Near and Far

November 13, 2001-Running Hot and Cold
(photo: Adelaide)

I’ve told you that Australians use the term “partner” to refer to gay or straight unmarried couples living in a committed relationship. When I wrote about the Xmas cards yesterday, I forgot to tell you they have special cards for partners.

We spoke to Daniel, Vikki, & Alex today. I really wanted to let David hear Alex sing “Ding Dong The Witch is Dead” in Hebrew. Her school is putting on the play The Wizard of Oz in Hebrew & David wasn’t here the last time when she sang it to me. It was a delight. I chuckled just watching him listen to it. Then we got to hear her play two tunes on her clarinet. We didn’t even know she was taking lessons. I learned today that her school requires kids to play an instrument in the band. That’s great!

But the best part of the conversation was when Daniel answered the phone & said that they were hanging out in front of a fire in the fireplace. We had just turned our air conditioning on for the first time. We had a flying cockroach visit us during the evening & David decided he couldn’t live with that. I didn’t know that they disgusted him so. I guess there are still surprises after almost 38 years of marriage. The weather went back to “fine” yesterday & we went back to open windows today. Life is tough. November 14, 2001-Friendly Club I was the speaker this morning at the Friendship Club. It’s a group of men & women who meet at the Temple to discuss varied subjects & to stimulate their minds. They wanted to know about real estate in America, so I filled them in. One thing I learned was that here they now have a five day cooling off period during which time the buyer can back out of a contract & only lose a small percent of the deposit. Buyers are now going around making offers on several properties. Then they go to the seller of the one they’re most interested in & pressure him into lowering the price with the threat that if he doesn’t the buyer will buy one of the other properties. It’s created quite a problem.

The rest of the meeting was the discussion of questions. One question was, “What, if anything, are you doing about the anthrax/terrorist threat?” One woman said, tongue in cheek, that a neighbor of hers is an Arab & that she’s having him open all of her mail.

November 16, 2001-Adelaide

As we approached the Adelaide airport, we flew over a flat patchwork of farms in shades of tan & brown. It could have passed for Oklahoma. Slowly, greens appeared & I realized we were flying over the foothills of the Flinders Range. The Murray River began to wend its way through the landscape & vineyards came into view. As we landed, we caught a glimpse of the ocean. I looked on the map & it is the Indian Ocean. That’s a first for us. The area’s claim to fame is that it’s the only state in Australia not established by convicts. Germans, Brits, & other Europeans came here & built villages much like the ones they knew at home. It’s laid out on a series of grids, & a ring of parks surrounds the entire city with the Torrens River running through it. The Europeans, especially the Germans, brought wine to the region & it has flourished as one of the backbones of the economy. From the city & hillsides, you’ld never guess that a desert looms over it all. The old buildings were made of sandstone & brick since there were so few trees.

AANZUPJ

We’re in Adelaide for an AANZUPJ Conference. It stands for Australia, Asia, New Zealand Union of Progressive Judaism. They’re considering changing the name to something more manageable. There are about fifty rabbis & congregational leaders here including representatives from Hong Kong & Singapore.

One thing we found was you can’t drink the tap water in Adelaide. It’s been described as looking like something a crocodile has lived in or just. The water in the hotel looks ok, but we’re being cautious & bought a 10-liter jug for drinking. We’re told the tap water is ok for brushing teeth. It is an odd problem to have in such a beautifully laid out & sophisticated city.

The AANZUJP meeting started with a welcome by the Kaurna people who comprise the indigenous tribe living in the area before the “white fellas” wiped them out. The chair of the meeting gave the leader a shofar as a symbol of our people & said she would have to learn to play it. The chair mentioned that if the Kaurna woman could play a didgeridoo, she would be able to play the shofar. That illustrated the chair’s ignorance of the tribal culture. As you all know since you’ve been reading these emails, aborigine women aren’t permitted to play a didgeridoo. Secondly, a didgeridoo isn’t played as a horn by fixing the lips to the mouthpiece & blowing. It’s played by blowing air over the lips & loosely vibrating lips & vocal chords at the same time. I
guess, as tourists, we’ve been privileged to learn more about their people than the Aussies have.

Dinner was preceded by an address by Gaby Levi, the Israeli ambassador to Australia. The meal was at the hotel. The food was what you’d expect at a nice Best Western. Poor David had to eat perch. It had some kind of white cream sauce on it that he said made it palatable. I asked for mine without the sauce. That made it tasteless. Thank goodness for lemon. The birkat hamazon, grace after a meals, was sung. For those of you who are familiar with it, they started with Shir Hamaalot to the tune of Waltzing Matilda. It was hysterical. They do have a sense of humor.
The after dinner speaker was a rabbi who used to be at Holy Blossom Temple in Toronto. As he says, he’s the most foreign person he knows. He was born in Poland, escaped as a baby to England, lived in Canada, & is now head of the World Union for Progressive Judaism in Israel. That’s the organization that oversees non-American congregations. His talk started out ok, but quickly launched into a critique of American Reform Judaism. What he forgot was that many rabbis at the conference were Americans since that’s where reform rabbis are made. That’s where the seminaries are. He’s of the mind that we need to make peace with the orthodox community by observing the halachah, customs, that are dear to them. He clings to the false hope that one day they will accept us. One example he gave was that, in the case of one non-Jewish parent, the reform movement recognizes patrilineal & matrilineal descent in affirming that a child is Jewish rather than the orthodox view of only going by the religion of the mother. He’s also opposed to sanctification of gay/lesbian marriage. This will get really interesting since David is delivering a paper on just that topic at the rabbinic meeting that follows this one in a few days.

He seems to be missing the definition of progressive/reform Judaism. Change is an integral part of it. Constant study of traditions & laws in light of increased information & modern knowledge are part & parcel of the fabric of the movement. If debate & openness were frozen in the past, we would be orthodox. Then there was the point at which he was just plain wrong. He said that American reform rabbis performed inter-marriage to fill a popular demand & to better maintain membership & market their congregations. He claimed that American rabbis do what is fashionable, not holy. I was very proud that David was able to stay in his seat & be a good boy. I, on the other hand, was squirming. How dare he speak as an expert of American Reform Judaism & cast it in such a negative light. How dare he set himself up as an expert & then be so wrong? This is the rabbi whose opinions were roundly cast aside at a convention of 600 rabbis in Phoenix in the late1980’s.

Hopping

This afternoon, we skipped out on the meeting & took a bus tour of the city. It was a hop on & hop off kind of affair. We got off at the library to check out the free Internet usage & ran into a man wearing a kippah (Jewish head covering) who started a conversation. Assuming he was Jewish I mentioned the conference. It turned out that he was a Messianic Jew. He asked me if I had seen the light or did I believe that I would just molder in the ground & be eaten by worms after I died. I mentioned that there is an afterlife concept in Judaism & the Jews did not believe in Jesus as the Messiah, but that we practiced Judaism as Jesus had as the Jew he was. End of conversation.

Toby