A blog about making beer that got ridiculously out of hand

A quick side note - this post got REALLY long as I wrote it, so don't feel obligated to read it!

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Okay, so I haven't posted in awhile. A long while. Recently, though, my friend and fellow Pardes Educator Marc Silberstein and I decided to start brewing our own beer.

I've been interested in homebrewing for a few years, but since living in Israel, the prospect of starting up has been quite daunting - on a student's budget, it's pretty expensive in the States, but with everything beer-related being imported, costs here go up even further. After deciding to stay in Israel for a couple more years, though, I couldn't let any more time pass before I started brewing.

At the Jerusalem Wine Festival, I met Denny Neilson, proprietor of The Winemaker, a wine- and beer-making shop in Mevasseret, a town just outside of Jerusalem. I took a two-part, six-hour beer making course, and after that, Marc and I purchased all the start-up equipment needed for our first homebrew.

Before getting into the specifics of our venture, I thought I'd go over the basics of beer making.

To make beer, you basically need three ingredients - water, yeast, and malted grain. Nowadays, beer is rarely brewed without the addition of hops, but until several hundred years ago, hops were rarely added. First, you need to created a 'wort', which is basically water mixed with the sugars extracted from a few kilograms of malted grain. There are several ways to reach a full wort, which I will go over in a bit. After establishing your wort, one usually boils the wort with hops, the flowers from the hop plant which contain bitter oils, in order to add bitterness, flavor, and aroma. Finally, after straining and cooling the wort, yeast is added, before the entire mix is sealed for fermentation. The yeast will then consume the majority of the sugars extracted into the wort, changing all those sugars into alcohol. After several weeks of fermentation and several more weeks conditioning in bottles, the beer is ready to pour.

I mentioned that there are several methods for establishing the wort.

ALL-GRAIN: The most common amongst serious homebrewers is called "all-grain" brewing. In this method, you have to "mash" a mixture of base malts (usually 7-14 pounds) and specialty or flavoring malts (in much smaller quantities, up to 1 pound each, usually), keeping this grain mixture at 65-70 C for 30-60 minutes, depending on the recipe. This method requires the most equipment and the most time, but it is also the cheapest to produce.

PARTIAL MASH: This method requires far less equipment than all-grain, but it is more costly. Essentially, you start by making a "mini-mash", mashing all of the specialty grains and only a portion of the base malt. This mash also occurs in a much smaller quantity of water. After that, you add "malt extract," which comes either dry or liquid, which is essentially as it sounds - concentrated malt extract. Essentially, to save time and space, you are paying someone else to provide you with a whole bunch of the mashing ground work, and you save yourself having to have a much more complicated rig. After adding the malt extract, you continue very similarly to the AG method.

EXTRACT PLUS GRAIN: Very similar to the partial mash, except you don't do a mash at all. Instead, you steep ONLY your specialty grains, replacing all of your base malt with extract. From there, the method is identical to partial mash.

FULL EXTRACT: This method eliminates all grain extraction. Usually, full extract kits come in cans, and in the extract is both the base malt extract and the specialty malt extract. This method is the most expensive but also the easiest. Alas, because you are essentially adding extract to water and boiling, there is little to no variation that can be done with the recipe.

On to our project!

(I'm sorry ahead of time, I tried to take pictures along the way, but at the more labor-intensive parts of the process, I simply forgot. Next brew, I'll try to get more of the process captured)

Because of space limitations and the high start-up cost, we decided to pursue the partial-mash/extract plus grain route. For this method, we only need one large pot (holding roughly 12-16 liters) and a kitchen stove, plus all the fermentation equipment.

Here are our ingredients (plus a couple of beers to drink along the way):



First, we heated 6 liters of water to 70 C. This recipe is for 19 liters of beer, but the remainder of the water will be added later.



Once the water hit 70 C, we turned off the heat, added the specialty grains tied up in a muslin sack, and covered the pot. At the same time, we placed the liquid malt extract container (in the upper right hand of the picture) in a pot of warm water to soften. Much like molasses or honey, it's very high in sugar, so when cool, is very firm.



While this is steeping, it's a great time to enjoy a beer.



After 30 minutes of steeping, we removed the specialty grains from the water. We threw these grains out, but they could be used in breads, bird feed, or compost. Just don't feed them to your dog - evidently, spent grains are highly toxic. Weird.



Now, we brought the wort up to a boil. So as to prevent burning on the bottom of the pot (from all the sugars in the liquid extract), we turned off the heat. Then, we poured the malt extract into the wort.



Finally, we brought the wort back up to a boil. Once we got a good boil going, we added the "bittering hops". The oils in hops provide different attributes when added at different times - if boiled for awhile, the hops provide bitterness. If boiled only a couple minutes, the hops add flavor. If not boiled at all, but instead added after the boil finishes, the hops add aroma. The recipe we used called for a good amount of hops, which you can see floating on the top of the wort. For a beerhead like myself, things are starting to smell pretty great at this point.



Here's Marc doing his stir thing:



After 60 minutes of boiling, we cut the heat. At this point, it is very important to chill the water as quickly as possible. From this point forward, everything must be sanitized - introducing bacteria at any point here would be very bad. Since bacteria like luke-warm substances, it's essential to get this 90+ C liquid down to a temperature at which the yeast can be added, so that you can seal the mixture and allow fermentation to safely begin. There are several ways to chill this liquid quickly - putting the cook pot in a large sink filled with ice water, immersing a coil cooler into the wort, or our method. We added a large, pre-frozen ice cube (think ice cream tub sized) into the wort in the pot, bringing the temperature down to about 50 C. After that, we added pre-chilled water into the primary fermenter (a large, 25 L bucket), then strained the wort to remove most of the spent hops. At this point, we the topped up the wort to 19 liters with more chilled water, bringing the final beer mix to about 24 C.

I missed taking pictures through most of this, since we were both pretty active, but here are the spent hops:



Finally, we "pitched" the yeast, which basically means adding the yeast to the beer. There are several ways to do this. First, you can start with liquid yeast, which is already active before it's added, but needs to stay refrigerated right up to use. Next, you can rehydrate and activate dry yeast, then add that mix to the beer. Finally, you can do what we did, which is sprinkle the dry yeast directly onto the beer, letting it reactivate in the beer itself. While some brewers don't like this method, it seems to be working for me (and many others who do it this way).

Now, on to fermentation, where I'm at now. Because of the heat in Jerusalem, I had to devise a way to keep the beer cool (ideally, between 16-20 C) without blasting the all-too-expensive air conditioning all day, despite it being 32 C outside. So, I created a "swamp cooler," placing the fermentation bucket in a bin filled with water, adding water bottles filled with water and frozen, wrapping a towel around the bucket (to pull cold water up and around the whole bucket and to keep light out), and aiming a fan at the bucket. (The fermenter is on the left)



So, that's where I'm at. Fermentation started last night, and primary fermentation will continue for the next few days. After that, I'll be transferring the beer to a secondary fermenter for another week or two, then bottling. If there is interest, I can update my progress as I go.

Oh, and here's an early mock-up of the label:



I hope I haven't just bored the tears out of you.

For those that are interested (which is probably none of you), here is the recipe for the first batch:

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Big Papa Pale Ale

6.6 lb Munton's Super Light Liquid Malt Extract
1 lb Munton's Extra Light Dry ME
1 lb Cara Munich II (50L)
5 oz Cara Aroma
2 oz Cara Amber
4 oz Centennial Hops (9.5% AAU)
3 oz Perle Hops (7.5% AAU)
11.5 g Safale S-05 American Pale Ale yeast
1 tsp Irish Moss
1/4 lb Corn Sugar

Steep specialty malts at 70 C for 30 minutes. Bring wort to boil, add LME and DME. Boil 60 minutes, add hops at following schedule:

60 min - 1 oz. Centennial
30 min - 1 oz. Perle
15 min - 1 oz. Centennial
5 min - 1 oz. Centennial, .5 oz Perle
Dry hop - 1 oz. Centennial, 1.5 oz Perle

Add Irish moss at 15 minutes. Pitch yeast dry, or reactivate in boiled and cooled water. Reserve corn sugar for bottling.

MySpace reminds me of 1997

Yes, I've become a lightweight addict of Facebook. I'm certainly no complete Facebook automaton, endlessly writing wall posts and notes and making friends with people I carpooled once with in fourth grade, but yes, I like the connectivity, and I certainly have gotten in touch with old friends I never would have found or heard from otherwise.

Perhaps I'm getting ahead of myself.

Facebook, for the uninitiated, is a website based around social connectivity. You sign-up into a network, which can be your high school, university or city or country of residence, and then, through that network and other searches, you begin adding friends. Now, once you've added a friend, you can then search through all of THEIR friends, and then you can add anyone with whom you and this new friend might mutually be friends, and so on, and so forth. Additionally, you can post an endless number of pictures and tag them (which means tracking who appears in what pictures, so you can create a catalog of images starring yourself from a variety of photographers with a few clicks), write wall posts (every user has an online public blackboard), send messages, write notes (their version of blogging), and search, search, search. I know people who lose hours, literally, hours a day on Facebook. Facebook is fairly technologically advanced, though; it uses a lot of inline Java elements, as well as an internally refreshing browser element (so you don't have to refresh the entire page for new content, a la GMail), and the tagging feature is just plain awesome.

Online, though, Facebook is not alone. Before Facebook came along, another site called Friendster became relatively popular. Using a relatively, if not far more simplified and technologically-outdated, model, you once again find friends through friends, ostensibly creating the same spider-web of a network through a myriad of friends signed up. A rather clunky predecessor to Facebook, but it certainly helped to open the door to the kind of unabashed internet exhibitionism and narcissism (perhaps most famously available on YouTube) that years ago would have seemed like identity-theft suicide.

I did the Facebook thing, though, and before that, the Friendster thing. I had a lot of friends on both, you see, and even though I resisted a Facebook account for the longest time (in some kind of kind-of-the-schoolyard I-was-here-first I'm-sticking-with-Friendster kind of illogical mentality), I finally signed up, because I knew too many users and it had simply become too socially commonplace to avoid (rarely a Shabbos meal goes by without it's mention). So, now I belong to Facebook and Friendster. You'd think I'd have the bases covered, wouldn't you?

Ah, yes, MySpace. Frankly, I don't really know how to explain MySpace. It's kind of like Facebook and Friendster, except instead of arranging your friends and pictures and notes in an easy-to-follow, organized fashion, it seems to take everything, throw it in the blender, chug it too quickly, get queasy, then vomit everything up on the page with some annoying background image and terrible music playing in the background. I avoid myspace like the plague. The few times I have been to a MySpace page, though, I've realized something - I think they took a look at the internet circa 1997, said, "hey, this is great! Let's make our site exactly like this!" and then did so.

Seriously, let's test this out. You tell me... which of these sites was made in 1997, and which in 2007?

ONE

TWO

Uncanny. It's like the late nineties got in a time machine and came forward ten years and had massive design diarrhea all over myspace and then ran away. Sounds disgusting? It is.

Anyhow, this post really has nothing to do with anything except for the fact that I spend far too much time on the internet and felt the least I could do was color it with some commentary, albeit sophomoric potty humor, at best. Hope you enjoyed this little diatribe.

My Life Now, My Life Next Year

After months of telling myself that THIS was the night I'd sit down and write my blog, I decided that tonight was the night. I'm going to start off free-form and see where it goes, since I've given up all hope of this blog having any semblance of continuity.

Maybe that's for the best, though. I don't spend a lot of time reading blogs, but the best of what I have read, though, develop a character not through overly thoughtful meditations (to which I clearly aspire and to which I generally fall short), but rather through small, regularly updated moments, simply reflected upon so as to slowly paint all corners of a character, not just a few brazen brush strokes.

Starting with the second night of Pesach (Passover), Jews go into a period called the Omer - a period counting the 49 days between the Pesach sacrifice and the holiday of Shavuot, but a period which, due to rabbinic interpretation, has been tied to a sense of loss and mourning (often attached to stories related to Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai and Rabbi Akiva and his 24,000 students). In the midst of this period, a number of days are marked. We've recently recounted three of them - Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Memorial Day), Yom HaZikaron (Memorial Day) and Yom Ha'Atsma'ut (Israeli Independence Day).

Of those three, Yom HaZikaron and Yom Ha'atsma'ut fall directly next to each other on the calendar. In the Jewish calendar, the day starts the night before - this means that you start the day mourning the loss of Israel's fallen soldiers and end the day celebrating it's independence. Memorial Day was felt here in a way I never felt in the US - where Americans take the day off work, visit relatives, and enjoy extremely good sales at the mall, this country mourns deeply, communally. The military graveyards are packed, from the most secular to the most religious in the state, hardly a person doesn't have some connection to a soldier that has died, and those that are lucky enough help to mourn others' losses. In a sense, to see a graveyard more full of the living than the dead gives a sense of hope - that Jews have reached a place where we are still growing rather than shrinking, coming together rather than drifting apart, even for a day.

Within hours of such sadness, downtown city centers throughout the state became a celebratory zoo. Downtown Jerusalem, in particular, was a crowded mess - cars are blocked out and the streets run packed with families, teenagers, and couples alike.

A favorite moment revolved around a group of otherwise secular Israeli teenagers huddling down the street, chanting Israeli Zionist songs, and raising an oversized Israeli flag. Too often and too recently, the flag here is constantly tied to a sense of inevitability and militaristic misstep, that every right the country might think it's making turns into a somehow unplanned greater wrong. The flag has become so rife with corruption that it's lost it's innocence - after 59 years, the flag has gone from a badge of honor to a sign of something more sinister. When these kids ran through the street lifting the flag, though, it was born anew - the blue star on the white shield buckled magnificently in the streetlight sheen, and the breezy night caused the flag to even give itself applause. Israel was everything we want Israel to be, a pure state of peace, and community, and shared vision and shared purpose, a flag over a union of brotherhood locked in purpose of well-meaning and selflessness. It was beautiful.

I haven't made this knowledge widely-known, for some reason, but I'm staying in Israel next year. I'll be a Pardes Fellow, which essentially means I'll once again be a full-time student in the Pardes Beit Midrash (our study hall, where I spend 3/4 of my day), with the added responsibility of creating and implementing a leadership project, as well as being a general role model in the Pardes community, both in and out of the Beit Midrash. How I came to this thinking went kind of like this:

1. Come to Pardes for year, apply to Pardes Educator's Program
2. Get into Pardes Educator's Program
3. Realize that you really should study more before going into Educator's Program, or else your knowledge of Torah will totally suck
4. Apply for Pardes Fellows Program
5. Get into Pardes Fellows Program
6. Decide between Fellows Program and Mechina (preperatory) year for Educator's Program
7. Agree to Fellows Program
8. Realize that the Pardes Educators Program was never for you in the first place
9. Be really happy with your decision but equally confused about the future

And after all that, I'm still ecstatic with my decision to stay. I'm not so totally clueless about the year after next - I forsee myself either in graduate school (in either a Jewish Ed. MA program or a Jewish Studies program) or working (most likely in a community-based programming position). Either way, I went through a lot of stress about my future this year - a lot of right-or-wrong-decision worry, a lot of totally useless and unnecessary stress. When all was said and done, though, I'm left where I was when I first came back to Judaism, when I first realized that I needed to make Judaism a central part of my life. I know that this life will still have many paths yet to travel, that a "career decision" is barely that, that a professional choice is but a step on the overall bigger goal - ensuring a life focused on bringing goodness and peace into the world, on making the global world better through my local steps.

Back to Yom Ha'atsma'ut. An Israeli tradition on Independence Day is the barbecue - they freakin' love it. You can even get little $2.50, pre-packaged, disposable grills at the corner stores (makolets), charcoals and all. Back at Willard Residential Hall, in the I-live-in-dorms college days, I became grillmaster for our dorm cookouts. It was really great fun; there are only rare joys greater than cooking ten feet of meat at a time for waiting, hungry freshmen. Tuesday, I stepped back into my role, and it was terrific. Granted, it was 20-something Jews instead of freshmen, but the joy was the same. They all laughed at me for being the meat-cooking vegetarian, but I loved it. I really can't explain the sheer visceral joy in running a grill - the heat off the grill, the smell of the marinated meat dripping fat onto the coals, the occasional flame-up - these all leave a real sense of meaningful quietude, a purposefulness that few other tasks ever allow.

Yeah, I know. That's weird.

I'll finish with a thought. As I become more entrenched in this country, whether I like it or not, I constantly reflect on my relationship not only with Israel, but with the surrounding countries, the US, and the world. At the alumni panel hosted at Pardes for Yom HaZikaron, a former-student-turned-reporter remarked on the fact that she lives here permanently, but that she has never, in fact, ever made aliyah to gain Israeli citizenship, because doing so would prohibit her from entering the territories of Gaza and the West Bank. As such, she's essentially stateless - she has US citizenship, but doesn't live there, vote there, or pay but the slightest of taxes, and she doesn't have Israeli citizenship, yet she does everything but vote here, including raising her children in the school system. Even still, to be, at the root, stateless - does this appreciate our ability to report on a place, to reflect on a culture? If we're not invested anywhere, do we then become appropriate voices of the objective? I'm not sure, but it left me puzzled, nonetheless.

In lieu of the Omer, I hope we can all take pause in the next few weeks, at least once, to admire the awe that constantly surrounds us.

Oh, and let's not forget picture time. (Click for bigger)


Some stunning flowers in the Golan.


Ditza, me, and Tel Aviv.


Just a glimpse at the party that was downtown Jerusalem on Yom Ha'atsma'ut.


Who likes a barbecue picnic? I like a barbecue picnic.

The Secret Life of the Bachelor

This has gone from being a good blog to a mediocre blog to a non-existent blog, so the least I can do is entertain you for two minutes and change.

A really great day

I'd give today a solid, solid A.

My Gemara shiur was fabulous, as my chevruta Matt and I stormed through parallel sugiyot in both the Bavli and the Yerushalmi on Massechet Megillah while even having some time for a fascinating midrash on Mordecai and King Ahaseureus.

In Nevi'im Rishonim, my new bikiut Nach class, we're two p'rakim into Melachim and Shlomo just ascended to kingship. The Beit HaMikdash is surely on it's way soon.

My Zohar class was esoteric as ever, but I'm really letting go of the sheer rationalist in me and opening up to the totally radical concepts that were recently reserved for the Kabbalists.

Another Matt, my Mishnah Yomi chevruta, and I conquered Massechet Sota, nearly catching up to the calendar after falling twelve mishnayot behind. 10 mishnayot in an hour and change. Unstoppable.

My night seder chevruta, Ariel, and I had one of our best sessions tonight, unlocking some groundbreaking ideas that even the Rishonim don't comment upon.

And finally, my homegirl Ilana is back in town, and I had my first meaningful conversation outside of Torah in a long while.

Yes, I know I spent this whole post talking in Jewish code, but it's too late and I'm too happily exhausted to care. Lilah tov.

Am I Dead?

The answer is: NO!

I know, I haven't posted in awhile, and this isn't going to exactly satisfy your appetite.

I'm planning on writing up something interesting after Shabbos, but for now, a quick Shabbat Shalom and a status update.

I'm currently working on my application for the Pardes Fellows Program, which is a well-funded one-year program with a stipend. The program is aimed at returning students. I was also accepted into the Educator's Program, but I'm going to push the master's degree back a year in favor of learning more Torah. The Master's in Jewish Education is definitely in the plan, though.

I'll write more soon.

PS This is one of my favorite pictures that I've ever taken (click for bigger):

Snow in Jerusalem demands a blog update...

...Since Mom's pestering last week didn't seem motivation enough.

I think I got burned out on writing for awhile; early this month, I had a D'var Torah, a "Take 5" (a lunchtime talk by one of the students), and my Educator's Program essay all to write, and with the grind of school taking it's toll, at times, I had very little motivation for blogging. I'll do my best to be better.

First off...

SNOW IN JERUSALEM.

The threat of snow was first heard Tuesday at lunch. David Bernstein, Dean of Pardes, made an announcement during lunchtime, saying, "Be aware, there is a forecast for snow tomorrow night. Don't get too excited, these are usually false alarms."

Now, growing up in Atlanta, which seems to have a relatively similar weather pattern to Jerusalem, I didn't put too much stock in a pending snowstorm; too many times had I had visions of a warm-bed-sleep-in in my mind throughout elementary and middle schools, only to wake up to dry ground and a screaming parent. These threats rarely even materialized into any precipitation at all, and they certainly often failed to develop into a snowfall that would amount to anything.

Tuesday afternoon, though, the rain started. It started out pretty light, but by Tuesday night, it was going at a good clip. I can attest that it was coming down pretty hard - we played a game of flag football out in the chilly rain (and narrowly lost, 14-7, in an epic defensive battle). It was a winter rain... cold and wet, but it was nowhere near cold enough to warrant snow, and the thought of pending flaky fun never crossed my mind.

Somewhere in the snow family, though, is a distant cousin - hail. About two minutes into my already-rainy walk to school on Wednesday morning, snow's friend decided to pay a visit. A pea-sized, hail-everywhere visit. Hail in my face, on my body, on my feet. And the wind didn't help; the little hailettes went wherever they damned well pleased, and there wasn't much I could do but get a faceful of pain, hard and wet. Now, hail looks pretty harmless when it bounces off the pavement, looks like it's made of water, but at least looks pretty frozen. I'm not sure how, then, I ended up more wet (where my parka didn't cover) from the hail than I ever have been from rain; my jeans were so soaked that they ended up soaking my socks underneath, which ended up soaking down inside my shoes, making my otherwise waterproof boots entirely useless.

After making it to Pardes, it just continued to rain. The threat of snow was still pending, as they had seen some up north, but it was just too warm and wet for any falling snow to do much but melt into the already-gigantic puddles. Thus, when the first snow flakes were reported during my afternoon Midrash class with Baruch, I didn't even make it to the window. I had seen this happen too many times growing up, too many times. Hopes raised, only to be shattered by too-warm ground or too-short a snowfall. But the snow continued to fall, and got thicker, too.

Only after dinner, though, did the hope really shine. A night seder student came in, shouting, "It's sticking!" No, it couldn't be. Yes, it was! How could this happen? So much water everywhere, still above-freezing temperatures, but sure enough, the streets were turning white and the trees were getting weighed down with this sticky-wet frozen wonderstuff. I left Pardes, though, and the snow had stopped; ah, an eighth of an inch on the ground, and that was it, then. Time for it to melt, to get back to puddly Jerusalem. Alas, no! Halfway home, the snow started again, and how! And how!

It snowed and snowed and snowed. This wasn't the light, fluffy snow that the colder cities see most of the winter... this was stick-to-your-ribs, soak-up-a-soup, thicker-n-gravy snow, a wet and heavy snowball-makin' snow, dripping wet before it hit the tree branches and street corners. A snow that didn't crunch under your feet, but rather, bit back. And it was glorious.

After a day of much-needed rain, I was over the wet stuff; I knew that Israel needs all the precipitation it could get, but half my clothes were already soaking wet, and I was losing outfits by the day. But now, precipitation we could all enjoy - water for the land, and a white wonder for the senses. It even smelled of snow... this usually-smelly city had been cleansed, covered in a peaceful blanket of sticky snow.

I went to bed with the talk of school closings. "If the public schools close, the we close. If the public schools are open, then we're open," David Bernstein also added on Tuesday. I didn't want to miss school, even though Thursdays are only half-days anyhow, but there was something about the magic of snow being so great that school closes. It creates a one-day holiday, of sorts: kids in the snow, parents home watching them, everything closed and the masses at ease.

Alas, I woke up, half the snow already melted, and the schools open for business. It got pretty close to freezing, but as I should have guessed, the puddles and running water did their trick, and the constant city traffic kept the streets from ever becoming too dangerous. I was fooled again - against my better judgement, I fell into the lull of snow-thinking, the foggy mist of snowy dreams not only fogging up my glasses, but also clouding my reasoning and understanding of the likelihoods of these weather patterns. I was built up, only to be let down.

In reality, though, I went to bed knowing that school was going to be open today, that a lot of the snow would be gone, and that, just like in my childhood, these warmer areas just don't cling to snowfalls the way colder climates do. I really chose to give in to the childish dreams of snow-filled days and empty classrooms, because I remembered the joy that always came with that excitement and anticipation, even if it ended up with me drudging to school, cursing the school board and local government. I made the choice, the attitude adjustment to believe, to hope for this little, meaningless thing.

I've thought a lot about faith, belief in G-d or a higher power, adherence to an organized religious system in the faith of questionable supporting evidence. I question those who even say "we need something to believe in;" I think there are plenty who get by just fine without believing in very much at all. Sometimes I worry that I'm investing my faith in a system that is factually problematic and religiously a little crazy. In the end, though, I'm making a choice to believe, a choice in something that may prove meaningless in a scientific sense, but in a personal sense, creates the framework for how I encounter the world. It's through this choice, this belief, that I fall asleep hoping every night, despite the potential for disappointment.

Oh and here's some snow:



PART TWO SOME RANDOM STUFF

My roommate's Chanukiyah:


The Kotel, on a Wednesday night:


Downtown Jerusalem, as seen from the Tower of David:



And here is my "Take Five" talk, if you're interested. I was asked to talk about "My Jewish Hero."

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The word “hero” comes from the Greek “heros,” meaning “warrior,” but I find an interesting idea of the hero stemming from Carl Jung’s system of archetypes. While this system has been used to identify stereotypes or epitomes, in a strict linguistic sense, an archetype is merely a defining example of a personality type. The hero archetype is entirely the hero – untainted by misgivings, shortcomings, and bad decisions.

I don’t know how to identify with this archetype. An archetypal hero is nothing more than a work of fantasy, an all too pure version of a human being whose existence is contradictory to the human experience. Even our culture’s archetypal “heros” fail to meet the criteria of perfection – Avraham neglects his parental obligation with Ishmael, Ya’akov tricks his brother to earn his birthright, and Moshe’s first act in Torah is that of murder. To live in this world is to betray the archetype, and to sin is unlike the archetypal hero.

In fiction, though, archetypal characters are used so that a reader might subconsciously recognize the archetype, and thus the motivations, behind the character’s behavior. Archetypes serve not as complete wholes, but rather, a set of attributes connected with otherwise flawed characters. Homer’s Odysseus is certainly not without his flaws, but his driving motivations are simple and clear – nobility, honor, and love. We learn these characteristics not out of the great duration of The Odyssey when Odysseus engages in less-than-noble behavior, but rather in the brief moments when the true motivations of his character shine through.

In this sense, heroes can only exist in fleeting moments. Our heroes stand as such for us not because of the life they are going to live, as in some fated Greek tragedy, but rather for the life that they have lived. Just as we remember our favorite musicians for the hits that we sing to ourselves every day, we also forgive them for the slew of mediocre melodies that served as little more than filler on what might have otherwise been a killer album. So too do we remember our heroes; they need only fit the archetype in a moment to stand in long-lasting relevance and meaning.

So here we come to the question I started with – who is my Jewish hero? In short, I don’t know. I see the classic Jewish heroes of both the distant and more recent past as inspirational, but I fail to connect to their memories and tales viscerally. Personally, I find so many people in my life an inspiration, but I hesitate to hold any of them up to such a high stature. I truly want my heroes to be without fault, to be so steadfast so as to hold up to perfect criticism. In a huge scope, this is an impossibility. Only when I shrink my scope, then, does the image of the hero come into focus.

I find heroes every day, especially here. In Scott Kaplan’s moving speech about his conversion, I found overwhelming and inspirational courage. In Jess Kendler’s D’var Torah, I was amazed at her outstanding ability to examine text. And in hearing so many peoples’ stories in coming to Pardes, in making a choice to spend so much time doing something so uniquely distinctive, I’m filled with awe.

If heroism lives in these moments, then we should strive for this momentary heroism. When we aim to live our life as a whole in a heroic manner, we’re bound to face disappointment. Only when we realize that steeping our deeds right now in heroism, that refocusing every moment on the acts and deeds of a hero, only then can we live on as heroes to someone.

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Thanks for reading, sorry for the delay. Much love, as always.

David