There’s an interesting show up at the JEA right now that y’all must check out.

Ching Levy is a local Savannah artist who began her career on on rice paper using traditional Chinese brush strokes and has evolved into a unique, delicate style that incorporates Eastern and Western influences. She’s won awards all over the place and I just love her colorful, kind aesthetic:

繽紛小鳥聚枝頭
合唱一曲樂自由
左右牽手共一處
同心齊力為地球

A colorful flock gathers at the treetop
Singing in unison celebrating freedom
Hand in hand, living in one space
With united hearts and combined strengths for the earth

What I’m wondering is how such a talented Chinese Jewess has escaped the Yenta this long.

Ching Levy is Jewish, right? Related to the Levy’s Jewelers Savannah mishpocheh? Somehow?

Or has El Yenta Boy’s latest obession of all things Asian tricked me into a hopeful game of Jewish geography?

Over the 15 years of my not-quite successful writing career, my work has appeared in a myriad of places, some worth mentioning, most not. I’ve helped other people compose love letters, book proposals and, for a fee paid up front in cash, college term papers. I’ve seen my name in lights, ink, pixels and on the door of my Shalom School classroom (though no one’s ever called me “Mrs. Lebos” to my face and lived.)

But never, ever have I written a Yom Kippur sermon. Intentionally, anyway.

So you can understand why I was a little surprised while sitting in synagogue Saturday, stomach rumbling, sinuses aching, consciousness fading, when I heard the rabbi thunder the name of this blog.

El Yenta Man poked me. “Wake up! He’s talking about you!”

Reb Belzer was reading the post I wrote last Yom Kippur about the curious incident of the Mickve Israel Jesus intruder, in which I came to terms somewhat with the churchy ways of my adopted Jewish community. It was not, um, the most flattering piece in certain parts, which is to say it was not written with the intention that it would be read out loud to the entire congregation on the holiest day of the year.

I began to pray to our good and merciful God to open up an escape hatch under my pew. El Yenta Man started complicated hand miming to indicate to anyone sitting around us that the woman next to him with her head between her knees was the blogger being quoted on the bima. I glanced two rows back at my father-in-law, but his red ears were the only part I could see since he had his face in his hands. At least it wasn’t one of those posts where I detonate multiple f-word bombs.

As the rabbi finished reading, I understood why he had chosen this piece to elucidate his point this Yom Kippur: In the end, I make clear that this congregation is full of good people, good Jews who embody the essence of tolerance and non-judgement of what I (and apparently the rabbi) believe to be True Judaism. (Even if they still, say, break the fast at Walt’s BBQ with a pulled pork sandwich.)

Still, when the morning service ended, I wondered if I could use the ancient secret passageway under the ark (pictured here, btw) to get up to the babysitting room to claim my children without having to face the five hundred people who now knew my web address, which has my punim on it. No such luck. El Yenta Man steered me right into his father, who looked at me and shrugged. “I’m speechless.” I could only assume I had tarnished the family name forever.

Then a colleague of his came up and clapped him on the back. “She’s your daughter-in-law? Well done!”

“Yes,” his wife agreed. “Definitely one of Belzer’s best sermons ever. At least he didn’t talk about Iraq.”

My father-in-law looked relieved. I snuck out of the sanctuary, but not before receiving a bear hug from the rabbi, who has a terrific sense of humor and apparently appreciates mine. But now that I’ve been outed as a a renegade Jew, y’all had better be ready for some crazy African dance moves on Simchat Torah.

I also would like to add that last year’s Yom Kippur post was a turning point in my opinion of Mickve Israel. Sure, I’m always going to be talkin’ some sh*t that the Gothic architecture and its interior cross are always going to make me feel like I’m in Notre Dame, but I’ll take on anyone who dares call this congregation “Judaism Lite.” The 275th anniversary of its founding is coming up this year, and its history is fascinating. (Phoebe Kerness, one of the brilliant docents you might meet if you come visit, brought tears to my eyes when she reminded me that my mother-in-law did much of the research and wrote the text used during the tours, even though she’s received no credit for it.)

During Rosh Hashanah services, the three beautiful young women of last year’s confirmation class each sang a Torah portion with such clarity and spirit it gave me goosebumps. And of course, there is the unique event of “El Norah Ah-Lee-La” preserved in the original vernacular of the Sephardic ancestral founders, sung by Kayton Smith for the past chunk of years. The tune has been passed down l’dor va’dor (generation to generation) and I’ve already asked Kayton if he’d teach it to me, though he assured me he’s good for another twenty years or so.

Such a meaningful High Holidays combined with the rollickin’ good time of Shalom School has finally groomed a real feeling of being at home at Mickve Israel, where my husband was bar mitzvahed and confirmed, where we were married, where our children learn how to make sukkahs out of graham crackers and pretzels.

And that’s why I can overlook the round challahs baked with candied green and red maraschino cherries you usually find in a Christmas fruitcake. 😉

Happy 5768, y’all!

My new job’s editorial territory extends past the state line, so last week I found myself touring the tiny coastal town of Beaufort, SC with local writer/arts maven/breadmaker’s wife Lisa Rentz. She was walking me through the halcyon streets past the arsenal when we came face-to-face with a small, white clapboard house with a mogen david plaque out front. Even with the South’s established Jewish history, it was still a surprise to find a synagogue among the Baptist churches, and I had to take a peek, even if it wasn’t official skirt! business.

Congregation Beth Israel has a sweet little ruby-carpeted sanctuary and knotty pine social hall and looks like it can accomodate a couple hundred worshippers. The core can’t be more than 100 or so families, though the lone volunteer unloading Chanukah chozzerai (in July?) says the numbers vary depending on recruits from the nearby Marine training center on Parris Island, who have been attending Beth Israel since 1918. (I know! Jewish Marines! It was an afternoon of anomalies, what can I say?)

The most interesting tidbit gleaned from my six-minute detour in to Beaufort’s Jewish nexus is that the Torah housed in Beth Israel’s ark is the very one carried over from Lithuania by the Lipsitz family. “Is that the same Lipsitz of Lipsitz Shoes?” I ask Lisa, looking over my contact list for the day (part of my job is scouting products from local businesses for the magazine; yes, I’m getting paid to shop, don’t be jealous.)

“That’s the younger Lipsitz,” Lisa informs me. “His dad still runs the department store across the street.” So she takes me back down Bay Street to Lipsitz’s Department Store, Beaufort’s oldest mercantile establishment, where the son of Max and Bertha Lipsitz, the first couple to be married inside Beth Israel, has spent almost all of his 87 years selling anything you could possibly need.

It’s Mrs. Lucille Lipsitz who greets us when we walk in; even though she’s probably said the same “Hello, y’all, may I help you?” greeting a million times in her life, her voice still rings with sincere Southern charm. Business appears to be rather slow, the store is sparsely stocked with the pink pastel beachwear, straw hats and vinyl suitcases. There’s a circular rack of vintage dresses, and I can’t decide whether they’re there to fulfill Beaufort’s demand for retro polyester or if they’ve actually been there since 1967.

There’s the tinny drone of a daytime game show in the background, and I ask if Mr. Lipsitz might be able to speak with me. From a recliner in the back of the store a crackly drawl pipes up. “I’m him, whatcha y’all need?” Joseph Lipsitz is simply the most adorable old man I’ve ever seen, with thick plastic glasses and pants up to his armpits, and is delighted to tell me all about his family’s role in Beaufort since the 1870’s. Much like the Jews of Savannah, these folks assimilated into Southern life by becoming outstanding citizens and opening successful businesses. Joe grew up in an apartment above the store, and a walk across two lanes introduced me to two more generations of Lipsitz, Joe’s son Neil and Neil’s bar-mitzvahed age son Adam, training for the family business during his summer vacation.

Thankfully, Lipsitz’s Shoes had a much more modern inventory than its parent store, and I was able to find a fabulous pair of moss green Clarks for September’s sneaker layout. So I got what I came for in Beaufort — as well an an unexpected addition to my never-ending historical education of Southern Jewish life.

For more morsels, check out this online museum of Southern Jewish artifacts
and A Jewish Tour of the Carolinas.

*in the spirit of my favorite kvetch, one should sing the title of this post to the tune of Three 6 Mafia’s Oscar-winning ditty.

It probably doesn’t come as an surprise to you that this Yenta finds life in Savannah somewhat understimulating, at best. (At worst, I have a big, bad bag of obscenities that unlocks itself and spills onto the table after I’ve had a few cocktails.) The ironic absence of African dance and drum culture, the bizarre pride in the mediocrity of the public school system, the ubiquity of fried food — I’m not finding a whole lot to keep my spirits juiced. Even my Jewish experiences thus far have led me to the edge of becoming a Reform shul dropout.

But I got a flyer in the mail for an all-day “learning experience” at Mickve Israel hosted by Rabbi Arnold Belzer, and even though it probably wasn’t going to be the iconoclastic, “new Jew revue”-type event like the lucky kids in NYC get, I just couldn’t spend another Shabbos staring at the cold, flat ocean.

“Twelve hours at temple…with the rabbi?” shrieked El Yenta Man after I had lured him into the car with intimations that we were going on a long date. Of sorts. “I thought we were going to a cheap motel! Let me out! I’m going fishing!” Thank you, Lord, for child-proof locks.

We arrived to a fairly packed sanctuary, which I’m guessing is rare for a non-b’nai mitzvah Saturday, in spite of the synagogue’s generous weekly Kiddush brunch. Rabbi Belzer presided on the bima, explaining the differences between the traditional Orthodox, modern-but-observant Conservative and anything goes-Reform movements of Judaism, which he broke down as “crazy, hazy and lazy.” (I’d never heard that one before; I think I laughed the loudest.)

My eyes did their usual wandering around the room with its classic nave structure and breathtaking stained glass with inscriptions from the 1800’s, but was distracted by the sound of pens scratching on paper. I saw that some people were listening very attentively and taking notes. I had my pen out, too, of course; I’m always scribbling stuff to collect for this blog, and perhaps one day, a book. Since when do Jews listen to the rabbi, let alone write it down? I thought. Could it be that I am not the only Jewish blogger in Savannah? Then it dawned on me: These people weren’t Jews.

It seems the rabbi’s Judaism 101 talk is immensely popular among Christians looking to find out more about our religion, for various reasons, some earnest, some scary. Not that there weren’t a good number of congregants there, too; I recognized several senior Yentas from my weekly lunch with my mother-in-law. The rabbi, who I’ve always liked a lot but many find to be a little showy for the third oldest congregation in the country, unapologetically framed religion in marketing terms, and admitted that Judaism has pretty lame PR: We don’t seek converts, we don’t believe in original sin and we don’t promise eternal salvation.

I started to get down with the basic explanations of Judaism, learning what I must’ve slept through in Hebrew school. Did you know that Reform Judaism was developed in the 19th-century South in keeping with the Protestant aesthetic so popular in America at the time? Or that the Southern Baptists fund Jews for Jesus? (Rabbi B. invoked meshuggeneh pundit Dennis Prager when one of the non-Jews asked why one couldn’t be a Jew for Jesus: “It’s like being a vegetarian for meat.”)

I was enjoying the learning so much that I was jarred back to reality when it came time for the Shabbat service. This synagogue in particular exemplifies that benign Protestant aesthetic and feels so much like church that I find it kind of creepy. Yarmulkes are the exception rather than the rule. The 1950’s prayerbooks are small, black, read left to right and look like something a Franciscan priest might carry while riding his horse to the next mission. Common prayers like the Sh’ma and Sim Shalom are sung by a choir in weirdly unreachable melodies rather than the easy, familiar tunes that prevail from Scottsdale to Jerusalem to Buenos Aires. It bothered me also that there is no exhuberant carrying of the Torah around to receive a kiss or a touch — where is the joy, people?

Rabbi B. made up for some of this crusty WASPyness by changing references to “mankind” to “humankind” in the service and maintaining moderate liberal viewpoints during the following discussions on all the touchy subjects like abortion, homosexuality and the Apocalypse. He also told a quite a few decent jokes: A Liberal Protestant, a Catholic and a Jew are discussing when life begins. The Liberal Protestant says: “At birth.” The Catholic disagrees: “At conception.” The Jew trumps them all: “When the kids leave for college and the dog dies.”

We spent most of the afternoon discussing Maimonides 13 Articles of Faith, comparing Judaism to Christianity and Islam, which rose some hackles when we came to #9 — that whole “the Torah is complete, don’t add to it with say, a new testament.” Rambam’s (Maimonides nickname) levels of tzedakeh were also on the curriculum, as was the basic rules of kashrut, which the rabbi taught are not so compulsory. I had to ask: Why is chicken considered meat when it would be impossible to cook it in its mother’s milk? Have you ever had chicken milk? The rabbi’s answer was that many of the tenets that we think of as essential to Judaism are actually religious interpretations ingrained into culture; i.e. the old rabbis thought someone might mistake chicken for lamb meat (uh, only if you cooked the kishkes out of it) and it was just easier to include it in the fleishig category, so it became law. I don’t know if I buy that, and I suspect the rabbi might’ve dumbed down some of this knowledge for the gentiles present.

While I liked what the rabbi had to say much more than I expected — he certainly kept everyone’s attention for 12 hours, which is more than anyone in Hollywood could ever do — there were a few moments that the “we’re just like you, except for the Jesus part” schtick kind of got to me. Rabbi Belzer makes no secret that he thinks Chassidism and its missionary arm Chabad is for nutjobs, and he used the example of how some Lubavitchers carry around beepers so they can be notified the very second the Messiah comes. The room broke into giggles, but I’m positive there were a few in the Mordecai Sheftall Memorial Hall that would camp outside Wal-Mart if they started selling beepers for Jesus.

Perhaps the biggest lesson I learned from Rabbi Belzer and this day of learning for Jews and people who want to know about them is that I have nothing to be ashamed about as a falling-far-short-of-kosher, rarely-attend-synagogue kind of Jew (sheesh, at least I don’t eat bacon.) His inclusive, changeable, “not written in stone, except for the parts that are” interpretation of Judaism falls closer to my own than I figured, yarmulke on his keppe or no. (Even El Yenta Man took away plenty from the day, though I had to promise a cheap motel night sometime soon.)

This notion that we have free will and autonomy as Jews, that we do get to choose how religious, how cultural, how kosher we want to be, is liberating and empowering to those of us finding our way in this Jewish life. All too often I abdicate my own self-respect to those more religious, as if they are better people simply because they read better Hebrew (to note, I surprised myself at my remembered teenage skills — those little goyishe prayerbooks had no alliterations.) I consider myself a creative kind of Jew; while I suppose some may critcize me for “picking and choosing” my mitzvot, I do what feels right out of love, not obligation.

So while the Christians got a crash course, the rabbi gave me the gift of affirmation and inclusion into Savannah Jewry, even if I don’t know the tunes yet. Perhaps one day I’ll rock my idea for future t-shirt of the week: “Jewish by birth, Southern by the grace of God.”