Laura Silver2013-05-23T22:01:06-04:00Laura Silverhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/index.php?author=laura-silverCopyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Laura SilverGood old fashioned elbow grease.Jewish Meditation: How Sitting Helped One Brooklynite Connect With Judaismtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//2012-05-17T12:20:57-04:002012-05-17T12:48:45-04:00Laura Silverhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/laura-silver/By Laura Silver Tablet Magazine
My cousin and I are both perpetually busy people: I’ve been known to zip between three or four cultural events in a single day, my bike piled high with gear, while she can carry on several simultaneous cell-phone conversations while driving. So, when she suggested, five years ago, that I try meditation, I was puzzled. She said it had helped her to gain perspective and establish boundaries, even setting times when her cell phone was off-limits. But I didn’t see how it could help me. Sitting in one place did not seem like a way to get anywhere -- I mean, who had time? And besides, meditation certainly didn’t seem Jewish.
But that all changed over the last six months. Now I sit and meditate on my fire escape each morning. The daily practice of meditation has helped me take a break from the computer screen and separate, at least a tiny bit, from the need to respond to everything at the speed of text. But even more unexpectedly, it’s introduced me to a Jewish community that I want to return to on a regular basis.
***
For years after that first conversation with my cousin, I stuck to my skepticism. “Om Shanti” mantras in yogic meditation put me on the defensive as a Jew: No matter how soft or subtle the chanting, no matter how soulful or soothing the syllables, I remained convinced they were chords of conversion.
Then I heard about the Jewish Meditation Center of Brooklyn, which billed itself as a “community of meditators and spiritual leaders transforming the world through the cultivation of awareness, compassion, and Jewish wisdom.” I was intrigued, but still suspicious. Why should a mostly secular, jeans-wearing Jewish person join a group of Bu-Jews in orange robes? It took me another year to go to the center, to see for myself.
I attended a monthly beginners’ night last November. There were 10 of us, enough for a minyan, including regulars and first-timers like me, in the second-floor music room of the Hannah Senesh Community Day School. No one was wearing a robe; actually, I was the only one in orange, a well-worn cardigan missing the third button from the top.
Jewish meditation is linked to mysticism, I learned, an ancient Hebraic practice found in Kabbalah. For instance, the Amidah part of the synagogue service is often considered an opportunity for silent prayer or meditation, and another form of Jewish meditation, hitbodedut (self-seclusion), involves going off on one’s own to address the Almighty in one’s own words. So, meditation wasn’t necessarily foreign to Judaism after all.
We learned some short meditations that first night, focusing on breath, hearing, and specific parts of the body. Those lasted two minutes, then five, which marked the edge of my comfort zone. But sitting in silence with other people was surprisingly relaxing. The “sit leader” for that session gave friendly instructions and made it clear that there was no single right way to go about meditation. Afterward, she led us to a local watering hole to celebrate a simcha: One of the participants had passed the bar exam. Instant camaraderie.
She also invited us to return for regular weekly sits: two sessions of 20 minutes preceded by a kavannah (intention) based on the weekly Torah portion, with time for sharing verbal reflections between the silences. A room of Jews sitting without talking for 20 minutes seemed unlikely -- and almost cruel. But curiosity and determination lured me back. I was eager to develop a weekly routine and liked the idea of getting to know like-minded people by sharing space rather than small talk. Now that I realized that meditation was safe turf for Jewish learning, I was willing to engage.
At my first full-length session, I perched on a black zafu, or meditation cushion. My fellow meditators -- again a mix of beginners and veteran practitioners -- sat quietly. But after such a promising introductory session, this sit felt interminable. I wanted to leave. My body felt inert; I did not understand how to “follow” or “work with” the breath. My breathing hung like an invisible habit. A different sit leader -- volunteers take turns running sessions -- suggested several techniques to maintain focus. One idea was to count breaths on the exhale. That sounded reasonable enough, but I had trouble distinguishing the inhale from the exhale. In other words, I was taking my breath for granted.
As a kid, I experienced similar confusion with my right and left and, as a result, learned to do a cartwheel leading with my normally nondominant left hand. It proved to be a good party trick for the 10-year-old set. But if I messed up in meditation, it might be more than a party trick. It might change my entire mindset.
But wasn’t that the point?
I kept going back. Meditation made me examine my habits and helped me identify my patterns of thinking and understand the possibility of tweaking my responses. Meditation invited me to be gentle with myself. Particularly helpful with this was chesed meditation, a series of blessings -- for community, others and self -- that originates with the Jewish concept of chesed, or loving kindness.
Unlike in synagogue services, there was no set liturgy, no language to mispronounce, no melody to carry (or drop). Yet we were engaged in a collective Jewish practice, reflecting on the weekly Torah portion as a community.
By now, I have become a regular at the center, which means I continue to sit with newcomers newer than me and with familiar faces-turned-friends. Sitting still remains relatively new for me. And I’m not the only one who finds it challenging. Meditators of all experience levels share feedback that mirrors my past and present responses:
“I think I overthink breathing.”
“That was hard.”
“My mind kept wandering.”
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly how my burgeoning meditation practice has made a difference in my day-to-day life. I may be a bit calmer or slightly slower to anger. I’m beginning to understand that I don’t have to act on every idea or urge or impulse, at least not immediately. But mostly, I go back for the people -- to sit still, to breathe and share with others.
It’s not always the fully fledged, grounded feeling my cousin predicted, but in a way, it’s better: The community is committed to collective and individual grappling, with the intention to have our practice radiate out into the world. This sounded a bit hokey to me at the beginning, but I do feel like we are forging new, positive pathways of interaction, internally and externally.
And the Jewish Meditation Center isn’t the only place where I meditate. Just as people daven alone at home, in addition to going to a minyan at synagogue, a person can also meditate solo, independent of the larger group. Mornings, I sit cross-legged on my wrought iron, fifth-floor fire escape (or if it’s raining, next to the window) for 10 minutes. Sometimes 11.
Still, resistance and bargaining figure in. Here’s a peek at my inner dialogue on a typical morning:
Ten minutes? Ten whole minutes? Again? It’s only 10 minutes. Not even a full quarter-hour.
You don’t have time. I just wasted 20 minutes staying in bed.
See? You can’t afford to take 10 minutes out of your day. I can’t afford not to.
OK, fine. Just not right now. If not now, when?
So, when I head to the fire escape, it’s not an act of flight, but a gesture of commitment. Just getting in position can be akin to scaling a major peak. (My fire escape is above the Brooklyn tree line.) I take in the sounds of birds, take note of my thoughts, and take turns blessing friends, family, strangers and myself with the chesed meditation.
May you be blessed with peace.
May you be blessed with joy.
May you be blessed with lovingkindness.
May you be blessed with compassion.
I still have trouble distinguishing between the in breath and the out. It’s still hard to maintain a modicum of calm amid ambulance sirens, daily worry and impending deadlines. But I always get something out of sitting: the understanding that, resistance aside (or rather, fully present), I have the ability to set -- and fulfill -- a daily commandment.
Laura Silver is a writer-in-residence at the New York Public Library’s Wertheim Study.]]>The Knish Lives in Israeltag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.14565852012-04-26T16:00:02-04:002012-06-26T05:12:01-04:00Laura Silverhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/laura-silver/In honor of Israeli Independence Day, some reflections on my search for an ancestral food in the Jewish homeland.
Israel, on my first visit in 1994, was teeming pitas, tomato-and-cucumber breakfasts and fresh-squeezed Jerusalem juices. (How did they pull milk from plump shriveled dates?)
At my cousins' house, Cohava shuttled cutlets and salads of cucumbers, beets and zucchini to the porch and introduced each dish in French, easier for me to understand than Hebrew. Her husband asked me questions about each branch of the family tree. Yiddishized words got untangled and enunciated. Family was not mishpoche, but mish-pa-CHA. Even coziness sounded gruff.
Outside the suburbs of Haifa, at Kibbutz Ramat Yochanan, I worked behind the scenes in the dining hall. The Egyptian-Jewish cook thumped smoke flavoring from industrial containers to a plastic vat of eggplant innards. More smoke flavor. More. More. Babganush, I later learned, was called hatzilim or eggplants in Hebrew, which sounded like haloutzim or pioneers. Each time I went back to Israel, the food and the people became less foreign. I learned words for soft cheese, pastries and drinks. Café hafouch, upside-down coffee, seemed to make the most sense: a foamy latte with a definitive band of white.
Still, I could not find a cornerstone of my culinary upbringing. The knish seemed to be as absent from Israel as the Yiddish language. Janna Gur, editor of the Israeli food magazine Al HaShulchan (On the Table), confirmed some of my suspicions in an e-mail:
"Indeed knishes are quite rare here. Your best bet would be Bnei Brak and Mea Shearim Quarter in Jerusalem, time capsules of the Eastern European Shtetl. There are quite a few delis that sell Ashkenazi classics, including knishes."
On a trip to Warsaw I found a through line to the Israeli knish. At the Singer Festival for Jewish Culture, I sat next to a Polish-born Israeli woman who told me her aunt had played the Yiddish theater in Poland and later baked knishes in Tel Aviv.
Bella Sherman, 87, arrived in Israel in 1948, and started working at Café Batya, an Ashkenazi-style restaurant that predated the founding of the Jewish state. She remembered that Batya's husband hid weapons from the Haganah (the Jewish paramilitary organization during the pre-statehood times of the British Mandate of Palestine) in cauldrons in the kitchen. Bella worked there for seven and a half years and remembered the knish recipe:
"The dough has to be elastic, if the flour is too dry, you add some water to it," she told me. "You knead the dough, make it as thin as a table-cloth, that's what we call it too, "a table cloth of dough" (mapat batzek in Hebrew) then you put the meat, not at the center but all around, then use a glass to press around it... the size depends on what you fill it with."
Guidelines and traditions that gave way to improvisation. And so my relationship with Israel: different forms, shapes, aftertastes and emotions that run the gamut from hot to cold to lukewarm. But, always, a gut feeling.]]>Christmas with Claude Lanzmann's 'Shoah'tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.8020352010-12-29T18:35:54-05:002011-05-25T18:20:30-04:00Laura Silverhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/laura-silver/Shoah.
Claude Lanzmann's nine-hour epic returned to the big screen on its 25th anniversary. It opened in uptown Manhattan, at Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, on Dec. 10, and landed at the IFC Center in New York's Greenwich Village on Christmas Eve as part of a national re-release. I took it as a sign, or rather, an invitation.
My folks were out of town and the Jewish museums were closed (Christmas fell on Saturday, the Sabbath). My Christmas companions of years past were busy with spouses and boyfriends. I was back from a trip to Poland that included a day at Auschwitz-Birkenau. It made sense to continue the exploration, to find other people with a similar focus. At least that's what I told myself.
The Night Before
On Christmas Eve, I told friends about my plans. They winced.
"Why don't you come over afterward for some hot chocolate and key lime pie?"
I liked the idea of having someone to share the aftermath, especially since I had my own misgivings about seeing the movie. Was this an extreme form of self-flagellation, a special Christmas-issue dose of masochism?
Nonetheless, a nine-hour movie solved the problem of what to do on Christmas Day -- and night. And could help ward off the particular brand of self-pity that can come with being alone on Dec. 25. Even for a non-celebrant.
"It's a good place to find Jews on Christmas," I told the key lime pie friends.
"What about a synagogue," they asked, "aren't there Jews there?"
I wanted a different kind of prayer. Plus, it was tradition.
As a kid in Hebrew school, I made a lavish book report cover that represented Elie Wiesel's Night with a flame-laden sky and barbed wire made of black thread studded with unruly knots.
One Saturday night in college I went to a film about Janusz Korczak, the Polish-Jewish doctor, educator and head of an orphanage who accompanied his charges to their deaths. My peers went to concerts; I schooled myself in death marches, hidden children, kinder transports and lives of shtetl dwellers.
The Screening
I packed vegetable dumplings, fresh-made biscuits, a container of salmon and broccoli rabe and a thermos of black tea with milk. "It's going to be a rollicking show," I joked to the woman in front of me at the IFC Center box office, relieved to discover another Shoah traveler.
"What else am I going to do on Christmas?" she shrugged.
The theater was small and packed, more than 50 people in tall-backed seats. I migrated to the front row and stole glances at the audience: a trio of female college students, white-haired couples, a pair of Japanese tourists, middle-aged guys in sweatshirts, artsy-looking 20-something dudes who pooled golden chocolate wrappers in the cup holder between their seats. The woman a few seats over crunched popcorn and slurped soda. It was her second time, she told me during the first intermission. During a pan of the verdant killing fields at Chelmno, an elderly man came in, sat down and took his coat off. An hour later he put it on and left the theater.
Mantle of Memory
Last month in Birkenau, I lingered in front of the pond of ashes where four stones are engraved in Polish, Hebrew, Yiddish and English: "To the memory of the men, women and children who fell victim to the Nazi genocide. Here lie their ashes. May their souls rest in peace."
I swallowed rage, sorrow, nausea and hoisted the biggest stone I could find onto the Yiddish marker, proof of my presence. Shoah required a different kind of lifting. I kept running commentary on what had changed since Lanzmann turned his camera on the extermination camp: no weed along the tracks, markers in front the ash pit, a thicket of tour buses.
When the screen filled with the steps to Crematorium II, my shoulders folded, my eyes closed and I gagged slightly. The popcorn cruncher had left. I was alone in the first row.
The final credits rolled at 11:45 p.m. Two dozen of us Shoah watchers gathered our things, nodded toward each other and moseyed to the lobby. One man joked about the end of "Shoahfest," another talked of his drive back to Princeton, N.J. We congratulated each other on our endurance.
Too late for key lime pie.
The Chaser
The 20-something chocolate wrapper guys recruited a lanky, blond French Ph.D. student for a drink and invited me to join.
Just before midnight, four of us perched on low stools in the back room of a Bleecker Street bar. We distilled the close-ups and wide shots over Christmas cookies and pints of Guinness. They explained the technology that allowed Lanzmann to capture clandestine video of the former SS men he got on tape. We wondered which of the interviewees might still be alive.
Most are not.
Shoah began with a line from the Old Testament: "I shall give them an everlasting name" (Isaiah 56:5).
Three gentiles from Tennessee, Miami and Le Havre, France, and a Jewish gal from Brooklyn had dedicated a day to it. At 2:30 a.m. we exchanged e-mail addresses and parted ways.
For the first time, I felt fellowship on Christmas. The day was holy.
]]>On Veterans, Crosses and Shieldstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.7824002010-11-11T16:04:04-05:002011-05-25T18:10:25-04:00Laura Silverhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/laura-silver/
Last spring, the Supreme Court decided (5-4) that an 8-foot cross could remain in the Mojave Desert as a memorial to fallen soldiers of World War I. It returned the case to a lower court and soon after, according to authorities, the steel cross went missing at the hands of a vandal.
Advocates of the cross have petitioned President Obama to resurrect the monument put in place by World War I vets in 1934. I, too, want to honor sacrifices made by our forebears. I like a bold statement in the landscape but find the symbol exclusive and exclusionary.
Good questions. Plus, the obvious one: If a cross disappears from the desert, does it have a right to be resurrected?
A memorial may etch a notch in our collective conscious, but it cannot convey the details of veterans' lives. The Mojave Desert Cross (it should rest in peace) honors service members of the United State's majority religion while eclipsing the experiences of soldiers of non-Christian faiths. Those who pray to the cross may not understand how it can alienate adherents of other religions. Perhaps people of non-dominant faith groups have the (forgive me) cross to bear.
In that spirit, I offer a Jewish perspective that spans the New York metropolitan area.
Long Island
My great uncle and aunt died in a 1955 Coney Island tenement fire and were laid to rest in a military cemetery in Farmingdale, New York, each beneath a Star of David. (The Hebrew, Magen David, translates as 'shield of David.') Benjamin and Esther Mittleman led non-observant lives, but were interred as descendants of Israel, surrounded by people of the cross, beneath near-identical tombstones.
The difference marked me, and set me in search of other markers to the Jewish war dead.
Jews are not as active in the U.S. armed forces as they once were, but members of the tribe -- 10,000 or so -- still serve as enlisted men, volunteers, officers and chaplains. U.S. Navy Admiral, retired, Howard Robinson, the director of JWB Jewish Chaplains Council, estimated that Jews make up approximately three-quarters of one percent of soldiers in the American military today.
At the southern end of Central Park, next to the majestic elms of Literary Walk, I discovered a freestanding rock with a flat, plaque-covered face. It bore the Knights of Pythias name and insignia above names of World War I casualties, among them: a Schwartz, a Dickstein and a Katz. Representatives from the Knights of Pythias secular fraternity were not able to offer insight into the disproportionate number of Jewish names on the plague. Jewish veterans groups in New York City were also stumped, but Snyder explained that the rock-plaque had never been an authorized monument. "No one actually took credit for it," he said. Still, one thing was clear: no crosses here. No Jewish stars either.
Brooklyn
Zion Park War Memorial in Brownsville, Brooklyn, was erected 85 years ago when the neighborhood was largely Jewish. The triangular park that houses the memorial is now home to bus stops, benches and some semi-effective trash receptacles.
The monument sported -- and still does -- a Star of David on the left pedestal and eagle on the right one. It features names of 89 dead, inscribed on two slabs. Between them: a bas-relief of a winged female warrior brandishing a sword and a non-denominational shield. She is perched above a dedication plaque installed in 1925 by the Citizens' Memorial Committee and the Soldiers' and Sailors' Memorial Committees of the American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars. The inscription echoed sentiments of Liberty Institute:
COMMEMORATE THOSE WHO, AT THE CALL OF THEIR COUNTRY, LEFT ALL THAT WAS DEAR
ENDURED HARDSHIP, FACED DANGER AND FINALLY PASSED OUT OF SIGHT
OF MEN BY THE PATH OF DUTY AND SACRIFICE, GIVING OF
THEIR LIVES THAT OTHERS MAY LIVE IN FREEDOM
THOSE WHO COME AFTER SEE TO IT THAT THEIR NAMES BE NOT FORGOTTEN.
Amen. And proof that one religious symbol does not fit all veterans.]]>Notes from a Kickstarter Campaigntag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.7770122010-11-01T12:08:51-04:002011-05-25T18:10:25-04:00Laura Silverhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/laura-silver/
The magic and the mania of my Kickstarter campaign ends today. Now I can focus on the project at hand, writing: The Book of Knish: Loss, Longing and Search for a Humble Hunk of Dough.
Kickstarter is a funding platform for artists, filmmakers, and creative types. I first heard of it last January at a Creative Capital workshop on online tools for artists. Crowdfunding was an attractive alternative to grant applications and a good option for funding the ones that had met with rejection notes.
I pitched the Book of Knish project to Kickstarter in May and was accepted the next day. Then I schemed and planned for four months. A friend volunteered to film the requisite video, pro bono. I studied projects labeled "successful," "popular," "recommended," and "funded" and labored over my descriptions of giving levels and rewards.
Yiddish Kickstarters' Union?
Before I launched my project, I donated to a Kickstarter initiative a friend found online: Zackary Sholem Berger's Not in the Same Breath: A Yiddish & English Book of Poetry and scoured the site for other Jewish-themed projects. Punk Jews and a movie about Birthright trips were fully funded. A cholent-based card game and photo portraits of Jewish War Veterans in the San Fernando Valley did not get the pledges they needed.
The Fine Pixels
On Kickstarter, supporters are "backers"; pledges become donations when - and if - the campaign goal is met on deadline; donations aren't tax-deductible (unless projects obtain fiscal sponsorship) and the platform keeps five percent of a successful project's intake.
Indiegogo, a similar system, encourages creative types to obtain fiscal sponsorship (and the associated tax-deductible status) through Fractured Atlas artist service organization and allows parents of a project to keep what they raise, even if it falls short of the initial goal.
Posting a project in a public forum makes it available to a broader audience, manages the administrative details, conveys clout and makes it easier (at least for me) to solicit support. Still, it's a hands-on process. I sent out mass emails, posted the link on my g-chat status and advertised via Facebook and Twitter. I donned a full-body knish suit for Knish Alley Revival, a somber processional on New York's Second Avenue and stopped by the Kickstarter offices in full regalia. A few staffers tweeted my picture, but it didn't have the same viral effect as the much-coveted "Project of the Day" spot.
Heather Quinlan, whose If These Knishes Could Talk documentary on the New York accent, raked in $7,538; credited her 301-percent success rate to chunky donations from strangers who found her through the special designation.
Camaraderie and Community
My own obsession with Project of the Day introduced me to the "faux-graphic memoir," Axe Man, Who Will Be 70 in the Year 2010. I pledged $35 for a signed book. The author thanked me and relayed this message: "tried to back your project, something snafu-ed along the way on the site. I have had several potential backers say the same to me."
Yep. But perseverance pays off. One of my backers succeeded on her fifth attempt.
Thanks Audrey. And friends, colleagues, family and new people I met through the fundraising effort. I'm honored and humbled and eager to fulfill your rewards.
I've already received mine: reassurance that I'm not going at it entirely alone.
And the influx of dough? If my campaign is funded, I'll be able to transfer the sum into my account 14 days later. After two weeks of intensive writing, I'll be ready for a diversion, and especially grateful for the monetary support.
This article appeared oneJewish Philanthropy as Knish + Kickstarter = A Newfound Appetite for Fundraising
Laura Silver's work has been published in the New York Times, National Public Radio and the Jerusalem Report. ]]>My Big Jewish Halloween Costumetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.7762082010-10-29T21:53:05-04:002011-05-25T18:10:25-04:00Laura Silverhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/laura-silver/
My awkward relationship with the holiday dates back a few decades, to a beloved jack-o-lantern who met a premature death in the incinerator room of my childhood apartment building in Queens, New York.
I've since moved to Brooklyn and outgrown the Alley Cat, China Doll (a particularly sparse year in the unenlightened 1980s) and World Trade Center (I was one half of a pair) costumes of All Hallow's Eves past, and I'm starting to see the holiday in a new light.
Mostly, it's thanks to the knish.
In case you're not familiar, it's a wrapped dough, baked or fried and stuffed with potato, buckwheat groats, vegetables or meat. It has origins in Eastern Europe and was popularized by Jewish immigrants on the Manhattan's Lower East Side and Brooklyn's Coney Island in the early 1900s.
Knishes were a staple of my upbringing, the one reliable link to Jewish heritage in a secular family, with a religious identity largely rooted in what we didn't do. We didn't celebrate Christmas. Didn't say the Our Father, didn't go to Mass. Except that one time when Patty Appel invited me to stay over on Halloween. The following morning, All Saints' Day and a Sunday, I sat next to her in the pews and followed my grandmother's instructions: Don't kneel. And don't take Communion.
Last year, while visiting Poland in search of traces of my grandparents' lives, I landed in the eastern towns of Bialystok and Knyszyn (sounds like knishn) and unearthed details that linked the iconic Jewish food to Catholic mourning rituals.
I'm still not big on trick-or-treating, but the knish is a good conversation piece and a way to get people talking about ghosts they'd rather not touch. Last week, at a party on Second Avenue on New York's Lower East Side, a guy dressed as professor asked me why I was clad in yellow foam with a mustard dispenser dangling around my neck. "See that multi-plex down the block?" I asked. He nodded.
It used to be a Yiddish theater, I told him. There's still a huge Jewish star on the ceiling. And this street was called Knish Alley. Kosher dairy restaurants populated the strip from 14th Street to Houston. Now, it's mostly dumplings and pierogies. But I'm proud to inhabit the knish suit and to re-infuse Jewish history into a hipster zone -- and Halloween.
]]>
