Hippies and Shavuot – A Guest Blog by Harry Chauss

May 27, 2009 · Filed Under Baum's Blog 

You may have noticed I haven’t blogged lately.  Well, I still haven’t.  This blog is a guest entry from my good friend and giver of free-advice, Harry Chauss.  If you like what follows, I wrote it.  If you don’t, he wrote it.

In all seriousness, many thanks to Harry for writing this – and if any of you out there wants to write a guest blog, email me.  And if you want to see what Harry looks like, the photo  is from about 6 years ago.

Harry Chauss and the cacti

Okay, enough from me.  Here is the guest blog written by the oh-so-cool Harry Chauss…

When I was a kid, my house was filled with thousands of books.  I never counted, but I’m pretty sure my older brother did.  There were books for kids, books for grown-ups, books that told stories, and books that taught you how to do stuff.  There were secular books, Jewish books, and I’m pretty sure there were even a few Christian books thrown in just for fun.  There were dictionaries and two sets of encyclopedias.  If one of the many kids in my family was bored, he or she was told either to go outside or read a book.  So we did.  Sometimes simultaneously.  Kids reading outside are so cute, aren’t they?  In the winter? In Minnesota?

There was one particular series of books to which I paid almost no attention.  These were the First, Second, and Third Jewish Catalogs.  (If you buy these books through this link, OurJewishCommunity.org will get a percentage of the sale!) They were written by Michael Strassfeld and Sharon Strassfeld, who were, and possibly still are, hippies.  Their goal was to teach their reader everything he or she might need to know to live a Jewish life.  They included a lot of things that one might not need to know, but that it might be fun to know…like how to tie tzitzit [knots on the corners of a prayer shawl].  And how to make wine.  I’m pretty sure that they not only taught the reader how to lay tefillin [phylacteries!], but also how to tan the leather to make the tefillin straps.  They were really detailed.

Of course, the whole idea was that if one wanted to be Jewish, it might be a good idea to know how to do it by oneself.  This was in the early 1970s, a time when some people were living on communes and things like that.  People were growing their own organic food in community gardens.  People were really empowered to do things themselves.  I’m not sure why, but I think it had to do with Woodstock or something.  I’ll ask around.

Jews had their own hippy movement.  It was called the Chavurah movement.  The idea was that young people thought that synagogues…well the polite way to put it would be that synagogues had little to offer young people.  The truth was that they were sick of being judged for being hippies by all the old people at their synagogues and they were sick of having to just sit and watch services happen.  They wanted to make it happen on their own, so they did.  They stated groups called chavurot, which comes from the Hebrew word for “friend,” or possibly “comrade,” if one looks in an old enough dictionary.

These groups of friends did stuff.  Jewish stuff.  Together.  They created their own services. They created their own curricula for teaching their kids about Judaism. They probably planted community gardens.  Nowadays there are still some chavurot, but a lot of them have been subsumed into larger synagogue movements. Except they weren’t, exactly.

Anyway, Shavuot is coming up.  It’s a holiday.  Rabbi Baum can tell you about it.  It involves staying up all night and eating cheesecake.  It’s a good one.

Once, I was teaching a class for high school students who worked as teaching assistants at congregational supplementary schools.  We called it “Sunday School” when I was a kid.  At any rate, the curriculum called for the kids to make a lesson plan about a Jewish holiday.  One of the kids chose Shavuot.  His lesson plan included all the facts about Shavuot:  Ten Commandments, Sinai, Moses, etc.  Then his plan called for teaching his students to juggle.

“Why are you teaching the kids to juggle?”  I asked.  He pointed out a passage in a book he’d read.  It said that during the staying up all night part of the holiday, kabbalists [Jewish mystics] used to teach each other “special skills.”  “Yeah, kabbalistic skills,” I said.

“Well, I don’t know any kabbalistic skills,” he said, “I know how to juggle—it’s my special skill.”

So here’s the point. Yes, way down here. It’s that that kid was right.  On a whole bunch of levels.  First, he gave the kids in his class a fun memory.  The wacky teenager taught them to juggle.  They probably still associate juggling with Shavuot.  I hope they do.  Second, he made Judaism his own, but not blindly and “just ‘cause.”  Third, he did something.  Just like those chavurah hippies.  He got bored, learned something and acted on it, in his own way.

There is a tradition that all Jews were at Sinai on that first Shavuot when Moses delivered the Ten Commandments.  I like it.  It makes us all responsible for our own Jewish life and experience.  There’s no backing out, saying “It’s what my ancestors got, not me.”  If it doesn’t work for you, be a hippy and make something for yourself.  But, really, patchouli oil is optional.

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