FELA! on Broadway: A Review

The old Reese's peanut butter cup jingle is the perfect description for the Bill T. Jones - Fela extravaganza on Broadway: "Two great tastes that taste great together" FELA! is absolutely delicious -- amazing choreography by Jones combined with spectacular direction overall. And Antibalas honors Fela's music with their own deep grooving sounds -- electrifying. Both the actors playing Fela and his Mother deserve Tony Awards -- stunning performances. Mindblowing.

The only negative in this play is the attempt to add contemporary corporate bashing to Fela's narrative and to add contemporary examples of police related violence (Sean Bell) to the story. I understand the emotional connection, for sure -- but it comes across as a moral equation or a grab-bag of anti-establishment politics.

Still -- amazing work with great power.



For those of you not familiar with Fela, here is some video footage of the late great Nigerian musician

Shlomo Sand: A Response

Khazaria Flashback

That morning
We first woke up as Jews.
Drank Turkish coffee.
Started complaining.

The King, Jewish?
This will not turn out well.

Like schoolchildren they spoke to us.
Fringes.
Little boxes.

the joy of learning a new language
a room in the brain we didn’t know was there.

fires engulfed our old gods.
sacrificial flames for the big new one.
but we winked across the aisle
backup plan under the floorboards.

We have been chosen
The grey beards tell us
And our homeland lies in ruins
And our temple desecrated
But we have been chosen.

We learn to sing a new song
The chicken is saltier now
But we all love the Sabbath
Huge improvement.

So now we are all Jews.
Feels weird.
Feels right.
Maybe we were Jews the whole time?


- Daniel S. Brenner

Debkafile Homes In

Home? Hone?

I recently read the headline on Debka...

Al Qaeda homes in on Germany as its next European target

I scratched my head. Home in? Isn't it "hone in" ? Time for some sleuthing...and



...it turns out that there is a fascinating little history of the term.

Chana's Prayer: A Commentary for Men

I was asked by the good folks in Charlotte, North Carolina's Chavurat Tikvah to share a few words on the Rosh Hashannah Day 1 Haftarah. While I didn't have time to write out a drash, I did put some thoughts together and had a half way decent insight on the topic.

So here's how I started -- Chana's prayer is a beautiful counter-culture moment in the RH liturgy. Here we are with all this gratitude and all hail God is King talk, and here this woman steps up and prays "al" -- "against" God. The Rashba remarks that her prayer was not dignified or proper because she basically said "How could you allow me to suffer like this?" -- but that is the very reason why the Talmudic commentators in Bercahot 31a-b love her. They liken her to Moses (and Elijah) as someone who is willing to say to God -- "hey what's going on up there? you need to act down here."

There is a great bit from Levi of Berditchev on this where he holds the shofar aloft and says: "hey God - you want to hear this? then have my enemies blow it -- because you obviously seem to favor them."

Second -- I shared the brilliant commentary of Lori Lefkowitz (appeared in RT). She argues that Chana is not eating - she has an eating disorder, brought on by both the unrealistic demands of patriarchy and by the abuse of Peninah. (there's even a Midrash that says that Peninah would taunt her by saying ("i'm packing lunch for the children to take to school") The eating disorder is causing her infertility. But emoting -- pouring out her heart -- is the self-medicating therapy that she needs. She has the power to break from her depression and self-destruction and become aligned again. (a midrash puts the following words in Chana's mouth ' do you want me to be an angel -- to not eat and not have children, or do you want me to be a woman?)

Third -- and this is my contribution to all this -- is the question "why should men be listening to this story year after year?" My sense is that we need to hear the words of both Elkana and of Eli -- two men who obviously do not get how deep the depression and despair of this woman has become. Elkana says "isn't my love better than ten sons?" -- a message to all of us men who think that we are G-ds gift to women, that all they want is our attention and that's it. Eli, in accusing Chana of being drunk, is a paradigm for all the times that we men dismiss women's emotions as hysterical. Rather than see the very moment when they are speaking from the heart, we see it as madness. Hearing the story of Chana we are given an opportunity to repent for our inability to respond to the suffering of women -- and a charge to change our ways.

Rosh Hashannah Poem: Cash for Clunkers

Cash for Clunkers

A Poem for Rosh Hashannah

Hitch your rusty old heart to the tow truck
(We’ve got an old 8 track of Yossele Rosenblatt Sings Holiday Favorites up in the cab.)
Chains of prayer pulling you along
the glass walled showroom by the old highway
eternal light
a red neon “open”

Plastic banner whipping in the wind
Trade-ins Welcome
Gates of repentance marked by an “ENTER” arrow, slightly bent.

And here you are,
Your clogged heap,
Your worn tires,
Your gunked up insides.

Do you even accept my make and model?

Blast your horn nine times.
Collapse on your steering wheel for one long and holy honk.

Open the glove compartment and recite the words in the Owner’s Manual:

Forgive us, have mercy on us, atone for us.

Close you eyes and the new year lies before you.

It’s a 5770.

And it is clean.
And it is pure.
And it sparkles.
And it smells like new car.
And the odometer reads
“you have more life to live”

So where are you heading to?


-Daniel S. Brenner

090909 NY Times City Room Blog Meets Reb Blog :)

SEPTEMBER 4, 2009, 3:57 PM
09/09/09: An Auspicious Start to School?

By JENNIFER 8. LEE
Sept. 9, 2009 — or 09/09/09 — will be a significant day for baby boomers (the digitally remastered Beatles collection is being released) and for gadgetphiles (Apple may introduce new products).

But it will also be significant for New York City children. It is the first day of school.

Given the diversity of cultures in New York City, we wanted to know whether this means anything. After all, given how 9/9/99 was widely heralded, perhaps we could expect a repeat a decade later.

City Room first thought of reaching out to rabbis, given that many are familiar with gematria, the Hebrew numerological art of finding meaning by spinning numbers and words. Eighteen is lucky, because the letters in chai (חי) — the word for “living” — are composed of letters that add up to 18.

Since 18 is 9 plus 9, what would another 9 add? Would it be 50 percent more luck? Or does the extra 9 mess everything up?

But the purists among our first round of rabbis would not even look at the Gregorian calendar. (”The English calendar is basically random from a Jewish perspective,” one said, somewhat dismissively.)

Alas. But we found one willing to humor City Room. Rabbi Daniel S. Brenner, executive director of Birthright Israel NEXT, noted in an e-mail message that if you add up the three 9’s, you get 27. Similarly, that corresponds with the numeric value for the Hebrew letters in chida (חידה), the word for “riddle”: het, yud, dalet, hey.

Asked to expound on what “riddle” might mean in a school year context, Rabbi Brenner wrote:

Jewish education is based on the critical inquiry that happens between teachers and student, and riddles — which ask us to challenge how we define our world — are one of the fun ways that teachers engage students in learning. On the first day of school, I would hope that teachers not only set out the classroom rules, but set forth the “riddles” that they will explore with their students over the year.

Then we turned to the Chinese, another group that embraces numbers. We called Justin Yu, president of theChinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, for his take. The word for the number nine, jiu (九), sounds like the word for longevity in Chinese, jiu (久). He added, in Chinese, “Ninety-nine means forever, so 999 is even better.”

When asked about what that meant for students, he said:

The Chinese say that on Sept. 9, you can go very, very high. Sept. 9 is a day that people go up climbing mountains. For students, going back to school by Sept. 9 means that their score will be very high, and whatever they achieve will be much higher.

Are there other cultures that find meaning in 09/09/09 as the beginning of the school year?

Forward Thinking

(PHOTO: Birthright Israel NEXT alumni from Brooklyn dance at the National Yiddish Book Center)


Way back in 1997 I was a Steinhardt Fellow at CLAL – the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership. Fresh out of rabbinical school, I was thrown into a rowdy crew of Orthodox, Reform, and Conservative rabbis – all of whom were dedicated to finding some way that we could transcend those very labels and yet still be true to our convictions. (I was trained by the reconstuctionists so I kind of had a head start.)

I only met very briefly with Michael Steinhardt during that year, but I heard many times about his desire to create a “Common Judaism” – a Judaism that was proudly shared across secular and religious circles. I was taken by the idea – and much of my teaching and curricula building energies were focused on defining the parameters of just such a breakthrough concept in Jewish life.

Reading the recent Forward articles I am reminded by those years at CLAL.

I, for one, am proud of the diversity of the programs this past year that Birthright Israel NEXT supported in New York -- including programs such as a seminar on Jewish culture led by the brilliant faculty of the National Yiddish Book Center, an exhilarating dance performance by the Batsheva Dance Company at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and multiple evenings where Birthright Israel participants told their personal stories in our Monologues production. And I am also proud that there is room at our table for a sometimes irreverent reconstructionist rabbi like me and the sometimes irreverent haredi-trained rabbis from the JEC to work on the same project. In my experience, I have found that they offer a style of teaching that is compelling and a passion for Judaism that is genuine and that their offerings connect with a segment of our alumni. Their contribution to our overall offerings to Birthright Israel alumni in New York is yet another example of the diversity that crosses boundaries and exemplifies Birthright Israel’s maverick approach.

But the program that touches the most New Yorkers is not any of the cultural or religious events that we have organized, but our call for alumni to take responsibility for their own Jewish lives. I am incredibly proud that over 1,000 New Yorkers who are Birthright Israel alumni opened up their homes to their friends for “NEXT Shabbat” dinners. Inviting a large group of people into a small apartment is, in my opinion, an enormous responsibility. 82% of our hosts had little or no experience hosting a Shabbat dinner. Yet, three-quarters of them made a home-cooked meal for their guests. Since the average size of the meals was fourteen guests, that amounts to over fourteen thousand guests in the first year of the program. Nationally, our numbers are closing in on 50,000 guests. (Show me a Jewish organization that can create peer-led, home hospitality events where over 50,000 young adults meet each other and have a positive Jewish experience for an average cost of under $25. If we had more donors across the country who saw the simple logic of this model, we could easily take the number of guests to 100,000.)

One of the things that happens after the Shabbat hosts finish their event is that they are asked how much of a grant that they would like to cover the expenses that they put up for the meal. They can get up to $25 per guest – but the vast majority of our hosts do not ask for $25. They ask for less because they realize that if they do, more people can benefit from the program.

In the past year alone Birthright Israel NEXT was involved in over four hundred events in eleven cities and we worked with over eighty partnering organizations. In other words, through Birthright Israel NEXT young adults are being exposed to multiple options for Jewish involvement – from mainstream Jewish institutions to emergent ones. I found it ironic that the Jewish Daily Forward editorial used the example of the JDC as one such possibility of the use of program funds because Birthright Israel NEXT actually worked with the JDC and I was fortunate to visit the JDC office in New York and meet with Birthright Israel alumni who discovered for the first time the life-saving work in the FSU that the Joint has undertaken. One of my staff worked on an amazing short film about her trip with other Birthright Israel alumni to the Ukraine to visit JDC projects. (There is a clip of it in this four minute video)

I hope that critics will take a look at the entirety of Birthright Israel NEXT and see not only the authentic diversity that we embrace, but the tens of thousands of young adults who are discovering that Jewish life in America is a big tent where secularists, all types of religious folks, and those who do not have a defined ideology have a home.

No Jewish Music in Top 50 World Music Albums!

Well the good people over at Amazon.com have a list of the best 100 world music albums of all time and I spot three Jewy ones in the bunch.

The kicker: none of them break into the top fifty!

Ofra Haza comes in at 61 Idan Raichel at 75 and Andy Statman at 93 (how is he world music btw? World Music being defined here as non-Western)

Where is Habreira Hatvit???? Shlomo Bar was world music before world music even existed folks! And what about Miguel Hurstein's magnificent Bustan Avraham?

One more thing - Fela with Ginger Baker as his best? Fela has five albums better than that one. Try Odoo - a full on masterpiece! The title track's double bass lines alone are sheer brilliance.

The Pull-Quote

Believer, Beware got this wonderful write up in Huffington Post while I was off in Israel drinking Yotvata's delicious chocolate milk.

"I hate anthologies -- all that stopping and starting, just as you get into a writer. I loved this one though because it reflects the theme of my own disjointed weird life. I grew up as a missionary kid, pastor's sidekick, God merchant, Religious Right leader, you name it. I long since escaped if not to sanity then to a little more happiness. So I sometimes read other people's books about religion and most are from the outside in. Take it from one who knows this wacky territory, Believer Beware is from the inside out.

Who can beat this opening to "Please Don't Feed the Prophet," a story by Daniel S. Brenner? "God is a sweater that you grew out of. God is an old book on Soviet politics lying in a thrift shop. God is a friend from college that you want to get rid of but can't. God is a souvenir."

Believer Beware is laugh out loud funny, touching, irreverent and yet, in deeper ways, pays religion the ultimate compliment: it's worthy of scrutiny, debate, hate, love and loathing and measuring up on a very personal scale of intimate first hand experience. You may divorce religion but as the writer's in this book demonstrate, you never sever the ties, you'll owe "alimony" for the rest of your life. So this is a book for anyone who knows two things: first, that for better or worse religion is important; second, that experiencing religion can be a harrowing passage into the darker side of human frailty and sometime into liberating (even sublime) hilarity."

Slouching Towards Bushwick....

Slouching towards Bushwick, posed a few questions to me. It's been a while since I had time to blog, but I felt guilty for not responding, so I sat down and wrote....here goes....


A blog wherein Rabbi Daniel Brenner answers Samantha’s Questions. (or attempts to do so)

Does “being Jewish” mean having a daily practice? Do you do things each day to “be” Jewish like praying before eating, after going to the bathroom, performing mitzvot, etc. or can you just “be” Jewish without doing anything particularly Jewish?
One of my teachers, Reb Zalman, said that without discipline you don’t get the pay-off. I don’t do everything I could do, but I am conscious of starting my day with a few words of gratitude, saying a short prayer before eating…I do that sort of thing in my head. I hope that in doing so that I am cultivating a sensibility – meaning that I am thinking about the Jewish perspective on things that I eat, and maybe even more important -- things that I say. That is the everyday Jewish.
Do you feel grateful that you are Jewish? Like, is your daily life better because you are Jewish? Or is it just a part of you, like being born male, brown-haired, etc.?
I am grateful. Jews have a unique history and I marvel at every chapter/tale I hear that adds to the multi-layered Jewish category in my brain. Is my life better? Who knows, I’ve never been anything else, really. But having experienced years in a Christian environment and days in a Zen Buddhist environment, I’d say that daily life in Jewish environments has its pluses. For one thing it’s louder – much louder, and it is quirkier, snarkier, more sarcastic, less focused on manners, etc. That is also a huge downside. Being Jewish is not ‘just part of me’ though. My mom does not look particularly Jewish and growing up I don’t think that I looked particularly Jewish…and I grew up in North Carolina…so I could have opted out in some way.
How much does your childhood Jewishness affect your Jewishness later in life?
I had some amazing childhood experiences. First off, I had some great teachers in a small Jewish day school. I realized early on that arguing about Jewish ethics is at the heart of our tradition. I also got to go to Jewish summer camps and see ‘outdoor Judaism’ at its best. So I got both intellectual oriented Judaism and emotional community-feeling Judaism. I still like both and try to replicate them for my own children. (two of whom are off at summer camp right now)
Do you ever grow tired of thinking about the Jewish community?
Yes, it is exhausting. But if I wasn’t thinking about the Jewish community I’d be thinking about another community.
Do you want Birthright alumni/young Jews to believe in God? Do you think those who don’t now will come to believe in God after being part of a Jewish community?
I’ve always said that there is a difference between believing in God and loving God. Belief is a word that I use about whether or not I think that the Miami Dolphins are going to make the playoffs. Love is a word I use to describe those things that are beyond my rational mind’s ability to break them down into facts. I tend to side with the kabbalsits and non-dualists on God – so God is what is, not some separate being outside of what is. And in that way, when I think about loving God, I think about loving the big, tragic, beautiful mess that we are all caught up in.
I think that in community, you go beyond your self a little bit more, and can open your heart up to other people, and that is the only way that you can really love God when it comes down to it – because praying towards a wall is not what it is all about in my opinion. It might help you do a better job at opening your heart when in dialogue with a person, but it isn’t the act that ultimately matters.
Is it important to you to be Jewish? Why? Because you were born Jewish and/or because Jewish wisdom is important for the world? For you as an individual?
Yes. But I don’t separate the mind and body part of being Jewish as if we could just say “what’s important, to study choreography or to be a dancer?” My being Jewish can’t be separated out into body/mind. I have a genetic history and a psychological disposition and resulting mind-map that are a result of 3,000 plus years of a particular tribe wandering around the globe and trying to stay together. That’s real and was there from the moment that I was born. As I’ve grown and experienced the limitations and abilities of my particular body I have come to understand my Jewishness on the physical level as a real thing. As for the Jewish wisdom part – that came from the way that I was taught language, taught what matters, taught my name and my history….it is far beyond what I could ever chronicle in a thousand books.
What is important to me is both the embodied and the language/ritual based expressions. My children are, literally, another layer of Jews with all sorts of hereditary quirks. I hope that the Jewish education I give them will help them to value the continuation of the whole package. I know that that may sound racist, but I really do not care if they marry someone who is of different genetic history. I just want them to love – or at least make peace - with their own embodied situation -- the eyes they have, the metabolism, the occasional hyperactivity….that sort of thing. I hope that they want to replicate it someday in another little person.



My goals in life are to be happy+successful. How can you or other Jewish leaders/organizations help me achieve my goals?
I’m still trying to be happy+successful and I think that it is taking a long time. Good Jewish organizations are helping people find friends and find meaning and as a result they are a little bit happier and more successful. But there is no perfect formula, so all I can do is quote pirke avot: Who is rich? One content with their portion.
Are you working on a book? What’s the best thing you’ve read lately?
I just finished a book of poetry and I have a few short stories in the works. I’m reading Absurdistan now – so far I’m loving it.
Briefly, what is the best part of being alive?
Falling in love and making babies and watching those babies grow up. Swimming at the bottom of a waterfall. Yotvata Chocolate Milk. Dancing to Fela. Laughing with friends.

Away We Go!

Leaving for Tel Aviv this week...with a stop-over in Paris. Looking forward to speaking English in a French accent the entire time...a la inspector cluseau.

.Here's two quick movie reviews
Away We Go:

Loved Maya Rudolph.Took me a while to get into it, but once I did, fantastic.stroller scene is a gem.

Up!

What is it with Pixar and "cute" fat people?

Grandpa Boris Caption Contest

We need Grandpa Boris' wisdom now more than ever. WWGBD?

Noone ever comments on this blog, but maybe a few brave souls will play screenwiter for the next zinger from Boris' chapped lips.....

TABLET: The New Jewish Read

The good people over at Nextbook have launched an online magazine of sorts with the chisl-icious title "Tablet" -- check it out. The style is clean -- more texty than photo-heavy and relaxing on the eyes. But if you stare at it too long it becomes white fire on black fire.

A Special in the Jewish Week

The New York paper The Jewish Week is running a piece I penned about the last two years of my professional life. (has it been that long?)

Here goes:



Reaching Birthright Alums: The Follow-Up Diet
by Rabbi Daniel Brenner
Special To The Jewish Week

Shimshon Shoshani, the man tapped by Prime Minister Netanyahu to steer Israel’s educational system back on track, is about as direct and honest a critic as you can find. A year and a half ago, when I was being initiated into the Birthright Israel world that he guided during his highly successful term as CEO, he felt that it was his duty to give me some blunt advice.

I sat in his Jerusalem office, drank some tea with him, and after we exchanged a few words in Hebrew he looked me in the face and he stated in clear English:

“Mr. Brenner, do not build another bureaucracy.”

It was quite a challenge. As the new head of Birthright Israel’s post-programming
for alumni of the free Israel trip for 18- to 26-year-olds (now dubbed Birthright Israel NEXT), I had been given the task of reaching out to more than 200,000 young adults, the vast majority of whom do not associate with Jewish communal life or even know what Jewish communal life might offer them. It was also clear to me that the existing Jewish organizations were struggling to reach, let alone engage, this demographic, and in most cases were actually turning them off from further involvement. To add to this, even our own organizational communication abilities were hampered. (Twenty-somethings change their e-mails and their addresses every 18 months or so.) Could we have a call center in Bangalore try to reach them all by leaving 200,000 messages on their cell phones? What would the message be? Could our small staff ever follow up with them?

So I cut a deal. I told Shoshani that all I wanted was to place one full-time professional informal educator in every major U.S. city. I can’t say that he was enthusiastic about the idea. But he didn’t kibosh it altogether, and so (with the generous help of the Jim Joseph Foundation and the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Foundation) the pilot program took off.

Now, one year in, we’ve learned a few things about how to reach and engage some 200,000 young Jewish adults without building a bureaucracy. How? We placed young, full-time directors in five cities (Chicago, Denver, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Miami) and watched what unfolded. Operating without the overhead of shiny new buildings, these directors deployed a volunteer team of fellows — young leaders who had been selected and trained to initiate private gatherings — and they all got to work. They generally eschewed big social events, instead crafting small gatherings for 15 to 30 people. In this way, a volunteer staff was able to facilitate and support peer-driven events.

What did they do? Hebrew classes, cooking expositions, blanket making for a homeless shelter, hiking in a state park, visiting a nursing home, getting an update on Israel’s elections, celebrating Shabbat — the types of gatherings were diverse and brought in diverse crowds. The directors responded quickly to economic trends, partnering with local Jewish vocational services and employment agencies to help young adults navigate the job market. They also connected to Jewish cultural events, Israel events, and other local happenings. Within months, they had hundreds of people talking about Birthright Israel NEXT in their cities. We expect that as this momentum continues, these leaders will, for the first time, involve tens of thousands of young adults in their own Jewish communities outside our original five major cities. (To find out how this will spill over into existing communities, please get back to me in about five years.)

Second, we learned that the best of our online projects can result in intimate, in-person contact. It was our hunch that home hospitality and home cooking can be central to Jewish life even in a socially mobile and digital generation. So in the past year, Birthright Israel NEXT (through the generosity of Michael Steinhardt) has sponsored over 2,700 Shabbat dinners in private homes. All the hosts registered online, created Web pages, and opened their actual doors to an average of 14 guests. That is more than 40,000 dinner attendees in less than a year.

Third, we learned that there is a great thirst for Jewish content. While great educational programs and resources do exist, young adults do not know where to take the first steps to connect with them, and the work of leading young adults comfortably into the inner circle of Jewish education is just beginning. It is rather ironic that through a program that offers a free trip to Israel, young adults are now interested in the National Yiddish Book Center. But if you happened to be in Amherst recently, you would have found a busload of Birthright Israel alumni engaged in dialogue with Aaron Lansky, the center’s founder, and other scholars.

Have we reached all 200,000 Birthright Israel alumni? Not yet. But in the past year, we did involve over 60,000 young adults in our programs and are expanding that number each day.

During this time of cutbacks, when many organizations are going on diets to tighten the belts, I’m glad that we started our work with a svelte strategy. I thank Shimshon Shoshani for his advice and wish him luck as he takes on a truly daunting and heroic task.

Rabbi Daniel Brenner is the executive director of Birthright Israel NEXT.