First 31 Days, 31 Ideas; Now 28 Days, 28 Ideas

Daniel Sieradsky is an interdisciplinary artist and documentarian investigating post-normative forms of Jewish cultural expression. He is Director of Technology for Repair the World, former Director of Digital Media for JTA News and founding publisher of the pioneering blog Jewschool.
For January of 2010, he blogged a daily idea for how technology could help the Jewish people in a series 31 Days, 31 Ideas. It is fascinating reading and I hope to see many of those ideas. Now, he is back as part of a February series (this time with partners JTA & The Fundermentalist, the Forward and its Sisterhood Blog, eJewish Philanthropy, Jewcy, Jewschool, the Jewish Federations of North America and 31 Days, 31 Ideas, a project of Daniel Sieradski) will together publish 28 ideas from 28 Jewish thinkers. I can't wait to see what they come up with. The first idea is for Jewish media to cooperate and cross-link, creating Jewish media mashups.

I challenge any of the students (or campus professionals) reading this to try the same thing: come up with a new idea for campus Jewish life each day. If you do, let me know.

Wildpeace by Yehuda Amichai

I share this poem that I saw posted on Jewschool. I will be away the next week at an IJS retreat. Please do not take a lack of posts or Facebook response as ignoring the situation in Gaza.

Shabbat shalom, Rabbi Bruce

Wildpeace
Yehuda Amichai

Not the peace of a cease-fire
not even the vision of the wolf and the lamb,
but rather
as in the heart when the excitement is over
and you can talk only about a great weariness.
I know that I know how to kill, that makes me an adult.
And my son plays with a toy gun that knows
how to open and close its eyes and say Mama.
A peace
without the big noise of beating swords into ploughshares,
without words, without
the thud of the heavy rubber stamp: let it be
light, floating, like lazy white foam.
A little rest for the wounds - who speaks of healing?
(And the howl of the orphans is passed from one generation
to the next, as in a relay race:
the baton never falls.)

Let it come
like wildflowers,
suddenly, because the field
must have it: wildpeace.

Translated by Chana Bloch

New Take on the Holocaust

This year, Grammy award winning Israeli violinist Miri Ben-Ari andIsraeli rap/hip-hop star Kobi "Subliminal" Shimoni have co-produced a hip-hop music video expressing their sentiments on the Shoah. It is called "God Almighty When Will it End."

It is non-traditional and--for many--disturbing. In Israel, CD/Video was distributed by the thousands to students in schools, by recommendation, approval and blessing of -- amongst others --Professor Yehuda Bauer (Israel's leading historian on the Holocaust) and Rabbi BennyLau (son of Holocaust survivor and former Israeli Chief Rabbi Yisrael M eirLau). As highly traditional people, they both praised this genuine effort to make the message of the Holocaust relevant to a disconnected younger generation.

As the generation of survivors pass away and new generations grow up without the personal contact to these truth-tellers, it is important to examine new ways to transmit the Holocaust. Even if this is not the way I would have chosen, it is worth examination. May we continue to grapple with the memory of the Six Million victims and its impact on our humanity.

Rabbi Bruce

Much of the above text comes from an email distributed by Rabbi Daniel Bouskila of Sephardic Temple Tifereth Israel (Los Angeles)

As usual, there has been a number of blog posts about this including two (here and here) on jewschool.