Introducing -- SF Russian Jewish Moishe House

It's a real treat writing the first entry from the Russian Jewish Moishe house of San Francisco. The team, Aleks (me), Vitaly, and Anna, are excited to embark on this amazing journey. We can't wait to meet new people, create new memories, and have a lot of fun doing it!

On Friday we inaugurated the Moishe House with our first event, a Housewarming/Halloween party. We had an amazing crowd out here. It was great to see so many people dressed up, letting loose. We enjoyed drinks on roofdeck while dancing and watching ships in the harbour. Special thanks to Gene Kosoy for setting up a photo booth.

A little about us --

We're three friends who decided to open up a Moishe house after realizing how much we enjoy hosting events and having good times with our friends.

A little about our Moishe House:

We're nestled on the south slope of Potrero Hill, which is a sunny neighborhood in SF, by the bay. We're looking to host rewarding and fulfilling events for the Russian Jewish community of SF.

-Aleks S.

Give Shabbat a Shot!

Let me start this blog by saying that I am nowhere near the level of a Rabbi; I'm just a simple Jew, who lives at Moishe House Great Neck, reflecting on his experience of becoming a more observant Jew. It's an experience that has changed my life, and that has given me the opportunity for tremendous growth in character and as a person. Here are few of the simple reasons why:

There is a huge misconception that observant Judaism and it's laws are restrictive to your daily lives and routine; however, I found it to be more liberating than I could have imagined. One example is Kashrut. You might find a Jew who would say, "I am a human, and true freedom is being able to do whatever I want; so I'm going to eat that cheeseburger, because I want to." In truth however, that is not true freedom; that person is merely a slave to his desires. He wouldn't eat that cheeseburger if he didn't desire it. True freedom is being able to understand that there are boundaries in life, and being able to overcome your desires.

As humans it's very easy to take the many blessings we have in life for granted; we tend to look at and desire what others around us have. However, many of us, Thank G-D, are blessed to have the ability to see, hear, talk, and walk. We are blessed to be able to see a rainbow (which we make a blessing on), smell a flower (which we make a blessing on), or even go to the bathroom (which afterwards, we make a blessing on). Another great example is waking up in the morning. Most people usually wake up dissapointed that they have to wake up so early; the first thing an observant Jew does when he wakes up is say they Modeh Ani, and thank G-D for giving him the gift of a new day. By saying blessings and thanking G-D, we automatically become more aware and appreciative of the blessings we have in life.

Finally, the most enjoyable experience for me of becoming a more observant Jew was when I became Shomer Shabbat. It's an awesome experience to be able to have the ability to completely disconnect from the work week and its stresses. It's an awesome experience to be able to have a nice dinner with family and friends without the distraction cell phones. It's an awesome experience to participate in and hear the beautiful Shabbat prayers and songs. It's an awesome experience to be an observant Jew!

So as a friend, a Jew, and fellow Moishe House resident, I would like to encourage all of you to try to apply something from Judaism to your life; even if it's overcoming just one desire, saying just one blessing, or "Giving Shabbat a Shot!"

I wish you all the best,

Joseph Yadgar

History is just stuff repeating

Oh, Fall. Having lived much of my adolescence in California, the change of seasons is still a noteworthy event. This is my second Fall season as a Moishe House resident, and I already feel how different everything is the second time around! The prep for an event, the weekly meetings, the required blogs... what once seemed intimidating or confusing, hah! No longer, my friends.

As fellow bloggers have mentioned, the real start of Fall for the Jews is all about Sukkot. Yes, yes, the Hebrew calendar starts anew sometime in Fall, but Sukkot really gets you in the season properly. For me, it’s the gathering of natural materials for the schach. I’m pretty convinced that the trimming of the city’s parks, family’s yards, the city streets' trees and all that other landscaping you see at this time of year, really started because that’s when we need stuff to cover our temporary shelters. (Another example of our history governing ‘secular’ activities? Pesach & spring cleaning!)

Last year I had also found much of the material for our schach, but I was mostly just hired help, taking directions. This year, as one of 2 ‘veteran’ residents, I took it upon myself to lead the building of our sukkah. (shout-out: Moishehouserocks.com!) I won’t go into the details (you should’ve been there!), but will rather share some thing I took from it.

As we built our sukkah, 2 doors down (no, not 3) we could see a family building theirs. (Note: the family’s sukkah was more ‘kit’ than ‘creation’ but to each their own) I stopped my efforts for a few moments to watch the two children throw schach onto their latticed-roof as their parents looked on. It hit me that here I am, participating in a tradition that, by all intent, I’ll be passing on to my children. And that’s what warms my heart about the Judaism I continue to discover, practice & share as a leader in our community: the universality - and at the same time, the uniqueness - of its role in one’s life. In some years, those children will be building their own. Years from now, my children will be throwing schach onto the structure I built. And 800 years ago, far away from Philadelphia, and without the musical accompaniment of an iPod & speakers and other 21st century niceties, a father was watching his children do the same.

-Cody Greenes

A MH Vancouver Sukkah story

It all began with a relatively simple plan: To build a Sukkah.

Jacob and I went to Home Depot with a Sukkah design that seemed affordable and easy to construct. It would be built with 6 and 8 foot long, thin aluminum poles attached together into a 12X12X8 foot Sukkah. Tarp walls would complete a roomy, drafty but altogether lovely Sukkah.Great.

Wandering the aisles at Home depot is probably what it feels like to be ADHD, not knowing where to look first, with nails, brackets, sinks, wood, drainage etc looming to the top of the warehouse ceiling and extending endlessly into the horizon of a D.I.Y junkie's dreamworld. Our first problem was that they didn't have poles, the right ones, that is. They had copper pipes (very expensive), long (12 foot) wobbly plastic pipes, but no 6 and 8 foot aluminum poles. So we kept exploring, silently recognizing that it would take a lot longer than expected. Ideas came to us, like using cinder blocks (didn't have the right ones), using lattices (too expensive), 2X4's (too heavy if we create a base out of them too), but were rejected, and we went home to think about it.

The next day we returned with Rotem. He thought a 2X4 structure could work. We bought 12 and 16 foot long 2X4 beams to build a 12 foot cube, with 16 foot crossbeams for support.

They were HUGE and HEAVY. Could we even fit them into a Subaru station wagon? We turned down the back seats, slid the beams in until they touched the windshield, but they still stuck out of the trunk about 4 feet. We had no rope with us either. We were impatient to go home, so Jacob and I sat in the trunk and held onto 12 -12 foot and 6-16 foot 2X4's, which, when held together, were as thick as a cedar trunk. Then we prayed that the beams a) wouldn't slip out of the open trunk door b) that the car wouldn't hit a bump c)scrape against the ground when driving uphill d) wouldn't get pulled over.

We drove 5 miles an hour to be safe. The drive from Home Depot to our house is uphill almost the entire way along a very busy street. Needless to say people were not happy we held up traffic. We shrugged off the dirty looks, the obscenities, and the people too embarrassed to even look at us for fear we are a bunch of crazy psychos. But then this car cuts us off and stops right in front of us in the middle of the street. This dude wearing a toque walks up and sticks his head in our window and says " you guys better pull over, you have no idea", I am going to write you up". We get a closer look at him and see he has a joint hanging out the corner of his mouth. Rotem looks at me, I look at Jacob who looks back at Rotem. Is he an off-duty cop smoking a joint or a stoner pretending to have authority? Rotem says something like, yeah sure we will get off the road at the next light, and he walks back to his car and drives off. We laugh and make our way slowly back home.

It poured the next day. But people showed up for the Sukkah building event, so we went out with our hammers, nails, brackets, boots and rain coats. After we began to nail the beams together, we realized a) just how tall 12 foot ceilings are, and how difficult it will be to erect the Sukkah and b) that our yard is uneven. So first we built the 3 walls separately, then laid one of the walls on the ground and nailed in the other 2 walls vertically, at right angles on opposite sides. Then we pushed and pushed until the Sukkah rotated 90 degrees, and the wall previously lying on the ground became the back wall. The walls teetered and swayed on the uneven ground, but held! The 10 people who helped stood back and laughed at how ridiculously tall the Sukkah was. It was unreal, like a distorted, monstrous prop. The Frankenstein of sukkahs. A walk- in -joke.

The Sukkah stood for 2 weeks and provided us with a place to host our clothing swap/drive, drink l'chaims, shake the Lulav, and hang out with friends. Would any of us have built such a Sukkah alone? NO, it was too much, too weird. But together as a group, somehow the weirdness of it became charming, the monster protective and comforting, the joke funny and not shameful.

Our walk-in-joke will be up next year, so if you are flying over Vancouver and your plane suddenly lurches, don't be alarmed, chances are you have just avoided our Sukkah.



Cheers,

Baruch Huberman, MH Vancouver

Recently, we are in the midst of the festival of Sukkot, a holiday that celebrates the harvest and often affords us an opportunity to shift the focus of our personal energies from personal introspection outwards into the world. Nothing exemplifies this shift more, than the sukkah, a simple tent, erected at Occupy Boston. Many Moishe Kavodniks have had an opportunity this past month to break bread in this sukkah and to take a look at the the goings-on in Dewey Square and it has struck many of us what an appropriate statement that particular sukkah really is in light of the orientation shift that Sukkot often embodies. Obviously we could look at the symbolic act of moving the festival celebration to the site of a mass protest as way of taking the personal commitments made during Yom Kippur in the process of T’shuvah or repentance and turning them into action in the world. Without endorsing the goals or tactics of the Occupation Movement, it is hard to deny that a public expression of righteous indignation at the current state of affairs is most certainly a conduit for living one’s values, the usually desired end result of t’shuvah.

This is certainly true, but there is another less obvious aspect of the Occupy Boston Sukkah that spoke to me. While meandering through the tent city that currently covers Dewey Square, I saw not one concerted action but dozens, heard not one voice but hundreds. The protesters and occupiers speak to a multitude of issues. Banners and signs decrying the evils of war, economic disparity, the denigration of teachers, the hijacking of the democratic process by business interests, and environmental degradation line Atlantic Avenue. It is a great fruit salad of causes. The sukkah itself also speaks to this level of pluralism for it was erected not by one Jewish organization but by more than eight. One would think that with so many priorities, organization would be next to impossible in this confusion of differing voices, yet chaos is far from the state of affairs there. The tent city sports free hot food distribution, recycling pick-up, and a free library with internet, and has the feeling in its calmer moments of a tidy New England town. It is for this reason that the Occupy Boston Sukkah has given me pause to think. Maybe it is not only that we need to come out of our reveries of introspection this Sukkot but out of our professional and political silos as well. Perhaps this Sukkot then can serve to remind us that turning outward does not just mean looking from ourselves out into the world, but also being able to embrace a diversity of priorities and opinions, that change comes not when we are walled off from one another and working diligently on our own personal projects, but when we find common ground with others. That being in the world and taking effective action often takes not single minded focus but the ability to listen to many voices and from that chorus, finally speak with one accord.

New Orleans!

All I knew before coming to New Orleans was that I would be living in the
Moishe House. That was the only fact, the only stable thing I had to look forward to
while I waited to move. I had just graduated college from the University of Michigan
in May and I had decided to quit the job I had waiting for me in San Francisco and
move unemployed to New Orleans. When I had visited New Orleans in the past I
was moved by the emphasis that people in New Orleans seemed to place on
community and relationships. I was drawn to the people I had met during my visit
and the opportunities I could foresee in such a great city. Ideologically I was sold on the city, yet when I arrived I realized, what do I do now?

My first few days were spent networking with non-profits, companies, and
even restaurants that were just not hiring. I would walk into my not yet settled
home, the Moishe House and wallop in my discouragement to roommates who did
not yet know me. The support I received from my Moishe House roommates and
the larger Moishe House community literally got me through a rough transition
period. Everybody I met was willing to hash out my sorrows with me and offer
me positive reinforcement. I believe strongly in the power of community and
specifically the power of intentional community, Moishe House exemplifies my
beliefs.

At this point I have been in New Orleans slightly over a month and Moishe
House is now not the only thing that is settled for me in this city. Yet, living at the house and hosting people on a weekly basis has helped me focus and concentrate on
creating a new home for myself in New Orleans.

Barrie Schwartz
MH New Orleans

MH San Diego turns 1!!!

MHSD turns 1!!!!! That's right, as of October 1, 2011, we turned one. It's been a great year, our community has grown from essentially 3 people to hundreds. We now get at least 30 guests every Shabbat, and many regulars hang out outside of MHSD events.

That our birthday happened to fall between Rosh HaShana and Yom Kippur makes contemplating the year that passed both easy and interesting. This past year has been a learning experience to say the least. I personally learned how much EFFORT it takes to host successful and meaningful events and really what it takes to facilitate community-building. I want to thank my house-mates (Dovi, Natalie and Jon) for all their efforts in making our house and this social experiment called Moishe House an absolute success.

Personally, this was a year of big changes as well. It was my first complete year back in the US after living/working/studying in Israel for the prior 3 years; I also started a PhD program here in San Diego that was *a little* more time-consuming than I thought it would be. Even with all the stress of trying to juggle 5-6 events a month, tons of school work, trying to maintain a life outside of Moishe House (it's actually possible), at the end of every month it's been completely worth it. This month, I'm especially looking forward to building our sukkah (this Sunday). We just missed Sukkot when we moved in last year and I'm really excited to have an amazing house and back yard in which to build one this year.

Shana Tova and Gmar Chatima Tova to all.

Noah