Privacy Disclaimer: Google Analytics Installed

On all of the other websites I manage, I have installed Google Analytics; especially within the last year. You see, the previous version of their script used to really slow down your website on page loads and the like. However the new version hardly impacts your browsing experience. So I decided to also install it on this blog (although my other blogs do not have the script installed).

So as a visitor to this blog, this is what you have the right to know about the information I am tracking:

1) The geographic location of site visitors and the duration of their visit.
2) Sources of traffic to this blog; including referring sites
3) A report on "page clicks" which is basically which links the visitors to the site follow
4) Exit and entry pages
5) Technical information, such as IP, browser, operating system, screen resolution
6) Search terms and engines that led visitors to my blog

Hopefully this information is not seen as frightful or discouraging. My guess is that most webmasters collect the same information (especially since this can be done for free); but just simply never tell you about it.

So *Can* Jews Get This Happy When They Give Their M'aser?

One Bad Apple Doesn't Spoil the Whole Bunch (cue in the Osmonds please)

One thing that Miami is woefully short on is good news stories. It is always nice to see one (when it does pop up) and even nicer when the story is being written about Jews. Meet Leonard Abess, Jr., a Jewish banker who sold his lot at a hefty profit and is sharing it -- with his employees! And this is not the Jewish version of a X-mas bonus either. We are talking about $60 million dollars being split about 471 ways (to account for all current employees and some former employees). I don't believe they received equal shares (the final amount factored in years of service) but if those shares were equal, you would be looking at checks at the tune of $127,388.54 a person. Not too shabby for an "employee appreciation gift". (See the full article here)

Sadly the amount of Mr. Abess's gift is dwarfted by the amount that Bernie Madoff squandered away. But it is a wonderful kiddush Hashem for the Jewish people [to the non-Jewish world around them] to have prominent, successful Jews do things such as this.

People of the Book

Well, it has been a bit longer than a week since I received my Bachelor's degree. To my surprise, the feeling is completely different from when I received my Associate's degree. And even though I held jobs in the past that normally would employ 4-year college graduates, there is a difference between having to convince someone that you are qualified and have some sort of verifiable proof that you are qualified. Maybe it's also a different feeling because I have a job landed (B"H) and I also got accepted into a graduate school program. Now only a handful of people in my family graduated from college and even fewer attempted graduate school. So this is a real milestone for not only me, but my family as well.

I went into this past Shabbos with those warm fuzzy feelings of accomplishment and having good news to share. While it is true that nothing really changed about that, there was a conversation over shalosh suedas about shidduchim. Yes, the topic that when people talk about, they rarely are singing its praises (for better or for worse). The mainstay of the conversation focused around abuse; and how important it is to have the people involved in shidduchim divuldge any information that may highlight issues with anger management, mental instability, and dysfunction in the family. As the conversation went on, I mused about the women who find themselves in abusive marriages. Why do they think so lowly of themselves to put up with it? Is being married more important than the safety of you or your children?

So how does this relate to being a female college graduate? Well, a comment was made to me that intelligent, successful women can be intimidating to a man. This is not just in the frum community; but it is especially a noticeable issue in the frum community. I laughed and said that this is just what I would want to be hearing right before getting ready to enroll in graduate school. However I feel that these people (who are my friends) are looking to give me an accurate portrayal of the frum world; before my entire destiny is intertwined with it. They want to make sure I realize what I am getting into. But what they don't realize is that the seed to pursue education was implanted into me long before the seed that started my growth towards Judaism. It just has not be a very steady, progressive path; unlike my experience with Judaism.

Very early on I learned that the Jews are "The People of the Book". And it is no secret that most American Jewish families are big proponents of higher education. Couple that education with an incredibly entreprenueral spirit and you have quite a few successful Jews who have funded the foundation of our present day Jewish communities. However in the frum community, the rules seem to change a bit for women. Not that frum women are not encouraged to go to college. But they do usually limit their majors and focus on future professions that pay well; but are flexible and can be done part-time if needed. Now from a practicial standpoint, this makes perfect sense. However from a social standpoint, it causes an issue for women who have chosen a different path. I actually asked on a list-serv of frum women if there were any MBAs there (in order to sniff out a mentor). I believe their was only one.

I can only imagine what other single women who desire to convert [to Orthodox Judaism] do in order to reconcile their professional life/career with their newfound lifestyle. In the beginning, I was lucky in that I worked for a frum company; because G-d knows, I was not at a point professionally where I would have been able to negotiate the drastic changes a frum lifestyle demands. B"H, my new job has great hours and is generous with personal time off. But I do need to be "on" and be there through thick and thin. When I am in the office, I do an awesome job because it is all I need to think about, all I need to worry about. How it would work if I had children or anyone else to be concerned about I really do not know. But I took the position based off of how my current life is and what I am -- not the "what-ifs" of the future.

It really makes me ponder how or if things will change once I earn my MBA (bezras Hashem)? I actually like working in higher education; but those jobs are not a dime a dozen and can often times be in locals far away from Jewish communities. Also there is no shame in being a stay at home mother, but when you have an education that cost almost $100K, is that still feasible? Still overall, I feel better today about my ability to support a Torah observant life than I did 5 years ago. If anything, I feel as if I'm in a position to assert myself professionally and say, "Hey, this is how I will work and these are my terms." What I have to offer now is a 'take it or leave it' sort of deal.

fire, fire....

Power By Numbers

I am not the biggest fan of the Jerusalem Post, but Mrs. Hausman pointed out this article as one of interest. I applaud Rabbi Rosenblum for saying this and find that there is too little opposition raised to those who raise these detrimental, anti-Torah "solutions" for Am Yisrael. Of course I am referring to the "power by numbers" game; where the Jewish people start internalizing the feeling that we need to take whatever we/they can get. It is very true that quantity does not yield quality; and it will actually hurt the Jewish people to take on loads of insincere converts and to brand every person with a bit of Jewish ancestry as one of the tribe. Now a halachaic Jew should be lovingly (and carefully) reintroduced into Yiddishkeit; there is the responsibility to bring in lost members of the family. But the responsibility is two-fold, and a certain level of respect for Judaism should be developed to attain the distinction of becoming a baal teshuva.

Many people across all Jewish denominations voice disdain about the difficulty of the process of converting to Judaism. Very rarely though do you hear them give any concrete examples of why they feel they way that they do. Perhaps they have lost sight of the fact that Judaism is not a faith that wants outsiders to come in so that they can "see the light" per se. I may be one of the few Jewishly-inclined Black people who does not feel like we are doing the world any favor by going into Uganda and converting the Abayudaya. This is not because they do not desire to be Jews or that they do not believe in what they are doing. However the very real issue is what the understanding and committment to Judaism is on an individual level. And apparently, this still seems to be a point of contention among the Abayudaya.

On the other hand, it seems that there may be a slight aire of "the Jews would rather not do conversions" to the [original] article. True a lot of this could be directed at the fact that many conversions are substandard. However this has the danger of spilling over onto sincere converts who really do find that Torah observance fits them like a glove, even though they were born to non-Jewish mothers. Unfortunately I recently heard from a very young child that "goyim have no neshamas". I think it's pretty safe to say that the child did not come to this conclusion all alone and evidently there are some pretty strong messages being sent out there to try to strongly designate "them vs. us". And it is true, a core aspect of Judaism (to loosely quote "The Believer") is to separate things. In fact, the very word קודש (holy) means to "be separate". But this separateness does not mean superior or inferior. Shrimp cocktails are not inferior to slices of gefilte fish; they are simply not permitted to Jews. Similary it is not that married gentile women are so immoral for walking around with their hair uncovered. But they are not in tune with the specific holiness allotted to certain states of being; nor are they expected to be. Without the Torah to regulate their lives, how could they be? However, this does not make gentiles inferior.

I liken the Torah to electric current. You can live perfectly fine without direct benefit or belief in utilizing it (like the Amish). You can also be an unsuitable conduit for it, like [unpure] water. However when properly applied and utilized through the correct mediums, it can be a treasure. Now when mankind first started to utilized electric current, we did not use it for all the things we use it for today. Converts to Judaism are like new inventions who make wonderful use of what is already there. Similarly, you have the most pointless, and even destructive, new things that are utilizing electricity nowadays. Just like you have "converts" who are not tapping into the Torah properly and become an overall drain on the Jewish people.

Assimilation is a very real problem, but the solutions are elusive. However so many of the proposals just do not seem "right". Propaganda against non-Jews does not seem right; tasteless pop-culture initiatives like Heeb magazine do not seem right; mass conversions are certainly not right. In fact the back and forth arguments over the standards of coversion seem devoid of one important piece of the puzzle -- which is personal motivation. Is the convert-to-be attracted to the Torah or to the idea of being a Jew? Of course, we must keep in mind that this "idea" varies so much from situation to situation. It seems that if the conduit is good, and if the source is good, you end up with a praiseworthy result. Any weakness on either end is bound to cause problems. I am pretty sure that even the most "evangelical" of Jews out there could agree on that.

A Real Shidduch Crisis

Last week, an article was brought to my attention entitled, "The Marriage Question: Non-White Jews Wonder If They Will Find Spouses". With such a good title, I felt compelled to read the article. I was expecting little, but surprisingly, it was very good. Apparently Shoshana Kordova is accustomed to writing about hairy topic such as this and Jewish single mothers by choice. I could not find anything about her hashkafic background, but she seems pretty knowledgeable and sensitive to Torah observant Jews.

Although the overall tone of the article is not positive, I appreciated the fact that the author did not chalk up the problems that Black Jews face in shidduchim to overly-simplified Jewish racism or hypocrisy. Instead the focus is more so on the specific reasons which underlie the problem; lack of exposure and limited experience. However this "Jews are just racist" theme does come out a bit in the dialogues with the people being interviewed. For example there is an Adam Resnick who states that Black conversion [to Judaism] students have it the hardest. He qualifies this by saying that when people ask if a conversion student is romantically attached, they never inquire about the Black students (and my thoughts on that is if he recognizes this as a problem, why doesn't he suggest them himself then?).

But I find the personal accounts of Tashia Moore and Connie Singman to be invaluable. Here you have sufficient focus on the people who are directly affected by the subject of the article (as oppossed to an outsider assessing the situation). In fact Tashia's background is pretty similar to mine, in that she already starting identifying with Judaism from a young age. Then you go through a sort of "cultural rude awakening" when you step over into Orthodox Judaism and you have to reconcile the fact that you are not Jewish at all. And of course, even after you convert, there are some Jews where you will never be able to truly be a Jew (thankfully, they are declining in number). But the concerns of Tashia and Connie give a much needed voice to the other side of the coin. This is a case where the Orthodox Jewish community does not need a lecture on how racist or hypocritical they are. Instead, they just need to hear the voices of the fellow Jews-of-color. On a level that demonstrates that they are, in fact, part of the same family.

The article is not dated, but judging from the link, I would say it was written in 2001. A Google search for "Tashia Moore" today brought up this Facebook page, where it appears that she did eventually find a shidduch (if that is in fact her).