G-dcast on Parshat Kedoshim

Love Your Neighbor As Yourself: What If Leviticus Rhymed? asks Elana Jagoda, cantorial soloist at Peninsula Temple Beth El in San Mateo, California.  Elana is a music educator, performer, and composer who brings soul and innovation to Jewish music.

Elana released her first solo album, Zum Gali Gali, last year. She revamped classic Jewish family songs with a funky-modern flavor. It was a smash hit, and Zum Gali Gali was selected as one of seven CDs to be distributed nationally to families with young children through the PJ Library program.

If you want to sing along - and Abq Jew knows you will want to - here are the lyrics:

Kedoshim Lyrics
Written and performed by Elana Jagoda

In the chapters of Leviticus
These sacred words you shall not miss
Holy actions are the theme
In Parshat Kedoshim

Commandments you shall know indeed:
Leave some harvest for those in need
Idols should be far away
Be sure you keep the Sabbath day

Always welcome in the stranger
Take action if someone's in danger
Take care not to impede the blind
Do not wear cloth of threads combined

It does no good to bear a grudge
Your duty to be a fair judge
Don't mix species of two kinds
Do pay workers in good time

Don't sleep with the bride chosen for another man
Or you must offer up a ram
Please do not falsely swear
Follow the rules when you trim your hair

Don't subject your daughter to prostitution
Don't solve disputes through retribution
Forbidden is a new tree's fruit
Don't go after your neighbor's loot

Don't insult the deaf although they cannot hear
Your mother and father you shall revere
Help another if you are able
No meat with blood at your table

God's sanctuary you shall venerate
With ghosts do not communicate
In ways of magic do not prophesize
Before your elders you must rise

On your skin, no tattoos
And love the body Hashem gave you
Some may say above all else
Love your neighbor as yourself

In the chapters of Leviticus
These sacred words you shall not miss
Holy actions are the theme
In Parshat Kedoshim

Are You Jewish?

Greetings From 770: This video, from The New York Times (!), is dedicated to Abq Jews who have never visited Chabad Lubavitch World Headquarters at 770 Eastern Parkway in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and who have never seen a Chabad Lubavitch Mitzvah Tank on Central Ave.

Abq Jew has been privileged to attend Shabbos services at 770, walking all the way from Midwood (this was, ahem, a few years ago) to see and hear the Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, of righteous memory.

Warning:  Sit tight! There's a 15-second commercial before Are You Jewish? starts.

And Abq Jew has been ... annoyed by those Mitzvah Tankists while trying to make his frantic way across Manhattan.  But we remember:  מצוה גוררת מצוה, mitzvah goreret mitzvah, one mitzvah brings another (Pirke Avot [Ethics of the Fathers], Chapter 4, Mishna 2). 

And who knows - perhaps the Holy One, Blessed Be He, is waiting for just one more mitzvah before he sends Moshiach to redeem us all!

Coke & The Jewish Question

Things Go Better With:  Samuel G Freedman, writing in The New York Times, offers A Passover Toast to a Kosher-Product Innovator.

Rabbi Tuvia Geffen, of blessed memory, was born in Lithuania in 1870 and educated in the renowned Slobodka yeshiva. In the wake of a pogrom, he immigrated to New York in 1903, and seven years later he moved to Atlanta to become the rabbi of Shearith Israel, a tiny and struggling Orthodox congregation meeting in the battered remnant of a Methodist church. 

Rabbi Geffen z"l was a man of many achievements - including standing by Leo Frank during that dark episode, fighting immigration restrictions that "slammed shut the gates of the country before the wanderers, the strangers, and those who walk in darkness from place to place", warning of the danger of Nazi Germany, and advocating for agunot - Jewish women who were being denied religious divorce decrees by vindictive husbands.

But all those achievements are not why we invoke the name and memory of Rabbi Geffen today, more than 40 years after his death. No, we come to honor his least likely yet most enduring contribution to the Jewish people and his adopted nation:

Kosher-for-Passover Coca-Cola

You can read Rabbi Geffen's Coca-Cola teshuva here, and the entire Freedman article here.

Now, Abq Jew never did find Kosher-for-Passover Coca-Cola in Abq, but he wasn't looking too hard.  Did you?  For the honor of Yom Tov and the enjoyment of your fellow Yidden - please let Abq Jew know where!

Why Is Tonight Funnier Than All Other Nights?

An Orange On The Seder Plate:  From setting crumbs on fire to the awkwardness of eating a matzoh-and-salami sandwich, illustrator Vanessa Davis recounts her family’s weird and wonderful Passover traditions in Tablet Magazine.

Why should there be an orange on the seder plate?  For a very good reason, Abq Jew thinks.  Elias Lieberman comments (again, in Tablet Magazine), citing Ritualwell.org as his source:

In the early 1980s, while speaking at Oberlin College Hillel, Susannah Heschel was introduced to an early feminist Haggadah that suggested adding a crust of bread on the seder plate, as a sign of solidarity with Jewish lesbians (there’s as much room for a lesbian in Judaism as there is for a crust of bread on the seder plate).

Heschel felt that to put bread on the seder plate would be to accept that Jewish lesbians and gay men violate Judaism like chametz violates Passover. So, at her next seder, she chose an orange as a symbol of inclusion of gays and lesbians and others who are marginalized within the Jewish community. She offered the orange as a symbol of the fruitfulness for all Jews when lesbians and gay men are contributing and active members of Jewish life. In addition, each orange segment had a few seeds that had to be spit out – a gesture of spitting out, repudiating the homophobia of Judaism.

While lecturing, Heschel often mentioned her custom as one of many feminist rituals that have been developed in the last twenty years. She writes, “Somehow, though, the typical patriarchal maneuver occurred: my idea of an orange and my intention of affirming lesbians and gay men were transformed. Now the story circulates that a MAN said to me that a woman belongs on the bimah as an orange on the seder plate. A woman’s words are attributed to a man, and the affirmation of lesbians and gay men is erased. Isn’t that precisely what’s happened over the centuries to women’s ideas?”

Yidden!  It's Pesach!  We're free!  Everyone to the table!