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There wasn’t a Jewish grief group in Boston for young adults, so this rabbi started one
In Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Everything is Illuminated, a little girl named Brod is so familiar with grief and loss that Foer gives her a title: “Genius of sadness.” Brod sees melancholy everywhere, in the usual places — “the sadness of physical pain” — and in unlikely ones (“The sadness of domesticated birds”).
There is something of Brod in the Worst Club Ever, the group Rabbi Jackson Mercer founded this summer in Cambridge, Massachusetts, dedicated to helping young Jewish adults process the many — and often unexpected — ways that grief interrupts everyday life.
Mercer, 31, established the club because he believed young Jewish adults needed better — or any — bereavement services. It’s an absence he first noticed six years ago, when two close family friends lost loved ones on the eve of his wedding. One was due to give a Sheva Bracha, a wedding blessing, but she was also “like, actively in Shiva,” as Mercer put it. She didn’t know whether she could even attend a celebration, let alone participate.
“It was clear people needed guidance in the practical pieces,” said Mercer, who, when we met for coffee on a cold and bright morning, had on a flat-brimmed baseball cap and a hiking jacket — which in Cambridge/Somerville, a hub for both young adult Jews and progressive politics, is kind of the rabbinical uniform du jour.
Mercer realized that bereavement was more common among young adults than he’d thought. In his community alone — he’s a rabbi at BASE Boston, a nonprofit that puts on events for Jews in their 20s and 30s — “every person knew somebody” grieving, he said. And Boston’s existing support groups plainly could not meet the needs of younger, grieving Jews. If they wanted a Jewish experience, “it was mostly with people in their 60s mourning the loss of their life partners,” he said. But the younger crowd was little better: “Usually very Christian-focused — above all, on eschatology.”
Mercer talked with at least ten people in his Cambridge community who had felt misunderstood in other grief groups on account of their Jewishness or their age. An idea crystallized in his mind: a space to grieve that was both young and Jewish.
He was hesitant, however, to lead the group himself. For one thing, he was more comfortable discussing very recent loss than longer-term bereavement. “There’s rituals for it at first,” he said. But his initiative appealed to a different constituency. It was “people one to three years after a loss,” he told me. “So I needed to pivot.”
A therapist family friend joined the project. She and Mercer decided to lead the group together. “We met for a really long time,” Mercer said, “going back and forth about what would be helpful through a therapeutic lens — of how grief shows up for some people — and then taking those experiences and looking for those in Jewish texts.” In short, a group that blended Jewish textual analysis with clinical expertise.
The Worst Club Ever’s inaugural cohort, 12 members in all, met this summer for six weeks. Participants shared a culture and perhaps a generation, but often little else. One of them, Mercer said, knocking on the coffee table between us for emphasis,“really was not interested in studying Talmud.” Two others, meanwhile, were the children of Orthodox rabbis and had only recently returned from studying at yeshivas in the occupied West Bank. Yet such differences, insurmountable in other Jewish contexts, hardly mattered.
Meetings typically went like this: an opening ritual; a group analysis of a Jewish text — almost always a rabbi riffing on grief or death or mourning; and, last, a guided discussion about a non-scriptural topic. Secular and religious concerns mingled freely. One week, the group tackled how to approach Jewish holidays; the next, a participant’s recent wedding. Mercer was careful not to overdo the exegesis, and avoided prescribing specific mourning rituals.
“They were coming from such different backgrounds, different timelines and relationships,” he said. “None of that stuff would make sense to talk about all the time.” Occasionally discussions were little more than a collective lament. “All we could say, sometimes, was, ‘Man, this fucking sucks,” Mercer said.
The Jewish texts he did use helped participants make sense of their discomfort in other young adult bereavement groups — especially in ones dominated by Christians, for whom death is sometimes seen as a prelude to more permanent bliss. Mercer recalled introducing one text about a grieving rabbi who carried in his pocket his dead son’s tooth. When Mercer explained that this rendered the rabbi “ritually impure,” one of the group suggested this was, surely, an act of willful defiance — that for the rabbi anguish was his chosen companion. “I didn’t think of that,” Mercer replied.
Insights like this happened from time to time: moments when the distance between Mercer — yet to be seriously bereaved, mercifully — and his participants seemed impassable. He embraced the feeling. “I didn’t always know how I fit into this,” he said. “And it was okay for them not to be clear about how I fit into it, too.”
Mercer hopes to bring together another cohort within the next year while offering monthly drop-in spaces in the meantime. As far as he knows, there’s no other resource like it in Boston for Jews in their 20s and 30s. He suspects this is in large part because institutional American Jewish life is built on metrics: on bums-in-seats and kippot-on-heads. By comparison, the Worst Club Ever “is not a sexy program,” said Mercer. In fact, it’s the club you never want to belong to. But Mercer believes this summer’s program gives the lie to the “perception that people in their 20s and 30s don’t experience grief,” he said. “They just don’t know what to do.”
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On El-Sayed, Michigan’s Jewish Democrats aren’t all ready to unite behind nominee
Following Abdul El-Sayed’s narrow win of the Democratic nomination for Michigan’s open Senate seat, the state’s Jewish Democrats are reflecting on whether the divisions El-Sayed’s candidacy brought to the fore can be bridged before November.
Jewish voters make up just 1.4% of the electorate in Michigan. But the community had become deeply invested in the race, with Jews both in fierce opposition and fiery support of El-Sayed in an election that had become a proxy fight over the Gaza war and the U.S.-Israel relationship.
Jewish former Michigan congressman Andy Levin, who had endorsed El-Sayed, believes Democrats will get behind the nominee in the interest of defeating Republican Mike Rogers — a race that could determine which party controls the Senate. Pre-primary polls found Rogers leading El-Sayed by single digits.
“Shame on any Jewish Democrat if they’re going to go vote for Mike Rogers and put our democracy at risk because they can’t find their way to supporting Abdul El-Sayed, who is such a brilliant person, just because he doesn’t share their exact beliefs on Israel and Palestine,” Levin told the Forward. “That’s ridiculous.”
Levin lost his Senate seat to Rep. Haley Stevens after heavy spending against him by AIPAC, the campaign fundraising group advocating for unrestricted U.S. aid to Israel. An AIPAC-associated super PAC spent some $32 million in a failed attempt to get Stevens the Senate nomination.
Stevens endorsed El-Sayed for the general election Wednesday morning. But some Jews who voted for Stevens see no possibility for reconciliation. Rabbi Asher Lopatin of the modern Orthodox synagogue Kehillat Etz Chayim in suburban Detroit had endorsed Stevens in the primary, alarmed by El-Sayed’s association with the controversial Twitch streamer Hasan Piker and condemnation of Israel as a genocidal and apartheid state.
In a TV interview Wednesday, El-Sayed used the term “bloodthirsty” to describe Israel.
“To have so many people vote for someone who is so hurtful to the Jewish community, the things that the Jewish community values — I think it’s depressing,” Lopatin told the Forward.
Lopatin has made up his mind that he will not vote for El-Sayed in the general election, but he also isn’t yet sold on Rogers, the Republican nominee.
“I have to study him more,” Lopatin said. “But I will not vote for Abdul El-Sayed, definitely, and I would tell people they should not.”
Lopatin said he wishes Stevens would condemn El-Sayed rather than endorse him.
Still, others see El-Sayed as the best candidate to face Rogers in the general — and don’t want him to pull back on the issues that won him the nomination. Barbara Weinberg Barefield, a photographer outside Detroit who helped organize the group Jews for Abdul, said she has confidence El-Sayed will win the general — attributing the close primary race partly to the influence of outside money supporting Stevens.
“He was able to win this election in the face of close to $70 million of outside funding going to bolster his opponent,” Weinberg Barefield said. “This election is showing us, and elections around the country are showing us, that elections are not to be bought — they’re to be earned.”
Roslyn Schindler, a retired professor who taught Holocaust studies at Wayne State University, was also among El-Sayed’s Jewish supporters, even as she disagreed with him on his lack of support for a two-state solution. She stressed the importance of beating Rogers in November irrespective of disagreements on Israel.
“My motto is and will be: vote blue, no matter who,” Schindler told the Forward. “I am hoping that all Democrats realize that to do otherwise will be self-destructive and just plain wrong.”
Others are taking a wait-and-see approach. Decky Alexander, chair of the Michigan Democratic Jewish Caucus — which endorsed Stevens in the primary — isn’t issuing an endorsement in the general election yet.
She said the close margin El-Sayed won by, about 15,000 votes, gives her hope that El-Sayed will see the need to unify his party. A start, she said, would be focusing less on AIPAC during his general election campaign.
“There’s a lot of opportunity on Abdul’s side to be a better bridge maker versus kind of a bridge burner,” Alexander told the Forward. “The cards are his. It’s his responsibility to initiate.”
In his election night speech, El-Sayed didn’t mention AIPAC by name, instead speaking more generally about getting money out of politics.
On Wednesday, he addressed Jewish Michiganders directly: “I want you to know that my commitment to your safety, my commitment to Jewish safety, is the same commitment that I have to the safety of my own daughters.”
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‘The Yiddish Teacher’ (Poem)
One thing about the late Forverts staff writer and critic Miriam Hoffman — she cooked a heavenly eggplant in tomato sauce.
And why do I know this about one of our writers? Hoffman, a veritable lexicon-caldron of Yiddish sayings and terms she’d archived from her own mother’s distinct poylish dialect, was many things: A distinguished long-term professor of Yiddish at Columbia University; a theater critic turned playwright who turned the New York Public Theatre’s founding director Joseph Papp into a serious supporter of Yiddish culture; a child survivor of Siberian exile, and so much more.
As she encountered immigrant American life in da Bronx, the tiny dynamo that was Hoffman delighted in becoming American, freely advising everyone on the best consumer goods this country had to offer. A country that was a home and refuge to her, her parents, her husband and so many in her vast circle of Yiddishist friends, students, fellow writers, educators and chosen family. And then, once upon a time, she welcomed me into her Florida home for an overnight stay, so that I could record her jaw-dropping tales of how she and her beloved mameloshn Yiddish both survived the khurbn, the Holocaust. And talk into the video camera she did.
But first, there was lunch.
Rest in all your ferocious deliciousness, Miriam Hoffman, and thank you. For the eggplant, the advice on the best toothpaste, the stories — and for doing everything, everything, everything possible, to transmit your Yiddish to another generation.
The Yiddish Teacher
The Yiddish teacher bending saying:
In my book you’ll learn
the alefbeys through pictograms like so:
The gimel is a camel
The beys a house
You see?
The Yiddish teacher has an archive
in her bedroom closet
The folding doors open revealing:
shoeboxes filled with
stories and
poems and
songs she
wrote as a child
in the displaced persons camp
on paper donated to Jewish refugees
The Yiddish teacher was once
seated in back
of a transport truck
with all the other refugees
Trying to go over the Swiss Alps
to Mandate Palestine
The Yiddish teacher was born
in a Siberian prison camp
“people were starving, sure,
but there was sex”
The Yiddish teacher was the only
woman writer on staff
at the Forverts Yiddish newspaper
The Yiddish teacher remembers
the first time her family ate
Chef-Boy-Ar-Dee spaghetti and
meatballs
from a can
in the Bronx
We go shopping together
The Yiddish teacher loves Rao’s tomato sauce
“it’s the best”
The Yiddish teacher recommends
“Mavis Toothpaste”
It’s the best
The Yiddish teacher loves to
go fly fishing
The Yiddish teacher is short and slim
and round
I think
if I cup my hands together
I can
carry her around always
— Chana Pollack
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Christopher Nolan’s ‘Odyssey’ is a Talmud-quoting, Tisha B’Av epic
“Before there were Jews… there was ‘The Odyssey,’” a theater manager infamously posted on a marquee in Portland, Oregon.
While the mythic, Bronze Age events recounted in the blockbuster film likely never transpired, Homer’s epic poem is by any measure younger than the Jewish people. And Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey, now a proxy for a pitched battle over the essence of Western civilization, could not exist as it is without the Jews. Indeed, whether it knows it or not, it is telling a foundational story of our history.
Much of the criticism surrounding the film, which managed to agitate classicists from its first set photos of Matt Damon in a crested Grecian helmet (not a period-accurate Mycenaean boar-tusk ensemble) and bigots of all stripes with its casting of a trans man and people of color, has shifted since its release just before Tisha B’Av, taking aim at the film’s ideas and how they may clash with those of antiquity’s.
“Did you Christianize The Odyssey?” podcaster Zhong Shu asked Nolan in a now-viral interview.
Nolan explained that he was drawn to the ancient ethic of “xenia,” called “Zeus’ Law” in the film. In the Greek conception, this means welcoming guests because you never know if they may be a God. In Nolan’s blockbuster it’s described as treating others how you would be treated. When the law is breached, society as we know it comes undone, leading to our hero’s atonement and qualms that seem at odds with his traditional characterization.
While Nolan’s understanding mirrors the Christian Golden Rule, which itself is antedated by statements in the Torah and by Hillel, his vision of civilizational ruin when it is trespassed is more central to Judaism. Odysseus laments that, by creating the Trojan horse, and exploiting the code of hospitality to launch a massacre, he has broken something.
“To burn the walls of Troy is to burn the world entire,” Damon’s Odysseus tells Anne Hathaway’s Penelope. This is more or less a paraphrase from Talmudic wisdom: “To destroy one life is to destroy the world entire,” and its more recognizable corollary, “to save one life is to save the world entire.”
The Hebrew Bible is rife with examples of hospitality in extremis. In Sodom, Lot offers his daughters to a mob of rapists rather than have them violate his heavenly guests. The result: a destroyed city and a wife reduced to a table condiment. (Just before, Abraham fed these visitors, plus another angel of God.)
But watching the film Tuesday, I was reminded of another story. Remember when I mentioned Tisha B’Av, the holiday marking the destruction of Judaism’s ancient capital?
Our tradition teaches that the second temple fell because a man holding a banquet in Jerusalem kicked out his enemy, a fellow by the name of Bar Kamtza. Humiliated by his host, Bar Kamtza plots his revenge. He goes to Caesar and tells him the Jews are conspiring against his rule. To prove it, Bar Kamtza, like the wily Odysseus, concocts a ruse, suggesting the Romans send a sacrifice to the rabbis and see if they offer it.
They don’t, as Bar Kamtza blemishes the animal, making it unfit for offering.
In The Odyssey, the famous gift horse is presented as a tribute to Athena. Its blemish is the fighting force it hides inside, ready to sack the city.
The upshot of the rejected temple sacrifice was the razing of Jerusalem at the hands of the Romans. The temple is desecrated, in much the way the temple of Athena is in the film.
Christian theology doesn’t argue quite so forcefully that the violation of the Golden Rule augurs a civilizational collapse. Quite the contrary today, where xenophobia and whispers of Great Replacement — akin to the trade-wind rumors of sea peoples in Nolan’s film — have taken root in the Evangelical right. (Ezra Klein, and really anyone attuned to commentary as subtle as IMAX subwoofers, picked up on this tension.)
Jewish history tells us we fare poorly in places where the stranger isn’t welcome.
In a departure from the text, Nolan ends Odysseus’ wandering with his voluntary exile. He sails west, predicting a benighted age to come, where his exploits will be sung as men lose the ability to write.
Our story ends on a similarly bleak, yet hopeful note.
When Jerusalem fell, Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai devised his own deception, sneaking past the city walls in a casket (before he was let out, zealots wanted to stab the bier, recalling the Trojans’ stabbing of the horse).
But before Yohanan can make his escape he’s intercepted by the general Vespasian, who he mistakenly refers to as the emperor. Vespasian offers a correction, but almost instantly a messenger confirms this designation, telling him Caesar died and named him his successor. Regarding Yohanan’s mistake as prophecy, he offers him a request.
Jerusalem had fallen, self-determination was unrealistic, and so Yohannan asks for the city of Yavneh and its sages. From there our modern history began, literacy thrived and a dark age was subdued.
The Temple and Troy have yet to be rebuilt, but their legends live on.
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