semitism.net

I was interested to find an essay by Rabbi Daniel Judson on the Jewish custom of covering the head. It’s in a book called Rituals and Practices of a Jewish Life.

Rabbi Judson explains that he began wearing a kippah while he was a hospital chaplain.

It started for very practical reasons. It would help patients identify me as the rabbi-chaplain. When I walked into the room of a patient whom I did not know and announced myself as the chaplain, I would unconsciously lower my head a little to let him or her see the kipah.

His decision to wear it outside the hospital provoked discomfort among his friends, even those with a strong Jewish identity. He relates that a date, a Jewish day school teacher, asked him if he was “really going to go outside wearing that thing on my head.”

For him, though, the self-consciousness associated with the public display of religiosity was worth it because this small, symbolic observance also evoked a different sort of consciousness:

I saw God in the faces of other subway passengers and at the bedside of every sick person. This is what it means to have yirat shemayim (to be in awe of God), to feel God’s presence and power in all places.

His story makes me appreciate my wife, my family, my friends and my patients - Jewish and Not - who accepted the yarmulkah that appeared on my head about a year ago with curiosity and respect, and without judgment.

My wife, especially. After all, the guy she married was barely even a practicing Jew, and a few years later, I’m possibly the only guy in the Berkshires running around with a kippah.

The really odd thing is that, when I started wearing it, I still wasn’t much of a practicing Jew. Why was I wearing it? I felt a strong impulse, which I couldn’t explain very well.

I wanted to be a good Jewish role model for my kids. Maybe I wanted to show that an anti-Zionist could also be a proud Jew; or maybe to make explicit what had been understood but never spoken throughout my childhood and adult life in rural Massachusetts: that I was a Jew “from somewhere else” in a community of Christians with generations on the land.

I also had this idea that I would, as the song says, “make my life a blessing” - that I would honor God by living a moral life and by displaying honesty and compassion in my daily acts.

Rabbi Kerry Olitzky, quoted in Rabbi Judson’s essay, describes wearing the kippah as transformative.

This was true for me, in a very practical sense. It’s made me more observant of Jewish law. You just cannot go into a restaurant wearing a yarmulkah, and order lobster.

Note: this may be the part where any Orthodox who happen upon this post gasp and choke a bit. I’m sorry. What can I say? I am coming from a place within Judaism that was quite distant from halakhah.

Wearing the kippah has prodded me to learn and observe Jewish law to an extent that I would never have imagined a few years back. This has resulted in another sort of transformation.

For most of my life, I basically did not believe in God. I love science, and I was always quite satisfied to understand the world in terms of physical structures and natural laws. I had no need at all to invoke a divine being or supernatural intervention to explain life.

The proposition was: I have no satisfactory intellectual formulation of God. Without one, I can’t believe in God - except by a sort of compartmentalization in which reality is one thing and faith is something else; and if I don’t believe God exists, there is no sense practicing rituals of worship.

Now I’d turn the proposition upside down. The more I relate to God, through observance, ritual and prayer, the more real God becomes to me. In relating to God, I am relating to something beyond knowing (by definition, beyond science, beyond our ability to describe or understand) .

This, I think, may be a central truth of Judaism: outward observance leads to faith (or, better: closeness to God), rather than the other way around.

Rachel at Velveteen Rabbi recently posted an account by Karen Armstrong, a former nun, about her first serious encounter with Judaism, a lunch meeting with one Hyam Maccaby. He expressed this concept very nicely:

“No official theology?” I repeated stupidly. “None at all? How can you be religious without a set of ideas — about God, salvation, and so on — as a basis?”

“We have orthopraxy instead of orthodoxy,” Hyam replied calmly, wiping his mouth and brushing a few crumbs off the table. “‘Right practice’ rather than ‘right belief.’ That’s all. You Christians make such a fuss about theology, but it’s not important in the way you think. It’s just poetry, really, ways of talking about the inexpressible.”

Wearing a yarmulkah definitely evokes responses from people around you. Other Jews will recall their upbringing in Orthodox or mixed neighborhoods. I’ve learned a lot about Jewish customs from these conversations. I feel rather embarrassed that I - wearing the hat - sometimes know less about Jewish culture than they do.

In Springfield, I once had a police officer stop me on the street to tell me how much he respected the Jewish community. Expressions of support from Christians are very common and touching.

Occasionally the reaction is averse. One night, in the local convenience store, an older fellow hanging out behind the counter took one look at me and started expounding on Woody Allen and Jewish pornographers. I felt sorry for the young woman at the register, whom I know. I think the guy is her uncle or something. She was very embarrassed and couldn’t figure out how to shut him up.

Although it wasn’t my intent, I find that, by wearing the kippah, I am representing the Jewish People. For the most part, I feel proud of this, if somewhat unworthy.

Rabbi Judson quotes a 1965 sermon by Rabbi William Braude, a participant in the Reverend Martin Luther King’s march from Selma to Montgomery. Although it was not the custom among Reformed rabbis at that time to wear a yarmulahe, he and another rabbi wore them to protect their heads from the sun. In the free and accepting spirit of the march, the practice caught on:

…all our colleagues who came to Selma throughout their stay there wore yarmulkes. And the Negroes (the term used then) took to the yarmulkes, (they) began wearing them and calling them freedom caps. Then the rabbis proceeded to bring in large supplies of yarmulkes, which they distributed to those on the freedom march… I learned later that they sent back for a thousand yarmulkes, but all the civil rights workers wanted to wear them.

The yarmulahe he wore transformed Rabbi Braude’s personal act of solidarity to one of solidarity between Jews and blacks - a wonderful story.

But there is another, less talked about element to wearing a kippah. Not all of what we Jews have done in the past few decades is as virtuous as our participation in the civil rights movement. The relationship between Jews and blacks has frayed significantly as Jews have gained wealth, left the inner cities, and turned away from social justice and toward Israel as our major political cause.

There is a growing Muslim presence here in the Berkshires, as there is all through the U.S. I teach residents at Berkshire Medical Center, many of whom are from Pakistan or Arab countries. Some of the local hotels and service stations are managed by Arab immigrants, and I have a few in my practice. I often wonder what they think of the kippah.

When I think of the poverty and misery we are currently inflicting on Gaza - of our comfortable settlements on stolen land - of the forgotten Palestinian villages and the waves of refugees - of the ugly, destructive wall going up across farms and olive groves in the West Bank, and everything it implies - I am not so proud to declare myself a Jew.

These actions were driven by fear and desire; by the mistaken idea that human power can protect us from harm. They could not have been carried out by people truly imbued with yirat shemiyim.

To me, the kippah conveys allegiance to something more powerful than countries, borders and politics.

Be that as it may, by wearing it, I communicate that I am a part of the people who committed these acts.

It seems important to me to live with this discomfort, to feel shame for the sins of my people as well as pride in our virtues.

In this way, too, the superficial observance is a prod to action.