A school of tadpoles chilling along the edge of the water. Judging from their abundance on land nearby, these are most likely to be future American toads.

This is from the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, MN on September 2nd 2008. I had gotten close to police action on the previous day and enjoyed a face-full of mace, but during this march I hung back with another journalist. I had actually lamented to myself because I wasn’t sure there would be anything good to photograph if I kept my distance from police, but the march was much less dramatic and I got some good shots.

In truth, I take tons of shitty pictures but I just show people the good ones. For every picture I post, there’s often up to 20 (or more) that didn’t make the cut. My memory card fills up quickly. It’s not easy to know which shot out of dozens of seemingly identical shots is the one you should use. While learning how to use a photo-editing program is vital, it’s not going to pull a rabbit out of a hat if you don’t know what you’re doing with your camera. You can only do so much to try to redeem a bad picture. If it sucks, then it sucks.

I leave a lot of stuff on the cutting room floor but I also save it. I planned on selling some of it as stock photography, but then I started going back to see what I may have overlooked. This picture is one of them. I have a critical eye and even now I can see all of the reasons why I didn’t include this with the initial batch of RNC08 photos: it’s hectic, the woman in pink has her feet chopped off, and it would’ve been so much better if I had been a few feet back and to the right. But I’ve decided that it doesn’t have to be perfect.

I really did try to figure out what this thing was so it could have an actual title. However, Googling “vertical purple flower” didn’t work so great. (Larkspur?)

Most important is the fact that this isn’t the Orthodox vs liberal Judaism battle that some people are trying to make it out to be, it is a power-grab by the Haredi minority. As such, the silence and shrugs by people who don’t seem to understand it (either willfully or not) are just as frustrating as the attempts to purposely misrepresent the intent behind the bill.

Last week, there was an op-ed in New York Times by Alana Newhouse (of Tablet) that does a really great job at explaining what is going on and what is at stake:

[...] The problem is not simply that some of these rabbinical functionaries, who are paid by the state and courted by politicians, are demonstrably corrupt. (To take the most salacious of a slew of examples, an American Haredi rabbi who had become one of the most powerful authorities on the question of conversion resigned from his organization in December after accusations that he solicited phone sex from a hopeful female convert.) Rather, it is that the beliefs of a tiny minority of the world’s Jews are on the verge of becoming the Israeli government’s definition of Judaism, for all Jews.

It is hard to exaggerate the possible ramifications, first and foremost for Jewish Israelis. Rivkah Lubitch, an Orthodox woman who is a lawyer in Israel’s rabbinic court system, painted a harrowing picture of the future in a recent column on the Israeli Web site Ynet.

“Even if you didn’t go to register for marriage, and even if you didn’t go to a rabbinic court for any reason, and even if you didn’t pass by a rabbinic court when you walked down the street — the rabbinic court can summon you, conduct a hearing about your Jewishness and revoke it,” she wrote. “In effect, the entire nation of Israel is presumed to be Not-Jewish — until proven otherwise.”

Why are the rabbis doing this? The process is not being driven, as some say, by a suspicion of new converts — they’re simply a wedge issue. Nor is it, as others argue, a reaction to the influx of Russian Jews, who when they seek permission to wed in Israel are often asked for evidence that their families were registered as Jews in the old Soviet Union.

No, what is driving this process is the desire of a small group of rabbis to expand their authority from narrow questions of conversion to larger questions of Jewish identity. Since what goes for conversion also goes for all other clerical acts, only a few anointed rabbis will be able to determine the authenticity of one’s marriage, divorce, birth, death — and every rite in between.

And lest one imagine that this is just another battle between the more progressive Reform and Conservative denominations and the more observant Orthodox, it must be noted that the criteria used by the rabbinate are driven by internal Haredi politics, not observance. According to the Jewish Week, at one point the number of American rabbis who were officially authorized by the Israeli rabbinate to perform conversions was down to a few dozen. Even if you are Orthodox — and especially if you are Modern Orthodox — your rabbi probably doesn’t make the cut. (Don’t believe it? Go ask him.)

Given that the conversion bill is the latest in a series of similarly motivated efforts, it seems almost useless to note that the stringent approach to Jewish law that the Israeli rabbinate promotes bears little connection to the historical experience and religious practice of the majority of Jewish people over the past two millenniums. It will do little good, too, to point out that it is well outside the consensus established by Hillel — arguably the greatest rabbi in all of rabbinic Judaism and whom, as Joseph Telushkin argues in a forthcoming book, was willing to convert a pagan on the spot, simply because he’d asked.

And it doesn’t help to argue that giving the ultra-Orthodox rabbinate total control over Jewish practice will destroy religious life in Israel just as surely as clerical control hurt the Church of England and the Catholic Church in Spain and France. Or that the Zionist founders, from Herzl to Jabotinsky to Ben-Gurion, all believed passionately in the unity of the Jewish people and the need for a secular state. [...]

—
Modern Tribe has some great Jewish Gifts for all occasions