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(N.B. This is, more or less, a book review, complementing the shorter, more neutered piece I did a few weeks back. I’m currently halfheartedly shopping it around for a suitable home, so please holla if you’ve got any ideas.)

Growing up, my friends and I found the Sabbath to be a day of too much rest.

Because aside from the meals, which were great but predictable, and synagogue, which was dull and predictable, how does a kid fill the roughly 25 hours of prescribed downtime? We could read, sure, but few of us could remain occupied by a book for very long. Couldn’t write, or even do homework. No television or computer or video games. No practicing piano or guitar.  Playtime activities were severely curtailed by the adults’ admonishment not to disturb their shabbes schluf (nap), a tradition as sacred as kiddush or cholent. If the weather wasn’t welcoming – and I grew up in Toronto – and we were forced indoors, then no basement hockey, tag, hide n’ seek (always noisier than you’d expect), wrestling matches, food fights, or ping pong. Board games were an option, but even here it was slim pickings: Scrabble was verboten (word construction might be a form of ketiva, or writing, one of the 39 prohibited activities); Monopoly was frowned upon (closely resembles business transactions); and even chess was questionable (the active selection of the pieces might be a violation of borer, or sorting, another Sabbath no-no). And scorekeeping without a writing utensil is a bitch.

You’d think we’d eventually grow adept at passing time, like a jail inmate or a kind of Sabbath Zen master, but we never did. Sabbath – or shabbes, the term I grew up with and am still most comfortable using – usually meant severe, crushing, unrelenting boredom.

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I don’t have a stake in this argument, not really. From a macro perspective, this is little more than a small-c conservative community grappling with modern day reality; like with everything (e.g., feminism), they’ll get there, they’re just 40 years behind.

But this issue — how and if gays can fit inside the Orthodox community — is bigger than it seems. Because for the first time, the very notion of Orthodoxy itself, so vague historically, is being put to the test. Before, there were some ground rules — kosher, sabbath, stuff like this — for inclusion, and even those were not strictly regulated. On one level, it could be messily formulated like this: You want to call yourself Orthodox, you’re Orthodox. Very few people were going to ‘fake’ it.

But now the community is disputing that right to self-identify. Orthodox folk who happen to be gay and want to retain their religious bona fides now have to defend them. The subtext of this entire argument, from both sides, is that it’s not a halachik issue; it’s an issue of treatment, etc.  The question is, essentially: Does the community allow the individual to retain the title of ‘Orthodoxy’ despite breakage of law?

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I’m back to this Jewish Press article, about homosexuality, halacha, and everything in between.

Firstly, what’s most significant about this article isn’t the content — there’s nothing new here in that regard — it’s the medium: the Jewish Press.  The fact that a highly visible, impeccably Orthodox platform has to publish a defense of its own movement’s stance means, in a sense, that the gig is up. This issue is not going away. The gays are not going back into the closet. And — here’s where things get dicey — they’re not going about it quietly (cf., recent YU conferences, etc.), to the point where it has to be confronted. A conversation’s begun, and it’s one that, you get the sense, some people would rather not be having.

So the authors pen a very declarative, almost scientific-sounding defense of their halachik viewpoint. Which can be summed up as: Hate the game, not the players. Or, as they put it, rather unromantically:

Even as halacha clearly labels the act a sin, Judaism does not seek to label the actors as evildoers whom we must shun.

Like I’ve said, we’ve heard this before a hundred times, a million times before. The party line has become a strange breed of political sensitivity and halachik inflexibility:  We’re not homophobic, promise! We’re just God-fearing!

This is bollocks. Let me be blunt: Homophobia, even if it’s divinely-sanctioned, is still homophobia. And just because Bible-literalists and the like feel that the attitude is inescapable, that it’s an ineluctable part of Orthodoxy, doesn’t make it okay, much less moral. This act/actor distinction is awfully blurry. Plus, it’s an entirely academic distinction. The right-wing Orthodox people I know are, for the most part, simply blatantly (and proudly) homophobic. When an openly gay man who nonetheless eschews sexual relations is hired in an Orthodox school, well, I’ll gladly eat it.

I’m not done with this.

The post detailing the exchange on Tav HaYosher has been taken down for reasons that are none of your bizniss.

Jew stuff!

• ‘New Jews,’ who — get this — don’t have to love Israel.
• The wrath of the storms mean people who brave it can no longer carry with halachik impunity.
• The day of female, Orthodox rabbis is coming, like it or not (it’s the ‘Orthodox’ designation that will be debated); this is just a step closer.
• And in what’s a widespread, if unreported phenomenon, Aish offers much better questions than its answers. Now this ex-hasid writes for this site.

My browser’s freezing. More later.

• Orthodox rabbi at Harvard goes on and on about why Orthodoxy stuck around.
• New confusing Jewish website; not sure about this one yet.
• Asians & Jews, in education and beyond.

It turns out that the most employable thing about me isn’t my dashing semitic looks or uncanny sense of balance: it’s my web-aggregating acumen. A good 30% of my job is finding fresh fodder for a certain well-read blog (most of which doesn’t make it through), which means I see a lot of web content. And no need to waste the efforts of my tired eyes and strained wrist! So here are some of the gems I’ve discovered, loosely linked by Jewish content.

• A Hasidic boy’s first time. (Note: It’s a bit racy in spots, but, on the whole, it’s mostly innocent. I’m also a mite suspicious, but nevermind that. Also, contrary to what the author claims, Yiddish is mindblowingly hot.)
• The latest attempt to fix the ‘shidduch crisis.’  You know I’ll be back to rant on this one. (via Tablet)
• And yeesh, not a great day for Israeli rabbis. Just cruise on over to FailedMessiah for a roundup.

(Yo haters: This feature will be recurring, and probably less Jewish-themed as it progresses.)