Shabbat report

[cellio]

Saturday morning at Torah study we were talking about "peace offerings" again, so I asked how often this was done. Was this a special occasion, or did you do this any time you wanted to eat meat, or what? (The rabbi had said something in passing about how this was your chicken for Shabbat.) He said it's a good question and he's not sure; he believes that if you were in the "temple district", so to speak, then yes, you had to take it to the temple as a korban, and give the priests and God their shares, before you could eat it. If you were farther away, though, he's not sure; he said it didn't seem likely that people were expected to come from all across Canaan, let alone points farther away. (Of course, in the desert no one was that far from the mishkan, so this wouldn't have been such an issue.)

Perhaps ironically, my mishna study group, which is doing Tractate Pesachim, has just gotten to the practical details of how so many lambs can be slaughtered in such a short period of time. Every Jew was required to bring a lamb on erev Pesach, which would then be eaten at the seder. Obviously people could team up (you can't save leftovers), so that's one per large family or perhaps pair of families. But that's still an awful lot of lambs, and they only had a few hours in which to perform the ritual. I'm curious about how this will play out...

Friday night we had a guest speaker who is involved with the Holocaust Center in Pittsburgh. (I didn't know we had one.) Sadly, he was not a very engaging speaker; he kept talking about his opportunities to get to know survivors and so on, some of whom were there that night, and I found that I would have been much more interested in hearing them speak. Oh well. Sometimes the pulpit guests work out well, and sometimes they don't. It frustrates me when I realize that I've lost the opportunity for a good sermon from my rabbi to one of the ones who didn't work out. (Ooh, I feel like such a groupie! But it's true; I almost always find what my rabbi says to be very interesting, and I look forward to his talks.)

Saturday my parents stopped by shortly after I got home. They were in the neighborhood and wanted to drop something off (Dani's Christmas present, as it turned out), and I invited them in for lunch. (On Shabbat I try to make sure there's extra food in the crock pot, so I have the option to bring someone home from services.) This was the first time they'd heard kiddush and motzi and stuff, and my father ended up asking me a bunch of questions about Shabbat. I think it's pretty nifty that he wants to know about this stuff. Among things, we went partway down the "what is forbidden work?" path.

Saturday night Dani and I went out to Prince of India in Oakland. We'd never been there before, but we had a coupon from the entertainment book and I'd been craving Indian food, so we tried it. I thought the food was pretty good, though not as good as Sitar. The service was slow. And we ended up not using the buy-one-get-one-free coupon because when we got there we saw a sign in the window that said "dinners half off 7-10pm". It's kind of the reverse of the typical early-bird special, I guess. We asked if that applied on a Saturday night and they said yes, so we took it. (The coupon doesn't stack with other offers, in case you're wondering.)

The food in general was pretty good; the papadam was excellent. I want to learn how to make that, but I've never seen a recipe. (This is that thin wafer made out of lentils. It usually has a bit of a kick from pepper. This certainly did.)

Comments

[eub.livejournal.com]

the papadam was excellent. I want to learn how to make that, but I've never seen a recipe.

Geagle has papadam you can make. Microwaveable papadam; it starts as a little pancake and swells and crinkles and hardens. One of the ingredients is calcium oxide, a.k.a. quicklime. It's all quite unnerving. Unfortunately it doesn't taste good, which is one of my necessary conditions for eating quicklime.