We all know how pervasive technology has become in our lives, but the impact of “technology” is much more all encompassing than merely the arrival of a new widget or gadget. The printing press, for example, not only provided cheaper and more accessible books, it increased literacy rates, changed the nature of higher education, and triggered nothing short of a cultural revolution. Internet technologies, especially the rise of social media and mobile devices, are similarly challenging our societal status quo, with implications not only for business and communications, but also for our homes and families.

The Jewish home is a special place, often referred to as mikdash me’at, a little sanctuary. With a clear differentiation between the public and private, home is a safe space where we can take refuge from the demands and chaos of the world.

Judaism has much to say about boundaries — we have a synagogue mechitza to create boundaries between men and women in prayer, and the eruv to determine the parameters of a “home”; we have boundaries between the sacred and profane, kosher and traif. New technologies are challenging and making more permeable some of these home boundaries; they are impacting our relationships, competing for our attention, and of course also providing value. While home-based technology is not new (the telephone made an important dent many years ago), the Internet and mobile phones are not only exploding these boundaries but are changing how we experience and manage boundaries.

As these technologies become more infused into dominant culture (it’s no longer just “kids” — the 35–49-year-old age group is the fastest growing segment on Facebook), how we delineate between home and work, personal and professional, private and public is increasingly becoming blurred. Telephone calls, text messages, Facebook postings, and tweets, on computers and mobile phones, are often integral parts of our lives and in our pockets 24/7, or maybe 24/6. Some technologies divert our attention: Blackberries buzzing at the dinner table; a laptop computer joining a couple in their bed; or work e-mails competing with non-work activity on the computer.

But technology also provides new accessibility. For example a laptop on the kitchen counter displays an e-mail from my mother with my grandmother’s matzah ball soup recipe. Or my friends watch a G-dcast video about the parasha with their children before Shabbat, then discuss the story over dinner. In these ways, the tools enrich our lives by helping us access and weave new ideas and information into our homes.

Beyond accessibility to content, social media supports relationships. As is often said, “it takes a village to raise a child,” which refers to a network of supportive friends, shared values and lifestyles, delegated responsibilities, proximity to one another, and most of all, coordination among the many parts of the village. A modern family’s “village” is likely these days to be quite dispersed but no less critical to making our homes and families successful: A grandparent reading a book to a grandchild via a video chat, or a parent doing the same from a hotel room on a business trip; a new mother, isolated at home in a New England winter tapping her friends around the country for parenting tips through her Facebook status updates; or a Jewish educator who, via her blog, offers transparency into the classroom and ideas about how parents might reinforce Jewish learning at home.

And sometimes we use our permeable boundaries for the sake of adding to the gravitational center of the “village” without expectations.  Recently a woman’s newly retired parents were in a car accident and hospitalized. She posted the news as a Facebook status update. Someone in her congregation saw it and reached out to lend support. She summoned the rabbi to visit them in the hospital, and set the Caring Committee into action to deliver meals for the next difficult weeks. The “village” is at its best when we are willing to share both our simchas and our hardships, and is only possible when others are listening. Social technologies enable this permeability and transparency in new and powerful ways. Let’s put them to good and sacred use.

How do we negotiate these boundaries in life, with families, and in our homes? How do Jewish values inform our thinking and decisions about how we use technology at home? Please share experiences, questions, and ideas at www.shma.com.

I’ve lived in six different houses in four towns over the past 25 years. My favorites of these houses were the two that had front porches. Now, there was a lot about the interior of the houses that I liked as well, but the front porch was what I loved the best.

The front porch is a liminal space — both public and private. It faces the street, making it far more open to the world than a secluded back deck. It also invites visitors into the front hall — the most public of spaces inside the home. Like the chuppah, the porch is covered from above and open on the sides; it protects and welcomes.

I live in the Northeast where the front porch is a seasonal space. When spring arrives, the neighborhood comes alive. Streets with houses that have front porches are friendlier places, for children as well as adults. If a neighbor sees someone on their porch, they linger for a few minutes to check in and catch up on news. As the days grow longer and warmer, the porch becomes a gathering place, the public square for social interaction where spontaneous conversation may turn into substantive dialogue and debate.

It’s unlikely that the late 19th-century Russian Jewish thinker Yehuda Leib Gordon had a front porch. And if he did, I doubt that he would have thought about it as a space that bridges public and private life. Gordon coined what might be called the motto of the Enlightenment: “Be a Jew in your home and a man on the street.” He was saying that for Jews to make our way in the world, we must keep our Jewish identity private, secluded, in the confines of our homes or the privacy of our backyard. For my grandparents and immigrants like them, to make it in America, they cast off their Jewish observances in exchange for material and social success. Jewish practices that they kept were relegated to the seclusion of private spaces, or the synagogue, JCC, or federation.

Gordon’s notion of a bifurcated identity is less pertinent today where we are blessed with the privilege of living in a pluralistic and open society. Politicians, artists, business people, and others are more public as Jews in their professional lives and on the street. Ironically, many are less Jewish at home in a world that allows and even celebrates multiple, partial, and constructed identities. On the street, they can label their actions “Jewish” as a positive and public expression of identity, whether or not their private lives are enriched with Jewish learning and practice.

Perhaps the most obvious place where the blurring of boundaries between public and private occur is in the domain of social activism. Today, we have a Jewish environmental movement; Jews for social and economic justice; Jewish service-learning projects; we even have Sh’ma, a journal of Jewish responsibility. And a multitude of Jewish causes exist on Facebook and other social networking sites.

For Jews who have blurred these public-private lines, being Jewish is integrated into all aspects of life. In a metaphoric sense, the home’s front porch is anchored to a structure and foundation of Jewish teaching and tradition, but is also open and facing outward to the life of the street. As a liminal space, this metaphoric front porch is where public and private Judaism intersect. It’s a way of living as a Jew at home and on the street at the same time. It welcomes others in, yet protects the home’s private space. Unlike a back deck that hides from the world, the front porch looks out, offering opportunities to engage in social interaction and meaningful discourse. As a place of safety, comfort, and traditional warmth, it helps us frame life as a Jew and connect our beliefs and behaviors to the work of making a cleaner, safer, more hospitable, and comfortable neighborhood where all can live with dignity, decency, and mutual support.

I won’t be able to write Torah about a Jewish kitchen on an empty stomach, so I wander into my kitchen. As the garlic in the pan starts sizzling and popping (soon to be joined by chard, probably an alien vegetable to my Ashkenazi ancestors), I take a quick inventory of the room: two sets of dishes, milchig and fleishig, and enough of both to invite guests to our table; a really big fridge; some ritual items in danger of getting smashed by my toddler; meat/dairy labels on everything, the result of a marriage between someone who grew up kosher (how do I know which pot is for which? Because I just do) and someone who believes he will be struck by lightning if he uses the wrong sponge. There is also a wok; exotic spices like cumin and coriander; meat from happy, local grass-fed lambs; organic lactose-free milk; and a take-out menu for sushi. How did the Jewish kitchen turn into this?

One of my teachers taught that Jewish eating, and Jewish rules about eating, had long been a mimetic tradition, transmitted from mother to daughter in a parallel track to the Judaism of the book. I can hear the questions now from each generation of children: “Mama, why do we eat this? Mama, why are we cooking special food tonight? Mama, can I have a taste?” The books might tell the official story, the study house might be the place of masters and students, of arguments and interpretation, but the Jewish kitchen transmits the personal stories of our individual families — folk Judaism. As a rabbi and a mother, I love both worlds. I remember one year when, as a mouthy child, I told my mother I did not want our seder to “just be about the food.” She scolded me, saying that I was denying the contribution of every generation of women in our family to the meal. The generations of Jewish women (and men) who have cooked and nourished have created a culinary midrash on the cultures they lived among, giving birth to a wide variety of Jewish foods.

When imagining this Jewish kitchen, it would be easy to just picture comforting, nourishing images: chicken soup, gefilte fish, a warm gathering place. One of my favorite Yom Kippur sermons pictures God as an old woman, welcoming her errant child into her kitchen once more, everything remembered and forgiven. But the Jewish kitchen is also a place of rupture. We’re several generations past assuming it’s a kosher kitchen, and many of us could not even replicate our grandmother’s recipes if we tried. Like many American kitchens in general, the slowly simmered tastes of the Jewish kitchen are being replaced with quick, convenience tastes and ingredients. And many of us want to branch out beyond chopped liver, chicken soup, and kugel, to create new stories.

The renovated Jewish kitchen teaches us to enlarge our culinary palette; that adaptation, like tradition, is also a core Jewish value. On a Friday afternoon we might take in the aroma of chamim (a Sephardi cholent) rather than chicken soup or brisket. Many of our kitchens also include the cuisines of our non-Jewish family members or neighbors—sushi Shabbat, anyone? Or the kitchen might emulate contemporary mores and values — for example, today some see vegetarianism as the purest form of keeping kosher.

How can all this thread through a Jewish kitchen? For me, what makes a kitchen Jewish is its openness — to people, stories, and especially to new tastes, textures, and smells. The kitchen is the center of the Jewish home. It is warm and embracing and spicy. Its logical extension is the Jewish table, where dishes are passed, lives are drawn together, and new members of the family are woven into the fabric of family life. Every year at Pesach, we invite new guests to join those who left Egypt, new traditions to join with the old. There is always room for one more person at this table.

And surely you’ll have another bite to eat? There is always room for that, too.

My portraits examine the complex realities of a multiracial, multiethnic society — “the slipperiness of identity” that is my own autobiography. Raised by an Okinawan father from Hawai’i and an Anglo/Spanish Basque mother from the Pacific Northwest, I am now bringing up my own Jewish family in a Chicago neighborhood where the city’s Muslim, Hindu, and Jewish communities intersect. In the process of converting to Judaism, I made my home kosher. The refrigerator became symbolic of the central role of the kitchen in a Jewish home.

In my trompe l’oeil painting of our family’s Frigidaire, the haphazardly arranged decorations reflect our mixed identities: a Japanese American Jewish culture and bearing Yiddish words like “kvell” and “yinglish”; and drawings by Ariel, my Jewish Mexican stepdaughter. The refrigerator door serves as a surrogate portrait of my family. While the viewer doesn’t know what is inside the refrigerator, the painting tells something about my family by the images on the door and the style of the refrigerator acknowledges issues of class. The painting is at once very personal and distinct and also universal. On this family refrigerator, we can see a complex set of questions about negotiating what it means to be Jewish.

Yesterday at one of our food pantries, the 18 year-old teen, with a beauty befitting a star on “90210,” lay against the stone wall, her boyfriend comforting her as a case manager phoned 911, and I offered words of support to a dehydrated, vomiting, two-months-pregnant homeless woman. Just two days earlier, a 59-year-old former actress, model, and realtor came to my office and confessed that without a new job in the coming month she would lose her apartment and find herself on the street. An e-mail from another congregant asked for help for a young homeless couple that ended up at their door with only $13 and no place to go: “Rabbi, we’ve had them stay at our house for a few days but who can help them with medical and job-training needs?” Last fall, the ten-year-old boy handing a grocery bag to one of our clients was surprised to hear the homeless man wish him “Shana tovah,” realizing that the poor in our neighborhood also include the Jewish indigent. Another congregant, along with his three sons, was handing out food to the homeless, only to encounter his former friend and hair stylist, a man who artfully coiffed the heads of Oscar winners, now standing in line, ravaged by disease, living on the street, with no job and no medical care.

Here in the City of Angels, “the creative capital of the world,” are some of the most opulent mansions; but when every shelter bed is full, 75,000 men, women, and children sleep on a sidewalk, in a cardboard box, under a tree, or if they’re really fortunate — in the back seat of a car. Over twenty years ago our synagogue — with resources and the mandate of our tradition — began to address this overwhelming tragedy that unfolds every day in our city and on the doorsteps of our historic sanctuary.

In 1988, congregational leaders of Wilshire Boulevard Temple partnered with five neighborhood churches to form Hope-Net, a social services agency. For the economically poor in our area, Hope-Net food pantries and meal programs are the primary sources of emergency food. In addition, we’ve launched Hope-Net West Apartments, a building of close to twenty units for low-income families. A thrift store was also created to help supply high-quality, low-cost clothing, furniture, and household goods to those in need. As our Sunday morning food pantry clientele grew and needs for health services became evident, we partnered with Queens Care, a faith-based organization providing accessible healthcare for uninsured and low-income individuals and families residing in Los Angeles County. 

To maximize the difference we could make in the City of Angels, we needed to pursue both “transactional” and “transformative” acts of tikkun olam. A hungry person receiving a bag of food is transactional, an important “quick fix” for a serious problem. But now we’re also engaged in transformative change: building relationships with other communities and pressing elected officials to institute significant institutional, governmental progress for those most in need. Like other Jewish congregations, we are actively involved in “Congregation-Based Community Organizing” (CBCO, see Sh’ma issue January 2007 shma.com), and have formed a working partnership with an African American Catholic church in South-Central Los Angeles.

Together, we’re researching the money trail from Washington and Sacramento to Los Angeles, learning about “board and care” facilities  where families in homes become qualified to house the mentally ill who are homeless; we’re exploring how to repurpose foreclosed homes into safe havens for those most susceptible to violence and illness of all sorts. The path we are on is both challenging and sacred. We know we are doing what we can as a community to observe the mitzvah to care for the ger, the yatom, the almanah, the stranger, orphan, and widow — those most vulnerable in our society. In this way we pray and work to transform our city, in hopes that in Hollywood, the only true darkness will be found in the theatres or in the nighttime sky.

1. The first real furniture my partner and I bought after we moved into our house ten years ago was a beautiful cherrywood dining room table. The table came with dreams of Shabbat meals, sedarim, family gatherings, communal festivities, classes to be taught, and Torah to be studied. Most of this has come to pass around that table — the meals, conversations, Torah study, and family gatherings. Though much has happened to rock our world, our community, and our lives over these past ten years, on most Friday evenings, I still believe that I hear the good angel praying that it should be thus next week and the angel’s companion reluctantly saying amen.

2. Walpole State Prison: I visit K on Sundays — that is, when he’s not confined to solitary. When the weather is nice we sit at a rough wood picnic table in a grassy visiting area surrounded by families — children in their Sunday-going-to-prison clothes, wives and girlfriends dressed in the modest fashion regulated by the prison. In the field is a little carousel for the children; they push it around and then jump onto it and scream in joyous fright. Sometimes K and I eat; sometimes we talk. Sometimes he tells me about his fellow prisoners: rape, murder, armed robbery.

3. Center City, Philadelphia: Steam rising from the grates adds to pedestrian misery in the summer; it also provides a bit of warmth that blunts the edge of the bitter winter nights for those for whom the streets are home and the grates are bed. Every night on Walnut Street I see a man sitting on a milk crate. Tonight I invite him to dine with me in McDonald’s. Hesitant, he asks that I get him something and bring it back to him, outside. I insist that we both go indoors. He orders some kind of burger and fries; I order coffee, the universally kosher beverage. All the workers seem to know him from his usual perch outside the door. They look at him with surprise as we sit in the booth. He grows progressively more and more uncomfortable. Finally, he tells me he’d rather not stay here anymore. We leave and finish dining on the street.

4. “All who are hungry come and eat. All who need to partake of the Paschal sacrifice come and join with us,” so declaim 20 people around a beautifully set table. The door is locked. “All who are hungry come and eat” — but if they knocked on the door would we actually let them in? Would we go out and find “them” and bring “them” home?

5. The halakhic definition of “common space” is “people who eat at the same table.” This may be an abstract or potential “eat” symbolized by an unopened box of matzah. The matzah constitutes an eruv; it is a manufacturing of common space, a yachad, which consists of my home and yours, and every other Jew’s home.

What of those Jews who would not eat at my table? What of those Jews at whose table I do not eat? What of those Jews whose culinary customs are far removed from the Eastern European palate of my ancestry or the California palate of my contemporary life? Are they part of my yachad?

6. The first time my parents came to my home and told me they could not eat our cooking I had to make a choice.

The first time we went to my in-laws’ home and I told them I could not eat their cooking they had to make a choice.

I could have become offended and angry; I could have shattered the deep and loving relationship we have.

My in-laws could have been offended and angry; they could have nipped in the bud our relationship before it had a chance to blossom.

Fortunately, I chose to treat my parents’ decision as though it came from a different religious tradition, one that had no claim on me.

Fortunately, my in-laws made accommodations, now affectionately dubbed the “kosher box,” which includes kosher pots, plates, and cutlery, and they let us kasher a part of their stove.

1. What makes a home Jewish?
2. What books are essential to a Jewish home?
3. When you travel, what Jewish things do you bring with you from home?