Here’s a thing I wrote for the Jewish Quarterly.

Future Rabbi?

Congratulate me. I’ve just written a whole sheet of A4 by pen. After years of computercentricity it felt weird, foreign, as unwelcome a throwback to the 1980s as news that The Tweets have reformed so we can hear the “Birdie Song” live again (ah, “The Tweets”. Now there’s a name that finally has meaning in this social network age). As I heaved the pen clumsily across the paper, sweat pouring from my brow, Repetitive Strain Injury gathering in my freaked-out forearm, I felt like a man trying to plough a field with a… well, with a pen. And after all that intense manual labour, the words were about as legible as if they’d been written by a three year old. With his foot. Where were the clear curves and confident uprights of Times New Roman or Arial, the font which, as every Disney fan knows, gained its elegant look by sacrificing its voice to Ursula the Sea Witch? I couldn’t work out how to cut-and-paste, couldn’t make any of the words bold – writing with a pen and paper is rubbish.

Give me a couple more months and I’ll say the same about books. Jews may be known as the People of the Book but as far as I’m concerned we can already be rechristened (sorry, bad choice of words) the People of the Kindle. I’ve only had my e-reader a few weeks and I’m already cured of my nostalgia for the smell of a new book, the look of its cover, the physicality of turning the pages (which now seems almost as tough a form of manual labour as using a pen). I like that no-one on the tube can tell I’m reading Katie Price’s “Being Jordan” for the 4^th time (I hate missing the nuances and subtext). And why tell people you’re halfway through a book when you can tell them you’re 46% of the way through (Kindle virgins – there’s a little bar at the bottom of the screen that offers you this detail). I confidently predict that within five years even Torah scrolls will be in electronic tablet form and therefore so much easier to lift.

My writing style also betrays how I’ve evolved into a man who spends his whole life tapping at a computer (homo tapiens? Presuming you rhyme “sap-“ with “tap”). Too much texting and social networking have eliminated pronouns from the start of my sentences, and as for the verbs “to be” and “to have”, forget it. Fairly confident that irritates lots of people. Seen them banging on about it loads. Then there’s the informality of my email sign-offs. It’s always “best” or – heaven help me – “bestest”, from “Dave x” or “Dx”, even – and what a terrible slip of the keyboard that “x” was – when writing to the Chief Rabbi.

At least my writings aren’t littered with LOL’s and OMG’s (or, for the orthodox Jew, OMG-d’s). I’m over 40 so it would contravene the 1995 Act Your Age Act, but I can see the appeal. LOLs and smiley faces don’t half help clarify what you’re thinking – Kafka would be so much more understandable if “Metamorphosis” had begun “One day Gregor Samsa woke up to find he’d been turned into a huge beetle LOL”. Still I’m unable to resist the asterisk. Once confined to walk-on roles for footnotes and the occasional expletive, the asterisk has clearly got a new agent. It’s now constantly in work on the internet: to stress a word you *really* want to pick out or to express the feelings of the writer about his own sentence *wonders if he needs to give an example*.

I’ve got to the stage when it’s a struggle not to use asterisks and other internetisms when writing an article like this. The other day I even used *facepalm* in conversation (it’s internet for finding something so stupid you want to slap your forehead with your hand; see also *facedesk*). I was talking to an aunt with dementia at the time so the expression was never going to fly. What am I like *facepalm*?! But that’s homo tapiens for you. It may frustrate the peddants (spell it with two d’s, it really annoys them) but it’s surely only a matter of time before asterisks and LOL-style acronyms (Lolcronyms?) enter formal written text and our prayer books are full of “Blessed are you, OMG, who has created the fruit of the vine smiley face”.

Dx *hits send**takes rest of the day off*

Futureman. Is that a Jewish name? is a post from: David Schneider's website

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Here’s a thing I wrote about 10 years ago after my first trip to Deutschland…

I have recently returned from making a film in Germany. It was a significant event for me, not just because the script was wonderful, my fellow actors were marvellous and all those other well-known Paltrowisms. It was significant because the film was shot in Germany and I am – well, there’s no other way to say it – I’m Jewish. A Jew. Ein Jude.

For any Jew, a visit to Germany (and this was my first) is bound to be significant. Ever since I can remember, the Holocaust has been part of my consciousness. My mother fled the Nazis, my parent’s social circle is full of people who won’t buy German, who won’t listen to Wagner. For them, Germany will always be something they mistrust, something which frightens them.

And it’s not just my parents’ generation who feel that way. A Jewish friend of mine recently flew to Germany with his young family. Having arrived off the plane and collected their baggage, they prepared to board the shuttle bus to the central terminal. His family went on ahead of him, squeezed onto a full bus which then shut its doors and departed, leaving him to get on the next shuttle. All part of the airport experience, you might think. Irritating but perfectly mundane. Not for a Jew in Germany. For my friend – a normal, generally easy-going human being – he felt as if he was watching his young family being driven away by the German authorities, never to be seen again. Such is the power of our cultural inheritance.

I was determined not to be like that. I was the product of an enlightened education, I had studied German at university, I mixed with more gentiles than Jews and though I was of course fully respectful of the legacy of the Holocaust, I knew that Germany – at least the arty Westerners with whom I would be working – had been through a lot of self-examination and had come out the other side ready to plant a lot of hippy love-thy-neighbour flowers. I knew that every moment a Jew spends in Germany threatens to explode with symbolism. But I was determined that my symbols would be positive ones: every handshake would be an expression of Jewish-German reconciliation, every conversation would demonstrate a rebuilding, a fantastically moving renewal of trust. They would make statues of me embracing my new friends Hans and Wolfgang as we laughed over shared memories of deutsche rockstar Nena and her “99 Red Balloons”. I would waltz through Germany, the very essence of magnanimity, distributing absolution and forgiveness to all and sundry. I would be, for want of a better word, a forgiveness Ubermensch.

That was how it was meant to be. But my subconscious had other plans. On Day 2, I was having breakfast in my hotel with a photographer working on the film. He (German) was telling me how he’d hurt his knee and I (Jew, but it really doesn’t matter) was telling him about my own weak knees and how the best thing to do is to rest up with your ankle higher than your hip. I raised my right arm to demonstrate the optimum position – ankle higher than hip, ankle higher than hip – unaware that what I was actually doing was giving full-blown Nazi salutes just feet from the sculpted melon. And so it continued: when the director (English, gentile – though as I said, it really doesn’t matter) told me to do something different from what he had suggested the previous time, I wittily quipped in front of the film crew (all German except – disturbingly – for one Italian) “I was only following orders”. When the shooting of a certain scene which was meant to take a couple of hours was spilling over into its second day, I joked about it as the “Thousand-year shoot”, an unconscious tribute to Hitler’s sense of history. Every conversation I had I seemed to mention something about my background: “Can I have a cappucino my mother left Austria in 1938 two days before the Anschluss”; “what’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this where my mother’s family had to come in disguise in March ‘39” and so on.

By day 7, my Don’t-mention-the-war-ism was out of control. However hard I tried to avoid it, every little off-the-cuff comment seemed to come out in a comedy German accent so cod Captain Birdseye could have battered it there and then. My efforts to be relaxed and at ease with my German colleagues were collapsing quicker than the Polish army in 1939 (there I go again), and you didn’t have to be Freud to see that my true anxieties were surfacing like the crew of a stricken U-boat (you see, it can’t be stopped). The truth was clear and, like Rudolf Hess at the Nuremberg trials, I had to admit it: I was terribly uncomfortable in Germany.

Not that I experienced a grain of anti-Semitism. There were a few unfortunate remarks: one of the German drivers who shepherded the actors to and from the film-set used to herd us into his People Carrier with the difficult little joke: “everyone into ze cattle-truck!” – no doubt a problem of idiom rather than anything more sinister. But Jews don’t need to experience an anti-Semitic act to feel uncomfortable, especially in Germany. Our Rabbis tell us that each and every one of us was present at the giving of the Ten Commandments 3000 years ago, so you can imagine that the Second World War seems like yesterday. We don’t forget easily, especially – obviously – not the Holocaust. And yet that’s what I tried to do.

Thinking back, the strange thing about my behaviour was why had I been so desperate to make things easier for the Germans I met? After all, my people were the victims not the persecutors. For many Jews of my parent’s generation such an overly forgiving approach would have been impossible. Some might even see in it a dangerous, (stereo)typically Jewish desire to be liked and accepted. Maybe it was PC gone haywire – the foolish attempt of a non-sexist non-racist liberal who happened to be Jewish to prove that he didn’t discriminate, that he was above all that. To show that, with the perpetrators of the Holocaust growing old and dying, it was time to follow the lead of every guest on “Kilroy” and forgive but not forget (and there’s a lot to be said for such an attitude). Whatever the causes, when my noble intentions clashed with the cultural baggage I picked off the carrousel at Cologne airport, there were bound to be psychological casualties.

Still, this particular story has a happy ending. I calmed down. I started speaking to Germans more openly. With some of them (including my cattle-truck friend), I discussed the war – how the Holocaust has a defining effect on both our peoples giving us, paradoxically, a bond which other cultures do not share. Gradually, my don’t-mention-the-war-ism was cured. The statue of me embracing Hans and Wolfgang and laughing at Nena’s one-hit wonder became a more feasible proposition. As a result of my stay, there are even a couple of Germans with whom I may have made lasting friendships. How long they’ll last, I don’t know. Perhaps for a thousand years.

This article was first published in The Independent.

Jew travels to Germany shock is a post from: David Schneider's website

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According to the internet this is a DIY Circumcision kit...

I have a Jewish friend who’s so assimilated he’s joined a church and even had himself  baptized. This might be to do with getting his daughters into the local church school (I’m sure St Paul only converted because there was an excellent C of E primary just off the road to Damascus), but you have to admire his commitment. Nevertheless, when his first son came along, even this hardcore convert to school-league-table Christianity had him circumcised.

Circumcision is the last thing a Jew abandons, probably because it’s the most primitive and tribal of our rituals, a physical mark of belonging. But it’s not just a religious/ethnic issue. For me, it’s like there are three genders: male, female, and with a foreskin. The last is a complete mystery to me, even more than the female and that’s saying something. It’s inevitable I’d want my son to be like me in that crucial area (plus possibly a little bit bigger). But why would a right-on parent like myself who’d never dream of smacking his child think nothing of cutting off a piece of his penis?

There are plenty of reasons not to circumcise. The internet tells me that circumcised men enjoy considerably less sexual pleasure than uncircumcised men. One article says 35%, though you wonder how they reached such an exact figure, especially as any shortfall in their Jewish subjects is more likely to be due to their relationship with their mother than their lack of  foreskin. Then there was the actor I worked with who was “restoring” his foreskin through an eye-wateringly painful process of tape, “manual tugging” and – God help us – a system of O-Rings and weighted foreballs, whatever they are (I didn’t ask). For him, circumcision was abuse, the mutilation of an innocent child without its consent. We’re opposed to female circumcision, so why allow it with males? I think you could say the guy had issues.

Still, generations of circumcised Jews have turned out alright, give or take the odd several years of therapy. It’s meant to be cleaner and, as the announcement by the World Health Organisation’s Kevin de Cock (surely not his real name) seems to prove, healthier. I’m told the Royal family are circumcised, though whether that’s a recommendation or not I’m not quite sure. I’m also told that Jews are circumcised when they’re 8 days old because the nerve endings aren’t yet fully developed so the baby doesn’t feel pain like we would. It may be crying for other reasons – discomfort or hunger. Well, I’m no Lord Winston (who’s Jewish and therefore, I presume, circumcised) but I don’t think the sound the baby made at the circumcision I attended recently was because it felt a little bit peckish.

Luckily my extremely thoughtful girlfriend has so far provided me with two girls. I’m not sure what I’d do if I had a boy. It’s a big statement for a Jew not to circumcise but whether I could risk condemning him to a future of O-Rings and foreballs, I just don’t know.

This article first appeared in The Independent.

The unkindest cut of all is a post from: David Schneider's website

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Still here’s half a year’s worth. Definitely best if you read them in order. Hope they edify and educate you as much as I know they will if you’ve got half a brain cell.

Yours,

Rabbi David Schneider

(Jewish chaplain to the Somali pirate fleet).

Check out Rabbi David Schneider’s Weekly Words of Wisdom (With Rabbi David Schneider) here.

Rabbi David Schneider’s Weekly Words of Wisdom (with Rabbi David Schneider) is a post from: David Schneider's website

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What a wonderful parsha to begin these Weekly Words of Wisdom (With Rabbi David Schneider) – the parsha that tells of the last three plagues and the going out from Egypt. A new beginning for the children of Israel and, more importantly, a new beginning for the features page of the Jewish Chronicle. Of course it would have been better to have started at Rosh Hashanah or Simchat Torah, when we start reading the Torah all over again, but no, the editor, in his wisdom, um-ed and aah-ed and was frequently unavailable, like the four previous editors before him, until finally, like Pharaoh, he gave in and released my words from bondage. At least I didn’t have to slay any first-borns to get my way.

I’m joking of course.

But what about the parsha with its story of Passover? When I think of the Seder night, I think of the four sons in the Haggadah, especially the sneering son who says of the Passover miracles: “what’s this to me? Behold, am I bothered? Does my face look bothered?” Well, if he were my son, I would be quite witty and say in a smiling but adult way: “Remove thy hoody and be bothered! We may no longer be slaves in the strict Kirk Douglas Spartacus sense of the word (though they were more gladiators, I suppose), but in many ways we still are. (Slaves, not gladiators)”.

There are many different forms of slavery. Take a contemporary example. A man’s wife tries for years to get him to agree to having an extension built at the back of their house so they can have a breakfast bar and easy access to their south-facing garden. It’s an investment, she says, it’ll put value on the house. So finally he concedes. So they get quotes, choose a builder (even though, quite frankly, their quote was the least competitive) and the work commences. Little progress is made; in fact after a few weeks it seems to the man that work has ground to a halt. But he’s a busy, working man and he’s entrusted the project management to his wife, so he keeps shtum. So imagine his surprise when he comes home one day during the daytime to find his wife of 22 years in bed with the builder. All the more surprising seeing as the builder’s company are called Ladybuild and the builder’s actually a woman called, confusingly because it’s a man’s name as well, Leslie. No apologies, no excuses, just “that’s the way it is, like it or lump it!” Is that not treating someone worse than a slave? Is that not behaving exactly like Pharoah, doing whatever you want? I rather think it is! I rather think only Pharoah would hire a lesbian builder then sleep with her behind her husband’s back!

And I don’t think she can wriggle out of it by saying it’s his fault, he’s to blame! He’s been spending all that time with a female member of the congregation who’s in her 30s and who is, I suppose, very attractive, not that I’ve noticed. Doesn’t matter that she’s blind and recovering from major surgery, that she’s unable to read to herself so it’s actually a mitzvah to spend time with her, reading, talking.

Yes, we’re all slaves in one way or other, we all have to endure different forms of bondage – be it depression or anxiety or malicious gossip saying, for example, that there’s something physical going on with this congregant which, by the way, is pure loshen hora, speaking evil of another person, which, she should know, is a grievous, really, really horrible sin. I follow the sages when they say it is better to lose one’s tongue than speak evil of a person. I’d honestly rather be struck dumb than say one negative word about someone else. It’s just a shame that pathetic, spiteful, scheming witch who’s casting aspersions on an innocent, attractive blind girl doesn’t feel the same way.

Next week: Patience, trust and love: Parsha Beshallach.

This article first appeared in The Jewish Chronicle

Rabbi David Schneider’s Weekly Words of Wisdom 1: Bo is a post from: David Schneider's website

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