn’t know I was holding my breath about this case until I heard that… Read more »
So, here is a pop quiz: are Jews allowed to donate organs? Yes. I ask, because it turns out that many people are wrong on this count. Enough Jews are wrong about it, that Israel has been fighting off a bad reputation in the organ donor community. Frankly, it is simple playground etiquette—unless you are… Read more »
Are you gonna finish that? If you do, are you going to keep it down? The Passover Purge has me thinking about bulimia and Jews. I hear the word “purge” and I go straight there. Koshering your kitchen for Passover is hard and thorough work. Under normal circumstances, this just marks a heightening of Jewish… Read more »
My child was intended. Meaning—I intended his life, and intended to parent him. There was a decisive moment when we entered into “the process” so to speak. So I remember what it feels like to gaze wistfully at other people’s children, what it feels like to think, “yikes, what if it doesn’t happen for us?”… Read more »
I did an about face this month. I decided to stop believing in PMS.
It’s kind of pathetic, but I hadn’t even considered the culturally fabricated origins of this bio-myth until stumbling across this debate, in a blog that I sometimes read. It was kind of like finding out that the Tooth Fairy doesn’t exist—obvious in hindsight, but earth shattering in the moment. Because let me be clear: I have blamed my hormones for a LOT.
I recently took a teacher training program to learn to teach yoga to cancer survivors (if you are so inclined, this is the one to take, IMHO). Tari devoted a large portion of the program to the challenges posed by the “reconstructive surgery” process. It turns out that, in an effort to return women to “femininity” and “normalcy” (not my words), we end up limiting their range of motion.
But I was in the odd position of having to define the notion of “secular conversion” for myself and for the little family that I had very recently created. No one bats an eyelash when a born Jew refers to him/her self as a “secular Jew.” But for me to say that… Well, this gives pause. And why the difference?
I chose the “easy” way in, so to speak. Faced with the multiple schools of Judaism, I panicked and went with the one that seemed the least dogmatic. I chose a Reform rabbi to initiate me. But while it was non-threatening in many ways, it also left me with the anguish of choice and agency. It gave me the responsibility of co-creating my own sense of Jewishness.
I chose my mid 20s to make a wildly un-feminist choice. I converted to Judaism. For a man.
I’d like to pretend that I “always felt Jewish” or that discovering Judaism felt like coming home. But no such luck.
