#im not even kidding when i say this teacher must be obsessed with christianity | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

scottstiles · 7 years

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clarz

replied to your post

“hi divvy! i know you are MAD right now, so don't answer this until you...”

thanks so much for answering this! tbh i love the fact that you're religious and that you clearly love it so much. i went to a very catholic college, so that kind of thoughtful and deep connection with religion and tradition is important to me, and i love seeing it in other people. it's an important part of who you are! and part of the reason i asked is because you mentioned disliking the performance thing in your initial post, and i really connect with that. when i was growing up, the church i went to was pretty plain and traditional (despite very liberal politics and interpretations of scripture.) most of the other people i knew who went to church were evangelical and/or southern baptist, and i always disliked that their churches had like, full rock bands at services, and poppy contemporary melodies to "hymns." i understand that they're trying to make church fun, but it always made me suspicious and felt disingenuous. i don't think religious services should be a chore, certainly, but i also don't think that they should be "fun" in that way. that's not the purpose of religion. i don't think religion should become more like entertainment or performance, because it's supposed to be a space that's completely different from the rest of the world. it makes it feel less holy to me. so i definitely relate to how you feel there. also, how did you end up feeling about the service in the moment? (and i'd love to hear about the ma'apilim sometime)

SORRY I DIDN’T ANSWER THESE BEFORE CUZ I REALLY WANTED TO BUT PROCRASTINATION IS MY MIDDLE NAME (jk it’s tzviya but try saying that ten times fast. or just one time. slow.)

HERE WE GO:

1- i love finding other people who feel close to their religion, no matter what it is. i remember in teacher’s college i just naturally gravitated to the only catholic girls in my classes i guess simply because i enjoyed talking to them? we weren’t there learning to teach religion, but i’m always fascinated by what other people feel about it. i’ve found myself thinking on more than one occasion that i feel more comfortable with people who have that side to themselves, like me, rather than people who don’t interact/think about/believe in any of that kinda stuff. (im being purposefully vague because it’s a huge generalization, but nonetheless true-ish for me, i often find myself sharing much more common ground with palestinian muslims, for example, than a french canadian montrealer). i guess especially because religion is not something i consider a defining trait of mine, and im just in constant evolution with respect to that. judaism is so much more than just a belief in god or a practice of the rituals and commandments.

2- how fascinating to find someone in my age bracket who feels the same way about music in prayer. my problem has always been that i LOVE music, and its so personal and emotional that i DO see it fitting seamlessly with prayer but... it’s the setting that has always bothered me. it just never felt right for me in a synagogue. like you said, it’s just a different space. i don’t know about church and ‘making it fun’ but i definitely can imagine plenty of religions use music to draw in otherwise disinterested people who find prayer “boring” or pointless. music is awesome! i just wish people could feel the music in their soul as a separate entity from external music, like from an instrument. idk i guess i just really love singing XD and i wish it wasn’t always a performance or a competition of voices, because i think prayer should be personal. even if it’s between a community, its still voices connecting to each other. i’m reminded of Hannah’s prayer, in the book of Samuel (the prophet- his mother), she’s at the temple on one of the annual pilgrimages with her family and she’s depressed because she doesn’t have any children and her husband’s other wife just keeps popping out babies left and right. so she goes to be alone somewhere in the temple, and she’s weeping and praying to god for a child. Eli, the high priest, comes in and sees her shaking and moving her lips real fast so he goes, “hey, you shouldn’t be drinking in here” and she’s like “im not drunk, i’m praying”. so that’s the first place we read about a person actually praying, and not out loud. this was like a huge revelation to the priest cuz clearly he’d never seen that before, and now the tradition has become to pray like hannah. (as an aside, if u ever see the propaganda videos made by the nazis, they use footage of synagogues to show how loony tunes those jews are with their muttering and their rocking back and forth). cuz like, prayer is supposed to be out loud? ahaha anyway i forgot where i was going with this but... oh ya, okay, so prayer didn’t really exist (as we know it, in judaism- and therefore christianity/islam/western monotheism) until that point- it was all about the sacrifices. and the temple ritual was replete with music and instruments like the shofar, timbrels, lutes, blabla other ancient instruments. but since then, we’ve been meant to use our voices alone. so says tradition, i guess.

3- so i did go to services on yom kippur (kol nidre) but not at my shul. i went with my sister to the chabad house near my parents, and it was....not great. but it was compounded by a lot of factors- i got a wicked cold the day or two before, so my nose was running a marathon and i was coughing like a 90yr old with emphysema. i got my period that morning so i was on an extra steep emotional rollercoaster that i just somehow could barely control. so we sat on the other side of the mechitzah (the separation barrier between men and women), the rabbi/cantor stood at the head in the middle so we could all see, and we all prayed out loud, no hush on the women’s side or anything (pretty typical from what i remember of camp/school prayer services). but of course the tunes were not quite what i’m used to, and there was a bit of annoying stuff that just irks me as a perfectionist (like they use a lot of yiddish pronunciation of the hebrew words, injecting a bunch of oy oy oys and ahoyhoyhoys in random places, in fact i leaned over to my sister at one point and was like ‘did ned flanders write this nigun (tune)?’), but altogether i guess it was better than watching an orchestra perform the prayer? idk it was pretty bad, on an emotional level, but not in hindsight. im very good at ruining things for myself through sheer stubbornness. i must have embarrassed my sister just by existing next to her, poor girl, she really wanted me to like it. i’m glad it’s over, and hopefully by next year ill be back in nyc or some other city so i wont have to worry about it.

4- MA’APILIM!!!!! okay so this was my absolute favoritest thing as a kid and i can’t wait to describe it to you. one night in camp, every summer, the counselors and cits would wake us up at like 3am by barging into our cabins chanting (screaming, really) “MA’APILIM, MA’APILIM BEH-MASSAD, BEH-MASSAD. MATCHIL HALAYLA MATCHIL HALAYLA BEH-MASSAD, BEH-MASSAD.” which translates to : “ma’apilim at massad (the name of my camp) starts tonight.” i’m singing it in my head as i type XD. so they’d be screaming and we’d be tumbling bleary eyed out of bed to grab our socks and sweatshirts and run over to the flagpole (keep in mind i was 8 when i first experienced this, and we’ve had kids as young as 6 at camp). once we had all gathered in line with our bunkmates, the counselors and cits put on a little “skit”.

basically they acted like they were nazis and jews, and did a little skit of some basic bad holocaust stuff (don’t ask me to remember the exact details we’re talkin at least 20 years since i last did this) to scare the pants off of us. kids would always cry already at this point from the shouting. we’d all kinda follow into this “play” (sorry idk what else to call it), and marched over to the gym where we watched a fake hanging on the stage. they literally. hanged someone. in front of us. a fake noose, of course, duh, i remember my counselor showing it to me, but traumatizing to say the least (i still remember the name of the counselor they “hanged”- not sure this ever happened more than once but ill never forget it).

then we’d all hustle down to the waterfront, again “playing” the role of holocaust victims/survivors after these little “skits” had sort of put us in the headspace, and we play along, imagining we’d just experienced these things and were now running from it. it was terrifying and exhilarating as a small child, and an even more unbelievably emotional thrill ride as i got older and became pseudo-obsessed with holocaust lit and facts in general in my life (it never did go away but everything changes with age). ANYWAYS so down at the waterfront we got a speech from another counselor playing a member of the haganah (the main jewish defense force in palestine leading up to independence, which ben gurion later turned into the IDF). sidebar for a little history: in the 40s the yishuv (jewish agency) and the haganah began a mission called aliyah bet, “the second immigration,” an illegal smuggling operation to bring refugees from the holocaust into palestine under the noses of the british, since almost all countries in the world had barred their doors to jewish immigration from europe (a high level member of the canadian government is famously recorded as having answered, when asked how many jews they should let in, that “none is too many”). volunteer seamen from the US and canada and other countries crossed the ocean on cargo ships hastily refurbished to fit hundreds of people, picking up thousands of refugees in europe to smuggle them onto the beaches of haifa and tel aviv. paul newman has a lovely half nekid scene of this in the movie Exodus when he jumps off the ship in the middle of the night and swims up onto the beach- one of my fave movies ever and pretty much the story of aliyah bet (albeit with tremendous hollywood embellishment and only mild accuracy). these refugees who became illegal immigrants (caught or not) were known as “ma’apilim”- the root of the word is to “climb” or to “rise up”, and is found in the bible referring to the israelites who were still eager to enter the land even after the negative report of the spies.

okay so basically this was the idea. we were “playing” these illegal immigrants who had just escaped the holocaust, and were now facing another threat in the form of the british who were doing their best to keep them out of palestine. k so we’re down at the waterfront. all the kids get divided into small groups of about 10 or so, with one or two counselors at the helm to be our “haganah operatives” and guides to the end. what end, you say? so the camp is spread out into 2 areas, the main camp where the younger kids cabins were, and the dining hall and the gym and the waterfront, etc. then there’s a road in the middle of the camp, and beyond it a hill leading up to the senior cabins and some sports fields at the top. the goal was for each group to make it through camp to the top of the hill without getting caught by the “british,” played by the cits who were roaming around camp.

idk if i have to describe camp further for people who don’t know the concept, but basically we’re all in the middle of the damn woods with nothing around us for miles except the lake and the camps on the other side of it or down the road. ill never forget my first ma’apilim (tbh most of my description is from then, which is why its so fuzzy cuz these memories are 20+ years old), i was so lucky to get the tripper as our group leader (the tripper is the “nature dude” in camp, the survivalist ;). he immediately led us underneath the gym (which of course was just insane to my small mind... UNDER the gym??) to plan our route and give us instructions. we organized a roll call and signals, we practiced walking in a single file line silently and dropping to the ground on his signal. we smeared dirt on our faces for camo in the woods. it was *mason voice* intense. k so then as you can guess, we snuck our way up the hill through the woods. sometimes we’d encounter other groups, once in awhile i remember getting caught by a cit, and they’d take all or some of us to the “jail” on the basketball court” where we’d have to wait for a jailbreak (idk how that worked but it did, i remember it happening but not in any detail). a famous prison break that DID happen was at acre prison in 1947 when the irgun (another paramilitary jewish group) blew up the prison and broke out 28 of their members and 214 arab prisoners. if im not mistaken they briefly refer to it in exodus by recreating a prison break. exciting times. ANYWAYS fuck im such a tangential bitch sorry XD, by the end of the night we’d all make it to the top- “jerusalem”- and we’d have hot chocolate and say morning prayers as the sun rose over the hill.

i feel like my description is a little lacking, but hopefully u get the basic picture. ma’apilim wasn;t even the heaviest part of camp- that was tisha b’av- the fast day when we commemorate the destruction of the temple and every other traumatic destructive event the jewish people have gone thru. that night they’d prepare the camp with candles in sand filled paper bags lining all the paths. after dinner we’d walk with our bunks on the path and watch little skits in different parts of camp- scenes from these moments in jewish history, like the holocaust, pogroms in europe, the spanish inquisition, terror attacks in israel, etc. after walking the path we’d all convene back at the waterfront, where they’d set out a small reconstructed “temple” on a makeshift raft in the lake, and a banner on the beach that said “yizkor”- remember. then they’d light both on fire and we’d sit and watch them burn while singing appropriately somber songs like eli eli, by hannah senesz. after that we’d go back to the gym and lie on the floor in small groups huddled around candles. we’d listen as some people chanted the book of eicha (lamentations), and would slowly fall asleep (depending on our age, of course). anyone that was still up after that was over got to stay in the gym if they wanted to watch exodus- a 4 hour movie. the next day we’d fast all day (only those who wanted- 13 y/o +) and treated it basically like shabbat- no regular activities.

MAN did i get some wild shit imprinted on me from camp!! but i don’t regret one second. i only wish other people could have the experience i did, but i dont even know if they still do that there. they probably do, but this old lady has no excuses to step foot in a summer camp anymore :(

as a completely coincidental aside and not at all as a self promo, idk if u knew this but i’ve been working on a documentary for over a year now and this whole thing is a major part of the plot. i interviewed a lady who was a passenger on the exodus, and about 4 or 5 people who were volunteers from montreal/new york/new jersey/toronto that picked up and smuggled the refugees. the stories are incredible. i just hope the rest of the world will get to hear it from their mouths one day. all we need is 100k to finish the film XD

#clarz #OMG I FORGOT TO POST THIS #i thought i would add to it but this is a fucking essay so ima leave it at that #PLEASE ASK ME MORE QUESTIONS IF U WANT #ANYBODY #i love talking about this shit and i have nobody to do it with :))))#personal #jewish stuff #judaism #holocaust mention #death mention cw #hanging mention cw #nazi mention cw

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