Jewish

Book Review: If All the Seas Were Ink by Ilana Kurshan

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This book is the ultimate in Jewish #MotherCulture. It is meta Mother Culture, an inspirational and fascinating story of the process of Mother Culture within one Jewish woman in Jewish texts.

If All the Seas Were Ink by Ilana Kurshan

This is the story of Kurshan learning Daf Yomi over the course of about seven and a half years. YEARS. That’s dedication, even before you add in the three children she had in that time.

Kurshan wasn’t a mother when she began her Talmud journey. In fact, her journey was precipitated by her divorce from her first husband. Things were hard, and this helped her through and through all the hard times that came after that.

“Mother Culture” is not a process just for mothers. The way I see it, it’s just more important to encourage in mothers because mothers are the first people to stop their self-education because they’re so busy educating little people. And because the society around us tells us that we should sacrifice ourselves at every turn. If we’re doing something for ourselves, for our own benefit, society says that is selfish and harms our children. Mothers are an at-risk group, in a sense. It is so easy, and so culturally encouraged, to lose ourselves. And so we let ourselves atrophy.

And what could be more “selfish” than something that takes a significant amount of time, daily, for more than seven years?? How many women do you know who are comfortable committing to a daily practice for seven years? I know I don’t feel like I could because what will my life be like then?, I barely have the time now, sure the afternoon is free now but will it be in three months, I could make it work for a little while but what about when the rest of my family when the newness wears off… I could write excuses all day long to not sign up for a seven year program! But really, it’s not for seven years. It’s for today. Maybe tomorrow. Take one day at a time.

We adults, even us mothers, are “born persons,” as Mason would say. Our education, our enjoyment, our growth matters. Simply because we are people separate from our partners and children. Some in our culture try to make a “loophole” for mothers to do such “selfish” things for ourselves like sleep, exercise, and read books, but it’s such a backhanded permission: “your growth benefits your children directly” or “you can take care of yourself so that you’re less snappy at your family.” It’s still always couched in terms of other people’s needs, not ours.

Well guess what. Your needs matter, and your needs are rarely at odds with your family’s. Your needs are just as important as your children’s, and all of you deserve (and have the responsibility to) continue growing and challenging yourself every day. I’m writing this just as much for myself as for any of you. I need to hear it too.

If starting Daf Yomi is something that interests you, you don’t even need to understand Hebrew or Aramaic to learn something. For about a month (sadly only a month), I listened to a really nice podcast that summarizes the day’s Daf Yomi in 5-6 minutes: 5 Minute Daf with Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld. I still check in from time to time, and this is where I’ll start if I come back to this practice. But don’t worry, I have plenty of other practices keeping me busy right now!

So what are you doing for you?

Book Review: If All the Seas Were Ink

I’m going to lay it all out here: I loved this book. It’s one of my favorite books of the year, and the year is only half over and I read a lot of books.

If All the Seas Were Ink is a pleasure.

I don’t read much fiction and even fewer memoirs, but this was just a damn good story. Sure, it happened to a real person, but this felt like a great fiction read. I stayed up all night to finish, and I rarely do that since having babies. Ironically, I knew I would like this book because she started by explaining that it was simply the story as she experienced it, and that no one could write an objective memoir. That kind of intellectual honesty and attempt at kindness to the people in her memoir is unusual and much appreciated. (Whether anyone should write a memoir…or a blog…that involves speaking about other people is a question I’ve long struggled with.)

But why would I classify this book as Mother Culture?

This isn’t just a memoir about one woman’s divorce after making aliyah. It’s really more about her relationship with the Talmud. Yep, the Talmud. Post-divorce, she accidentally falls into learning Daf Yomi, the daily study of Talmud.

As someone less than experienced with the Talmud, this book was such a pleasurable way to get a kind of overview of the Talmud and some common and less-common stories from it. I would call this a living book for the Talmud. (If the concept of a “living book” is new to you, check out this podcast episode!)

I admit, it inspired me to do a little Daf Yomi myself. It only lasted about a month, but that’s a month of learning I wouldn’t have otherwise done. Nothing too crazy, especially as someone who is only a beginner learner of Talmud. I found a podcast with a 5-6 minute summary of each day’s daf (page): 5-Minute Daf Yomi with Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld. I continue to listen here and there, and maybe saying this aloud will make me take it more seriously. I really need to take my limmud (religious education) more seriously overall. It just gets so frustrating when my skills aren’t to the same level I can do in English with so many other topics. No adult likes feeling like a first grader again :/

But this book gave me back some of my passion for limmud, which has helped me stand up to that discomfort more often. It was an encouraging, enlightening, and engaging read. Definitely check it out!

The Rise of Nontraditional Homeschoolers

Homeschooling is just for families like the Duggars, right?

There’s a grain of truth to that: the modern homeschooling world has largely been run by white, middle/upper-class religiously and politically conservative Christian families, most located in the suburbs and rural areas. And the perception is that those families are specifically evangelical Christians who don’t believe in evolution.

But things are changing.

The homeschooling world is becoming very diverse, in every sense of the term: racial, religious, socio-economic, more dads. (I was surprised to find and meet so many Catholics and other “high Church” folks, but I don’t know whether they’ve always been there or that group is also on the upswing.)

I’ve found it interesting how so many people speak of homeschooling in terms of a division between “secular/atheist” and “Christian.” Because there are many people left out there, including our family! I think it’s problematic that we are basically forced to group everything as either “secular” or “Christian,” when it’s really a division of “Christian vs. not-Christian.” I’m not really secular, but that’s the group I fall under in this false dichotomy we’ve created for reasons that seem unclear and are probably a fluke of history in a post-Scopes Trial world.

I have seen an unfortunate number of negative comments against non-Christian homeschoolers and blindly racist comments because, as is now my favorite analogy, “fish can’t see the water they swim in.” I hope that as the homeschool world diversifies and increases, we’ll all learn from each other and create materials that allow each of us to provide the education that our families need. Not every parent is a crazy researcher/DIY person like me or the five million other bloggers out there. As more voices come forward, it will become easier to find the voice that resonates with you, but it’ll also become harder to find them in the ocean of voices. Ain’t that how it always is? A double-edged sword.

People chose to homeschool for any number of reasons, though most people assume it’s only a religious choice (though religion may still be a factor of course). Military families are a large subgroup of homeschoolers for obvious reasons: they move a lot. Black families are increasingly choosing to homeschool because of institutional racism, racist bullying, and low educational expectations for black children. Jewish families choose to homeschool for cultural reasons just as much as religious ones, and it can be hard to separate the two. Urban and rural families are choosing to homeschool because their local public school is underperforming. Families from different ethnic backgrounds (including Jewish families) may want history and foreign language curricula that reflect their own heritage. Families with special needs and/or gifted kids want their kids to have more individualized support or may think that the current educational model doesn’t meet their kids’ needs. I’d bet that a year from now, we’ll see articles about parents who began homeschooling now because of safety concerns. The choice of how to educate your child, if you choose to wade into it, is deeply complicated. We all choose and weigh factors differently, as we should. Al pi darko, train your children according to their way. Just as we’re seeing a growth in demand for Montessori Jewish dayschools, we will Gdwilling see an increase in demand for all educational choices and an increased respect for making those choices.

There’s no wrong answer for why people homeschool. And no one makes that call thoughtlessly. It must be actively chosen and sacrificed for in our society. That deserves respect, even if you disagree.

Here are some articles to read about how homeschooling is changing!

The Rise of Homeschooling Among Black Families | The Atlantic

Homeschooling Without God | The Atlantic (a lot of unnecessary religion slamming rather than statistics, but you get the point and an insider’s perspective)

Homeschooling: A Growing Trend | Jewish Action (but predicts that it will always be small in the orthodox community)

Choosing Homeschooling | Chabad.org

Homeschooling While Orthodox | Lilith Magazine

Homeschooled Jews Are a Minority Within a Minority | The Forward

Homeschooling: The Wave of the Future | Jewish Home LA

Book Review: The Complete Jewish Songbook for Children

Let’s just say it upfront: this is an excellent resource, especially if you’re new to Jewish songs.

I think my copy was supposed to come with a CD, but it didn’t, and I guess I forgot to follow up on that. I did buy it used, but… On the other hand, from what I remember reading in the Amazon reviews, the CD only offers a partial clip of the song. So they recommended YouTube anyway to get a full version of the song.

I admit, the book looks intimidating. It’s actual sheet music. I could read sheet music…for a flute…in the sixth grade. There’s no way I can sing from it. So the value of this book isn’t in the sheet music for me, at least not at this point in my life.

It’s the words. The lyrics.

And words it has. It includes transliteration, Hebrew text, and an English translation. You couldn’t ask for more. (Of course, always take translations with a grain of salt, especially when poetry is involved.) Depending on the space considerations for each individual song, the words are often spread across two pages. Transliteration is written under the notes on the sheet music, which I find difficult to read but better than nothing. The Hebrew text and translation are in blocks below or to the side. Here is Adon Olam as an example:

I can’t hear words in songs to save my life. I can only sing along with a song AS it is being played, and I will have zero memory of the words at all other times. In fact, I cannot sing Shalom Aleichem unless someone else is singing it. Despite singing it every week for a decade or so, I still only know the words as the song is actually happening. And certainly not the order of the verses! I’m always a fraction of a second behind the group because my ear has to hear it first. And there’s probably song mumbling instead of real words, depending on the song. I think I pull it off well, except now I’ve told you my dirty little Shabbos secret. Whatever the cause, this is a limitation I have to manage as best I can. Music is not my strength. I will probably never be “good” at it, but I can definitely improve and already have with the help of this book and YouTube.

This book helps so much. I have the words right in front of my face, and all the songs are located in one place. I can lead our “davening” in Morning Time with only this one book and YouTube on my phone. So far I’ve found everything I’ve gone looking for. I’m sure there’s something from the davening that isn’t there (maybe some of the Psalms?), but it’s a very comprehensive collection.

Except. (My favorite part. What can I say, I’m easily amused.) Despite being called “The Complete Jewish Songbook for Children,” there is actually a volume 2! Note that this book doesn’t say anything about being volume 1. They made a “complete” songbook and then realized it’s not complete. I want to buy the second volume just to see what they could have possibly forgotten!

Since people often care about where authors are coming from, this book is published by the Reform movement (by the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, which is now called the Union for Reform Judaism). I don’t think the denomination affects the book, but it may affect which tunes are printed in the sheet music, since sometimes different tunes are more common in different places. But they do include multiple tunes for several songs, so maybe it’s not a problem after all. And while I don’t think this makes the book any less acceptable to an orthodox parent, there are a lot of English lyric songs. Many are hokey for sure, but that’s kid songs for you. Here’s a less-than-hokey English-y song.

How to Use It

Now, the nitty gritty. How do I actually use this book?

I use it in our Morning Time with my toddler (and technically the baby). With songs, I almost always start with YouTube, and I use YouTube to learn the song. Just because of how my brain works, I prefer videos that show the lyrics as they are sung. No music videos here. Transliterated videos are best for me to get my sea legs, but I’ve done it from Hebrew-only too, it just takes longer. We – meaning I – sing from the video every morning (except Shabbat, when I often skip the song altogether if I don’t know it well enough from memory).

Even when I know the tune and some of the words (like Adom Olam, the first song I tackled), I’m just weak at tying the words to the song and building the memory of it. That’s just not how my working memory works. On the other hand, learning a song to a bracha I already had memorized (Modeh Ani) took only a couple of days, though admittedly it’s much shorter.

With Adon Olam, I sang along with the video, as many words as I could, 2-3 times in a row. It seemed like a waste to get my footing in the song by the end and then stop. Eventually, as I got more comfortable with it and could sing a majority of the words along, I reduced to once a day. As I get more comfortable with the song, I begin shifting to singing along with written Hebrew lyrics if I’m using transliteration.

Useful sidenote: I’m a very slow Hebrew reader, which is why I like transliteration even after all these years. But this practice with song videos has made my brain significantly faster with Hebrew. I’m still weak, but maybe after a year or two of this I’ll be half-decent!

Where’s the book in all this? It’s coming. Once I’ve built this auditory foundation through YouTube, I begin singing from this book. I use book darts (these are the awesome ones I use that are pictured above on Adon Olam) to mark the page for easy finding. When we reach that part of Morning Time, I flip open the book and sing the song right from the lyrics written on the page. Only Adom Olam still requires the book, but I can (and do) spend half the song watching the toddler like a hawk instead of looking at the page. I always keep my finger alongside the text so I can find my place again more easily. One day, I’ll move beyond needing the book’s help too, but for this stage, the Complete Jewish Songbook is an excellent resource. And given the nature of the musical education I need to give my children, this book will be dog-eared. I was hesitant to spend the money, but it’s worth even the full price if you feel like songs are difficult for you. There are few books I can imagine getting so much use out of, year after year.

Songs I’ve learned with the toddler so far, with links to the YouTube video I used if I used one:

Adom Olam
Modeh Ani (this is an earworm, be prepared to sing it all day)
The Four Questions/Mah Nishtana
Dayenu
Maoz Tzur
V’Ahavta (from the Shema) is our current project

Here’s about half the table of contents:

Book Review: Raising a Child with Soul by Slovie Jungreis-Wolff

As central as children and family are in the Jewish world, there really isn’t that many parenting books. I was even surprised how few books there are on the halacha related to raising children, especially babies. (There are a fair number of books on chinuch, as in teaching Jewish law and practice to your children, but those have seemed to me often limited to just ritual practice matters and often skewed toward male children, based on perusal in bookstores. Having girls, I haven’t bothered to buy any yet but probably will soon enough.) But when I asked around for the halachic considerations of having a newborn, the response was overwhelmingly:

Friend/Facebook: What do you mean? What’s there to know?

Me: Like halacha of kids. I’ve heard people talking about how you need to change diapers differently on Shabbat. Rules for how to sort toys to clean them up. Feeding meat and milk to kids. Can you wash breastmilk or formula bottles in a meat dishwasher? C’mon. How do you not see a million questions here?

Friend/FB: I never thought about that. It seemed obvious. / I just did what I had to do and didn’t ask questions I didn’t want answers to. / I just did what my mom or friends do.

Color me shocked. We analyze everything. Everything. Every detail of life. Why did I see so little discussion of halacha with kids? There are some books, mostly older. (I don’t recommend them – ask your posek/mom/friends. Way too many issues involved, and the books just give the most stringent answer based on assumptions that aren’t always articulated clearly.)

There’s a similar lack of books about parenting Jewishly, though there are more coming out all the time, mostly from the non-orthodox perspective, which I think is interesting. I have several Jewish parenting books I’m going to be reading over the next year or so, so look forward to more reviews! But let’s start with an excellent one: Raising a Child with Soul: How Time-Tested Jewish Wisdom Can Shape Your Child’s Character.

Raising a Child with Soul by Slovie Jungreis-Wolff

But what if you’re not Jewish? Is this still worth a read? Sure, why not? Given the nature of the parenting publishing world, I read a lot of parenting books explicitly written from a Christian perspective (heck, most of the Charlotte Mason community writes from this perspective). I’ve learned a great deal from them. You take what works and leave what doesn’t, and that’s true for every parenting book we encounter. Personally, I find it interesting to read parenting books that present cultures very different from my own, whether Christian, Dutch, or French. (Those are the groups I’ve read the most about.) Seeing common questions from a very different perspective of your own and with very different justifications or assumptions, you can analyze your own perspective and assumptions with a fresh eye.

I was so happy to discover this book at the library. I knew about the author’s mother, Rebbetzin Jungreis from the Hineni Center in Manhattan. When I was in my first year of law school and not actively affiliated with a community, I began watching Shalom TV since my roommates had cable (my first time with cable in 10 years at the time!). I was floored to find a Jewish channel on tv! Each Shabbat morning, I would watch a parsha shiur by Rebbetzin Jungreis on Shalom TV, and it was a major part of what pulled me back into shul and my conservative conversion (affectionately referred to as Conversion 1.0). When I learned that her daughter had written a book on parenting, I knew I wanted to read it. But at the time, I didn’t have any kids! Then of course I forgot about it.

I highly recommend this book. I like that this book gives Jewish sources and perspectives on the gentle parenting practices thankfully prominent today. But while still being authoritative and maintaining a clear distinction between parent and child, which I personally think is an important component of gentle parenting. There must be a foundation of respect of a parent, just because they’re the parent. While a child deserves respect as a born person, my home is still a benevolent dictatorship at the end of the day. She can’t understand every reason for the actions I take, and that’s ok and means I don’t always have to explain myself in the here and now. She’ll understand later. And while I’m happy to reconsider a situation based on new facts, I’m not trying to raise a lawyer who negotiates every decision. That’s not always a popular thing to say in the crunchy-ish groups I belong to, but my own life experience has shown that friend-based parenting isn’t a model I believe in.

And that’s also the model Charlotte Mason advocates. Both would argue that a child deserves a reason if they ask, but they also must be obedient regardless of whether they understand our reasoning or not. I believe both offered this excellent advice: if you tell your child to do something (and you shouldn’t overwield this power), and the child asks “why,” they can have an answer. But only after they’ve done what you asked. After they’ve obeyed quickly and cheerfully, they can come back to you for an answer and discussion. Funnily enough, they rarely come back because during the action, they magically remembered the reason you’ve explained to them 32 times before. It was usually just a stalling tactic. You’ve respected their request, respected their personhood by making reasonable requests in the first place, and also demanded the obedience that builds good character.

This book doesn’t explicitly say so (that I remember, but I remember hints at it), but Jewish parenting fulfills a key aspect of CM’s parenting advice: your child should understand that you too are bound by rules and must do the things you “ought” with quick and cheerful obedience just like they have to. Parents must obey Gd and the secular laws, just as a child must obey his parents. Few religious communities make that as clear to children as halachically-observant Jews. We have so many opportunities to model quick and cheerful obedience in our own behavior: “I’d really like a piece of cheesecake, but I just ate meat. I’ll have to wait three (or six or whatever) hours. Darn! Oh well. Wanna go read a book?”

The only downside of this book is that I didn’t connect well to the examples given. The author’s work is obviously primarily with very wealthy families. I’m not wealthy. It seemed that many of the parents were not orthodox like the author (and myself, though we are likely from very different orthodox communities), but I didn’t find that to be a barrier to connecting with the examples. Maybe that’s because I haven’t always been orthodox, but I think both orthodox and non-orthodox folks can connect with these examples.

On the other hand, I did have a hard time connecting to the example because I have different parenting practices than they do. I don’t (yet) have iPad and Disney World battles, and I hope that my parenting practices will nip most of those questions in the bud. For example, we’re not totally screen-free, but we’re close to it.

But I’d love to have summer home and international vacation problems. Hook me up!

Tl;Dr: Check it out, Raising a Child with Soul is definitely worth a read. Very practical and presents a different model of authoritative parenting than I’ve seen before, though many writers today tackle that fine line between permissive and authoritarian parenting. If you struggle with that line between being a crunchy parent and a traditional American parent, this one will speak to both sides of you and harmonize the best parts. If you lean toward one side or the other, you might benefit from a different viewpoint that’s still closer to the middle of the parenting spectrum.

Need More Pesach Resources? PJ Library Will Hook You Up!

It’s down to the wire, folks. Pesach is coming! Did you get so caught up in prep that you forgot to plan the fun? Check out PJ Library’s Passover page for songs, games, ideas, recipes, and anything else you might need to enrich Pesach for your kids!

PJ Library | Jewish Holidays: Passover

Book Review: Hava Nagila by Sheldon Feinberg

This book is about the most perfect Jewish living book I can imagine. It’s very short, and a quick read. But O.M.G. this story, y’all. I can’t even find this book on Goodreads, but there are a couple of used copies on Amazon. I doubt it’s in print, but it really should be. It’s a book not written by an expert on Jewish music. Just a student of the subject who really loves his teacher’s work, and every ounce of that passion and love comes across in the pages. I was sucked in and couldn’t put it down.

I heard on the Jewish Charlotte Mason Facebook group that there was a great children’s book about Hava Nagila and the story of its creation. I quickly found only one book titled Hava Nagila in our library system and ordered it, not at all considering whether there might be multiple books on this topic. (I’m going to blame that obvious oversight on newborn sleep deprivation – this was in the very early days.) It’s not a children’s book, though it could certainly be read to children. In fact, I think this could be a great inspirational story for elementary and middle school-aged kids.

I’m recommending it as #MotherCulture, but I think it’s a great read for anyone Jewish. (It probably requires too much prior knowledge for me to recommend it to non-Jews as a general rule.)

In a nutshell: the song Hava Nagila, you know, the most famous Jewish song on earth, was written by a 12 year old boy. TWELVE YEARS OLD. As a homework assignment!! And was not at all recognized for it. It spread through his class and to their families and then to the shuls of those families, slowly all over the world. It was generally attributed then (and now) as a “traditional” song, but it’s not. He created it around the turn of the century. The only downside of this book is that there’s almost no mention of years, especially in the early parts of the story. So I could only estimate the timeline as the story progressed, which I didn’t like, but I was willing to forgive because the story is so good.

Moshe Nathanson went on to a great body of work as a Jewish educator and cantor in the flagship synagogue of the Reconstructionist movement in Manhattan. He profoundly influenced American Jewish education by training hundreds (was it thousands? I forget) of Jewish day school teachers in Jewish music in the early 20th century and even wrote the book on Jewish music education that was used at the time. (Is it still used? I don’t know.) He even taught my father-in-law at his yeshiva as part of a traveling Jewish music educators program! Yet my FIL had never heard any of these accomplishments, just that he was a talented cantor and teacher. He must have been as humble as the book author asserts, since he could have capitalized on his connection to Hava Nagila, but even today, many (most?) people don’t know it’s a modern song with a known composer.

Oh yeah. He also wrote the song we use for bentching. Another song always attributed to the ether as a “traditional” tune. No big deal.

And there’s still more to the story. Check it out. Really.

I’m not normally the “omg!!!11!” exclamation point person, but this book made me one. I highly recommend it for a quick, easy, and downright enjoyable read. It even gave my cold, dark heart the warm fuzzies.

A Free Pesach Handicrafts Guide

Ms. Mason advocates that all handicrafts should be made for a purpose, for practical use. No glitter-for-the-sake-of-glitter around here:

“Points to be borne in mind in children’s handicrafts are: a) that they should not be employed in making futilities such as pea and stick work, paper-mats and the like; b) that they should be taught slowly and carefully what they should do; c) that slipshod work should not be allowed; d) and, that, therefore, the children’s work should be kept well within their compass.” (Vol. 1, p315-316)

In fact, you should (in general) lump together the concepts of “crafts” and life skills. And CM often had her students make handicrafts for the express purpose of being donated to the needy.

Children’s book publisher Kar-Ben has released a free digital mini-ebook: Passover Crafts for Little Hands, which has several presumably-useful crafts. It includes:

Seder Plate
Matzah Cover
Tie-Dye Afikomen Cloth
Matzah Tray
Haggadah Bookmark
Four Question Reminder

Or maybe you’d like to make your own if your kids are too young or “too old” for these projects! Know someone or a charity who would appreciate one of these as a gift?