For those of you who don't know me, I live in northern Minnesota, and I am blogging here under my Hebrew name, Yair. I spent quite a bit of time writing for the currently-on-hiatus blog JewsByChoice.org, which was a great outlet through which I met lots of interesting people from all over the place. You can see my posts from that blog here. There are 37 of them or so, covering a whole range of topics, including Jewish practice, history, Israel, Jewish life in rural areas, and my own musings on living such a life. Feel free to contact me through this blog if you have questions about those posts at all.
I called this new blog "Diaspora of the Diaspora" because I believe this aptly describes Jewish life where I live. While anyone who has been to Israel knows how easy it is to be Jewish there, but there are places in the Jewish Diaspora where it is also easy - New York, or Los Angeles, for example. Our Tradition talks about living in Eretz Yisrael as being the pinnacle of living a Jewish life, and anthropologically this makes perfect sense: Judaism was born there, and its calendar and rituals are derived from existence in that part of the world. By contrast, outside of Israel, Judaism's inherent rhythms are less in sync with the surroundings, and nowhere else does national life flow according to these rhythms. BUT, all places in the Diaspora are not the same, and living a Jewish life in a place with two synagogues and one Chabad house within a 165 mile radius presents a whole other set of challenges than those of living in, say, Teaneck, Crown Heights, or St. Louis Park. So, not only are we in the Diaspora here, but in many ways, we're dispersed from the Diaspora. Hence the title of the blog.
I hope to use this space to reflect on the challenges resulting from this arrangement. I also plan to post on related interests, including Jewish practice, study, philosophy, post-denominational observance, and other things like outdoors life in the North, books, politics, and maybe some homebrewing :)! Stay tuned, and if you've got the itch, feel free to drop me a line.
kol tuv,
Yair
