Jewish Blogosphere

These last few months I've been trying to give myself a tour of similar souls who toil in the cottage industry of expressing Jewish thought publicly and without any external restraint, irrespective of whether the comments might or might not be welcome.  I found some satire.  I found a lot of organizational cheerleaders.  Some in pursuit of getting even with thems who done em wrong.  A few mavens:  the artists, the cooks, some Rabbis who post their weekly sermons.  Many fewer explorers than I would have expected in an amorphous place devoid of geography yet accessible to most of the world.  If I want to move the furniture in my synagogue, I thought it would be easier to locate somebody else who has moved the furniture in their synagogue.  If I want to do projects like start a journal club or catalog members to target specific participatory invitations, I thought it would be easier to tap into expertise than it has been.  Judaism depends on these little subcommunities traceable to the USY Cliques of the 1960's where life's future Jewish and personal  attainments turned out to have little correlation with being part of the beautiful people.

The Jewish Web has a lot of entries but surprisingly little ability to target what might prove helpful.  It seems much like wanting a list of millionaires in Manhattan and being handed the telephone directory which indeed has the contact information of more millionaires that a person could reasonably contact.  But the telephone directory does not enable you to identify which of the people you wish to contact due to excessive clutter of irrelevant listings.

Somewhere out there a critical mass of Me and Pew defectors floats around, able to articulate how they got onto Judaism's exit ramp.  There are probably places to find dumb rabbi jokes interspersed with dumb rabbi jokes.  It remains by belief, accurate or not, that those who departed the tribal entities to go off on their own really did not disappear but became part of an expanding Jewish entropy which still has much to contribute.  And the organizations have gotten so inbred, that they lack the leaders who can connect external to themselves.   I'll keep looking and keep adding some clutter to the Jewish cyberspace.