Explaining Simchat Beit HaShoeva

At the end of the period of teshuva and the Day of judgement, the festival of Sukkot is the time of full. Compared to other festivals in the Jewish calendar - none on Pesach and one time on Shavuot -, the association between Sukkkot and joy is mentioned three times. According to Deut. 16: "And you shall rejoice on your festival and you shall be only joyous" and "And you shall be exceedingly joyous". "And you shall rejoice before Hashem, your Gd" (Leviticus 23:40). 

Source: Temple Institute

When the Temple still stood, the most important celebrations associated with the festival were Simchat Beit HaShoeva (Rejoicing - simcha - of the place - beit - of water drowing - hashoeva), the height of the holiday joy of the Sukkot. Not explicitly mentioned in the Torah, during the seven days of the festival, water was poured on the altar as a libation that accompanied the daily morning sacrifices, a ceremony called in Hebrew nisuch ha-mayim. Usually at the time, every day of the year, after the sacrifices were burned, an offering of wine was poured on the altar, but during Sukkot, the water was added.Symbolically, there were used water from Shiloh, from a source not affected by any human intervention. 

Each morning, the Kohanim were going to the pool of Shiloh (in Silwan), in the City of David, near Jerusalem, to fill a golden flask. Shofar blasts were greeting their arrival. The water brough was poured on the alter, at the same time with the wine. At the end of the celebration, the immense candelabrum in the Temple courtyard was lightened and it was hardly any courtyard in Jerusalem which didn't reflect its light. The Levi'im prepared the orchestra of flutes, trumpets, cymbals and harps to accompany the torchlight processions and the celebrations.  

The Tractate Sukkot (51:a) says that 'Whoever has not seen the Festival of Water Libation has never seen joy'. It used to take place every night during the Sukkot festival, except the first day and on Shabbes. The Kohanim, Levi'im, Israelim, elders, pious men and men of good deeds, all joined the celebrations that used to last even for more than 15 hours. Although it was not the Purim, many of the great sages were joining the celebrations, some of them in postures hard to imagine. It was said that Rabbi Shimon ben Gamliel juggled eight torches and raised himself on hand stand with only two fingers. Rabbi Levi juggled with many knives, while Shmuel was able to hold eight glasses of wine without spelling the content. It is written in the name of Rabbi ben Hanania: "When we used to rejoice at the place of water drawing, our eyes saw no sleep", meaning that after the celebrations, they were ready to return back to learning and the service in the Temple.

According to other interpretations, the ritual was part of a larger inducement of rain intent. On Sukkot, the world is judged by water (Mishneh Rosh Hashanah) and "Day of the Rains are as great as the day of Giving of Torah" (Talmud Ta'anit 7a). 

Nowadays, the festival is held in the diaspora, but the height of the celebrations are in Israel, especially among the many Hasidic sects in Bnei Brak and Mea Shearim. Shuls, places of study or yeshivot, all are opening their doors to music and dances. One of the most famous are Karlin, Breslev, Toldos Aharon, Belz or Toldos Avrohom Yitzchok.

Simcha at Ponevetz Yeshiva

When Hasidism is fun. Their fun

Hasidism sells in America, but not in the good way. After TV-shows and pathetic articles explaining to a shocked audience the duties of going every month to the mikwe, something new is on the market: an show that starts with a discussion about the eruv and ends up with casual discussion about porn. Nothing wrong with discussing such issues - the last one, I mean - but not by exploiting the innocence of a guy you 'met' on Craiglist at 'platonic love' section. 

Part of her 'installation' about faith, Annie Berman got in touch with Hasidic 25-year old married mad, with whom she talks about eruv, her love life failures and daily religious life. The guy, speaking good English, in full innocence, is opening his heart to her, but for the sake of the art installation, the context and probably the social context of the guy doesn't matter. It's more important to exploit the conversation till it leads at the yellow media level, when he's mentioning sex and other things that for the outside world might look so exotic. 

What bothered me the most was to hear the tonality of the voices of the two participants at the dialogue: she, with the arrogance of self-assumed intellectual superiority and condescension versus the innocent guy, lacking a proper contact with the non-Jewish world but still ready to clarify and help and share his thoughts with someone out of too much loneliness, maybe.   

I have no idea if this discussion brought any high audience or clarified the author's - calling a journalist someone who promise a recorded conversation on one topic and ends up in a completely different direction is abusive - curiosity or big life questions. But for sure, the approach is not professional and lack a proper honesty of a human being approaching other fellow human. 

It might sound pathetic for the illuminated minds, but sharing such normal feelings like compassion, love and respect are the chore of the daily normal human interaction, Hasidic or not. 

What the next year will stand for?

Regardless how brave I pretend I am or how optimistically I gaze at the future, with an idiotic smile on my face, this beautiful 5774 was a year of failures. On exactly old plans, starting with this blog and ending up with the domestic mess. Nothing really went on as I was expecting at the beginning of the year. Nothing at all. 

Put into a larger life perspective, this was the most challenging year of my life and I bet will have a lot of more consequences to deal with in the next weeks and months. I'm not that naive to pretend that everything should go smoothly always, but not that pessimistic either to believe that it's perfectly fine that everything you want to do is deemed to a happy failure. 

Not even my terrible will to overcome difficulties and always survive is not it used to be, perfectly turned into small little pieces by the stubbornness to accept a very distorted reality. Probably I wanted too much and was used always to receive what I was looking for and the challenges of the last months were completely out of my usual context. 

Now, when I am done with the overexposure of the recent past, and still hope that things can be changed for the good, or that everything happened was always, but always for the good, I cannot be fully supportive of my dreams and plans. 

Does it make to plan anything after all? Not that I'm suddenly the prey of a dramatic turn of faith and entering a dark age stage of nihilism. As for now, I decided to take a completely new attitude to life: getting less and less involved in planning. After so much planning and worries and too much thinking about what will happen if, I decided to give up. This year, a shmitta year, I don't look after the fruits, just will go and on with my life.

Who knows?

New adventures in JDate online dating (1)

This dating post is talking about old 'adventures' but thought that instead of turning the piece of paper with the old notes into little pieces, I rather use it for publishing on my blog. Sooner or late, I'm sure that someone will resonate with my impressions too.

I always felt that online dating is a sign of terrible failure. It works only for people that in real life are guilty of big social inadequacies, well known for an enormous record of problems - including domestic violence and various religious transgressions - and even though you might gain a match through it sooner or later you will end up single. Better single than the victim of a sociopath and potential murderer. 

Anyway, at the time I was in a relatively desperate dating situation. Y. disappeared - apparently for good - among the black hats of who knows what yeshiva in Jerusalem coping with its newly discovered religious fervour and the latest frum match I was into it was in fact one of those irreversible cases of people with a perfect yichus but unacceptable psychological problems, even for a poor BT girl as me, with a complicated yet resourceful enough heritage for writing an interest book about just another Jewish family from Eastern Europe. 

As usual, things were getting confused and the perspective of 'for ever alone' was more real than never. In fact, it was a perspective I was pretty ready to accept wholeheartedly. Isn't it better than being heartbroken in the painful other people's process of becoming a better Jew or being tricked by a smiling shadchan from Golders Green? 

For the next months I was frantically traveling as often as possible, trying to keep myself away from computers, social media networks and spending instead a lot of time learning, reading, doing some writing and eventually sleeping more than usual, maybe who knows, some answers to my singleton problems will be sent through the Kabbalistic waves of Y.'s new teachers through my dreams. After three months, nothing happened and a dramatic break up with the nice yet unstable frum match - ended up with the delightful observation 'Woman, you are crazy!', guess who's talking - I decided that it is about time to do something until it's not that late. Of course I was still dreaming about that family of mine, some children - not the old magical 10 - and a life immersed in learning and some meaningful trips along the way. Dream on, former little girl, dream on...

I had a look around my shul maybe something will miraculously jump along my way and rescue me from loneliness. Maybe one day. Started to ask discretely my relatives about some maybes, who knows perhaps they still be helpful after all. But it was also some other resource, except of course some valuable shadchamin resources specialized in 'Russian Men for Jewish Girls': the damned JDate. Back in the old country, I started to use it of for a while, out of boredom and a bit desperate that will never be able to find my Jewish boy. I didn't find him through it, but at least I did have some interesting conversations. The two guys I've met after some months of discussions were definitely not my style, and I wasn't their either but at the time, I was taking life more lightly.

After another seconds of regrets and badmouthing the one and only Y. who...read above what he did to me...I set up the profile on a late Saturday evening. - the same timing of years ago - and started to look around. Surprisingly enough, online there were some characters I've been in touch years ago, they grew up more mature, with updated pictures, far away in their 40s. What happened? This is what's waiting for me too? A decade or even more of online hanging looking for the one and only? 

With every new profile I was discovering, my desperation increased. Here he was again, the Swiss guy that used to show off as a non-religious OTD guy when he was only looking for some out of the bed adventure...

The more desperate you are, the more tempted you are to believe that money can solve almost all your problems! Should I maybe buy a 6-month plan, my maximum deadline for finding - again - a one and only? What gonna happen this time? Wish that this time I knew much better! For good!

to be continued...

Jewish memories in Thale, Germany

The region of Harz mountains, in Germany, was famous for the high concentration of Jewish population, especially in the 17-18th century. Despite the permanent threats of pogroms, the local landlords allowed the Jews to establish here, set up their own business and schools and even create important institutions of Torah learning. But as in many other cases, it was short lived and the persecutions in the 1930s lead to vandalism of synagogues and places of prayer as well as the significant diminishing of the Jewish population. 

Nowadays, there are almost no Jews left, most part of them being murdered.

The memories are strong though and one might find memorial notes about famous local families and personalities that leaved in various cities. 

One of such case was this mention, on a wall near the Karl-Marx street in Thale. It reminds the family Dessauer, who lived here for a while, before the war. Dessauer was a common name in the region, with similar names encountered in Magdeburg or Halberstadt, but the clear connection between them is not obvious. Dessauer might be a name that in fact can mention the common place of origin, the city of Dessau. 

Jewish memories in Hamburg: Otto and Paul Lang

The - sometimes strong - connection between national socialism and sport, especially in the case of the big sport associations is not yet fully explored. One of such cases is the famous and extremely popular FC Pauli in Hamburg. In the 1930s, many players of Jewish origin were either dismissed from their sport clubs or simply encouraged to do so by themselves.

One such a case are the brothers Lang, Otto and Paul, in whose honour a memorial stone was inaugurated a couple of years ago. The memorial stays at the entrance to the stadium. 

Both of them had an important contribution to the development of the local rugby. They left FC Pauli in 1933, the clear conditions of the departure not being documented in full details. 

Otto left shortly after Germany via Antwerp, from where he moved in the United States where he died in 2003. His brother, Paul, stayed in Germany and was deported to KZ Theresienstadt in 1945. He survived and returned to Hamburg after the war, where he died in 2003.

Jewish memories in Hamburg: Brandenburger Haus

A Hansa city, with an intensive trade activity, Hamburg also used to have a very rich and sophisticated Jewish community, whose representatives contributed greatly to the well-being of the city and its citizens. The free economic status that supposedly also involved a certain free mind frame. It was not always like this, but at least, for a certain period of time, Jews living in Hamburg had a good time. They invested in the local economy and constructions, their contributions remaining as part of the history of the city. 

During a short visit to the city of Hamburg, I discovered close to the Gansemarkt, the imposing Brandenburgerhaus. It has 4 stores and bay-windows, a typical architectural element from Liverpool, in England. This 'kontorhaus' - tradesman house, usually used as offices for businesses - was built following the plans of Johannes Wald.

The house belonged to Isidor Hirschfeld that wanted to build the house for his wife, born Brandenburger. Isidor, together with his brother Benno, had before the war a successful fashion owner based in Hamburg, with offices in Hannover, Bremen and Leipzig. Isidor died in 1937, but Benno shortly before the end of the war, at Buchenwald.