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Sophia Manuel grew up and attended elementary school in Leonia, and subsequently graduated from Dwight-Englewood School. Sophia became Bat Mitzvah at Adas Emuno, as did her sister, Lili, who is now a senior at Ithaca College, and has since graduated from Brown University with a degree in International Relations. Her mom, Beth Robin, is our piano accompanist for the High Holy Days and other special occasions, and her father, Peter Manuel, is a professor of ethnomusicology at John Jay College and the CUNY Graduate Center. Yesterday evening, in lieu of a D'Var Torah by Rabbi Schwartz, Sophia spoke about her experiences in India over the past year. Sophia was kind enough to allow us to publish her remarks on our congregational blog:
As some of you might remember, I spoke here about a year and a half ago, before I left for India. Many of you helped make my trip possible, for which I am so grateful. I just got back in mid-September and I wanted to tell you all a little bit about my experience.
I was in India with a program called the World Partners Fellowship with American Jewish World Service. For those of you who are not familiar with AJWS, it is a charity run by Ruth Messinger, which gives grants to grassroots local organizations in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. The grants are to support hundreds of organizations in their efforts to alleviate poverty and realize human rights, especially for the poor, women, religious minorities, sexual minorities, indigenous people, and people in areas of conflict or natural disaster. AJWS support these organizations through grants and by sending American Jewish volunteers.
The World Partners Fellowship was one of these volunteer programs. 12 recent college graduates or young professionals were selected through a rigorous process and were sent to India for a year, because that’s a site of many of AJWS’s local grassroots partners.
AJWS placed me in the capital of the poorest state in India, at an organization called [AJWS has asked that we not mention our host organizations, so I will refer to it as NGO1]. NGO1 was based in a city, but ran service programs in rural areas throughout the state. With contracts from the government of India and from international charities, NGO1 ran an eye hospital, elderly care, village health camps, midwife and childcare training centers, literacy and employment training, and women’s shelters and helpline.
My first tasks at NGO1 were writing, because the only other person there who spoke English was the president. So I wrote the Annual Report and the content for the new website. I also edited a lot of the written material that came out of NGO1 while I was there. When that work was done, I was given free range to pick one of NGO1’s programs and try to improve it. I chose the one of the women’s shelters and helpline.
Because I knew little about women’s issues in India, AJWS staff put me in touch with a number of government agencies and non-profit organizations in the area that worked with domestic violence. I spent several weeks meeting with experts and bureaucrats, learning about the violence against women in India and the different policies and programs to combat it.
What I learned disturbed me. Before moving to India, I’d read a book written in the 1980’s that detailed the lives of several women in India. Most of the stories involved village girls who, in their early teens, were forced by their fathers to marry older men. They moved in with their husbands’ families, where the in-laws often beat the young brides because they wanted more dowry from her family. When their husbands were angry, drunk, or just wanted to provide instruction, they would beat their young wives. They would have several children before they turned 18. If she gave birth to girls, she was tortured and sometimes even thrown out of the house, because the dowry for those daughters could put the household into debt. Sometimes, if she’d had several daughters, her mother-in-law would make her poison or abandone a newborn if it was also a girl.
These stories were horrible, but I assumed that the book was written in the 80’s about particular women and that this kind of thing didn’t really happen anymore in India.
After my two weeks of meeting with experts and reading reports, I was shocked to discover how wrong I was. Those stories were not unique in the 80’s and they are not unique today.
Nearly half of married women in India were married before they turned 18. More than half of married women in India are beaten by their husbands and many are beaten by their in-laws. There are half a billion women in India – so the scale of this kind of abuse is almost impossible to fathom. These numbers, combined with the high rates of female infanticide and neglect of daughters due to the tradition of dowry, along with high rates of maternal mortality, sexual assault, sex trafficking, and employment of girls in hazardous conditions have led Reuters to rank India as the fourth worst country in the world for women, after Afghanistan, Congo, and Pakistan.
Fortunately, the government of India has noticed that its women are suffering and has created a number of policies to reverse the trend. Dowry and child marriage have been illegal for decades. In 2005, the government passed an act to provide shelter and legal redress to victims of domestic violence.
NGO1’s shelter and helpline that I sought to improve were contracted by the government as part of this 2005 act. It was supposed to be the source of support for all women in that county – so about a million women. The contract of the government stipulated that the shelter should have beds for 30 women to stay for anywhere from 3 months to 2 years. The shelter was to have an administrator, cook, maid, vocational and literacy teacher, guards, and psychological and legal counselors. The contract said that NGO1 would pay for the costs and salaries would be paid with money that would be released from the state to the county administrator and then to NGO1.
After hiring a taxi and a translator, I drove 4 hours to the shelter. What I found was nothing like the government contract I’d read. The shelter, intended for 30 women, housed only 3, despite the fact that there were were probably tens of thousands of women who might have needed it. These three women were there because they could not tolerate the abuse from their husbands and because their parents refused to take them in. The women probably needed counseling and diversions, but none were available. They did not leave the dark bare shelter except to go to the hospital. The TV had been broken for 8 months. There were no activities except for informal reading and sewing lessons several hours a week. They didn’t know how to read.
Most of the staff required by the government plan (including lawyers, a psychologist, and a vocational trainer) had not been hired in the 2 years this program had been running. The two women who worked there had not been paid in a year. Also surprising was the Helpline. As part of the Domestic Violence act of 2005, each county was to have a helpline for women in distress. Depending on the needs of the caller, the Helpline could recommend a lawyer or shelter or it could invite the woman and her husband in for counseling.
The same woman who was stretched thin managing the shelter was also in charge of the helpline for this county. She told me that she received several calls a week, mostly cases of domestic violence. She said she would always try to get the couple to come in for counseling. If they agreed, she would conduct two sessions with the husband and wife. Then, usually by the 2nd meeting, she would get the husband to sign a sheet of paper promising never to beat his wife again. Then she would send them home. I asked her if she ever followed up on these cases. She said she didn’t have time. I asked her if she ever followed up on the women who had stayed in the shelter and returned to their husbands (as is often the case). She said she tried to call them once or twice a year. Sadly, government agencies and experts told me that in most cases of counseling, the husbands resume beating their wives.
I made a list of recommendations for the president of NGO1 to improve the shelter and helpline. While I was not an expert on domestic violence, it seemed clear that NGO1 should hire the necessary staff, so that the women could receive some counseling and training to occupy their days and so that the director wouldn’t be responsible for everything in the shelter and helpline. I recommended that the new staff should prioritize follow-up, perhaps even with surprise visits to the women’s houses, to make sure that their husbands had not resumed the violence. I suggested that NGO1 plan excursions for the women to leave the shelter, maybe to visit other shelters or training centers so they could get fresh air and interact with other people. I told the president that he should repair the TV and pay the staff who hadn’t been paid in a year. And I suggested that NGO1 publicize the shelter and helpline so that women are aware of it.
Unfortunately, it looks like none of my recommendations, besides fixing the TV, will be possible. The president told me, and a representative from the state confirmed, that the county administration does not prioritize social issues and so was delaying releasing the funds that it had received from the state. NGO1 could not make the hires itself or receive the funds directly because the government decided that it was important to give the county Administration some ownership over the shelter. The excursions were not possible because the director of the shelter did not have time. At least the TV could be repaired with the president’s own money.
The representative from the state told me that this shelter is normal. NGO1 is doing nothing wrong, except that they could be more active in meeting with the county administrators and persuading them to release the funds. The president of NGO1 told me that “persuading” means “paying bribes,” which he was not prepared to do.
I was so discouraged. Not only had all my work been in vain, but I could not accept that, despite the great domestic violence law, the women who’d called the helpline and stayed in the shelter were likely to continue suffering. And millions of women across India were likely to continue suffering.
For reasons that will take too long for me to explain now, AJWS moved me to a different Indian organization in Delhi. This one researched implementation of public service programs like NGO1’s and made policy recommendations to the government based on that research. They also worked on gender equality. My work for this organization was mostly writing. What I liked the most about this organization was their 2nd mission, to stop domestic violence in a way that is actually working. The Delhi organization headed efforts to challenge India’s patriarchy by working with young men to change their attitudes and behavior in a program I will refer to as NGO2. With the help of local partners in villages, NGO2 identified young men who seemed to be already questioning the patriarchal system. NGO2 would work with these men to see how gender equality could improve the lives of their sisters, mothers, wives, and daughters, as well as themselves. Once convinced, these young men would bring their peers to weekly group meetings, where they would have discussions and training about gender equality. Gradually the groups would share with each other that they had stopped beating their wives, started sending their daughters to school, were now inviting the women in their families to eat meals with the men, playing with their daughters, and helping their wives with housework. I watched videos of the men and their wives describing how their new attitudes had completely transformed their lives. These groups would then do outreach campaigns in their villages, trying to reach more and more men. And they actually did. Initially, the other village men thought they were behaving strangely, but gradually, they started to question patriarchy too.
This is just a tiny sliver of everything I learned and experienced in India. And it’s just a fraction of the work that AJWS supports in India and around the world. I want to thank the synagogue and those of you who contributed to AJWS on my behalf for helping me get to India and for being a part of these incredible efforts for human rights and development.
Sophia's talk was followed by an enthusiastic round of applause, a series of thoughtful questions from our congregants. As Rabbi Schwartz put it, in this season of light, Sophia has spoken to us about how she shared her own light with others in need, and everyone present found her talk truly inspirational, a powerful example of tikkun olam from one of our own, to make us all very proud.
Hanukkah begins Saturday night! Our Leonia community menorah lighting will take place outside of our synagogue at 7:00 PM, so please join us as we light the first light and sing songs, and then head inside for our annual Hanukkah party, with latkes and other delicious treats! All ages are welcome. This event is free and open to the community.
On Sunday, December 9 at 4:00 PM, join us for our Hanukkah Party for Young Families. Come partake of latkes, music, stories, and games. This Hanukkah party is geared for families with children ages 2-5, but older and younger siblings, grandparents, and other members of the family are welcome too! This party is free and open to the community.
On Friday, December 14 at 7:30 PM, come join us for our Hanukkah Shabbat Family Service. Congregation Adas Emuno has a family service every month led by a class from our religious school. These services are open to families with children of all ages, and to all members of our community.
And with eight nights of gifts, don't forget to do your Amazon ordering through our portal on this blog, over on the left, or if you're looking for some ideas, please come visit our new online Judaica store by clicking on the image above, or right here:
Adas Emuno will receive 25% of the revenue on all purchases, and the store will remain open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365.25 days a year! You don't have to be a member, or reside in the area, to visit our store or make purchases, so please encourage family and friends to try our new service.
And have a Happy Hanukkah ✡ We hope to see you soon!
As a follow-up to our previous post, The Less Than Perfect God of Hebrew Scripture, the subject of life after death and the idea of the soul was part of our recent discussion revolving around the Mishneh Torah of Moses Maimonides, as part of our Saturday morning Torah study led by Rabbi Barry Schwartz.
In the course of discussion, Jill Bolte Taylor's Stroke of Insight Ted Talk was mentioned, as it is an attempt to bridge the spiritual and the biological, albeit outside of any specific religious context.
It seems only fitting, then, to share that video here on our congregational blog, with the understanding that this does not represent any official view on the subject matter:
Whatever you may think of Taylor's perspective on the world, the two hemispheres might be taken as paralleling the contrast between Athens and Jerusalem. The subject of left and right brain hemispheres was addressed by the physician Leonard Shlain, the subject of the documentary we screened here at Adas Emuno this past August, Connected (see our previous posts, Get Connected at Adas Emuno and Connecting to Leonia Life). And we certainly can relate to the connection here between brain and heart, and for both this talk provides some food for thought!
This year in our Saturday morning Torah study led by Rabbi Schwartz here at Congregation Adas Emuno, we have been reading the Mishneh Torah of Moses Maimonides, the 12th century Jewish philosopher and theologian, and discussing his attempt to integrate Aristotelian logic into Talmudic scholarship, and provide an accessible summary of Rabbinic Judaism's interpretation of the Torah.
As a supplement to our studies, and a matter of general interest, a recent post on the New York Times Opinionator Blog, entitled An Imperfect God, seems worthy of our attention. The author is Yoram Hazony, president of the Institute for Advanced Studies at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem and the author of, most recently, The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture:
Here now is Hazony's commentary, posted on November 25th:
Is
God perfect? You often hear philosophers describe "theism" as the
belief in a perfect being - a being whose attributes are said to include
being all-powerful, all-knowing, immutable, perfectly good, perfectly
simple, and necessarily existent (among others). And today, something
like this view is common among lay people as well.
There are two
famous problems with this view of God. The first is that it appears to
be impossible to make it coherent. For example, it seems unlikely that
God can be both perfectly powerful and perfectly good if the world is
filled (as it obviously is) with instances of terrible injustice.
Similarly, it's hard to see how God can wield his infinite power to
instigate alteration and change in all things if he is flat-out
immutable. And there are more such contradictions where these came from.
The
second problem is that while this "theist" view of God is supposed to
be a description of the God of the Bible, it's hard to find any evidence
that the prophets and scholars who wrote the Hebrew Bible (or "Old
Testament") thought of God in this way at all. The God of Hebrew
Scripture is not depicted as immutable, but repeatedly changes his mind
about things (for example, he regrets having made man). He is not
all-knowing, since he's repeatedly surprised by things (like the
Israelites abandoning him for a statue of a cow). He is not perfectly
powerful either, in that he famously cannot control Israel and get its
people to do what he wants. And so on.
At this point, an interjection seems appropriate, to note that Hazony is raising the famous problem of free will, one that Maimonides among many others have taken up.
Philosophers have spent
many centuries trying to get God's supposed perfections to fit together
in a coherent conception, and then trying to get that to fit with the
Bible. By now it's reasonably clear that this can't be done. In fact,
part of the reason God-bashers like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris are
so influential (apart from the fact they write so well) is their
insistence that the doctrine of God's perfections makes no sense, and
that the idealized "being" it tells us about doesn't resemble the
biblical God at all.
So is that it, then? Have the atheists won? I
don't think so. But it does look like the time has come for some
rethinking in the theist camp.
I'd start with this: Is it really
necessary to say that God is a "perfect being," or perfect at all, for
that matter? As far as I can tell, the biblical authors avoid asserting
any such thing. And with good reason. Normally, when we say that
something is "perfect," we mean it has attained the best possible
balance among the principles involved in making it the kind of thing it
is. For example, if we say that a bottle is perfect, we mean it can
contain a significant quantity of liquid in its body; that its neck is
long enough to be grasped comfortably and firmly; that the bore is wide
enough to permit a rapid flow of liquid; and so on. Of course, you can
always manufacture a bottle that will hold more liquid, but only by
making the body too broad (so the bottle doesn't handle well) or the
neck too short (so it's hard to hold). There's an inevitable trade-off
among the principles, and perfection lies in the balance among them. And
this is so whether what's being judged is a bottle or a horse, a wine
or a gymnastics routine or natural human beauty.
What would we say
if some philosopher told us that a perfect bottle would be one that can
contain a perfectly great amount of liquid, while being perfectly easy
to pour from at the same time? Or that a perfect horse would bear an
infinitely heavy rider, while at the same time being able to run with
perfectly great speed? I should think we'd say he's made a fundamental
mistake here: You can't perfect something by maximizing all its
constituent principles simultaneously. All this will get you is
contradictions and absurdities. This is not less true of God than it is
of anything else.
The attempt to think of God as a perfect being
is misguided for another reason as well. We can speak of the perfection
of a bottle or a horse because these are things that can be encompassed
(at least in some sense) by our senses and understanding. Having the whole
bottle before us, we feel we can judge how close it is to being a
perfect instance of its type. But if asked to judge the perfection of a
bottle poking out of a paper bag, or of a horse that's partly hidden in
the stable, we'd surely protest: How am I supposed to know? I can only
see part of it.
Yet the biblical accounts of our encounters with
God emphasize that all human views of God are partial and fragmentary in
just this way. Even Moses, the greatest of the prophets, is told that
he can't see God's face, but can only catch a glimpse of God's back as
he passes by. At another point, God responds to Moses' request to know
his name (that is, his nature) by telling him "ehi'eh asher ehi'eh" -"I
will be what I will be." In most English-language Bibles this is
translated "I am that I am," following the Septuagint, which sought to
bring the biblical text into line with the Greek tradition (descended
from Xenophanes, Parmenides and Plato's "Timaeus") of identifying God
with perfect being. But in the Hebrew original, the text says almost
exactly the opposite of this: The Hebrew "I will be what I will be" is
in the imperfect tense, suggesting to us a God who is incomplete and
changing. In their run-ins with God, human beings can glimpse a corner
or an edge of something too immense to be encompassed, a
"coming-into-being" as God approaches, and no more. The belief that any
human mind can grasp enough of God to begin recognizing perfections in
him would have struck the biblical authors as a pagan conceit.
One more interjection seems called for here, just to note that the translation of the Holy Scriptures from Hebrew to Greek was not just a matter of linguistic substitution, but actually a translation of worldviews and philosophies. That this is inherent in the act of translation is a point made long ago by the linguistic anthropologist, Edward Sapir.
So
if it's not a bundle of "perfections" that the prophets and scholars who
wrote the Hebrew Bible referred to in speaking of God, what was it they
were talking about? As Donald Harman Akenson writes, the God of Hebrew
Scripture is meant to be an "embodiment of what is, of reality" as we
experience it. God's abrupt shifts from action to seeming indifference
and back, his changing demands from the human beings standing before
him, his at-times devastating responses to mankind's deeds and misdeeds -
all these reflect the hardship so often present in the lives of most
human beings. To be sure, the biblical God can appear with sudden and
stunning generosity as well, as he did to Israel at the Red Sea. And he
is portrayed, ultimately, as faithful and just. But these are not the
"perfections" of a God known to be a perfect being. They don't exist in
his character "necessarily," or anything remotely similar to this. On
the contrary, it is the hope that God is faithful and just that
is the subject of ancient Israel's faith: We hope that despite the
frequently harsh reality of our daily experience, there is nonetheless a
faithfulness and justice that rules in our world in the end.
The ancient Israelites, in other words, discovered a more realistic
God than that descended from the tradition of Greek thought. But
philosophers have tended to steer clear of such a view, no doubt out of
fear that an imperfect God would not attract mankind's allegiance.
Instead, they have preferred to speak to us of a God consisting of a
series of sweeping idealizations - idealizations whose relation to the
world in which we actually live is scarcely imaginable. Today, with
theism rapidly losing ground across Europe and among Americans as well,
we could stand to reconsider this point. Surely a more plausible
conception of God couldn't hurt.
To this conclusion can be added the point that this may well be part of the attraction of Kabbalah in recent years, as Jewish mysticism incorporates a concept of God that is quite different from the absolute perfection of Hellenized theology. And if nothing else, Hazony helps us to better understand how the worldviews of Athens and Jerusalem are difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile.
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We had a full house last night for the jazz concert performed by Eugene Marlow's Heritage Ensemble, as can be seen by these two photographs taken by Congregation Adas Emuno's president, Lance Strate:
And for a closer view, one rendered in stylish black and white, here are three more photos taken by Trustee Fred Friedman:
And as these pictures suggest, our full house was filled with music last night, and the band really brought the house down here in Bergen County, metaphorically speaking of course. Our thanks to everyone who made this special Leonia evening possible!
Thanks to Richard Alicchio for sharing this photograph, taken from the Jewish Standard, publicizing our hosting of the encore performance of Eugene Marlow's Heritage Ensemble this Saturday evening, December 1st, at 7 PM. The performance will be preceded by a brief Havdallah service, and followed by coffee and dessert downstairs in our social hall.
We have one more video to share with you from the Leonia Community Interfaith Thanksgiving Service hosted by Congregation Adas Emuno on Wednesday, November 21, 2012. This is the fourth in our series, following Hallelujah, All Good Things, and Seasons of Love (Thanksgiving Service).
Once again we have our Student Cantor Alison Lopatin singing together with our Religious School Director, Annice Benamy, who is also playing guitar along with Beth Robin on piano. This time, they join together to sing "In This House," then Rabbi Schwartz asks everyone to join in as they lead us in singing "America the Beautiful," a fitting final hymn for a Thanksgiving celebration:
You can also enjoy this video over on our YouTube channel under the title of In This House/America the Beautiful - Thanksgiving Interfaith Service 2012 .
And this is just a prelude to our upcoming musical weekend. Join us this coming Friday evening, November 30, at 7:30 PM as we feature a special musical Shabbat.
And then the following evening, Saturday, December 1, at 7 PM, you won't want to miss the encore performance of the Heritage Ensemble, and be sure to let your friends know about it. After all, you don't have to be Jewish to love jazz. We will be selling tickets at the door, and for more information see our previous post, The Heritage Ensemble Returns December 1st.
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