In the last six months, Sydney, my husband and I have covered ourselves with flour and raisins at challah-making class; danced, sang and stared in wonder at a guitar at Tot Shabbat; and read and re-read My First Shabbat Book (a gift from the fabulous PJ Library) more times than I care to remember. Sydney might not understand exactly what Shabbat commemorates, but she knows that it is celebrated with a special bread named challah, that we light special candles and that we drink wine from special cups (the word Kiddish is a bit beyond our vocabulary at the moment). And the best part? She thinks it’s all so wonderful and special, which of course it is.

Turns out you don’t have to understand the nuances of the Torah to understand the importance of a holiday – there’s plenty of time for that. I love watching Sydney discover her religious culture and traditions one step at a time. Can’t wait to see what the next step is – in the meantime, the “Shabbat book” is calling….

I recently joined the Open Tent’s discussion group for the Blessing of a Skinned Knee, though I first started reading and reflecting on this most interesting text when my daughter Orli was born 22 months ago.  For those of you that haven’t read it, the book is written by a mother/therapist/teacher that has undertaken a spiritual journey of sorts to find relevant solutions to raising children in today’s world using Jewish teachings.

During our first chat, all of us moms got a chance to voice a particular challenge that we are having in our own homes.  Some talked about completing homework, some talked about shyness, and I talked about sleep!  My fiery little one has gotten into the unfortunate habit of waking and calling for me every day between 5:30 and 6am.  ”Mommy, leche! (milk in spanish)  Moooommmmmmmyyyyyy!” is all I hear until I stumble in there, bleary eyed and slightly annoyed, preaching to her about the value of sleep and the need to stay in bed until dawn (which she obviously does not care to hear).

After this session, I went home determined to find a new tactic for dealing with this early waking behavior.  Someone had recently told me about a stoplight clock that is parent-programmed – a red light shines all night until the desired wake-up time, at which point it turns to green.  There is no noise, so if the toddler happens to still be asleep at, say, 7am, it will not wake him/her.  I went on the prowl and found an adorable clock online, complete with a little girl in a convertible car with a butterfly on the side, and had it shipped express.

When the package arrived, we sat down together and explored the new toy.  I demonstrated the red and green lights, and explained that she couldn’t call for me and ask for her bottle until the green light came on.  (It’s ok to wake up and even play quietly in her room, but no yelling.)  We are now 5 nights in – and she has waited until 7am for 4 of 5 of these nights!   The first morning, instead of “Mommy leche!” I heard “Light?  Mommy, light!”  It was like music – I haven’t woken up with such a bounce in my step in a long time.

This experience was a valuable lesson not only for me, Mommy, but for Orli as well.  She is giving me a little sanity to wake up and have a cup of tea or a little cereal before our day begins, and she is learning how to tell when it is time to get up.  She is also being given the freedom to play on her own until I come to her, which I always do.  Now I’m just a little more rested (at least for the next 5 weeks until the new baby is born).  :)

Parenting is the most important job most of us will ever have yet these children come into our lives without any instruction manuals whatsoever!  And just when we think we’ve got things figured out, our children reach a new stage which requires an entirely new figuring.  That’s what makes these books and discussion groups so necessary and important.

One theme which came up at my Mother-Daughter group last night, and again at the Blessing of a Skinned Knee Discussion today, is the tension between giving our kids enough freedom to help them grow, and yet at the same time keeping them safe.  In today’s world we’ve become so fearful of all the bad things that can happen that many of us try to protect (or over-protect) our children from everything. I even read in the newspaper about a parent who was warned by the police that she could be arrested for child endangerment because she let her son ride his bike to baseball practice alone!

In the Talmud we’re instructed that there are 3 things we are required to teach our children:  1)  Torah  2)  A trade and  3)  How to swim!  Swimming, of course, is a survival skill to teach our children.  But more importantly, when we teach a child to swim we need to let go of her to see if she will, quite literally, sink or swim!  For many of us, it’s the letting go part that’s so hard!  But if we never allow our children to fail, they will never learn independence and resiliency.

This Fall, we left our oldest daughter at college for her Freshman year and I really had to let go.  From the moment our babies become toddlers, they begin the process of inching away from us.  In what seems like an instant, our child’s tearful goodbye on the first day of kindergarten becomes our own tearful goodbye on the dormitory threshold.  And each time they move away from us, it’s our natural instinct to run and grab them back.  Believe me, I was tempted when we left our daughter at college!  We love our kids so much that we want to always be there for them because we think we know what’s best for them, or to shelter them from the harm we fear will befall them.

The fifth commandment teaches us to honor our parents.  We honor our children when we believe in them, guide and encourage them and allow them the space they need to discover for themselves who they are destined to be.

One of the most striking sentiments rising from the buzz at the annual Schmooze conference, a gathering of artists and arts professionals working Jewishly, was “At an economic time such as this, if you have to choose between being safe or taking a risk: take a risk,” with the idea being we have nothing to lose.

Having started our conversation with a stirring keynote address from Rabbi Irwin Kula of CLAL in which he centered on the idea of art for art’s sake and not for an external agenda related to numbers, this resonated as a call for unabashed artistic innovation and communal support for it. As much as I agree wholeheartedly in the idea of arts for art’s sake, something I live and breathe by, I also believe that inherent in art is an experience of identity and the possibility for community-building and social change. And Jewish culture in particular has a long history of a role in those things – from the centrality of liturgical music used to draw together a community in the beit knesset, the Hebrew term for synagogue that literally translates as “house of gathering,” to the Yiddish Theatre’s role in the Labor Movement to the current renaissance of Jewish culture that draws those even on the outermost fringes to a Matishayu show and its associated Shabbat Tent at, for example, Langerado.

And the art for art’s sake that paraded across the conference and its associated Oy!hoo Music Festival was indeed glorious. Choreographer Adam MacKinney of DNAWorks presented an excerpt from his multimedia piece HaMapah which explores his rich mixed family history mingling Jewish and African heritage. An accomplished dancer who has worked with a range of leading companies including Alvin Ailey, MacKinney has served as a US Embassy Culture Connect Envoy to South Africa. The piece combines documentary video, visual image, text and dance features an opportunity to watch MacKinney move, punctuating statements about expanding definitions of identity as he extends his long body throughout the space.

Another favorite of mine was Yiddish Princess, a Yiddish-singing classic punk band fronted by Sarah Gordon, a boisterous presence who couldn’t have been more generous with her energy and great pipes. The band’s tight, layered and dense sound is enhanced by the fluid and deeply soulful embodiment of Yiddish culture. Frontwoman Gordon’s substantial Yiddish literacy arises from the fact that she is of Yiddish culture royalty, indeed a Yiddish princess as the daughter of celebrated Yiddish singer Adrienne Cooper, who certainly holds the title of Yidddish Queen. Gordon was born and raised surrounded by this language and culture – exposed from birth to all of the great artists with whom her mother collaborates and jams around the country and the world, including some of the Princess’ own bandmates…when they are not luxuriating in punk.

Schmooze was also a nice opportunity to connect with artists who have been inside the Open Tent with us before including Susannah Pearlman of Nice Jewish Girls Gone Bad who has some new tricks up her sleeve; and Frank London who played an incredible set with fellow Klezmer-maven and Klezmatics bandmate, Lorin Sklamberg that accentuated the fact that these guys simply breathe music. Another artist from past Open Tent seasons I ran into was Alicia Rabins, a band member of Golem who is now additionally touring with her new band Girls In Trouble, which released its first CD on JDub Records this fall. I was psyched to get to hear Girls In Trouble live for a second time because their sound is so fulfilling and their lyrics so compelling. The girls in trouble to which the band’s name refers are in fact women of the Torah and their gender-based struggles – the band itself being Rabin’s thesis project for her recent graduate work in Jewish studies. The band’s sound is informed by a similar neo-klezmer/gypsy-punk sound as Golem infused by rich middle eastern sounds that fill the space to embrace the listener seemingly in the place of the Biblical stories.

Other musical highlights of the Schmooze and Oy!hoo included the ever-exciting and eclectic Soulfarm and kosher Gospel king Joshua Nelson who each put on great shows at the festival.

During Passover 2009, Arts Inside The Open Tent presented an alternative, creative Passover Seder as Art, promoting alternative access to the Passover experience. In conjunction with its exhibition, Growing Up Comix: JT Waldman, in partnership with Art Center/South Florida, the Seder As Art tied-in the graphic novelist’s piece Four Children, originally commissioned by Nextbook, while engaging artists in a variety of media (performing, media and visual arts) with their own interpretations of parts of the Haggadah. Participating artists were Kevin Arrow Andrea Askowitz, Hannah Lasky, Zammy Migdal, Rhonda Mitrani, Carmel Ophir & Howard Davis, and JT Waldman.

Seder As Art stood out as a successful interdisciplinary art experience not only because it relied on the intermix of a variety of disciplines, but also because of its play between art and audience – an experiential reinterpretation of tradition. The project served as a virtual aesthetic Seder which took guests (otherwise known as on Second Saturday gallery night art enthusiasts prowling the Design District’s offerings) through aspects of the traditional Passover Seder from the memory and nostalgia referenced in a mixed-media installation, My Matzo by Zammy Migdal to through a literal figurative print of a halo-ed Elijah by Hannah Lasky. Like an actual Seder, the project prodded and struck deep to provoke questions and stirred guests to examine contemporary issues in the face of the historical story of the journey from the narrow place of oppression to redemption.

In addition to Waldman’s piece, the project included Four Questions, a video installation by Rhonda Mitrani that juxtaposed text, sound, and video footage to question if the contemporary condition of media image bombardment numbs us to the fact that the same issues of oppression still exist.

Kevin Arrow’s Untitled (Recipe Box) was to the naked eye purely nostalgia as an installation of a wooden recipe box out of which he pulled and arranged mostly handwritten recipes for standard Ashkenazi Jewish recipes such as stuffed cabbage, matzah brei and brisket. His artist statement connected it to memories of his grandmother’s cooking and stories of another life in an Odessa shtetl surviving Cossack rampages. The very image of the balabusta, a Yiddish term of endearment and praise for a skilled Jewish homemaker (the literal translation is “master of the house”), in the kitchen of Arrow’s more upwardly mobile American childhood ably and abundantly providing for two generations of family served as a strong symbol of redemption. As the producer of this project I was fortunate to also hear another story of redemption. Arrow spoke of his acquisition of the box, discovered amongst a gutter full of discards. As he perused the refuse he came across hand-notated books and such treasures that it seemed someone else perceived of as trash. Thankfully Arrow redeemed some books, including cookbooks and the recipe box from annihilation giving it a new life amongst his own palette and in our installation.

Writer Andrea Askowitz, director of Lip Service, a monthly literary event at Books & Books and our partner in this season’s Lip Schtick, presented a story that lived in the spirit of Passover by centering on asking questions. Like a giant self-referential swirl, the piece on questioning questioned “Why Passover?” examining why Askowitz, who questions it all, has landed on Passover as a favorite holiday.

A throbbing nightclub installation drawn together by artist- and nightclub-collaborators Carmel Ophir and Howard Davis (Ophir owns the popular indie downtown club The Vagabond, Davis leads the club’s frequent thematic transformations) took over a corner of the space combining sound, video and text. Projected on a screen made of matzah and supported by a 45-minute musical loop of a contemporary DJ mix, the piece sampled excerpts of speeches by Martin Luther King Jr., Yitzchak Rabin and scenes of Charlton Heston as Moses in the movie The Ten Commandments. Together the elements gave audience a full aural, visual, and physical experience of its message of striving for redemption that also provided a soundtrack for the whole evening.

Altogether, each piece in this show represented a news means of access to the ideas we have been discussing at Seders for generations. I felt blessed simply for the amazing conversations that I got to have with the artists as they developed their ideas. Everything from connections to Jewish identity and family to practice (and non-practice) to cultural stereotypes to broader visions about current local and global crises came under the tent in a glorious creative virtual Haggadah of artistic process.

It is from that perspective that I am eagerly embarking on Seder As Art 2010 and look forward to sharing with South Florida audience another meaningful and exhilarating experience of Passover as interpreted by a dynamic cadre of locally-based artists. This years promises to be even more robust as we are expanding the project a bit by media and number of participants. So mark your calendars now for Art & Design Night in the Design District, Saturday, March 13 from 7 to 10pm. Stay tuned for lots more details!

This year, my husband and I have taken to lighting the menorah and singing the prayers nightly, hopeful that our 17-month-old bundle of energy pauses long enough to notice the flickering flames. We delight in watching her rip into presents, play with dreidels and nosh on latkes. She most likely won’t remember kicking off the holiday with Gima & Gramps on Friday night (when Gima decorated the house for the first time in some 20 years) or closing it out with Nana & Papa later this week, but somehow that doesn’t matter. What does matter is that we’re doing it – and creating traditions along the way. So much of my Jewish identity revolves around family traditions and cultural memories – I love the idea of sharing them and creating new ones with our daughter.
One wonderful thing about starting traditions is that they can easily be amended to your interests. A budding foodie? Kick off annual latke making. A devoted shopper? Encourage the munchkins to share in the delight of gift giving by helping pick out presents for parents, siblings and cousins. A big reader? Dig into any and every kid-friendly Chanukah book out there and retell the story in your own words with your toddler, tween or teen. Artists can create their own menorahs or decorate the house with homemade decorations. Channel your instincts and interests and let the fun begin.

On Dec 10, The Open Tent partnered with Birthright Israel to present a Hanukkah Soiree at South Beach’s Burger & Beer. Highlights included performances by Michelle Citrin and Jacob Jeffries, an open bar and Hanukkah nibbles. Relive the fun with the photo recap below.

]]> http://theopentent.org/2009/12/11/a-hanukkah-soiree/feed/ 0 http://theopentent.org/2009/12/01/photo-recap-open-tent-at-sleepless-night/ http://theopentent.org/2009/12/01/photo-recap-open-tent-at-sleepless-night/#comments Tue, 01 Dec 2009 22:21:59 +0000 Valerie Schimel, Freelance Journalist http://theopentent.org/?p=616 Miami Beach’s second Sleepless Night swept through the island with force from 6pm Sat, Nov 7 to 7am on Sun, Nov 8 and The Open Tent was a proud participant in the festivities. Our presentations for the evening included Oy-Le!, a Klezmer and Flamenco musical extravaganza at Lummus Park, and Lip Schtick, an interactive author presentation co-sponsored by Books & Books and Design Within Reach. See below for a photo slideshow recounting both of the events…

I remember the first time I ever visited the Western Wall (also known as the Wailing Wall or Kotel).  I was 16 years old and visiting Israel on the Alexander Muss High School in Israel program.  I had this vision in my head of what it would be like to see the Wall for the first time, to touch it with my own hands, to smell the ancient city of Jerusalem…and I was utterly disappointed.  First of all, the Wall looked much smaller than I had imagined, particularly the women’s side, which appeared to be about half the size of the men’s.  Secondly, on the women’s side of the Wall, nothing was happening.  All the action was on the men’s side – dancing, singing, praying out loud.  And then, what was especially irksome, was that many women and girls had lined up by the partition, and were watching the activity on the men’s side, without any thought to making things happen on the women’s side.  I vowed then and there, that I would one day return to the Wall and with devotion and love, bring life to the women’s side.

I am happy to say that I have fulfilled that vow.  I have had the privilege of visiting the Wall on many, many occasions, and of bringing groups of women to pray, dance and sing with me there.  Each time, when we lift our voices in song and our feet in dance, others join in, grateful for the opportunity of joyful expression.  Luckily for us, we have never been arrested.

Earlier in November on a Wednesday morning, a young medical student visited the Wall with “Women of the Wall”, a group which has monthly Rosh Hodesh (new moon) meetings at the Wall, and she was arrested for wearing a tallit.  Police said they arrested the women for not dressing in accordance with the site’s “dress code”.  Orthodox men, threatened by women’s spirituality, are suppressing women’s desire to pray out loud as a community, wearing the traditional garments Jews wear in prayer.

All over the world, women are allowed to wrap themselves in a tallit, a traditional Jewish prayer shawl, for prayer – everywhere — except for the holiest place on earth!  On this American holiday of Thanksgiving, I am grateful that I have the opportunity to pray as I wish, with other women or men, wearing a tallit or not.  Next time I’m in Israel, I will once again pray at the Wall, and one of the things I will pray for is the acceptance of women’s rights in Israel.

On Saturday, November 7 I had one of those extraordinary days that reminds me why I do what I do.

In preparation for Oy-Le!, our first Sleepless Night presentation (we did two), I spent the afternoon at the rehearsal/jam session of Heavy Shteltl Klezmer and Siempre Flamenco – five musicians who came together to fuse their unique, culturally-specific sounds. It was inspiring to see this small group of strangers walk into a room together, set up their instruments and equipment and proceed to connect through music. Like small talk at a cocktail party, pitch and rhythm mingled, musicians smiling at each other and laughing at points when musical phrases landed in mutually favorable places in the audio-sphere of our make-shift rehearsal room at Temple Emanu-el on Miami Beach.

Two hours later we were on our way to the Lummus Park Mainstage at 8th Street and the ocean where our juxtaposed jam was to take the stage at 6:30. It was a total thrill to be amongst the Sleepless Night hullabaloo right there on Ocean Drive, surrounded by arts enthusiasts and the anticipation of all the wondrous things that were to come throughout the night. With the first downbeat of Oy-Le! the small crowd that had been waiting swelled to double and triple its size as people were drawn to the unique sound resulting from the layering of Klezmer and Flamenco. Young and old, Jewish and non, Miamian and tourist, danced along to the rich rhythms which proved doubly familiar and accessible. The audience had a blast – but at the center of this joy was that of the musicians who shared the stage and shared the music from within themselves.

After the show I raced with a volunteer and a mic stand up the beach to Lincoln Road for our 8pm presentation of Lip Schtick in partnership with Lip Service hosted by Books & Books and Design Within Reach. What a buzz awaited us as audience streamed in for our show. Again, we welcomed an incredibly diverse audience – this time all having come out for compelling stories of contemporary Jewish experience. And compelling it was as voices soared into hearts – despite a sound system glitch that rendered my mic-stand-schlepping useless. The solid line-up of writers sharing their words about their names, their families, their stomachs, and all by way of connecting to their Jewish identity was as gloriously diverse as the enthusiastic audience. They were young and old, gay and straight, kosher and treyf.

The words that got put out there – tightly woven text relaying this broad variety of Jewish identity and experience – provided access points for everyone. And it was again the resulting incredibly joyful energy of artists and audience that was so dense you could practically see it. If you missed it, all the pieces can be viewed online via YouTube at the Lip Service site – click here.