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The Jewish Press

(Founded in 1920)

Margie Gutnik

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Annette van de Kamp-Wright

Editor

Richard Busse

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Susan Bernard

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Lori Kooper-Schwarz

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Gabby Blair

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Sam Kricsfeld

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Mary Bachteler

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Jewish Press Board

Margie Gutnik, President; Abigail Kutler, Ex-Officio; Seth Feldman; David Finkelstein; Ally Frieeman; Mary Sue Grossman; Les Kay; Natasha Kraft; Chuck Lucoff; David Phillips; and Joseph Pinson. The mission of the Jewish Federation of Omaha is to build and sustain a strong and vibrant Omaha Jewish Community and to support Jews in Israel and around the world. Agencies of the JFO are: Institute for Holocaust Education, Jewish Community Relations Council, Jewish Community Center, Jewish Social Services and the Jewish Press. Guidelines and highlights of the Jewish Press, including front page stories and announcements, can be found online at: www.jewishomaha.org; click on ‘Jewish Press.’ Editorials express the view of the writer and are not necessarily representative of the views of the Jewish Press Board of Directors, the Jewish Federation of Omaha Board of Directors, or the Omaha Jewish community as a whole. The Jewish Press reserves the right to edit signed letters and articles for space and content. The Jewish Press is not responsible for the Kashrut of any product or establishment.

Editorial

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The Jewish Press welcomes Letters to the Editor. They may be sent via regular mail to: The Jewish Press, 333 So. 132 St., Omaha, NE 68154; via fax: 1.402.334.5422 or via e-mail to the Editor at: avandekamp@jewishomaha.org. Letters should be no longer than 250 words and must be single-spaced typed, not hand-written. Published letters should be confined to opinions and comments on articles or events. News items should not be submitted and printed as a “Letter to the Editor.” The Editor may edit letters for content and space restrictions. Letters may be published without giving an opposing view. Information shall be verified before printing. All letters must be signed by the writer. The Jewish Press will not publish letters that appear to be part of an organized campaign, nor letters copied from the Internet. No letters should be published from candidates running for office, but others may write on their behalf. Letters of thanks should be confined to commending an institution for a program, project or event, rather than personally thanking paid staff, unless the writer chooses to turn the “Letter to the Editor” into a paid personal ad or a news article about the event, project or program which the professional staff supervised. For information, contact Annette van de Kamp-Wright, Jewish Press Editor, 402.334.6450.

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The Jewish Press (USPS 275620) is published weekly (except for the first week of January and July) on Friday for $40 per calendar year U.S.; $80 foreign, by the Jewish Federation of Omaha. Phone: 402.334.6448; FAX: 402.334.5422. Periodical postage paid at Omaha, NE. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to: The Jewish Press, 333 So. 132 St., Omaha, NE 68154-2198 or email to: jpress@jewishomaha.org.

Why I am excited about the Mega Challah Bake

ANNETTE VAN DE KAMP-WRIGHT

Jewish Press Editor

It’s something we can’t take for granted: programming is happening in the Jewish community left and right. Speakers at synagogues, the JCC, summer camp with hundreds of kids, our own Jewish Press Local Author Series (yes, that’s a plug, Ari Kohen will visit us in December!) and soon religious school and Beit Midrash and Eye on Israel. I could go on and fill this entire page with everything that’s on the calendar. However, there is one event that I think deserves particular attention. Chaired by the inimitable Jess Cohn, Tippi Denenberg, Andee Scioli and Louri Sullivan, the Mega Challah Bake and Boutique will bring 100+ women from all across the community together with one goal: to be inspired. I already know that the energy in the Goldstein Venue that evening will be amazing. Last week, you read about the women who are being honored: Michele Aizenberg Ansari, Nancy Rips and Nancy Schlessinger. But there is another group of women who will be put into the limelight that day. And they deserve our attention, because they show us what the future can and should look like. Their names are Lauren Dolson, Eleanor Dunning and Cadee Scheer, and they are to be honored as the 2022 Mitzvah Ambassadors. The Rose Mitzvah Amabassador Award was established in memory of Rose Schupack, OBM. What’s special about the honorees is that, according to Shani Katzman, “they wear their Judaism on their sleeve.” For Teens and college-age people, that is not always an easy thing. There is pressure from all sides to not be so outwardly Jewish, pressure from a majority culture that often doesn’t understand us or lives with long-held Antisemitic prejudice. There is criticism of the State of Israel, and the line between anti-Zionism and Antisemitism can’t

be found so easily. Watching young people nonetheless make the transition from being a Jewish child to becoming their adult Jewish selves is inceredibly exciting and we must celebrate it when it happens. Moreover, we must acknowledge it out loud and take every opportunity to tell them how proud we are of them. Because let’s face it, someday we will all be in the Rose Blumkin Home and we will have to trust them to run the show. The Mega Challah Bake and Boutique comes to Omaha on Sept. 15. Doors open at 6:15 p.m. at the Jewish Community Center for wine, socializing, and shopping. At 7 p.m., participants will learn how to mix, knead, and shape their own tasty challah bread. Organizers aim to weave together more than challah dough. They want to bring together both established Omaha and new Omaha, young and not-so-young, experienced bakers and total newbies. Like a cooking show, ingredients will be pre-measured and friendly teachers will go from table to table to give hands-on assistance. If you have NEVER made a loaf of bread you will be in good hands. If you are a competent challah baker and want to learn a sneaky trick or two, There will be something for you too. The challah baking extravaganza will sell out. To register, go to Ochabad.org/challahbake. You can also call 402.330.1800. Also, let’s get social, challah bakers! We want to see your challah on Instagram, so please send your pics to @MCBBomaha on Instagram.

The particular Jewish meaning of my hamsa collection

ANDREW SILOW-CARROLL

JTA I tend to get to Israel every two or three years, and every time I come home with a hamsa. The latest, which I picked up in May (along with a case of COVID — another story) is a lovely teal ceramic design from a workshop in the Golan Heights. We have a wall of these hand-shaped amulets in our house — less for good luck or spiritual karma than to advertise our connection to Israel. But to advertise what, exactly? The hamsa’s Jewish roots are slightly tenuous, or at least secondhand. The “hand of Fatima” is a Muslim symbol, perhaps pagan before that, and possibly Christian. According to one interpretation, the five fingers are meant to represent the five pillars of Islam (faith, fasting, pilgrimage, prayer and tithing). Like a number of folk customs, it was absorbed into Sephardic Jewish culture in the lands where Jews and Muslims lived and worked side by side, and where it came to suggest the hand of God, or a talisman used to ward off the Evil Eye. I have hamsas with an eye motif worked into the palm of the hand, others with fish designs — Jewish symbols of both fertility and luck. What they don’t have are overtly “Jewish” symbols: I avoid the ones with stars of David or menorah decorations. To some degree that’s my rebellion against Jewish kitsch — the gaudy, insistent aesthetic I associate with old-fashioned synagogue Judaica shops and well-meaning bar and bat mitzvah presents. I think it is also virtue-signaling on my part: The hamsa says I support the multicultural Israel that includes Jews and Arabs, Ashkenazim and Sephardim. “Cool” Jews like me don’t display exclusionary tchotchkes studded with Jewish stars or hang paintings of bearded dancing Hasids. (I mean, I have lots of Judaica with both — we just don’t put them on the top shelf.) It’s the same sort of insidery, too-cool-for-shul aesthetic that I have long associated with the Wissotzky Magic Tea Chest. I am guessing you have seen this or even have one: It’s a wooden box filled with tea sachets from Wissotzky, the Tel Avivbased company that has roots in tsarist Russia. Before it was widely available on Amazon, the tea box was a popular souvenir for repeat travelers to Israel. At one point I started calling it the “first postmodern Israeli souvenir”: Instead of celebrating Zionism or Judaism, the box’s decorations feature imagery from the Indian subcontinent. The writing is Hebrew but the message is international. Maybe first-timers bring home olive-wood camels and gaudy mezuzahs shaped like the Jerusalem skyline. Old hands like me know that a box of supermarket tea, like that delicately filigreed hamsa, says the “real Israel.” I know that’s putting a lot on a souvenir, and sometimes a hamsa is just a hamsa. But there is a whole field of scholarship that examines the deep meanings of everyday objects. Jenna Weissman Joselit, the doyenne of Jewish material culture, writes about how even Mordecai Kaplan, the influential 20th-century rabbi “not generally known for his interest in the material side of Jewish life,” counseled Jews to fill their homes with Jewish signifiers. “Jewish appointments were intended to convey a moral statement that went far beyond the physical: Manifestations of group identity, they served as constant reminders of ideals and practices,” Joselit writes in her study of Jewish consumerism, “The Wonders of America.” Besides, others are going to attach moral statements to your bric-a-brac that you may not even have intended. Search “hamsa” and one of the first things Google delivers is the question, “Is it disrespectful to wear a hamsa?” The answer comes from a jewelry seller, who advises, “It can be culturally insensitive to wear it without knowing what the symbol means.” Insensitive to whom is not clear, although presumably there are Jews and Muslims who object to seeing the symbol dangling from the wrists or necks of celebrities who are neither. At the very least, as one Mizrahi Jew has written, Ashkenazi Jews who embrace the hamsa as a symbol of Jewish or Zionist pride should be aware of and acknowledge its distinct meaning for Jews

from the Middle East and North Africa. I don’t think there was anything culturally insensitive about the artists who recently carved an elaborate hamsa into the sands at California’s Newport Beach. Or the Jewish environmental activist who places a clay hamsa along the shore of San Francisco Bay as an “offering to the water.” I prefer to think of the hamsa as a wonderfully ecumenical symbol. The hand is a blank canvas on which artists can project their own meanings, and the wearer their own statements. My statement is

The hamsa is a blank canvas on which artists can project their own meanings,

and the wearer their own statements. Credit: New York Jewish Week a little smug (“You won’t catch me with a dancing rabbi on the wall”) but also extremely hopeful: The open hand celebrates Israel’s unlikely blend of cultures and faiths, even as it wards off those who refuse to accommodate coexistence. What’s your most meaningful or interesting Jewish object? What does it say about your “ideals and practices”? Send pics and your thoughts to me at asc@jewishweek.org and I’ll try to feature them in a future column.

Andrew Silow-Carroll is editor in chief of the New York Jewish Week and senior editor of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. He previously served as JTA’s editor in chief and as editor in chief and CEO of the New Jersey Jewish News. @SilowCarroll

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media.

He asked them “Who is called a ‘wise man’?” They responded to him, “The person who sees the consequence of their action.” (Babylonian Talmud, Tamid 32a)

ARI WALLACH

JTA Many years ago I was asked to speak, on short notice, at a symposium in Geneva about the future of the global climate refugee crises. It was an important opportunity, but attending meant I was going to miss my 11-year-old daughter Eliana’s choir concert, the one for which she had been rehearsing for months. I was crushed, but no compromise was possible — I’d be on the other side of the globe for every performance. To my great shock, Eliana didn’t care, at least not exactly. “It’s okay, Dad,” she said. “If you miss it, you miss it. But do me a favor. When you are here, how about actually being here?” I was stunned, a little hurt, but I knew just what she was talking about. For the past year-plus, I’d been wandering around the house, conducting half my business by cell phone, distracted even when I was playing a board game with her. In the great way that children can state a complex thing simply and purely, my daughter had summarized our whole culture’s dilemma. Stuck in a forever state of reactive short-termism — an almost obsessive focus on the near future — glued to our devices and grappling with never-ending “breaking news” and business plans measured in hours and even minutes, we’ve become too much tree and not enough forest. News about the most recent COVID variant, for example, is a tree. Being part of my kid’s growing up? That’s the forest. Our short-term addictions, understandable as they are, are obscuring our longer term potentials. In another story from the home front, my 9-year-old Gideon recently did something…improper. It’s not important what, but let’s just say he wasn’t being his best self. When I found out, I flipped out and really read him the riot act. My wife Sharon pulled me aside and whispered, “Ari: longpath.” The word is a mantra in our household — it stands for the deliberate practice of long-term, holistic thinking and acting that, at its root, starts with real, hard-earned self-knowledge. At that instant I saw how off I was. Instead of modeling behaviors of self-awareness to help my son grow, I was reacting, and probably overreacting at that, glued once again to the short term at the expense of the long-term relationship with my son. On the highest level, I knew who I wanted to be in that moment with my son, but we are reactive creatures, easily prone to short-term decision making. So why is a futurist, who works with multi-national organizations, governments and leading foundations, and whose TED talk has been viewed several million times, writing about conversations with my children? The future is not just about flying cars, jet packs and robots doing our laundry. Nor is it just about climate change, rampant inequality or the loss of global biodiversity. Taken together, these aspects — good and bad — leave us with an incomplete picture of tomorrow’s promises and perils. The huge challenges we face as a society are going to require significant action at a political level.We need to vote at the booth and at the check-out counter in a way that aligns with our values. But that is not enough. Shaping the future also entails doing something beyond the political, something in some ways more difficult and definitely closer to home. Shaping the future towards a world we want to see necessitates that we connect with each other — at the human-to-human level — in a way that has significantly more impact than just how we vote or consume. How? Trim tabs. Trim tabs are the small edges of a ship’s rudder that, although tiny, can make a huge impact on the direction of the ship. The futurist Buckminster Fuller used the metaphor of a “trim tab” to explain how even small actions could have massive long-term effects, especially when scaled across populations. Shaping the long-term trajectory of society means connecting with others through a lens of empathy and with an eye on how those interactions will ripple out through time. What makes you a futurist — someone who cares and wants to shape society towards a better tomorrow — is putting your device down when your child enters the room and thinking about how your every action will play out over generations. This is the mindset of a true futurist. This is longpath thinking. At its heart, the belief in a longpath or “longer-term” mindset is a Jewish one. After all, we’re the people who have

dragged our story along to every outpost — the people who have waited on and insisted upon a future return. And just as our Passover story promises a transformation that does not happen overnight, the longpath view says that, yes, you can be an agent of change, not just a slave to the current climate, but it’s going to take some work. For me, the High Holy Days manifest the essence of a longpath outlook best of all. Rosh Hashanah both reaps the harvest of the past and points us toward our most profound wishes for the future year — but you can’t get there without a Yom Kippur. On this day of teshuvah, which means repentance and return, we understand that to look ahead of us requires that we first look back on the year past and engage in an honest reconciliation with JTA graphic by Grace Yagel all we have been and all those we have wronged — both in our own eyes and God’s. It’s hard work, but if we do this with an open heart, we have a chance to not only envision a better future, but to participate in creating it — for us and for others. The longpath view doesn’t just look deep into the future, but deep into the past. It holds that you cannot consider the future without transgenerational empathy, a clear accounting of all the preceding generations went through. Then, when you are ready to face the days, months, years, decades and centuries ahead, you must do your future-oriented thinking with future generations in mind. After all, your community and your world will belong to them. My father was a Polish refugee who escaped the ghetto and lost most of his family in the Holocaust — he went onto become a commander in the Jewish resistance. Years later, he used to say, “The future really started yesterday.” To move through the narrow passages and get to the land of milk and honey, we must adopt a mindset that integrates the far past and the far future. Transgenerational empathy is not merely a high-flown concept — it’s a practice, a way of taking the future seriously. On our mantel, along with photos of my parents and Sharon’s parents, and photos of us and of the kids, we have placed a few empty frames, a reminder of the generation to come. Seeing those empty frames is a subtle but persistent reminder that the decisions we make today, as individuals, as a family, as a community, are going to have everyday repercussions hundreds of years from now. This Rosh Hashanah marks the beginning of 5783 in the Jewish calendar. That means we’re only 217 years from the year 6000. Some say that’s the latest time for the messiah to arrive and usher in the redemption. Others insist the messiah can and will come earlier. The real question is: Where do we want the world to be in 6000, and what kind of longpath thinking will help get us there? To give you a little context, 217 years ago Napoleon was crowned King of Italy, Lewis and Clark headed out on their expedition, Beethoven premiered his Third Symphony and the first steam locomotive had just had its first run. There was no electricity, no cars, no phones, no internet. The United States itself was a mere 29 years old. Consider what can happen in two centuries. How would you like the world to look in Year 6000 and what are you willing to do to help make it that way? It’s a mistake to think that the people who will be affected will likely not be your people. According to the handy Descendants Calculator, in 217 years, or eight generations, the youngest of my children, 13-year-old Ruby, could have anywhere between 500 and 87,000 offspring, depending on the average number of kids per generation. And that’s just one of my three children! What kind of a world do you want your descendants to live in? What do we have to do collectively to co-create that future? We don’t need the answers this instant, but we do need to start making the small actions and asking the big questions right away.

Ari Wallach is a futurist to Fortune 500 companies, global nonprofits and philanthropists and is the author of Longpath: Becoming the Great Ancestors Our Future Needs (HarperOne, Aug. 16, 2022). Ari is also the co-creator of the 2008 presidential campaign-focused initiative, The Great Schlep with Sarah Silverman, and was formerly adjunct faculty at Columbia University lecturing on artificial intelligence, public policy and strategic futuring.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media.