My Beef
I am part of a liberal Jewish community back in Germany that is based around the MTV military chapel. We have not had a rabbi in years; to give you an idea, there currently are 1,426,713 active duty service members and another 1,259,000 in the reserves. There are about twelve rabbis in uniform, nine of which are orthodox.
My community hasn’t had a rabbi in years. The community has been pretty self-sufficient; we arranged for services on our own, contracted a non-trained cantor, had a ley leader represent us at the chaplains’ meetings. I invested a lot of my own time into this community, leading services when our cantor was gone, kashering the kitchen, keeping children entertained, clean-up duty, organizing services, going through checklists of what we did and did not need. While we weren’t many, we usually did okay – some people rotated through, but there was always a stable core to the community that was formed, in fact, by local civilians, not by service (wo)men or dependents.
As of last month, we have a rabbi again, an orthodox one. In one fell sweep, he has ripped any and all control over how we conduct services, how we organize situations, has completely changed times on when services are held, etc. According to those who I am in contact with, he is not exactly hostile towards the civilians, but not terribly welcoming either.
So, what inspired this? Well, as you all know, it’s Passover now. Usually our community organizes it and has a pretty grand old time. This year, the rabbi decided he needed to take things into his own hands despite the fact he would not be there. Instead of letting us do our normal thing, he imported a yeshiva student to conduct the service.
Our community has not had a rabbi for about ten years. This means ten Passover seders we managed to conduct on our own. What did he think we do before God sent us this divine message in form of Rabbi Jerkwad? Scratch our ape-like heads and chant “Ugga!” like heathens?
Christ on a cracker. If there is a God, then please, I would like for him to take this jackass back off our hands. I refuse to attend any services this man holds just because he is orthodox and I do not agree with orthodox Judaism. For all I know, he might very likely be segregating the community by gender and because he’s orthodox, he is sure to believe women are not allowed to touch the Torah. Fuck this shit.
Sophia Marsden said,
April 10, 2009 at 4:20 pm
Imagine how the Orthodox must have felt all that time when they didn’t have a rabbi…
vocisexmachina said,
April 10, 2009 at 5:16 pm
The orthodox Jews went to the conservative German synagogue – ours was the only liberal community for miles and miles. And since their services were all conducted in Hebrew, there wasn’t a language issue.