"The Soul of Every Living Thing" -- vegetarian video with Yonassan Gershom

I just finished editing this video for the Shamayim'v'Aretz ("Heaven and Earth") Institute, a new Jewish organzation promoting veganism as the ideal Jewish diet, as well as Jewish ethics and spirituality in general. They asked for a short video of me as a vegetarain, so here t is.

. As I have said before on this blog, I'm not a vegan (although I am a vegetarian) and I'm not even sure it is practical to be vegan outside of big urban centers, because the ingredients are so hard to find in rural areas. Biblically veganism is the ideal diet (Eden vas vegan) but I'm just nt there yet.

However, what I do have to offer my fellow Jews (and others) is practcal exeperience actually living with nature. So, watch this 5-minute video and tell me what you think. At the very least, you'll get to see some nice footage of my land and animals.

Shabbat (the Sabbath) as Child's Play

(Graphic courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Recently I read an article suggesting that families should turn off their TVs for one day per week in order to reconnect with each other.  I found that amusing, given that Orthodox Jews (and many others) already do this on the Sabbath -- and not just with TV.   All of our electronic devices -- from computers to phones to iPods -- are given a day of rest. 

As I have written on this blog before, we do daycare for the 2 grandchildren of my oldest stepson.  He is not Jewish and neither are the kids.  (He was born before my wife converted to Judaism and married me.  Her kids from another marriage never followed suit).  So the grandkids are not growing up with the same house rules as my wife and I when it comes to Shabbat (the Sabbath).   

Usually we are not doing daycare on Shabbat anyway, but it sometimes happens, and the first time this occurred, the oldest boy was horrified.  (The youngest, being a baby at the time, had no opinion yet.)  He just could not imagine what to do with himself without some sort of screen to stare at all day.  "What if I turn off the volume on my Gameboy?"  He asked.  No deal.  "How about if I go into the other room?  Or outside?"  Nope.   I explained that the Sabbath is not about how loud something is, it's about retreating from the weekday world, and that while he is in our house, he follows our rules.   He was sure he would die of boredom, and at first it seemed so -- but not forever.  Now he actually enjoys a Shabbat visit.

So what on earth do we do without all those gadgets?  Aside from prayers, meals, and other ritual activities, we play board games, card games, do jigsaw puzzles, take nature walks, play with non-electronic toys -- and read.   It is this latter activity that has really caught on with the kids.  It began with me reading stories out loud, and talking about how when you watch a movie, you watch somebody else's ideas about the characters, but when you read, you go on a journey in your own mind.  He didn't get it at first, but now, a few years later, he is such an avid reader that sometimes when he is here on a weekday he actually turns off the TV to read a book!  The last time I took him to Cub Scouts (about a half hour drive) he spent the whole time reading a new book he had just checked out of the library. 

I've also noticed that when he and his younger brother (now 3) play with Legos and other non-electronic toys, their play is much more creative.  All of those chattering toys that talk, buzz, beep, roar, or otherwise make electronic sounds are also no-nos on the Sabbath -- and quite frankly, the kids tire of them rather soon anyway, because they are so repetitious.  (And ubiquitous -- nowadays it's really hard to find toys that do not do this.)  Even on weekdays, the first thing the 3-year-old does is dump out the box of non-electronic cars, dinosaurs, blocks and Legos. 

He also loves paging through books and even though he can't yet read words, he spends hours looking at the pictures.  He looks for -- and recognizes -- any new books added to the children's shelf since last visit.  (Most of these we get at the thrift store, so that if he tears pages or spills on any of them, it's not big deal.  You do not want to be saying "no" or scolding a toddler about damaging his books, or you will kill his interest.  You should, however, teach him how to respect and care for books.)

All of this suggests that turning off your TV and other gadgets on a regular basis is a very good idea.  I would even go so far as to say that the Sabbath may well contribute to the high literacy rate among Jews.  At the very least, it helps us connect better when the family around the Sabbath table -- not a TV screen -- is the focus of our attention.   Try it sometime.

"Who Stole My Religion?" -- rescuing Judaism from Right-wing politics

I haven't been blogging much the last few weeks, because my energy has been going into the final stages of publishing a book with Richard H. Schwartz, author of Judaism and Vegetarianism, as well as other works. Schwartz's new book is called "Who Stole My Religion?  Revitalizing Judaism and applying Jewish values to help heal our imperiled planet.  I'm in the process of doing the formatting and layout for self-publishing on Lulu.com.   His regular publisher (Lantern Books) did not think they could get it out in time for the 2012 election, so we went the self-publishing route.  The back cover reads:

Richard Schwartz, author of
"Who Stole My Religion?"

"In the five decades since Richard Schwartz first became a religious Jew, he has watched the mainstream Jewish community shift more and more to the Right, often abandoning the very values that originally attracted him to Orthodox Judaism. In this soul-searching book, Schwartz examines the ways in which he believes his religion has been “stolen” by partisan politics, and offers practical suggestions for how to get Judaism back on track as a faith based on peace and compassion. Tackling such diverse issues as U.S. politics, Israeli peace issues, the misuse of the Holocaust, antisemitism, U.S. foreign policy, Islamophobia, socialism, vegetarianism, and the environmentalism, Schwartz goes where many Jews fear to go — and challenges us to re-think current issues in the light of positive Jewish values."

And yes, if you looked closely at the cover (which I designed, by the way) you will see my name there under his -- in much smaller print, because although I did help with a lot of research, editing and in some sections ghostwriting for this book, Richard Schwartz is indeed the primary author. We started out doing it co-authored in dialogue form (sort of the Jewish version of the "City Mouse and the Country Mouse" -- he has spent all his life in the New York City area) but that didn't work out.  So I decided to pull back and let it be his book, for the good of the project.  Still, he generously wanted to give me credit on the cover.   A couple of our original dialogues did make it into the Appendix area, along with a section on kapporot that we had previously co-authored.  And we did include both of our bios.

As for the cover, here's my explanation of the design:

The background photo (#ISS028-E-020072 from the NASA files) was taken aboard the International Space Station on July 31, 2011, when the sun was just below the horizon. When observed from space, the palette of gaseous layers of our atmosphere reminds us of the fragility and tenuousness of the thin cocoon that shelters life on Earth from the cold harsh vacuum of outer space. Without this precious envelope of air, life on Earth could not exist.

A thin crescent of the new moon appears to hang above the Earth, although in reality it is more than 238,855 miles away. On the Jewish calendar, the important holiday of Rosh Hashanah, which begins the High Holy Days season of repentance, always begins on a New Moon. Perhaps the message of this photo is to encourage us to think about how we are treating our planet’s fragile atmosphere, and to change our polluting ways before it is too late.

 Where to order:   

Who Stole My Religion?  is available in both print and ebook versions on Lulu.com.  If you order the print version by February 17, use the coupon code FLIGHTLESS at checkout to get free ground shipping in the USA (and maybe elsewhere, too -- not sure about that, but give it a try):

The PDF ebook version is also available on Lulu.com for immediate download.  In addition to getting your book super-fast, the download has the advantage of seeing the photos in color:

Will there be ebook versions for Kindle, iPad and Nook?

Not unless those programs are vastly improved for handling academic works.  Epub, the program used on iPad and Nook, completely reflows the text -- which means it does not respect page numbers, indented paragraphs for long quotes, footnotes, and other academic formats.  Every time the reader changes the font size, the pages are all renumbered.   Kindle does the same thing, plus the feedback on it's handling of footnotes is horrendous!  The fact is, these new e-reader formats are mostly suitable for novels and non-fiction works with plain prose text, but just can't handle the more complex layout of  an academic work.  Until such time as the program developers solve these problems, the format best suited to Who Stole My Religion? is PDF, which preserves the original layout and can be read on your desktop or laptop computer.

You can't fast forward a sunset ~ and other TIME-ly thoughts

A while back I was teaching a circle dance to some children and told them to go clockwise.  They looked at me blankly and had no idea what I was talking about.  Their generation is used to digital clocks -- which do not go in circles at all -- and that got me to thinking about how we experience time.   "Clockwise" comes from the way that the shadow moves on a sundial.   Later, this was carried over onto the faces of mechanical clocks.  In both cases, time is seen as a continuous, cyclical flow.  

An hourglass, on the other hand, is not cyclical. It has a beginning and an end. But it still shows a flow of time, as the grains of sand slowly run down. A digital clock, however, shows time as broken up into a bunch of individual numbered moments that are often disconnected from each other.  All of this may seem like a bunch of nitpicking, but I wonder how it affects the way we see the natural world.   Nature goes in cycles. Days, months, years-- all are based on the somewhat circular patterns of rotations and orbits. Even the elliptical orbits of comets go in cycles.  And they all move at their own pace. But are we losing that sense of the "flow" of time?

So last week I was watching a program on PBS about how families are spending less and less time outdoors, and how this, combined with the high speed of modern technology, is indeed distorting our inner sense of time.  "You can't fast forward a sunset," one of the panelists said, and that statement has stuck with me. In a world where you can speed up, slow down, or freeze-frame a movie, or watch it over and over anytime you want to, the slow steady pace of nature  often seems boring. So kids prefer to stay indoors and play speedy video games instead.

Yet it is precisely that slowness that allows us to relax and tune in to God's creation.    Being with nature is a form of meditation. Our bodies evolved in nature, the Garden of Eden was in nature -- however you define it, we need the natural pace of with nature.  But nowadays, even meditation is speeded up -- or at least people try to shortcut it. They go to a weekend seminar to get "enlightened" and are disappointed it it doesn't "work" right away.& But true enlightenment is a lifelong process that takes hours and hours of quiet contemplation.  You can't get there by plunking down your money for a workshop and no, there isn't an app for it, either.

The only way you can freeze-frame a sunset - or any event in nature - is to take a picture of it. Even then, you only have a small part of the real experience.  In photographing sunrises (which I seem to do more than sunsets lately), I have found that there is always a perfect moment where everything in the picture is just right.  The minutes before and after that are beautiful, too, but that peak moment is the best picture in the series.  However, in order to capture that moment, I have to patiently sit there for about 45 minutes or more, because the sunrise is going to unfold at its own pace, and there's not a darned thing I can do about it. It's happening on God's time, not mine.

Watching a sunrise is a "letting go" experience that requires us to fit into nature's pace, not the other way around. Only when you are willing to just sit there quietly and absorb the experience are you able to notice the subtle changes from second to second and minute to minute. There's that magical moment about an hour before dawn,  when the first bird begins to sing, when the rooster begins to crow and the wild geese begin to honk. In Jewish law, the earliest time you can say the Shema prayer is when you can distinguish a blue thread from a white one.  Try it at dawn sometime.

  

Sunrise on the Gershom farm
Pine County, Minnesota, Sept. 21, 2006