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Born in Brooklyn and raised in New York suburbs, Rabbi Ellen graduated at 19 from Brandeis University in Waltham, MA, and went on to earn a master’s degree from Stanford University. She then moved to Los Angeles and worked a number of editorial jobs in Los Angeles and New York before deciding to become a schoolteacher. While teaching English in Los Angeles Unified School District, Rabbi Ellen wrote and published her first two books: NO BIG DEAL, a novel for middle school kids, and EMBRACING THE STRANGER: Intermarriage and the Future of the American Jewish Community. In 1998, she edited THE JEWISH WOMAN'S BOOK OF WISDOM, a collection of short writings by Jewish women across several centuries.
By the mid-1990s, Rabbi Ellen was seeking answers to the question, “How can I transmit God’s covenant with the Jewish people without being a parent?” She decided to switch her career focus to Jewish institutional life. Impelled by deep involvement in her synagogue and participation in an elite Jewish chorus, Rabbi Ellen began to study synagogue music seriously and to work as a cantorial soloist. She also took classes in harmony, music theory, and conducting, and in May 2003, she earned a master’s degree in Judaic studies at the Los Angeles campus of Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion, acquiring a solid foundation in Bible, rabbinics, Jewish history, and Jewish philosophy. In June 2006, Rabbi Ellen completed the rigorous independent-study process sponsored by the American Conference of Cantors and Hebrew Union College’s School of Sacred Music to be cerrtified as a cantor. Rabbi Ellen served Temple Ner Tamid in Downey, CA as cantor for four years and also worked as a b’nai mitzvah tutor and freelance writer. In 2009, Rabbi Ellen joined the student body at Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in Wyncote, PA, becoming a full-time rabbinical student while continuing to work as a b’nai mitzvah tutor and officiant at weddings and funerals, adding experience as a nursing home and hospital chaplain. After ordination in June 2014, Rabbi Ellen decided to move to the Tidewater area, where her husband, Spencer Gill, grew up, to reach out to unaffiliated Jews and spiritual seekers with the joyous, progressive approach to Judaism she has experienced all her life and was privileged to develop in seminary. She lives in the Bayside section of Virginia Beach with Spencer and their mixed-breed pup, Cookie. |
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Timely Topics From Our Rabbi
A Modest Proposal:
Let’s Find a Gift-Giving Holiday Other Than Chanukah By Rabbi Ellen Jaffe-Gill It’s that happy, happy time of year when store windows call out “Happy Chanukah” in a blizzard of white, blue, silver, and gold right next to the “Merry Christmas” and “Season’s Greetings” banners, when menorahs are strung across boulevards after every third Santa-in-his-sleigh. And what could be wrong with that? After all, Chanukah is Jewish Christmas, isn’t it? That’s what most Americans think, and more than a few American Jews. They think that not so much because Chanukah falls close to Christmas but because its proximity to Christmas in a nation that has made Christmas a months-long obsession has inflated Chanukah into Christmas’s Jewish cousin, the kosher icing on the merchandising cake. I operate very happily in the dominant culture, but the way we celebrate Chanukah is such a massive cave-in that I think it’s time to put it in its proper place among Jewish observances. Chanukah is a minor holiday that commemorates the victory in 165 b.c.e. of outnumbered Jewish forces over the army of the oppressive Greco-Syrian empire that ruled Palestine at that time. It’s important enough for Hallel, psalms of praise, to be recited at services during its eight days and for a passage summarizing the Jews’ victory and praising God’s role in it to be added to the prayer of thanks in the central section of the service, and it merits special Torah and haftarah readings as well. Its rituals are lovely, its games fun, its songs delightful, and its signature foods way too yummy. But in no way does its prominence as a holiday begin to approach that of Christmas for Christians. Chanukah gets in line behind the High Holy Days; the three pilgrimage festivals, Pesach, Shavuot, and Sukkot, which are mandated by Torah; and the other two observances associated with books of the Bible, Purim and Tisha b’Av. The only thing Christmas and Chanukah have in common is their establishment near the winter solstice. Yet as far as most American Jews are concerned, Chanukah is a yearly focal point for Jewish identity. More American Jews light Chanukah candles than attend Yom Kippur services; only the Passover seder is a more popular Jewish observance. And that isn’t because the candles are pretty or the latkes are crisp or we’re proud of the Maccabees. Chanukah is a big hairy deal because it falls in December and we’re competing with Christmas. If the Jews had rededicated the Temple in Tammuz instead of Kislev, there wouldn’t be a single Jewish kid asking for a Chanukah bush or bragging to Gentile friends, “Yeah, well, I get presents for eight days!” While the giving of money at Chanukah has a long history, American Jews began Christmas-style gift-giving only after the practice of giving presents at Christmas took hold in this country, and that happened pretty late, not until the large wave of immigration from Germany during the mid-19th century. But once Christmas became the merchants’ delight, there was no turning back. As Christmas emerged from homes and churches into the public arena and liberal American Jews wove themselves into mainstream American life, Jewish parents found it increasingly difficult to fight the holiday’s seductiveness. They felt they needed to show and still need to show their kids that our holidays are just as colorful, just as tuneful, just as tasty, just as much fun, and just as joyous as Christmas. But we don’t need to give gifts at Chanukah to make Chanukah special. The story, the songs, the food, the lights are special enough. If we were to quit giving gifts at Chanukah, we’d no longer be telling our kids (and each other) that Chanukah is just as good as Christmas. We’d be saying that Chanukah is good, period, and there’s a world of difference between those two statements. Now I certainly would be Scroogewitz, not to mention un-American, if I suggested that Jews do without a gift-giving holiday altogether. Personally, I’d vote for Rosh Hashanah, a much more important holiday, and joyous in its own right — not to mention the birthday of the world. Or if the first of the Days of Awe seems too solemn for giving presents, what about Sukkot, a highly decorative holiday that celebrates God’s gift of the fall harvest after we emerge from the relative somberness of Yom Kippur? Or Shavuot, when we mark the giving of the greatest gift the Jewish people ever received: the Torah? I offer these alternatives because, heck, I like giving and receiving presents as much as the next person. I just think Chanukah is the wrong time to do it. My husband and I have this little tradition: on the eighth night of Chanukah, after we light all the candles and sing the blessings and put the chanukiah in the window, we step outside and look at it for a minute. It’s a beautiful sight. It doesn’t need tinsel. Don’t be afraid to ask for help Lately, there have been a few people in my life who have suffered physical trauma or emotional pain and didn’t let on until they’d been suffering quite a while. When I asked, “Why didn’t you let me know?” they gave the exact same response: “I didn’t want to bother you.” This would be followed by an exasperated exhalation on my part and a real or virtual hug. I used to be like that, not wanting to bother people with my problems. Then my husband contracted flesh-eating bacteria during a beach vacation in 2008 and almost lost part of a leg. All help extended was gratefully accepted: from airport personnel while getting him home to Los Angeles, from friends who sat with me into the night when he had surgery, from neighbors offering dog walks. When Spencer’s arrival home from the hospital coincided with the beginning of the High Holidays and I had to be at the temple when I was cantor, I reached out. Because almost all our friends were not only Jews but shulgoing Jews, I got my parents to drive out from Arizona to hang with Spencer over Rosh Hashanah. For erev Yom Kippur, Spencer’s best bud overcame all his phobias (illness, caretaking, neediness) to spend the evening in our condo, and the next day an Orange County pal gave up temple to stay for like ten hours. When I got home that night to break the fast, she greeted me with a plate of warm brisket. From then on, I made two promises: I would give help when asked, and I would ask for help as needed. So many people can’t do the latter. Has it been ever thus, that a high proportion of folks think it unseemly to ask for as little as a shoulder to cry on (while a smaller number not only need but demand rescue on a regular basis)? Is the unwillingness to reach out for support exacerbated in some way by the 24-hour news cycle and social media; do we see footage of wildfires and mass murders and Aleppo and decide our problems don’t matter? Has asking for help become institutionalized? (“Please send healing prayers on behalf of Ploni ben Ploni…” “Please sign up for the temple’s Bikur Cholim committee.” “Don’t worry, my insurance will handle it.”) Will the next generation, with its members’ reported reluctance to engage in face-to-face conversation, be able to give hugs, let alone receive them? Most of us, as we grew up, were exposed to the John Donne poem that begins, “No man is an island, entire of itself,” and the West African proverb “It takes a village to raise a child.” Both are wise sayings and should be taken to heart, but they don’t go far enough to encourage us to reach out to others when we’re in need. Accordingly, I invite you to turn to the words of that noted young philosopher Demi Lovato, who said, “The best advice I can give to anyone going through a rough patch is to never be afraid to ask for help.” (Thank you, Google and goodreads.com.) You don’t have to have gone through drug addiction and rehab to take that advice, either. Take it whenever you need a hot meal, a word of praise, a bear hug. If you run out of people to bother, by all means bother me Magical thinking Jewish News of Tidewater, July 18, 2016 Remember Mr. Ed, the talking horse of the early 60s sitcom? I think of him every year when Parshat Balak (Numbers 22:2-25:9) rolls around, as it does this week. The chumash Etz Hayim describes Balak as containing “what may be the only comic passage in the Torah,” albeit one with a serious message. Balak is the name of the Moabite king who sends Balaam, a seer and diviner, to the Israelite horde crossing the desert with Moses in hopes that Balaam will curse the Israelites into weakness that will allow them to be conquered. Balaam (with misgivings, because he is aware of the power of the Israelite God), rides toward the camp on his donkey. But on the way, the donkey sees a messenger of God in their path and refuses to continue. When Balaam won’t stop beating her, God gives the donkey the power of speech, and she calls out Balaam for his cruelty. Then Balaam sees the messenger and realizes that he had better let God call the shots from now on. He winds up blessing the Israelites rather than cursing them, in a speech that contains the well-known text Mah tovu ohalecha, Yaakov; mishk’notecha, Yisrael: How good are your tents, Jacob; your dwellings, Israel! The story of Balaam contains a lot of supernatural elements: Balaam’s role as a diviner who can impose powerful curses and blessings; the apparition of God’s messenger before Balaam and his donkey; even Balaam’s subsequent assertion that he can do and say only what the Israelite God tells him to do and say. This got me to thinking (that’s right, my mind doesn’t work the way yours does) about some contemporaries of Mr. Ed whom I watched on TV as a child. Television of the early-to-mid-60s presented, as it does now, dramas in the science fiction and fantasy vein, such as The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits, but those years also featured several comedy shows in which humans learned life lessons from other-worldly sources. Samantha Stevens cleaned her house with a twitch of her nose and tried to get her tightly wrapped hubby to loosen up in Bewitched; in My Favorite Martian, a visitor from the Red Planet enriched a young man’s humdrum life; sexier-than-human women were the focus of My Living Doll and I Dream of Jeannie; and some poor sap had to listen to his dead mom, reincarnated as a 1928 Porter, nag him in My Mother, the Car. And, of course, there was Mr. Ed, whose goal was usually to influence Wilbur Post to make his life more comfortable. What was it about the years 1961-1965, when these sitcoms premiered, that made American TV audiences want to laugh while watching characters who couldn’t exist in real life? Certainly those years, which brought us tense moments of the Cold War, the JFK assassination, violent clashes between white and black Americans, and the escalation of warfare in Vietnam, were fraught with anxiety. Some folks might have found a subliminal comfort in the idea, “Let the one who can work magic set things right.” To religious believers, that One is God, but there’s a terrible danger in trusting God alone to fix what’s wrong with the universe. For one thing, God in Torah can be pretty capricious and on occasion has to be talked out of wiping out whole populations. Plus, much of the time, God’s intentions are carried out through human agency; for example, God doesn’t bless the Israelites in their camp; Balaam does. There, the outcome is benign, but what about the times when carrying out God’s will, or what is seen as God’s will, leads to mayhem and even mass murder? Throughout history, how many atrocities have been committed in God’s name? Balak notwithstanding, I get nervous when I see people engaged in magical thinking: If I win the lottery, all my troubles will be over. If the right candidate gets elected, my nation will be transformed. Contemporary Jews can’t operate on the assumption that all will be well if God (or some other powerful entity) pulls the strings; we have the responsibility to act, of our own volition, in ways that reflect what God wants for the world. That, I think, is the path the talking donkey showed Balaam. — Rabbi Ellen Jaffe-Gill, Tidewater Chavurah |
